A La Esperanza

Designed by Mexican architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, Benito Juarez Community Academy is a public high school forged out of years of struggle between the Pilsen community and the city of Chicago. In the late 1960s, the neighborhood’s Mexican population was growing while the quality of existing school buildings was in decline. After years of public meetings and protests excoriating de facto segregation in CPS (marches were organized by mothers of Pilsen-raised children), the board of education finally agreed to construct a new campus. Named for Mexico’s first president of Indigenous heritage, the curriculum would include bilingual cultural programs and Latin American history. Architecturally, the volumes of the main building’s exterior walls evoke sloping forms found in Mayan and Aztec structures, providing a sense of cultural identification for the largely Latinx student body. In collaboration with the community, Vázquez intentionally designed the gymnasium to incorporate a building-long mural, which became A la Esperanza after artist Jimmy Longoria won a design competition in 1979.