This is an old story about my dad’s line of the family, one I’ve been thinking about a lot since I got here last Sunday to visit my old man. It’s connected to a hotdog stand in Chicago and the immigrant community that surrounded it. Don’t read with an empty stomach.
Last year I went to a hotdog stand on Maxwell Street in Chicago that made me rethink my placement in the world. My dad used to tell me about this place, Jim’s Original, sitting there since the late 1930s, planted in a neighborhood that kept swallowing people and spitting out something new. His father, wiry, tall, stern, a cop in Monterrey, a luchador in the mercado, later a scrap metaller, would take him there and order these greasy dogs on poppyseed buns, buried in grilled onions.
Maxwell Street never belonged to anyone for long. Jewish, Polish, Italian, Black, Mexican, bodies cycling through, languages stacking, smells lingering longer than the people. Even the stand itself slips out of the version I grew up with. Not Polish, not really. Macedonian. The kind of detail that doesn’t break the story, just exposes how stories get edited down, cleaned up, made easier to understand.
I picture my grandfather at the counter, placing his order in careful English, and then the reply, “you got it, Frank.” Frank was his gringo name. They were broke. The kind of broke where a hot meal outside the house I guess registered as an event, since it’s some of the few memories about my grandfather my dad has ever recounted to me. I never got to meet my grandfather. But apparently these ordeals made a big impression on my dad, because to this day, his favorite food is a good ole’ Chicago dog.
So, I’m standing there last year, holding one of those greasy, processed, onion-heavy, slightly repulsive but somehow enticing Chicago dogs, dripping onto the paper, onto my hands, onto the sidewalk. Like when they served this thing, containment was never the goal. The smell is thick, permanent, grill smoke welded into the concrete. I look around as I feast on this delicious hotness. Then, I see a restaurant called La Michoacana. Then, another: La Purépecha (after the native people from Michoacán). The word catches. It loops back to a conversation I had in Mexico City, my friend saying his family was from Michoacán, that they went to Chicago. The connection lands late, but it lands. My grandfather’s family is from Michoacán. So what the hell is the connection between this oleaginous corner in Chicago and Michoacán.
So I start digging, expecting something thin. Instead it opens up. The Purépecha, the people tied to that region, built one of the major civilizations of pre-Hispanic Mexico. They are one of the few who held off the Aztecs. More than that, they worked metal in a way most others around them didn’t. Copper, bronze, tools, objects. Their world centered around Lake Pátzcuaro. Movement across water. Canoes cutting lines through the surface. Trade routes linking communities in steady, continuous motion.
Generations later, my great grandparents, grandfather, my dad, all working in metal again, just stripped down to something raw. Scrap metal. Steel. Buying in dusty warehouses in the U.S. rustbelt, hauling through Texas and past the border, reselling through Mexico, particularly Monterrey. Material moving south. No ceremony left, just weight and price and timing.
Michoacán has a long memory of leaving. People go, and then more people go, and eventually it becomes less of a decision and more of a direction. Chicago sits at the end of one of those lines, especially if you’re tied to industrial work. Before that line hits Chicago, it passes through Monterrey. Steel city. Heat, noise, repetition. The Fundidora Monterrey, one of the earliest and most important steel foundries in Latin America, turned the city into an industrial anchor, a place where raw material gets processed, repurposed, sent back out. It makes sense that families connected to metal and trade would move through a place like that. My family follows it almost too cleanly. Michoacán to Monterrey. Monterrey to Chicago. Then back again, like the system resets but never fully clears. All of this, I thought, inexplicably, but there’s some logic to it.
Even the reason I’m born is connected to this multigenerational migration path. My dad eventually left Chicago, goes back to Monterrey, meets my mom. That’s it. I’m not at the beginning of anything. I’m somewhere in the middle of a sequence that keeps running whether I was paying attention to it or not. People move, materials move, names shift, routes adjust. I end up here. Funny enough , at some point I might have to explain why I’m in Europe, which makes no sense if you try to draw a clean line through all of this…
The guy behind the counter hands me the food. He’s speaking Spanish, but not my dad’s Spanish. Different cadence, different edges. Central American (and probably Salvadoran if I had to guess, since I had a lot of clients from here when I first become a lawyer in Houston). Another layer sliding into place. Same motions, different hands.
At some point some other second generation immigrant will stand there, holding the same hotdog, maybe not thinking about any of this. Or maybe they will….
My great grandmother, with my grandfather. She was from Michoacán, allegedly over six foot tall, and was the first to move to Chicago.
My brother and I after clogging our arteries on the fateful day.