As fall settles into Chicago, a ghostly chill raises the hackles of those attuned to a different kind of presence in the city’s streets. We live in a city of disappearances: from the original loss of home of Chicago’s many Native tribes, to the thousands of people disappeared by the Chicago Police Department into the hidden world of undisclosed interrogation warehouses, Chicago cannot escape the specter of absence.

Today, gentrification is one of the city’s harshest disappearing forces, leaving communities scrambling to preserve distinct histories that are whitewashed with every painted-over mural and “invisible eviction” that pushes another family from their home. But as Ricardo Gamboa’s new play The Wizards shows, even as real estate speculation makes it harder to see obvious signs of who once inhabited a space, a sense of haunting reminds us of those whose physical presence steadily erodes. For Gamboa, a playwright, academic, and organizer who grew up on the city’s southwest side, The Wizards is yet another opportunity to use the occult to remind people of who and what we’re losing to these forces. 

The Wizards10/14-11/26: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM; no performance Thu 11/24 (Thanksgiving), APO Cultural Center, 1438 W. 18th St., clata.org. 45 reservations available each night through Eventbrite for sliding-scale ($20-$60), ten pay-what-you-can walk-up tickets per show.

In the play, Amado, played by Gamboa, and Sam, played by Gamboa’s partner Sean James William Parris, are forced to move back to Amado’s hometown of Chicago after being queerbashed in New York City on the night of Donald Trump’s election. Settling into an apartment in Pilsen and witnessing the rapid shifts in the neighborhood that Amado once called home, the couple soon discover a Ouija board in their new home, which allows them to reach the spirit of the Wizards, a group of four teenage Mexican boys from the 60s who formed their own Motown cover band. While the rest of the plot remains tantalizingly out of reach, Gamboa promises a thrilling journey for those trusting souls, saying that the second half of the play was written from a place of uncertainty, hoping the audience will engage the cast in the shared space.

“How do you write from a space of not knowing, where I’m not just translating points of view that I have, or that might be floating in memes on Instagram?” Gamboa asks themselves. “I’m a creator, not a translator. The goal is to use the play to navigate these contemporary questions about race and histories of violence, and to get the audience and myself to a place where we can have honest conversations about them.”

The Wizards is many years in the making, and has already led Gamboa down other, unexpected paths. After developing the play as part of the Goodman Theatre’s New Stages program, the script made its way to the makers of Showtime’s The Chi, which led to Gamboa moving to Los Angeles to write on the show for several seasons. Still, Gamboa knew the play would eventually make its way back to the neighborhood that birthed it, and its appearance at the APO Cultural Center, a focal point for Mexican American art and activism on 18th Street, brings the project full circle.

The play was directed by Katrina Dion, whose latest directorial work 57 Blocksat Free Street explored similar questions around whose stories are told in a city hellbent on erasing the subjectivities of Black and Brown people. Staged as part of Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, and coproduced by the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance, National Museum of Mexican Art, and Gertie (a new organization aiming “to build a community of young professionals in Chicago who are ready to engage with the city and each other in new ways”), Gamboa says they see the play as an offering to the late Destinos executive director Myrna Salazar, who championed stories that often struggle to receive the support they deserve.

The Reader caught up with Gamboa in mid-September, as revelries for Mexican Independence Day kept 18th Street busy outside the theater’s doors. The interview has been edited for shortness and clarity.

Annie Howard: You seem deeply concerned about the weight of history, but this work is set in the very recent past, one that’s haunted by much deeper histories. What compels you to take that approach to look at these issues we’ve inherited and continue to struggle with?

Ricardo Gamboa: A lot of what my work does is look at these histories that are embedded and alive in the present, even if they’re not necessarily visible. We don’t see a settler arriving when we step out on 18th Street, but it doesn’t mean settler logics are still not contouring what it looks like centuries later. 

Even when we’re talking about something like colonization, part of what it was fueled by was the idea of reason, linear time, and these very Western impositions on just like how to look at the world, how to look at the universe, that weren’t necessarily congruent with the people that they found in the “New World.” Alternative magic or spirituality practices were embedded in those cultures, and they were a way of looking at the world. 

It’s really disorienting to be walking through these blocks, having grown up in Pilsen and Little Village and seeing how rapidly things have changed, knowing the history that has transpired that’s been completely erased by gentrification. White supremacy has an evil magic, where it disappears people, it displaces them, and makes them into ghosts. So for me, the magic in the play is there because I believe in it, but it’s also a way of questioning the normative reality that’s been constructed. 

You’re hosting the play at the APO Cultural Center, one of the enduring institutions of activism in the neighborhood. Can you talk a bit about what it means to put on the show here?

Despite the onslaught of gentrification and capitalist speculation that has targeted Pilsen, the neighborhood has maintained a lot of its original character. It’s a testament to how resilient the community is. There’s history of struggle, and the APO Cultural Center is part of that history. 

