Historiography of Chicago’s Mexican Community
Ray Hutchison
Urban and Regional Studies
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
April, 1999
Notes originally prepared for presentation at round table session ("Chicago Latinos and Their History: Old and New Research Directions") of conference on Mapping Latino/Latin American Chicago held at the University of Illinois at Chicago, September 28-29, 1998
Introduction
The city of Chicago holds a special place in the study of race and ethnicity. It was in Chicago that W.I Thomas and Florian Znaniecki (1918-1920) completed their study of The Polish Peasant in Europe and America and St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton (1945) wrote Black Metropolis as part of the research on immigrant communities produced by the Chicago School of Urban Sociology. Despite this rich heritage, there has been little study of the rapidly growing immigrant ethnic communities of the post-World War Two period. Even though the Asian and Hispanic communities in the city have grown rapidly in this period, and now comprise more than a quarter of the total population, there have been only a handful of studies about these groups. None have come from sociologists at the University of Chicago.
The growth and expansion of Chicago’s Latino population over the last three decades is astonishing; most Americans and many academic researchers continue to think of the Mexican population as being confined to the southwestern states. Yet as early as 1960 Chicago emerged as the third-largest Mexican city in the United States, ranking only behind Los Angeles and San Antonio in the number of Mexican-origin persons. By 1970 the Mexican-origin population in Chicago exceeded that of the every state except California and Texas.
The Mexican community in Chicago may be one of the best-kept secrets in ethnic studies. Standard works in Chicano studies, such as Rudy Acuna's Occupied America, make only passing reference to Chicago and the Midwest; the two special issues of the Social Science Quarterly (in 1973 and in 1983) devoted to The Mexican American Experience in the United States contained only one article dealing with the Chicago population. Although the new field of Chicano Studies has produced important research and theoretical contributions over the last several decades, and there are many studies focusing on the Mexican population in other areas of the country, there is virtually no published material on the Mexican community in Chicago.[1] Even at professional conferences in Chicano Studies papers dealing with the Chicago population are noticeably lacking.
The neglect of Chicago’s Mexican population within the larger body of social science research was not always the case. Robert Redfield, perhaps the leading American anthropologist of the mid-century, conducted fieldwork in Mexican neighborhoods in the 1920s, and Paul Taylor included early Mexican settlements in the city in his materials on Mexican labor in the United States. Robert Jones and Louis Wilson completed an early report on the Mexican community for the Chicago Church Foundation, and in the 1930s W. Lloyd Warner supervised research on the South Chicago community as part of a Work Progress Administration (WPA) project at the University of Chicago. Despite these auspicious beginnings, there has been little research on the Chicano community in the post-war period.[2]
It is useful to take a step back for a moment to consider how much of this history has been lost. When W. Lloyd Warner came to the University of Chicago from Harvard University, he planned to continue his comparative study of American communities, and worked with two graduate students -- St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton -- to produce the classic work on the African American community at mid-century, Black Metropolis.[3] Less well-known is the fact that the same WPA (Works Progress Administration) funding that supported graduate students and research assistants in this work was also used for a major survey (including personal interviews) with some 2000 Mexican families living in South Chicago. The study was direct by Jackson Baur and produced a master’s thesis that focused on social disorganization and delinquency in the immigrant community; the original survey data was destroyed when janitors at Michigan State University "recycled" Warner’s boxes of papers in the 1970s. When Paul Taylor visited Chicago in the 1930s to conduct research for work on Mexican Labor in the United States, he was able to draw upon a host of local studies produced by students from the University of Chicago and the Chicago Theological Seminary. And while much of this early research focused on the Mexican community, Elena Padilla’s classic study of Puerto Rican migration to the United States was originally written as a master’s thesis at the University of Chicago; it compared the assimilation of Puerto Rican migrants in the barrios of Chicago and new York. It is more than a simple rhetorical question to ask why there has been little follow through on these earlier research studies, and why the Chicago community remains nearly invisible in studies of immigrant communities in the United States as well as in specific subfields such as Chicano Studies.
