Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification by Mike Amezcua (review)

Reviewed by: Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification by Mike Amezcua G. Aron Ramirez Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification By Mike Amezcua (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. 320. Notes. Clothbound 45. 00; paperbound 25. 00; e-book 24. 99. ) Mike Amezcua's new book challenges historians to rethink traditional narratives of white-to-Black demographic change in postwar cities. Amezcua describes the evolution of Mexican American life in Chicago from the 1950s to the late twentieth century. While his book misstates its principal interventions, it is nevertheless a compelling reinterpretation of key trends in twentieth-century urban history. The book comprises six chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter is the book's introduction. Amezcua's narrative begins in chapter two, where he deftly connects demolition to urban renewal and deportation, two sides of the same coin in how they gutted Chicago's Mexican community in the 1950s. The third—and sharpest—chapter argues that, despite Saul Alinsky and Joseph Meegan's claims that their advocacy of conservation-through-rehabilitation was rooted in localism and democratic decision-making, in practice it hardened racial boundaries. Amezcua's reinterpretation of Jane Jacobs's Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) is particularly commendable. Chapter four describes Mexican Americans' role in creating a visibly Mexican Chicago through real estate and political inclusion in the Daley machine. The book's fifth chapter describes the overlapping Chicano Movement and Mexican American pushback to the Chicago 21 plan (1973) from both activists on the left and a newly emboldened cadre of ethnic-Mexican conservatives on the right. Chapter six returns to the threat of displacement by describing gentrification that took the form of both "flipping" colonias and generating revenue through "ethnic tourism" after 1977. Amezcua's accomplishments differ from his stated intentions. He asks "what the story of conservatism looks like when Mexicans and Mexican Americans are placed at the center of the story" (p. 6). Yet that is not the book's strongest point. Conservative Mexicans and Mexican Americans play some part in chapter five, and some readers might be persuaded that the pro-business, civil-rights-deflective politics of the Daley-era Cook County Democratic Party might mean that Amezcua has joined scholars such as Geraldo Cadava and Benjamin Francis-Fallon in writing about Latinx conservatism. But not all readers will believe that the so-called ethnic white homeowners in Chicago forged a politics of social conservatism through a specific opposition to Mexicans and Mexican Americans. The playbook for keeping Mexican people in restricted neighborhoods resembled End Page 85 the playbook for keeping Black people in restricted neighborhoods. Indeed, many of Amezcua's paragraphs in chapters three and four detail racial tensions principally through accounts of white hostility to Black neighbors. Amezcua's principal strength is providing a challenging—and ultimately convincing—model of demographic change in postwar cities. He does not offer mere platitude that cities became increasingly multiracial after World War II; he guides the reader through that change. Leaders in the city's southwest side "reinforced the color line by Browning it with Mexican enclaves, creating a solid zone that separated white Back of the Yards from Black Bronzeville" through "efforts to steer Mexicans and reshuffle white ethnics in separate residential directions" because "some blight, if managed carefully, could fortify neighborhood boundaries by propping up one moderately undesirable group to keep another unwanted group from moving in" (p. 63). This argument, not one about conservatism, will have the longest-lasting legacy on future scholars of a multiracial United States. For everyone else, the book is engaging and well-documented. Amezcua tends to propose terms like "restrictionist populism, " "bungalow suburbanism, " the "wetback suite, " "conservative colonia, " and "incentive apparatus, " but it is unclear how much staying power any neologism will have. He clearly nods to Michael Innis-Jiménez, Gabriela Arredondo, Lilia Fernández, and Andrew Sandoval-Strausz, all of whom have produced critical scholarship on Mexican Americans in twentieth-century Chicago. Amezcua's focus on demographic change and ethnic Mexicans in the Midwest will surely provide a template for exciting new scholarship from historians, such as Emiliano Aguilar. . .