Editor’s Note: This is the first post in this month’s theme, The Latinx City
By Ryan Reft
If you’ve been even remotely paying attention in 2024, immigration and its impact on America has been a hot topic this year (and to be honest, nearly every election cycle since the 1990s). Granted, it’s a discussion largely defined by mendacious lies and fever dream levels of misrepresentation, but nevertheless it is certainly a source of national debate.
Whatever gibberish nativists spew forth, the fact is that throughout American history and especially for the past fifty years, Latinx immigrants have helped revitalize both rural and urban America. Regarding the latter, Latinx immigrants have refurbished declining neighborhoods, established cultural and political footholds in major metropolises such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, and reshaped entire urban demographics– what the late Mike Davis described as Magical Urbanism.
This influence extends past cities into rural areas and towns and the suburbs. For example, if one looks east of Los Angeles to the San Gabriel Valley (SGV) Asian and Latinx immigrants and their children have reinvigorated working class suburbs creating a compelling cultural mix, as Davis described it, “the dim sum con salsa suburbs” while also establishing “the most important Latino constituency in the nation.”[1]
Still, Greater Los Angeles and the SGV are rather obvious examples. Chicago, which has historically been home to Southern and Eastern European immigrants and serves as the capital of the Midwest, provides a clear yet less recognized illustration of the Latinx City, or using Davis’s language, the “Latino Metropolis.” Postwar Latinx immigration to and settlement in Chicago prevented the city from completely hemorrhaging its population. While the city lost 1.5 million white residents between 1940 and 1980, the overall population only declined by around 400,000–still demographically challenging, but not as bad as it might have been.
Arriving in communities with worn housing stock, these new residents rebuilt and refurbished homes in a style combining elements of Spanish American and Anglo American architecture, what cultural geographer Daniel Arreola labels, “the Mexican American housescape.”[2] In this way, Latinx residents practically invented “sweat equity,” a term bandied about by real estate developers and homeowners with abandon on countless HGTV shows. Through this “bottom up beautification, Latinos [took] aging buildings and storefronts and filled them with civic and cultural institutions, churches and businesses to make redlined communities into bustling ones,” historian Mike Amezcua wrote in his 2022 work, Making Mexican Chicago.[3]
Two neighborhoods in particular, Little Village (formerly known as South Lawndale) and Pilsen, serve as prime examples demonstrating the impact Latinx Chicagoans, in this case largely those of Mexican heritage, have had on the city and these communities. However, such developments are not only about the built environment and urban space, but also the political landscape. Today, as the largest minority in the United States, Latinx voters and politicians hold an increasingly important place in electoral politics at all levels. Moreover, as historian Lilia Fernández points out in her 2012 work Brown in the Windy City, Latinx Chicagoans, largely Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, “bore witness to” and endured postwar deindustrialization and the various conflicts it enacted while also playing a critical role in the urban renaissance of the twenty first century.[4]
In his landmark study, Walls and Mirrors: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Politics of Ethnicity, David G. Gutiérrez emerged as one of the first historians to explore the politics of Latinx Americans through the prism of the largest group under the ethnic umbrella. Political pundits casting about for Latinx voting tendencies would do well to consult it along with more recent works such as Geraldo Cadava’s The Hispanic Republican. In Walls and Mirrors, Gutiérrez explores both the liberal and conservative ideologies running through politically diverse Mexican and Mexican American communities.
