Steel Barrio

Steel Barrio PDF Author: Michael Innis-Jiménez
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814724655
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book

Book Description
"The richly documented history of Mexican South Chicago here yields a sophisticated, rounded, and compelling study of the evolution of an immigrant place. Attentive to structural factors shaping migration and assimilation, Innis-Jiménez also tells textured human stories of the work, play, and solidarity that created and recreated an enduring community, snatching life from discrimination and hardship." —David Roediger, University of Illinois Since the early twentieth century, thousands of Mexican Americans have lived, worked, and formed communities in Chicago’s steel mill neighborhoods. Drawing on individual stories and oral histories, Michael Innis-Jiménez tells the story of a vibrant, active community that continues to play a central role in American politics and society. Examining how the fortunes of Mexicans in South Chicago were linked to the environment they helped to build, Steel Barrio offers new insights into how and why Mexican Americans created community. This book investigates the years between the World Wars, the period that witnessed the first, massive influx of Mexicans into Chicago. South Chicago Mexicans lived in a neighborhood whose literal and figurative boundaries were defined by steel mills, which dominated economic life for Mexican immigrants. Yet while the mills provided jobs for Mexican men, they were neither the center of community life nor the source of collective identity. Steel Barrio argues that the Mexican immigrant and Mexican American men and women who came to South Chicago created physical and imagined community not only to defend against the ever-present social, political, and economic harassment and discrimination, but to grow in a foreign, polluted environment. Steel Barrio reconstructs the everyday strategies the working-class Mexican American community adopted to survive in areas from labor to sports to activism. This book links a particular community in South Chicago to broader issues in twentieth-century U.S. history, including race and labor, urban immigration, and the segregation of cities. Michael Innis-Jiménez is a native of Laredo, Texas and Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Alabama. He lives in Tuscaloosa where he working on his next book on Latino/a immigration to the American South. In the Culture, Labor, History series

Steel Barrio

Steel Barrio PDF Author: Michael Innis-Jiménez
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814724655
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book

Book Description
"The richly documented history of Mexican South Chicago here yields a sophisticated, rounded, and compelling study of the evolution of an immigrant place. Attentive to structural factors shaping migration and assimilation, Innis-Jiménez also tells textured human stories of the work, play, and solidarity that created and recreated an enduring community, snatching life from discrimination and hardship." —David Roediger, University of Illinois Since the early twentieth century, thousands of Mexican Americans have lived, worked, and formed communities in Chicago’s steel mill neighborhoods. Drawing on individual stories and oral histories, Michael Innis-Jiménez tells the story of a vibrant, active community that continues to play a central role in American politics and society. Examining how the fortunes of Mexicans in South Chicago were linked to the environment they helped to build, Steel Barrio offers new insights into how and why Mexican Americans created community. This book investigates the years between the World Wars, the period that witnessed the first, massive influx of Mexicans into Chicago. South Chicago Mexicans lived in a neighborhood whose literal and figurative boundaries were defined by steel mills, which dominated economic life for Mexican immigrants. Yet while the mills provided jobs for Mexican men, they were neither the center of community life nor the source of collective identity. Steel Barrio argues that the Mexican immigrant and Mexican American men and women who came to South Chicago created physical and imagined community not only to defend against the ever-present social, political, and economic harassment and discrimination, but to grow in a foreign, polluted environment. Steel Barrio reconstructs the everyday strategies the working-class Mexican American community adopted to survive in areas from labor to sports to activism. This book links a particular community in South Chicago to broader issues in twentieth-century U.S. history, including race and labor, urban immigration, and the segregation of cities. Michael Innis-Jiménez is a native of Laredo, Texas and Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Alabama. He lives in Tuscaloosa where he working on his next book on Latino/a immigration to the American South. In the Culture, Labor, History series

Chicago Transformed

Chicago Transformed PDF Author: Joseph Gustaitis
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809334992
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book