The resulting gaps in our understanding of the Mexican-American experience in the United States is clear when we consider comparisons which could (and which must) be made between the development of the Mexican community in Chicago and the southwest, and between Mexican and other Hispanic groups in Miami, New York, and Los Angeles. While scholars in other areas of the country have produced a significant literature on the experience of immigrant groups. These include Robert Waldinger and others who have studied immigrant communities in New York City well as recent volumes on Los Angeles by Edward Soja and his associates; there is no such research tradition in Chicago or among Chicago-based scholars. In this chapter I discuss earlier historical work on the development of the Mexican community in Chicago. This discussion is intended to highlight (a) how this work fits in with other studies of the Chicago School; (b) the methodology used in this work; and (c) reasons why this work is not being done at the present time.
Historiography of the Mexican Community
Much of our knowledge of the origin of the Mexican community in Chicago comes from Paul Taylor's (1931) early study of Mexican Labor in Chicago and the Calumet Region.[4] This is the most frequently cited primary source in Kerr, Reisler, and other historical studies of the Mexican community.[5] Taylor was a labor economist at the University of California-Berkeley. He arrived in Chicago in the summer of 1928 to gather data for his volume on Chicago and northern Indiana. His initial contact in Chicago was Robert Redfield, who had just completed his graduate work in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Chicago.[6] Robert C. Jones, who was taking graduate classes at the University of Chicago with the hope of gaining admittance to the doctoral program in sociology, was hired as Taylor's research assistant. Anita Edgar Jones, then enrolled in the social work program at the School of Social Service Administration and involved in a study of living conditions for Mexican workers for the Immigrant Protective League, also assisted in the research. Research materials collected by Robert Jones and Anita Edgar Jones (not related to one another), were combined with reports from other students and social workers, and then edited by Paul Taylor to produce the volume which bears his name. As this summary suggests, a rather large group of scholars from local universities, settlement houses, and government agencies produced this first generation of research studies on the Chicago's Mexican community in the 1920s and 1930s.
While Paul Taylor's work is generally considered the authoritative study of the development of the Mexican community--it is certainly the most comprehensive such work--other primary sources are available from archives at the Chicago Historical Society, the University of Chicago, and other institutions. Indeed, it was precisely these sources which Taylor used to compile his report--and copies of much of the material in the Chicago archives can be found in the Paul Taylor Collection at the Bancroft Library (University of California-Berkeley).[7] Among these primary sources are research papers and master's theses by graduate students at the University of Chicago (Jackson Baur and Raymond Nelson) and Chicago Theological Seminary (Robert C. Jones); settlement house reports (Manual Ibanez); and studies conducted by social service agencies (Anita Edgar Jones). Even this abbreviated list--many other sources can be found in the archives listed above--suggests a very dense networking of sources. This network is constructed around graduate students and faculty at the University of Chicago, including Robert Redfield, who conducted fieldwork in the Mexican colonias (1924) prior to receiving his degree in 1928; social workers such as Ruth Camblon from the Immigrant Protection League (author of the first study of "Mexicans in Chicago," published in The Family in 1926) and Mary Bolton With (head of the Chicago Housing Authority from 1952-58, also the wife of Louis Wirth from the University of Chicago). David Weber suggests that the active involvement of social workers and settlement houses in the Mexican neighborhoods made it more difficult for city officials to participate in the repatriation of Mexican workers during the Great Depression of the 1920s, and certainly the impact of repatriation from the Mexican colonias was substantially different from that experienced in Detroit and other midwestern cities.[8]
These early studies include many different sources of statistical data--earnings reported by employers, the value of checks cashed by banks in Mexican neighborhoods--along with qualitative data such as the opinions employers, realty agents, and others as to the "character" and "temperament" of the Mexicans. Especially interesting is the overlap of data sources in several studies: Anita Edgar Jones reports census data, immigration figures, school enrollment data, and personal observations from field work in the Mexican railroad camps (Taylor uses the immigration and school enrollment data in his report); Robert C. Jones and Jackson Baur collected life histories of Mexican immigrants in Chicago (the life histories collected and translated by Robert C. Jones are later used in Manual Gamio's The Mexican Immigrant). Survey methodology comes relatively late in the course of these studies; Jackson Baur's research for the W. Lloyd Warner/Works Progress Adminstration study of the Mexican colonia in South Chicago includes preliminary interview schedules with all 800 Mexican households in South Chicago, along with more in-depth interviews with 2000 Mexican respondents.
