Co-sponsored by The Newberry Library, Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, The Center for Latino Research at DePaul University, Latino Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, and the Katz Center for Mexican Studies at the University of Chicago
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Julia Grace Darling Young, University of Chicago This paper investigates the actions of Mexican emigrants, exiles and refugees in the Chicago area during Mexico’s Cristero War, a bloody church-state conflict that ravaged the Mexican countryside from 1926 to 1929. During this period, the Mexican community in the region became polarized around the religious question, as local Catholic associations and pro-Church immigrant newspapers encouraged them to participate in a conflict from thousands of miles away. Through their interactions with Catholic leaders in both the U.S. and Mexico, these emigrants attracted the support of powerful players within the Chicago Archdiocese, who in turn helped them to carve out enduring social spaces within Catholic Chicago. By examining these transnational political activities, I hope to shed new light on the history of Mexican community-formation in Midwest. This chapter focuses on two moments of the journeys of those participating in the Bracero Program, the informal name for a series of labor agreements in effect from 1942 to 1964; these U.S.-Mexico agreements brought braceros, as participants were called, to work for brief stretches in US agricultural fields. Taken from my manuscript, Bordering Modernities: Transnational Labor Migration and the Making of Mexico and the United States, it traces out the encounters returning braceros had with Mexican border guards and their ultimate re-incorporation into home pueblos. In analyzing these culminating moments of the journey, the chapter attempts to reconcile its central irony: these migrants, who were crowned as state-appointed modern agents when leaving Mexico and denied the status and rewards of being modern north of the border, continued to fight for a version of being modern—a version imagined by neither Mexico nor the United States. This paper examines the culture and political economy of Tucson and the Arizona-Sonora border region during World War II. Focusing on such issues as the border’s wartime militarization; the labor migrations of Mexican and Mexican Americans to work in Tucson's civil and military defense industries; World War II’s impact on regional economies; the relationship between Tucson and border communities like Nogales and Douglas; and the joint efforts of Arizona and Sonora to defend the border against enemy invasion through Mexico, my paper establishes many of the social, cultural, political, and economic relations that shaped Tucson and the Arizona-Sonora borderlands during the postwar era as well.
Midwest Mexicans and the Cristero War
Border of Belonging, Border of Foreignness: Patriarchy, the Modern, and the Making of Transnational Mexicanness
Defending the Borderlands
Identity, Community, and Mexican Labor Immigration: Creating and Contesting Mexicanidad in Chicago, 1970–1979
This paper is a preliminary investigation on how the influx of Mexican labor immigration during the 1970s changed the social dynamics of identity and community in the history of ethnic Mexicans in Chicago. I will focus on the evolution of two Chicago neighborhoods: Pilsen and Little Village in order to examine how Mexicans engaged with and contested Mexicanidad- “‘a feeling of common peoplehood’ based on a collectively-imagined Mexico” in everyday life. The shift in the dynamics of identity and community formation that the decade of the 1970s witnessed, I hypothesize, is the erosion of a civil rights orientation and the development of Mexicanidad. My work will critique dominant lines of interpretation of Mexican identity and community formation that reify narratives of voluntary Mexican immigration and settlement in the United States.
Jerry Garcia, Michigan State University
Mexicans, Teamsters, and Growers: Immigration and Race in Washington State's Apple Industry
This paper examines how race, immigration, the political economy, and globalization sabotaged unionization efforts in the largest apple industry in the nation located in the state of Washington. The primary labor force in this industry are individuals of Mexican origin who have immigrated to the Pacific Northwest. The conclusion of this paper discusses why the Teamsters abruptly pulled out of representing the workers after a five year struggle.
Alexandra Mendoza, University of Minnesota at Twin Cities
Motherhood in the Borderland: Adolescent Chicanas in the Decolonial Imaginary
Chicana/o folklore is a site at which cultural values and gender roles are both produced and maintained and the parameters of acceptable social behavior are constructed. Feminine archetypes embodied by figures such as La Llorona, La Virgen de Guadalupe, and Malintzín are constructed along a moral binary that forces women into one of two categories: “virgin” or “whore.” By realizing their potential as reproductive bodies, adolescent Chicana mothers birth a third space between virgin and whore—what Gloria Anzaldúa calls a borderland space and Emma Peréz calls an interstitial space—outside of this moral binary. Carved out by their own flesh, this space represents a point of rupture for the archetypical narratives of female sexuality proscribed by Mexican/Chicano culture and provides a space for reimagination and liberation.
Susana Peña, Bowling Green State University
Transgender Borderlands/Miami Borderlands: Documenting Early Cuban American Transgender Activists
Gloria Anzaldúa highlighted the relationship between the geopolitical specificity of the U.S./Mexico border—with its history of migration, inequality, and violence—and the psychic borderlands of those who transgress normative social categories of race, gender, and sexuality. This paper asks whether Miami is a “borderlands”? While acknowledging important differences between Anzaldúa’s conceptualization and Miami, I argue that the intersectional examination of a geo-politically specific region, Latino/a groups, and borders between gender, racial, and class categories that Anzaldúa provides helps us further understand Miami. Also, I examine the borderlands between transgender male-to-female and gay male communities. I document early Latina transgender activists in 1970s Miami who participated in Transgender Action Organization (TAO). Drawing on the organization’s publications and Director Angela Douglas’ self-published autobiographies, I analyze the participation of Latinas in the organization. Through my analysis, I analyze the borders between Cuban American gay male and transgender communities.
Raúl Coronado, Jr., University of Chicago
Seduction as Revolution: The Printing Press and Political Consciousness in Early 19th Century Texas
In 1810 Texas was the northeastern extremity of New Spain and was still part of the Spanish empire. In that year, Father Miguel Hidalgo, leader of the Mexican movement for independence deputized José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara ambassador to the U.S. Gutiérrez de Lara traveled to the U.S. in the hope of gaining support for the independence of Spanish America. This paper explores the arrival of revolution and political modernity in Spanish Texas by turning to Gutiérrez de Lara’s travels and the revolutionary documents he circulated throughout Texas. The paper concludes by briefly discussing the relationship between these events and the history of US Latino subjectivities.
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