Program

Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowships, 2019

Project

Chicagolandia: Oral Histories of Chicago’s Latinx Suburbs

Department

History and Political Science

Abstract

“Chicagolandia” uses oral histories of Latina/os living in the Chicago suburbs from 1960 to the present to complicate popular and scholarly understandings of late-twentieth-century suburbanization and immigration. The project engages questions of race, citizenship, and equality at the nexus of two fields of scholarship—suburban history and Latinx studies—to examine how Latina/os navigated and helped shape the suburbs, a critical site of economic opportunity and political power in the postwar United States.

Program

ACLS Community College Faculty Research Fellowships, 2025

Project

A Century of Latinx Suburbia in Oral Histories, 1925-2025

Department

History & Political Science

Location

The Newberry Library, Chicago, IL

Abstract

“A Century of Latinx Suburbia in Oral Histories, 1925-2025” uses oral history to uncover the understudied stories of Latinx suburbia. The project includes oral histories of Latinx people who have lived and worked in Chicago’s suburban communities across the last hundred years. The interviews span from early-twentieth-century Latina/o communities to histories of Venezuelan migrants who settled in greater Chicago in recent years. Documenting the history of Chicago’s Latinx suburbs will complicate the understanding of the nexus of race, immigration, and suburbanization in American history.