The neighborhoods of Oak Cliff in the city of Dallas and Little Village in Chicago are separated by more than 1. 500 miles of road, but they share an amazing history in common.
In the middle of the 20th century, both places began to be abandoned by their white inhabitants and received a sudden wave of Latino immigrants, who went from being less than 3% of their population in 1950 to more than two-thirds four decades later .
Both Oak Cliff and “La Villita” thus stopped facing a gloomy outlook and became vibrant sites of growing investment, commercial activity and sociability in their streets.
Another point in common between both neighborhoods is that their fortuitous change of destiny is recounted by the historian AK Sandoval-Strausz in his recent book “Barrio América: how Latino immigrants saved the American city”.
Professor of history and director of the Latino studies program at Penn State University, Sandoval-Strausz explains that the recent history of Latino immigrants populating cities that lost residents was repeated across the US, from New York to Boston or Milwaukee.
“There is 25 millions of people who today would not be living in cities if those Latinos had not arrived “, says the author, himself born in New York to immigrant parents.
” And without large portions of their population, those cities would not work ”, he adds in an interview with BBC Mundo.
What follows is a synthesis of the telephone dialogue, edited for clarity reasons:
Why are city Did the US need to be saved?
In essence, due to a combination of deindustrialization and racial prejudice, many Anglo-Saxons, especially white people, were moving from cities to suburbs. And that left cities without enough people, jobs and businesses to survive economically.
For example, there were many cities like Chicago and Detroit that lost a third of their population between 1950 Y 1980. That meant there were abandoned neighborhoods, homes, schools, and businesses. Those who stayed there lived in places with very few economic opportunities.
Crime also increased. Many people who lived in cities were afraid of being on the streets.
Various observers said that large cities were already obsolete.
Then they arrived Latinos…
Exactly. For a long time there was a number of Mexican-Americans or Puerto Ricans in the US for a long time, but they would be 3% or 4% of the population and most did not live in cities.
Then the migrants began to appear, especially from Mexico, after Central America and then from all of Latin America, at the precise moment when all these empty neighborhoods could have burned or decayed.
These migrants began to rent, to buy houses, to occupy empty businesses, schools and churches. And that allowed those neighborhoods to suddenly come back to life.
In some of these cities there were other neighborhoods that never recovered. In Chicago, the main Mexican neighborhood, La Villita, gained population, but the closest neighborhood never did. And in that neighborhood where migrants did not arrive, 10, 000 houses were destroyed by neglect or fire.
Fires caused mainly to collect insurance?
Yes, in many cases.
The other The thing is that the mainly white Anglo-Saxon people who had lived in these neighborhoods and left had the possibility of selling their houses because they had invested a lot of money in them and there was no way to get that money back.
When Hispanics arrived, they wanted to buy houses and businesses. That was a huge form of investment in neighborhoods and cities where no one wanted to invest, like Oak Cliff in Dallas, La Villita in Chicago, and similar neighborhoods all over the U.S.
Does it refer to medium and large cities?
Yes. The largest neighborhoods were in the largest cities. But if you look right now at the 25 largest US cities, two of them have a majority of Latinos, nine are more than a third Latino and 13 more than one quarter of Latinos.
It is a large number of people who have transformed a large number of cities.
¿ L Latinos revitalized those cities investing in homes and businesses?
Exactly. What was needed most was people who could come and take care of the basic physical infrastructure of the city. Remember that Hispanics are the essential workforce of large parts of American industry.
From Mexicans and other Hispanics who work in home construction, childcare, restaurant services, maintenance of buildings … Without these jobs, cities just wouldn’t work.
Sure there were immigrants from other parts of the world who did that too, but many more Latinos: three times more than Asian-Americans.
So when you say that Latinos saved America’s cities, you don’t mean it metaphorically, but literally?
Sure. At the end of the period I speak there were 50 millions more Latinos and half of them went directly to the cities. I can tell there is 25 millions of people who today would not be living in cities if those Latinos had not arrived .
If you didn’t have oxygen to breathe, you would die. And without large portions of their population, those cities would not function. Remember Dallas is 43% Latina, Chicago is 30% Latin…
One of the things that worried many Anglo-Saxon intellectuals in 1960, ’70 Y ’74 was that people stayed in their houses, turning their backs on each other. But it was much more likely that the newcomers wanted to spend time outdoors, playing dominoes in the street, having fun and talking with their neighbors.
