Chicago: Hemispheric Crossroads

Accounts centered on European immigrants and reform politics have often overlooked the city’s connections to labor migration from Mexico and the inequalities that sustained its industrial growth. This article examines how employers, reformers, and government authorities shaped Mexican workers’ lives in Chicago. Steel mills, railroads, and packinghouses recruited Mexican labor while workers faced policing, deportation, and limited opportunities for civic inclusion. Americanization programs and settlement houses provided needed services, but they also imposed cultural expectations and reinforced a divided labor force. Encounters with European immigrants and African Americans further shaped Mexicans’ position in the city’s workplaces and neighborhoods. Placing these experiences toward the center of Chicago history reveals the limits of progressive reform and shows how institutions associated with social improvement also supported labor control and exclusion.