Chicago Latina Trailblazers

Chicago Latina Trailblazers PDF Author: Rita D. Hernández
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 025204729X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Mexican American and Puerto Rican women have long taken up the challenge to improve the lives of Chicagoans in the city’s Latino/a/x communities. Rita D. Hernández, Leticia Villarreal Sosa, and Elena R. Gutiérrez present testimonies by Latina leaders who blazed new trails and shaped Latina Chicago history from the 1960s through today. Taking a do-it-all attitude, these women advanced agendas, built institutions, forged alliances, and created essential resources that Latino/a/x communities lacked. Time and again, they found themselves the first Latina to hold their post or part of the first Latino/a/x institution of its kind. Just as often, early grassroots efforts to address issues affecting themselves, their families, and their neighborhoods grew into larger endeavors. Their experiences ranged from public schools to healthcare to politics to broadcast media, and each woman’s story shows how her work changed countless lives and still reverberates across the entire city. An eyewitness view of an unknown history, Chicago Latina Trailblazers reveals the vision and passion that fueled a group of women in the vanguard of reform. Contributors: Ana Castillo, Maria B. Cerda, Carmen Chico, Aracelis Flecha Figueroa, Aida Luz Maisonet Giachello, Mary Gonzales, Ada Nivia López, Emma Lozano, Virginia Martinez, Carmen Mendoza, Elena Mulcahy, Guadalupe Reyes, Luz Maria B. Solis, and Carmen Velasquez

Chicago Latina Trailblazers

Chicago Latina Trailblazers PDF Author: Rita D. Hernández
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 025204729X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book Here

Book Description
Mexican American and Puerto Rican women have long taken up the challenge to improve the lives of Chicagoans in the city’s Latino/a/x communities. Rita D. Hernández, Leticia Villarreal Sosa, and Elena R. Gutiérrez present testimonies by Latina leaders who blazed new trails and shaped Latina Chicago history from the 1960s through today. Taking a do-it-all attitude, these women advanced agendas, built institutions, forged alliances, and created essential resources that Latino/a/x communities lacked. Time and again, they found themselves the first Latina to hold their post or part of the first Latino/a/x institution of its kind. Just as often, early grassroots efforts to address issues affecting themselves, their families, and their neighborhoods grew into larger endeavors. Their experiences ranged from public schools to healthcare to politics to broadcast media, and each woman’s story shows how her work changed countless lives and still reverberates across the entire city. An eyewitness view of an unknown history, Chicago Latina Trailblazers reveals the vision and passion that fueled a group of women in the vanguard of reform. Contributors: Ana Castillo, Maria B. Cerda, Carmen Chico, Aracelis Flecha Figueroa, Aida Luz Maisonet Giachello, Mary Gonzales, Ada Nivia López, Emma Lozano, Virginia Martinez, Carmen Mendoza, Elena Mulcahy, Guadalupe Reyes, Luz Maria B. Solis, and Carmen Velasquez

Latina/o/x Education in Chicago

Latina/o/x Education in Chicago PDF Author: Isaura Pulido
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252053508
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
In this collection, local experts use personal narratives and empirical data to explore the history of Mexican American and Puerto Rican education in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system. The essays focus on three themes: the historical context of segregated and inferior schooling for Latina/o/x students; the changing purposes and meanings of education for Latina/o/x students from the 1950s through today; and Latina/o/x resistance to educational reforms grounded in neoliberalism. Contributors look at stories of student strength and resistance, the oppressive systems forced on Mexican American women, the criminalization of Puerto Ricans fighting for liberatory education, and other topics of educational significance. As they show, many harmful past practices remain the norm--or have become worse. Yet Latina/o/x communities and students persistently engage in transformative practices shaping new approaches to education that promise to reverberate not only in the city but nationwide. Insightful and enlightening, Latina/o/x Education in Chicago brings to light the ongoing struggle for educational equity in the Chicago Public Schools.

Puerto Rican Chicago

Puerto Rican Chicago PDF Author: Mirelsie Velázquez
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252053206
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
Winner of the Critics’ Choice Book awards of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA-CCBA) The postwar migration of Puerto Rican men and women to Chicago brought thousands of their children into city schools. These children's classroom experience continued the colonial project begun in their homeland, where American ideologies had dominated Puerto Rican education since the island became a US territory. Mirelsie Velázquez tells how Chicago's Puerto Ricans pursued their educational needs in a society that constantly reminded them of their status as second-class citizens. Communities organized a media culture that addressed their concerns while creating and affirming Puerto Rican identities. Education also offered women the only venue to exercise power, and they parlayed their positions to take lead roles in activist and political circles. In time, a politicized Puerto Rican community gave voice to a previously silenced group--and highlighted that colonialism does not end when immigrants live among their colonizers. A perceptive look at big-city community building, Puerto Rican Chicago reveals the links between justice in education and a people's claim to space in their new home.

