Early in Rachel Rinaldo’s 2002 video Division + Western the camera pans across an alley from a mural of a fist raised in a salute to Puerto Rican pride to a newly constructed condominium building outfitted with balconies and barbecues. Another shot captures an assortment of developers’ signs advertising new projects including an “Artists Village Condominium.” “All this marketing is targeted at people just like me,” says Rinaldo, seen on camera in the middle of Wicker Park. “I like sushi. I like going to record stores. So I participate in these things. But I also know that just five blocks down that way–in fact I can almost see them from here–are the Puerto Rican flags.”
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Rinaldo’s 28-minute video–named for one of the two Humboldt Park intersections marked by giant red-and-blue steel flags–uses interviews with neighborhood activists, statistics charting the area’s shrinking Puerto Rican population, black-and-white footage from an old newsreel on Puerto Rico, and clips of Fourth District congressman Luis Gutierrez on Meet the Press to draw a parallel between the Puerto Rican struggle for independence and the current rhetoric surrounding gentrification. While the political message is familiar–westward-pushing developers and new Anglo residents are cast as colonialists by the activists she interviews–Rinaldo’s tactic of turning the camera on herself grounds the video in her own experience as someone who’s both part of the problem and trying to be part of the solution.
She enrolled at the University of Chicago to pursue graduate work in sociology in 1996, after a four-month stint backpacking through Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, and wrote her master’s thesis on the history of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center and its role in Humboldt Park politics. Currently she’s back in Indonesia on a Fulbright-Hays fellowship, doing research for her dissertation on feminism and globalization.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Robert Wyrod.
