The Mole de Mayo festival celebrates 15 years this Memorial Day Weekend in a new Pilsen location.
The new venue is set on 18th street between Morgan and Halsted, less than a mile from where previous iterations of the festival were held between Ashland and Blue Island avenues.
Calls for Mole de Mayo’s relocation increased in the last two years as local residents and Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th) cited an increase in noise pollution, traffic and parking limitations in an already congested neighborhood, Block Club first reported.
Alex Esparza, executive director of the Economic Strategies Development Corporation (ESDC), which organizes the event, hopes the relocation will provide relief to residents.
“We wanted to give the people in the normal venue a break,” Esparza said.
Still, Esparza hopes the festival can switch to its previous site every other year given the business strip’s cultural significance to Pilsen’s Mexican community.
Since 2009, Mole de Mayo has celebrated the cultural heritage of Mexico through the traditional mole dish with a cook-off, Mexican lucha libre wrestling and live music.
The money generated by the 3-day event goes back into ESDC programming after operational costs are met, which in turn supports aspiring entrepreneurs and local Pilsen businesses.
“Our financial impact for the community is 3 million for this weekend alone,” Esparza said.
Local residents have voiced concerns for years and urged Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez to hold community meetings to address the issue.
Though the festival was originally located on 16th street and Peoria, Esparza wanted to stake a claim in Pilsen amid a growing community concern for gentrification, ultimately moving the festival to the 18th street corridor in 2015.
He calls this relocation an unapologetic Pilsen “shut down.”
“We’ve had an uphill battle the last couple of years with gentrification, so it was very important to put our name out there in terms of the legacy that people before us have made in our community,” Esparza said.
However, not everybody saw the first relocation to 18th street as a fight against gentrification.
Victoria Romero has attended Mole de Mayo almost every year in its former location, but not because she wanted to.
“There was no way to not go when [the festival] is literally the corner of my block,” she said, “I had to walk through it in order to go anywhere in my neighborhood”
But Mole de Mayo is not Romero’s sole concern and she expressed this at public meetings she attended.
“Our entire summer gets interrupted almost every single weekend,” Romero said, also citing events like the Pilsen Brew-Ja Crawl and Carrera de los Muertos which extend to late fall.
For Romero, the tradeoff of blocked roads, loud noise and unsanitary conditions isn’t enough to warrant the number of festivals. She feels like Pilsen is being treated as Chicago’s amusement park.
“We get very little return on our investment to host all of these events, and we see very little infrastructural improvement come our way when it’s time to invest in our community,” Romero said.
“I’m either getting pushed out of Pilsen by gentrification or I’m being pushed out by the inconvenience of these damn festivals that I have to put up with all summer long,” she added.
