The Second City Anew: Mexicans, Urban Culture, and Migration in the Transformation of Chicago, 1940--1965 [electronic resource].

9781124803883

1 online resource (229 p.)

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This dissertation investigates an understudied period of Chicago's history by drawing attention to the ways in which ideas of urban decline and anxieties around Mexican immigration in the 1940s and 1950s shaped how Mexicans and Mexican Americans articulated local and transnational urban identities. This project examines cultural sites and sources of economic development "from below" such as civil rights organizations, hometown associations, street vendors, beauty pageants, consumers, and youth organizations as creators of shifting ethnic politics. In mapping these communities and their marketplace cultures, "The Second City Anew" argues that the two decades following World War II represented a critical moment for Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans in Chicago. The first chapter, "The Second City and the Smokestack Migrations," contextualizes Mexicans in relation to the Great Migrations of African Americans and poor whites to Chicago, historicizing the cultural impact of such diverse journeys. The following chapter, "Walkers in the City," focuses on the creation of Mexican pedestrian street cultures at a time of shifting neighborhood boundaries due to white flight and urban renewal. The third chapter, "The Laboring of Mexican American Cultures," centers on the formation and work of the Mexican American Council of Chicago, a civil rights organization. The last chapter, "Beauty, Leisure, and Labor: Mexicana and Mexican American Women's Public Culture," argues that local circumstances facilitated the emergence of transnational identities shaped by work and consumption patterns. In the context of new immigration, urban problems, and capital flight, ethnic Mexicans made a world for themselves that challenged 'Black and White' ideas of race and ethnicity in ways that had consequences for the emergence of non-white identities in mid-twentieth century America. As this dissertation shows, the most marginal of actors---citizens, non-citizens, braceros, youth, and women---exploited the market to live in ways that they wanted in postwar Chicago. Mexican Chicagoans developed entrepreneurial cultures, political discourses and consumption practices that were in constant conversation with the city, the United States, and Mexico.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

English

October 03, 2012

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2011.

Yale University.