In Chicago, Mexican-American Altars Reimagine Home
As ICE increasingly targets migrant neighborhoods, carefully crafted altars to La Virgen de Guadalupe outside homes transform sidewalks into sites of community and protection.
In Chicago, Mexican-American altars are reimagining home. This article is part of a series highlighting underrepresented craft histories, researched and written by the 2025 Craft Archive Fellows. Craft, known as artesanía in Mexico, is inextricably linked to work and the everyday. The hands that create these altars, accustomed to labor as much as craft, can transform displacement and recreate home.
Craft goes beyond aesthetics, encompassing symbols, skills, histories, and inherited knowledge. A crafted object is a testament to the hands that made it and the generations of repeated gestures passed down through those hands. Much of folk craft begins in the home, made for the home, and is essential to constituting what a home is.
This becomes particularly significant in migration, where home must be remade. Among Mexican migrants in the United States, altar-raising to La Virgen de Guadalupe is a part of that remaking. Collective altars form their own archive of an overlooked American craft tradition, rooted in the migrant and homesteading experiences of recreating home in new environments.
While Mexican altar-making is present in institutional spaces, such as the Chicago's National Museum of Mexican Art's annual Día de Muertos exhibition, the everyday devotional altars in Mexican neighborhoods have received less attention. The reporter turns to their personal archive of photographs, documenting public altars over nearly 15 years, and revisits South Chicago and Pilsen, historically Mexican neighborhoods, to capture the altars that exist today.
Written by urgent.news from Hyperallergic's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