APO was founded in 1962 as an organization to address the discrimination that Latino workers would face, and they took up residence in Pilsen in 1968. This building, which was built in 1883 as a Czech community center, was handed over by the archdiocese at that time. After that, there was so much organizing that came out of this space: campaigns for Brown worker rights, against the CTA and Department of Streets and Sanitation, a lot of political and popular education, and the arts. The Mexican American printmaker Carlos Cortéz would work out of here, and the muralists Hector Duarte and Salvado Vega, both part of the mural tradition that defines Pilsen, came out of here. 

Years ago, I realized that my dream was to do the play in this building. I talked to Leticia Guerrero, and she was like, Yo, let’s do it. We came up with a residency in honor of her mom, Raquel, who was one of the founders of APO, and the Raquel Guerrero Residency for Theater and Social Change is the banner that we’re operating under. When the show closes, I hope to have raised enough money to renovate this hall space so that it can be more in use.

Did you intend to have the play staged during the fall “spooky season,” or was that a lucky happenstance?

It’s something we wanted to tie into both Halloween and Day of the Dead, but also Thanksgiving. The play jumps through time, with Sam and Amado living in the years of the Trump administration, then going back to the 1960s and ’70s. As a cultural studies scholar, I know those moments are closer than we might want to acknowledge, part of an enduring and ongoing legacy of colonialism and white supremacy. We’re not just trying to cash in on these moments, but I believe that in October, the veil between the worlds is thinner. What happens if we honor that?

Can you talk a bit about the other programming you’re building around the production of the play?

As part of the show, we’re having two nights of community storytelling events that provide an evening alternative for community members. There’s a lot of bars that have popped up in Pilsen in recent years, but they’re not always hospitable to the Brown people that have lived here. Being able to use this space to welcome people and to have a good time.

Latinos love to tell spooky fucking stories. You go to Mexico, you’re on the rancho sitting around a campfire, and someone will start telling you about how they saw the devil in the cornfield or some shit like that. We’re playing with that cultural tradition, inviting members of the cast and local Latino Chicagoans to share stories that deal with themes of haunting, ghosts, the supernatural. That’s broadly defined: someone’s telling a story about their bedroom that’s literally haunted, but someone else is talking about they’re haunted by the specter of transphobia. We’ll also be doing a youth institute, working with young people, teaching performance and playwriting.

The goal is to remind people of this omnipresent Mexican American population that’s often ghosted out of the historic record, even in the present. It’s important to have a process and a venue that reflects that history, one that sews that principle into everything. We’re telling people: We’re putting it on here, and you’re gonna remember that this is a community that fought. We are a people that have been fighting, so let’s reanimate that spirit.

Read More

As fall settles into Chicago, a ghostly chill raises the hackles of those attuned to a different kind of presence in the city’s streets. We live in a city of disappearances: from the original loss of home of Chicago’s many Native tribes, to the thousands of people disappeared by the Chicago Police Department into the hidden world of undisclosed interrogation warehouses, Chicago cannot escape the specter of absence.

Today, gentrification is one of the city’s harshest disappearing forces, leaving communities scrambling to preserve distinct histories that are whitewashed with every painted-over mural and “invisible eviction” that pushes another family from their home. But as Ricardo Gamboa’s new play The Wizards shows, even as real estate speculation makes it harder to see obvious signs of who once inhabited a space, a sense of haunting reminds us of those whose physical presence steadily erodes. For Gamboa, a playwright, academic, and organizer who grew up on the city’s southwest side, The Wizards is yet another opportunity to use the occult to remind people of who and what we’re losing to these forces. 

The Wizards10/14-11/26: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM; no performance Thu 11/24 (Thanksgiving), APO Cultural Center, 1438 W. 18th St., clata.org. 45 reservations available each night through Eventbrite for sliding-scale ($20-$60), ten pay-what-you-can walk-up tickets per show.

In the play, Amado, played by Gamboa, and Sam, played by Gamboa’s partner Sean James William Parris, are forced to move back to Amado’s hometown of Chicago after being queerbashed in New York City on the night of Donald Trump’s election. Settling into an apartment in Pilsen and witnessing the rapid shifts in the neighborhood that Amado once called home, the couple soon discover a Ouija board in their new home, which allows them to reach the spirit of the Wizards, a group of four teenage Mexican boys from the 60s who formed their own Motown cover band. While the rest of the plot remains tantalizingly out of reach, Gamboa promises a thrilling journey for those trusting souls, saying that the second half of the play was written from a place of uncertainty, hoping the audience will engage the cast in the shared space.

“How do you write from a space of not knowing, where I’m not just translating points of view that I have, or that might be floating in memes on Instagram?” Gamboa asks themselves. “I’m a creator, not a translator. The goal is to use the play to navigate these contemporary questions about race and histories of violence, and to get the audience and myself to a place where we can have honest conversations about them.”

