Making Mexican Chicago

From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification

Mike Amezcua

• Editorial: University of Chicago Press
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780226815831
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia mondiale

Winner of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society's First Book Award: 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.

1 :: Crafting Capital

In 1957, Anita Villarreal was arrested by federal agents and charged with conspiracy to violate US immigration law.1 A midwestern Mexicana, born in Kansas and reared in Chicago, Villarreal opened her first real estate office in the city in 1946.2 By the time of her arrest a decade later, she had helped secure housing for thousands of Mexican migrants—part of an estimated seventy-five thousand Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans who, by the late 1950s, called Chicago home.3 Fearing that many of these immigrants would become public charges, federal investigators interrogated Villarreal on how and where these “outsiders” had found shelter and sanctuary in the city. Claiming that she had helped immigrants secure fraudulent visas, the court found Villarreal guilty (though the judge suspended her sentence and gave her five years’ probation).4 The case was a flashpoint in the Cold War era’s criminalization of undocumented migrants and those who aided them.

By renting and selling homes to these newcomers, Villarreal was doing more than building her own upstart real estate business. She was also participating in one of the largest recruitment drives of Mexican immigration to an American city in the twentieth century, a drive that linked hope from the South to the promise of economic opportunity in the North. All too often that promise was thwarted by exclusion. Every time Villarreal secured housing for a Mexican or Mexican American in Chicago, she was pushing back against a relentless and punishing immigration-control apparatus—a racialized system that consigned Mexicans, US and non-US citizens alike, to a perpetual state of alienage. Villarreal was not alone. After World War II, a loose network of intermediaries and stakeholders participated in a clandestine enterprise that shuffled tens of thousands of undocumented (and illicitly documented) immigrants to Chicago’s factories, railyards, packinghouses, and fields to fuel the engines of US capitalism. While postwar Chicago was built on this labor, Mexican settlement was unwanted, undesirable, and contentious in the eyes of the city’s white majority. Nonetheless, by the end of the twentieth century, this wave of immigration and settlement would transform Chicago into the third-largest Mexican metropolis in the United States, with profound implications for the city’s survival and renaissance.5

Making Mexican Chicago explores how the Windy City became a Mexican metropolis in the second half of the twentieth century. In the decades after World War II, Chicago’s working-class neighborhoods became sites of struggle as Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans attempted to build new communities in the face of white resistance and exclusionary regimes of citizenship that cast them as perpetual aliens. The book charts the diverse strategies that Brown Chicagoans devised as they fought back against the forces of residential segregation, economic predation, and gentrification. In the process, Making Mexican Chicago offers a powerful multiracial history of the city, shedding new light on the origins and endurance of urban inequality. It recounts not only the stories of Mexican and Mexican American Chicagoans but also those of the varied and diverse brokers who facilitated the transformation. For her part, Anita Villarreal belonged to the class of real estate merchants with immigration expertise who functioned as stewards of the city’s Mexicanization. These stewards found shelter and sanctuary for Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans in white ethnic working-class neighborhoods that were racially exclusive and often hostile. They persistently championed Mexicans as reliable renters and homebuyers, hoping to convince anxious propertied whites to suspend their biases against Mexicans (and Latinos, more generally) and to convince them that renting or selling their homes to them was a sound investment.

One building at a time, Villarreal pushed the residential boundaries of Mexican settlement into all-white neighborhoods. Her motives were complex and even contradictory. On the one hand, when she encouraged Mexican Americans or Mexican immigrants to buy a home, she was demanding their inclusion in the postwar American dream of homeownership. At the same time, Villarreal coveted the properties of whites because these properties maintained their value in volatile, racially restrictive markets. She sought to provide migrants with a sense of belonging while simultaneously facilitating their conscription into the profoundly exploitative, racial capitalist labor regime that fueled Chicago’s postwar growth.

Chicago has always been a city of insiders and outsiders, inclusion and exclusion. Its founding as a settler-colonial trading post had been built on the violent removal and extermination of Native Americans. In the early 1800s, Chicago’s white settlers initiated a project of proprietary belonging and protective localism at the gates of US western expansion. Over the nineteenth century, successive groups were cast as outsiders who ostensibly threatened the local power structure: indigenous tribes who were displaced in the 1830s and 1840s, African Americans from the South who came to Chicago after the Civil War, and the Southern and Eastern European immigrants who arrived between 1880 and 1920. By the 1920s, anxieties among locals instigated a backlash in the form of restrictive immigration quotas designed to slow the influx of Europe’s “undesirables.” At the same time, Chicago was emerging as a crucial epicenter of progressive reform efforts to assimilate European immigrants into American whiteness.6

Figure 1.1. Anita Villarreal, real estate broker and property manager, finds shelter for recently arrived Mexican immigrant workers in her apartment building, 1949. (Image courtesy of the Villarreal Family.)