The standard of scholarship shown in these studies is measurably different from that of contemporary social science disciplines. Robert Redfield's field notes are not as detailed or systematic as would be expected of an anthropology graduate student at the present day; the life histories used by Baur are no longer common fare in sociological research. Instead, the studies reflect the diversity of methodological approaches used in the interdisciplinary research of the early Chicago School of Urban Sociology. The use of personal documents and life histories is derived from Thomas and Znaniecki's study of The Polish Peasant in Europe and America,[9] which exerted a powerful influence over the social sciences despite the fact that W.I. Thomas had been forced to leave the university a decade earlier. There is a similar plan and method to many of the studies: Robert Redfield, Raymond Nelson, and Anita Jones all describe visiting employers to inquire about the quality of Mexican workers; interviewing bank officers to inquire about the average amount of the paychecks of Mexican workers; and talking with post office employees to discover how many persons send money orders to relatives back in Mexico.
Just as the methodology used in the early studies reflect the prevailing mode of research methodology, the various themes used to interpret the available data and bring some sense of order to the personal interviews and observations made in the Mexican colonias reflect the dominant assimilation theory which developed from Robert Park's race relations cycle. Omi and Winant describe the "ethnicity-based paradigm" which emerged in the 1920s and 1930s as "an explicit challenge to the pre-existing biologistic paradigm."[10] Early researchers clearly viewed the Mexican population as just one among many immigrant groups to come to the United States, and therefore subject to the same influences (such as family disorganization) as other immigrant groups. Escobar notes that Taylor’s approach to the study of Mexican labor in the Midwest was decidedly assimilationist; even when confronted with direct evidence from employers that Mexicans were subject to discrimination vis a vis Eastern European workers, Taylor fails to comment on this disparity, and instead focuses on the relatively high wages of Mexican workers in the Chicago region compared to the southwest.[11]
Little distinction is made between Mexican-American migrants from the southwestern United States and Mexican immigrants. There is a prevailing racialism (again using Omi and Winant's terminology) in the comments of employers, realty agents, and other persons reported in the early research studies. Mexicans are frequently described as a separate "race." Because they are viewed as a separate racial group, it is assumed that Mexicans as a group share specific attributes (Taylor is told that Mexicans work harder than blacks but not as hard as whites). Comments are frequently made--both by researchers and by the persons they interview--as to the "temperament" of Mexicans.
Ethnic conflict is viewed as a natural product of intergroup contact. The researchers discover ethnic antagonisms between blacks and Mexicans, and between Mexicans and other immigrant workers. In some instances ethnic antagonism is the consequence of competition for employment in the steel mills and meat packing plants; other immigrant groups complain that Mexicans will work for lower wages than will other groups. Paul Taylor directly asks employers about the use of Mexican workers as strikebreakers in the packing house strikes following World War One and is given responses from employers that would be unthinkable in a later period.
The racialist construction of labor markets is implicit in many of these studies. Race is view by employers as a factor which determines not only the particular job which an individual is qualified for--Mexicans work at unskilled jobs--but also the wages paid to persons working the same job. Thus Mexicans enter a segmented labor market from the very beginning. Yet the information in these studies indicate that Mexicans occupy an intermediate position within this segmented labor market. They are considered by most--but not all--employers to be superior to blacks (and thus are able to obtain semi-skilled jobs and higher wages), but inferior to the European immigrants of the previous decade.
