World War I depleted the reliable ethnic European immigrant workforce that mined, picked, packed, and to a large extent built America as a result, American companies turned to Mexico for labor.

During these decades, two world wars and the Great Depression had both the U.S. The onset of the Mexican revolution in Chicagoland began immediately after World War I and waned during the 1960s. The Mexican narrative is not a terminal narrative, but rather a profoundly personal one that is either parallel to or diffused in every American’s life. For instance, in We Are Americans: Voices of the Immigrant Experience, published in 2003, Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler note that, “By the end of the 1920s, Mexican immigrants were picking beets in Minnesota, assembling cars in Detroit, packing fish in Alaska, laying track in Kansas, and meatpacking in Chicago.” The Hooblers also unearth Los Angeles’ Mexican political history by identifying the mayor of Los Angeles in 1853, Antonio Franco Coronel, a Mexican migrant who emigrated with his father in 1834 and worked in the gold mines of San Francisco. Flores concludes his introduction by stating that, “This book demonstrates that the revolution was a truly transnational phenomenon that stretched from Mexico City and the Bajio to Los Angeles and Chicago.”įor decades, the Mexican-American narrative has been documented and reported in the form of narrative art and scholarship. Stories of the suffrage movement, the gay rights movement, and the civil rights movement are plentiful today, yet in Chicago, home to one of the largest Mexican populations in the United States - the largest non-white ethnic group in the United States - the Mexican experience is mostly unknown, immaterial, and misunderstood. Flores concludes, “In sum, some Mexicans may have developed a national identity in Chicagoland, but this book suggests that Mexicans did not so much become Mexican in Chicago as they became more liberal, traditionalist, or radical.” He uncovers a total of at least seventy-five Spanish-speaking immigrant societies operating between 19. He exhumes and examines census data, parish registers, city directories, and marriage licenses. naturalization historical census to date. He analyzes 3,110 naturalization records from 1900 to 1940-the largest “Hispanic” U.S. He approaches Chicago’s Mexican history with technical expertise. Flores’s The Mexican Revolution in Chicago: Immigration Politics from the Early Twentieth Century to the Cold War, published in 2018 by the University of Illinois Press, deconstructs and decentralizes narratives surrounding the Mexican revolution, so that Americans can come to terms with the Mexican presence in Chicago and the Midwest.įlores, associate professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, profiles key players and stakeholders by uplifting historical anecdotes and introducing quantitative data. They controlled, developed, and disseminated the narratives of Mexicans in Chicagoland (conceptualized here as the geographical area that includes Chicago, East Chicago, and Gary). Oppositional Mexican migrants-liberals, traditionalists, and radicals-were responsible for the construction of local Mexican identities and their revolutionary politics. From the roaring twenties to the cold sixties, Mexicans in the Chicago area embodied a diverse, pluralist society where political, cultural, and religious continuums converged, seeding the region’s contemporary Mexican-American civilization.

Mexicans in chicago 1930