Faith and Family for Early Mexican Immigrants to Chicago: The Diary of Elidia Barroso

Elidia Barroso emigrated as a young woman from Mexico to the United States in 1917 and settled in Chicago in the 1920s. She kept a hand-written diary that reflected her family history, internal migration within revolutionary Mexico, and her first years in Texas and Illinois. The Barroso diary offers an unusually personal story from the first wave of Mexican immigrants in the early twentieth century. The following selection features a Spanish-language transcription of the diary and its English-language translation, thus offering an accessible primary source about a female Mexican immigrant. The introductory essay considers how Elidia Barroso’s story exemplified the gender and kinship norms of her era, as well as the personal piety and more formal Catholic worship that colored many immigrants’ experiences.