San Pablo was settled in the early 1800s by Mexican pioneers, also known as "Tempeneños," south of the Tempe butte. By the 1870s, Mexicans were vital to Tempe's economical growth, assisting in the construction of the C. H. Kirkland and McKinney Canal and the Hayden Flour Mill, and with agriculture soon after the establishment of Fort McDowell. The agricultural field cultivated by the settlers of San Pablo is now Arizona State University's main campus. Over time, the Mexican settlers of San Pablo were subjected to eminent domain and were dispersed throughout Maricopa County. To this day, the Mexican population has assisted in the economic development of Arizona ranching, agriculture, private industries, the public sector, and in the defense of the United States in time of war.

Home to 165,000 residents (within a 40 square mile radius), the city of Tempe is surrounded by the booming cities of Mesa, Phoenix, Scottsdale, and Chandler. But the Salt River Valley area was once populated with just a few small farms, when Charles Trumbull Hayden, owner of a mercantile and freighting business in Tucson, homesteaded here in 1870. The community he established--Hayden's Ferry--soon became the trade center for the south side of the valley. Hayden's Ferry became Tempe in 1879 at the suggestion of Englishman Darrell Duppa, who commented that the area reminded him of the Vale of Tempe in Greece, and it was not long before other developments promoted the growth of this new town. In 1885, the Arizona legislature selected Tempe as the site for the Territorial Normal School, the predecessor of Arizona State University. The Maricopa and Phoenix Railroad, which crossed the Salt River at Tempe, was built in 1887, and in 1911, the Roosevelt Dam was completed. World War II, the creation of Tempe Town Lake, and other 20th-century events also influenced the growth and character of Tempe, now Arizona's seventh largest city.

Phoenix's Mexican American community dates back to the founding of the city in 1868. From these earliest days, Phoenicians of Mexican descent actively participated in the city's economic and cultural development, while also fiercely preserving their culture and heritage in the thriving barrios, by establishing their own businesses and churches. In 1886, Henry Garfias became the first member of the Mexican community to be elected a city official. The 20th century saw the creation of organizations, such as La Liga Protectora and Sociedad Zaragoza, that gave a stronger political voice to the underrepresented Mexican population. In 1953, another member of the Mexican community, Adam Diaz, was elected to city council. As the century progressed, the Mexican American population grew and expanded into several areas of Phoenix, and today the substantial community is flourishing.

On any given day in Arizona, thousands of Mexican-descent workers labor to make living in urban and rural areas possible. The majority of such workers are largely invisible. Their work as caretakers of children and the elderly, dishwashers or cooks in restaurants, and hotel housekeeping staff, among other roles, remains in the shadows of an economy dependent on their labor. Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona centers on the production of an elastic supply of labor, revealing how this long-standing approach to the building of Arizona has obscured important power relations, including the state’s favorable treatment of corporations vis-à-vis workers. Building on recent scholarship about Chicanas/os and others, the volume insightfully describes how U.S. industries such as railroads, mining, and agriculture have fostered the recruitment of Mexican labor, thus ensuring the presence of a surplus labor pool that expands and contracts to accommodate production and profit goals. The volume’s contributors delve into examples of migration and settlement in the Salt River Valley; the mobilization and immobilization of cotton workers in the 1920s; miners and their challenge to a dual-wage system in Miami, Arizona; Mexican American women workers in midcentury Phoenix; the 1980s Morenci copper miners’ strike and Chicana mobilization; Arizona’s industrial and agribusiness demands for Mexican contract labor; and the labor rights violations of construction workers today. Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona fills an important gap in our understanding of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the Southwest by turning the scholarly gaze to Arizona, which has had a long-standing impact on national policy and politics.

In 1925 Adolfo ‘Babe’ Romo, a Mexican American rancher in Tempe, Arizona, filed suit against his school district on behalf of his four young children, who were forced to attend a markedly low-quality segregated school, and won. But Romo v. Laird was just the beginning. Some sources rank Mexican Americans as one of the most poorly educated ethnic groups in the United States. Chicano Students and the Courts is a comprehensive look at this community’s long-standing legal struggle for better schools and educational equality. Through the lens of critical race theory, Valencia details why and how Mexican American parents and their children have been forced to resort to legal action. Chicano Students and the Courts engages the many areas that have spurred Mexican Americans to legal battle, including school segregation, financing, special education, bilingual education, school closures, undocumented students, higher education financing, and high-stakes testing, ultimately situating these legal efforts in the broader scope of the Mexican American community’s overall struggle for the right to an equal education. Extensively researched, and written by an author with firsthand experience in the courtroom as an expert witness in Mexican American education cases, this volume is the first to provide an in-depth understanding of the intersection of litigation and education vis-à-vis Mexican Americans.

"An interdisciplinary anthology covering diverse aspects of the Mexican-American experience in the United States."--Amazon.com viewed November 12, 2020.