Chicago as a Mexican American hub
 

It looks like Chicago became a hub for Mexican immigration in the 1950s? Beofre the 1990s it seems like it was the only US city with a large Mexican American population outside the Southwest.

What drew such a large Mexican population? Could say it was industry, but they really didn't go to other Northern or Rust Belt cities in large numbers.

I've read that the first wave that settled on the southeast side of Chicago were heavily recruited to come work in the factories and for others Chicago was a primary train destination and that's how alot of Mexicans ended up here after crossing into the southwest The second wave settled in a heavily immigrant area in the near west side of the city where they could practice their customs without alot of fear of discrimination. I do know other Mexican Americans whose families settled in other smaller midwestern cities usually had to Americanize much faster. I know there was another big wave in the 70s and I know for alot of them it was a combination of available housing and jobs. My family skipped Los Angeles because even back then there was already a housing crunch in the Mexican areas and skipped Texas because of the crappy job opportunities whereas in Chicago they were able to work in factories and rent cheap 2 or 3 bedroom apartments. The 90s wave, which I think was the biggest came to an already established Mexican community also primarily made up of first gen immigrants from mostly the same parts of Mexico.

The entire western 3rd of the USA laughs at this. :haha::haha:

Doesn't Chicago have the second largest Mexican American population after L.A.?

Yeah theres like a half million in Chicago alone and im sure over a million in the whole metro area. And yeah it's a hub as Mexican culture in Chicago is not as watered down with 3,4 or 5th generation Mexican Americans like in the southwest.

Are you going to argue relative vs absolute? There might be several hundred thousand Mexicans in the city of Chicago but there are millions upon millions of them in Western states. In New Mexico for example 49% of the population identifies as Latino or Hispanic with 30% of households speaking Spanish.

Sure there are more people in absolute terms in the city of Chicago but they are not a dominate cultural group in Chicago or the Midwest.

mexican-americans don't have to be the dominant group in chicago for it to be a hub of mexican immigration.

and yes, of course there are more total mexican-americans in "the western states" (no fucking shit), but comparing a single city to "the western states" is an absurdity.

the fact that chicagoland is home to 1.1 million people of mexican ancestry is still quite notable considering that it's over 1,100 miles NE of the border.

The premise of the thread is why Chicago is unique as a Mexican immigration hub outside the Southwest.

I dont think anyone would say Chicago is a hub for mexican peoples and culture, they would for say Polish or Italian, or Irish (and long long ago French). Even if their are more Mexicans in Chicago by absolute numbers than those other groups these days.

Thats my take anyway

your take is radically outdated.

that's my take anyway.

I'm happy to use the term "hub" instead and move on.

perfect! :tup:

thread edited to remove the off-topic literalist dip-shittery.

another interesting aspect of chicago's status as a mexican immigration hub is the spillover effect up into milwaukee.

these are city proper numbers, so certainly not great for apples-to-apples, but it's the best i could quickly do because the american fact finder doesn't do metro areas.


Major Midwest Cities (city propers) by Mexican-American %:

Chicago: 22%
Milwaukee: 13%
Kansas City: 8%
Indianapolis: 7%
Detroit: 6%
Minneapolis: 6%
Columbus: 3%
St. Louis: 3%
Cincinnati: 1%
Cleveland: 1%

Cleveland being lowest isn't surprising as it's east of the "Mexican/Puerto Rican" line. But yeah Chicago really stands out, with some spillover in Milwaukee. The other cities have Black-dominated NHW populations for the most part.

The other Great Lakes/Rust Belt cities ceased to be major immigration hubs nearly a century ago.

You can see that with another large group - Polish Americans. Chicago attracted a lot of Polish immigrants through the 1980s and 1990s, while the other cities are pretty much all pre-1930 Polish American.

Yeah, and a lot of those Latino residents of NM have been living in the US for generations - often equal to or longer than many Americans of Irish or Italian descent. New Mexican Latino culture =/= Mexican culture.

The same can be said for many Latinos in the borderland areas of Texas and Arizona. When it comes to the Southwest, having Latino ancestry is extremely different from being a recent immigrant.

Well isn't that what you'd expect from a place called NEW Mexico?!? :rolleyes:

. . .

A good friend of mine who identifies as Mexican-American was born in Chicago to a Mexican immigrant and a white Cheesehead. His parents divorced in the early 1970s, and his mom moved the kids with her up to Milwaukee.

His memory was of a jarring change. While it was not weird to see Mexican-Americans in Chicago then, and there was already an established Mexican-American community (I don't recall which neighborhood) in which he felt at home, the opposite was true of Milwaukee. He was often the only Mexican-American person people up there had met, and there was no community to speak of. He moved back to Chicago on his own as soon as he could, because Chicago was just a better fit for an 18-year old Mexican-American, circa 1988. It's not that he was obsessed with his ethnicity, but rather that he didn't want to stick out like a sore thumb all the time, wanted to feel more 'normal.'

