By Cheryl Ross
That is the essential question of Ramirez’s poetic fable Israel in Exile, a film premiering Friday, May 4, at the Chicago Theatre as part of the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum’s Del Corazón Festival. It also might be the essential question of Ramirez’s own life. The son of Mexican immigrants, he ran with a Latino gang, became a teenage parent, and dropped out of college before making his way up the ranks of the local theater scene to become artistic director of the Latino Chicago Theater Company and an actor in movies and network TV. But he’s climbed the American ladder without feeling at home on it. He built his career telling honest stories of the “Latino experience,” and the higher he went the harder that became. On ABC’s Missing Persons he spouted lines that had “nothing to do with what I feel, or what I think is the reality of my people.” Things were better at Latino Chicago, but in 1997 the theater went up in flames. Putting the pieces of his artistic life back together, Ramirez saw a chance to make a film that would let him have his say.
The family relocated to mostly white Humboldt Park, buying a house and renting out the top and garden floors. They maintained their ties to other Mexicans by returning to Pilsen to shop and attend church. Ramirez played with the neighborhood kids in Humboldt Park and was generally treated well by other whites there. Older Latinos with foreign accents, like his parents, were not as fortunate. English being his first language, Ramirez knew the difference between sarcasm and sincerity, and he heard whites in the neighborhood putting down his parents. “That’s one of the things that you don’t get when you’re an immigrant,” he says. “You come and present yourself and you take people at their face. You’re not sensitive enough or know enough about the language to know when someone is being facetious, and that’s one of the cutting tools we use to get over on people.”
He’d loved entertainment since he got addicted to TV when he was six. He and his friends were religious about the Sunday double feature at the Tiffin theater on North Avenue near Pulaski. They’d pick up gossip there and often wound up in a gang fight. He describes himself as his gang’s “language” point man, the guy who forged absence notes, called lawyers, and spoke for friends who weren’t as good with English.
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It was his wife’s turn to complain about the neighborhood. He had a long-term plan but she wanted “more right away–like the new car, and the new furniture, and the beautiful place.” After a month in Humboldt Park she picked up their baby girl and walked out.
“What kind of gift do you want?” Ramirez asked.
