Making Mexican Chicago: Development, Displacement & the Mexicanization of the Urban Landscape
In Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification, Mike Amezcua offers readers a powerful account of the radical transformation of Chicago’s urban landscape during the second half of the 20th century. Unlike the common approach prioritizing racial tensions and power dynamics associated with the fraught relationship between white-controlled systems and African-American communities, Amezcua invites us to reconsider the role of the Mexican-American community in the consolidation of Chicago as one of the most dynamic Latinx cities in the United States. That is, how did Chicago become the city with the third most important Mexican-American enclave this past century? And how does that help us to understand the various urban development projects, economic policies, and cultural practices that undergird the project of the modern American metropolis?
By breaking with both the white/black binary and a narrative that mainly focuses on modes of resistance and oppression, Amezcua maps out a broad historical panorama of placemaking—in addition to the Mexican-American community’s complicity and dealmaking to partake in various levels of capitalist development and make inroads into the Democratic Party machine. The group Amigos for Daley, for example, used its influence to negotiate access to much-needed resources for the community’s wellbeing. In turn, Amezcua explores a community in constant transformation, its displacement impacted by multiple waves of migration, deportation, and conflict throughout the past century—from World War II to the Cold War and encompassing deportation initiatives like Operation Wetback and the industrial decline and subsequent economic transformation from the 1950s to the 1990s. Through these processes, the community strategically engages with various government officials and intermediaries, civic and business associations, and cultural organizations—thus revealing the complexity of its ideological, economic, political, and cultural attitudes. Each of these schemes represents various attempts to make Chicago their own; to forge a sense of belonging and by doing so, Mexicanize one of the most important major cities in the U.S.
In lieu of a chapter-by-chapter summary, I’d like to emphasize several timely aspects that allow readers to place themselves within the urban spatial reconfiguration that Amezcua invites us to contemplate. Amezcua opens the discussion with a key reflection on what the racialization of the term “Mexican” signifies as a concept. The fact that Chicago becomes Mexican shows exactly how Mexican-American communities were subjugated. The word ‘Mexican’ stops denoting just a nationality and becomes an ethnoracial category that places them in a space of subjugation, a legal status—the undocumented—and a condition of not belonging. That is, to be passing through, not assimilating, and consequently, disposable, removable, and subject to deportation. Unlike white communities (Irish, Italian, Slavic, Czech, and Lithuanian), the Mexican community did not share their European cultural heritage, the emerging mass American culture at the turn of the century, nor the trade unionism that would eventually allow those groups to assimilate to an idea of whiteness incompatible with the ethno-racial differences of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. This prietización or “darkening,” to use a contemporary term that addresses a process of racialization at odds with the white/black binary (or “browning”), determines the kinds of spaces that Mexican communities can occupy, as well as the exclusions and structural violence that they may face. It also determines the kinds of strategic alliances and solidarity that they would establish with other groups, such as the African-American and Puerto Rican communities. Amezcua doesn’t romanticize the capitalist aspirations and individual and collective ambitions of Mexican-American communities in their struggle to create political and economic inclusion. On the contrary, he contextualizes why, despite representing a threat to the white enclaves in their fight to possess limited resources and urban spaces, these communities go from being disdained or feared to being necessary or preferable to curtail Black settlement. Indeed, Amezcua discusses the multiple times that Mexican-American enclaves served as borderline communities between neighborhoods such as in the Back of the Yards, or the meatpacking district commonly known as Las Yardas. These “Mexican walls” were a strategy of cultural and economic redlining.
Likewise, Amezcua does not focus exclusively on elites and the institutions they represent, but rather on the intermediaries or “power brokers” who provide us with a much more comprehensive and dynamic view of the way in which Mexican communities respond, negotiate, or intervene in various projects of construction, displacement, and demolition. Perhaps the most emblematic case is that of Anita Villarreal, with whom Amezcua opens and closes his book. Villarreal was a real estate agent and a mother of eight children, two of whom were adopted, as well as an intermediary for the community against business and real estate associations, local government, and political parties. She was a key transformative agent of Chicago’s urban landscape after being displaced from the Near West Side neighborhood, then Pilsen, before ending up in South Lawndale and transforming it into an area known as La Villita. A political candidate, activist, and entrepreneur, Villarreal had actually been arrested in 1957 on a federal charge of conspiring to violate U.S. immigration law. She along with her real estate agency were responsible for securing property to rent and sell to thousands of migrant and displaced Mexican families from 1946, when she opened her first agency, until the end of the 1990s. Villarreal knew how to profit off the racial anxieties of white property owners. But she also defended deportees, as well as families threatened and eventually displaced by the demolition of the Mexican neighborhood in the Near West Side for the construction of University of Illinois’ Chicago campus, particularly during the 1950s and early 1960s. Amezcua notes that 4,800 Mexicans were displaced for the university construction (59). By the mid-1960s, Villarreal was living in La Villita as the Mexican population grew from 10% to 32% between 1966 and 1968 (144). In the mid-1980s, she ran for city council with a platform centered on individual entrepreneurialism and purchasing power. Although she lost the election, her influence with respect to creating favorable conditions for business and private-public redevelopment projects remained powerful. One example is the construction of an arch in La Villita, which future Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari would visit in 1991. For Amezcua, Villarreal represents a complicated figure who was a champion of private urban revitalization efforts, supporter of the economic growth of small businesses, as well as a skillful messenger of migrant values like work and sacrifice as political currency (215-216, 227).