It looks like today's Milwaukee is quite different from the one he remembers.

it sure is. metro milwaukee's mexican-american community is now ~100,000 people strong, and quite concentrated on the SW side of the city.


https://i.redd.it/aupdhuonnufx.jpg
source: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/com...race_1361x679/


roughly 2/3 of the latinos represented by the yellow dots on the map above would be of mexican ancestry (puerto ricans making up the majority of the remaining 1/3).


milwaukee's barrio: https://www.google.com/maps/@43.0182...7i13312!8i6656


they've even included a chorizo in the famous sausage races at miller park for over a decade now (running alongside bratwurst, polish sausage, italian sausage, and hot dog):

https://ewscripps.brightspotcdn.com/....0_640_480.jpg
source: https://www.tmj4.com/news/klements-s...r-brewers-snub

I have family all over the west coast (California, New Mexico, Texas). Chicago is a Mexican hub, and a completely unique one for being so far north and East . It’s only laughable to west coasters that have never been there.

There's way more Mexicans in Chicago than Polish or Italian. Irish, not sure.

Yea I tell Mexicans in LA how large Chicago's Mexican population is. Most of them had no idea. I mention Milwaukee sometimes too.

Chicago's role as a Mexican-American hub is not laughable to people on the West Coast--I think it's exactly what we would expect of such a large and prominent American metropolis. It's just that Westerners often don't know much about a lot of places to our east, including Chicago.

If anything, I would think Westerners are guilty of assuming Mexican-Americans have a bigger presence throughout the nation, especially in the big regional hubs, than the data would support.

South Asians are another large Chicago group that immigrated in the later part of the 20th century.

For some reason, European, Mexican and Asian immigration all continued to boost Chicago's population onto the late 20th century/21st century, long after Midwestern cities in general were known for peaking in terms of high immigration rates. Any reason besides the fact that Chicago was the biggest city in the region?

What do Mexican-Americans and those with familiarity with Mexican-Americans in the West think about NYC? Would it be surprising that the Mexican presence isn't as big out east or is it common knowledge that other Hispanic groups are more common out east like Puerto Ricans around NYC's metro or the various Latin American/Caribbean groups in Miami?

For Latino/Hispanic populations in cities and states, everywhere but the eastern seaboard is mostly Mexican with the occasional smaller group thrown in (Hispanos in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, Tejanos in Corpus Christi and San Antonio, Central Americans in Los Angeles and Houston, a rich tapestry of ethnicities in New Orleans, Puerto Ricans in Chicago, San Antonio was founded by the Spanish crown but originally settled by afrohispanic Canary Islanders, etc.).

Along the eastern seaboard, however, cities and states all lack the same large Mexican American populations present west of I-95 yet are still known for specific particular communities: Brazilians (Boston, Jersey, Chicago), Cubans (Miami, Jersey, NYC), Puerto Ricans (Orlando), Hondurans, Costa Ricans, and other Central Americans (Miami, NYC, Boston), Haitians and other (NYC), Dominicans (NYC), Colombians (NYC), Venezuelans (NYC), etc. EXCEPT rural North Carolina. Economic pressures there have resulted in decent rural pockets of Mexican American farm labor.

My question is this: why doesn’t the United States have any city to speak of with a large immigrant population from Chile, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, The Guyanas, Paraguay, or Uruguay? Or do we and I just don’t know?

I would say Westerners of every race expect all big US cities to have Mexican-Americans in large numbers, including New York, as a projection of what we experience here. At the same time, I'd say everybody also knows the West Coast and Southwest are more Mexican-American than most of the country.

NYC has very large population from Guyana. There are a few almost entirely Guyanese enclaves. Liberty Ave. in Brooklyn-Queens is a Guyanese mecca.

Most of the other countries you listed have decent representation in NYC and Miami. But obviously Chile and Argentina were immigration destinations until recently, and Uruguay and Paraguay immigrated to these wealthier next-door states. Totally anecdotal, but my coffee guy is Uruguayan.

I’ve lived in the East for most of my life, and I can attest to the fact that I met Latinos from a variety of national origins. Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, Brazilian, Ecuradoran, Nicaraguan, etc. It was only when I came to the Inland empire that I started to meet only Mexican Latinos on a day to day basis.


As for Chicago as a hub, I think some earlier posters hit it on the head. I also think relative proximity to the Western US and Mexico compared to the Eastern cities helped bring a lot of Mexicans to Chicago.

Not sure what is meant by Cleveland being ''east of the 'Mexican/Puerto Rican' line'' as Cleveland and its area has a larger Puerto Rican population than Mexican. If anything, Cleveland has been historically east of the "Mexican line.''

^ That's my point. The Hispanic population in Cleveland is mostly Puerto Rican.

Got it. Understood now.:)

Where Latinos exist, they are largely a mix between Mexican and another group or just outright Mexican, in any city that is not on the I-95 corridor:

All major non-western cities that are not on the I-95 corridor:

Atlanta: Mexican, Central American particularly El Salvadoreno, and Caribbean
Cleveland: Puerto Rican and Mexican
Chicago: Mexican, Puerto Rican, Brazilian, others
Milwaukee: Mexican
Indianapolis: Mexican
Columbus: Mexican and Puerto Rican
Detroit: Mexican (huge dating back to the 20s and 40s, one of the hardest hit by forced repatriation during the 20s and 30s)
Minneapolis: Mexican and Ecuadorian
Kansas City: Mexican and Central American, particularly Guatemalan and El Salvadoreno
Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Cincinnati have negligible Hispanic/Latino populations.