The Wizards is many years in the making, and has already led Gamboa down other, unexpected paths. After developing the play as part of the Goodman Theatre’s New Stages program, the script made its way to the makers of Showtime’s The Chi, which led to Gamboa moving to Los Angeles to write on the show for several seasons. Still, Gamboa knew the play would eventually make its way back to the neighborhood that birthed it, and its appearance at the APO Cultural Center, a focal point for Mexican American art and activism on 18th Street, brings the project full circle.

The play was directed by Katrina Dion, whose latest directorial work 57 Blocksat Free Street explored similar questions around whose stories are told in a city hellbent on erasing the subjectivities of Black and Brown people. Staged as part of Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, and coproduced by the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance, National Museum of Mexican Art, and Gertie (a new organization aiming “to build a community of young professionals in Chicago who are ready to engage with the city and each other in new ways”), Gamboa says they see the play as an offering to the late Destinos executive director Myrna Salazar, who championed stories that often struggle to receive the support they deserve.

The Reader caught up with Gamboa in mid-September, as revelries for Mexican Independence Day kept 18th Street busy outside the theater’s doors. The interview has been edited for shortness and clarity.

Annie Howard: You seem deeply concerned about the weight of history, but this work is set in the very recent past, one that’s haunted by much deeper histories. What compels you to take that approach to look at these issues we’ve inherited and continue to struggle with?

Ricardo Gamboa: A lot of what my work does is look at these histories that are embedded and alive in the present, even if they’re not necessarily visible. We don’t see a settler arriving when we step out on 18th Street, but it doesn’t mean settler logics are still not contouring what it looks like centuries later. 

Even when we’re talking about something like colonization, part of what it was fueled by was the idea of reason, linear time, and these very Western impositions on just like how to look at the world, how to look at the universe, that weren’t necessarily congruent with the people that they found in the “New World.” Alternative magic or spirituality practices were embedded in those cultures, and they were a way of looking at the world. 

It’s really disorienting to be walking through these blocks, having grown up in Pilsen and Little Village and seeing how rapidly things have changed, knowing the history that has transpired that’s been completely erased by gentrification. White supremacy has an evil magic, where it disappears people, it displaces them, and makes them into ghosts. So for me, the magic in the play is there because I believe in it, but it’s also a way of questioning the normative reality that’s been constructed. 

You’re hosting the play at the APO Cultural Center, one of the enduring institutions of activism in the neighborhood. Can you talk a bit about what it means to put on the show here?

Despite the onslaught of gentrification and capitalist speculation that has targeted Pilsen, the neighborhood has maintained a lot of its original character. It’s a testament to how resilient the community is. There’s history of struggle, and the APO Cultural Center is part of that history. 

APO was founded in 1962 as an organization to address the discrimination that Latino workers would face, and they took up residence in Pilsen in 1968. This building, which was built in 1883 as a Czech community center, was handed over by the archdiocese at that time. After that, there was so much organizing that came out of this space: campaigns for Brown worker rights, against the CTA and Department of Streets and Sanitation, a lot of political and popular education, and the arts. The Mexican American printmaker Carlos Cortéz would work out of here, and the muralists Hector Duarte and Salvado Vega, both part of the mural tradition that defines Pilsen, came out of here. 

Years ago, I realized that my dream was to do the play in this building. I talked to Leticia Guerrero, and she was like, Yo, let’s do it. We came up with a residency in honor of her mom, Raquel, who was one of the founders of APO, and the Raquel Guerrero Residency for Theater and Social Change is the banner that we’re operating under. When the show closes, I hope to have raised enough money to renovate this hall space so that it can be more in use.

Did you intend to have the play staged during the fall “spooky season,” or was that a lucky happenstance?

It’s something we wanted to tie into both Halloween and Day of the Dead, but also Thanksgiving. The play jumps through time, with Sam and Amado living in the years of the Trump administration, then going back to the 1960s and ’70s. As a cultural studies scholar, I know those moments are closer than we might want to acknowledge, part of an enduring and ongoing legacy of colonialism and white supremacy. We’re not just trying to cash in on these moments, but I believe that in October, the veil between the worlds is thinner. What happens if we honor that?

Can you talk a bit about the other programming you’re building around the production of the play?

As part of the show, we’re having two nights of community storytelling events that provide an evening alternative for community members. There’s a lot of bars that have popped up in Pilsen in recent years, but they’re not always hospitable to the Brown people that have lived here. Being able to use this space to welcome people and to have a good time.

Latinos love to tell spooky fucking stories. You go to Mexico, you’re on the rancho sitting around a campfire, and someone will start telling you about how they saw the devil in the cornfield or some shit like that. We’re playing with that cultural tradition, inviting members of the cast and local Latino Chicagoans to share stories that deal with themes of haunting, ghosts, the supernatural. That’s broadly defined: someone’s telling a story about their bedroom that’s literally haunted, but someone else is talking about they’re haunted by the specter of transphobia. We’ll also be doing a youth institute, working with young people, teaching performance and playwriting.