Although a fully articulated theory of race relations does not emerge in these studies, the evidence suggests that while the researchers viewed the Mexicans as more-or-less the same as other, earlier immigrant groups (a view which is consonant with the prevailing "ethnicity-based paradigm"), they actually are describing a segmented system of race and ethnic relations in which Mexicans stood somewhere in the middle. This is not the same as Manuel Barrera's view of racial inequality and class segmentation in the American southwest--although Mexicans are often referred to as a "race," it is also clear that employers and others view Mexicans--and Mexican labor--as qualitatively different from blacks.[12] Instead, the system of inequality described in these studies is one where race, ethnicity, and class intersect in some fashion as yet unexplored in the literature on race and ethnic relations--yet another reason why continued research on the development of the Mexican community in Chicago is important for our understanding of the Latino experience in the United States.
Lack of Research on Mexican Chicago
Although Mexican and other Hispanic groups are now well established in Chicago and other industrialized cities of the Midwest[13], there has been little research on these communities since the first generation of studies in the 1920s and 1930s summarized above. A number of reasons contribute to the lack of research, among them:
1. While universities in Chicago boast some of the leading scholars in the study of Hispanic / Latino populations (at various times Douglas Massey, Marta Tienda, and Alenjandro Portes have been on the faculty at the University of Chicago), their research most often focuses on the Mexican or Hispanic population in a national context or larger-scale comparative studies; individual cities (such as Chicago) are not the focus of investigation;
2. The primary research interests of other important Latino scholars located at universities in the Midwest remain focused on the southwest. For example, Edward Escobar (University of Indiana-Northwest, editor of Forging a Community: The Latino Experience in Northwest Indiana) is originally from Los Angeles and often returns to the city for his continuing research.
3. Other scholars who initiated important research in the 1970s and 1980s -- persons such as Gilbert Cardenas -- have returned to teaching and administrative positions at universities in the southwest.
4. Structural conditions within the publishing industry (both the formal structure of book publishing as well as the more informal structure of journal publishing) are also important; several university presses have focused on the Mexican population in the southwest, and seem reluctant to expand their coverage to include Hispanics/Latinos/Mexicans in other areas of the country.
Most critical Most critical in this regard, however, is the lack of an indigenous Midwestern Latino academic community which might nurture a research agenda focusing on the experience of Mexicans and other Hispanic groups in the Midwest. There are only a handful of Hispanic scholars who grew up in the Midwest who have made this region the focus of their subsequent research. Important in this regard is Felix Padilla who produced an impressive body of work about the Puerto Rican and Hispanic community in Chicago while he was at DePaul University[14] (but he now has left for New York); Denis Valdez, who grew up in Detroit and has studied of labor/union involvement among Mexican workers in the Midwest; and Zaragosa Vargas (University of California-Santa Barbara), also from Detroit, who has continued to study the history of Mexicans in the Midwest--although from the somewhat distant vantage point of Santa Barbara, California.
Equally important, while Hispanic and Mexican-American students are entering universities in the Midwest in increasing numbers, they, like other first-generation college students, are more likely to chose business and other instrumental careers over sociology and other social science disciplines. As a consequence, there are only a small number of Hispanic graduate students at research centers in the Midwest who are likely to contribute to this research agenda in the short term.
Reviewing this picture, one very much gets the sense that a complete history of the Mexican American experience in the Midwest awaits the development of a core of scholars who have grown up in the Midwest and have obtained positions in research universities within the region where they will be able to continue their work in the coming decades. Just as the field of Chicano Studies developed in the 1960s among graduate students at universities across the southwest, we might expect a comparable group of Mexican-American scholars to emerge from research universities in the Midwest in the coming decades.