During the early postwar period, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the G.I. Forum, both of which originated in the American Southwest, leaned to the right, often disassociating from undocumented immigrants for fear of being lumped with them. Further, many sought to be recognized in the same fashion as their European counterparts as hyphenated Americans, an attempt to avoid being categorized as a “racialized caste likes Blacks or Chinese” notes Davis.[5] In contrast, the Community Services Organization (CSO) worked with undocumented Mexicans, helping them to adjust to life in the United States and guiding some toward citizenship. One finds similar dynamics in Chicago during the 1950s. The city’s Mexican American Council, like its southwestern counterparts “increasingly distanced itself from undocumented Mexican immigrants,” during the same period.[6]
On the national level, John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign, “Viva Kennedy,” successfully co-opted both liberal and conservative Mexican/Mexican American voters. For example, Chiagoan Arturo Velasquez cut his political teeth campaigning for JFK that year and created the Mexican Americans Democratic Organization (MADO), which eventually became a vocal backer of the Daley administration and conservative Latinx interests. Nixon also attracted Latinx voters, notably though his appointment of more than fifty-five Mexican Americans to policy making positions, a stark contrast to JFK and LBJ’s nine appointments. Nixon’s appointments included Chicagoan Alex Armedaris (Director of the Office of Minority Business Enterprise) and fellow midwesterner and Latinx, Frank Cassillas (strategist and co-founder of the Republican National Hispanic Council).[7] These appointments, along with to his foreign policy anti-communist bonafides were popular with Cubans and Cuban Americans in particular, and his support of “Brown capitalism” enabled Nixon to become the first Republican to secure over thirty percent of the Latinx vote and set the bar for future GOP presidential candidates.[8] “Ever since Nixon’s reelection in 1972,” writes Cadava, “Hispanic Republicans have helped Republican presidential candidates win about a third of the Hispanic vote.”[9] Which is all to say that Latinx voters are neither reflexively liberal or conservative.
To be fair, one cannot simply graft Gutiérrez’s southwestern and western political history onto the Midwest. California and Southwestern cities lacked the urban machines of the Midwest and East Coast. This mattered even more in the 1960s, when federal dollars flowed through municipal coffers that were all within the grasp of the Daley political machine. Additionally, unlike in the Southwest where Mexicans had long established roots, they were relative newcomers to the Windy City. “Mexicans in Chicago were not a colonized population on ancestral lands, they were immigrants like so many others in the past,” observes Fernández. Finally, cities of the Southwest lacked the “racially shifting neighborhoods” that punctuated postwar homeownership in Chicago, nor were opportunities to build political coalitions with fellow Latin American groups, as Mexican Chicagoans did with Puerto Ricans, present in the same way.[10]
With these differences noted, cities like Chicago offer a window into political developments described by Cadava, Davis, and Gutiérrez. First, responses by white Chicagoans to the burgeoning presence of Latinx residents presaged the conservative nativism we are all witnessing today. “What does the rise of modern conservatism look like when Mexicans and Mexican Americans are placed at the center of the story?” asks Amezcua pointing out these mid-century encounters were historically prescient. “Decades before the call for Mexican immigration restrictions became a pillar of contemporary nativist conservatism, white-rights proponents innovated micro-policies in their own neighborhoods and local communities that generated Mexican spatial segregation, containment, and market exclusions.”[11]
Puerto Rican and Mexican immigrants began arriving in Chicago and other metropolitan areas, during the first decades of the twentieth century–Mexicans in particular–often driven by the chaos of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and opportunities in the railroad industry. Railroads not only offered employment but also created connections between Latin America and the city, thereby further aiding migration during this period and beyond.
