Nearly two months have passed since the Park District board voted to keep a statue of Puerto Rican nationalist Pedro Albizu Campos from being erected in Humboldt Park, but the case just won’t die.
The imbroglio is rooted in contrasting interpretations of Campos, a man few Chicagoans had even heard of. Campos was born in 1891, just seven years before U.S. troops invaded Puerto Rico. Over the next 50 years the island evolved into a commonwealth of the U.S., and Campos might easily have emerged as one of its more prominent leaders. He was a Harvard-educated lawyer who by almost all accounts was also a forceful, charismatic orator. But he wanted no role with the U.S. government. Yankee imperialism, he preached, had brainwashed his people to the point that white Puerto Ricans thought they were better than black Puerto Ricans and almost all Puerto Ricans were abysmally ignorant of their art, music, and culture. He advocated independence, by any and all means, including violence. On several occasions his backers clashed with federal troops, and he spent more than 20 years in prison on various charges of inciting to overthrow the government. He died in 1965.
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By January of 1993, when Ocasio was sworn in as alderman, a six-foot-tall statue of Campos had been completed and a Park District advisory committee headed by Commissioner Margaret Burroughs had reviewed the proposal to install the statue in the southeast section of Humboldt Park. Burroughs suggested that the statue be bronzed–which it was at an additional cost of $18,000–and then recommended that it be erected. “We didn’t expect to get any opposition from the Park District board,” says Ocasio. “We hoped to have an unveiling ceremony in the spring or early summer.”
Like Ocasio’s, Alvarez’s attitudes toward Campos are shaped by his own experiences, in this case as a social worker in Cuba when Fidel Castro came to power.
“I’m as much a Puerto Rican as many of these people,” says Alvarez. “My mother was born in Puerto Rico. I’ve lived there. I’ve studied there. I have family there. Yes, I was born in Cuba. But I don’t consider myself more Cuban than Puerto Rican. I feel more Caribbean. More of a citizen of the world.”
But Claypool and the board are unrelenting. “It was clear to us that the controversy was dividing the community,” says Nora Moreno, communications director for the Park District. “Our position is that members of the community come back to the board with someone they all agree on.”
