Bodies in Motion and the Seduction of Jazz: Taxi-Dance Halls and Urban Nightlife in Chicago's Im/migrant Communities

During the 1920s and into the 1940s, taxi-dance halls in Chicago became urban spaces in which both leisure and labor became central for working-class im/migrant men and women. Despite its negative reputation as locations of “vice” and “illegal” sexual activities (according to sociologists and moral reformers of the Progressive Era), the taxi-dance halls of Chicago served as a microcosm of the broader diversities and tensions within im/migrant racial and ethnic communities in early twentieth century Chicago. As African Americans and European immigrant ethnics moved to the city of Chicago because of its promises of economic independence and opportunity, young Filipino college students and workers were likewise migrating from the Philippines as a product of U.S. colonial relations for similar reasons.

This project seeks to explore the taxi-dance hall as an interracial, inter-ethnic, gendered, classed, and global social institution. It takes as its subject the experiences of Filipino immigrant men, African American jazz musicians from the South, and white European ethnic women in a growing labor market and an expanding world of commercialized urban leisure. Within this triangulation of men and women’s experiences in the taxi-dance hall, they shaped a discourse between larger themes of vice and entertainment, labor and leisure as well as virtue and morality. This is a story of identity crossings, as European ethnic women and men of color negotiated and challenged social and cultural norms through the fluidity of their informal and formal economic, social, and sometimes sexual relationships.