Chicanas of 18th Street

Chicanas of 18th Street PDF Author: Leonard G. Ramirez
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 025209302X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Overflowing with powerful testimonies of six female community activists who have lived and worked in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, Chicanas of 18th Street reveals the convictions and approaches of those organizing for social reform. In chronicling a pivotal moment in the history of community activism in Chicago, the women discuss how education, immigration, religion, identity, and acculturation affected the Chicano movement. Chicanas of 18th Street underscores the hierarchies of race, gender, and class while stressing the interplay of individual and collective values in the development of community reform. Highlighting the women's motivations, initiatives, and experiences in politics during the 1960s and 1970s, these rich personal accounts reveal the complexity of the Chicano movement, conflicts within the movement, and the importance of teatro and cultural expressions to the movement. Also detailed are vital interactions between members of the Chicano movement with leftist and nationalist community members and the influence of other activist groups such as African Americans and Marxists.

The Mexican Revolution in Chicago

The Mexican Revolution in Chicago PDF Author: John H Flores
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252050479
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Few realize that long before the political activism of the 1960s, there existed a broad social movement in the United States spearheaded by a generation of Mexican immigrants inspired by the revolution in their homeland. Many revolutionaries eschewed U.S. citizenship and have thus far been lost to history, though they have much to teach us about the increasingly international world of today. John H. Flores follows this revolutionary generation of Mexican immigrants and the transnational movements they created in the United States. Through a careful, detailed study of Chicagoland, the area in and around Chicago, Flores examines how competing immigrant organizations raised funds, joined labor unions and churches, engaged the Spanish-language media, and appealed in their own ways to the dignity and unity of other Mexicans. Painting portraits of liberals and radicals, who drew support from the Mexican government, and conservatives, who found a homegrown American ally in the Roman Catholic Church, Flores recovers a complex and little known political world shaped by events south of the U.S border.

Bringing Aztlan to Mexican Chicago

Bringing Aztlan to Mexican Chicago PDF Author: Jose Gamaliel Gonzalez
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252090144
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Bringing Aztlán to Mexican Chicago is the autobiography of Jóse Gamaliel González, an impassioned artist willing to risk all for the empowerment of his marginalized and oppressed community. Through recollections emerging in a series of interviews conducted over a period of six years by his friend Marc Zimmerman, González looks back on his life and his role in developing Mexican, Chicano, and Latino art as a fundamental dimension of the city he came to call home. Born near Monterey, Mexico, and raised in a steel mill town in northwest Indiana, González studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame. Settling in Chicago, he founded two major art groups: El Movimiento Artístico Chicano (MARCH) in the 1970s and Mi Raza Arts Consortium (MIRA) in the 1980s. With numerous illustrations, this book portrays González's all-but-forgotten community advocacy, his commitments and conflicts, and his long struggle to bring quality arts programming to the city. By turns dramatic and humorous, his narrative also covers his bouts of illness, his relationships with other artists and arts promoters, and his place within city and barrio politics.

Latina Lives in Milwaukee

Latina Lives in Milwaukee PDF Author: Theresa Delgadillo
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252081361
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Milwaukee's small but vibrant Mexican and Mexican American community of the 1920s grew over succeeding decades to incorporate Mexican, Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central American, and Caribbean migration to the city. Drawing on years of interviews and collaboration with interviewees, Theresa Delgadillo offers a set of narratives that explore the fascinating family, community, work, and career experiences of Milwaukee's Latinas during this time of transformation. Through the stories of these women, Delgadillo caringly provides access to a wide variety of Latina experiences: early Mexican settlers entering careers as secretaries and entrepreneurs; Salvadoran and Puerto Rican women who sought educational opportunity in the U.S., sometimes in flight from political conflicts; Mexican women becoming leather workers and drill press operators; and second-generation Latinas entering the professional classes. These women show how members of diverse generations, ethnicities, and occupations embraced interethnic collaboration and coalition but also negotiated ethnic and racial discrimination, domestic violence, workplace hostilities, and family separations. A one-of-a-kind collection, Latina Lives in Milwaukee sheds light on the journeys undertaken then and now by Latinas in the region, and lays the foundation for the further study of the Latina experience in the Midwest. With contributions from Ramona Arsiniega, María Monreal Cameron, Daisy Cubías, Elvira Sandoval Denk, Rosemary Sandoval Le Moine, Antonia Morales, Carmen Murguia, Gloria Sandoval Rozman, Margarita Sandoval Skare, Olga Valcourt Schwartz, and Olivia Villarreal.

