Q&A with Juan Mora, Author of Latinx Encounters

Latinx Encounters: How Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans Made the Modern Midwest reexamines the history of the American Midwest through the experiences of Mexican, Mexican American, and Puerto Rican migrants. The latest volume in the Latinx Histories series traces the movement of people, labor, culture, and ideas across regions and borders, revealing how Latinx communities helped shape the modern Midwest.

In this conversation, Mora discusses the origins of the project, the challenges of recovering migrant histories, and what readers can learn by viewing the Midwest through a Latinx lens. The interview was conducted by Laura Jaramillo Martínez, a history graduate student at Columbia University whose research examines Colombian soldiers in the Korean War, historical memory, and state violence in Latin America and East Asia.

In the book you argue that the Midwest has stayed peripheral to Mexican American and Latinx history despite its importance. What drew you to research and write about this region?

J: I’m from Chicago, and grew up around the Mexican communities of Pilsen and Little Village and the Puerto Rican community of Humboldt Park, fascinated by the intersections between the two. I went into grad school planning to continue Chicago urban history, but during my first year I took a Greyhound to Detroit, stayed in an Airbnb for five days, and dug into the Clement Kern papers at the Walter Reuther Library. I expected to find only Mexican and Mexican American farm workers, but found Puerto Rican farm workers too, which led me to the 1950 airlift of PuertoRican migrants to Michigan. That became the starting point for the whole project. I’d planned to focus only on the Bracero program era, but the research kept expanding the timeline, so the book now runs from World War I through the 1980s.

Much of the history that you chronicle throughout the book was made by people who left very little paper behind. How did you create such vivid depictions of them and their worlds without simplifying or generalizing about their lives and circumstances?

J: It requires bringing together many different archives into a cohesive narrative, and it took people interested in recording these stories. Father Clement Kern, out of Detroit, was the starting point: a commission visited Detroit every winter to investigate work conditions, but the migrant workers were never there, they’d already gone back to Texas or Mexico. So in the 1940s, Kern started recording their testimonies himself. Another source was the Truman Commission hearings in Saginaw, Michigan, the only Midwest location, where workers shared their stories directly. I also drew on official correspondence: migrants’ grievances to the Mexican Consulate in Chicago, reported back to Mexico’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs, and reports from Puerto Rico’s Farm Labor Program officials in Michigan and Ohio. Fusing together sources from Puerto Rico, Texas, Mexico, and the Midwest, there’s no single archive, but it’s possible to build a narrative that does justice to migrants’ experiences.

One of the stories that stuck with me most was the Mysterians, children of Mexican migrant farm workers in Michigan, described by critic David Marsh as punk rock back in 1971, the first time the term appeared in print. Punk’s origin story is usually told through New York and London. What does this Michigan version show us that the standard narrative misses?

J: That was one of my favorite chapters to write, and one of the hardest to research, there’s no traditional archive for it, just an amalgamation of online repositories, websites, and interviews. What Dave Marsh was actually referring to was partly the chorus running through the song, and partly the dance moves Question Mark was using; he wanted to be on American Bandstand. What I wanted to highlight was the intersection of the Mexican American music industry in South Texas and the migration of Mexican Americans up to the Midwest. These teenagers were all children of migrant farm workers; some had played in conjunto bands, one was a classically trained pianist, others learned guitar in the fields with their uncles or cousins. That combination, the South Texas music industry, postwar migration, and agricultural labor, is what brings these families together in Michigan and produces a song with such a long-lasting impact. I don’t think they anticipated how big of a hit it would be. That’s really how I was hoping to approach that story in that chapter.

Do you think Midwestern Latinx communities evolve differently than in other regions?

J: In terms of the permanent settlers, those migrants who exit the migratory stream, one of the first things has to be little stores, little restaurants. Going back to that chapter on Question Mark and the Mysterians, one of the most fascinating parts was the family, Lily and Joe Gonzalez, because that’s how the Mysterians come into their orbit, how they get to know one another, through the store El Pato, which was both a local grocery storeand a wholesale vendor for other goods in the region. That’s got to be one of the initial anchors for these migratory communities. Even within the region, the development of these communities isn’t uniform. Some are interested in permanently settling in the Midwest, whether it’s Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, or Chicago, but in many ways they also plan to go back home. So development is very different, but at the same time, they’re bringing their social and cultural background from South Texas, from Mexico, from the interior of Puerto Rico, to the Midwest as well. There’s much more to be done on permanent settlement in places like Saginaw, but I’m more interested in how they’re coming and going, whatthey’re bringing back from these different areas, and how that ultimately shaped the development of the region.

What do you hope readers walk away thinking or feeling after reading your book?

J: Ultimately, Mexican, Mexican American, and Puerto Rican migrant farm workers in the Midwest fought to be respected and protected, through the public sphere and organizations like the Farm Labor Organizing Committee. FLOC is not a household name, and I hope that after reading this, people will be familiar with that history, and will know that the struggle for farm worker rights is far from over. Understanding these three groups enriches our understanding of the twentieth-century Midwest, and Latinx history more broadly, including in rural agricultural areas, not just the big cities.