Though regarded as a great photographer, Osgood started his career as a reporter, and when we found a wonderful store called Casita Azul, at 817 Chicago Ave., Evanston, we also discovered that Osgood had once written a story about its owner, Jill Negronida Hampton.
He wrote about her in 1995, when she, her sister Amy Negronida, their mother and a business partner traveled to Mexico. Osgood wrote: “After a five-hour journey along a treacherous mountain road, a bus with 17 Mexican girls, four Chicago-area women and a missionary arrived by a full moon in the Mixe Indian village of Linda Vista in southern Mexico. The time was central standard, the lifestyle nearly first millennium.”
That is good writing and what the group was doing was a good thing: helping the people in the places that produced the goods that they sold in their store, which was then in another Evanston location and called Ethnically Speaking.
Osgood wrote of their visiting an orphanage with nine duffel bags filled with first-aid kits, diapers, shoes, soap, balloons and pen pal letters written by kids at Evanston’s Haven Junior High; of their trying, unsuccessfully it turned out, to find a site for a medical clinic.
“The trip was incredible, fascinating,” Osgood says.
Negronida closed Ethnically Speaking in 1999 and, after a few years selling goods on eBay, opened Casita Azul last October. “My sister really is a people person,” said Amy. “The Internet really didn’t fit her personality.”
Amy said this while running the store one Saturday afternoon; her sister was on a buying trip in Mexico.
The store is a colorful gathering of items priced from a couple of bucks to many hundreds of dollars for exquisite beaded creations by the Huichol Indian tribe. There are also some colorful purses for sale, with 10 percent of the cost going back to Mexico to support a 120-bed dormitory for the families of people who have been hospitalized with serious illnesses.
“Jill’s philosophy is to give back in any way we can to the artists and their communities,” says Amy, who can been seen (on the left) with sister Jill in Osgood’s very fine photo.
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rkogan@tribune.com