Book Description
Winner, ISHS Russell P. Strange Book of the Year Award, 2017 It’s been called the “war that changed everything,” and it is difficult to think of a historical event that had a greater impact on the world than the First World War. Events during the war profoundly changed our nation, and Chicago, especially, was transformed during this period. Between 1913 and 1919, Chicago transitioned from a nineteenth-century city to the metropolis it is today. Despite the importance of the war years, this period has not been documented adequately in histories of the city. In Chicago in World War I: How the Great War Transformed a Great City, Joseph Gustaitis fills this gap in the historical record, covering the important wartime events, developments, movements, and people that helped shape Chicago. Gustaitis attributes many of Chicago’s changes to the labor shortage caused by the war. African Americans from the South flocked to Chicago during the Great Migration, and Mexican immigration increased as well. This influx of new populations along with a wave of anti-German hysteria—which nearly extinguished German culture in Chicago—changed the city’s ethnic composition. As the ethnic landscape changed, so too did the culture. Jazz and blues accompanied African Americans to the city, and Chicago soon became America’s jazz and blues capital. Gustaitis also demonstrates how the nation’s first sexual revolution occurred not during the 1960s but during the World War I years, when the labor shortage opened up unprecedented employment opportunities for women. These opportunities gave women assertiveness and freedom that endured beyond the war years. In addition, the shortage of workers invigorated organized labor, and determined attempts were made to organize in Chicago’s two leading industrial workplaces—the stockyards and the steel mills—which helped launch the union movement of the twentieth century. Gustaitis explores other topics as well: Prohibition, which practically defined the city in the 1920s; the exploits of Chicago’s soldiers, both white and black; life on the home front; the War Exposition in Grant Park; and some of the city’s contributions to the war effort. The book also contains sketches of the wartime activities of prominent Chicagoans, including Jane Addams, Ernest Hemingway, Clarence Darrow, Rabbi Emil Hirsch, John T. McCutcheon, “Big Bill” Thompson, and Eunice Tietjens. Although its focus is Chicago, this book provides insight into change nationwide, as many of the effects that the First World War had on the city also affected the United States as a whole. Drawing on a variety of sources and written in an accessible style that combines economic, cultural, and political history, Chicago in World War I: How the Great War Transformed a Great City portrays Chicago before the war, traces the changes initiated during the war years, and shows how these changes still endure in the cultural, ethnic, and political landscape of this great city and the nation.

The Mexican Revolution in Chicago

The Mexican Revolution in Chicago PDF Author: John H Flores
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252050479
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book

Book Description
Few realize that long before the political activism of the 1960s, there existed a broad social movement in the United States spearheaded by a generation of Mexican immigrants inspired by the revolution in their homeland. Many revolutionaries eschewed U.S. citizenship and have thus far been lost to history, though they have much to teach us about the increasingly international world of today. John H. Flores follows this revolutionary generation of Mexican immigrants and the transnational movements they created in the United States. Through a careful, detailed study of Chicagoland, the area in and around Chicago, Flores examines how competing immigrant organizations raised funds, joined labor unions and churches, engaged the Spanish-language media, and appealed in their own ways to the dignity and unity of other Mexicans. Painting portraits of liberals and radicals, who drew support from the Mexican government, and conservatives, who found a homegrown American ally in the Roman Catholic Church, Flores recovers a complex and little known political world shaped by events south of the U.S border.

World of Our Mothers

World of Our Mothers PDF Author: Miguel Montiel
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816546673
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book

Book Description
World of Our Mothers captures the largely forgotten history of courage and heartbreak of forty-five women who immigrated to the United States during the era of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. The book reveals how these women in the early twentieth century reconciled their lives with their circumstances—enduring the violence of the Revolution, experiencing forced labor and lost childhoods, encountering enganchadores (labor contractors), and living in barrios, mining towns, and industrial areas of the Midwest, and what they saw as their primary task: caring for their families. While the women share a historic immigration journey, each story provides unique details and circumstances that testify to the diversity of the immigrant experience. The oral histories, a project more than forty years in the making, let these women speak for themselves, while historical information is added to support and illuminate the women’s voices. The book, which includes a foreword by Irasema Coronado, director of the School of Transborder Studies, and Chris Marin, professor emeritus, both at Arizona State University, is divided into four parts. Part 1 highlights the salient events of the Revolution; part 2 presents an overview of what immigrants inherited upon their arrival to the United States; part 3 identifies challenges faced by immigrant families; and part 4 focuses on stories by location—Arizona mining towns, Phoenix barrios, and Midwestern colonias—all communities that immigrant women helped create. The book concludes with ideas on how readers can examine their own family histories. Readers are invited to engage with one another to uncover alternative interpretations of the immigrant experience and through the process connect one generation with another.

