Division on Division

LEAN MANUFACTURING Emmanuel Holmes helped design the speaker boxes, which consist of an MP3 player (below) powered by a solar panel and batteries.

The walk was only a few blocks, but Emmanuel Holmes and his friends were scared to take it.

In the fall of 2007, Holmes, then a student at Humboldt Park’s Roberto Clemente High School, was involved with Co-op Image Group, an organization that facilitates after-school arts programming. That night, Holmes was planning to volunteer for a gallery show at Reversible Eye, a five-minute walk from Co-op Image’s Corner Art Center (2658 W Evergreen St). To the surprise of Mike Bancroft, Co-op Image’s founder and executive director, and Cortez Davidaz, who runs the org’s Mobile Media Lab, Holmes and some of his peers suddenly refused to go. They realized they’d have to cross Division Street from north to south, thus traveling across gang territories.

To many Humboldt Park residents, Division does more than just mark 1200 north. It’s a literal dividing line between Maniac Latin Disciples’ gang territory, on the north side of Division, and the area south of the street controlled by rival crew the Spanish Cobras. “We were worried if we crossed to the south side that they were gonna think we were MLDs,” Holmes tells us. “You’ve got to be careful where you walk.”

“There’s an assumption that if kids come from one side of Division there’s an inherent affiliation,” Bancroft adds. “This kind of division locks people into this unfortunate one-block mentality.”

“It hit us then,” Davidaz says, “that especially in urban neighborhoods we have these invisible walls. Kids are afraid to go this way or that way either because of things they’ve experienced or, oftentimes, things they’ve heard.”

Davidaz and Bancroft decided Co-op’s next project would attempt to bridge the Division Street gap, to get the two sides talking—or at least listening—to each other.

The result is the Speaker Box Project. In 2008, Davidaz, Holmes and more than a dozen other students conducted hours of on-the-street interviews with Humboldt Park residents on both sides of Division Street. They asked questions such as, “What’s the first thing that comes to mind when I say division?”; “Can you name any division you feel on a daily basis?”; and “What does community mean to you?” Davidaz taught the students to edit their interviews, which he compiled into a 90-minute clip that gives an absorbing, if scattershot, oral history of the ’hood.

Most of the interview subjects remain nameless. There’s the 28-year-old woman born and raised in Humboldt who talks about loved ones she lost to gang violence. An old man bemoans gentrifiers who move into the neighborhood “with a sense of entitlement.” A middle-aged woman remembers growing up in Humboldt Park during the ’60s and ’70s, when “you had PVPs—gangs of European descent: the Playboys, the Ventures and Pulaski Park” warring with the largely Latin gangs. One young boy recounts a recent run-in with the Spanish Cobras: “I had to jump under a car, and the next thing you know they started shooting, like, pow! pow! I was screaming in my head because if I would’ve screamed out loud they would’ve came and shot me.”

The interviews stream through a couple of abandoned newspaper boxes that Co-op Image turned into audio devices. Davidaz outfitted the boxes with mini solar panels and D batteries, which power an MP3 player. This week, the boxes will be placed in front of the Corner Art Center and Reversible Eye.

“Ain’t nothing to fight over,” Holmes says. “They should be able to come over here and chill with us, and we should be able to go over there and chill with them. I would love that.”

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