Between the 1940s and the mid-1960s, both groups migrated to Chicago as a result of “state sponsored mass labor importation programs.” Operation Bootstrap, largely overseen by the Puerto Rico Department of Labor’s Migration Division, encouraged modernization and economic development in Puerto Rico and led to the migration of the island’s workers into domestic and industrial labor in Chicago. In contrast, the Bracero Program brought hundreds of thousands of guest workers to the U.S. for work in agriculture (and a much smaller number in the railroad industry), but many soon made their way to employment in urban manufacturing and other industries in cities across the U.S. During the 1960s and 1970s, land reform and urban policies in Mexico and in other parts of Latin America led to more Mexican and Latin American arrivals.[12]
Chicago’s Near West, Near North, and Near Southwest areas included several neighborhoods that would become home to the city’s Latinx community with Puerto Ricans and Mexicans as the two largest cohorts, the first large aggregation emerged during the 1940s and 1950s on the Near West Side and Back of the Yards, south of Pilsen and Little Village. Though Mexicans and Puerto Ricans sometimes lived in the same communities and in proximity to one another, Pilsen and Little Village, by the 1980s, were both seen as specifically and heterogeneously Mexican. In 2000, Davis described the two communities as “the capital of the Mexican diaspora in the Midwest.” In contrast, Humboldt Park, West Town, and later Logan Square were designated as Puerto Rican. Puerto Ricans often lived in closer proximity to African Americans than their Mexican counterparts. Both groups were driven from community to community by segregation, urban renewal, and highway construction.[13]
Back of the Yards, one of the first communities where Mexican Chicagoans landed, serves as a good example. Fernández grew up in Pilsen during the 1980s and remembers her own grandmother’s experience in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. Moving there in the 1950s from Mexico, her grandmother attempted to buy a home but the savings and loan institutions only allowed her to do so on contract, an onerous financial arrangement in which the seller retained ownership of the property deed until the mortgage was completely paid off. A single missed payment meant termination of the contract, forfeiture of all previous payments and eviction.[14] As would be the case in Little Village and Pilsen, white ethnics in the community opposed the influx of such arrivals. “Over the years, I observed how the fear of racial succession became a self-fulfilling prophecy: the community went from being almost exclusively white (mostly Irish, Polish, Lithuanian), with a couple of Mexican homes, to increasingly Mexican and black, and then entirely Mexican and black,” remembers Fernández.[15]
Racist fears held by white ethnics dated back well before the Fernándezes’ arrival in Chicago. As early as 1938, Saul Alinsky, working with local leaders, established the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC) in an effort to organize the neighborhood politically and culturally, binding a fervent labor activism with the religious devotion of the predominantly Catholic residents. The BYNC promoted the increasingly multicultural nature of the community including its burgeoning Mexican population and Alinsky viewed the depiction of working class Latinx families in the neighborhood as critical to the larger message of “realizing New Deal social democracy in the neighborhoods.”[16]
However, since BYNC never addressed housing segregation (an actual byproduct of the New Deal), the reality proved much different. Alinsky feared alienating white ethnics and never attempted to shame them for their racism. The area was multicultural and multiethnic, but like the Near West Side, “this diversity belied the continuing physical segregation” of Black Chicagoans from their white counterparts. Ethnicity mixed, race didn’t. Latinx residents existed within this matrix somewhere between white and Black and often contextualized in their proximity to Blacks and perceptions of them held by white counterparts.[17]
Over time, BYNC’s rhetoric shifted from cultural pluralism and openness to an organization defined by white ethnic insularity dedicated to protecting the neighborhood from “change and outsiders.” One late 1950s newsletter from the organization stated it bluntly, “White People Must Control Their Own Communities.”
In 1957, the city rezoned the Mexican portion of the community, which shrunk its residential area, and established Ashland Avenue as a barrier to integration. Those who remained did so with placemaking in mind, often through the Cardinal’s Committee for the Spanish Speaking (CCSS) which “organized Latino Catholics around social, religious, and political issues during the 1950s and early 1960s.” Las Yardas, as the Mexican segment of the community came to be called, created a local civil society, gained some level of political representation, and held cultural events celebrating Mexican heritage. At the same time, the CCSS could also be considered a sign of white ambivalence toward the community since it’s also true that the Catholic Church created CCSS, in part, because a significant portion of its own clergy resented the new arrivals. The CCSS tapped into Catholic conservatism by stressing anti-communism and opposing militant labor organizing, in a general attempt to diminish political radicalism within the community. From this group arose Back of the Yards Latin American Voters, which organized voter registration drives, fundraised for political candidates, and created a permission structure for Latino support of machine candidates.[18]
Back of the Yards serves as precursor to the later, more comprehensive transformation of the two communities to the south, Little Village and Pilsen. During the early decades of the twentieth century, both neighborhoods were home to immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe. In addition to zoning changes in Las Yardas, Mayor Daley’s redevelopment of the Near West Side for the construction of the University of Illinois-Chicago, displaced hundreds of Mexican American families who also looked to Little Village and Pilsen for new homes.
