Making Mexican Chicago

Mike Amezcua details the complex political struggle over white-flight neighborhoods in postwar Chicago, showing that while white oppression of blacks was often based in supremacist ideologies, discrimination against Latinx peoples-especially Mexicans-was rooted in questions of sovereignty and belonging. Immigration policy was central to the defense" of the white city. While the story of white flight from blackness is well known, Amezcua demonstrates that white fears of brownness were likewise powerful-yet they also set the terms by which Latinx community and political power did develop. As Mexicans and Mexican Americans accrues political power, they became integral to the city's economy-and increasingly tended toward social conservatism, intent on protecting the value they were creating. Their assimilation was less to whiteness per se than to white capitalist agendas"--