Making Michigan Home: Mexican Americans Bridging the Rural-Urban Divide
(University of Illinois Press, expected Fall 2025)
My forthcoming book, Making Michigan Home: Mexican Americans Bridging the Rural-Urban Experience (University of Illinois Press, expected 2025), analyzes the Mexicano experience in Midwest. Faced with powerful figurative boundaries of social, economic, and political exclusion, I examine how Mexicanos actively negotiated and molded the space around them, redefining how and where they belonged so far from the more Chicana/o-populated American Southwest. I argue that because Mexicanos never constituted a numerically significant population in any one area, they claimed belonging via leisure spaces and labor unionism. By gathering for celebrations, sports, movies, and music, Mexicanos claimed physical and social space within Michigan’s cities and towns, connected with other Mexicano communities across the state and country, and constructed their own sense of identity and community. Using multiple archival sources, online repositories, oral histories, and local newspapers, I show that Mexicanos adapted remarkably to their environment by finding which placemaking mode of leisure and/or labor was most effective, enabling them to make a home in the region while developing unique Midwestern-centric cultural identities.
By investigating the complicated process of identity and community construction so far from the U.S./Mexico border, my work extends existing literature on placemaking and cultural formation by exploring the ways in which Michigan Mexicanos grappled with identity, nationality, and citizenship in a region where they were either rendered invisible or viewed as first-class laborers and second-class citizens. Beyond this, by examining the crossover between the rural and urban arenas, my project breaks down the artificial divide characterizing many labor and (im)migration studies. For many Mexicanos, flowing back and forth between rural and urban areas meant increased social and cultural interaction as well as improved economic viability as they participated in both factory work and farm labor. In addition, my chapter on Mexicanos in the United Auto Workers Union (UAW) is one of the first to explore the impact of one of the nation’s largest unions on Mexicanos.
(University of Illinois Press, expected Fall 2025)
My forthcoming book, Making Michigan Home: Mexican Americans Bridging the Rural-Urban Experience (University of Illinois Press, expected 2025), analyzes the Mexicano experience in Midwest. Faced with powerful figurative boundaries of social, economic, and political exclusion, I examine how Mexicanos actively negotiated and molded the space around them, redefining how and where they belonged so far from the more Chicana/o-populated American Southwest. I argue that because Mexicanos never constituted a numerically significant population in any one area, they claimed belonging via leisure spaces and labor unionism. By gathering for celebrations, sports, movies, and music, Mexicanos claimed physical and social space within Michigan’s cities and towns, connected with other Mexicano communities across the state and country, and constructed their own sense of identity and community. Using multiple archival sources, online repositories, oral histories, and local newspapers, I show that Mexicanos adapted remarkably to their environment by finding which placemaking mode of leisure and/or labor was most effective, enabling them to make a home in the region while developing unique Midwestern-centric cultural identities.
By investigating the complicated process of identity and community construction so far from the U.S./Mexico border, my work extends existing literature on placemaking and cultural formation by exploring the ways in which Michigan Mexicanos grappled with identity, nationality, and citizenship in a region where they were either rendered invisible or viewed as first-class laborers and second-class citizens. Beyond this, by examining the crossover between the rural and urban arenas, my project breaks down the artificial divide characterizing many labor and (im)migration studies. For many Mexicanos, flowing back and forth between rural and urban areas meant increased social and cultural interaction as well as improved economic viability as they participated in both factory work and farm labor. In addition, my chapter on Mexicanos in the United Auto Workers Union (UAW) is one of the first to explore the impact of one of the nation’s largest unions on Mexicanos.