Abstract
In his landmark 1983 book, Arnold Hirsch identified the formation of the “second ghetto” in Chicago, exposing the layers of white resistance to black settlement in the windy city in the decades following World War II. Hirsch’s book opened the door to a new generation of urban history scholarship not just on Chicago, but on many U.S. cities that witnessed stark divides across the fissures of race and class.
This body of work was important and groundbreaking. It shook our shared confidence that the Civil Rights Movement was actualizing real racial progress in postwar America and exposed not only the persistence but also the furthering of inequality outside the South. The only problem was the exclusive focus on the black and white contours of postwar urbanization. Fortunately, a few scholars have demonstrated in recent years that the second ghetto was not just black, but brown as well. Some of that scholarship has focused on Puerto Ricans in New York, or Cubans in Miami, but the bulk of it centers upon the Mexican immigrant and Mexican American experience. As home to largest concentration of Mexican-descent peoples outside of Mexico City, Los Angeles dominates this conversation, but Chicago has earned a prominent place as well. Since 2008, there have been several excellent books on the history of Mexican Chicago. This is another one.
Making Mexican Chicago explores how Chicago accommodated, reluctantly, a Mexican-descent community that took shape through external struggles and internal conflicts. Amezcua, a native Angeleno and undergraduate major in Chicano Studies (and History) at UCLA, is well-attuned to the internal diversity of the barrio. He delivers a rigorous and compelling narrative about the origins and expansion of the Chicago barrio, and the individuals who shaped its development. They struggled against the daunting, but familiar, forces that shaped urban development in the second half of the twentieth century: suburbanization, white flight, urban renewal, slum clearance, highway construction, deindustrialization, and gentrification. The author maintains a keen eye towards these broader forces and the challenges and opportunities they present for the Windy City’s Mexican diaspora. He also notes the unique predicament of Mexican nationals in the US, and the restrictionist immigration policies that compounded the postwar urban crisis for significant segments of the urban population. This is a major strength of the book: how it draws upon two powerful currents of recent United States scholarship, the ‘urban crisis’ literature from Hirsch, Sugrue and others, and the discourse of ‘illegality,’ as explored through the work of Kelly Lytle-Hernandez and Mae Ngai. Making Mexican Chicago effectively synthesizes these lines of research to elucidate the meaning and making of Mexican Chicago.
In between, Amezcua brings to light individual struggles to make do in Chicago, putting people first (very much in line with an older tradition of ‘history from below’). So, the book opens with the story of Anita Villareal, a real estate broker, property manager, blockbuster, and eventual civic leader who pushed the residential boundaries of Mexican Chicago by securing housing for thousands of Mexican migrants arriving in the city. Villareal’s is the not the typical hardscrabble story of Mexicans washing dishes, cars, or homes to build a life in foreign U.S. cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. Hers veers towards white-collar work, negotiating and arbitrating the shifting boundaries of work, housing, and community among Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans in Chicago. To his credit, Amezcua takes pains not to pigeonhole this community; it aligns, politically, with both Democrat and Republican, establishment and anti-establishment; economically, with labor and capital (or with the gentrified and gentrifier); and culturally with both Spanish and English. The tensions between new Mexican immigrant arrivals with first- and second-generation Mexican Americans are familiar, as are those between young Chicano activists and their more conservative elders. Religiously, the story is less ambiguous. The Catholic Church plays a decisive role in community formation in Mexican Chicago, a bulwark against the forces of racism and exclusion and an anchor of community development. But like the best examples of Chicano history, the analysis includes a lot of ‘in between,’ or mestizaje, illustrating how Chicago supported a bi-lingual, bi-national, bi-cultural community, becoming Mexican American, but with a uniquely Chicago twist. As such, Making Mexican Chicago illuminates the self-conscious development of a community well-attuned to the ethno-racial geography of the Windy City, its constitutive groups, and their struggles to claim urban space and create community.
The book follows a chronological trajectory from the late 1940s to the 1990s. The story begins with the brown scare that unfolded at the outset of the post-World War II era through the deportation campaigns of Operation Wetback, as well as the Bracero Program, which brought tens of thousands of Mexicans to work in the U.S., including the Midwest. In between these federal programs, a segregated Mexican community began to take shape in Chicago, bolstered by civic associations, labor organizations, and homegrown cultural institutions (no Chicano history monograph is complete without the requisite acronyms of political groups). This community not only had to contend with restrictions imposed by U.S. immigration policy in the 1950s, but also with the daunting forces of Chicago’s powerful redevelopment machine that granted city officials and urban elites almost total control in shaping the racial and class contours of Chicago. Amezcua illustrates how Mexican newcomers dodged the wrecking balls and bulldozers that enforced urban renewal and slum clearance, carving space out for themselves by transforming the abandoned spaces left in the wake of white flight, disinvestment, and deindustrialization.
