Latinos make up the second-largest racial group in Chicago, with nearly 30% of the city’s population identifying as Hispanic or Latino in the 2020 census.
But advocates say the impact Latinos have had on Chicago isn’t well represented in historical records. One group is working to fix that by creating their own space for Latinos to share their histories.
A series of events inspired the four co-founders to start Raíces Chicago Story Coalition, a nonprofit capacity-building organization that supports archival and storytelling projects by and about Latino communities.
“I was working at the Chicago History Museum, and a lot of things were happening at that time — including an election that was a platform for folks to share negative stereotypes about immigrants, stereotypes about Mexicans in particular,” said Nancy Villafranca, president and co-founder of Raíces Chicago Story Coalition.
During her time at the Chicago History Museum, she met Lilian Macias. The two began to notice how difficult it was to find stories and archives specifically focused on Latino history.
“It wasn’t expansive and representative of our history and stories over time and space,” said Villafranca.
Their work focused on creating culturally relevant curricula for students but that process was challenging.
“While doing that work, I realized I had to create a lot of the resources needed,” said Liliana Macias, vice president and co-founder of Raíces Chicago Story Coalition. “From having to create a curriculum that talked about the different communities on the South and West Side of the city to making the history of these neighborhoods accessible to the students.”
Macias ran the Chicago Learning Collaborative program at the Chicago History Museum. While there, they had to go as far as creating their own artifacts and taking photos of prominent images that represented Latino culture and history.
“It really made me deeply understand the need for Raíces Chicago and the work we’re going to do,” said Macias.
The two other members of the organization, Ivan Guzman and Ema Pinto, also come from similar backgrounds. All four founders started working on the idea of Raíces in 2019 and officially launched January 2024. The group started the archival initiative with the focus centered around storytelling.
“We had earlier conversations around the intentionality of that word…the power of stories to be able to connect with people to do away with a lot of those stereotypes and negative narratives or mistruths about certain communities,” said Villafranca. “We believe sharing stories has the power to bring people together and create cultural understanding.”
Raíces Chicago intends to create a structure to ensure the sustainability of these stories over time. They aim to establish a system for people to research these stories 20 years from now, a goal they say is most critical because through their research they discovered it currently does not exist.
“I think one of the reasons we have been under-documented is, one, folks from outside [California or Texas] have largely told our stories. What happens when Chicago born Latinos don’t get to tell their own stories? What is missed in the nuisance?,” said Macias. “And two, it’s racism. There is this idea that Latinos in the Midwest are just passing through here to work the field, factories, clean and raise the property value of neighborhoods.”
Ensuring Latino Chicagoans are at the forefront of this archival research will help improve the underrepresentation of Latino communities in Chicago history. The group also plans to shine a light on specific groups within their culture that are also marginalized, like the LGBTQ community.
They’ve already kicked off this summer with a few projects they’re excited to work on. They plan to create a directory and work with other Latino organizations so they have the capacity and resources to do their own archiving.
“We want to support organizations to tell their stories, so that we could collaboratively tell a larger, more complex story about Chicago and Latinos in Chicago,” said Macias.
