Multiracial and Lesbian Inclusion

Black and White women, as well as lesbians, actively contributed to the Festival. The White, non-Latina women who participated reflect collaborations between MLEA and White civic actors and feminists. In attendance was anthropologist Gwen Stern, one of the core group of women who first organized Mujeres (Espinoza, Mujeres Latinas, 505). In the photo below, we see Stern with MLEA executive committee member Linda Coronado, who also joined the Festival. To learn about community activist Coronado, who helped elect Chicago's first Black mayor Harold Washington, see SPOTLIGHT below.

According to historian Lilia Fernández, in Pilsen: "Chicano/a activists… saw the importance of White allies. They relied on their skills to write grant proposals… and to negotiate with mainstream institutions. Moreover, Chicana and Chicano activists had close friendships with some of them, even being comadres (godmothers) and compadres (godfathers) to each other's children. It was not entirely unexpected that Chicanas and White allies would influence each other's politics" (Brown in the Windy City, 253).

Gwen Stern worked with community women to form the Latina Mother Infant Committee and helped the committee gather data, secure funding, and design programs. With professor Steve Schensul, Stern and the committee were able to obtain funding for the Latina Mother Infant Program, "Dar a Luz" ("Profile of an Anthropologist"). According to the MLEA newsletter, by the time of the Festival, Stern had served on the MLEA Board of Directors for six years and coordinated "Dar a Luz."

In the Festival, we we pooled resources outside of the community for volunteers. Through my particular part, I was able to get a lot of young non-Latina women, Black and White, and Jewish too, to help us. Which were mostly lesbians. Nobody wore a placard saying they were, you know-- we were just there in the community. I also made the contact for the band. I don't think anyone batted an eyelash when the band performed and their name was Sister Blues and the Blue Suede Dyke Band. I don't recall anybody saying anything negative at all. Not from the older women, not from anybody. Not from the Mujeres group. It was wonderful to have Alison & her band there.                      -Diana Solís, Festival Co-organizer

In the photo above, we see Festival coordinator Diane Avila with Alison Clark, a member of Sisterblues and the Blue Suede Dyke Band, an interracial band featured at the Festival that Solís would also enjoy at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival later that summer. Latina lesbians were not a visible, collective force in 1979 Chicago. Partly through Diana Solís' advocacy and friendship circles, it is remarkable that we can identify lesbians and non-heterosexual women who had active roles, quietly and more overtly, at this public Festival. Solís invited her friends, including other lesbians, to volunteer or just enjoy the Festival, including a Black woman couple who helped out that day. 

Solís drew sustenance from women’s music, "a euphemism for lesbian music, identity, and social organizing” that created empowering spaces during an era of rampant “homophobia and misogyny” (Morris, “Soundtracks”). She frequented and sometimes wore a t-shirt from Mountain Moving Coffeehouse for Womyn and Children, a lesbian feminist music venue that featured performers on Saturday nights in rented spaces on Chicago’s North Side since 1975. For Solís, recent utopian efforts to forge women’s culture and communities in Midwest-based women’s music festivals were an inspiration for the Pilsen Festival. Judy Markowitz, a lesbian guitarist and singer who regularly played flamenco guitar and “ethnic music” (Markowitz, “Her Music”) at “Mountain Moving,” also shared her music on the Festival stage at 1:30 PM.

Some women participated in the Festival who had not yet “come out.” MLEA, like other women’s organizations of the period, was subject to lesbian-baiting, “labelling women or groups of women as lesbians in order to discredit them and to pressure them to conform to traditional gender roles” (McClintock. “Lesbian Baiting,” 241), to intimidate women who needed help and discourage potential funders. Alicia Amador is seen in the background blowing up balloons in the Festival video (00:49). At that time, Amador, sister of the organization’s first staff member (Maria “Maruca” Martinez), helped out at the Festival as a staffer at MLEA who was raising a daughter since she was 15. Amador, who would have a long career working with youth at MLEA, was aware of her attraction to girls since her teen years but was “very secretive” (Amador), not “coming out” to family and at work until the 1990s (Amador). 

