Visualizing Chicanx Presence in the Rural Midwest
Indiantown, June, 2021. 35mm
Author’s note: Figures in this text correspond with interactive maps that can be accessed here. I am indebted to my family and church members for sharing with me the history of my diaspora and our Saginaw hometown, especially my grandpa Emilio Serrato Jr. He and I discussed much of the history in this photo essay during a 2017 oral history about his brother’s band, ? and the Mysterians. This oral history can be accessed here.
The Scottish band The Bay City Rollers named themselves after throwing a dart on a globe that landed on Bay City, Michigan. To me, growing up Latinx in the predominantly-white, post-industrial, rural region of Mid-Michigan felt as random as a dart throw. My childhood home was among the expansive farm fields surrounding two cities, Saginaw and Bay City. Being mixed, my engagement with each city was mediated by race; I shuttled between the two cities visiting my Mexican-American family in Saginaw and my white family in Bay City. Three generations of my Chicanx (Mexican-American) family have lived in Saginaw and interacted with the region in this way. My own transient engagement with the cities is reminiscent of my tíos, who formed their band ? and the Mysterians in Saginaw but recorded their #1 Billboard hit, “96 Tears,” upriver in Bay City.
My experience of Michigan is far from the state’s perception in the national social imaginary. As a swing state, Michigan receives national attention but often without a nuanced understanding of its social landscape. National news coverage often and rightly identifies polar opposite narratives within the state, ranging from recent right-wing extremist activity in response to pandemic guidelines set by Governor Gretchen Whitmer to the now 8-year ongoing Flint Water Crisis. In the week preceding the 2020 presidential primary in Michigan, the Mid-Michigan region was spotlighted in a New York Times article illuminating the economic crises facing the “blue-collar” demographic.¹ However, the article made little mention of Saginaw’s significant Black population and no mention of the Latinx population, inadvertently demonstrating the misrepresentation and invisibility people of color experience living in rural areas. Latino Studies, too, often bypasses the rural Midwest. Although scholarship of the Midwest is emerging, the discipline is largely represented by more concentrated communities living in the country’s coasts and borderlands.
This photo essay will demonstrate how communities of color are made peripheral in Michigan. The photographs in this essay are my own and feature sites of my family’s diasporic history in Mid-Michigan, and I took most of them on my grandpa’s 35mm camera. In this essay, I will contextualize these photographs with statistical/political maps and the Chicanx lived-experience of the state’s infrastructure. Here, people of color have historically been marginalized by virtue of space and, consequently, their presence minimized in the public sphere. Invisibilized communities of color face the gradual repercussions of generational poverty, health crises, the formation of densely white and harmful conservative communities, and community erasure (defined here as death or outmigration). My landscape photography visualizes the space afforded to Chicanxs in Michigan, fabricated by the state to be marginal in the metaphorical “American Dream.”
The camera is often thought of as an extension of the hand. So, too, are our experiences of cartography and infrastructure embodied. As a Michigander, I have always used my hand to show people where I’m from in the Lower Peninsula. As noted by the New York Times, “Up North” is a common reference to the state’s upper-half. Though the imagined border varies for everyone, many residents use the term to indicate their travels to the state’s lesser-industrialized north for vacationing or hunting. The majority of the state’s Black and Latinx populations, however, reside in cities within the inferred “south” of the state. As the state was established during the 1800s, its infrastructure repeats the Civil War era’s north/south binary.
Zilwaukee Bridge, November 3, 2020. 35mm.
Mid-Michigan is comprised of the “Tri-Cities” of Saginaw, Bay City, and Midland. County lines exist among the farmland surrounding each of the cities. These Tri-Cities were among some of the state’s earliest establishments as they were halfway stops along the journey north on the Native American Saginaw Trail.² Leveraging the Saginaw River, Saginaw and Bay City’s economies thrived well into the twentieth century by partaking in fur trading, lumber, fishing, and agricultural, shipbuilding, and automobile industries; meanwhile in Midland, brine extraction would lead to the emergence of competing chemical companies that ultimately became Dow Chemical Company, whose world headquarters remain in the city to this day. The north and south of Mid-Michigan is bifurcated by the I-75 Interstate expressway, as the Zilwaukee Bridge hoists the expressway over the northern-flowing Saginaw River that historically connected the Saginaw and Bay City.
