MAKING MEXICAN CHICAGO

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.