Barrios Norteños: St. Paul and Midwestern Mexican Communities in the Twentieth Century / Edition 1

by Dionicio Nodín Valdés

Overview

Mexican communities in the Midwestern United States have a history that extends back to the turn of the twentieth century, when a demand for workers in several mass industries brought Mexican agricultural laborers to jobs and homes in the cities. This book offers a comprehensive social, labor, and cultural history of these workers and their descendants, using the Mexican barrio of "San Pablo" (St. Paul) Minnesota as a window on the region.

Through extensive archival research and numerous interviews, Dennis Valdés explores how Mexicans created ethnic spaces in Midwestern cities and how their lives and communities have changed over the course of the twentieth century. He examines the process of community building before World War II, the assimilation of Mexicans into the industrial working class after the war, the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and more recent changes resulting from industrial restructuring and unprecedented migration and population growth. Throughout, Valdés pays particular attention to Midwestern Mexicans' experiences of inequality and struggles against domination and compares them to Mexicans' experiences in other regions of the U.S.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780292787445
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	05/01/2000
Series:	Pike Subsidy Series
Edition description:	1 ED
Pages:	406
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.91(d)

About the Author

Dionicio Nodín Valdés is Professor of History at Michigan State University.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Mexican Inequality and the Midwest
  • Modeling Chicano Inequality
  • Mexicans and Midwestern Geography
• Chapter 2: Reckoning with Winter
  • Last of the Immigrants
  • Urban Farmworkers
  • Organizing and the Community
• Chapter 3: Memory of Hunger
  • The Drive to Repatriate
  • The Internal Colonia
  • Agents of Americanization
• Chapter 4: Good Solid Workers
  • An Urban Proletariat
  • Dilemmas of Americanism
  • Dismantling the Barrio
• Chapter 5: El Movimiento: Becoming a Little More Militant
  • Reconstructing a Barrio
  • El Movimiento and the Community
  • Agency and Agencies
  • The Struggle for Knowledge: Chicano Studies
• Chapter 6: Completing a Circle
  • Migration and Settlement
  • Chasing the Dream
  • Mexican Menace
  • Contradictions of Culture
• Retrospective
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

What People are Saying About This

Juan Gómez-Quiñones

This is to date the most comprehensively narrated and researched work on Mexicans in the Midwest.... It clearly supersedes [past published works] and is also of higher quality, I think, than most other works published in the field of Chicano studies in recent times.
-- Juan Gómez-Quiñones, Professor of History, UCLA

Juan Gómez-Quiñones

This is to date the most comprehensively narrated and researched work on Mexicans in the Midwest.... It clearly supersedes [past published works] and is also of higher quality, I think, than most other works published in the field of Chicano studies in recent times.

Editorial Reviews

Although this scholarly treatise is often burdened by the weight of academic language, t remains an important contribution to the literature of ethnic and Chicano studies. In an earlier book, El Norte (1991), Valdes (Chicano studies, Univ. of Minnesota) examined agricultural workers in the Great Lakes region; here he investigates Mexicans in San Pablo (St. Paul, MN) and the Midwest in general. He studies their social, cultural, and economic evolution, focusing on group inequality among the Midwest's Mexican communities, which he considers a central them in Chicano studies. Beginning before World War II, Valdes documents the Chicano community's development in Minnesota and compares it with Mexican communities in the southwestern United States. His case-study method enables him to draw these comparisons, and he sees increasing similarities between Mexicans in the Midwest and their more traditional status in the Southwest. Heavily documented with secondary and newspaper sources, this book is recommended for academic libraries with collections in sociology and ethnic studies.-Boyd Childress, Auburn Univ. Lib., AL

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