Black and Latinx populations are present throughout Saginaw’s history and its earliest recorded Black residents date to the 1830s. Alternatively, Bay City and Midland resemble many other Michigan cities as they have historically been and remain predominantly white. According to the 2010 Census, over half of Saginaw’s population identified as Black or Hispanic, whereas over 94% of Bay City’s population identified as white. In both cities, residents of color have historically lived either concentrated within the city or dispersed among the counties’ ruralities.
Mexican Migrant Camp by Meijers, June, 2021. 35mm.
Mexican migration to Mid-Michigan was first facilitated by agricultural employers recruiting labor from the border regions of Mexico and Texas in the 1910s. Among these migrants were my late Grandma Eva Lugo and her family who lived and worked on a pickle farm in rural Mid-Michigan. Companies like the Michigan Sugar Company enticed their prospects with the offer of a train ticket and housing, although these costs would ultimately and sometimes unknowingly be deducted from their wages.³ The housing provided by their employers were known as “Mexican migrant camps,” and poor housing conditions of the camps in Saginaw were documented by the Farm Security Administration in the 1940s (see Figures 6-7). Camps were scattered throughout rural Mid-Michigan and anchored their residents to the fields. Though defunct today, some remain standing and prove how residents were spatially disjointed from the city. At the Mexican Migrant Camp by Meijers (pictured above), for example, there are no homes within a half mile radius and City Hall is four miles away. It would take over an hour to walk to City Hall from the camp in the unlikely event that a migrant without citizenship would take legal action against their employer/landlord.
Indeed, agricultural employers did not assist migrants in obtaining citizenship, and their contemporaneous agricultural practices exposed fieldworkers to toxic chemicals. Amid the Great Depression, Mid-Michigan’s Mexican population had been decimated by nearly 75%. After local opinion and public newspapers blamed Mexican migrants for stealing jobs from Americans, many agricultural employers deported their recruits.⁴ The quarter of the population that remained were barred from accessing Depression-era federal relief programs, which catalyzed grassroots collectives like Saginaw’s Union Civica to establish community and help migrants obtain citizenship. By the end of the Depression, these same employers returned to the border to recruit again after local farmers could not secure sufficient labor.⁵
Union Civica, Buena Vista, June, 2021. 35mm.
How we view the landscape around us impacts our understanding of place. The physical spaces we do and do not engage with, the people we do and do not see in these places, and representations of places in media all influence our understanding of them. Thus, one’s understanding of place is rooted in their positionality to it. Agricultural employers in Michigan marginalized Mexican migrants and their needs through space. Unlike contemporaneous federal redlining practices that located and limited the movement of people of color, migrant camps that were isolated from the city made the presence of their residents peripheral. The migrant camps intentionally placed among Mid-Michigan’s ruralities remained out of sight and mind to residents closer to the city.
Migrant camp placement and redlining both shaped Michigan’s infrastructure and minimized the agency of communities of color. Governmental redlining practices of the 1930s have crystalized the social landscape of Mid-Michigan’s industrial era. Then as now, most of Saginaw’s residents of color live around or east of the Saginaw River. This phenomenon occurs across the state as rivers serve as the racial divide in cities like Benton Harbor, Grand Rapids, and Battle Creek. Saginaw is also among the nation’s most segregated cities, along with several other southernmost, post-industrial Michigan cities like Flint and Detroit.⁶ Lingering racial segregation in cities like Saginaw and Flint leave their communities of color spatially out of sight and subsequently out of mind to their neighboring predominantly-white cities/counties.
Potter Street Station, May, 2021. 35mm.
My paternal and maternal great grandparents on my Mexican side took this train ride north in the 1930s to Saginaw’s now-defunct Potter Street Station. This train station was known in its heyday as the Ellis Island of the Midwest and was designed by the same architect behind New York City’s first skyscraper, Bradford Lee Gilbert.⁷ The neighborhood surrounding the train station became home to many of the Black and Mexican migrants settling in the area and received a “red” grade when surveyed by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in 1937. My grandpa was born in his family home a few blocks from Potter Street Station.
Such train rides north from Mexico to Michigan were traveled by the likes of Diego Rivera for his 1933 Detroit Institute of Arts mural commission (Figure 10), which depicts industrial labor of the time at the birthplace of Fordism. Indeed, the demand for labor in the automobile industry also brought many Latinx and Black migrants of the First and Second Great Migrations.
Grey Iron Foundry from Unity Park, May, 2021. 35mm.
