Maria Sanchez worked at the Maxwell Street Market selling tacos and huaraches for more than 20 years, weathering periods of low sales, harsh winters and a fluctuating schedule.
Her family was fielding calls from customers and workers about when their business, La Flor de Mexico, will open at the market this season when she learned this month she will no longer have a slot at the historic market.
“They took away our job from one day to another,” Sanchez said in Spanish, adding that she couldn’t access a virtual meeting where the changes were announced.
“I couldn’t even give my opinion after being there for so many years — during the good and bad until the end.”
The Maxwell Street Market has long served as a place for Chicagoans — in particular immigrants — to become entrepreneurs. The storied market, with ties to the history of blues music and the Polish sausage, has origins in the late 19th century, with the city officially recognizing it in 1912.
The market operated Sundays at Maxwell and Halsted streets until 1994 when it was forced to move to nearby Canal Street to make way for the University of Illinois Chicago expansion.
This Sunday will mark its return to its original location. Some praise the market for moving back to where it started, but others worry about its future as it enters a shorter season, open only six Sundays until October.
The market will operate from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. this Sunday, along Maxwell Street between Halsted Street and Union Avenue, with more vendors situated along Union Avenue between Rochford and Liberty streets.
The new iteration of the market will have 35 vendors, said Nikki Butler, event producer for the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events and the Maxwell Street Market. As of this week, the city had received about 65 applications for the season.
The city moved the market from South Des Plaines Street and West Polk Street, where it had operated since fall of 2008, because that area has become the landing zone for migrants arriving by bus, Butler said.
Some of the changes were needed because the market has to work with the university’s schedule, Butler said.
“We’re just in a different space, and we’ve got to be sensitive to the folks that are in that space all the time,” Butler said.
The move will mean a smaller space for vendors, and customers will likely notice the absence of food businesses, with the city encouraging people to instead dine at nearby restaurants, such as Jim’s Original Hot Dog, where the Polish sausage was created. The city will evaluate the change in food vendors and see if any changes could be made in the future, Butler said.
“It was certainly a difficult decision that we had to make,” Butler said. “It is tough. Unfortunately, at this time, we’re just unable to allow the food vendors, but there are quite a few restaurants right in that area, and specifically on Maxwell Street.”
By last year, the number of food vendors had dwindled to three, Sanchez said. Food vendors had gradually stopped selling at the market after years of changes to its schedule and how it operated.
Sanchez said she depended on the income she generated from selling at the market. If she would have known about the changes earlier, she would have applied to sell at other festivals or markets. Sanchez said she’s willing to limit her business to selling aguas frescas, pop or tamales, but she was told she couldn’t do that.
“They threw us out that easily,” Sanchez said about how market officials treated the food vendors. “I’m angry, I’m disappointed. It’s not fair after working there for so many years.”
Steve Balkin, a longtime researcher of the Maxwell Street Market, said he thinks the return to Maxwell Street is good news, but he worries about the decline in vendors. He estimates there were 1,200 vendors in the 1990s compared with fewer than 50 vendors in recent years. Balkin said various waves of immigrants — from those coming from Eastern Europe to Latin America — had used the market as a way to move up the economic ladder.
“I was hoping that the Maxwell Street Market would be a showcase for Chicago during the Democratic National Convention to show the world how Chicago can dive right in and help the new immigrants in a sensible way by providing them outlets for economic opportunities — particularly entrepreneurial economic opportunities,” Balkin said. “And that as a showcase for this, the market would not only be in the old location, but they would have slots for hundreds of vendors, not a few. And that it would be every Sunday, not just one Sunday a month.”
It had been on Maxwell Street for more than 80 years, where it had been a wide-stretching street market sometimes stretching from Jefferson to Sangamon streets, said Lori Grove, senior vice president and treasurer of the Maxwell Street Foundation. It included storefronts and street stalls that sold everything from clothes to meat.
The Maxwell Street Market allowed Maricela Villa, of Villa’s Nuts and Candy, to work for herself when she became a new mother nearly 25 years ago. Her business of packaged nuts and candy grew from one table at the market to a storefront business.
Even with a storefront, Villa said her business depends on markets during the summer. But after hearing about the changes, Villa said she opted to not participate this year. She will spend her Sundays this summer traveling to a market in Northwest Indiana while heading to different markets on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.
“If Maxwell would be there every Sunday, I would go to Maxwell because I don’t want Maxwell to die,” Villa said.
Taniesha Hanson-DePluzer, of Indelible Bliss Candles, Soaps & More, sold at the market last year, and she applied for this year’s season. She thinks the location change could be a good thing for the overall market.
Like Villa, she started her business as she navigated motherhood and uses soy-based candles and skin care products because she believes self care is an important component of mental health.
Hanson-DePluzer has a storefront at 4342 ½ N. Central Ave., in Portage Park, and her business has expanded to include candle-making workshops and corporate events. But at markets, she’s able to test out products and reach new customers.
She liked the sense of community among the vendors at the Maxwell Street Market. She also noticed there was nostalgia among the sparse crowd, though she didn’t fully understand it because she grew up in Jamaica.
“These very people that I met that had this longing for it to be what it used to be, perhaps, it would encourage more or encourage them, along with more people, to want to be a part of this again,” Hanson-DePluzer said. “To support their local artisans, their local small businesses. So I feel like it would be a plus if that’s the intent behind it, where they want to go back to what it was, as well as creating a different vibe or adding to whatever the history of it could be.”
Evelyn Ramirez is one of the people who has a longing for the market to return to its past. She was raised in the market, as her grandmother sold produce and her parents later joined and started what would eventually become Rubi’s Tacos.
The family sold at the Maxwell Street Market until the coronavirus pandemic hit, Ramirez and her mother, Maria Landa, said. They pivoted to selling tacos from their home before working out of a shared kitchen at 1316 W. 18th St. Lines for the Guerrero-style tacos have grown even longer since the family was featured on Netflix’s “Taco Chronicles.”
Many of the vendors they used to work with left the market in recent years. Ramirez said she thinks the market should have moved back to Maxwell Street sooner, and the city should have done more to help keep the longtime vendors.
“I don’t like what it’s become,” she said. “But that’s just me because, again, we grew up in the market — the original one. We saw it when it was in its glory. So it’s really sad to see it now.”
