In 1966, Police Shot a Young Puerto Rican Man. What Followed Created a Blueprint for a New Kind of Solidarity
By Felipe Hinojosa August 13, 2025 (ZocaloPublicSquare.org)
Chicago hit a boiling point on Sunday evening, June 12, 1966, just one day after the city’s first Puerto Rican Day parade. Police shot a young Puerto Rican man, Arcelis Cruz, in an alley near the Humboldt Park area. Officers said Cruz had pulled a gun. Witnesses refuted the claim. Crowds of young Puerto Ricans, continuing the celebration at a nearby music festival, heard the shot and poured in to see what was happening. Anger mounted quickly; protesters hurled rocks at police and busted store windows along Division Street as police threatened them with their guns and riot sticks. Over three days, what started as a protest turned into a full-scale rebellion. The unrest stretched a mile along Division Street, one of Chicago’s major east-west thoroughfares, from West Town to Humboldt Park, involved more than 80 police officers and a K-9 unit, and resulted in 50 arrests, countless injuries, and millions of dollars of destruction.
The Division Street “riots,” as they came to be called, marked an important moment in U.S. history. They were part of a wave of charged protests during the 1960s, from Harlem and Newark to Watts, as Black and Brown Americans expressed frustration over poverty, police brutality, joblessness, and housing. The Chicago uprising isn’t as well-known as others, but it’s significant for paving the way for multiracial and pan-Latino coalitions and organizations across the U.S. Led by a pair of Mexican immigrant brothers, Obed and Omar López, the movement for solidarity seeded by Division Street would shift the city’s landscape of activism and coalition building, uniting Puerto Ricans with Mexicans and other recent arrivals. Ultimately, it helped create a new style of democracy, rooted in rage, that established Latinos as a legitimate local political force.
Located just west of the Chicago River and northwest of downtown, the West Town and Humboldt Park neighborhoods had long been home to an ethnic mix of Europeans (primarily Polish, German, and Norwegian). Puerto Ricans began moving in during the late 1950s and early 1960s after highway construction projects in the name of urban renewal pushed them out of Chicago’s Near West Side “just steps ahead of the bulldozers,” as historian Lilia Fernández wrote.
They brought with them the smell of Caribbean foods, the sight of Puerto Rican flags hanging from rearview mirrors, and the sound of salsa music on Sunday afternoons at the park. By 1970, Puerto Ricans made up nearly 40% of the neighborhood’s residents. But as the deindustrializing economy wobbled, racial tensions escalated as the ethnic whites blamed declining property values on the newcomers.
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.
Led by a pair of Mexican immigrant brothers, Obed and Omar López, the movement for solidarity seeded by Division Street would shift the city’s landscape of activism and coalition building, uniting Puerto Ricans with Mexicans and other recent arrivals.
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.
But it would be the work of grassroots organizations, and leaders like the López brothers, that built lasting Puerto Rican political power and laid the foundation for multiracial and pan-Latino community organizing. In the months after the Division Street rebellion, Obed López tried to help the cause by joining the Puerto Rican-only Spanish Action Committee of Chicago (SACC). “I thought to myself, if I can’t be in SACC because I’m Mexican, I still wanted to do something,” López told his fellow activist and Chicago organizer José “Cha Cha” Jiménez in a 2012 interview. So López founded the Latin American Defense Organization (LADO).
LADO was non-violent but “aggressive in the political sense,” López said, as well as welcoming to all Latin Americans in Chicago. LADO first worked to get Division Street protesters out of jail. Soon, it turned attention to delivering resources to the community, including helping families navigate the welfare system. And in 1969, LADO was part of a major political action in partnership with the group Cha Cha Jiménez had founded, the radical Young Lords Organization—whose minister of information was Omar López.
Originally a Puerto Rican gang, the Young Lords evolved into a radical political organization just two years after the rebellion in order to fight urban renewal policies that targeted Puerto Rican families in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, just two miles from where the rebellion started on Division Street. The Young Lords were also pioneers in coalition-building; together with white radicals and the Black Panther Party, they formed the first Rainbow Coalition, which brought together groups along shared antiracist class struggles. And along with LADO, in 1969, they occupied McCormick Seminary in response to the school’s indifference to Latino families losing their homes in Lincoln Park. The López brothers played an integral role in the occupation—Omar as a member of the Young Lords and Obed as the key spokesperson for the entire occupation, which he called “an act of love.” After five days of peaceful protest, the Seminary agreed to provide funding for social services like daycare and a public health clinic in the Armitage Methodist Church, community educational workshops on Puerto Rican history, and an architectural plan for mixed-income housing. The occupation brought national attention to the struggles of Latinos in Chicago that inspired similar movements in barrios across the country including in Houston, New York, and Los Angeles.
Born in rebellion, in a city marked by segregation, LADO and the Young Lords propelled Latinos into the center of a multiracial civil rights movement that encouraged families to speak out on the issues that mattered to them. The solidarity of the movement would later fuel political coalitions like the one that elected Harold Washington, the city’s first Black mayor, in 1983. Chicago’s Latinos were no longer invisible; “the riots,” as Obed López made clear, “were what gave birth to the political movement in this community.”
Almost 60 years later, most Americans know nothing about the rage that fueled change in Chicago’s neighborhoods, next to nothing about the place of Latinos in American history, and just barely more than that about the struggles across the country to secure equal rights, dignity, and the right to call this place home. And yet even in this moment of ICE raids on the streets, I’m hopeful that a new story of the Americas and the United States is being written; one where (im)migrant struggles and grassroots organizing can once again show us what solidarity and democracy look like.
Felipe Hinojosa was born and raised in Brownsville, on the Texas-Mexico border. A historian, he holds the John and Nancy Jackson Endowed Chair at Baylor University.
This piece publishes as part of “What Can Become of Us?,” a collaboration between the Stanford Institute for Advancing Just Societies and Zócalo Public Square.
Primary editor: Eryn Brown | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard
