Harrison Park (Zapata Park)

On the evening of June nineteenth, nineteen seventy-three, twenty-three-year-old David "Boogie" Gonzalez came to Harrison Park (Zapata Park) to settle a dispute between two Pilsen street gangs—the Morgan Deuces and the Latin Kings. It was his job: the local community center El Centro de la Causa had hired Gonzalez to talk to people an ordinary social worker might not admit to his presence.

Gonzalez himself had belonged to a gang as a teenager. In nineteen seventy-one, his older brother Jacob, who had returned from the Vietnam War, was shot dead on 18th Street. After that, Boogie began reconciling young people he knew from his earlier life. Four months before the meeting in the park, he had managed to negotiate a truce.

Harrison Park (Zapata Park) was suited to such negotiations because of its role in the neighborhood. The West Park Commission created it in nineteen twelve on the site of a former lime works, to give an overcrowded industrial part of Chicago open space, sports, and social services. A stone quarry was later added to the park. That is why the fields, pool, and meeting rooms here were meant not as a decorative amenity for the neighborhood: people met, played, celebrated, and settled disputes here.

Officially, the park is named in memory of Carter Harrison Sr., Chicago’s five-term mayor, whom his contemporaries considered one of the city’s most popular leaders. But in the years when Gonzalez worked here, Mexican activists called this place Zapata Park—in honor of Emiliano Zapata, leader of a peasant army in the Mexican Revolution, who sought the return of land to rural communities. Later, this unofficial name took root inside the building: a bronze bust of Zapata was installed in the rotunda, and the fieldhouse was officially named the Emiliano Zapata Cultural Center.

That June night, the earlier truce was already falling apart. Gonzalez was trying to stop a new clash when a gunman in a passing car hit him twice in the chest. Boogie died here. The agreement he had maintained did not outlive him.

A few days later, a memorial march went along 18th Street. Gonzalez’s coffin was carried by six young people—each representing a separate Pilsen gang. In nineteen seventy-eight, artists Aurelio Diaz and Salvador Vega painted his portrait on a wall at the intersection of 18th Street and Throop Street. The paint flaked away over time, part of the image was painted over, but Vega returned and created an updated version. It retained the explanation of why Boogie had come to Harrison Park (Zapata Park): “the first to unite the clubs of 18th Street for peace and unity.”