Over time, these new European immigrants established a political machine that reinvigorated a defensive neighborhood localism that appealed to established European ethnics by constructing Chicago as “a white man’s town.” African Americans making their way to the Windy City during the Great Migration on the promise of freedom from Jim Crow encountered a deeply entrenched localism and a white populace ready to preserve a hierarchical racial order. Whites and their locally rooted identities were perched on top of a segregated Black metropolis. Historians of Chicago have tended to focus on this confrontation between Black and white communities, and with good reason: the city was the site of extraordinary structural and interpersonal violence against African Americans. But this book places Mexican immigrants at the center of the city’s modern history. Between the First and Second World Wars, the city’s steel, meatpacking, and manufacturing companies recruited workers from across the US South and the Americas. Untethered by quota laws, Mexican immigrants became the ideal expendable labor force. They were presumed to be docile, transient, perpetually deportable, and permanently controllable. Imperialist and colonialist hegemony over the Americas, along with US capitalism’s thirst for unregulated labor, impelled state bureaucrats and influential lobbyists to turn Mexico and Puerto Rico into distribution centers for migratory labor. This created diasporic nodes of workers in Chicago and the greater Midwest. By the 1940s and 1950s, the presence of Latinos in the Windy City unsettled the city’s racial order, provoking locals to redraw boundaries yet again.7

Of course, Chicago was not the only place where the flow of Mexican immigration alarmed locals who feared that the borders around their neighborhoods were dissolving. Mexican enclaves, colonias (colonies) or “little Mexicos,” proliferated across the midwestern industrial landscape in the 1910s and 1920s.8 These communities were created independent of the US Southwest’s legacy of conquest that had supplied Anglo settlers with a socio-racial lexicon in which to locate Mexicans. In the urban North, making sense of Mexicans, their place, and their race had to be invented in the twentieth century.9 This project of “making sense” of these newcomers was spearheaded not only by the city’s influential elite and policymakers but also by Chicago’s white ethnic residents. In particular, Irish, Polish, Italian, Slavic, Czech, and Lithuanian residents were, over time, assimilated into whiteness via their European heritage, an emergent mass culture, and industrial unionism.10 While these various ethnic groups became “white,” people of Mexican descent and/or nationality were reconstituted as “Mexicans,” a nonwhite, ethno-racial category that proved remarkably effective as a tool of exclusion precisely because it was so broad. The term made little distinction over immigrant status, naturalization, American birthright citizenship, or government categorization. By eliding such distinctions, “Mexican” became a marker for nationality, ethnicity, and race all at once.11 The vagueness of the term allowed white locals to weaponize it by portraying all Mexicans as racially inferior and unassimilable outsiders, unfit for the benefits of modern urbanity. As the twentieth century unfolded, Mexicans were cast in a perpetual alienage that followed them into the neighborhoods where they tried to create new homes and start new lives.

Making Mexican Chicago places the Mexican experience at the center of the modern history of the central city and its everyday contests over neighborhoods, segregation, and the white defense of property rights. The successive waves of Mexican immigration to Chicago from the 1940s to the 2000s make clear that those contests can only be understood in a multiracial context. White ethnics in Chicago not only mobilized against Black settlement, they also vigorously defended their communities against Latino settlement. White propertied mobilizations against Black Americans have received considerable attention in chronicles of the postwar urban crisis, and rightfully so, as they helped to shape Black apartheid and suburban entitlements.12 But the city’s Latinos were also segregated, disenfranchised, under-resourced, and scapegoated. Simultaneously, like their African American counterparts, they helped turn the central city into a staging ground for equity-seeking, opportunity, resistance, and rebellion.13