The goal is to remind people of this omnipresent Mexican American population that’s often ghosted out of the historic record, even in the present. It’s important to have a process and a venue that reflects that history, one that sews that principle into everything. We’re telling people: We’re putting it on here, and you’re gonna remember that this is a community that fought. We are a people that have been fighting, so let’s reanimate that spirit.

Read More

As fall settles into Chicago, a ghostly chill raises the hackles of those attuned to a different kind of presence in the city’s streets. We live in a city of disappearances: from the original loss of home of Chicago’s many Native tribes, to the thousands of people disappeared by the Chicago Police Department into the hidden world of undisclosed interrogation warehouses, Chicago cannot escape the specter of absence.

Today, gentrification is one of the city’s harshest disappearing forces, leaving communities scrambling to preserve distinct histories that are whitewashed with every painted-over mural and “invisible eviction” that pushes another family from their home. But as Ricardo Gamboa’s new play The Wizards shows, even as real estate speculation makes it harder to see obvious signs of who once inhabited a space, a sense of haunting reminds us of those whose physical presence steadily erodes. For Gamboa, a playwright, academic, and organizer who grew up on the city’s southwest side, The Wizards is yet another opportunity to use the occult to remind people of who and what we’re losing to these forces. 

The Wizards10/14-11/26: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM; no performance Thu 11/24 (Thanksgiving), APO Cultural Center, 1438 W. 18th St., clata.org. 45 reservations available each night through Eventbrite for sliding-scale ($20-$60), ten pay-what-you-can walk-up tickets per show.

In the play, Amado, played by Gamboa, and Sam, played by Gamboa’s partner Sean James William Parris, are forced to move back to Amado’s hometown of Chicago after being queerbashed in New York City on the night of Donald Trump’s election. Settling into an apartment in Pilsen and witnessing the rapid shifts in the neighborhood that Amado once called home, the couple soon discover a Ouija board in their new home, which allows them to reach the spirit of the Wizards, a group of four teenage Mexican boys from the 60s who formed their own Motown cover band. While the rest of the plot remains tantalizingly out of reach, Gamboa promises a thrilling journey for those trusting souls, saying that the second half of the play was written from a place of uncertainty, hoping the audience will engage the cast in the shared space.

“How do you write from a space of not knowing, where I’m not just translating points of view that I have, or that might be floating in memes on Instagram?” Gamboa asks themselves. “I’m a creator, not a translator. The goal is to use the play to navigate these contemporary questions about race and histories of violence, and to get the audience and myself to a place where we can have honest conversations about them.”

The Wizards is many years in the making, and has already led Gamboa down other, unexpected paths. After developing the play as part of the Goodman Theatre’s New Stages program, the script made its way to the makers of Showtime’s The Chi, which led to Gamboa moving to Los Angeles to write on the show for several seasons. Still, Gamboa knew the play would eventually make its way back to the neighborhood that birthed it, and its appearance at the APO Cultural Center, a focal point for Mexican American art and activism on 18th Street, brings the project full circle.

The play was directed by Katrina Dion, whose latest directorial work 57 Blocksat Free Street explored similar questions around whose stories are told in a city hellbent on erasing the subjectivities of Black and Brown people. Staged as part of Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, and coproduced by the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance, National Museum of Mexican Art, and Gertie (a new organization aiming “to build a community of young professionals in Chicago who are ready to engage with the city and each other in new ways”), Gamboa says they see the play as an offering to the late Destinos executive director Myrna Salazar, who championed stories that often struggle to receive the support they deserve.

The Reader caught up with Gamboa in mid-September, as revelries for Mexican Independence Day kept 18th Street busy outside the theater’s doors. The interview has been edited for shortness and clarity.

Annie Howard: You seem deeply concerned about the weight of history, but this work is set in the very recent past, one that’s haunted by much deeper histories. What compels you to take that approach to look at these issues we’ve inherited and continue to struggle with?

Ricardo Gamboa: A lot of what my work does is look at these histories that are embedded and alive in the present, even if they’re not necessarily visible. We don’t see a settler arriving when we step out on 18th Street, but it doesn’t mean settler logics are still not contouring what it looks like centuries later. 

Even when we’re talking about something like colonization, part of what it was fueled by was the idea of reason, linear time, and these very Western impositions on just like how to look at the world, how to look at the universe, that weren’t necessarily congruent with the people that they found in the “New World.” Alternative magic or spirituality practices were embedded in those cultures, and they were a way of looking at the world. 

It’s really disorienting to be walking through these blocks, having grown up in Pilsen and Little Village and seeing how rapidly things have changed, knowing the history that has transpired that’s been completely erased by gentrification. White supremacy has an evil magic, where it disappears people, it displaces them, and makes them into ghosts. So for me, the magic in the play is there because I believe in it, but it’s also a way of questioning the normative reality that’s been constructed. 

