Free Food, Free Space: People's Stews and the Spatial Identity Politics of People's Parks

Abstract

As radio host and historian Studs Terkel discovered when he arrived at Chicago's activist-created Poor People's Park at the corner of Halsted and Armitage one fall evening in 1969, food served as a symbolic form of cultural and territorial reclamation. Created spontaneously by activists days prior, the park was the most recent spatial occupation by Lincoln Park residents who had been protesting the impact of urban renewal on affordable housing. Terkel heard the crunch of shovels and rakes hitting the rocky dirt, yet the smell of simmering Puerto Rican asopao de pollo or chicken stew continued to draw the residents' attention. 1 When asked by Terkel why she came out to cook for park workers, Ceil Keegan explained that the dish honored the ethnic heritage of the Young Lords leading the park's construction. Her calm and earnest tone conveyed her pride in cooking for these activists as a form of emotional caretaking, encouraging denigrated members in her community to be proud of their culture. Local newspapers had characterized the protest as militant and hypermasculine, yet Keegan made a public display of slowly cooking a delicious vat of chicken stew-its tantalizingly rich aroma pouring into the lungs of their surrounding white middle-class critics who looked on from the sidewalks with derision. Within Poor People's Park, food was a medium for asserting power and reclaiming space that became a foundation for building cross-cultural alliances across boundaries of race, gender, ethnicity, and class in the Lincoln Park neighborhood.