Steel Barrio: The Great Mexican Migration to South Chicago

Steel Barrio: The Great Mexican Migration to South Chicago

 

Steel Barrio: The Great Mexican Migration to South Chicago, 1915-1940, by Michael Innis-Jiménez

New York: New York University Press, 248 pages, 2013, $27.00, ISBN 9780814724651  

 

The basic premise of Professor Michael Innis-Jiménez’s new and fascinating book, Steel Barrio: The Great Mexican Migration to South Chicago, 1915-1940 is to explore the social history of three Mexican communities in Chicago during the interwar period. In the introduction, the author posits that although the book “explores several themes with the community,” it also attempts to illustrate how that community attempted to create a “third space,” or a community “located in the interstices between the dominant national and cultural systems of both the United States and Mexico” (10-11). In so doing, the book is about “how community members used the discrimination against them, a sojourner attitude, organized sports, mutual aid organizations, and other groups to bring together a diverse community of Mexican and Mexican Americans—some educated, most not—to finds ways to change their physical and cultural environment in order to survive” (13). After sitting down for a few hours with the monograph, the reader soon realizes that Innis-Jiménez accomplishes this task in an admirable and very readable approach that is likely to become an important monograph for those looking to understand this period, the City, and the complex histories of race relations and Mexican migration.        

Divided into three sections with an equal number of chapters in each of the sections, Steel Barrio constitutes a perfect ten chapters that can be read with a remarkable easiness and clarity and under two hundred pages. The three sections are marked “Migration,” “Community” and then “Endurance”; thus following the migration of Mexican migrants that arrived at the turn of the century, their settlement within three communities; and then documenting the challenges and leisure of this first generation. In terms of periodization, therefore, the book covers everyday life and living of three Mexican communities in Chicago during the interwar periods, but with a more robust illustration of South Chicago, or what the author terms Steel Barrio

The author begins each chapter with the words and experience of people, with a human story, and one taken from interviews or other first-hand accounts. This is an interesting pattern that can be seen in each of the chapters that follow, and employed as a way to build up the narrative with a quantitative and qualitative narrative structure that includes dozens of attractive illustrations from the period. Following the aforementioned three-fold structure, the monograph essentially narrates the history of these communities by discussing their migration, life, and leisure—with a particular focus on how baseball becomes so central for community formation in the early 1930s. During these depression era lulls, the final chapter on baseball collates all of these communities into a playful and political chapter that binds the book into story boards seemingly geared towards a documentary film.

Like many “professional obligations” that we oftentimes find unnecessary, “professional courtesy” requires that some constructive criticism be forthcoming. In that spirit, and as a nineteenth century Mexicanist by training, I could not help notice that there was only one source in the Spanish language, and no research conducted in Mexico proper or in the language of the migrants during this period. One gets the feeling that Mexican migrants to Chicago had access to a miraculous, yet unknown, early twentieth century version of Rosetta Stone that immediately gave them access to this new English speaking world. In the longest chapter of the book, “Resistance,” for example, an aversion to assimilation, naturalization, and learning English are made in a very convincing and informative fashion yet Spanish language sources or newspapers are not employed to demonstrate this empirically. There is no research material from Mexico, no use of Spanish language newspapers, save endnote 46 in chapter six. This insensitivity to “historical temporality,” to borrow a phrase (and theoretical maxim) of historian William H. Sewell, may be the product of a purely “Americanist perspective” focused almost exclusively on secondary materials in English, even though these populations communicated disproportionately in Spanish.      

Echoing E.P. Thompson’s approach to Irish immigration in England during the Industrial Revolution, Steel Barrio has its limitations with respect to Mexican migrants in Chicago and how this working class made “itself as much as it was made.” As Thompson himself noted, “I have considered the Irish, not in Ireland, but as immigrants to England,” and so research in Ireland was not considered, nor were the Welsh or Gaelic languages taken into account. If, as Thompson was famous for saying in his 1963 The Making of the English Working Class, “the working class made itself as much as it was made,” then the Mexican working classes were also “made” before they arrived in the US and then continually “remade” in Chicago—as John H. Flores of Case Western Reserve University has recently remarked. As such, it stands to reason that various experiences and ideas in Mexico, like labor organizing, may have also migrated with these migrants in 1915. Thus, although the author explores an impressive amount of primary documents within the US, particularly those from the collections of Paul S. Taylor (Economist) and Manuel Gamio (Anthropologist), their experiences become conscious only after they’ve crossed the international boundary following the violent phases of the 1910 revolution. Various labor agreements between the US and Mexico for the interwar periods, particularly the 1917-1921 Bracero agreements, are absent from historical consideration, as are earlier political transnational organizations like those of the Flores Magón Brothers, the International Workers of the World, or the Western Federation of Miners.  

Aside from my these obligatory critiques and considerations, Steel Barrio joins a growing body of work on Mexican migration and life in the windy city, and is likely to become an important book in the field, if not an obligatory starting point. 


This book review will later be published by the Journal of American Studies.

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Jose Ángel Hernández is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the author of Mexican American Colonization during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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