Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz (review)

Barrio America presents a compelling new interpretation of the twentieth-century urban crisis that placed Latinos at the heart of urban revitalization. While many credit the professional creative class for the rebirth of cities after decades of depopulation and disinvestment, A. K. Sandoval-Strausz argues that it was Latino migrantes who moved into urban neighborhoods across the United States, revived flagging real estate markets, filled vacant business districts, and transformed the urban landscape. Focusing on Chicago's Little Village and Dallas's Oak Cliff neighborhoods, it reveals how national and global forces reshaped urban life in the postwar period, and illuminates how Latinos "saved" the American city and built meaningful lives, claimed rights, and remade urban space to suit their needs.

Urban populations began dwindling in the 1950s and 1960s due to numerous factors, including manufacturing firms' relocation to suburbs, federal highway expansion, discriminatory lending practices, and White residents' fleeing desegregation. Latinos, who had long-standing ties in both Chicago and Dallas but still made up a small proportion of the total population, held a tenuous position in each city's racial hierarchy, acting as buffers between anxious White residents and African Americans home-buyers seeking access to quality housing and better amenities. Between 1965 and the 1980s, major immigration reform and economic shifts in Mexico and Latin America led millions of migrantes to make their homes in the United States, and the "Latinization" of American cities rapidly expanded. Latinos arrived, Sandoval-Strausz writes, "at the point when they were most needed" (153). In cities that had been hemorrhaging people, jobs, and tax revenue, migrantes stabilized urban neighborhoods by renting and purchasing affordable housing, filling the needs of the labor force, and establishing new businesses in empty storefronts, bringing vibrant community life back to urban areas. As property owners and members of a growing political constituency, they flexed their power through protests and inter-ethnic urban political coalitions to elect African American and Latino candidates into city government despite the efforts of established political machines to maintain the status quo. Beginning in the 1980s, greater numbers of migrantes displaced by civil war in Central America arrived in U.S. cities and continued to contribute to the vitality of these communities.

In separate and especially fascinating chapters on transnationalism and Latino urbanism, Sandoval-Strausz illuminates how migrantes and their families refashioned abandoned city spaces into places for meaningful interaction and mutual support. The transition of plazas as communal spaces into barrio business districts and housing that prioritized walking and sociability harkened to the mid-century vision of New Urbanists. Even local businesses benefitted from Latinization. In Oak Cliff, the Charco Broiler restaurant saved itself from insolvency by adding jalapeños and other menu offerings to cater to their new neighbors (249). The book closes with the heightened anti-immigrant rhetoric of the last several decades, including the especially virulent strain evident in national politics since 2016, and the increasing gentrification of the very neighborhoods migrantes saved from ruin. Sandoval-Strausz concludes that the two most pressing threats facing these communities are the "people who have money and are drawn to these neighborhoods" and those "who hold power and are contemptuous of them" (325).

Barrio America makes a forceful case for the positive and necessary contributions Latino migrantes made to American cities in crisis, despite the structural limitations, discrimination, and xenophobia they encountered. Weaving together data drawn from census records, government reports, newspaper coverage, and rich oral histories, it builds on recent excellent scholarship on Latinos in the Midwest and makes significant contributions to Texas history, bringing cities like Dallas—whose Latino history deserves more attention—into the fold of urban studies. Barrio America distills the complex histories of urbanization, immigration reform, foreign policy, and Latino community formation in a way that is engaging and accessible for academic, student, and general audiences alike.