Two years after the Festival, Latinas would enjoy Salsa night under dim lights at Marilyn’s (lesbian) Bar on the Near North Side, and Chicago’s first Latina lesbian organization (Latina Lesbians en Nuestro Ambiente, LLENA) would not launch until 1988 (Torres, “Building a Translengua”). According to Amador, it wasn’t until MLEA started working with Amigas Latinas, a group started in 1995 by and for “Latina lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning women” (“Amigas Latinas”) where Amador was an early member, that MLEA became a place that clearly welcomed women-loving women as clients and otherwise (Amador, “Mujeres Latinas”). 

The Chicago Urban League Women’s Component, added to the organization during the 1970s, also participated. Thus, a few non-Latina Black women participated in or attended the Festival despite the city’s deep racial segregation. Although cultural activist Lola Lai Jong would later become part of Solís’ circle of lesbian friends, we found no record of Asian Americans at the Festival.

SPOTLIGHT: Linda Coronado appreciates Salima Rivera's poetry reading in the Festival video (04:33, behind Rivera). According to the June '79 MLEA newsletter, at the time of the Festival Coronado, a former teacher, was a Latino student recruiter and advisor  at University of Illinois Chicago Circle (UICC). Among her many roles over the years, this Chicago civic leader would become executive director of MLEA and director of the Interpreter Department at Cook County Hospital. She organized Latino support for Harold Washington's mayoral campaign; "For activists like [Rudy] Lozano and Coronado, who had been at the forefront of panethnic organizing during the previous decade, their involvement in the Washington campaign offered a unique opportunity to make manifest their vision of a shared Latino identity among Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and others" (Sánchez Jr., "What are We?," 275). After his election, Coronado served as chairwoman of the Chicago Commission on Latino Affairs during the Washington administration.

To see & hear Alicia Amador (1953-2010) on growing up in Pilsen, her career at MLEA, and challenging racism, sexism, and heterosexism: Chicago Gay History: Alicia Amador

To hear from musician Judith Markowitz, including what it was like to play at Mountain Moving Coffeehouse and her perspectives on lesbian feminist separatism in 1970s Chicago:                        Chicago Gay History: Judith Markowitz

Want to learn more about the Women’s Music movement that started in the early 1970s? Soundtracks of Sisterhood (Bonnie Morris)

SOURCES

Amador, Alicia. Interview by Tracy Baim. Chicago Gay History. August 1, 2007. Video. https://www.chicagogayhistory.com/video_bio.php?id=688

“Amigas Latinas.” The Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame. Last modifed 2016. https://chicagolgbthalloffame.org/amigas-latinas/.

Espinosa, Martha. “Mujeres Latinas en Acción.” In Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Vicki Ruíz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol, 505-506.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

Fernández, Lilia. Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. 

Markowitz, Judith. Interview by Tracy Baim. Chicago Gay History. July 25, 2007. Video. https://www.chicagogayhistory.com/video_bio.php?id=534

“Mountain Moving Coffeehouse for Womyn and Children.” The Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame. Last modifed 2005. https://chicagolgbthalloffame.org/mountain-moving-coffeehouse-for-womyn-and-children/

McClintock, Mary. “Lesbian Baiting Hurts All Women.” In Women's Voices in Experiential Education, edited by Kay Warren and Association of Experiential Education, 241-250. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1996.

Morris, Bonnie. “Soundtracks of Sisterhood.” Perspectives on History, October 14, 2020. https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/november-2020/s oundtracks-of-sisterhood-historicizing-the-womens-music-movement

"Profile of an Anthropologist." 1978. Anthropology News: 13.

Sánchez Jr., Jaime. 2021. "'What are we?': Latino Politics, Identity, and Memory in the 1983 Chicago Mayoral Campaign." Modern American History 4, no. 3: 263-284.

Torres, Lourdes. “Building a Translengua in Latina Lesbian Organizing.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 21, no. 3 (2017): 272-288