In the book, Amezcua addresses various projects and plans for revitalization, transformation, and urban development. One concrete example is the case of the Pilsen neighborhood in the late 1970s, where several organizations like Pilsen Neighbors Community Council and Pilsen Housing and Business Alliance launched a campaign to promote “development without displacement.” The campaign discussed community efforts to revitalize the neighborhood, establish a system of mutual aid and community control, and hold banks, the city, big landlords, and real estate speculators accountable for their actions toward the aforementioned communities. In 1976, the “Pilsen Neighborhood Plan” is introduced with a vision that directly opposed the Chicago 21 plan (a master plan for the city released in 1973), which basically promoted the gentrification of Pilsen—from a primarily Mexican enclave to a community of white hipsters and yuppies, or the group of artists led by speculators like John Podmajersky and others. It was in the 1970s that Podmajersky decided to create a kind of white enclave in the eastern part of the neighborhood. When Ronald Reagan arrived to the White House, his administration introduced a series of housing policies with a focus on privatization that drastically impacted neighborhoods like Pilsen and its community organizations, whose political priorities were overshadowed by the pursuit of tax subsidies, thus opening the door once again to speculators and market-driven housing development. This historical perspective of the transformative plans for such an iconic Mexican neighborhood repeatedly reminds us of the many ways in which Mexican communities have literally put themselves in the line of fire as a response to the threat of private and government interests in displacing and “de-Mexicanizing” the urban landscape of Chicago.
Making Mexican Chicago interrogates how the Mexican community survives in this post-industrial city—that is, how it manages to build community amid ongoing conditions of vulnerability and precarity. The areas where they lived suffered economic abandonment and a lack of resources, infrastructure, and institutional support from churches, unions, and officials within government offices. This is worth highlighting: it is not only a symbolic and material displacement, but also a corporeal one. Therefore, it is important to emphasize the embodied, material, and symbolic work to stop the threat of displacement and invisibility. In the third chapter, for example, Amezcua discusses how Mexican and Mexican-American youth in the 1950s appropriated the crime prevention efforts of the University of Chicago Settlement House by rejecting the imposition of a cultural agenda focused on multi-ethnic pluralism promoted by social workers who conceived of the community as foreign or new to their own neighborhood. Instead, community members organized cultural activities celebrating their Mexican heritage such as family reunions, religious activities, community dances, and sporting events with piñatas, tamalizas, and even rock-and-roll bands—thereby emphasizing the vitality of the neighborhood. By the early 1980s and 1990s, as Amezcua examines in chapter six, youth culture began to challenge long-standing ideas of authenticity and nationalism in the Chicano movement by exploring other ways of conceiving and expressing themselves through music, muralism, and literature, such as punk culture or the work of Sandra Cisneros.
Casa Aztlán. A mural in Pilsen, Chicago for the Chicano Movement. Credit: Thorkild C. Bøg-Hansen (Wikipedia Commons)
With the whitewashing of the historic Chicano murals at Casa Aztlán in 2017 in Pilsen and the closing of La Capilla in Las Yardas, we are once again facing a new transformation of the urban landscape of Mexican Chicago. In its time, La Capilla, was more than just a spiritual home. It was also a social, cultural, grassroots, community-based political space. Through Making Mexican Chicago, Amezcua documents the kinds of displacement and erasure that the Mexican community has faced, particularly during the second half of the 20th century; as well as the responses of the Mexican and Mexican-American community. This act of documenting a criminalized, invisible, and “illegalized” community is among Amezcua’s most important contributions. The archival research includes official documents, memorandums, and urban planning/development projects, as well as photographs and personal letters, interviews, and even cultural expressions through music not typically associated with Mexican imaginaries, such as punk. Amezcua reminds us of the types of practices and counter-cultural spaces that arise when re-signifying cultural expressions, thereby inviting us to reflect on the fundamental role of the body in creating imaginaries that have expanded the potential and inhabitable worlds of Mexican Chicago. Making Mexican Chicago is therefore not only a critical study on historical development and displacement, but also the Mexicanization of Chicago’s urban landscape.
—
Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification (2022)
By Mike Amezcua
320 pages. The University of Chicago Press. $45.00
Manuel R. Cuellar is Assistant Professor of Spanish, Latin American, and Latinx literatures and cultures in the Department of Romance, German, and Slavic Languages and Literatures at The George Washington University. He focuses on Mexican literary and cultural studies with an emphasis on race, gender, and sexuality. His research primarily engages questions of performance, especially as they concern dance, indigeneity, and Afro-mestizx imaginaries in Mexico, combining ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and studies of contemporary and classical Nahuatl, Mexico’s most widely spoken and written Indigenous language. Dr. Cuellar’s strong background in Mexican traditional dance has led him to explore dance’s role in Mexican national identity, indigeneity, and queerness in Mexico and the United States. His book, Choreographing Mexico: Festive Performances and Dancing Histories of a Nation (UT Press 2022), reveals how written, photographic, cinematographic, and choreographic renderings of a festive Mexico highlight the role that dance has played in processes of citizen formation and national belonging, from the late Porfirian regime to the immediate post-revolutionary era (1910-1940). His work has appeared in Performance Research, A Contracorriente, and Mexican Transnational Cinema and Literature.