Yet the Mexican story diverges from the African American story in that it has centered so heavily on immigration status. The white ethnic mobilization against the Mexican “threat” in places like Chicago can only be understood in light of the covert dimensions of living and being Mexican in the United States. People who have been cast in varying states of alienage have, by design, tried to evade documentation, have been severely underdocumented, or more strikingly, fraudulently documented. For this reason, patterns of migration and settlement defy the kinds of data urban historians hold indispensable: property deeds, maps, demographic reports, zoning and municipal codes, fair-housing laws, and community-organization records. In fact, the act of migrating, securing shelter, and simply being in the United States while Mexican have often constituted, through structures of immigration control and enforcement, acts of crime or conspiracy. Therefore, the history of Mexican settlement in US metropolitan areas is also a history of fraudulence and concealment, involving clandestine networks of recruitment, smuggling, illegal border crossing, blockbusting, tenement busting, fake documentation, and the obscuring and hiding of these acts. For instance, Latino building managers who operated white-owned apartments in transitioning Chicago neighborhoods were often incentivized to conceal both the number of renters and their ethnicities in order to hide an overcrowded tenement of Spanish-speaking migrants from would-be “adversaries” like building inspectors, tax collectors, insurance appraisers, immigration agents, and anxious neighbors worried about their property value. These stories require interrogating the noninstitutionalized archive as much as any other.

If these stories shed new light on modern urban history, they also help to explain the realignment of US politics in the late twentieth century as New Deal liberalism was displaced by conservative hegemony. The constitutive role of racial antagonism in the urban North in that realignment is well known: urban whites in places like Chicago sold their properties, gave up their parishes, and headed to the suburbs, where many abandoned their longstanding commitment to the Democratic Party, which they had come to associate with redistributive policies that favored minorities at the expense of the white working class. But this book argues that the transformation was not driven solely by a strict backlash against the Black civil rights movement or Great Society redistributive programs.14 The transformation also played out in Chicago neighborhoods, where white residents attempted to exclude Mexican settlement and where Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans sometimes competed and sometimes collaborated with various stakeholders over access to neighborhoods, property ownership, commercial opportunities, and political power. The conservative revolution was felt and experienced at a micro level in neighborhoods where white city dwellers watched from their windowsills and front stoops as an emergent Mexican immigrant-built environment took shape.

This book thus poses the question: What does the rise of modern conservatism look like when Mexicans and Mexican Americans are placed at the center of the story?15 Despite the city’s longstanding reputation as a Democratic stronghold, in the 1950s and 1960s Chicago’s blue-collar neighborhoods became seedbeds of white backlash rooted in antigovernment, antidiversity, and white-entitlement politics.16 From their windows, those in the Southwest Side of the city seethed as their neighborhoods changed from white to Mexican, block by block. 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.17 By inventing anti-Mexican exclusions in housing and business, propertied whites scripted segregation when the law was not enough. This book explores the spatial and racial politics that emerged from white-fight/white-flight mobilizations as European American ethnics considered whether to leave the central city or stay and protect their neighborhoods from the mass arrival of migrants from the Global South.18 While these white ethnics thought a lot about African Americans—and historians have examined the various manifestations of that thinking—they also thought a lot about Mexicans and Brown people as they confronted them in apartment halls, on doorsteps, and on city streets.

This book also explores the complex structures of feeling for all stakeholders as Mexicans and Mexican Americans gradually transformed the cityscape.19 For would-be immigrants and the Mexican diaspora in Chicago, this structure encompassed individual and collective ambition, equity seeking, and dreams of opportunity, however circumscribed by the exigencies and exploitation embedded within US capitalism. For white ethnics, the feelings were often those of loss and a sense of being under siege from hostile external sources. Mexican settlement engendered white resentment over the scarcity of resources, the perceived unassimilability of outsiders, and the fear that neighborhoods would degrade and property values would decline. These fears and resentments were exacerbated by housing policies and speculative markets directly tied to race. Propertied whites came to understand that statist penalties could be levied against them if their neighborhoods became ethnically and racially heterogeneous. That logic was articulated as early as 1933, when a University of Chicago–trained economist and former real estate agent, Homer Hoyt, published his influential study One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago. Hoyt ranked ethnic and racial groups according to their detrimental impact on property and land values. On a scale of one to ten (with ten being the worst), Hoyt ranked African Americans ninth and Mexicans tenth. These two groups were at the bottom of the scale not only for their negative correlation to property value but also because that correlation was supposedly immutable. Improving these groups’ economic situation, Hoyt pr...