Mike Amezcua: Making Mexican Chicago
@ 57th Street Books
Online
Opening Thursday, March 24th, from 6PM - 7PM
Mike Amezcua discusses Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification. He will be in joined in conversation by Marcia Chatelain.
This event is in partnership with the University of Chicago’s Chicago Studies
Virtual Event
About the book: Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification examines 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. Making Mexican Chicago 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. Making Mexican Chicago offers a powerful multiracial history of Chicago that sheds new light on the origins and endurance of urban inequality.
About the author: Mike Amezcua is Assistant Professor of History at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He teaches and researches in Latinx history, urban history, the built environment, racial inequality, politics, and immigration. He is the author of Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification (University of Chicago Press, 2022). His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times, and Teen Vogue. In 2020, Amezcua was the co-winner of the Arnold Hirsch Prize for Best Article in Urban History by the Urban History Association and in 2021, he was named a Mellon Emerging Faculty Leader by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars.
About the interlocutor: Marcia Chatelain is a Professor of History and African American Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Her latest book, the Pulitzer Prize winning Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America examines the intersection of the post-1968 civil rights struggle and the rise of the fast food industry. Chatelain is a proud native of Chicago, Illinois; her first book South Side Girls: Growing up in the Great Migration (Duke University Press, 2015) reimagined the mass exodus of black Southerners to the urban North from the perspective of girls and teenage women. She is a leading public voice on the history of race, education, and food culture.
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Tags: 57th Street Books, Chicago, Hyde Park, Making Mexican Chicago, Marcia Chatelain, Mike Amezcua, Mike Amezcua: Making Mexican Chicago, The Seminary Co-op Bookstores
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