You’re hosting the play at the APO Cultural Center, one of the enduring institutions of activism in the neighborhood. Can you talk a bit about what it means to put on the show here?

Despite the onslaught of gentrification and capitalist speculation that has targeted Pilsen, the neighborhood has maintained a lot of its original character. It’s a testament to how resilient the community is. There’s history of struggle, and the APO Cultural Center is part of that history. 

APO was founded in 1962 as an organization to address the discrimination that Latino workers would face, and they took up residence in Pilsen in 1968. This building, which was built in 1883 as a Czech community center, was handed over by the archdiocese at that time. After that, there was so much organizing that came out of this space: campaigns for Brown worker rights, against the CTA and Department of Streets and Sanitation, a lot of political and popular education, and the arts. The Mexican American printmaker Carlos Cortéz would work out of here, and the muralists Hector Duarte and Salvado Vega, both part of the mural tradition that defines Pilsen, came out of here. 

Years ago, I realized that my dream was to do the play in this building. I talked to Leticia Guerrero, and she was like, Yo, let’s do it. We came up with a residency in honor of her mom, Raquel, who was one of the founders of APO, and the Raquel Guerrero Residency for Theater and Social Change is the banner that we’re operating under. When the show closes, I hope to have raised enough money to renovate this hall space so that it can be more in use.

Did you intend to have the play staged during the fall “spooky season,” or was that a lucky happenstance?

It’s something we wanted to tie into both Halloween and Day of the Dead, but also Thanksgiving. The play jumps through time, with Sam and Amado living in the years of the Trump administration, then going back to the 1960s and ’70s. As a cultural studies scholar, I know those moments are closer than we might want to acknowledge, part of an enduring and ongoing legacy of colonialism and white supremacy. We’re not just trying to cash in on these moments, but I believe that in October, the veil between the worlds is thinner. What happens if we honor that?

Can you talk a bit about the other programming you’re building around the production of the play?

As part of the show, we’re having two nights of community storytelling events that provide an evening alternative for community members. There’s a lot of bars that have popped up in Pilsen in recent years, but they’re not always hospitable to the Brown people that have lived here. Being able to use this space to welcome people and to have a good time.

Latinos love to tell spooky fucking stories. You go to Mexico, you’re on the rancho sitting around a campfire, and someone will start telling you about how they saw the devil in the cornfield or some shit like that. We’re playing with that cultural tradition, inviting members of the cast and local Latino Chicagoans to share stories that deal with themes of haunting, ghosts, the supernatural. That’s broadly defined: someone’s telling a story about their bedroom that’s literally haunted, but someone else is talking about they’re haunted by the specter of transphobia. We’ll also be doing a youth institute, working with young people, teaching performance and playwriting.

The goal is to remind people of this omnipresent Mexican American population that’s often ghosted out of the historic record, even in the present. It’s important to have a process and a venue that reflects that history, one that sews that principle into everything. We’re telling people: We’re putting it on here, and you’re gonna remember that this is a community that fought. We are a people that have been fighting, so let’s reanimate that spirit.

Read More

As fall settles into Chicago, a ghostly chill raises the hackles of those attuned to a different kind of presence in the city’s streets. We live in a city of disappearances: from the original loss of home of Chicago’s many Native tribes, to the thousands of people disappeared by the Chicago Police Department into the hidden world of undisclosed interrogation warehouses, Chicago cannot escape the specter of absence.

Today, gentrification is one of the city’s harshest disappearing forces, leaving communities scrambling to preserve distinct histories that are whitewashed with every painted-over mural and “invisible eviction” that pushes another family from their home. But as Ricardo Gamboa’s new play The Wizards shows, even as real estate speculation makes it harder to see obvious signs of who once inhabited a space, a sense of haunting reminds us of those whose physical presence steadily erodes. For Gamboa, a playwright, academic, and organizer who grew up on the city’s southwest side, The Wizards is yet another opportunity to use the occult to remind people of who and what we’re losing to these forces. 

The Wizards10/14-11/26: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM; no performance Thu 11/24 (Thanksgiving), APO Cultural Center, 1438 W. 18th St., clata.org. 45 reservations available each night through Eventbrite for sliding-scale ($20-$60), ten pay-what-you-can walk-up tickets per show.

In the play, Amado, played by Gamboa, and Sam, played by Gamboa’s partner Sean James William Parris, are forced to move back to Amado’s hometown of Chicago after being queerbashed in New York City on the night of Donald Trump’s election. Settling into an apartment in Pilsen and witnessing the rapid shifts in the neighborhood that Amado once called home, the couple soon discover a Ouija board in their new home, which allows them to reach the spirit of the Wizards, a group of four teenage Mexican boys from the 60s who formed their own Motown cover band. While the rest of the plot remains tantalizingly out of reach, Gamboa promises a thrilling journey for those trusting souls, saying that the second half of the play was written from a place of uncertainty, hoping the audience will engage the cast in the shared space.