The General Motors (GM) Grey Iron Foundry opened just blocks away from Potter Street Station in 1919. My grandpa and his father both worked for GM until retiring. In the industrial workplace, employers were again responsible for the marginalization of their Latinx and Black employees. They were typically given the lowest-paying and most physically demanding jobs, and were often denied promotions enjoyed by their white coworkers regardless of seniority. Such practices were common throughout the Midwest auto industry (with nearby Flint’s locale coining the term “GM Crow”⁸), but also took place in other industrial workplaces like the steel industry. Nonwhite employees often felt ostracized by their white counterparts, some recalling eating lunch outside to avoid criticism about what they ate.
Indiantown Radio Towers, January, 2021. 35mm.
I always knew my way home among the flat landscape because I lived near three 1,000 foot radio towers. Built during my grandpa’s early childhood in the 1940s, these towers are responsible for nearly all of Mid-Michigan’s news and radio communications. These towers also delivered Detroit’s Motown and the music of Stevie Wonder to his childhood home near the Foundry. They also transmitted ? and the Mysterians after “96 Tears” was picked up by a disc jockey in Flint. Despite the distance, cultural events and music brought communities of color together. My grandpa remembers his dad singing in Spanish and playing the guitar he brought from Mexico in their family home; and bars frequently hosted dances with live music, some with mariachi bands. My grandparents met because they each had a brother in ? and the Mysterians. They are remembered as one of the country’s first garage bands and in 1966 became the first Chicanx band with a #1 Billboard hit. The band’s success earned them a national tour, which my grandpa joined in the summer between graduating high school and starting his job at the Foundry. He has fond memories of traveling the country and meeting The Yardbirds and Diana Ross.
Serrato Family Room, March 5, 2020. Large format.
With his earnings from the foundry, my grandparents purchased a house among the fields of Saginaw’s outskirts. My grandma wanted to “get out of the city” and my grandpa has enjoyed the freedom to play music as loud as he pleases. Uncoincidentally, the house they purchased was directly across from a migrant camp that was later torn down. After moving in, my grandpa converted the garage into the “Serrato Family Room,” complete with a bar, pool table, his record collection and speakers, a drumset, and, of course, side paneling. The Family Room has hosted decades of family gatherings.
Places like Mid-Michigan complicate the narrative that rural areas favor populist movements because their communities of color have limited political agency and representation. Michigan was among the hardest hit by the globalization of the auto industry, especially in recent memory through the shortcomings of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In the New York Times article, interviewed Mid-Michigan residents cite such post-industrial financial crises as their reasoning to support former president Donald Trump.
During his first presidential campaign, Trump stated, “It used to be the cars were made in Flint and you couldn’t drink the water in Mexico. Now the cars are made in Mexico and you can’t drink the water in Flint.”⁹ Yet, Genesee County, the home-county of Flint, never voted for Trump. Two Michigan cities with significant and historic Latinx populations, Saginaw and Traverse City, were among the few counties in Michigan to flip during the 2020 Presidential Election (Figure 14).¹⁰ While the election saw a historic nonwhite voter turnout, populist backlash has nonetheless insisted that such votes were “fake.” Additionally, people of color living in Michigan have experienced the worst end of industrialism long before NAFTA. Dangerous working conditions in factories and fields damaged their bodies. Without economic mobility in the workplace, many could not accrue wealth and remain in the loop of generational poverty. Legislation like NAFTA has merely relocated the raced labor complex that had existed in Saginaw to lesser developed countries, reproducing the conditions that make peripheral the labor of people of color from the perspective of those in the United States.
Such racialized structural inequities were realized in real-time during the pandemic when vaccine rollout was administered by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services on a tiered timeline. The second phase of vaccine rollout, intended for residents over the age of 65 and essential workers external to healthcare, was delayed by one month in Saginaw, Genesee, and Kalamazoo Counties. These counties house significant and segregated Black and Latinx communities, who are disproportionately more likely to have underlying health conditions and occupy the essential workforce. My grandpa, whose house is within a mile of Saginaw’s county line, scrambled between health departments trying to secure a dose. This month-delay could have and likely did contribute to the erasure of communities of color that is embedded in Michigan’s infrastructure.
Houghton Elementary School (Public school attended by my grandpa and closed in July 2015), July, 2021. 35mm.
