Troubles also flared between Puerto Ricans and police, who harassed and targeted them—sometimes simply for gathering on street corners or walking through the park. In the summer of 1965, just a year before the rebellion, police brutally beat several young Puerto Rican men in a dispute over fire hydrants. “Residents of the Division Street area shared a pervasive belief,” sociologist Félix M. Padilla wrote, “that policemen were physically brutal, harsh, and discourteous to them because they were Puerto Ricans; that policemen did not respond to calls, enforce the law, or protect people who lived in this community because they were Puerto Ricans.”
So it was hardly a surprise when the streets erupted, calming down only on the third day, when an overwhelming police presence flooded the area. But what happened in the weeks and months that followed changed the course of the Latino experience in Chicago forever.
When the shooting occurred and the commotion began, brothers Omar and Obed López were standing a block away, waiting for an order of tacos at Doña Maria’s restaurant. They sprang into action, joining friends and community leaders to calm the fury, and helping keep others safe by pointing them to hiding spots. The Lópezes were from Mexico, which made them unusual in the neighborhood; while Mexicans and Puerto Ricans lived in proximity in the Near West Side in the 1940s, urban renewal projects largely drove them to different parts of the city in the next two decades. Rebellion, however, would join them together again. Relative unknowns in the neighborhood, in the coming months and years, the López brothers would become known across Humboldt Park and Chicago as leaders of the Latino community.
In the immediate aftermath of Division Street, neighborhood activists who had been touched by the rebellion—youth, families, religious leaders—decided there was no going back. Cultural recognitions like a Puerto Rican Day parade, they vowed, would no longer be enough. Chicago’s Puerto Ricans began planning direct political action. Throughout the second half of 1966, they organized peaceful rallies at Humboldt Park, participated in the Chicago Commission on Human Relations hearings on police brutality, and marched to city hall. There, they demanded full citizenship rights and decried how housing discrimination, lack of jobs, poor city services, and police brutality structured everyday life.