By the early 1960s, the Near West Side community of North Lawndale had become ninety percent Black. South Lawndale’s white ethnic residents openly opposed integration and sought a way to keep the neighborhood alive and segregated. Richard Dolejs, a white realtor, deployed what has become an age-old tactic in real estate: in 1964, he changed the neighborhood’s name to Little Village in an effort to distance itself from the neighboring community and to convey a “sense of central European ethnicity by evoking the kind of peasant hamlet that many of Dolejs’s Bohemian and Polish immigrant stock neighbors remembered or imagined as their place of origin in the old country,” notes A.K. Sandoval-Strausz in his 2019 work, Barrio America.
For Black Chicagoans, the message was clear. “This is to assure the white community that we aren’t part of the black community,” a writer in the city’s Black newspaper of record, The Defender noted. Emerging as a general practice in Chicago and other cities, realtors and other real estate professionals viewed Puerto Ricans and Mexicans as buffers from Black populations, but it was a tenuously held belief and one that produced very limited, and transactional, levels of acceptence. “Tolerance for Mexicans became predicated on two factors: anti-blackness and recovering home equity,” argues Amezcua.[19]
Recognizing both their economic power and attempting to blunt Black encroachment on Pilsen, Dolejs courted Latinx homeowners on a limited basis, admitting in an oral history interview that “we said, ‘We’ll sell to Mexicans but we’ll only sell to them up to Twenty-Third Street.”[20] Ethnic white tolerance of their new neighbors waned quickly. From 1950 to 1960 alone, Pilsen went from ten percent Mexican to fifty percent. By 1980, nearly seventy-eight percent of the community consisted of Spanish-speaking residents, Mexicans being by far the largest group within that categorization.[21]
The name change stayed, but the community’s white ethnic residents did not as “the departure of old timers show[ed] no signs of abating.” Latinx Chicagoans stepped into the breach even if the neighborhoods’ Polish and Czech residents struggled to “figure out how ethnic Mexicans and Puerto Ricans fit into a racial order that they understood as either black or white,” notes Sandoval-Strauss.[22]
The slippage of racial binaries provided Latinx Chicagoans with opportunities that Black Chicagoans were unable to access, but Latinx residents remained subject to a stubborn racism that, even if not as severe, remained incredibly limiting. What began as a “port of entry” transformed into “an enclosure” for Mexicans arriving after 1965. What emerged was a “third housing market” for Mexican and by extension Latinx residents, defined by its imprecision as housing values aligned in “relation to Black … and white … housing markets,” notes Amezcua.[23]
Yet like African Americans, many Puerto Ricans and Mexicans were barred from unions, which in mid-century Chicago was a daunting prohibition. Newspaper accounts often depicted them as delinquents and criminals. At the same time, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, while perhaps grudgingly accepted in Pilsen and Little Village, were also not subject to the same level of resistance. For once, the invisibility of Latinx populations in postwar Chicago was of some benefit. “[C]onsidering the level of violence against Black people moving into white neighborhoods, many people of Spanish-Indigenous descent thought that being mostly overlooked was by no means a bad thing,” notes Sandoval-Strauz.[24]
However, Pilsen and Little Village residents did not necessarily look to blend into the urban background nor did invisibility suit the community in the long term. “Unlike in the Southwest, where Chicanas/os were more recognizable as a racial minority, Mexican Americans in Chicago had struggled to gain visibility for decades,” notes Fernández. From 1968-1974, Mexican residents made the neighborhood the center of the city’s Chicano movement, engaging in social activism on a broad scale that encompassed “a wide range of political views, strategies and goals.” Protests included bus boycotts and sit-ins opposing the Chicago Transit Authority’s history of discrimination against Latinx residents; challenging the local, predominantly white leadership of the Pilsen Neighbors Community Council (PNCC); forming a chapter of La Raza Unida and nominating a Mexican American candidate for Congress in 1972; and establishing a chapter of Brown Berets. In November of 1971, local leaders opened El Centro de la Sausa, the Latin American Youth Center, Inc. (El Centro) which provided recreational and athletic programs for the local young people as means to empower residents and direct young people toward new opportunities.[25]
However, while many Mexican Chicagoans leaned into the Chicano movement, others sought to convey “a Mexican immigrant/ethnic group that was hard-working, entrepreneurial, loyal to the Democratic Party, and cooperative as they navigated entry into racially tense neighborhoods,” notes Amezcua. This cadre of Mexican American business leaders, conservatives, and some moderates threw in with the Chicago machine and Mayor Richard J. Daley, who while ostensibly a Democrat, was culturally aligned with conservatives and frequently courted the largely Republican Chicago business community.
