Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification

Abstract

In 1990, Mexican-born architect Adrián Lozano was tapped to build el Arco de la Villita (the Little Village Arc). The two-story-tall Mexican colonial archway, complete with a clock gifted by former Mexican president Carlos Salinas, stands on 26th Street. It welcomes locals and visitors alike to one of Chicago's most vibrant commercial main streets and one of the metropole's largest Mexican neighborhoods. In 2022, the arc was granted official landmark status by the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, making it the first structure to be designated as such by an architect of Mexican descent in the city. This recognition marked a milestone for the area's Mexican community, as it granted a marker of permanence in Chicago's diverse, and often contested, built environment. Little Village is one of several neighborhoods present in Mike Amezcua's provocative Making Mexican Chicago. A work which takes readers on an expansive historical tour of a number of the Windy City's colonias, neighborhoods with embattled histories of Mexicans. These residents sought to make a permanent place for themselves, doing so through organizing, collective action, entrepreneurship, and their own brand of resistance to white supremacist policies. Structured across six chapters, Making Mexican Chicago highlights the methods of exclusion deployed against this community and the ways in which they answered back.Chapter 1 focuses on the experiences of Mexicans in twentieth-century Chicago's housing market, where they had to contend with the so-called “restrictionist populism” of white Chicagoans, anxious at the prospect of a Mexican invasion. Chapter 2 juxtaposes the scale and impact of xenophobic immigration efforts like Operation Wetback in the 1950s with the realities of displacement brought on by the making of the University of Illinois Circle Campus. Chapter 3 takes readers to Las Yardas (Back of the Yards), where Mexicans navigated liminality between Black and white communities while also establishing roots in the neighborhood. The fourth chapter tracks the development of real estate markets in the southwestern sector of the city. Here, readers are introduced to the story of La Villita, and how entrepreneurs and Mexican-serving institutions made the neighborhood their own and organized for political integration. Chapter 5 contextualizes the impact the Chicano movement had on the city's colonias, spotlighting stories of radical activism in response to ongoing disenfranchisement. The final chapter revisits the neighborhoods explored earlier in the text, presenting more contemporary narratives of resistance to gentrification and Mexican suburbanization, highlighting new frontiers in the embattled story of the Mexican community in Chicago and beyond.Beyond the built environment and local movements, Amezcua anchors his cross-neighborhood analysis in the stories of changemakers both behind and at the forefront of the many efforts in Mexican Chicago. Two such examples are the story of Anita Villareal and Refugio Roman Martinez. Villareal, the first Latina in the city to obtain a realtor's license, wielded her power to broker access and upward mobility for her community through home ownership, and later, political enfranchisement. Martinez, a labor organizer and activist with the United Packinghouse Workers of America, more explicitly embodied the migrant story often faced by those on the ground, as he endured almost two decades of legal harassment and surveillance by local officials and immigration authorities. Both narratives, and the countless others in this text, intimately highlight the spectrum of efforts and approaches undertaken by Chicago's Mexican communities in the pursuit of better working and living conditions and the ever-present risk that came with pursuing them.Given the substantial amount of historical ground covered, some of the smaller narratives sometimes feel incomplete. One such example is the Chapter 6 mention of Cicero, the first suburb west of Chicago. The story of Mexicans in Cicero is presented as a welcome addition to a rehabilitating suburb, but no mention is given of the deliberate efforts of local officials to police and forcefully remove this very same group from the town, an effort that reached its peak in the 1990s. Ultimately, Amezcua's book will appeal to specialists, but it is also accessible enough to be assigned to undergraduate readers. It is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship challenging black and white binaries in urban centers; providing much-needed nuance to the shaping of the Mexican political identity in the second city. Read in tandem with titles like Deborah E. Kanter's Chicago Católico and Felipe Hinojosa's Apostles of Change, Amezcua's Making Mexican Chicago provides an extensive interpersonal look at the brown lives that have come to shape the legacy of the white city.