![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Most of the literature and other publications on CBOs assume that they speak the voices and pursue the interests of the communities they claim to represent. While acknowledging the transformative work of some of them, recent studies have portrayed CBOs as forces of social control and poverty management. This paper reports the findings of a study examining the trajectory of CBOs in Pilsen, a Latino community in Chicago, through a historical-genealogical approach that helps identify the interests they have advocated across time and their shift from politics of resistance and advocacy to coalition politics of cooperation to their absorption into the agenda of a neoliberal administration. Guided by insights from Gramsci and Foucault, this study argues that CBOs speak different voices and advance different interests across time.
Disclosure statement
The author declares that no financial interest or benefit has arisen from the applications of this research
Notes
1. This approach reconstructs the trajectory of Pilsen CBOs through their practices, their institutional relationships, their responses to historically specific conjunctures, their adaptations to shifts in the political economy and the forces they affiliated with or supported across time.
2. In turn, Forte (Citation2014, p. 14) characterizes NGOs as “the Trojan Horses of global neoliberalism.”
3. The structured part of interviews included the story of their CBOs, their roles within them, sources of funding, philosophies, and affiliations. This was followed by an open conversation on constituencies, relationships, the circumstances challenging or affecting their work and other topics they brought up.
4. Based on my work in a Pilsen CBO between 1975 and 2003, I compiled a list of CBOs and their leaders adding to it names they suggested and names quoted in the documents collected. Then, I interviewed the ones I could contact.
5. That year, non-Hispanic Whites were 32.6% of the city, followed by Latinos (29.7%) and Blacks (29.3%) (Armentrout, Citation2017).
6. Only three of the city’s 75 communities (Douglas, Grand Boulevard and Washington Park) were majority Black in 1950; a generation later, one-third went from White to Black and, by 2010, only 21 were majority White – 12 of them exceeding the national average of 63% White.
7. “Machines” are led by an authoritative boss running the city with the support of businesses and campaign workers that trade loyalty for public reward (e.g., jobs and contracts, political careers and public “favors”) (Gossnell, Citation1933).
8. This term refers to the control of the black electorate through black politicians trading support for position within government.
9. A coalition of organized labor, corporate businesses and White ethnics, the Democratic Machine (aka the Machine) controlled Cook County politics through a tight structure of precinct captains and committeemen, an extensive patronage benefitting Whites and a Black submachine in control of the Black vote (Alkalimat & Gills, Citation1989).
10. The 1994 Republican Contract with America item 5 commits to “Renew the vital role of private institutions such as charities, Boys and Girls Clubs, and neighborhood groups to serve as support networks” (Moore, Citation1995, p. 170).
11. The 1970 Census reported 25,000 Latinos – out of 43,341 residents – in Pilsen (Alvarez, Citation2014, p. 84).
12. For this, they demanded that Catholic churches ministered in Spanish and adopted Latino traditions.
13. For a discussion of the role of murals, (see Duran Arp-Nisen, Citation2006; Sepulveda, Citation2008).
14. Examples of this approach include popular education practiced by Instituto del Progreso Latino, Centro de la Causa, and Latino Youth; a concerted struggle against redlining and demands for the acceptance of Latinos in the construction trades led by Eighteenth Street Development Corporation; a front of the Chicano movement promoting the cause out of Casa Aztlán; a campaign asking for a new high school led by Pilsen Neighbors Community Council; Latino-centered, bilingual day care and health care led by El Hogar del Niño and Pilsen Little Village Mental Health Center; and a refugee and empowerment program for battered women, Mujeres Latinas and Acción.
15. Different from Blacks whose vote the Machine secured through plantation politics, Latinos pushed themselves in via (1) independent political organizations (IPOs) organizing mass citizenship and voter registration drives and slating candidates for office; (2) the Rainbow Coalition; and (3) a 1981 court order creating three Latino majority wards (Fremon, Citation1990; Cardenas, Citation2004; Cuevas, Citation2010-2010).
16. Fearing the effect of a Black administration with a racial equity agenda on property values, White neighborhoods in the northwest and southwest corners of the city formed the Save Our Neighborhoods/Save Our City Coalition (SON/SOC) to protect against potential decreases in property values in their neighborhoods through the establishment of a Guaranteed Home Equity Program (Green, Citation1988).
17. HDO spent US$530,338 in campaigns; “1,173 men and women are certified to register people to vote on HDO’s behalf. And 482 of those HDO deputy registrars – or 41% – also have city jobs, a Sun-Times analysis of government payroll and voter registrar records found.” Several HDO members were indicted and the courts dismantled it in 2008. HDO helped elect Aldermen Danny Solis (25th Ward), Ariel Reboyras (30th Ward), and Jorge Cardenas (12th), Senators Tony Munoz and Iris Martinez; state representatives Susana Mendoza and Edward Acevedo; and appointed Machine hacks such as Al Sanchez, Victor Reyes (HDO director), Javier Torres, Angelo Torres, and Aaron Delvalle” to City Hall jobs. An HDO member stated, “It has nothing to do with Hispanic empowerment … It has to do with running a city-run and funded political Machine by the mayor and his underlings.” (Konkol, Fornek, Spielman, & Golab, Citation2005).
