Timeline of the Puerto Rican Community in Chicago
1975 Hispanic Housing Development Corporation is founded by a collective of Latino business, civic, and religious leaders, seeking to provide quality housing for Chicago’s Latino community.
1973 The Puerto Rican Cultural Center is opened. In its more than thirty years of existence, the PRCC is housed in several locations throughout the Humboldt Park neighborhood. With a strong commitment to the center’s motto, “Live and help to live,” the organization works to provide numerous services to the…
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• Proyecto Pa’Lante is established as an educational outreach program for the Latino community, providing academic support services on campus at NEIU. The program is a product of struggles waged by the Puerto Rican and Mexican students who comprise the Union for Puerto Rican Students. View the video of it's…
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• Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School (then known as Rafael Cancel Miranda School) is opened as an alternative high school in Chicago (now located above the Puerto Rican Cultural Center). Albizu Campos High School is founded because the local public schools ignored the concerns of Puerto Rican…
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• The Union for Puerto Rican Students is founded at Northeastern Illinois University to address the concerns and realities of the growing Puerto Rican and Latino populations on campus. Among other efforts, UPRS is responsible for establishing Que Ondee Sola in 1972, the longest consistently published Puerto Rican or Latino…
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• The Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center, named after the revered Puerto Rican abolitionist, was founded by Latin American Development Services. The cultural center’s focus is cultural work, providing educational development, and workshops in community empowerment, leadership, and performing arts in the Puerto Rican community.
• The first political Puerto Rican mural in Chicago, “La Crucifixión de Don Pedro,” is painted by the Puerto Rican Arts Association on North and Artesian Avenues in Humboldt Park. In the summer of 2003, the mural’s existence is threatened due to the construction of a condominium in the vacant…
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