Chicagolandia: Race and Labor in Latinx Suburbia
Creators: name: Ramirez, Antonio
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: Suburban history
subject: Latinx history
subject: Chicago history
subject: U.S. history
subject: Oral history
subject: History (General)
subject: Humanities
subject: FOS: Humanities

description: “Chicagolandia: Race and Labor in Latinx Suburbia” documents the history of Puerto Rican and Mexican populations in Chicago’s suburbs from the 1940s to the early 2000s. This dissertation emphasizes the central role labor played in Chicagolandia’s growth, racial formations, and politics, and argues that labor exploitation is a key reason Chicago’s Latinx suburbs exist today. Through archival research, historical newspapers, census data, and oral histories, this study challenges the imagined notion of suburbs as white and upper middle-class by centering the voices and experiences of Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in the long history of postwar U.S. suburbia. “Chicagolandia” shows that Mexican and Puerto Rican workers built communities, participated in local politics, and established organizations in greater Chicago as early as the 1940s and 50s. As large numbers of white Chicagoans moved to the suburbs in the 1950s and 60s, the suburban Latinx population also grew. During this period, Puerto Rican and Mexican community leaders and organizations used a pragmatic racial politics that leveraged patronage connections and proximity to white elected officials to win critical resources for Latinx communities. At the same time, they navigated and counteracted the racial discrimination suffered by Puerto Ricans and Mexicans as they worked, sought housing, and participated in suburban society. In the 1970s and 80s, Chicago’s population and key manufacturing sectors became increasingly suburbanized. Mexican immigrant workers drawn to suburban factories began to outnumber Puerto Ricans. As the growing Mexican population became more visible, elected officials, the media, and the public in Illinois responded by signaling the “illegality” of Mexicans as an issue of great concern. Suburban state legislators led the charge in increasingly punitive attempts to target undocumented Mexican immigrant workers who were nonetheless essential to suburban industries. “Chicagolandia” shows that suburban Latinx workers permanently reshaped the demographics and workplaces of metropolitan Chicago across the late twentieth century. Inspired by Latin American organizing traditions, many demanded better union representation and dignified work. In the post 9/11 period, though, large sectors of suburban Latinx workers were forced out of unions and into precarious, temporary employment. Suburban temp workers and their allies continued to fight for better working conditions and eventually won some of the nation’s strongest labor protections. This study is bookended by chapters that use an ethnographic approach to examine the relationship between Latinx racial identities and suburban space. The first chapter uses my childhood and adolescence as a suburban Mexican youth to engage questions of authorial standpoint. The epilogue surveys how my community college students and I collaborated with suburban Latinx residents to cooperatively construct a history of Chicagolandia.