The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow

The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow PDF Author: DaMaris B. Hill
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739197886
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Get Book

Book Description
The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland engages in an important conversation about race relations in the twentieth century and significantly extends the historical narrative of the Civil Rights Movement. The essays in this collection examine instances of racial and gender oppression in the American heartland—which is conceived of here as having a specific cultural significance which resists diversity—in the twentieth century, instances which have often been ignored or overshadowed in typical historical narratives. The contributors explore the intersections of suffrage, race relations, and cultural histories, and add to an ongoing dialogue about representations of race and gender within the context of regional and national narratives

The Multiracial Promise

The Multiracial Promise PDF Author: Gordon K. Mantler
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469673878
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Get Book

Book Description
In April 1983, a dynamic, multiracial political coalition did the unthinkable, electing Harold Washington as the first Black mayor of Chicago. Washington's victory was unlikely not just because America's second city was one of the nation's most racially balkanized but also because it came at a time when Ronald Reagan and other political conservatives seemed resurgent. Washington's initial win and reelection in 1987 established the charismatic politician as a folk hero. It also bolstered hope among Democrats that the party could win elections by pulling together multiracial urban voters around progressive causes. Yet what could be called the Washington era revealed clear limits to electoral politics and racial coalition building when decoupled from neighborhood-based movement organizing. Drawing on a rich array of archives and oral history interviews, Gordon K. Mantler offers a bold reexamination of the Harold Washington movement and moment. Taking readers into Chicago's street-level politics and the often tense relationships among communities and their organizers, Mantler shows how white supremacy, deindustrialization, dysfunction, and voters' own contradictory expectations stubbornly impeded many of Washington's proposed reforms. Ultimately, Washington's historic victory and the thwarted ambitions of his administration provide a cautionary tale about the peril of placing too much weight on electoral politics above other forms of civic action—a lesson today's activists would do well to heed.

Histories of Drug Trafficking in Twentieth-Century Mexico

Histories of Drug Trafficking in Twentieth-Century Mexico PDF Author: Wil G. Pansters
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826363598
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book

Book Description
This work brings together a new generation of drug historians and new historical sources to uncover the history of the drug trade and its regulations. While the US and Mexican governments developed anti-drug discourses and policies, which criminalized both high-profile traffickers and small-time addicts, these authorities also employed the criminals and cash connected to the drug trade to pursue more pressing political concerns. The politics, socioeconomic relations, and criminal justice system of modern Mexico has been shaped by standing public and covert state policies as well as by the interaction of subnational trajectories of drug production and trafficking. The essays in this study explore this complicated narrative and provide insight into Mexico’s history and the wider contemporary global drug trade.

Making Mexican Chicago

Making Mexican Chicago PDF Author: Mike Amezcua
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226826406
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Rethinking the Chicano Movement

Rethinking the Chicano Movement PDF Author: Marc Simon Rodriguez
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136175377
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book

Book Description
In the 1960s and 1970s, an energetic new social movement emerged among Mexican Americans. Fighting for civil rights and celebrating a distinct ethnic identity, the Chicano Movement had a lasting impact on the United States, from desegregation to bilingual education. Rethinking the Chicano Movement provides an astute and accessible introduction to this vital grassroots movement. Bringing together different fields of research, this comprehensive yet concise narrative considers the Chicano Movement as a national, not just regional, phenomenon, and places it alongside the other important social movements of the era. Rodriguez details the many different facets of the Chicano movement, including college campuses, third-party politics, media, and art, and traces the development and impact of one of the most important post-WWII social movements in the United States.

A Promising Problem

A Promising Problem PDF Author: Carlos Kevin Blanton
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477309039
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book

Book Description
Chicana/o history has reached an intriguing juncture. While academic and intellectual studies are embracing new, highly nuanced perspectives on race, class, gender, education, identity, and community, the field itself continues to be viewed as a battleground, subject to attacks from outside academia by those who claim that the discipline promotes racial hatred and anti-Americanism. Against a backdrop of deportations and voter suppression targeting Latinos, A Promising Problem presents the optimistic voices of scholars who call for sophisticated solutions while embracing transnationalism and the reality of multiple, overlapping identities. Showcasing a variety of new directions, this anthology spans topics such as growth and reassessment in Chicana/o history manifested in a disruption of nationalism and geographic essentialism, the impact of legal history, interracial relations and the experiences of Latino subpopulations in the US South, race and the politics of religious history, transborder feminism in the early twentieth century, and aspirations for a field that increasingly demonstrates the relational dynamics of cultural production. As they reflect on the state of their field, the contributors offer significant insights into sociology, psychology, anthropology, political science, education, and literature, while tracing the history of activism throughout the last century and debating the very concepts of “Chicano” and “Chicano history.” Although the political landscape is fraught with closed-off rhetoric, A Promising Problem encourages diversity of thought and opens the possibilities of historical imagination.