CRRES Speaker Series Lecture

Presented by the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society

This talk will discuss how the Windy City became a Mexican 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 immigrants and Mexican Americans attempted to build new communities in the face of white resistance and racial capitalism 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 in their struggle to achieve political power and control the fate of their neighborhoods.

Mike Amezcua is Assistant Professor of History at Georgetown University. He teaches and publishes on US and Latinx history, urban history, racial inequality, politics, and immigration. He is the author of Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times, Teen Vogue, and Public Books.