Navigating Ethno-Racial Currents

Abstract

This article focuses on Mexican experiences of ethnic and race relations in interwar Chicago. Mexican contact with European immigrant groups and blacks was critical in the formation of Mexican ethno-racial understandings of themselves and their place in the ethno-racial orders of Chicago. The article moves through several sites in the daily lives of Mexican men and women in which they experienced racializing incidents. Each provides a critical thread in the evolving tapestry of Mexican racial positioning. Much of the interaction was expressed in male-male conflicts suggesting that this seemingly gender-neutral process and the increasingly pejorative meanings assigned to “being Mexican” in Chicago played out in gendered-male terms. Taken together, these factors prove that ethno-racial dynamics in Chicago were much more complex than previously suggested. They underscore the simplistic inadequacies of a black-white dichotomy while also clarifying the power these tropes held in shaping Mexican circumstances and opportunities during this period in the history of the Windy City.