New DePaul art exhibit honors history of the Young Lords

A purple beret adorned with colorful pins. Black-and-white photographs of a Lincoln Park that’s no more. Large-scale protest art. These objects all fill the second floor of the DePaul Art Museum in a new exhibit that dives deep into the history, activism and enduring lessons of the Young Lords Organization.

In “Tengo Lincoln Park en mi Corazón: Young Lords in Chicago,” curator Jacqueline Lazú looks back at the Civil Rights organization that got its start in the same neighborhood the museum and university call home. The exhibit aims to give the group its dues in a moment when museums are under the microscope.

Originally a street gang, the Young Lords grew into an advocacy group focused on the rights of Puerto Ricans who had settled in Lincoln Park in the 1950s and ’60s. These communities were facing displacement under Mayor Richard J. Daley’s plan for “urban renewal.” Despite their protracted activism, inspired in part by the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords’ legacy has been underrecognized in the city where the organization began. Later, other Young Lords chapters formed in places like New York.

“Somewhere along the way, we sort of forgot or really marginalized the history of the Young Lords here in Chicago — and certainly in the neighborhood of Lincoln Park, that has changed so much,” said Lazú, a professor in the university’s modern language department who has spent years studying the Young Lords. “But we still remember them as one of the most influential Civil Rights organizations for Latinos of that era.”

The exhibit arrives in a tense political moment when President Donald Trump has taken direct aim at museums nationwide. In a social media post last month, Trump wrote, “The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’” That language, along with the administration’s attacks on diversity and cuts to arts funding, has led some institutions to play it safe in hopes of keeping a low profile.

But the DePaul Art Museum is not backing down from its social justice-oriented mission, said its director, Laura-Caroline de Lara.

“I know everybody’s feeling very differently in terms of what they should or should not be doing and how they should be proceeding, but really: This is who we are, and this is what we do,” de Lara said. “As far as I’m concerned, DPAM really doesn’t plan on shying away from this important work.”

Despite feeling eerily relevant for today, the exhibition has been years in the making. It’s the culmination of decades of collaboration between the university and the Young Lords.

The organization started in the late 1950s as a gang founded by José “Cha Cha” Jiménez and other young Puerto Ricans. Their families had arrived in Chicago amid a wave of Puerto Rican migration to the mainland and eventually settled in Lincoln Park after being edged out of both Downtown and Old Town.

Puerto Rican youth frequently had run-ins with police and other young people from Chicago’s ethnic enclaves, according to Jiménez.

“We were dealing with discrimination, and the way we dealt with that was to form our own clique,” Jiménez, who died in January at the age of 76, told WBEZ’s “Worldview” in 2018.

While serving a jail sentence for drug charges in the late 1960s, Jiménez was exposed to the writings and ideology of Civil Rights leaders like Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. That planted an idea in his mind.

“This is what we need in the Puerto Rican community,” he recalled in the 2018 interview. “A type of similar organization, militant like the Black Panther Party, to address all the police brutality and housing issues that we were dealing with. So, we were able to transform a gang. We built a movement.”

The group engaged in direct action — including protests in the streets and a sit-in at a McCormick Seminary building — to draw attention to the discrimination and displacement experienced by the Puerto Rican community in the neighborhood. Like the Black Panthers, the Young Lords organized free meals for neighbors and established a child care center so that women could join the movement.

It is this activism and solidarity that Lazú has been studying for more than two decades. In that time, she has helped to archive, organize and broadcast the group’s history and contributions to the broader Civil Rights Movement. In 2023, that work led to a historical marker on campus. It sits outside what was once the seminary’s administration building (now part of DePaul’s music school), which the Young Lords occupied during a 1969 protest that followed the police killing of Young Lords member Manuel Ramos.

Now, Lazú’s scholarship is powering the new exhibit and a forthcoming book, co-authored with Jiménez, to be published from Haymarket Books next March. But for Lazú, it’s all a bit bittersweet to see these efforts come to fruition after Jiménez’s death.

“I would have loved for him to, like we did so many times before, see these projects through and really collaborate on launching them and presenting them to the public,” she said. “I feel like he’s here in spirit.”

For Jiménez, the work never ended, Lazú said. “I don’t think that there are enough words to really describe the level of commitment that Cha Cha had to the Young Lords, and what he named as a protracted struggle,” she said. “Cha Cha never stopped calling himself a Young Lord, and he didn’t see an ending to the Young Lords Organization.”

It is that spirit that the exhibition tries to capture, and Lazú is grateful to have the backing of DePaul. “We can’t allow ourselves to think that every moment of discourse is a moment of controversy, as opposed to an opportunity for dialogue,” Lazú said. “And that’s how I see this.”

In a moment of deep divisions, Lazú said the Young Lords can serve as an inspiration. “They were very much about dialogue across difference and through difference,” she said. “They weren’t afraid of those moments of tension.”

Courtney Kueppers is an arts and culture reporter at WBEZ.