Whatever the reasons for the lack of study of the Mexican community to date, the continued expansion and growing importance of the Mexican community in Chicago demands that additional attention be given to the Mexican (and other Latino) neighborhoods in future research in Chicano studies and in the mainstream social sciences alike. Some areas which this research might address include the following:
Historical Studies. Louise Ano Nuevo Kerr's study of the Mexicans in Chicago from 1939 through 1954 remains the major historical account of the Mexican community. This research must be expanded to provide a full account of the origins of the community, and especially the continued growth of the community in the 1970s and 1980s. This more comprehensive history of the development of the Chicago community naturally invites comparisons with other cities in the Midwest. What factors account for differences in the origins and eventual success of Mexican colonial in Chicago and in Detroit? Why did repatriation have a more significant effect in Detroit and Toledo (for example) than in Chicago? As noted earlier, David Weber has suggested that the extensive involvement of settlement houses and social work professionals softened the impact of repatriation in Chicago--yet we have little or no information on role of settlement houses and the involvement of social workers in Detroit and other cities during the Depression.
As the historical record becomes more complete, attention should also be focused on the historiography of the Mexican community. The relationship among academics, social workers, and professional social service agencies needs to be studied more closely. Jackson Baur's study of the South Chicago community was conducted under a grant from the Works Progress Administration. While there are many studies of the role of federal financing of the arts, sponsorship of social science research under the Works Progress Administration should also be studied. The influence of W. Lloyd Warner on the development of Chicago sociology during this period is generally considered to have been limited to introducing the "caste school" of race relations (Kurtz, 1984, pp. 50-51); the material presented here may suggest that his contributions to the department should be examined in greater detail. Finally, study of the Chicago Mexican community by the academic and social work community ended with the onset of World War Two. What accounts for the lack of interest in the Mexican community--still visible and growing rapidly--in the 1950s and 1960s? Part of the answer may well lie with the decline of the settlement house movement in the 1930s and 1940s which provided the natural avenue to studies for graduate students from the University of Chicago and other institutions. What other factors might account for the disengagement of research in the immediate post-war period?
Sociological Studies. While the city of Chicago had a Mexican population of some 350,000 persons in 1990, the suburban Cook County area accounted for an additional 120,000 persons of Mexican origin. Some of these suburban communities--such as Cicero and Berwyn on the city's southwest side--represent overflow areas from older established Mexican enclaves within the city. Other suburban communities formed in older industrial satellite suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s. In still other areas within the suburban region (particularly in Northwest Indiana), third- and fourth-generation Mexican Americans have moved into newer suburban neighborhoods. The continuing growth of the Mexican population across the Chicago region should place this group squarely on the research agenda not only for persons in Chicano Studies but for social scientists (anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists) more generally. The immediate starting point is to study the continuing growth and expansion of Mexican neighborhoods within the city, with a focus on the important social issues that this implies:
(1) the development of ethnic enclaves in the southwest side neighborhoods, and the impact of these enclaves on local employment opportunities, wage ceilings, and entrepreneurship/ethnic enterprise within the Mexican community;
(2) acculturation and social integration within the Mexican community, particularly in the second and third generation, and the changes in family structure, demographics, and language patterns which are likely to accompany this integration;
(3) comparisons between Mexican immigrants (first generation) and Mexican Americans (second and third generation) in such areas as education, employment, and earnings; and
(4) Questions associated with the continued migration and immigration to the community, including the extent and significance of return migration, impact of family networks and "chain migration," and the extent and economic impact of illegal immigration in local neighborhoods and in the city as a whole.
(5) What impact has suburban residence had on Mexican families and on the Mexican community more generally? The question which has been addressed in the now extensive literature on black suburbanization--does suburban life offer Mexican Americans the same benefits and rewards that it offers other Americans?--needs to be addressed to the suburban experience of the Mexican population in Chicago (and in other cities).
Of crucial importance in these sociological investigations is the question of the long-term impact of economic decline on the South Chicago and Southeast side Mexican communities and in the south suburbs more generally. For many years South Chicago was the most prosperous of the Mexican colonial, yet the decline of the steel industry has destroyed the long-standing base of employment and, along with it, opportunities for social mobility. What has happened to the Mexican families--most of them second and third generation--who have remained behind? This, of course, represents a much broader question: How will the changing social, economic, and political landscape of the 21st Century will impact the development of the Mexican community in urban centers such as Chicago?
Notes:
