Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City

2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/19364695.42.4.07

1936-4695

Jessica Kim,

Latin American and Latino Studies

A. K. Sandoval-Strausz's Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City is a sweeping and absorbing study of how Latinx immigrants have remade American urban centers over the past fifty years. While the granular focus of the book is on two neighborhoods, Oak Cliff in Dallas and Little Village in Chicago, Barrio America is actually a far-reaching national history about the role of immigration in making and remaking American cities over the course of the twentieth century. The book is a significant contribution to studies of urban America because it places Latinx immigration and urban community-building at the center of the nation's history in the twentieth century.Central to the book is Sandoval-Strausz's critique of urban theorists and their focus on the “return of the creative class” as the source of the recent urban renaissance in the United States. He acknowledges the importance of this population in recent shifts in American cities but argues, compellingly, that centering them ignores half a century of urban change led by Latinx immigrants. Sandoval-Strausz also demonstrates that Latinx urbanism is the more significant of the two trends. As he notes in his concluding pages, “a single block full of immigrant families contributes far more to the life of a city than a hedge-fund billionaire” (p. 309).The ability to narrate both a local and a national story and to deftly move from the neighborhood to the nation is one of Sandoval-Strausz's finest achievements in Barrio America. While he delves into census tract shifts, small business growth, and local politics at the neighborhood level throughout the book, he also tells a national story about the transformation in American cities led by Latin American migrants. The book moves adroitly between the two urban neighborhoods of Oak Cliff and Little Village and national histories of racial segregation, industrialization, deindustrialization, and immigration policy. He then brings his readers back to the narratives and stories of Latinx immigrants to ground national and international trends in personal experience. While he does this throughout the book, several examples are particularly compelling. In Chapters 4 and 5, Sandoval-Strausz outlines racial housing policies, deindustrialization, white flight, the politics surrounding the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, and the policy's sweeping impact on US immigration. He then notes, “any understanding of the transformation of Little Village and Oak Cliff, and the Latinization of urban American more generally, must begin with one basic observation: the millions of Mexicans and other Latin Americans who migrated to the United States showed up just when the nation's cities needed them most” (p. 133). From there, he traces exactly how these trends played out on the ground in Dallas and Chicago, from the stabilization of housing and rental prices to shifts in employment and median income in specific neighborhoods to the creation of myriad small businesses. He adds texture to these local histories with rich evidence drawn from oral histories of the Latinx immigrants who settled in and remade Oak Cliff and Little Village.Sandoval-Strausz's analysis can also shift skillfully from the neighborhood to the international, making Barrio America a transnational history. This is not surprising, given that Sandoval-Strausz is tracing the impact of Latinx immigrants on American cities. He is also careful, however, to explain the economic and political trends in Latin America that led to both Latin American urbanism as well as the economic displacement that forced millions to seek economic asylum in the United States. In one of the more innovative portions of the book, Sandoval-Strasuz pushes his transnational argument even further, outlining what he terms a “hemispheric urban system” in which “Latino migrants initiated a sustained exchange of people, money, and construction that linked communities and reshaped built environments throughout the hemisphere” (p. 257). In other words, urban regions across the hemisphere are linked by the Latinx populations that call them home and who maintain deep ties to families and communities across the Americas.Barrio America is also attentive to how Latinx immigrants have remade urban space and redefined life in the public realm in many major American metropolitan centers. From street vendors to open-air markets to family lives lived in front yards, Sandoval-Strausz focuses not just on the quantitative changes led by Latinx immigrants but also on the qualitative shifts they have made in American urban life: “equally important was the distinctive urban culture of the newcomers—the way they gathered, walked, dwelled, shopped, and socialized . . . it was Latino urbanism that became the most expansive version of immigrant space in American cities” (p. 264).Finally, Barrio America is also a political history. Federal and local policy, immigration law, electoral shifts at the local and national level, and political rhetoric about immigration are all given careful scrutiny in Sandoval-Strausz's study. This allows him, by the book's conclusion, to speak forcefully about how immigration has shaped and will continue to shape not just urban America but also the nation's major political debates and policy decisions. And as he notes in the conclusion, the future of America, not just its cities, has “arrived and is living at the corner of E pluribus unum and Aquí estamos y no nos vamos” (p. 334).Exhaustively researched and dynamically narrated, Barrio America is a significant achievement and essential reading for anyone interested in urban and immigration history and a deeper understanding of the history of twentieth-century America.