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“Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification” explores the social and political history of migrant city-building and community formation led by working-class Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans that made Chicago the third largest Mexican metropolitan community in the United States. It foregrounds the role of Latinx people as they confronted and navigated the city’s highly racialized real estate marketplace. Mexican workers and residents joined with social and economic movements to respond to deindustrialization, housing discrimination, economic precarity, and the regime of privatization which sought to remake the city into luxury enclaves in the 1970s-1990s, forms of inequality that continue today.

Speaker

Mike Amezcua is associate professor of History at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He is a historian of the United States, Latinx communities, politics, immigration, and capitalism. His book "Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification" was the winner of multiple prizes including the C.L.R. James Award by the Working-Class Studies Association; the Lewis Mumford Prize from the Society for American City and Regional Planning History; and the First Book Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.