Stop General Iron organizers talk about healing and their vision for the Southeast Side.
By Alma Campos
Crystal Vance Guerra (Photo: Alma Campos)
This profile is part of our How a Community Heals series.
The door is open to Dulce’s Cafe at 88th Street and Commercial Avenue in South Chicago. Locals walk in to buy coffee, freshly blended fruit and veggie juices and warm toasted sandwiches. A row of potted plants decorates the storefront’s glass windows, and nearby a Virgin Mary figurine sits on an altar next to pink and white carnations in a vase.
Crystal Vance Guerra sits inside the coffee shop; she lives just a few blocks away. She is one of the cofounders of the social justice collective Bridges // Puentes, which formed in June 2020 during the global protests following the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd. In support of Black and brown unity, the group began organizing biking events and caravans to bring the community together against police brutality and to demand justice for families at the border.
“We've been doing a lot of healing for our neighborhood,” Vance Guerra says. “All these NGOs, all these organizations, the youth groups … they've been taking on the work.”
It wasn’t long before they joined an environmental justice fight that had been brewing for years on the Southeast Side: In the fall, the group organized a cycling event called Rise Against General Iron, where participants from all over the city rode their bikes in zombie costumes and Halloween makeup.
The Stop General Iron coalition, which includes Bridges // Puentes and other Southeast Side groups, is fighting the relocation of the controversial metal scrapper from the white and affluent Lincoln Park neighborhood to the Southeast Side, a Black and brown working-class community already overburdened with toxic pollution from companies operating in the area. Earlier this year, organizers and residents intensified their campaign through demonstrations, rallies and a month-long hunger strike to stop Mayor Lori Lightfoot from approving a permit for Reserve Management Group (RMG), which purchased General Iron and is building the new renamed facility.
Melany Flores, an organizer with the Stop General Iron coalition, met Vance Guerra in the spring. They collaborated at an Easter event for kids and a food giveaway hosted by Bridges // Puentes. On the last day of the hunger strike, Flores carried a thick wooden sign made by Vance Guerra’s group—decorated with blue marker lettering that read, “We Deserve Clean Air,” over a drawing of the map of the 10th Ward. Inside the map were nails pinned to the wood—each representing a day that hunger strikers didn’t eat.
Flores grew up on the Southeast Side. She’s lived in Hegewisch for 20 years. She participated in 17 days of the hunger strike where she lost more than 20 pounds and developed dangerous symptoms such as extreme cold body sensations, headaches and lethargy. Her six-year-old daughter noticed when she wouldn’t sit down for dinner. “You need to eat, mommy,” her daughter would say, according to Flores.
Flores says that while she is still recovering from the hunger strike, putting her body and mental health on the line to halt General Iron’s move into the Southeast Side was necessary. “I got involved because it's in my community, and it seemed like nobody cared that we were going to be victims of this big company moving into our neighborhood.”
And after over three years of back and forth between the city and General Iron and months of mounting public pressure from local organizers, Southeast Side residents finally got the city’s attention. Mayor Lightfoot delayed RMG’s permit process in March, then indefinitely suspended the process last month after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expressed concerns about the facility’s environmental issues.
Both Vance Guerra and Flores see their work to heal the community as twofold: showing love to their neighbors by bringing people together, and organizing for a better future for the community.
Healing can happen when you lift someone’s spirit, as a giver or receiver, says Flores: “Whether it be something simple like planting some new flowers, just to give the community a new sense of beauty or a new sense of life.”
While neighborhood cleanups and campaigns like Stop General Iron bring the community together, Vance Guerra thinks it's ultimately the city’s responsibility to repair and invest in the neighborhood. “For us to heal, there’s the work that we continue to do internally,” she says, “but we see more and more pain or more trauma because our communities don't receive what they need from the city.”
The pandemic and activism against police brutality only magnified the Southeast Side’s environmental burden and exposed other wounds that run deep in the area, such as disinvestment in local businesses, school closings, a lack of educational opportunities and teen homelessness, she adds. “The pandemic brought us all together on a global level … but also on a very hyperlocal level where the fractures within the system were laid bare.”
These fractures, she points out, are embodied by the small, family-owned Dulce’s Cafe where we sit for our interview. The city’s planning department is considering a plan to open a chain coffee shop, Dollop, in South Chicago through its Invest South/West development initiative, which makes her worry about Dulce’s ability to compete. She says this type of development feels “disrespectful” and that it’s only one example of the city not paying attention to what the community really needs.
“One of the first images that come to my mind as a child is broken glass,” Vance Guerra says, remembering her own childhood in South Chicago. “There's broken glass in the parks, there’s broken glass on the sidewalks, the windows are broken, the houses are broken, everything is broken and what does that do to you as a kid?” Through Bridges // Puentes, Vance Guerra wants to pick up the broken glass and repair the windows and homes in the neighborhood.
Healing is the process of becoming healthy again, but Vance Guerra and Flores do not have a recollection of a healthy and vibrant Southeast Side. That is why their goal is to imagine a new future for the Southeast Side built through unity and organizing—not unlike the kind they witnessed in the Stop General Iron movement. “I think the pandemic kind of gave a lot of people a sense of starting over,” Flores says. “Things aren't going to be the same. We're not going to let them be the same.”
Alma Campos (she/her) is a bilingual writer, journalist and translator. She writes about immigrant communities and equitable development.
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