Brown in the Windy City by Lilia Fernández

Author:Lilia Fernández
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sources: Kitagawa and Taueber, Local Community Fact Book, 1960; Chicago Fact Book Consortium, Local Community Fact Book, 1970 and 1980, 84–85, 87–88, 364.

*In 1960 and 1970, most Latinos/as were classified as white. By 1980, a larger number of “Spanish-origin” people chose to identify as “other race” or were identified as such. Nonetheless, the number identified as “of Spanish origin” in 1980 does not correspond exactly to the “other nonwhite race,” as some may still have self-selected or been classified as “white” or “black.” The dramatic decline in “white” population from 1970 to 1980, then, reflects not only the flight of European Americans but the shift of many Latinas/os’ racial identification from “white” to “other.” Some of that demographic change occurred in the previous decade (1960–70) but is not discernible because so many Latinas/os were still being identified as white.

†These terms were used in 1970 and 1980, respectively. The label “of Spanish origin” was assigned independently of race, based on the logic that Spanish-speaking people could be of any race. Most “Spanish-origin” people were counted under the “white” racial category in 1960 and 1970, though a number who self-identified as “black” are enumerated as such.

‡This is an estimate calculated by adding the total Puerto Rican and Mexican foreign born or foreign stock.

§Ruth Horowitz estimated that by the early 1970s, half of the ethnic Mexican population in the neighborhood was actually born in the United States to US-born parents, thus making them third-generation Mexican Americans. Horowitz, Honor and the American Dream, 241n19. If this is in fact accurate, as it may be given that the “Spanish-origin” population enumerated in 1970 is much larger than the sum of those identified as Puerto Rican or Mexican foreign born or of foreign parentage, then it stands to reason that there were many more “Spanish-language/Spanish-origin” residents in 1960 who were third-generation and not captured in that category.

Mexicans and Neighborhood Change

For decades, Pilsen and South Lawndale had housed a mix of foreign-born Europeans and native-born whites, “spatially integrated but socially segregated.” Various European immigrants crossed paths on neighborhood streets but generally attended their own churches, cultural centers, and social clubs. Many immigrants in fact held deep-seated ethnic and national antagonisms toward one another (Poles, Slavs, Czechs, Germans, etc.), and local churches reflected these ethnic and national divisions.22 Pilsen’s East End, for example, had three Catholic parishes within several blocks of one another, attesting to the ethnic exclusivity of religious worship. Irish immigrants had founded Sacred Heart parish in the late nineteenth century; Lithuanian immigrants established Providence of God only a few blocks away in 1900; and Slovak immigrants raised St. Joseph parish and elementary school just blocks from there at the turn of the twentieth century as well.23 Although they socialized with their own, such immigrants rarely lived in isolation from one another, unlike the stark segregation African Americans experienced. Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, however, European ethnic differences declined in significance and European Americans more firmly gripped a shared racial identity. One researcher

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.