“How do you write from a space of not knowing, where I’m not just translating points of view that I have, or that might be floating in memes on Instagram?” Gamboa asks themselves. “I’m a creator, not a translator. The goal is to use the play to navigate these contemporary questions about race and histories of violence, and to get the audience and myself to a place where we can have honest conversations about them.”

The Wizards is many years in the making, and has already led Gamboa down other, unexpected paths. After developing the play as part of the Goodman Theatre’s New Stages program, the script made its way to the makers of Showtime’s The Chi, which led to Gamboa moving to Los Angeles to write on the show for several seasons. Still, Gamboa knew the play would eventually make its way back to the neighborhood that birthed it, and its appearance at the APO Cultural Center, a focal point for Mexican American art and activism on 18th Street, brings the project full circle.

The play was directed by Katrina Dion, whose latest directorial work 57 Blocksat Free Street explored similar questions around whose stories are told in a city hellbent on erasing the subjectivities of Black and Brown people. Staged as part of Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, and coproduced by the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance, National Museum of Mexican Art, and Gertie (a new organization aiming “to build a community of young professionals in Chicago who are ready to engage with the city and each other in new ways”), Gamboa says they see the play as an offering to the late Destinos executive director Myrna Salazar, who championed stories that often struggle to receive the support they deserve.

The Reader caught up with Gamboa in mid-September, as revelries for Mexican Independence Day kept 18th Street busy outside the theater’s doors. The interview has been edited for shortness and clarity.

Annie Howard: You seem deeply concerned about the weight of history, but this work is set in the very recent past, one that’s haunted by much deeper histories. What compels you to take that approach to look at these issues we’ve inherited and continue to struggle with?

Ricardo Gamboa: A lot of what my work does is look at these histories that are embedded and alive in the present, even if they’re not necessarily visible. We don’t see a settler arriving when we step out on 18th Street, but it doesn’t mean settler logics are still not contouring what it looks like centuries later. 

Even when we’re talking about something like colonization, part of what it was fueled by was the idea of reason, linear time, and these very Western impositions on just like how to look at the world, how to look at the universe, that weren’t necessarily congruent with the people that they found in the “New World.” Alternative magic or spirituality practices were embedded in those cultures, and they were a way of looking at the world. 

It’s really disorienting to be walking through these blocks, having grown up in Pilsen and Little Village and seeing how rapidly things have changed, knowing the history that has transpired that’s been completely erased by gentrification. White supremacy has an evil magic, where it disappears people, it displaces them, and makes them into ghosts. So for me, the magic in the play is there because I believe in it, but it’s also a way of questioning the normative reality that’s been constructed. 

You’re hosting the play at the APO Cultural Center, one of the enduring institutions of activism in the neighborhood. Can you talk a bit about what it means to put on the show here?

Despite the onslaught of gentrification and capitalist speculation that has targeted Pilsen, the neighborhood has maintained a lot of its original character. It’s a testament to how resilient the community is. There’s history of struggle, and the APO Cultural Center is part of that history. 

APO was founded in 1962 as an organization to address the discrimination that Latino workers would face, and they took up residence in Pilsen in 1968. This building, which was built in 1883 as a Czech community center, was handed over by the archdiocese at that time. After that, there was so much organizing that came out of this space: campaigns for Brown worker rights, against the CTA and Department of Streets and Sanitation, a lot of political and popular education, and the arts. The Mexican American printmaker Carlos Cortéz would work out of here, and the muralists Hector Duarte and Salvado Vega, both part of the mural tradition that defines Pilsen, came out of here. 

Years ago, I realized that my dream was to do the play in this building. I talked to Leticia Guerrero, and she was like, Yo, let’s do it. We came up with a residency in honor of her mom, Raquel, who was one of the founders of APO, and the Raquel Guerrero Residency for Theater and Social Change is the banner that we’re operating under. When the show closes, I hope to have raised enough money to renovate this hall space so that it can be more in use.

Did you intend to have the play staged during the fall “spooky season,” or was that a lucky happenstance?

It’s something we wanted to tie into both Halloween and Day of the Dead, but also Thanksgiving. The play jumps through time, with Sam and Amado living in the years of the Trump administration, then going back to the 1960s and ’70s. As a cultural studies scholar, I know those moments are closer than we might want to acknowledge, part of an enduring and ongoing legacy of colonialism and white supremacy. We’re not just trying to cash in on these moments, but I believe that in October, the veil between the worlds is thinner. What happens if we honor that?

Can you talk a bit about the other programming you’re building around the production of the play?

As part of the show, we’re having two nights of community storytelling events that provide an evening alternative for community members. There’s a lot of bars that have popped up in Pilsen in recent years, but they’re not always hospitable to the Brown people that have lived here. Being able to use this space to welcome people and to have a good time.

