About the event

Join MACRI for a virtual conversation with Dr. Mike Amezcua about his recent book exploring the history of the third-largest Mexican American population in the United States. The story of Mexican immigration and integration in Chicago is one of complex political struggles, deeply entwined with issues of housing and neighborhood control.

This FREE virtual event will stream live on Facebook https://bit.ly/MACRI-live & YouTube https://bit.ly/YT-MACRI

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Mike Amezcua is a scholar, writer, and teacher of History and Latinx Studies. He is the author of Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification, published by the University of Chicago Press as part of the series, Historical Studies of Urban America. His writing has appeared in The Journal of American History, Journal of Social History, The Sixties, as well as op-eds and commentaries in The Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times, and The Abusable Past. In 2021, he was named a Mellon Emerging Faculty Leader by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation). He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Georgetown University and lives in Washington, DC.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification

By Mike Amezcua

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.