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Metropolitan Latinidad

Transforming American Urban History

A wide-ranging collection of essays that centers Latinos in the history of American cities and suburbs.
 
Latino urban history has been underappreciated not only in its own right but for the centrality of its narratives to urban history as a field. A scholarly discipline that has long scrutinized economics, politics, and the built environment has too often framed race as literally Black and white. This has resulted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the full social canvas of American cities since at least the early twentieth century.
 
Traversing metropolitan areas like Atlanta, Chicago, El Paso, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York, this collection of essays brings together both established and emerging scholars, including long-time urbanists and academics working in the fields of Latino, borderlands, political, landscape, and religious history. Organized at different scales—including city, suburb, neighborhood, and hemisphere—this impressive body of work challenges long-standing narratives about metropolitan America. The contributors—Llana Barber, Mauricio Castro, Eduardo Contreras, Sandra I. Enríquez, Monika Gosin, Cecilia Sánchez Hill, Felipe Hinojosa, Michael Innis-Jiménez, Max Krochmal, Becky M. Nicolaides, Pedro A. Regalado, Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez, and Thomas J. Sugrue—engage a diverse range of subjects, such as urban rebellions, the suburbanization of Latinos, affordable housing, labor, the built environment, transnationalism, place-making, and religious life. The scholars also explore race within Latino communities, as well as the role that political and economic dynamics have played in creating Latino urban spaces. After reading this book, you will never see American cities the same way again.

360 pages | 14 halftones, 4 line drawings, 1 tables | 6 x 9 | © 2025

Historical Studies of Urban America

History: American History, Urban History

Latin American Studies

Reviews

Metropolitan Latinidad provides readers with a terrific introduction to a dynamic and exciting field. Across a range of approaches and geographic locations, these essays delve into histories of race, space, and politics that have too often been ignored in the field of urban history in the United States. Collectively, they push the field in crucial new directions.” 

Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, author of “Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean”

Metropolitan Latinidad reshapes the narrative of Latino urban history, bringing attention to how migration, settlement, labor, and place-making operate in often overlooked regions like the US South and the suburbs. With a scope ranging from the neighborhood to the continent, this collection brings urgency, depth, and nuance to the study of Latinos’ ever-evolving role in transforming American cities and suburbs.”

Natalia Molina, author of “A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community”

Table of Contents

Introduction
A. K. Sandoval-Strausz

Metropolis
1. Latinx Uprisings: Violence, Representation, and Social Movements in Urban America, 1960s–1970s
Pedro A. Regalado
2. “You Were the Ones That Called Us, Georgia”: Mexican Construction Labor as Place- and Mythmaking
Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez
3. Latinos on the Crabgrass Frontier: Migrants, Immigrants, Race, and the Transformation of Postwar Suburbia
Thomas J. Sugrue
4. Are Latino Suburbs Ethnoburbs? And Why It Matters
Becky M. Nicolaides

Neighborhood
5. Adobe Homes for the Sun City’s Mexican Barrio: Community Housing Alternatives and Creative Self-Determination in El Paso, Texas
Sandra I. Enríquez
6. Gods in the City: Acción Cívica Evangélica and Latino Religious Politics in New York City, 1969–1978
Felipe Hinojosa
7. The “Puerto Rican Exception” and the Limits of Latinidad in Urban History
Llana Barber
8. Latinx Palimpsest: Remaking a Colonia on the Edge of Aztlán
Max Krochmal and Cecilia Sánchez Hill
9. “Gastronomical Gallivanting in Foreign Fields”: Mexican Restaurants and Cultural Exchange in Interwar Chicago
Michael D. Innis-Jiménez

Hemisphere
10. LatinX Metropolitan Pasts: A Hemispheric and Speculative Approach
Eduardo Contreras
11. “In the Grips of the Monster That Forced Us to Flee”: How the Cold War Made Our Latino Cities
Mauricio Castro
12. Navigating Space and Race: Afro-Cubans in Miami and Los Angeles
Monika Gosin

Acknowledgments
Notes
List of Contributors
Index

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