Barrio
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In 1988 photographer Paul D’Amato was driving around Chicago with his camera when he decided to follow Halsted Street into Pilsen, the city’s largest Mexican neighborhood. Intrigued by the barrio and neighboring Little Village, he began to take photographs and would continue to do so off and on for the next fourteen years. D’Amato started with the public life of the neighborhood: women and children in the streets, open fire hydrants, and graffiti. But later—after he got to know the area’s Mexican residents better—he was allowed to take more intimate photos of people at work, families at weddings and parties, and even gang members.
Brown in the Windy City
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Like other industrial cities in the postwar period, Chicago underwent the dramatic population shifts that radically changed the complexion of the urban north. As African American populations grew and white communities declined throughout the 1960s and '70s, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans migrated to the city, adding a complex layer to local racial dynamics. Brown in the Windy City is the first history to examine the migration and settlement of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in the postwar era. Here, Lilia Fernandez reveals how the two populations arrived.
Chicanas of 18th Street
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Overflowing with powerful testimonies of six female community activists who have lived and worked in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, Chicanas of 18th Street reveals the convictions and approaches of those organizing for social reform. In chronicling a pivotal moment in the history of community activism in Chicago, the women discuss how education, immigration, religion, identity, and acculturation affected the Chicano movement. Chicanas of 18th Street underscores the hierarchies of race, gender, and class while stressing the interplay of individual and collective values in the development of community reform.
Citizen Illegal
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Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán
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Chicago is home to the second-largest Mexican immigrant population in the United States, yet the activities of this community have gone relatively unexamined by both the media and academia. In this groundbreaking new book, Xóchitl Bada takes us inside one of the most vital parts of Chicago’s Mexican immigrant community—its many hometown associations.
The Mexican Revolution in Chicago
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This project examines the diverse political culture of Mexican immigrants, the formation and efficacy of immigrant-led transnational organizations, and the variables that affect immigrant assimilation through a history of the Mexican immigrant community of metropolitan Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century. John Flores presents a narrative that revolves around the lives of immigrant community leaders, who are characterized as members of a "revolutionary generation." These immigrants include men and women, white-collar professionals, and blue-collar laborers who subscribed to a passionate sense of Mexican national identity that derived from their experience and understanding of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20), a civil war fought by diverse factions.
Negotiating Latinidad
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Longstanding Mexican and Puerto Rican populations have helped make people of mixed nationalities—MexiGuatamalans, CubanRicans, and others—an important part of Chicago's Latina/o scene. Intermarriage between Guatemalans, Colombians, and Cubans have further diversified this community-within-a-community. Yet we seldom consider the lives and works of these Intralatino/as when we discuss Latino/as in the United States.In Negotiating Latinidad, a cross-section of Chicago's second-generation Intralatino/as offer their experiences of negotiating between and among the national communities embedded in their families. Frances R. Aparicio's rich interviews reveal Intralatino/as proud of their multiplicity and particularly skilled at understanding difference and boundaries. Their narratives explore both the ongoing complexities of family life and the challenges of fitting into our larger society, in particular the struggle to claim a space—and a sense of belonging—in a Latina/o America that remains highly segmented in scholarship. The result is an emotionally powerful, theoretically rigorous exploration of culture, hybridity, and transnationalism that points the way forward for future scholarship on Intralatino/a identity.
Sweet Home Chicago?
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Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among aged Mexican migrants in Chicago, Franziska Bedorf investigates the phenomenon of return migration by tracing how people's intentions to go back change over time. Considering global labour mobility, she evaluates transformations of belonging and the wider economic, political, social and cultural frameworks that shape them. In front of the backdrop of debates on integration, transnationalism and belonging, the study explores why migrants keep and form attachments to and detachments from places, people and cultures.
