Making the MexiRican City

Making the MexiRican City
Author: Delia Fernández-Jones
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2023-02-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252053990

Large numbers of Latino migrants began to arrive in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the 1950s. They joined a small but established Spanish-speaking community of people from Texas, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Delia Fernández-Jones merges storytelling with historical analysis to recapture the placemaking practices that these Mexicans, Tejanos, and Puerto Ricans used to create a new home for themselves. Faced with entrenched white racism and hostility, Latinos of different backgrounds formed powerful relationships to better secure material needs like houses and jobs and to recreate community cultural practices. Their pan-Latino solidarity crossed ethnic and racial boundaries and shaped activist efforts that emphasized working within the system to advocate for social change. In time, this interethnic Latino alliance exploited cracks in both overt and structural racism and attracted white and Black partners to fight for equality in social welfare programs, policing, and education. Groundbreaking and revelatory, Making the MexiRican City details how disparate Latino communities came together to respond to social, racial, and economic challenges.

Making Mexican Chicago

Making Mexican Chicago
Author: Mike Amezcua
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2023-03-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226826406

An exploration of how the Windy City became a postwar Latinx metropolis in the face of white resistance. Though Chicago is often popularly defined by its Polish, Black, and Irish populations, Cook County is home to the third-largest Mexican-American population in the United States. The story of Mexican immigration and integration into the city is one of complex political struggles, deeply entwined with issues of housing and neighborhood control. In Making Mexican Chicago, Mike Amezcua explores how the Windy City became a Latinx metropolis in the second half of the twentieth century. In the decades after World War II, working-class Chicago neighborhoods like Pilsen and Little Village became sites of upheaval and renewal as Mexican Americans attempted to build new communities in the face of white resistance that cast them as perpetual aliens. Amezcua charts the diverse strategies used by Mexican Chicagoans to fight the forces of segregation, economic predation, and gentrification, focusing on how unlikely combinations of social conservatism and real estate market savvy paved new paths for Latinx assimilation. Making Mexican Chicago offers a powerful multiracial history of Chicago that sheds new light on the origins and endurance of urban inequality.

Puerto Rican Chicago

Puerto Rican Chicago
Author: Mirelsie Velazquez
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 142
Release: 2022-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252053206

The postwar migration of Puerto Rican men and women to Chicago brought thousands of their children into city schools. These children's classroom experience continued the colonial project begun in their homeland, where American ideologies had dominated Puerto Rican education since the island became a US territory. Mirelsie Velázquez tells how Chicago's Puerto Ricans pursued their educational needs in a society that constantly reminded them of their status as second-class citizens. Communities organized a media culture that addressed their concerns while creating and affirming Puerto Rican identities. Education also offered women the only venue to exercise power, and they parlayed their positions to take lead roles in activist and political circles. In time, a politicized Puerto Rican community gave voice to a previously silenced group--and highlighted that colonialism does not end when immigrants live among their colonizers. A perceptive look at big-city community building, Puerto Rican Chicago reveals the links between justice in education and a people's claim to space in their new home.

Racial Alterity, Wixarika Youth Activism, and the Right to the Mexican City

Racial Alterity, Wixarika Youth Activism, and the Right to the Mexican City
Author: Diana Negrín
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2019-11-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816540012

While the population of Indigenous peoples living in Mexico’s cities has steadily increased over the past four decades, both the state and broader society have failed to recognize this geographic heterogeneity by continuing to expect Indigenous peoples to live in rural landscapes that are anathema to a modern Mexico. This book examines the legacy of the racial imaginary in Mexico with a focus on the Wixarika (Huichol) Indigenous peoples of the western Sierra Madre from the colonial period to the present. Through an examination of the politics of identity, space, and activism among Wixarika university students living and working in the western Mexican cities of Tepic and Guadalajara, geographer Diana Negrín analyzes the production of racialized urban geographies and reveals how Wixarika youth are making claims to a more heterogeneous citizenship that challenges these deep-seated discourses and practices. Through the weaving together of historical material, critical interdisciplinary scholarship, and rich ethnography, this book sheds light on the racialized history, urban transformation, and contemporary Indigenous activism of a region of Mexico that has remained at the margins of scholarship.

We Heard It When We Were Young

We Heard It When We Were Young
Author: Chuy Renteria
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2021-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1609388054

We Heard It When We Were Young tells the story of a young boy, first-generation Mexican American, who is torn between cultures: between immigrant parents trying to acclimate to midwestern life and a town that is, by turns, supportive and disturbingly antagonistic.

Brown in the Windy City

Brown in the Windy City
Author: Lilia Fernández
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2014-07-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 022621284X

Brown in the Windy City is the first history to examine the migration and settlement of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in postwar Chicago. Lilia Fernández reveals how the two populations arrived in Chicago in the midst of tremendous social and economic change and, in spite of declining industrial employment and massive urban renewal projects, managed to carve out a geographic and racial place in one of America’s great cities. Through their experiences in the city’s central neighborhoods over the course of these three decades, Fernández demonstrates how Mexicans and Puerto Ricans collectively articulated a distinct racial position in Chicago, one that was flexible and fluid, neither black nor white.

Chicago Católico

Chicago Católico
Author: Deborah E. Kanter
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2020-02-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 025205184X

Today, over one hundred Chicago-area Catholic churches offer Spanish language mass to congregants. How did the city's Mexican population, contained in just two parishes prior to 1960, come to reshape dozens of parishes and neighborhoods? Deborah E. Kanter tells the story of neighborhood change and rebirth in Chicago's Mexican American communities. She unveils a vibrant history of Mexican American and Mexican immigrant relations as remembered by laity and clergy, schoolchildren and their female religious teachers, parish athletes and coaches, European American neighbors, and from the immigrant women who organized as guadalupanas and their husbands who took part in the Holy Name Society. Kanter shows how the newly arrived mixed memories of home into learning the ways of Chicago to create new identities. In an ever-evolving city, Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans’ fierce devotion to their churches transformed neighborhoods such as Pilsen. The first-ever study of Mexican-descent Catholicism in the city, Chicago Católico illuminates a previously unexplored facet of the urban past and provides present-day lessons for American communities undergoing ethnic integration and succession.

Latina/o/x Education in Chicago

Latina/o/x Education in Chicago
Author: Isaura Pulido
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2022-08-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252053508

In this collection, local experts use personal narratives and empirical data to explore the history of Mexican American and Puerto Rican education in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system. The essays focus on three themes: the historical context of segregated and inferior schooling for Latina/o/x students; the changing purposes and meanings of education for Latina/o/x students from the 1950s through today; and Latina/o/x resistance to educational reforms grounded in neoliberalism. Contributors look at stories of student strength and resistance, the oppressive systems forced on Mexican American women, the criminalization of Puerto Ricans fighting for liberatory education, and other topics of educational significance. As they show, many harmful past practices remain the norm--or have become worse. Yet Latina/o/x communities and students persistently engage in transformative practices shaping new approaches to education that promise to reverberate not only in the city but nationwide. Insightful and enlightening, Latina/o/x Education in Chicago brings to light the ongoing struggle for educational equity in the Chicago Public Schools.

Smeltertown

Smeltertown
Author: Monica Perales
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2010
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0807834114

Traces the history of Smeltertown, Texas, a city located on the banks of the Rio Grande that was home to generations of ethnic Mexicans who worked at the American Smelting and Refining Company in El Paso, Texas, with information from newspapers, personalarchives, photographs, employee records, parish newsletters, and interviews.