Anyone know what Tampa’s large Hispanic community consists of?

Milwaukee is more PR than Cleveland is Mexican, no?

What does the Mexican-Puerto Rican "line" look like in the Southeast as you get from a more historically Mexican-immigrant influenced state (Texas) to a Puerto Rican- immigrant influenced one (Florida), but with lots of areas with low Hispanic populations in between like Alabama, Tennessee or even Appalachia in general?

Atlanta is largely Mexican, but with Central American pockets
Houston has large Central American populations
New Orleans is historically the south’s non-Mexican Mecca, until Miami usurped it, but it also has a large Mexican population

Yes.

~80-15 Puerto Rican to Mexican in Cleveland
~70-25 Mexican to Puerto Rican in Milwaukee

All four communities are large enough for mention.

To answer my own question:

Cleveland city

Puerto Rican 31,000 8.1%
Mexican 4,500 1.1%

Cleveland MSA

Puerto Rican 66,000 3.2%
Mexican 24,000 1.2%

Milwaukee city

Mexican 74,000 12.4%
Puerto Rican 27,000 4.5%

Milwaukee MSA

Mexican 108,000 6.9%
Puerto Rican 37,000 2.3%

Does the low-Hispanic population area of Appalachia, western PA, Kentucky, etc. strongly divide the Puerto Rican "east" with the Mexican "west"?

The coastal Southeast or South Atlantic (Virginia, South Carolina etc.) doesn't have as many Mexicans but still seems to be connected to the Puerto Rican "east coast" community between NYC and Florida.

The transition is more gradual in the northeast/Great Lakes, right?

Does the Mexican/Puerto Rican line also reflect their relative share of immigration history by land vs. by sea?

The Southwestern Mexican communities and those of the Texas, Great Plains, Chicago I think had a land route (Chicago's early Mexican community in the 1910s came up from the southwest), whereas the Hispanics (including Puerto Ricans and others, both islanders and Central/South Americans) crossed the sea, naturally.

I'm also curious as to if Mexican communities in the East tend to be those who internally migrated from Mexican communities in the West/Southwest rather than independently moved from Mexico directly, by plane or sea.

What's also interesting is the absence of Puerto Ricans in Detroit, given that they have sizable numbers in Cleveland, Chicago and Milwaukee.

Largely this is the case, it seems, but there’s more nuance. For instance, New Orleans is historically non-Mexican while Atlanta is mostly Mexican. This may be due to the pattern you note in your follow up comment: New Orleans is coastal.

Also: rural N.C has a Mexican population centered around Fayetteville.

That's interesting... was there ever a large Puerto Rican population there and they left, or was it just that they never moved there in large numbers to begin with?

Puerto Rican emigration (from the island) was clearly going strong when Detroit was at its peak prosperity so it does raise the issue of why they didn't choose Detroit over the other Midwestern cities like Chicago, alongside the east coast strongholds (like NYC).

There were at least some Mexican workers early in the 20th century so clearly some Hispanics were there for jobs.

Hispanic immigration among the three major groups tends to correlate with economic industry:

Mexicans: manufacturing and farm labor
Puerto Rican: garment, service, and entertainment industries
Cuban: historically wealthy individuals who decamped en masse for more cosmopolitan destinations in wave 1 then very poor individuals in wave 2 who went where the wealthy had previously

There's a tiny Carribean Hispanic (DR and PR) community in Detroit, located along Michigan Ave., basically populating a zone that becomes AA to the north, Mexican to the south, and Appalachian white/Arab to the west (east is downtown). There are a couple of restaurants and markets.

Cleveland (city proper) might actually surpass NYC (city proper) in % PR. I find that amazing. NYC was 8.8% PR in 2010, but that % has probably dropped.

I suppose one can speak of a "Caribbean Hispanic east" that's comprised of the Northeast, Cleveland and Florida. Dominicans seem to be in places where the PR population was significant already but are far more limited to a few places.

PRs and Dominicans live alongside more with Blacks (many do have African ancestry), much more than Mexicans do in US cities. Cubans are mostly white and accepted as such, and have a higher socioeconomic status.

In the South outside Florida Hispanics are very recent (it was pretty much Black and White until 1990 or so) and mostly Mexican.

In the DC/Baltimore area Salvadorans are the largest group by far.

Meanwhile, 26th St in Little Village (one of Chicago's predominantly Mexican neighborhoods) is the second highest grossing shopping and tax revenue district in the city after only Michigan Ave itself. The stores there are almost exclusively catering to Chicago's Mexican community.

Something to think about.

Hillsborough County, FL per the Census:
Puerto Rican: 91,476
Mexican: 65,578
Cuban: 65,451
Colombian: 14,926
Dominican: 13,112

Miami-Dade County does have over 40k Peruvians and 29k Argentinians (compared to 856k Cubans).