Chicago Católico: Making Catholic Parishes Mexican

Latinos in Chicago and the Midwest

by Deborah E. Kanter

Today, over one hundred Chicago-area Catholic churches offer Spanish language mass to congregants. How did the city's Mexican population, contained in just two parishes prior to 1960, come to reshape dozens of parishes and neighborhoods? Deborah E. Kanter tells the story of neighborhood change and rebirth in Chicago's Mexican American communities. She unveils a vibrant history of Mexican American and Mexican immigrant relations as remembered by laity and clergy, schoolchildren and their female religious teachers, parish athletes and coaches, European American neighbors, and from the immigrant women who organized as guadalupanas and their husbands who took part in the Holy Name Society. Kanter shows how the newly arrived mixed memories of home into learning the ways of Chicago to create new identities. In an ever-evolving city, Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans’ fierce devotion to their churches transformed neighborhoods such as Pilsen.

The first-ever study of Mexican-descent Catholicism in the city, Chicago Católico illuminates a previously unexplored facet of the urban past and provides present-day lessons for American communities undergoing ethnic integration and succession.

224 pages, Hardcover

Published February 10, 2020

Reviews

[Viral · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was an interesting look at the role of the Catholic parishes of Chicago and how they shaped the Mexican community the developed here - starting with the critical role of St. Francis' on the Near West Side, to the growth of Mexican attendance in formerly Eastern European Catholic churches in Pilsen, and how attendance in these churches and the services and resources they provided were critical to the Mexican community. The book was really short, and didn't really delve as deep as I was hoping it would (the Northwest side barely gets any mention). I also felt the author had a clear bias in favor of the role of religion in Mexican Chicago's development, which is fine, but I feel like it came at the expense of talking about the labor and political activism that also shaped it. This may be my bias showing, but how do you talk about Pilsen in the 70s and not mention the labor and immigration related organizing that occurred within the Mexican community there? Rudy Lozano is turning in his grave so fast you could power the city grid. This book definitely felt like it was trying to argue that Catholic Mexican Chicagoans are just good pliant conservative family-oriented churchgoers like their Eastern European brethren before them who moved to the suburbs to avoid integration, and I do not care for that as a historiographical project.

I did learn some stuff, but ultimately not nearly as much of interest as I was hoping.

[Ian Woollen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Writing history well is an art, and Deborah Kanter is an artist. Thoroughly researched and informative, this book evokes people, place, and time with a deft, delightful style that is a pleasure to read.