Organizations like the Mexican American Chamber of Commerce, MADO, and Amigos for Daley, corralled Latinx support for the machine. Individuals like Velasquez and Little Village realtor Anita Villarreal sought to take responsibility for Mexican settlement in Chicago and incrementally worked their way into the apparatus of the decaying Chicago machine. Denied access to Little Village’s all-white real estate board, which barred her from accessing many local financial institutions and the Multiple Listing Service which more or less appraised realtors of available properties in her area, Villareal endured professional barriers based on her ethnicity and gender.
White realtors alleged that Villareal was a “blockbuster” preying on white racial anxieties to encourage home sales at lower prices then selling them back to market restricted groups at a significant mark up. Latinx Chicagoans saw her differently. She was a civil rights pioneer, securing housing for Latinx families in a segregated housing market. “We’re going to be the first Mexican suburb,” she frequently promised. For “La Villita” aka Little Village, Villareal’s advocacy and influence on local affairs expanded the neighborhood’s commercial opportunities and increased its property values. However, Villareal was not what one would describe as a political liberal. If she began her political life as a New Deal Democrat, she ended it as a Reagan conservative. Her methods reflect this shift. The bungalow suburbanism adopted by Velasquez and Villareal rested on a political foundation emphasizing neighborhood stability, business growth, and appointments to patronage positions.[26]
Such efforts may have granted some amount of political representation to the community, provided individuals like Villarreal and Velasquez political power, and perhaps drawn some largesse from city hall, but it also “undermined Latino political power and furthered white machine control of majority-Latino neighborhoods.”[27] Villareal embodies the fact that housing, the physical product and the individuals who built, sold, and rented it, drove political, economic, and cultural change brought by Latinx immigration to the city. On the one hand, her work to secure housing for Latinx families served to bolster Mexican Chicagoans’ political, economic, and social standing, but at the same time Mayor Daley’s overtures to Latinx Chicago were often mealy mouthed and underwhelming, such as his Latin American Task Force, which did little to battle prejudice in unions and focused primarily on minority apprenticeship programs.[28]
In general terms, even with “fractious Barrio politics” on display, Daley had co-opted a majority of the Latinx community. The political divide between conservative and liberal activists rested on the fulcrum of self-determination. The two groups disagreed on the best way to achieve it; for the former finding a way to funnel federal and municipal dollars to the community was best achieved by working within the system. For the latter, opposition to the machine remained paramount. The only way to secure Latinx interests was to topple it and elect individuals representing the community rather than machine functionaries.[29] Both recognized the wilting “Daley Consensus” as the machine declined. Planning and economic development, or rather, their opposition to plans put forth by Daley in this regard, drove both sides of this internal debate.