18. The Machine selected its own Latinos for bureaucratic and elected positions.
19. Pinstripe patronage is the practice of steering public business to accounting, law and other corporate firms in exchange for support that replaced traditional patronage trading public jobs and “favors” for support.
20. According to interviewees, the closing of two housing CBOs (Voice of the People and People’s Housing) convinced LISC that CBOs were not fit for development and, instead, should work in market facilitation.
21. NCP confronted gentrification with formulas of balanced development and income mixing that became currency among Pilsen organizations (Interviewees).
22. “Aldermanic privilege refers to the power of Chicago city council members (aldermen) to initiate or block city council or city government actions concerning their own wards. Sometimes written into official council rules, it is often based on unwritten understandings among members or on arrangements with city administrators who find it expedient to routinely comply with aldermanic requests.” (Thale, Citation2005).
23. At this point, organizing became marketing.
24. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 “defined a community action program as one that provides services, assistance, and other activities of sufficient scope and size to give promise of progress toward elimination of poverty or a cause or causes of poverty through developing employment opportunities, improving human performance, motivation, and productivity, or bettering the conditions under which people live, learn, and work. Nonprofit agencies were established in communities throughout the country to administer such programs using funds from the federal government and other public and private sources.”
25. While some movement CBOs accepted their new role, others folded (e.g., El Centro de la Causa, Latino Youth, Casa Aztlan, Association for Worker Rights (APO) and one, Pilsen Alliance, was created to lead the struggle against gentrification. Movement CBO refers to CBOs primarily engaged in mobilization and action against the status quo.
26. This developer accumulated a large number of units that he rented only to artists claiming that “he couldn’t rent to locals, because if he rented seven rooms to four people, soon there would be four more, and then 14 in the same apartment.” (Pearce, Citation2006).
27. This debate coincided with a series in the Chicago Tribune (McCarron, Citation1988) accusing CBOs of anti-development despite the fact that they were advocating “development without displacement.”
28. In the late 1990s, a City Hall–UIC–private sector partnership razed the only city’s remaining open market (Maxwell Street) between UIC and Pilsen to build University Village, a project with 960 units, dormitories for 755 UIC students, and 120,000 sq. ft. of retail space; then, the city relocated the South Water Market that was turned into 850 residential units; CHA, then, demolished four public housing high-rises (the ABLA Homes) to build a mixed income development, Roosevelt Square. A stream of condominium buildings and new retail followed.
29. Created to revitalize strategic areas, TIFs increase property values and, thus, have a high gentrifying potential.
30. See “Balanced Development Versus Gentrification” in TRP’s Home Page (http://resurrectionproject.org/pilsen-land-use-committee-helps-keep-development-balanced-in-pilsen/) and Pilsen Alliance’s response in PA’s Home Page (http://www.thepilsenalliance.org/pilsen-alliance-responds-to-pluc/).
31. Affordable housing is allocated from waiting lists containing nonresidents mainly.
32. As of this writing, the community was engaged in a clash with the city over a proposed landmark designation.
33. In 2016, anti-gentrification forces derailed a 500-unit proposal that the alderman had endorsed but disputes over a 99-unit proposal across from Benito Juarez high school that he and his zoning committee (PLUC) endorsed lagged.
34. A parallel Latino civil rights movement had as a core the movement for the independence of Puerto and one of its main instigators in the Young Lords.
35. The Chicano Civil Rights Movement sought the empowerment of Mexican Americans as a first step for structural change while leaning on ethnic pride to build a community of resistance and demand.
36. Founded in 1968 to provide legal aid and social services to Mexican immigrants, Centro de Acción Social Autónomo or CASA adopted a Marxist-Leninist rationality (Papers & Collections, Citation1963–1978).
37. As Katznelson (Citation1981) shows, excluded from the ranks of organized labor, Latinos and Blacks sited their struggles in their residential concentrations. Meanwhile, the Mexican civil rights movement associated the Latino condition with the forceful US annexation of Mexican territory that reduced Mexicans to servitude and, thus, focused on self-determination and nationalism (see Delgado & Stefancic, Citation1997; Garcia, Citation2014; Rosales & Rosales, Citation1997).
38. This adjustment coincided with a similar turn in Latino national politics: frustrated over the lack of results of the civil rights movement, Latino leaders opted for the electoral route establishing the Raza Unida Party with a community-based, grassroots, and nationalist format (see Ignacio & García, Citation1989).
39. In legal argot (CitationUSLegal, n.d), the CBO is “a public or private nonprofit organization of demonstrated effectiveness that (A) is representative of a community or significant segments of a community; and (B) provides educational or related services to individuals in the community.”
40. This shift in fact may explain the detachment of these CBOs from the fate of the community and their apparent lack of concern for the threat of gentrification.