Theirs is a story of resolute resistance and bottom-up revitalization—building communities and neighborhoods through hard work and sweat equity. Amezcua’s strong and clear writing (another strength of the book) neatly frames the narrative’s thoughtful balance between structure and agency: this is especially true of his treatment of deindustrialization, which limited economic mobility for Mexican arrivals to Chicago, and yet created new spaces for community formation. The racism that drove white flight and neighborhood succession, similarly, did indeed constrain social, economic, and spatial mobility, but it also broadened the contours of Mexican Chicago, enabling the creation of a “brown bungalow belt” (a provocative revision of white flight as a beginning, not an end, at least from a Mexican immigrant perspective!). Homeownership among Mexican Americans is not a prominent topic within Chicano historiography, but Amezcua illustrates how buying homes and property led many community members to pivot away from New Deal/Great Society programs to embrace the anti-tax, do-it-yourself, bootstraps politics of the New Right, pinning hopes on private property and homeownership as a means towards full inclusion. On the other hand, the Chicano Movement of the 1970s gets extensive treatment in later chapters, especially as it reflected a younger generation’s disaffection from Chicago’s machine politics dominated by Mayor Richard Daley, as well as an older generation of Mexican civic leaders who hewed closely to the city’s political establishment. This is where we find familiar strategies of resistance and activism, including, marches, rallies, boycotts and direct-action campaigns among students and community leaders, and where colorful murals appear on the walls of Pilsen and Little Village to announce the birth of La Raza. The new militancy of Chicano politics in Chicago primed the community for upcoming struggles against gentrification in the 1980s and 1990s, which heralded the city’s neoliberal reliance on privatized capital and the heightened visibility of a new creative class and niche entrepreneurs.
A poignant conclusion considers the twenty-first century forces that are ‘unmaking’ Mexican Chicago, destabilized through disinvestment, economic restructuring, the carceral state, political disenfranchisement, and predatory corporate reinvestment. But ultimately, Making Mexican Chicago is a story of “making,” not “unmaking.” Amezcua shines in his ability to balance these opposing forces in his analysis, carefully woven throughout each of the chapters. The book’s research base is solid, even innovative. There is an abundance of familiar sources from local and national archives, including maps, demographic reports, zoning and municipal codes, etc., but Amezcua acknowledges that these staples of urban historical research are insufficient for understanding the experiences of marginal, transitory, and often invisible communities. He emphasizes the political exigencies of concealment, obfuscation, smuggling, forgery, and other covert tactics designed to resist the overt pressures from would-be adversaries like building inspectors, tax collectors, insurance appraisers, immigration agents and anxious neighbors. Therefore, Amezcua calls for greater attention to the “noninstitutionalized archive,” an important concept that could use further elaboration in the text. What is the noninstitutional archive and where do we go to find it? Is this the much-touted “rebel archive” that is changing the potential for historical scholarship? What’s the difference? Another minor quibble is the author’s tendency to pack in terminology that this reader found somewhat distracting. “Racial capitalism,” OK, “the carceral state,” check; even “neoliberal multiculturalism” I get, but then we also get “restrictionist populism,” “incentive apparatus,” “conservative colonia,” and “bungalow suburbanism,” etc. At times, this reader felt a little bogged down with the terminology, which felt repetitive and awkward.
Still, Making Mexican Chicago is an admirable achievement. The book adds another hue to the story of urbanization in the United States after World War II and builds upon a strong tradition of urban Chicano Studies. It will benefit students of U.S. urban history, Chicano history, and ethnic studies more broadly, and marks an important contribution to the history of Chicago, long a favorite laboratory for urbanists (Amezcua rightly acknowledges the legacy of the Chicago School and the ensuing correctives along the way). This book will shape the field in important ways. It distinguishes Mike Amezcua as a deft historian and heightens anticipation for what comes next.
ORCID iD
Eric Avila https://orcid.org/0009-0003-0649-7337