Once a landscape of dunes, marshes, and woodlands hugging the southern edge of Lake Michigan, the city of East Chicago was a developer's dream for the emerging steel industry. The industrial jobs provided a way out of poverty, but the area also offered parks, schools, neighborhoods, and civil organizations. Ammeson, born and raised in East Chicago, shows that the city had a sense of vitality and the essence that the American dream was available for all. -- adapted from back cover
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.
Once an almost impenetrable landscape of dunes, marshes, and woodlands hugging the southern shore of Lake Michigan, the land comprising what would become East Chicago was a developer's dream for the emerging steel industry. Considered one of the country's ultimate melting pots, four out of five of its citizens hailed from other countries, each bringing their valued cultures and traditions to this thriving metropolis. The industrial jobs, requiring hard work and much grit, provided a way out of poverty, but the area also offered beautiful parks and mansions along the waterfront, as well as great schools, neighborhoods, and civic organizations. East Chicago had a sense of vitality and the essence that the American dream was available for all.
The life and times of growing up in the blue collar steel mill neighborhood on the south side of Chicago in the turbulent 60s and going off to war in Viet Nam. Also interviewing the cast of characters that that also lived through those times.