Latinos love to tell spooky fucking stories. You go to Mexico, you’re on the rancho sitting around a campfire, and someone will start telling you about how they saw the devil in the cornfield or some shit like that. We’re playing with that cultural tradition, inviting members of the cast and local Latino Chicagoans to share stories that deal with themes of haunting, ghosts, the supernatural. That’s broadly defined: someone’s telling a story about their bedroom that’s literally haunted, but someone else is talking about they’re haunted by the specter of transphobia. We’ll also be doing a youth institute, working with young people, teaching performance and playwriting.

The goal is to remind people of this omnipresent Mexican American population that’s often ghosted out of the historic record, even in the present. It’s important to have a process and a venue that reflects that history, one that sews that principle into everything. We’re telling people: We’re putting it on here, and you’re gonna remember that this is a community that fought. We are a people that have been fighting, so let’s reanimate that spirit.

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The High Speed Rail Alliance aims to make trains a more practical option for getting across Chicago and the nation

In the second part of the Reader’s series spotlighting advocacy organizations working to make our region a better place to walk, bike, and ride buses and trains, we caught up with Rick Harnish, executive director of the Chicago-based High Speed Rail Alliance.

Founded in 1993 as the Midwest High Speed Rail Association, this nonprofit wants to see a nationwide network of 220 miles-per-hour train routes that would offer a fast, convenient, affordable, and safe alternative to driving and air travel. “We help individuals and local leaders understand what high-speed rail really is, why we need to build it, and what steps they can take to help make it a reality,” Harnish said.

If the alliance achieves its mission, it would be particularly beneficial for Chicago, since our city already has direct—albeit relatively slow and unreliable—Amtrak service to just about every major U.S. metropolis. Harnish said the only true high-speed rail corridor in the works in the U.S. will connect Los Angeles and San Francisco with a route allowing for speeds of over 200 mph, shortening the roughly 400-mile trip to under three hours. The closest thing we have to that right now in Illinois is Amtrak’s Chicago-to-St. Louis Lincoln Service route—which travels up to a relatively pokey 90 miles per hour on the Joliet-to-Alton stretch. 

The Illinois Department of Transportation’s recently announced six-year plan includes a $246 million earmark for bumping the Lincoln Service speed limit up to 110 mph, hopefully by 2023. But Harnish says incremental progress isn’t going to get us where we need to go. “We need a network of services that all work together to connect entire regions in the entire country.”

The IDOT plan also includes $447 million for new passenger service to Moline, plus $275 million for a Rockford route. But given the opportunities for rail expansion made possible by the $1.2 billion federal infrastructure bill passed by Amtrak superfan Joe Biden, Harnish said Illinois needs to pick up the pace. “The state needs to make some decisions and get those trains running.” He also wants to see Illinois create new service to Peoria and Decatur, plus direct Amtrak access to O’Hare International Airport.

Not only would the latter make the airport more accessible from other parts of the Midwest, it dovetails with the alliance’s CrossRail plan for better crosstown Chicago transit. This would use the St. Charles Air Line, an existing rail corridor that parallels 16th Street in the South Loop, to connect Union Station to the Rock Island District and Metra Electric District lines.  “That would become the core of an entirely new express service that would go across town, as opposed to just heading into town,” Harnish said. 

CrossRail would also create a higher-speed, “one seat” ride from the southern suburbs and south side to O’Hare without the need to make a downtown transfer, making jobs at O’Hare and in the northern suburbs much more accessible for lower-income and working-class residents. “The system would be useful for so many more people,” Harnish said. “It really would be a game-changer for Chicago-area transit.”

Coverage funded by The Darrell R. Windle Charitable Fund and Polo Inn

To check their previous story in this series, visit https://chicagoreader.com/city-life/gaining-momentum-the-active-transportation-alliance-discusses-its-campaigns-to-fight-car-dependency/.

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What happens when award-winning playwright Tony Kushner, Top Chef Rick Bayless, and TikTok sensation Shermann “Dilla” Thomas walk into a room? Join us on October 19, 6:00 pm CST to find out.

The Chicago Public Library Foundation Awards are back! This year we’ve put the spotlight on storytelling and the powerful ways that stories can nourish the soul, create connection, and inspire us to act, whether they’re told around the table, at the theater, or over TikTok.

We’re inviting all of Chicago to join us on October 19 for a free YouTube broadcast of our awards ceremony, hosted by legendary Chicago newscaster Bill Kurtis. The event will feature appearances from our honorees: local historian and social media star Shermann “Dilla” Thomas, globally recognized chef and restaurateur Rick Bayless, and acclaimed playwright, screenwriter, and activist Tony Kushner, who will be interviewed by best-selling author and National Public Radio (NPR) host Scott Simon.

