Barrio America

October 14, 2019
Penn State University professor Sandoval-Strausz (Hotel: An American History) takes a close look at Chicago’s Little Village and Dallas’s Oak Cliff neighborhoods in this judicious account of the role that Latino immigrants have played in revitalizing American cities over the second half of the 20th century. Sandoval-Strausz gives Latin American migrants and their barrio communities much of the credit for solving the “urban crisis” caused by “white flight” and the race riots of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. In Little Village, he writes, Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrants were classified as “white ethnics” by real estate agents who wanted to create “a bulwark against African Americans.” Addressing the current political climate, he notes Republican efforts to court Latino voters in the early 2000s, but criticizes the party for “unhesitatingly adopt” President Trump’s “trademark strategy” of sowing fear of immigrants and other minorities. By documenting the opportunities provided to Latino immigrants as a secondary effect of white discrimination against blacks, Sandoval-Strausz presents a helpful guide to understanding the mechanisms of systemic racism, and he reminds readers that the current immigration debate is grounded in decades of local and national policy. The vibrancy of Latino culture is somewhat missing, however, as Sandoval-Strausz focuses more on statistics than individual community members. This is a useful reference for readers interested in public policy and the history of Latin American immigration.

November 1, 2019

For decades, beginning in the 1970s, Hispanic immigrants and their descendants sustained and revitalized American cities experiencing blight. As urban populations shrank and infrastructure crumbled amid deindustrialization, disinvestment, and white flight, Latin American immigrants kept neighborhoods vibrant. Sandoval-Strausz (history, Pennsylvania State Univ.; Hotel: An American History) rejects the conventional wisdom that young professionals saved the cities. From Chicago's South Lawndale to Dallas's Oak Cliff neighborhoods (barrios), working-class Latinos have moved in, purchased homes, improved public health and safety, and revived commerce while enduring discrimination and threats of deportation. Cultural tendencies such as socializing outdoors rather than indoors, or walking rather than driving, aided urban revitalization. Sandoval-Strausz builds on pioneering treatises such as David Diaz's Latino Urbanism and Davis Mike's Magical Urbanism, blending statistics and oral history to make his points. Sometimes Sandoval-Strausz stretches a point; he argues, for example, that higher rates of immigration caused the nation's falling crime rates. Overall, this is a thoughtful, provocative, and well-written study of why Hispanics have been and continue to be vital to the health of American cities. VERDICT Likely to become a staple in Latinx and urban studies.--Michael Rodriguez, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2019
One cannot understand the modern American city, contends historian Sandoval-Strausz, without understanding the people who made it what it is: Latino immigrants. This essential, timely book recounts the history of urban America, often told in white and Black, through the wide lens of Latino immigration. Focusing on the transformations of two neighborhoods, Chicago's South Lawndale (today Little Village) and Dallas' Oak Cliff, Sandoval-Strausz offers a fresh perspective on urban decline and revival. He details the strange, malleable racial politics of Latino identity amid the urban crisis. In Chicago, racist whites subjected Mexicans to the same slurs they used for African Americans. In Dallas, with its triracial social system, some Latinos defended segregation to prove their whiteness. Over time, Latinos in both cities forged a new politics, building multiracial coalitions to elect Black mayors. But the book goes beyond conventional history. It alternates between geographical scales, uncovering the links between community, city, nation, and hemisphere. In a dazzling chapter on Latino urbanism, Sandoval-Strausz shows how immigrants' practices of daily life, brought from their hometowns, reshaped the physical structure of their neighborhoods. Deeply researched, full of insights, and with a powerful message, powerfully told, the story of American cities remains a story of migration.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)