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Illinois Issues
Archive2001-Present: Scroll Down or Use Search1975-2001: Click Here

Barrio: Photographs depict Chicago's Pilsen and Little Village neighborhoods

When he took that right turn off Halsted Street to 18th Street back in 1988, Paul D'Amato thought he was about to take his last pictures of Chicago. 

D'Amato, now a photography professor at Columbia College Chicago, had plans to take a teaching position in Maine. But what he found in Pilsen, then the city's largest Mexican neighborhood, caught his attention and held tight. "I had been to a lot of different neighborhoods in Chicago, but this one had an aura to it,'' he writes. "It was dark and colorful, full of texture, energy.''

By the end of that first year of teaching in the wooded Northeast, D'Amato was heading back to Pilsen, "a sweltering, treeless neighborhood made of concrete, bricks, and asphalt — a place that stayed hot well after the sun set and was relieved only when someone illegally opened a pump, borrowed a piece of lake, and flooded the street.''

He returned for the next 13 summers. The results of those visits were published earlier this year by the University of Chicago Press as the art book Barrio: Photographs from Chicago's Pilsen and Little Village. Initially, D'Amato believed he was documenting gangs, but he eventually realized that his true interest was in the larger community of Pilsen and the adjacent Little Village neighborhood to the southwest. 

"In capturing the richness and vigor of the community, Paul D'Amato revels in the broad palette of human emotions. The pictures are gritty, but never unremittingly grim,'' writes Pilsen native and author Stuart Dybek in his foreword to Barrio.

Gang members D'Amato met served as his key to the community, allowing him to collect invitations to house parties, weddings and quinceañeras (the Latin-American coming-out party for 15-year-old girls). 

Why Pilsen? "At first it was a kind of predictable documentary answer: urban neighborhood, Latino culture, etc.,'' writes D'Amato, whose photographs are in the permanent collections of several museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Photo-graphy in Chicago. "Then it became a little more personal as I saw the hood as a kind of metaphor for immigration itself and a contemporary expression of what my father's neighborhood might have been like in Boston at the turn of the century.''

But when D'Amato returned to Chicago to live in 2001, he found that the Pilsen he had known was gone. The home values had skyrocketed, and the neighborhood's only barrier to the Loop was an expanded University of Illinois at Chicago campus. "The place just feels more subdued — literally and figuratively.'' Paint, which D'Amato describes as "butt-ugly brown," now covered the graffiti. "I know it's not as if someone went into the Sistine Chapel with a roller, but all of this graf', some of which was truly beautiful, was a direct reflection of the life of the place.'' He writes, "All I know is, what once was will never be again. I'm just glad I was here for so much of it before it ended." 

The Editors

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Illinois Issues, December 2006

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