Kushner is the 2022 recipient of the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, which is given annually to an esteemed writer. Best known for his Tony-award winning 1993 play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (which he later adapted for a television miniseries directed by Mike Nichols) and the musical Caroline, or Change, Kushner’s screenwriting credits include Steven Spielberg’s Munich, Lincoln, and West Side Story.

Bayless will receive the Arts Award, which celebrates the power and impact of Chicago’s artistic community. An award-winning author who has written nine cookbooks as well as immersive food-centric plays, such as the sensual Rick Bayless in Cascabel and the farcical Recipe for Disaster, he’s become as celebrated for his innovative approach to storytelling as much as he is for his culinary prowess.

The 21st Century Award, which honors significant achievements by creators with ties to Chicago, will be presented to TikTok sensation, urban historian, and lifelong Chicagoan Shermann “Dilla” Thomas (marking the first time the award has been given to a digital artist). Thomas has become a local pop-culture phenom through sharing stories about Chicago’s people, architecture, and impact on the world over his popular social media accounts. Through his work, he’s made the city’s rich history and culture accessible and engaging to all.

The Chicago Public Library Foundation was founded in 1986 to accelerate the potential of the Chicago Public Library system by investing in resources that transform lives and communities. “What an incredible honor to be an innovation lever for the Chicago Public Library for more than 36 years—investing resources in groundbreaking programs and initiatives that transformed lives and communities. The Library Foundation will continue to be a partner to the Library in finding new ways to serve Chicago communities,” said Brenda Langstraat Bui, president and CEO of the Chicago Public Library Foundation.

Courtesy Jordan Balderas

The 2021 Chicago Library Foundation Awards were viewed by more than 8,500 people , and raised $1.5 million to advance the library’s community programs, including free help with homework, digital courses for adults, and creative opportunities for teens.

The 2022 Chicago Library Foundation Awards are presented by BMO. Mayor Lori Lightfoot & First Lady Amy Eshleman, Governor J.B. Pritzker and First Lady M.K. Pritzker are honorary chairs. All donations help support free lifelong learning programs and resources for all at Chicago Public Library. Visit cplfoundation.org/awards to learn more.

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E3 Radio is a proud member of the Chicago Independent Media Alliance (CIMA), a partnership of independent, local media entities. Today through October 17th, you can donate to our #WeAmplifyChicagoVoices campaign at SaveChicagoMedia.org.

Read on to learn more about our Anna DeShawn, the founder of CIMA partner E3 Radio and the Qube.

Chicago native Anna DeShawn became interested in broadcasting at a young age through watching Robin Roberts on ESPN, but she quickly became disillusioned by the biases and superficialities that were rampant in the television industry. “I quickly realized that I was not the face of television, because I’m masculine of center, I don’t wear makeup, and I’m not femme presenting, and that was the image I was seeing,” she says.

She eventually found her niche when, as a student at Drake University, she landed an internship for the popular radio show Tom Joyner Morning Show. “I realized I could talk to thousands of people and make an impact while wearing sweatpants. I thought, ‘This is the life.’ And so I fell in love with radio.”

Inspired by her studies of influential Black women, including activists Ella Baker and Elaine Brown, she piloted a PSA campaign that she hoped to syndicate to college radio stations. When that failed to take off, she decided to start her own show. 

In November 2009, DeShawn launched E3 Radio, which spotlights queer music and news stories. “It was a passion project, and it’s evolved so much over the past 12 years,” she says. “Today we’re on 24/7. We play queer music in high rotation and report on queer news. We believe in telling the stories and playing the music that deserves to be heard.”

Last summer, DeShawn took her vision to the next level when she founded the Qube, a curated podcasting app centering the voices of BIPOC and QTPOC talent. “The Qube is the evolution of E3 Radio, 150 percent,” she says. “The world has moved to podcasting, and we’re moving along with it, partially because we love listening to podcasts, and partially because we found it incredibly difficult to find good podcasts out there in the world that centered our experiences and had hosts who looked like us. We thought, ‘How can we solve this problem?’”

The Qube has since grown to 94 broadcasters, who together have amassed a catalog of 8,000 episodes and a listening base that’s grown beyond Chicago into other markets including Washington, D.C., New York, Oakland, Dallas, and Toledo. For DeShawn, that’s ample evidence that their content is filling a very noticeable void in the podcasting space. 

“It’s tough for us to imagine a time when television didn’t have a BET,” she says. “But there is no BET in podcasting. There’s no one uplifting people of color inside the podcasting space from an app perspective. So, if you think that should exist, then you should care about what we’re doing with the Qube. We’re looking to make content created by BIPOC and QTPOC folks accessible. We’re looking to celebrate and amplify them because they’re great, and you just can’t find them.”

Learn more about E3 Radio and the Qube at e3radio.fm, and make a donation to them and nearly 40 other local media CIMA outlets at SaveChicagoMedia.org.

The Chicago Independent Media Alliance (CIMA) is a project of the Reader Institute for Community Journalism, publisher of the Chicago Reader.

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