Life is composed of challenges. The solutions we find through our challenges continues to mold and define who we are and where we go from here. Sometimes we need others to help us with some of the challenges we face. Some of us rely on close relationships, friends, family or even co-workers for direction and the support needed to overcome challenges. Some of us have no one we can rely on so the task of overcoming some challenges falls directly on our shoulders. That, my friends, is a heavy load.
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He began SJOM as an emergency shelter in the heart of Chicago’s Pilsen community with the belief that all individuals should have a suitable place to live and the opportunity to make a better life for themselves.
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A safe alternative to sleeping in the streets, SJOM provides basic needs for many who have nowhere else to turn to.
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Beginning in the early 1970s Pilsen became increasingly ethnically Mexican as people were forced to move when their former small enclave to the North of Pilsen was torn down to make way for the University of Illinois at Chicago. Mexico's racial breakdown is officially presented as 9-17% white, 60% Mestizo (Indigenous-European hybrid), 30% Indigenous, and 1% other but the majority of Pilsen's most recent immigrants are those of the Mestizaje (mixture) of Indians and Spaniards. Mexico, like the United States, is a PanCultural Society. Latinos became the majority in 1970 when they surpassed the Slavic population. The Slavs were the majority in the 1960s but the passage of the INS Act of 1965 caused a turn in the ethnic makeup of not only Pilsen but the United States as a whole. The neighborhood continued to serve as port of entry for immigrants, both legal and undocumented immigrants and mostly of Mexican descent, since.
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