A Historical and Regional Overview of Latinas in the United ... - CUNY

Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview
Puerto Rican community rested largely on specifically
gendered ideologies: like the denigrating views of
African American women, these views described poor
Puerto Rican women in very negative terms. Puerto
Rican and other Latina women made efforts to better
their socioeconomic conditions, however, by organizing
around issues of welfare rights, education, and employment
discrimination.
By 1965, when the Immigration and Naturalization
Act reformed American immigration quotas, Mexican
and Puerto Rican migrants to cities like Chicago and
Detroit were increasingly accompanied by Cuban and
Central and South American immigrants. Again, while
Latin American men often immigrated alone as an
economic strategy to provide for their families back
home, women also immigrated as part of household
units. Increasingly in the 1970s and 1980s, however,
women also began immigrating alone, as men had
done earlier, also seeking to provide economically for
their families back home.
Cuban immigrants began arriving in larger numbers
after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The earliest waves
of immigrants included mostly professionals and elites.
By the 1980s the Cuban immigrant population included
more working-class and less educated immigrants as
well. Central and South Americans also included
middle- and upper-class professionals, but particularly
for Central Americans, migrants included large numbers
of political refugees who were fleeing civil wars
and political unrest in war-torn homelands. Mexican
immigrants continued arriving, many of whom were
fleeing Mexico’s economic devastation during the late
1970s and early 1980s. Latina women from many of
these sending countries played crucial roles in maintaining
transnational ties and social networks between
home and the U.S. mainland.
By the 1970s Latinas in the Midwest, especially the
second and third generations, became increasingly
politicized and more vocal about demanding services
and rights for their communities. Women became the
backbone of community organizing and grassroots activism
and led various struggles for equitable housing,
education, employment, and welfare rights. Maria
Cerda, a Puerto Rican woman, became the first Hispanic
to serve on the Chicago Board of Education
in 1969. She advocated assiduously for bilingual education
and a school curriculum that valued Latina/o
children’s cultural backgrounds. Six years later Cerda
became the first executive director of the Latino Institute,
a research and advocacy agency that provided
technical assistance and support for local Latina/o
community-based organizations. In 1973 Mexican and
Puerto Rican women in Chicago founded Mujeres Latinas
en Acción, a social service and advocacy agency
that serves Spanish-speaking women. Mexican moth-
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ers in Chicago during the 1970s also led the struggle
against inequitable, segregated, and inferior education
for their children in overcrowded Mexican neighborhood
schools. As small numbers of women began
gaining access to higher education and professions,
Latinas also became more visible as artists, educators
and businesswomen and in other professional roles
during the 1970s and 1980s. By the end of the twentieth
century Latinas began flexing some political power
as well, running for city, county, and state political
seats and gaining political appointments in municipal
government.
Still, Latinas in the Midwest struggle with gender
and racial discrimination in education, housing, and
employment. Recent immigrants, in particular, experience
high rates of poverty, low wages, inequitable education,
and inadequate housing. But U.S.-born Latinas
also experience high rates of unemployment, poverty,
and lack of educational resources. Latinas in the region
have faced particular challenges over the
decades. Being in a geographic region that is often
overlooked by the East Coast–West Coast emphasis on
Latinas/os, Latinas have had to work hard to make
their communities visible on the national level. They
have also encountered significant diversity within the
Latina/o community in the region. Today Latina immigrants
continue to arrive from countries throughout
Latin America—Colombia, Guatemala, Chile, Peru,
Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua and El Salvador. They also
find, however, long-standing communities of women
who trace their roots in the region back to the early
twentieth century.
SOURCES: Fernández, Lilia. 2005. “Latina/o Migration
and Community Formation in Postwar Chicago:
Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Gender, and Politics, 1945–
1975.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego.
García, Juan R. 1996. Mexicans in the Midwest, 1900–
1932. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; Padilla,
Elena. 1947. “Puerto Rican Immigrants in New York
and Chicago: A Study in Comparative Assimilation.”
Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago; Pérez, Gina M. 2004.
The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement,
and Puerto Rican Families. Berkeley: University of California
Press; Vargas, Zaragosa. 1993. Proletarians of the
North: A History of Mexican Industrial Workers in Detroit
and the Midwest, 1917–1933. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
LATINAS IN THE SOUTHEAST
Lilia Fernández
When one thinks of traditional areas of settlement for
Latinos, one thinks primarily of the Southwest and the
Northeast of the United States. However, the first Spanish
settlement in what is now the United States was in