March honors Pilsen activist murdered 51 years ago

The life of David “Boogie” Gonzalez changed in 1971 when he lost his older brother Jacob, who had come home from Vietnam for a year, to gang violence in Pilsen.

“I guess that was a wake-up call for him,” recalls his sister Annabelle Gonzalez-Falcon, 72. “That’s when he decided to change things.”

Boogie Gonzales, the second youngest of five siblings, had been a member of a street gang in his youth. But after his brother’s death, he devoted himself to the Chicano movement, which at the time wanted to unite the Mexican-American community in Pilsen.

As a social worker at a Pilsen community center, he brokered hard-won truces between the neighborhood’s rival gangs, then called “clubs” – work now commonly known as violence interruption, funded here and elsewhere with city support.

The work ultimately ended with his early death at the age of 23. Boogie Gonzalez was gunned down in Harrison Park in Pilsen on June 19, 1973, allegedly while trying to ease tensions within a gang.

Fifty-one years later, his surviving family and supporters gathered in the same park for a march to commemorate his legacy.

The march, organized by the Gonzalez Foundation, a nonprofit founded by his nieces, was similar to the march that took place immediately after his death, when dozens of people flocked to 18th Street for a rally for peace.

Saturday’s march reflected those calls for peace and unity and was part of a larger effort to ensure Gonzalez’s work continues and his legacy is remembered in a changing neighborhood, said one of his nieces, Victoria Guy.

“Boogie was one of the first de-escalators in Chicago,” said Guy, 42. “He was a pioneer. That’s a deep-rooted story that we need to tell.”

About 30 people marched down 18th Street from Harrison Park to Throop Park at the corner of 18th and South Throop Streets, holding signs that read “Boogie Lives!” and chanting “For Boogie” as they walked.

In Throop Park, across from a mural bearing his image, they unveiled an honorary street sign in his name along with Byron Sigcho-Lopez, mayor of the 25th district.

“This will bring some justice to the sacrifice Boogie Gonzales made for our community,” Sigcho-Lopez said. “And we know his life and legacy are important to us.”

Gonzalez and his family lived on 16th Street. His father started a tortilla company, sold snacks and condiments to stores, and made piñatas.

“He was a good big brother,” Gonzalez-Falcon recalled. “He always stayed close to me.”

The night he was killed, Gonzalez-Falcon said she had just returned home from the laundromat when someone called and said her brother had been in an accident. A neighbor drove her and his girlfriend to the hospital. By that time, her brother was already dead.

“It just kept going from there,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “The hospital was so full of people that when I came out of the room and talked to the doctor, I was going from arm to arm the whole way out of the hospital.”

The foundation’s next goals, organizers said, are to officially rename Throop Park to Boogie Park and commission a new mural featuring his image on a wall across from the park. The foundation has launched a GoFundMe campaign for a mural that his family says will be more similar to one painted several years after his death.

This mural, on the north side of 18th and Throop, depicted a tall Gonzalez with red paint on his chest. It has faded over the years, according to a Chicago Sun-Times article about the family’s efforts to restore it.

The mural was eventually redesigned, with his face painted smaller than the original and sandwiched between text identifying him as “the first to unite the clubs on 18th Street to create peace and unity.” To the left of his image, it mentions his goal of uniting the neighborhood against “a system that oppressed us.”

“I wanted to break the chains that oppress our people,” it says. “I gave my life for that.”