The issuance of Chicago 21: A Plan for the Central Area Communities by the city furthered this disregard as it sought to once again displace the city’s Latinx residents through questionable urban renewal plans. The Daley administration published Chicago 21 and Chicago’s Spanish Speaking Population, a report on Latinx Chicago, in the same month of 1973. The latter never “explicitly stated” that “Spanish-heritage people were becoming essential to the Windy City’s future,” observes Sandoval-Strausz, but the message to that effect was clear. In contrast, Chicago 21 “was a far better indicator of the Daley administration’s priorities.” The plan hoped to revitalize downtown and eliminate blight, which of course was aimed at white middle-class residents at the expense of established but still burgeoning Mexican communities. For Pilsen, it meant bringing private developers in to attract “middle to upper income” residents, which the community clearly viewed as ignoring them. The plan became a “rallying point in a new era of political activism among Chicago Hispanics.” Daley and others simply could not, or would not, envision a city “redeemed” by Latinx immigration rather than undermined by it.[30]
Even conservative groups like MADO and Amigos for Daley recognized fissures in their relationship with City Hall and maneuvered accordingly. In 1972, they both endorsed an anti-machine candidate for governor. A Latinx member of the the Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations, Claudio Flores, a respected leader in the Puerto Rican community, blasted the administration for it failure to improve conditions for the city’s Spanish-speaking residents. By 1972, Service, Employment, and Redevelopment Jobs for Progress Program (SER) had established offices in Pilsen and were distributing antipoverty funds directly to the community, bypassing the machine and administered by Latinx Republicans. Yet around the same time, the Pilsen Neighbors Community Council emerged dedicated to “community control and grassroots” organization and would become a leading light in the city’s progressive politics. Tensions between conservative and liberal Pilsen residents persisted, but both understood the machine did not have their full interests at heart.[31]
Daley’s passing in 1976 served as the death knell for the machine politics that had defined Chicago from the 1930s to the mid-1970s. The emergence of Mayor Harold Washington during the early 1980s and his courting of the city’s Latinx population proved crucial in his victory and his consolidation of power over an unruly and nakedly racist city council. It was, however, not a foregone conclusion. The establishment of Saul Alinsky- affiliated United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) chapters across the city in Pilsen, Little Village, Back of the Yards, and in the Southeast Side by the early 1980s provided Latinx residents with a political voice. UNO, a “Catholic, parish-based organizing vehicle” organized to develop civic and political leadership among working class and poor communities and was unsure of Washington at first, but his efforts to win over its membership paid dividends. Getting the full support of the city’s Latinx community, however, required interventions by people like MADO leader Arturo Velasquez, Maria Cerda, the first Latina on the Chicago Board of Education, and labor organizer Rudy Lozano, all of whom managed to mediate differences between Daley Democrats who threatened to vote for Washington’s white opponent, and independent progressives.
In subsequent years, in the wake of Washington’s victory Jesus Garcia, Juan Velasquez, and Luis Gutierrez were elected to the city council, where they allied with Washington. Latinx residents made up eleven percent of Washington’s new hires, “still less than their proportion of the city’s population but a much better record than his predecessor” and the new mayor was better in terms of administrative posts, one fifth of which were Latinx officials, notes Sandoval-Strausz. Washington passed an executive order barring questions regarding citizenship on City of Chicago application materials and preventing city employees from reporting to federal immigration officials without a court order. Finally, Latinx Chicagoans received a much fatter portion of city contracts. This did not assuage all tension between Black and Latinx Chicagoans, but it ushered in a new era of increasing Latinx political power in the city. “Washington’s victories had confirmed the political importance of Mexican American and Puerto Rican voters in the Windy City,” observes Sandoval Strausz. In other cities, such as Dallas, where Black and Latinx communities struggled to find common ground until Ron Kirk’s election in 1995, more than a full decade after Mayor Washington’s Rainbow Coalition.[32]
When Richard M. Daley won election to City Hall in 1989, he immediately recognized this dynamic and worked with UNO on issues such as school reform to consolidate his support among the city’s Latinx residents while rebuilding the machine more along the lines of international corporations and big business. Latinx residents in Pilsen, Little Village, and elsewhere across the city continued to battle over their political direction, but now had a much larger share of power within the city’s formal and informal political structure though in part demographics dictated such change.
