Metropolitan Latinidad: Transforming American Urban History

A wide-ranging collection of essays that centers Latinos in the history of American cities and suburbs.

Latino urban history has been underappreciated not only in its own right but for the centrality of its narratives to urban history as a field. A scholarly discipline that has long scrutinized economics, politics, and the built environment has too often framed race as literally Black and white. This has resulted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the full social canvas of American cities since at least the early twentieth century.

Traversing metropolitan areas like Atlanta, Chicago, El Paso, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York, this collection of essays brings together both established and emerging scholars, including long-time urbanists and academics working in the fields of Latino, borderlands, political, landscape, and religious history. Organized at different scales--including city, suburb, neighborhood, and hemisphere--this impressive body of work challenges long-standing narratives about metropolitan America. The contributors--Llana Barber, Mauricio Castro, Eduardo Contreras, Sandra I. Enríquez, Monika Gosin, Cecilia Sánchez Hill, Felipe Hinojosa, Michael Innis-Jiménez, Max Krochmal, Becky M. Nicolaides, Pedro A. Regalado, Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez, and Thomas J. Sugrue--engage a diverse range of subjects, such as urban rebellions, the suburbanization of Latinos, affordable housing, labor, the built environment, transnationalism, place-making, and religious life. The scholars also explore race within Latino communities, as well as the role that political and economic dynamics have played in creating Latino urban spaces. After reading this book, you will never see American cities the same way again.

A. K. Sandoval-Strausz is director of the Latina/o Studies Program and professor of history at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City and Hotel: An American History.