War on Poverty, War on Division Street: Puerto Rican Chicago in the 1960s through the Lens of the Janet Nolan Collection

IntroductionOn April 15, 1966, in the midst of President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty, a Roman Catholic nun named Parmalee got off a plane in Chicago. Raised in the suburbs of the Windy City, Parmalee was returning, after several years of missionary work in southern Mexico, to lead one part of an ambitious, multi-site research project investigating the ways in which different racialized groups in the United States responded to poverty. She would spend the next fifteen months living in the West Town neighborhood on the city's near northwest side, meticulously documenting the growing Puerto Rican population.1 Parmalee's research team produced an evidentiary record-nearly three thousand pages of ethnographic field notes, interview transcripts, and reflective essays-that provides a unique window into a pivotal period in the development of Chicago's Puerto Rican community.Parmalee eventually left her order and married, taking her husband's surname and becoming Nolan. I met Nolan in 2011, and we quickly became friends. Over the subsequent years I worked with her to find an archival home for her papers. Today, this cache of documents is officially known as the Janet Nolan Ethnographic Research on Puerto Ricans in Chicago It resides at DePaul University's Special Collections and Archives, ensuring that it will be permanently held in Chicago and accessible to scholars once it is properly processed. The Collection tracks crucial historical processes and events, including: the growing concentration of the previously dispersed Puerto Rican population in the West Town and Humboldt Park neighborhoods; the starkly increasing poverty of the community and its changing ethno-racial self-perception; popular responses to the three-night-long Division Street riots of June, 1966; and the development of key community organizations like the Spanish Action Committee of Chicago (SACC) and the Latin American Defense Organization (LADO). Most importantly, it documents the quotidian struggles of ordinary people in the face of intransigent liberal bureaucracies, replete with small joys and sometimes larger sorrows.This article describes the Nolan Collection, contextualizes its production and subsequent use in terms of the history of the Puerto Rican community in Chicago as well as the War on Poverty, and argues for a careful and critical engagement with the voluminous amounts of information contained within it. Here, I suggest that the prior example of contentious debates among historians of slavery over the proper usage of ex-slave narratives produced during the 1930s can help guide scholarly interaction with the Collection. In this context, it is no coincidence that the slave narrative debates emerged within the same War on Poverty context that generated Parmalee's research itself. Nonetheless, while the comparison is instructive, there are unique facets to consider in the case of the Nolan Collection that have no prior parallel. Real problems will face scholars who wish to utilize the Collection, but within reasonable parameters, the benefits of such usage will far outweigh any downside.Fifty years after Parmalee began her research, the arrival of this special issue of CENTRO Journal is reflective of the modest boom currently under way in scholarly studies of Puerto Rican Chicago, past and present. The Nolan Collection holds the potential to dramatically reshape how the community is understood and represented by scholars today and in the future.Puerto Rican Chicago in the 1960s: Dealing with DisplacementAfter two decades of growth and deliberate geographic dispersion, Chicago's Puerto Rican community in the middle part of the 1960s was rapidly being concentrated in a small number of neighborhoods, mostly on the near northwest side of the city. What had begun as a targeted and temporary labor migration immediately after World War Two, ballooned into a sizeable but precarious permanent population, increasingly dependent upon government assistance to offset the uncertainty of employment and the near-inevitability of poverty wages should work even be found. …

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