Public schooling is another infrastructural system that has marginalized people of color in rural Michigan. In 2013, Saginaw’s significantly Black and Latinx Buena Vista Township was left to dissolve its entire public school district. The district’s close proximity to GM plants facilitated economic fallout in the decades preceding its dissolution.¹¹ Many other schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods have also closed a result of the Local Government and School District Accountability Act, the top-down state legislation intended to recoup losses of public schools in financial distress.¹² The city continues to look forward, however, as Saginaw elected its first Latinx state representative, Vanessa Guerra. When elected, Guerra was the youngest-ever member of the Michigan House of Representatives.¹³ Her agenda has prioritized education and marginalized communities in Saginaw.
As Michigan enters another significant election cycle, pragmatic working class praxis must contend with the raced history of labor in the United States. When our communities are invisibilized through space and time, they and their more urgent crises are forgotten in collective understandings of the public sphere. The invisibility of people of color in rural areas can be rectified through the recognition of our historic presence and adequate political representation that grants us agency over the structural inequalities we experience. Visualization is only half the battle, those we share space with must respect our role as members of the collective public sphere.
Footnotes
¹ Blumenstein, Rebecca. “Coming Home to a Michigan County Where Life Has Shifted.” The New York Times, 9 March 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/us/michigan-primary-election.html
² The Saginaw Trail was a series of connected pathways that traversed from Detroit, through Saginaw, to Mackinac Island (the island between Michigan’s peninsulas, believed by the Ojibwe to be the birthplace of the universe). Further reading on the Saginaw Trail: Pielack, Leslie. The Saginaw Trail: From Native American Path to Woodward Avenue. Arcadia Publishing, Inc., 2018, Chicago.
³ Rosales, Steven. “’This Street is Essentially Mexican’: An Oral History of the Mexican American Community of Saginaw, Michigan, 1920-1980.” The Michigan Historical Review, 40.2, 2014. Pp. 39.
⁴ Rosales, 43.
⁵ Rosales, 44.
⁶ Dissimilarity ratings are a sociology measure used to evaluate segregation across census tracts. 0 indicates full integration and 1 indicates full segregation, and the national average is .526. Saginaw has received a black-white dissimilarity index rating of .649. Find the dissimilarity ratings of places across the country by visiting https://s4.ad.brown.edu/Projects/Diversity/segregation2010/default.aspx.
⁷ Engel, Justin. “Could passenger trains return to Saginaw’s Potter Street Station? With a congressman asking, an idea gains steam.” MLive Media Group, 29 July 2021. https://www.mlive.com/news/saginaw-bay-city/2021/07/could-passenger-trains-return-to-saginaws-potter-street-station-with-a-congressman-asking-an-idea-gains-steam.html
⁸ Highsmith, Andrew. Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2015. Pp. 101.
⁹ NBC News. “Cars Made in Mexico? Undrinkable Water in Flint? Trump Vows Turnaround.” 6 November 2016. https://www.nbcnews.com/video/cars-made-in-mexico-undrinkable-water-in-flint-trump-vows-turnaround-802425923724
¹⁰ Like Saginaw, Traverse City’s agricultural industry recruited and retained Latinx migrants during the early twentieth century. Rosales, 47.
¹¹ Knake, Lindsay. “Sense of loss remains 1 year after Buena Vista school district closed.” MLive Media Group, 19 May 2014. https://www.mlive.com/news/saginaw/2014/05/buena_vista_schools_one_year_l.html
¹² Further reading on Buena Vista Township and Michigan’s educational finance reform: Arsen, David et al. “Which Districts Get into Financial Trouble and Why: Michigan’s Story.” Journal of Education Finance, 42.2, 2016. Pp. 100–126.
¹³ Further reading on Vanessa Guerra: Serrato Doyen, Kayleigh. “A Socially-Distanced Afternoon with Democratic County Clerk Candidate, Representative Vanessa Guerra.” Mi Gente Magazine, Saginaw, September 2020. https://www.migentemagazine.com/an-afternoon-with-vanessa-guerra.html?fbclid=IwAR2FVWTAGARadiEmor5cpTgevmKZ7QT8eo-4KejzDd3p9IHY9zfPi6uhkfE
Kale Serrato Doyen (she/her) is currently a Ph.D. student of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. She received a B.A. in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago in Spring 2020. Kale studies modern and contemporary art history of the United States with a focus on Black and Latinx artists and their representations of landscape. She has completed curatorial internships at the National Museum of Mexican Art, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and was a 2018-20 Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago. She was also a Museum Technician at the Bay County Historical Society in Bay City, Michigan from 2015-2017.