Teatro del Barrio member

Louis Guadarrama, Jr. is a former Bowen High school teacher who grew up in South Chicago. As a youth, he dropped out of high school and entered the army, where a friend taught him how to develop film. Later, he went back to school and started the bilingual education program at Bowen. He also took a series of photos of South Chicago street scenes as well as of the Teatro del Barrio, a Chicano-inspired theater group that performed in South Chicago during the 1970s. Louis’s father, Louis Guadarrama, Sr. had emigrated from Mexico to South Chicago in 1929 and worked at Wisconsin Steel. Louis, Sr. was also a union official and involved in founding the Latin Fraternal Society at that mill.