A Journey To The Windy City And Its Ordeal
The first stream of Latino migration coincided with Chicago’s rise as a massive center for industrial capitalism that included growing railroad, steel, and meatpacking industries in the mid-to-late 1900s.[12] American’s employers actively sought out Latino laborers, who at that time were primarily Mexicans. They promised young men permanent employment, but their ulterior motives were to seek cheaper, more exploitable labor to fuel its demanding urban industry.[13] They worked at steel mills in the South side of Chicago, in meatpacking companies located in the Back of the Yards, and railroads in the North West side. Many were replacing European immigrant workers, whose entrances into the US was then restricted as a result of WWI and the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. In his book titled Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification, Mike Amezcua explains “Mexicans immigrants became the ideal expendable labor force. They were presumed to be docile, transient, perpetually deportable, and permanently controllable.”[14] In adding insult to injury, Mexican settlement was unwanted, undesirable, and contentious in the eyes of the white majority in the city. Although both Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans attempted to build new communities, they were facing white resistance and exclusionary regimes of citizenship that casted them as perpetual aliens. This evidently created sites of struggle in the city’s working-class neighborhoods. Furthermore, Puerto Ricans started migrating to Chicago in the late 1940s, and the increasing presence of Latinos in the Windy City, disturbed the city’s racial order, provoking locals to redraw boundaries.[15] Since Latino immigrants were seen as racially inferior and unassimilable outsiders, unfit for the benefits of modern urbanity, many tried to avoid documentation, often leading to inadequate records, and even fraudulent documentation. Therefore, “patterns of migration and settlement defy the kinds of data urban historians treat as indispensable: property deeds, maps, demographics reports, zoning and municipal codes, fair-housing laws, and community-organization records.”[16] Amezcua articulates that “the act of migrating, securing shelter, and simply being in the United States while Mexican have often constituted, through structures of immigration control and enforcement, acts of crime or conspiracy.”[17] Simply put, the U.S. immigration laws have historically criminalized the existence of Latin immigrants. In order to survive and build lives, they had to often rely on clandestine networks, fake documentation, and hidden living arrangements. As time progressed, Latin Americans and immigrants sought to remake Barrios (neighborhoods) through homeownership and commercial power. They were determined to make a name for themselves. This initiated the formation of young activists and community members who later mobilized direct-action campaigns, boycotts, marches, and protests against the unjust political establishments. Inspired by calls for self-determination, Latino activists proclaimed that “la raza (the people) deserved both political rights and a redistribution of economic resources at all levels of government.”[18]
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