Making the MexiRican City

Making the MexiRican City examines the placemaking practices that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans used to make a home for Latinos in Grand Rapids throughout the twentieth century. It reveals how Latinos calculated their strategies in resisting racism and discrimination in Grand Rapids, Michigan— Making the MexiRican City examines the placemaking practices that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans used to make a home for Latinos in Grand Rapids throughout the twentieth century. It reveals how Latinos calculated their strategies in resisting racism and discrimination in Grand Rapids, Michigan—a small city nestled in a region that is pro-business and religiously conservative. This community exemplifies how a numerical minority with limited resources can transform an indifferent, and at times hostile, locale into a setting that meets their material and cultural needs. This book argues interethnic relationships that Latinos formed and sustained were key to this process, especially interethnic families, and the emergence of MexiRicans in Grand Rapids. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans pursued parallel and, at times, interdependent and intersecting journeys to Michigan from the 1920s to the 1970s. Once they arrived, structural forces and their personal agency compelled them to interact as they searched for housing, jobs, and re-created cultural practices. They also fashioned a pan-Latino solidarity that crossed ethnic boundaries to develop a form of institutional activism that emphasized working within the system to advocate for social change alongside Black and white allies. Latinos used this to challenge inequality in antipoverty funding, policing, and education. As this strategy evolved, it exposed and exploited the cracks in both overt and structural racism that bred Latino marginalization.