Mike Amezcua, Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022)

Where jobs existed in Chicago, ethnic Mexican workers, men, and women arrived at barrios to fill them. They consisted of US citizens going back generations—a rare number linked to the US war of aggression against Mexico in 1846—as well as migrant nationals, from the long-time denizen to the greenhorn, the authorized, and sin papeles (the unauthorized). No matter their residency status, the worker-hungry industries of agriculture, manufacturing, meatpacking, and mining recruited a hyper-exploitable surplus pool of labour to realize capitalism’s insatiable ambition: profit maximization. Scholars have studied the acculturation of ethnic Mexicans, but what was the process of settlement after their initial arrival at commercial-industrial hubs? And how did this residential progression follow, especially as ethnic whites moved to Bungalow Belts as the city’s economy deindustrialized?

Historian Mike Amezcua’s trenchant Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification meticulously addressed these fundamental questions by profiling ethnic Mexican agents of real estate, community, labour, and politics in the service of their communities. No matter their individualized vocations and temperaments, they complemented each other in their mutual goal to self-determine on behalf of their gente, people, how their respective communities would be defined as they refused to be pawns at the complete mercy of Chicago’s institutions dominated by white ethnics. The political machine of Mayor Richard J. Daley stood at the center of this milieu after World War II until the early 1970s.

Therefore, what united an entrepreneurial class of ethnic Mexicans with activists more oriented toward social justice and community empowerment was their shared goal to make sure that the residential needs of their Raza, compatriots, were recognized and respected. Some embedded themselves within the partisan system as Democrats and others as Republicans; more militant Chicagoans eschewed both parties during the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In this regard, Amezcua analyzes, rather subtly, the transformation of Chicago’s ethnic Mexican community from a transgenerational lens of the Mexican, Mexican American, and Chicano across the eras of the Cold War and Vietnam.

More aligned with a politically moderate faction, Anita Villareal shattered fixed notions of ethnic Mexican womanhood. As a real estate broker and property manager in a white-male industry, she was determined to be economically independent while servicing the housing needs of her clientele of migrant Mexicans, first as renters and then as homebuyers. With the flexibility of being lucratively self-employed, Villareal joined Daley’s Democratic machine. As fundraising and voter mobilization were the catalysts behind political power, Villareal hoped that Daley’s patronage system would reward her community to the extent to which it could be energized, at least over time. But she could not accept eventual political opportunities for appointed or elected office in Chicago as her real estate acumen had gained her a cash flow too handsome to be sacrificed. So instead, she sponsored the selection of ethnic Mexican politicos in her place. As a result, her community could no longer be ignored to the extent that it had previously been.

Thus, Villareal was no revolutionary, as she did not harbour any open opposition to the speculative, if not predatory, character of real estate and Chicago’s larger political spoils system. Indeed, besides the achievement of financial independence, her main concern was ensuring that her community of ethnic Mexicans, which consisted of neighbours and fellow entrepreneurs, had an equal chance to thrive in the extant systems of capitalism and politics.

Consequently, however, other change agents were not so patient. Equally reformist, if not more conservative politically, people such as Martin G. Blanco and others not as entrepreneurial and more on the left, like Rachel Cordero and Mary Gonzales, shunned Chicago’s Democratic machine politics as they witnessed how Daley, his white liberal operatives, and organizers such as Saul Alinsky refused to address the general needs of their gente, people; in fact, the opposite occurred as Chicago shot callers further segregated their Raza and Black residents. So, a Brown capitalist class sided with the Republican party while grassroots activists joined an eclectic array of organizations that arose during the el movimiento such as the Latin American Alliance for Social Progress, Committee of United Latins, and Movimiento Artístco Chicano, to name a few, committed to the values of cultural nationalism, liberation, and self-determination in relation to a residential renaissance ultimately proposed in the Pilsen Neighborhood Plan of 1976.

Conversely, people who shared Blanco’s impatience with the abstemious patronage funnelled from President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty were impressed by President Richard Nixon’s Brown capitalist ethos and Hispanic political appointments. It is in this story that Amezcua complements the narrative of Nixon being a mastermind of racial divide-and-conquer politics. As the author notes, “Nixon waged a ‘Southern strategy’-style campaign to undermine and divide the Latino vote by encouraging third-party efforts…” (171) This involved supporting the La Raza Unida Party as well as pitting Black and Brown interests against each other.

So where Making Mexican Chicago is also an examination of how ethnic Mexicans became Mexican Americans who internalized, if not consciously accepted, a racial capitalism, in this case in real estate, Amezcua aptly contrasts the conservative, if not accommodationist, nature of ethnic Mexican entrepreneurs against community activists by assiduously narrating the evolution of the Chicano movement in the Windy City in relation to national civil rights drives and hemispheric decolonial movements abroad. Amezcua provides a revisionist perspective on Alinsky’s cunningness – as sponsor of the Community Service Organization in California in relation to César Chávez, the eventual founder of the United Farm Workers union, and his mentor Fred Ross – that accommodated the racism of ethnic whites of Czechoslovakian, Italian, and Polish ancestry through residential segregation of ethnic Mexicans and African Americans. Such liberal machinations insidiously maneuvered Brown residents as a buffer community to distance white suburbs from direct contact with Black Chicagoans.

In all, Making Mexican Chicago is a critical contribution to the historiography of ethnic Mexican urban settlement in the second half of the 20th century. This is particularly true as Amezcua successfully conveys to the reader the righteous indignation that fueled the Chicano movement’s rise while encapsulating the complexity of community politics in a prose that demands close concentration on the part of the reader. Hence, the audiences that will benefit most from this study are scholars and graduate students.

In closing, the excellence of the author’s research and storytelling could have been advanced further by a section within the book’s introduction on the historiography of the making of Mexican Chicago during the first half of the 20th century. This omission, however, is offset by how Amezcua commendably presents the vibrant animo that motivated people such as Villareal, Blanco, and Gonzales to struggle on behalf of their people.

Frank P. Barajas

California State University,

Channel Islands

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2023v91.0025.