Negotiating Latinidad

Negotiating Latinidad PDF Author: Frances R. Aparicio
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252051556
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Longstanding Mexican and Puerto Rican populations have helped make people of mixed nationalities—MexiGuatamalans, CubanRicans, and others—an important part of Chicago's Latina/o scene. Intermarriage between Guatemalans, Colombians, and Cubans have further diversified this community-within-a-community. Yet we seldom consider the lives and works of these Intralatino/as when we discuss Latino/as in the United States.In Negotiating Latinidad, a cross-section of Chicago's second-generation Intralatino/as offer their experiences of negotiating between and among the national communities embedded in their families. Frances R. Aparicio's rich interviews reveal Intralatino/as proud of their multiplicity and particularly skilled at understanding difference and boundaries. Their narratives explore both the ongoing complexities of family life and the challenges of fitting into our larger society, in particular the struggle to claim a space—and a sense of belonging—in a Latina/o America that remains highly segmented in scholarship. The result is an emotionally powerful, theoretically rigorous exploration of culture, hybridity, and transnationalism that points the way forward for future scholarship on Intralatino/a identity.

Chicago Católico

Chicago Católico PDF Author: Deborah E. Kanter
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 025205184X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Today, over one hundred Chicago-area Catholic churches offer Spanish language mass to congregants. How did the city's Mexican population, contained in just two parishes prior to 1960, come to reshape dozens of parishes and neighborhoods? Deborah E. Kanter tells the story of neighborhood change and rebirth in Chicago's Mexican American communities. She unveils a vibrant history of Mexican American and Mexican immigrant relations as remembered by laity and clergy, schoolchildren and their female religious teachers, parish athletes and coaches, European American neighbors, and from the immigrant women who organized as guadalupanas and their husbands who took part in the Holy Name Society. Kanter shows how the newly arrived mixed memories of home into learning the ways of Chicago to create new identities. In an ever-evolving city, Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans’ fierce devotion to their churches transformed neighborhoods such as Pilsen. The first-ever study of Mexican-descent Catholicism in the city, Chicago Católico illuminates a previously unexplored facet of the urban past and provides present-day lessons for American communities undergoing ethnic integration and succession.

Defending Their Own in the Cold

Defending Their Own in the Cold PDF Author: Marc Zimmerman
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252093496
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Defending Their Own in the Cold: The Cultural Turns of U.S. Puerto Ricans explores U.S. Puerto Rican culture in past and recent contexts. The book presents East Coast, Midwest, and Chicago cultural production while exploring Puerto Rican musical, film, artistic, and literary performance. Working within the theoretical frame of cultural, postcolonial, and diasporic studies, Marc Zimmerman relates the experience of Puerto Ricans to that of Chicanos and Cuban Americans, showing how even supposedly mainstream U.S. Puerto Ricans participate in a performative culture that embodies elements of possible cultural "Ricanstruction." Defending Their Own in the Cold examines various dimensions of U.S. Puerto Rican artistic life, including relations with other ethnic groups and resistance to colonialism and cultural assimilation. To illustrate how Puerto Ricans have survived and created new identities and relations out of their colonized and diasporic circumstances, Zimmerman looks at the cultural examples of Latino entertainment stars such as Jennifer Lopez and Benicio del Toro, visual artists Juan Sánchez, Ramón Flores, and Elizam Escobar, as well as Nuyorican dancer turned Midwest poet Carmen Pursifull. The book includes a comprehensive chapter on the development of U.S. Puerto Rican literature and a pioneering essay on Chicago Puerto Rican writing. A final essay considers Cuban cultural attitudes towards Puerto Ricans in a testimonial narrative by Miguel Barnet and reaches conclusions about the past and future of U.S. Puerto Rican culture. Zimmerman offers his own "semi-outsider" point of reference as a Jewish American Latin Americanist who grew up near New York City, matured in California, went on to work with and teach Latinos in the Midwest, and eventually married a woman from a Puerto Rican family with island and U.S. roots.