During the 1990s, the city’s Latinx population exploded. By the 21st century, Chicago’s metropolitan region had become one the largest aggregations of Mexican immigrants in the U.S., second only to Southern California.[33] The “bungalowization of Mexican Chicago” distributed Mexican culture across the city and created very different cultural and electoral politics than had existed under Washington. Pilsen’s Mexicanness was now seen as a source of economic development, such as the establishment of the Mexican Fine Arts Museum (today known as the National Museum of Mexican Art) in 1986. Opposing gentrification, endorsing school reform, and other issues, in addition to battling discrimination, emerged as important political fights. However, by the 21st century Chicago’s Latinx voters and elected officials occupied a much different place in a much different city from the one in which they arrived over seventy-five years ago. One might even anticipate the city’s first Latinx mayor in the near future, though which wing of the community they might represent remains a mystery. Regardless of what may come, in what has been, Latinx Chicago’s impact on the city remains undeniable. Politically, like the city they call home, Latinx Chicago contains multitudes.
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Featured image (at top): Entrance to gallery at the National Museum of Mexican Art located in Pilsen, Chicago, IL, photograph by author, October 2024.
[1] Edward Newton, “San Gabriel Valley Becomes the New Power Base of Latino Voters,” Los Angeles Times, January 21, 1990, accessed August 12, 2016; Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City (New York: Verso, 2000), 46-48.
[2] A.K. Sandoval Strausz, Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the City (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 275.
[3] Mike Amezcua, Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 57-58.
[4] Lilia Fernández, Brown in the Windy City: Mexican and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 7.
[5] Davis, Magical Urbanism, 17.
[6] Fernández, Brown in the Windy City, 52.
[7] Amezcua, Making Mexican Chicago, 169.
[8] Geraldo Cadava, The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity from Nixon to Trump (New York: Harper Collins, 2020), 153, 147, 84-85, 106; Amezcua, Making Mexican Chicago, 168-172.
[9] Cadava, The Hispanic Republican, x-xi.
[10] Fernández, Brown in the Windy City, 226-227.
[11] Amezcua, Making Mexican Chicago, 6-7.
[12] Fernández, Brown in the Windy City, 24. Sandoval-Strausz, Barrio America, 55, 110-111, 138-139.
[13] Fernández, Brown in the Windy City, 135, 132-133, 236.
[14] Lilia Fernández, “In the Shadow of the Second Ghetto,” Journal of Urban History, Vol 46 (3): 501, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0096144219891152; Amezcua, Making Mexican Chicago, 138-139.
[15] Fernández, “In the Shadow of the Second Ghetto,” 501.
[16] Amezcua, Making Mexican Chicago, 69-71.
[17] Fernández, Brown in the Windy City, 63.
[18] Amezcua, Making Mexican Chicago, 73-74, 93, 98, 101-103; Fernández, Brown in the Windy City, 77.
[19] Amezcua, Making Mexican Chicago, 145.
[20] Sandoval Strausz, Barrio America, 40.
[21] Strausz, Barrio America, 29-31; Fernández, Brown in the Windy City, 220-221.
[22] Sandoval Strausz, Barrio America, 31-33.
[23] Amezcua, Making Mexican Chicago, 139.
[24] Sandoval Strausz, Barrio America, 94.
[25] Fernández, Brown in the Windy City, 209-210, 23.
[26] Amezcua, Making Mexican Chicago, 109, 142.
[27] Amezcua, Making Mexican Chicago, 110.
[28] Amezcua, Making Mexican Chicago, 163.
[29] Amezcua, Making Mexican Chicago, 171-2.
[30] Sandoval Strausz, Barrio America, 182-183; Amezcua, Making Mexican Chicago, 172-173.
[31] Amezcua, Making Mexican Chicago, 166-7, 208.
[32] Sandoval Strausz, Barrio America, 211-212, 214, 222-223.
[33] Amezcua, Making Mexican Chicago, 247.