Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger: School Segregation in Rochester, New York

era youth more generally embraced radicalism, Mexicandescent parents sometimes shifted toward a conservative embrace of “antitax sentiment, law-and-order politics, and do-it-yourself bootstrappism” (15). In this way Making Mexican Chicago complements stories of the youthful Chicano Movement told in books like Lilia Fernandez’s Brown in the Windy City (2012), which reflects the other side of the coin of Mexican Americans’ growing dissatisfaction and frustration with mid-century liberalism. Amezcua’s story continues into the latter decades of the twentieth century by exploring Mexican and white reactions to gentrification. Both communities resisted Chicago’s redevelopment plans for their neighborhood, which they rightly viewed as likely to displace them in favor of wealthier residents. As what Amezcua calls “an ostensibly color-blind gentrifying class” (17) replaced restrictive populists, community members continued to debate the best way to stabilize Mexican communities in the face of gentrification as well as ongoing exploitation, dispossession, poverty, and racialization. Mexican-descent people continued trying to control the way in which they were incorporated into Chicago, with many still embracing homeownership and private property as the path to what they hoped would be full inclusion in American society. In this way, Amezcua’s book complements recent scholarship like A. K. Sandoval’s Barrio America, which illuminates how Latinos reinvigorated cities like Chicago and Dallas by buying homes, starting businesses, and creating vibrant communities. The book ends with a conclusion that briefly explores the twentyfirst century story of Mexican Chicago, particularly the way the encroachment of the “creative class” into neighborhoods now seen as hip and desirable reflect ongoing displacement of ethnic Mexican residents, who continue to fight to retain their neighborhoods as sites of community and culture. Besides his intervention in the history of conservatism, Making Mexican Chicago makes a few other key interventions in our understanding of Chicago’s history. First, it centers Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and fills in a story often told from the Black/white/white ethnic perspective. Amezcua rightly claims that issues like neighborhood control, segregation, and property rights can only be understood in a multiracial context, meaning in this case by incorporating Mexican-origin people alongside the more often told story of Black and white Chicago. Amezcua frequently situates the story of Mexican Chicago in relation to Black Americans, including by showing both how white ethnics fought to keep both Blacks and Mexicans out of their neighborhoods and both communities were segregated, disenfranchized, under-resourced and scapegoated, but also by showing how Mexicans found more fluidity in residential segregation than Black Chicagoans. Amezcua points out how Mexicans’ transformation in the 1960s from “property menace to property asset” (13) was linked to a negative comparison with Black Americans. Another particularly interesting aspect of the difference between the two communities is what they left behind for historians. Amezcua explains that Mexicandescent people cast as alien and criminal worked to avoid leaving documentary evidence, and what they did leave was sometimes fraudulent. This poses a different kind of challenge to scholars trying to excavate their stories, unlike with communities without this fear who left a wider range of records. In this way, “the history of Mexican settlement in US metropolitan areas is also a history of fraudulence and concealment... and the obscuring and hiding of these acts” (6). This keen observation raises the question of whether framing Mexican and Mexican American Chicago in a different context, alongside for example Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans, whose “paper sons” and other stories of illegality, concealment, and assumptions of perpetual foreignness, might be fruitful. While Chicago’s Chinesedescent population was, and continues to be, significantly smaller than its Mexican-origin community, such a comparison, beyond the Black/Brown one, could yield insights about race and belonging in twentieth-century Chicago. Through careful archival and oral history research, Making Mexican Chicago excavates an important story of attempts by Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans to claim and shape their place in Chicago. It should be essential reading for anyone interested in Chicago, Mexican and Mexican American, immigration, and urban history.