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• 1 2021-04-19T17:26:47+00:00 Mexican Migration 1 Families moved between Mexico and the Midwest throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. image_header 2021-04-19T17:26:47+00:00
  Above: Mexican Hometown Associations Oral Histories. Newberry Library. View digital publication

  The Goff Family

  This christening bonnet was made in Mexico by Estanislao de Goff and used for all seven of her children when each was baptized in the Catholic Church. Six were baptized near Elgin Ranch in Necaxa, Pueblo, Mexico. One was baptized in Aurora, Illinois, at St. Nicholas Catholic Church USA. Estanislao was the cook and housekeeper at a large Mexican ranch in the early 1900s when she married Dean Goff, the ranch’s American manager, who had been sent to Mexico by his father to avoid service in the Spanish-American War. Dean and Estanislao lived happily in Mexico until 1918, when they and their five children were forced to flee the country to escape death at the hands of Pancho Villa’s guerilla forces. The Goff family settled in Dean’s home town of Elgin, where Estanislao was “not favorably received” by Dean’s family. Dean eventually got a job at the Pearsal Milk Company and Estanislao did needlework for a shirt factory and later worked in a steel mill during World War II. —Illinois State Museum

  Harrison High School Walkouts

  For several years beginning in 1968, Mexican American and African American students and parents staged protests at Chicago's Harrison High School to assert their culturally specific educational needs. In 2016, Jose Resendiz created a wooden artists' book documenting the activism. The colophon states:

  The Harrison High School Walkouts is an artist book that takes an archival form based on historical events in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The book draws inspiration from personal interviews and graphic campaigns that shed light on student responses to the pressures of assimilation and dealing with the stresses of maintaining social and cultural representation in education. It is the concentration of collectivity, community, and historical documents that gives the book its social qualities and increases its political possibilities. The collected memorabilia has been redesigned and produced by incorporating laser, inkjet, letterpress, woodblock, and screen printing methods.

  Mexican Hometown Associations

  Hometown associations, or clubes de oriundos, are organizations created by migrants and immigrants to allow them to assist the people in their communities of origin. They began more than three decades ago with Mexican migrants in the United States who realized that their families and neighbors back home were going without essential services and infrastructure. The first hometown associations raised money and pooled donations to provide them.

  Seeing the great value of these initiatives, officials in Mexico began to offer matching funds to multiply the efforts of their citizens abroad, beginning with Dos por Uno at the state level in 1992 and culminating with the federal government’s Tres por Uno program inaugurated in 2002. These programs inspired similar efforts in many countries across Latin America and have been adopted around the world as an important economic development strategy.

  The Mexican Hometown Associations Oral History Project has gathered and preserved the testimony of 23 people in Chicago directly involved in those efforts. The project unites the work of people in the migrant community with researchers at multiple universities and the staff of the Newberry Library. Together, they have digitally recorded, annotated, and transcribed dozens of hours of interviews with club members detailing their personal histories, arrival, and lives in Chicago and the activities of their associations on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

  This digital archive, held at the Newberry, is an extraordinary record of representatives from the fastest-growing group of people in the Chicago area.  The project offers community members, researchers, public officials, and many others firsthand accounts of the lives, activities, and achievements of this dynamic group of Chicagoans.

  Selected Oral Histories

  Bertha Arroyo

  Married in 1981, Bertha Arroyo and her husband arrived in Chicago, Illinois, with the goal of working, saving money, and then going back to Mexico, but they ended up staying and became legal permanent residents. Bertha declares that the main reason for leaving Amealco, Guerrero was the “lack of future” for their family. Upon finishing elementary school in Amealco, Bertha worked at the family farm during her adolescence. In Chicago, Bertha and her husband worked at a baby toy factory and in a few other similar jobs.

  Ricardo Carranza

  Ricardo Carranza was born in 1963 in the village of El Parral, Monte Escobedo municipality in Zacatecas. He came to the United States without documents in 1975 and is now a naturalized US citizen. Ricardo returned to El Parral, Zacatecas in 1992 and began his hometown club the same year to finance projects to bring electricity, sewage, roads, and internet access to Parral and scholarships for Chicago children.

  María Félix

  María Félix is originally from Xichú, Guanajuato, Mexico. She completed a bachelor’s degree in Querétaro and a master's degree in finance at the University of Guanajuato. After some failed investments, María Félix decided to come to Chicago and explore her professional opportunities. Arriving in Chicago with a tourist visa in 1992, Maria and her family later regularized their immigration status. In Chicago, she worked as an accountant for restaurants, cinemas, and clubs.

  View all: Mexican Hometown Associations oral history interviews