A lesson in Latino, indigenous resistance at Newberry Library

Isabel Quiroz looks at a 495-year-old map of Mexico City from the Edward E. Ayer collection at the Newberry Library. | Pat Nabong/For The Sun-Times

Fresh off a successful protest against one of the city’s major museums, high school students from Pilsen and Little Village visited the Newberry Library to learn about histories of resistance within Chicago’s Latino and indigenous communities.

The students from Instituto Justice and Leadership Academy, an alternative high school at 2570 S. Blue Island Ave., led a social media campaign in November aimed at the Chicago History Museum for the lack of Latino representation among its exhibits.

Their campaign bore fruit Dec. 4 as the museum agreed to install a wide-ranging exhibit on the Latino experience by 2023 and launch a citywide essay contest next school year centered on the history of Chicago’s diverse Latino population.

But the Instituto students aren’t interested in taking a victory lap anytime soon. The trip to the Newberry was their latest attempt to better understand their roots outside of the classroom and bring their community’s history to the forefront.

“It’s frustrating that we had to go this far only to now start learning about our histories in our own city,” said senior Isabel Quiroz, 18.

Students browse the pages of a pictorial manuscript from the 18th century at the Newberry Library.

Quiroz and her classmates perused priceless artifacts at the Newberry, including a 495-year-old map of Mexico City — then known as Tenochtitlan — drawn by the Spaniards at the height of their conquest.

Students also paged through a facsimile of “The Red Man’s Greeting” by Simon Pokagon. A citizen of the Potawatomi nation, Pokagon handed out copies of his book at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 to the dismay of some attendees.

“On behalf of my people, the American Indians,” Pokagon wrote, “I hereby declare to you, the pale-faced race that has usurped our lands and homes, that we have no spirit to celebrate with you the Great Columbian Fair now being held in this Chicago city, the wonder of the world.”

Liliana Baena, left, shows her classmates a photo of Pilsen from the 1990s archived at the Newberry Library.

Liliana Baena, 18, said her favorite archives were black-and-white photos of anti-gentrification protests in Pilsen from the 1990s published in the Chicago Reader.

Baena was born in Chicago but moved to Mexico with her mother as a toddler. She came back to the city in September and now lives in Little Village, where a spate of murders and shootings have rocked the neighborhood in recent weeks.

“It’s been really sad with everything that’s going on, but these photos make me feel better about our situation here in Chicago,” Baena said. “It’s good to see ourselves in these photos, fighting for our community.”

A photo by Nathan Mandell from the Chicago Reader collection at the Newberry Library showing an anti-gentrification flyer on a light pole in Pilsen from 1998.

The library trip was coordinated by Instituto history teacher Anton Miglietta and Analú López, a librarian in Newberry’s American Indian and Indigenous Studies collection.

Born and raised in Little Village, López, 37, said she hoped to show the students items in Newberry’s collection that resonate with the work they’re doing today.

“I wanted to bring in material that’s relevant to the histories they’re working to bring to the surface,” she said.

Analú López, the Newberry Library’s librarian of the Edward E. Ayer collection, talks to students about 1998 photographs of Pilsen.

Carlos Ballesteros is a corps member of Report for America, a not-for-profit journalism program that aims to bolster Sun-Times coverage of Chicago’s South Side and West Side.