A New Play Revisits the Memories and Sacrifices of a Chicago Young Lords Leader

Chicago Stories: The Young Lords of Lincoln Park premieres Friday, October 11 on WTTW and at wttw.com/chicagostories or the PBS app.

When Ivan Vega was asked to play the role of José “Cha Cha” Jiménez in a new original play, he felt a little intimidated. Jiménez is, after all, an impactful figure – a political leader in Chicago who stood up for the Puerto Rican community as it faced displacement in Lincoln Park in the 1960s.

“I was more nervous to play Cha Cha, because these are real people, these are people that are alive, that have sacrificed so much for the movement, for the community, for the people,” says Vega, who is also the co-founder and executive director of UrbanTheater Company in Humboldt Park.

“I wanted to play him as authentic as possible. And there’s that pressure of also working in the community – like people actually knew this guy. I don’t want people to come up to me and be like, ‘Wow, great show, but you were way off on this one!” Vega says.

Vega spends two hours on stage in “Chicago Lore(s),” a play currently running at UrbanTheater Company in Humboldt Park through the end of October. “It’s basically an ethnographic piece,” says Miranda Gonzalez. She directed the play and also serves as the theater’s artistic director. “It’s about two friends reflecting on how they committed to the civil rights movement. They ask themselves how they think they’ll be remembered,” she says.

The first of those friends is Jiménez, who was the leader of a youth street gang turned political group called the Young Lords Organization, which is also the subject of a new Chicago Stories documentary, The Young Lords of Lincoln Park. In the late 1960s, the Young Lords fought against housing displacement in their rapidly changing Lincoln Park neighborhood. They staged a dramatic takeover of the administration building for McCormick Theological Seminary (on DePaul University’s present-day campus), demanding that the funds the seminary allotted for the community be given back to the neighborhood for an affordable housing development and other social services. The Young Lords also set up programs that provided health care, child care, free breakfast for kids, and legal aid for their community.

The second of the friends in “Chicago Lore(s)” is Billy “Che” Brooks, the deputy minister of education for the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. The Young Lords, Black Panthers, and a group of white Appalachians called the Young Patriots came together to form the first Rainbow Coalition – an important display of unity in the civil rights movement.

“One thing that I think that hopefully [the play] can teach us is that there’s power in unity,” says Sammy A. Publes, the actor and playwright behind the story. “That’s where we really can dismantle this idea of us-versus-them.”

Publes has a unique connection to the play’s central figure. For many years, he lived just down the road from Jimenéz in Michigan.

“Somebody asked me if I wanted to meet this man by the name of Cha Cha Jiménez, a Puerto Rican gentleman. Being that it’s West Michigan where I live, there isn’t a lot of people of color. They kind of figured the only two Latinos in town should probably know each other,” says Publes with a laugh.

What developed between him and Jiménez was a friendship and a mentor-mentee relationship. Publes was familiar with the more broadly told story of the Young Lords in New York, but Jiménez taught him how influential the Chicago group was. He has hours of recordings from their conversations, plus many more hours spent fishing or spending time with Jiménez, when he learned the deeply personal details of the leader’s life, as well as the physical and mental toll the movement took on him. Jiménez – who, according to Publes, was intent on ensuring the history of the Young Lords is recorded – asked him to write a play for the 50th anniversary of the McCormick Seminary takeover.

“A lot of times history tends to erase our efforts, especially by Black and brown folks, so his main thing was just that we get it down on paper,” Publes says. “That’s the point of the work: to try to catalog as much information as we could.”

Publes developed several shorter iterations of the play, but a few years ago, Gonzalez approached him about developing it further for UrbanTheater Company.

“We chose this story because we are an organization that is founded by Chicago natives, and a lot of the times when you are watching theater, our very own history gets overlooked. There are very few folks that really highlight stories in this city,” Gonzalez says.

While the initial versions of the play were more “documentary style,” it is now a memory play, with Vega as Jiménez recalling key events and people that shaped his own journey and the legacy of the Young Lords Organization. Publes says the title, “Chicago Lore(s)” comes from the idea that some of the stories are “so incredible,” such seemingly tall tales, that he was unsure people would believe they are factual. In giving the tales life on stage, he hopes they become something more.

“I sat down for many hours with Che and Cha Cha, and I would say to Cha Cha, ‘I don’t think people are going to believe me when I say this particular thing.’ He would say, ‘Well, they’re just stories,’” Publes says. “There are so many tales of activism and humanity that are not spoken about. Hopefully this goes from a lore or a tale into actual education to be taught in the schools.”

Publes hopes that his play conveys that Jiménez, now older and in poor health, was not without flaws, but that he still sacrificed much in pursuit of civil rights.

“All these memories hopefully will help the audience see kind of like what made up this man – this complicated, very deep man,” Publes says.

Stories of displacement and housing conditions hit particularly close to home for a theater located in the heart of the Paseo Boricua, as Humboldt Park is a neighborhood that has been impacted by gentrification.

“My family actually knew a lot of Cha Cha’s stories,” Gonzalez says. “My family was also facing those things – which was slumlords and living conditions that were not up to par, because at the time there were there were no specific policies or regulations around tenants’ rights.” Gonzalez hopes audiences ask themselves “what progress looks like,” and how the issues the Young Lords faced in 1969 are similar to or different from what is happening now.

“As I do this play, the sense of home, of community, of family, of fighting for your homeland, those are things that are really admirable, and those are things I see so much around me in the community that I’m in,” says Vega. “We have to tell these stories.”