Making Mexican Chicago: Meet the Author Mike Amezcua
@ Newberry Library
60 W Walton St, Chicago, IL 60610
Opening Thursday, April 28th, from 6PM - 7PM
This program will be held in person at the Newberry. Please register for free in advance here: https://reg.learningstream.com/reg/event_page.aspx?ek=0057-0014-22b59f75ca5b4f528068c9aa938f5cdd
As we welcome visitors to the library, we’re continuing to closely monitor health and safety conditions related to COVID-19 in Chicago. Click here for our visitor policy: https://www.newberry.org/visit
In Making Mexican Chicago, Mike Amezcua offers a powerful multiracial history of Chicago that sheds new light on the origins and endurance of urban inequality. Amezcua visits the Newberry to discuss how the Windy City became a postwar Latinx metropolis in the face of white resistance.
Though Chicago is often popularly defined by its Polish, Black, and Irish populations, Cook County is home to the third-largest Mexican American population in the United States. The story of Mexican immigration and integration into the city is one of complex political struggles, deeply entwined with issues of housing and neighborhood control.
In the decades after World War II, working-class Chicago neighborhoods like Pilsen and Little Village became sites of upheaval and renewal. Mexican Americans attempted to build new communities in the face of white resistance that cast them as perpetual aliens. Mike Amezcua charts the diverse strategies used by Mexican Chicagoans to fight the forces of segregation, economic predation, and gentrification, focusing on how unlikely combinations of social conservatism and real estate market savvy paved new paths for Latinx assimilation.
For this event, Amezcua will speak with James Akerman, Curator of Maps at the Newberry and the curator of the exhibition Crossings: Mapping American Journeys.
Mike Amezcua, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Georgetown University, was recently named the co-winner of the Arnold Hirsch Award for Best Article in Urban History by the Urban History Association.
James Akerman is the Newberry’s Curator of Maps and Director of the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography.
Purchase Making Mexican Chicago online from the Newberry Bookshop here: https://bookshop.newberry.org/making-mexican-chicago-postwar-settlement-age-gentrification
This event is being held in conjunction with Crossings: Mapping American Journeys. The exhibition runs at the Newberry from February 25 through June 25.
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Tags: James Akerman, Jim Akerman, Making Mexican Chicago, Making Mexican Chicago: Meet the Author Mike Amezcua, Mike Amezcua, Newberry Library
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