Latino Chicago

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

TThis major-level course is designed to provide students with a substantive overview of Latina/o immigration and community formation in Chicago during the twentieth century, and how it became one of the largest Latino cities in the United States. The Windy City's rise in the nineteenth century as an industrial metropolis transformed it as a magnet for capital, culture, and labor. A series of key events around the turn of the century and into the early decades of the twentieth century - the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, the rise of economic production during World War I (1914-1918), and the Immigration Act of 1924 that greatly reduced Eastern and Southern European immigration - would come to shape the patterns, processes, and terms of Latina/o migration into Chicago, particularly those of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. Mexicans and other Latin Americans joined the Great Migrations of African Americans and ethnic whites to look for better opportunities in the north, and since then, Latino Chicagoans have forged communities as they have also negotiated the broader social, cultural, and political currents of American history throughout the twentieth century. This course will introduce students to these broader patterns as explored through recent scholarship on Latinos/as in Chicago. Students will also read key primary sources in the field and consider the historiographical debates about retelling this aspect of Chicago's history.