So, in addition to being many, they create an interesting life on the street, they create their own businesses that give everyone a reason to get out: they really revitalize.
You spoke at the beginning of racial prejudice as part of this phenomenon. How is this?
When the Civil Rights movement emerged in the decades of 1950 Y 1960, one of the things that black people wanted was to live in neighborhoods other than where they had been restricted.
But when they tried to move into a predominantly white neighborhood, the whites often threatened, attacked, or moved to the suburbs.
However, they did not want to sell their houses to blacks for being racists. Mexicans and other Latinos were not considered white or equal to Anglo-Saxons, but they were considered acceptable enough.
So, because they had this status between black and white, in some places they became a new acceptable group in the city, even in neighborhoods where whites did not like blacks.
Another point you make is that Latino neighborhoods in the US They tend to have lower crime rates than similar white neighborhoods. That contradicts the rhetoric of people like former President Donald Trump, who blames Latino immigrants for crime rates in this country…
Yes, completely. Trump lied about everything and one of his lies was that.
Sometimes, if a lie is repeated often enough, people will believe it. And unfortunately there are many people, especially white people, who when they hear that this new group is to blame, they believe it despite not being true.
Support for Donald Trump came mainly from rural areas and other areas far from cities. So the people who believed their lies about immigrants are not the ones who actually live close to immigrants.
Now there is a new wave of Latin American migrants trying to enter the EE. .UU. Through its border with Mexico. Is it a continuation of the phenomenon that you describe in your book of Latinos who come to revitalize cities, perhaps after a new urban exodus due to the pandemic?
The pandemic seems be coming to an end gradually so maybe it’s too early to talk about it.
But as for your main question, the answer is yes. Sometimes they come for different reasons: in some cases there is violence in their countries of origin, or there are no job opportunities that pay like in the US
The sad and ironic thing is that, as I say In my last section of the book, America desperately needs people. Our birth rate has fallen below what we need to replace the population. And if it weren’t for immigrants, we would be in a very difficult demographic situation.
The irony is that some Americans believe that immigration is a problem when, in fact, it is the solution.
If we were in a rational political moment, we would see that we need more people and we would welcome them.
A recent study indicated that, apart from the current level of immigration, the United States need some 226, 000 more people every year.
They are people who are desperate to come here, who will work hard, who have already suffered a lot for the simple fact of wanting to live here. We must recognize that as we have in the past. But sadly there is enough racism and stupidity to prevent it.
I feel like historians will look at this period one day and say: how did a third of the people in the nation go so crazy?
A chapter in his book looks at recent changes and attempts at change in the US immigration system. President Biden is now proposing to Congress a reform to regularize the status of 11 millions of immigrants undocumented. What can history teach us about this?
There is a great example of how it worked and that is IRCA: the Law of Control ly Immigration Reform of 1986, which included an amnesty for almost 3 million migrants, mostly Mexicans.
Sociologists have followed systematic studies on what happened to these migrants and find that their wages went up 20%, because once they had legal status their employers could not threaten to call “La Migra” and They negotiated for more salary.
They discovered that the people who benefited from the amnesty bought houses and their property rates went up, because once they had the security of being here they thought: “Well, now that I’m going to stay, I’m going to buy a house ”. They received more training and education, because a person who is threatened with deportation at any moment is not going to invest in himself through education; a person with legal status will. They are all improvements in the lives of these migrants due to their change in status.
And it also meant that in the neighborhoods where they lived they bought houses, opened businesses.
If we did same with good for everyone.
It would be great because in fact it would give them to millions of people security, a kind of psychological well-being and a huge increase in the money they earn.
But that remains to be seen, there is little chance of it being approved in Congress, right ?
With the current Congress we have, I think it will be an uphill battle. I think there is. There is talk of breaking up the plan into a bunch of different bills that may only legalize dreamers (Editor’s note: Refers to thousands of undocumented youth who came to the U.S. as children and received protection under the program DACA).
But I think he’s right. Unfortunately, with the current balance of power in Congress it is unlikely that the entire bill will pass, which is very sad.
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