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| 149 7 Making “The International City” Home Latinos in Twentieth-Century Lorain, Ohio Pablo Mitchell and Haley Pollack Lorain, Ohio, along Lake Erie thirty miles west of Cleveland, is at present the home of 14,000 Latinos, about twenty percent of the population in a city of 68,000. Puerto Ricans are the largest majority, with over 10,000 citizens, while almost 2,500 residents are identified as Mexicans. African Americans currently represent an additional fifteen percent of the city population . Latinos first settled in “The International City” (as Lorain city boosters dubbed it) in significant numbers in the 1920s when ethnic Mexicans migrated from Texas and other borderlands regions. Drawn by jobs in the steel industry, 1,300 men, according to one account, arrived to work in the steel mills in 1923 and 1924. The men settled in South Lorain, within walking distance of the steel mills and surrounded by other immigrant communities, largely from southern and eastern Europe.1 Twenty years later, the Lorain Morning Journal reported the arrival of “26 Puerto Ricans” to Lorain; they joined a Puerto Rican community that by the early 1950s had grown to 3,700, some seven percent of Lorain’s 50,000 residents. This chapter examines two critical periods in the history of Latinos in Lorain: the 1920s and the immediate postwar period of the late 1940s and the early 1950s. Through the use of newspaper accounts, court documents such as naturalization records and civil cases, and U.S. census enumerations, this chapter describes multiple aspects of the lives of Latinos in Lorain, including marriage patterns, residential geography, and community formation.2 Carving out spaces of their own, Latinos in Lorain created a community distinct but not wholly separate from the town’s white and African American citizens . Latinos negotiated their status among Lorain’s other inhabitants with whom they often lived, married, and worked, making cross-racial and crosscultural connections. 150 | Pablo Mitchell and Haley Pollack In examining overlooked locations like Lorain, Ohio, scholars can begin to fill in gaps in the history of Latinos in the United States, expanding past major urban centers and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The chapter broadens the field of Latino studies, and Latino history in particular, by focusing on sexuality. In what follows, we argue that thr key to Latinos’ ability to claim citizenship and civic respectability in Lorain may have been their ability to present themselves as sexually proper. Though significant numbers of Latinos lived in Lorain during both periods, it was only in the 1940s and 1950s that they appeared in the popular press as respectable citizens. Unlike the earlier period, where the Latino community was predominantly male and childless, there were far more Latino families in the postwar era. Thus sexual respectability, always a key component of citizenship, was far easier for postwar Latinos to claim than for those arriving in the 1920s and 1930s. The study of sexuality, in this case is whether domestic lives are portrayed as marital and reproductive or non-normative and “queer,” helps explain the increasing acceptance of Latinos in mid-century Lorain Latinos in Lorain Few historians have focused on the history of Latinos in Lorain. In fact, some of the most valuable sources of information on early twentieth-century settlements are sociological accounts. In 1926, George Edson’s study of Lorain was one of several dozen investigations of Mexican communities in the Midwest and on the East Coast that he produced in the 1920s, including “Mexicans in Sioux City, Iowa,” “Mexicans in Pittsburgh,” “Mexicans in New York City,” and “Mexicans in Saginaw.” Fifteen years later, Herbert Krauss’s 1941 master’s thesis, “Immigrant Organizations in Lorain, Ohio,” included brief comments on “the seven Mexican organizations existing in the Mexican quarter of South Lorain,” as well as noting an “Honorary Commission” organized by the Mexican consul’s office in Cleveland.3 More recently, historians have begun to examine the arrival of Latinos in Lorain. In 1981, Frank Jacinto published a valuable, though brief, overview in his “Mexican Community in Lorain, Ohio.” Jacinto notes that “the first Mexicans , consisting of two or three families, to settle in Lorain, arrived about 1921,” and that they had likely been workers of the B&O Railroad Company. Quoting another sociological study from 1931, he describes the “Mexican racial stock in 1930 as: Indians 23%, White 3%, and Mestizo 74%.” Perhaps the most important contribution of Jacinto’s work is his detailed description of the development and maintenance of early community...

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