Amezcua, M. (2023). Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification. The University of Chicago Press

Making Mexican Chicago by Mike Amezcua narrates the ethnic Mexican experience in the Windy City as it "became a Mexican metropolis in the second half of the twentieth century."Comprised of six chapters, Amezcua focuses on the neighborhoods of Near West Side, Pilsen, Back of the Yards, and La Villita (Little Village).He is interested in the spatial and racial politics that stemmed from "white flight" by ethnic Europeans who grappled with the notion of either leaving or staying in their neighborhoods as ethnic Mexican immigration contributed to not only the rising population, but also the creation of Mexican spaces in white neighborhoods.He is also interested in "the complex structures of feeling" that all of those involved experienced as ethnic Mexicans, citizens and undocumented, as they transformed these spaces into their own.These structures of feeling "encompassed individual and collective ambition, equity seeking, and dreams of opportunity" (p.7)-all which were limited by U.S. capitalism.