From 2000 to 2010, the Latino population increased by more than 73 percent across eight midwestern states. These interdisciplinary essays explore issues of history, education, literature, art, and politics defining today’s Latina/o Midwest. Some contributors delve into the Latina/o revitalization of rural areas, where communities have launched bold experiments in dual-language immersion education while seeing integrated neighborhoods, churches, and sports teams become the norm. Others reveal metro areas as laboratories for emerging Latino subjectivities, places where for some, the term Latina/o itself corresponds to a new type of lived identity as different Latina/o groups interact in shared neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. Eye-opening and provocative, The Latina/o Midwest Reader rewrites the conventional wisdom on today's Latina/o community and how it faces challenges—and thrives—in the heartland. Contributors: Aidé Acosta, Frances R. Aparicio, Jay Arduser, Jane Blocker, Carolyn Colvin, María Eugenia Cotera, Theresa Delgadillo, Lilia Fernández, Claire F. Fox, Felipe Hinojosa, Michael D. Innis-Jiménez, José E. Limón, Marta María Maldonado, Louis G. Mendoza, Amelia María de la Luz Montes, Kim Potowski, Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Rebecca M. Schreiber, Omar Valerio-Jiménez, Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, Janet Weaver, and Elizabeth Willmore

From 2000 to 2010, the Latino population increased by more than 73 percent across eight midwestern states. These interdisciplinary essays explore issues of history, education, literature, art, and politics defining today’s Latina/o Midwest. Some contributors delve into the Latina/o revitalization of rural areas, where communities have launched bold experiments in dual-language immersion education while seeing integrated neighborhoods, churches, and sports teams become the norm. Others reveal metro areas as laboratories for emerging Latino subjectivities, places where for some, the term Latina/o itself corresponds to a new type of lived identity as different Latina/o groups interact in shared neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. Eye-opening and provocative, The Latina/o Midwest Reader rewrites the conventional wisdom on today's Latina/o community and how it faces challenges—and thrives—in the heartland. Contributors: Aidé Acosta, Frances R. Aparicio, Jay Arduser, Jane Blocker, Carolyn Colvin, María Eugenia Cotera, Theresa Delgadillo, Lilia Fernández, Claire F. Fox, Felipe Hinojosa, Michael D. Innis-Jiménez, José E. Limón, Marta María Maldonado, Louis G. Mendoza, Amelia María de la Luz Montes, Kim Potowski, Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Rebecca M. Schreiber, Omar Valerio-Jiménez, Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, Janet Weaver, and Elizabeth Willmore

Addresses the politics of immigration, in the everyday lives of one community National immigration debates have thrust both opponents of immigration and immigrant rights supporters into the news. But what happens once the rallies end and the banners come down? What is daily life like for Latinos who have been presented nationally as “terrorists, drug smugglers, alien gangs, and violent criminals”? Latino Heartland offers an ethnography of the Latino and non-Latino residents of a small Indiana town, showing how national debate pitted neighbor against neighbor—and the strategies some used to combat such animosity. It conveys the lived impact of divisive political rhetoric on immigration and how race, gender, class, and ethnicity inform community belonging in the twenty-first century. Latino Heartland illuminates how community membership was determined yet simultaneously re-made by those struggling to widen the scope of who was imagined as a legitimate resident citizen of this Midwestern space. The volume draws on interviews with Latinos—both new immigrants and long-standing U.S. citizens—and whites, as well as African Americans, to provide a sense of the racial dynamics in play as immigrants asserted their right to belong to the community. Latino Hoosiers asserted a right to redefine what belonging meant within their homes, at their spaces of worship, and in the public eye. Through daily acts of ethnic belonging, Spanish-speaking residents navigated their own sense of community that did not require that they abandon their difference just to be accepted. In Latino Heartland, Sujey Vega addresses the politics of immigration, showing us how increasingly diverse towns can work toward embracing their complexity.

Overflowing with powerful testimonies of six female community activists who have lived and worked in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, Chicanas of 18th Street reveals the convictions and approaches of those organizing for social reform. In chronicling a pivotal moment in the history of community activism in Chicago, the women discuss how education, immigration, religion, identity, and acculturation affected the Chicano movement. Chicanas of 18th Street underscores the hierarchies of race, gender, and class while stressing the interplay of individual and collective values in the development of community reform. Highlighting the women's motivations, initiatives, and experiences in politics during the 1960s and 1970s, these rich personal accounts reveal the complexity of the Chicano movement, conflicts within the movement, and the importance of teatro and cultural expressions to the movement. Also detailed are vital interactions between members of the Chicano movement with leftist and nationalist community members and the influence of other activist groups such as African Americans and Marxists.

Publisher Description

Bringing Aztlán to Mexican Chicago is the autobiography of Jóse Gamaliel González, an impassioned artist willing to risk all for the empowerment of his marginalized and oppressed community. Through recollections emerging in a series of interviews conducted over a period of six years by his friend Marc Zimmerman, González looks back on his life and his role in developing Mexican, Chicano, and Latino art as a fundamental dimension of the city he came to call home. Born near Monterey, Mexico, and raised in a steel mill town in northwest Indiana, González studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame. Settling in Chicago, he founded two major art groups: El Movimiento Artístico Chicano (MARCH) in the 1970s and Mi Raza Arts Consortium (MIRA) in the 1980s. With numerous illustrations, this book portrays González's all-but-forgotten community advocacy, his commitments and conflicts, and his long struggle to bring quality arts programming to the city. By turns dramatic and humorous, his narrative also covers his bouts of illness, his relationships with other artists and arts promoters, and his place within city and barrio politics.

Longstanding Mexican and Puerto Rican populations have helped make people of mixed nationalities—MexiGuatamalans, CubanRicans, and others—an important part of Chicago's Latina/o scene. Intermarriage between Guatemalans, Colombians, and Cubans have further diversified this community-within-a-community. Yet we seldom consider the lives and works of these Intralatino/as when we discuss Latino/as in the United States.In Negotiating Latinidad, a cross-section of Chicago's second-generation Intralatino/as offer their experiences of negotiating between and among the national communities embedded in their families. Frances R. Aparicio's rich interviews reveal Intralatino/as proud of their multiplicity and particularly skilled at understanding difference and boundaries. Their narratives explore both the ongoing complexities of family life and the challenges of fitting into our larger society, in particular the struggle to claim a space—and a sense of belonging—in a Latina/o America that remains highly segmented in scholarship. The result is an emotionally powerful, theoretically rigorous exploration of culture, hybridity, and transnationalism that points the way forward for future scholarship on Intralatino/a identity.