How about that?

Little Village- the community in Chicago in which I was raised, and which appears in red on the map of the city to the right- has for decades been the heart of Chicago's Chicano community. After misreading the title of a book here at the West Des Moines Public Library, it's just dawned on me for the very first time that the words "Chicago" and "Chicano" differ by only one letter. As far as I can tell this has absolutely no significance, other than the fact that given where I grew up I really ought to have realized that a long time ago.

The origin of the word "Chicano" is obscure. It has been traced to 1930's and '40's California, but some scholars claim an earlier origin. One theory is that it originated with the inability of native speakers of Nahuatl, an Aztecan dialect spoken in the Mexican state of Morelos, to say Mexicano. Instead, the
theory goes, they said Mesheecano, as the word would be pronounced in their language.

The name Chicago, on the other hand, is said to come from a Frenchified pronunciation of the Miami-Illinois Indian word shikakaakwa, meaning "wild onion,""wild garlic," or "wild leek" (Allium tricoccum, right) which grew in profusion along the shores of Lake Michigan before the coming of the white man. The French explorer La Salle, an associate of whom had described the plants on an earlier visit to the area, referred to the site as "Checagou" in a memoir written around 1679.

While the name may seem appropriate, it is probably unrelated to the pungent play of the Chicago Cubs over most of the past century and more.

Throughout most of my residency there, Little Village (also known as South Lawndale) was a largely Bohemian-American community, with a substantial German-American minority (including my mother's family). It has been a center of Chicago's Mexican-American community since the late 'Sixties and early 'Seventies.