Session Abstract

“Urban Latinidad: New Directions in Latino History”

 This panel highlights new cutting edge work in Latino/a urban history by up and coming professors who are in the process of completing their first books. Focusing on traditionally understudied Latino/a urban communities, New Orleans, Chicago, Birmingham, and San Francisco, each scholar brings a new dimension to the fields of Latino History and Studies.  Focusing on the relatively new and understudied Latino immigrant community of Birmingham, Alabama, Michael Innis-Jiménez comparatively analyzes first-wave immigrants to the Urban South in the late twentieth century with first-wave Mexican immigration to Chicago and Detroit in the early twentieth century. Innis-Jimenez uses social and environmental history as lenses to analyze what happens to a new immigrant community during economic turmoil and rising anti-immigrant sentiment. Complicating our understanding of race relations in postwar Chicago, Lilia Fernandez examines Chicago’s racial dynamics as large numbers of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans entered ethnic “white” neighborhoods. These new Latino/a residents tested the racial and ethnic boundaries of those communities and their presence in such neighborhoods often precipitated racial hostility, conflict with local police, and urban unrest that cannot be explained through a black and white lens. Eduardo Contreras explores the emergence of Latinidad in San Francisco, one of the few multi-ethnic Latino communities prior to 1980.  He examines the construction and emergence of Latinidad in that city by examining five community institutions over five decades starting in the 1930s.  Contreras argues that, by examining thes institutions, it becomes clear that Latinidad is not a product of one single group or one historical period, but of multiple institutions with different objectives.  Julie Weise focuses on Mexicans in New Orleans between 1910 and 1939 by examining their place in the Southern Regional obsession with the binary of black and white.  Weise’s paper considers the roll of local and transnational power holders who created the “fictive terms of racial segregation in New Orleans” that allowed Mexicans to enjoy the privileges of whiteness in the highly racialized Southern city.  These four papers, focusing on four understudied urban, Latino/a populations, bring together the fascinating geographical, political, and cultural differences of Latin American diasporas in American cities.