"This Street is Essentially Mexican": An Oral History of the Mexican American Community of Saginaw, Michigan, 1920-1980

“This Street is Essentially Mexican”: An Oral History of the Mexican American Community of Saginaw, Michigan, 1920-1980 by Steven Rosales During the era of the First World War, Mexican migrants from Texas and Mexico were pulled northward by a number of employment opportunities in the greater Midwest, including sugar companies, railroads, agriculture, and manufacturing. These migratory networks were often seasonal in nature, especially with regard to agriculture, but many migrants were persuaded to settle permanently due to the prospect of higher pay, the less overt discrimination found in the North, and the difficulties associated with constant travel. By the Great Depression, Mexican colonias (barrios) were established in cities and towns across the Great Lakes region. As historian Zaragosa Vargas describes it, “To survive, Mexicans had to depend on wage labor obtained through migration. Although they could earn a living in Texas, their second-class status propelled them to extend the search for a better life to the North.”1 One such location was the city of Saginaw, located in Eastern Michigan at the crossroads of the fertile Saginaw Valley and the greater Detroit industrial zone with its foundries and booming automobile industry. With the onset of the Great Depression, however, and the dramatic decline in available jobs in Michigan and across the United States, there emerged a massive effort to repatriate individuals of Mexican ancestry back to Mexico. Against this backdrop, Saginaw’s Mexican American population fell sharply. It would grow once again during the Second World War and thereafter as renewed demands for cheap labor in a variety of industries lured Mexicans and Mexican Americans northward. Despite this continuous presence of Mexican American communities in the Midwest since World War I, an emphasis on the 1 Zaragosa Vargas, Proletarians of the North: A History of Mexican Industrial Workers in Detroit and the Midwest, 1917-1933 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 4. The Michigan Historical Review 40:2 (Fall 2014): 33-62©2014 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved 34 The Michigan Historical Review American Southwest, in particular the states of Texas and California, has dominated Chicano/a historiography.2 The Southwest’s proximity to the Mexican border and its large Mexican American population base has influenced this geographical bias. Another factor, arguably, is the legacy of the Chicano Movement from a geographic perspective. The majority of its events occurred in various Southwestern locations as the movement unfolded in the mid-1960s, thereby placing greater focus on the plight of the Mexican American community along the US-Mexico border, an approach that subsequently continued at college campuses as Chicano/a Studies and Southwestern Borderland Studies normalized a traditional focus on the American Southwest and northern Mexico. Focusing on Saginaw thus helps expand the scope of Chicano/a historiography beyond the American Southwest. This analysis in particular, explores the generational growth of Saginaw’s Mexican American population from 1920 to 1980, with special consideration given to the process of arrival in the city, migrant field work throughout the state of Michigan, and foundry work (particularly in Saginaw’s Grey Iron Foundry, a subsidiary of General Motors). Moreover, these forms of wage labor were accompanied by a variety of cultural practices that sought greater inclusion into the mainstream: community dances, commercial endeavors, religious life, and political mobilization are testaments to the quality of life issues that motivated the community’s pursuit of a better life.3 Furthermore, these experiences were also gender specific, affecting men and women differently, and at times providing the latter with opportunities to assume positions of authority within the larger struggle for community uplift.4 A limited but growing body of scholarship has documented the contours of the Mexican American labor experience and selected aspects 2 I employ “Mexican American,” “Tejano/a” and “Chicano/a” to describe individuals of Mexican ancestry having US citizenship through birth or naturalization. The second term refers to Texas residents having Mexican ancestry and the latter references the modern era, in particular the Chicano Movement, from roughly 1965 through 1975. The term “Mexican” will designate Mexican nationals living in the US. Lastly, I utilize “Latino/a” as an all-encompassing form of identification. The term “Hispanic,” as used...