A piece called “In Chicago, Mexican-American Altars Reimagine Home” looks at what happens when people are made to leave everything behind. In Chicago’s Mexican neighborhoods, altars raised to La Virgen de Guadalupe sit outside homes, and they serve a purpose beyond being displays of faith. These altars are acts of remaking home in a hostile environment, and they carry real weight for the people who raise them.
The work is a contribution from the 2025 Craft Archive Fellows, arranged in partnership with the Center for Craft, and it is part of a series devoted to underrepresented craft histories. The author, whose kin include both tradition and the trades, states that craft was never divorced from work. The saying goes échale arte — add art to the utilitarian. Craft, known as artesanía in Mexico, was bound up with work, necessity, and the everyday.
Hands That Make Home
The study focuses on the hands of those who make altars, hands that are commonly as accustomed to labor as to craft. Through this handiwork, displacement is transformed and home is recreated. Craft reaches beyond the simple aesthetic, grasping instead the symbols, skills, histories, and inherited knowledge that give handiwork its rich meaning.
What a building made by hand reveals is not only the hands that shaped it, but the repeated gestures of many generations carried forward through those hands. Much of what people make in their homes begins inside those walls: built by their hands, for daily use, and essential to what makes a home what it is. This becomes especially meaningful when people must leave their homes and remake them somewhere else.
Altars as Archive
Mexican migrants in the United States have been raising altars to La Virgen de Guadalupe, an act known as levantar un altar, as part of a broader remaking. Collectively, these household altars create their own archive of an overlooked American craft tradition. The small, everyday devotional altars built on porches, in gardens, storefronts, windows, and along streets in Mexican neighborhoods have not received the same institutional attention as the museum version.
For decades, Chicago’s National Museum of Mexican Art has staged an annual Día de Muertos exhibition, grouping ofrendas from Mexico and the United States with folk art and other visual art. The everyday altars, however, have not drawn the same level of attention.
The writer has spent nearly 15 years recording public altars. For this project, they drew on that personal archive while also updating their collection. They walked through South Chicago and Pilsen, two historically Mexican neighborhoods, to document the altars that exist today.
What These Altars Show
The altars serve a dual purpose beyond mere religious displays. They function as gathering places and sources of security for the neighborhood. In a context where immigration authorities are intensifying their attention on migrant communities, these altars turn public sidewalks into areas of community and protection.
The family history shapes the writing, and that is where the piece gets its texture. In Mexico, craft does not exist apart from work, necessity, or the everyday. It is in the hands.
A Look at the Numbers
- 15 years of photography documenting public altars
- Annual Día de Muertos exhibitions at the National Museum of Mexican Art for decades
- Two historically Mexican neighborhoods: South Chicago and Pilsen
- Ofrendas from Mexico and the United States at the museum
These altars function as a form of refusal. They declare: we exist, we have a place, and we will rebuild our dwellings even amid hostile surroundings. The writer’s task serves as a reminder that documenting a community can take many forms, and the personal record carries the same weight as the official one.
The altars are small. They are also powerful.
Source material: “In Chicago, Mexican-American Altars Reimagine Home,” Hyperallergic.
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