Steel Barrio: The Great Mexican Migration to South Chicago, 1915–1940 by Michael Innis-Jiménez (review)

The two words “steel” and “barrio” are rarely paired. One reason is that historical studies of Mexican barrios have been limited to Southwestern cities. Another is that steel mill histories have focused on European immigrants and black migrants. In the past decade, scholars have corrected this regional bias of Chicano history by producing important monograph studies in Midwest cities, including Chicago. Gabriela Arredondo and Lilia Fernandez have produced pathbreaking studies on “Mexican Chicago,” the city with the second-largest population of Mexican-born immigrants in the United States. Steel Barrio is the newest addition. Unlike previous studies, Innis-Jiménez’s work focuses on South Chicago’s Mexican community, which emerged in the shadow of steel mills from 1915 to 1940.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part examines the familiar story of Mexican migration from western Mexico to Chicago. The Mexican Revolution and the Cristero Rebellion were two major events that prompted many to flee the political chaos in Mexico for the United States. Restrictive immigration legislation passed between 1917 and 1924 greatly reduced the immigrant labor supply from southern and eastern Europe. But it was “race and riots,” according to Innis-Jiménez, that greeted Mexicans arriving in Chicago. The 1919 steel strikes and race riots produced a hostile racial climate for African Americans that prompted employers to hire Mexican workers because they were cheap, dependable, and docile. Labor agents or enganchistas located and recruited Mexican workers and delivered them to their prospective Chicago employers.

The second part of the book focuses on how Mexicans were received by their new bosses and neighbors. Many of their neighbors were immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and African American migrants from the South. The newcomers had few housing options, so they settled in the cheapest and most polluted section of the city leading Innis-Jiménez to contend that these “less-than-white Mexicans suffered from additional environmental racism” (p. 59). Many unattached men or solos lived in bunkhouses on steel mill property or in boarding houses with non-Mexicans, whereas families lived in boxcar camps or in cramped apartment buildings. Despite their marginalization and racialization, Mexicans were not victims. They actively changed their physical environment by building a Catholic church, opening small businesses, forming voluntary organizations, publishing Spanish-language newspapers, and organizing cultural celebrations. What set them apart from other immigrant groups in South Chicago was their proximity to Mexico, which allowed for a steady influx of new immigrants from the south, and permitted workers to embrace a “sojourner attitude” that discouraged them from taking out naturalization papers and settling permanently in the city.

The third part examines how Mexican South Chicago lived in the face of high unemployment, denial of relief services, and repatriation campaigns during the Great Depression. Individuals like Mercedes Ríos, a bilingual social worker from Texas, and Alfredo de Avila, a Mexican steelworker-turned-labor-organizer, along with the popular-front organization El Frente Popular Mexicano, helped to ameliorate the suffering of Mexicans who remained in South Chicago. Some of the male leaders emerged from organized sports and recreational activities during the economic crisis. The South Chicago neighborhood fielded competitive semi-pro baseball teams that traveled to other communities to play against non-Mexican teams, and their victories became a symbol of community and nationalistic pride. From these teams emerged several multipurpose sport clubs like Yaquis, Excelsior, Atlas, and Monterrey. Although sports teams and organizations expanded recreational opportunities for male South Chicagoans, they also reinforced gender hierarchies: women were limited to basketball.

Supported by rich archival research and oral histories, Innis-Jiménez successfully argues that Mexicans forged a “third space” in South Chicago that was locally specific and distinct from that of other immigrant groups in Chicago, and also from life in Mexico. Unlike other Mexican neighborhoods in Chicago with strong settlement...