El Grito returned to Butler Field on September 12 and 13 after being cancelled in 2025, when organisers paused it out of concern for community safety amid federal immigration enforcement in Chicago. The return should have been the story. What happened instead was thinner and stranger.
Saturday was visibly sparse. the published calendars found attendees who remembered the festival packed from 2pm to 10pm in previous years; the 2024 edition drew around 24,000. Downtown car caravans were relatively muted, and police warned that displaying flags outside vehicle windows is illegal, with extra enforcement stationed downtown.
Chris Beltran offered the sentence that matters most, because it refuses a single explanation: it was pretty empty, he said, probably because people are still scared about ICE, but also because of the boycott. Isaac Cuellar put the first half more plainly — some people were already scared because they think ICE might just pop out of nowhere.
The Boycott
Calls to boycott El Grito went viral on TikTok and Instagram in the days beforehand, led in part by the influencer Angel De La Rosa. The grievance concerned the festival’s organiser, Korina Sanchez, who is CEO of Third Coast Hospitality, the company of her father Sam Sanchez — Moe’s Cantina, Tunnel, Old Crow Smokehouse. Sam Sanchez had supported the Trump administration’s law-and-order platform, while opposing the tactics of the enforcement operation in Chicago.
Korina Sanchez’s response was unequivocal and deserves to run in full. She said she does not support Donald Trump, in those words. She described the event as non-partisan. She said she understood why some members of the community were raising concerns, that she respected that everyone would make their own decision about attending, and that El Grito exists to support local businesses, celebrate the culture, and bring the community together around Mexican heritage and pride in Chicago.
Not every attendee agreed the boycott helped. Meredith Cline thought it was taking away from the vendors. Diego Rivera framed his ticket as a choice about where money goes — he would rather it went toward Mexican people than to a big corporate festival.
The Livestream
A free civic ceremony honouring El Grito de Independencia began after 8pm on the Sunday, and it was streamed live for people who could not attend in person. Read that detail slowly. A city livestreamed a patriotic ceremony so that residents who were afraid to stand in a park downtown could still take part in it.
That same weekend carried the 55th annual 26th Street Parade through Little Village, where community groups handed out know-your-rights material and monitored the route for federal agents while the parade rolled past. Parade weekend normally generates $6 to $8 million for Little Village restaurants, bars and shops.
Across the summer the pattern was consistent. Little Village’s Cinco de Mayo parade was cancelled for a second year. El Grito scaled down. Fiesta del Sol ran with trained response teams.
Chicago held its Mexican Independence celebration this year. It just held some of it through a screen, for people who had decided the park was not safe, and the city agreed with them enough to point a camera at the stage.
Cover image: Via abc7chicago.com