Telling details and a skillfully constructed narrative bring alive Mexican efforts to create a refuge.
A historical work chronicles the struggles of Mexican immigrants for acceptance in Chicago.
The third-largest Mexican metropolis in the United States is not some city nestled in the Sunbelt but one usually associated with Black, Italian, and Polish immigrants. As of the 2010 census, Chicago had 961,063 residents of full or partial Mexican origin, putting it behind only Los Angeles and Houston. Amezcua, a professor of history at Georgetown University, takes the measure of Chicago’s Mexican community in a compelling and disturbing book that tracks its “decades-long struggle to build a sanctuary out of the central city in the face of state violence, political disenfranchisement, economic disinvestment, and the backlash of hostile white ethnic mobilizations.” Like many Black citizens, Mexicans migrated to Chicago to work in its factories, rail yards, and packinghouses, providing cheap labor for industrial capitalism. But they were left to the depredations of slumlords in impoverished neighborhoods such as the Near West Side. In 1933, one former real estate agent who assessed the detrimental impact of various ethnic and racial groups on property values ranked Mexicans below Black people. During the 1950s, there was a “siege-like environment” in Mexican neighborhoods amid Immigration and Naturalization Service enforcement campaigns that used “totalitarian” tactics. Agents even raided Spanish-language movie theaters, “inciting chaos as people ran in all directions searching for the exits.” Some readers may find the book somewhat wonkish, but Amezcua has an eye for revealing details—one activist died of a stroke on the train deporting him back to Mexico—and deftly ties the narrative together through the story of Anita Villarreal, a daughter of Mexican immigrants. Against the odds, she built a successful real estate business, in part by “reaching out directly to Czechs, Poles, and others who were ready to sell” their inner-city homes. White residents “handed out circulars that warned other whites not to sell their homes to her and to boycott her business,” the author reports. “Villarreal ignored it all and continued her methods.” The book ends on a sobering note, denouncing the “carnage of gentrification” and lamenting that in “a society constituted by neoliberal multiculturalism and racial capitalism,” immigrants still “exist in a paradox of being essential but also expendable, deportable, and erasable.”
Telling details and a skillfully constructed narrative bring alive Mexican efforts to create a refuge.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-226-81582-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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