Dionicio Nodín Valdés is Associate Professor of Chicano Studies at the University of Minnesota.
Review
"This is to date the most comprehensively narrated and researched work on Mexicans in the Midwest. . .
. It clearly supersedes [past published works] and is also of higher quality, I think, than most other works published
in the field of Chicano studies in recent times."
--Juan Gómez-Quiñones, Professor of History, UCLA
University of Texas Press Web Site, March, 2002
Summary
Mexican communities in the Midwestern United States have a history that extends back to the turn of the twentieth
century, when a demand for workers in several mass industries brought Mexican agricultural laborers to jobs and
homes in the cities. This book offers a comprehensive social, labor, and cultural history of these workers and
their descendants, using the Mexican barrio of "San Pablo" (St. Paul) Minnesota as a window on the region.
Through extensive archival research and numerous interviews, Dennis Valdés explores how Mexicans created
ethnic spaces in Midwestern cities and how their lives and communities have changed over the course of the twentieth
century. He examines the process of community building before World War II, the assimilation of Mexicans into the
industrial working class after the war, the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and more recent changes resulting
from industrial restructuring and unprecedented migration and population growth. Throughout, Valdés pays
particular attention to Midwestern Mexicans' experiences of inequality and struggles against domination and compares
them to Mexicans' experiences in other regions of the U.S.
