Professor edits new book focused on Latino influence on urban history

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A new book edited by A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, professor of history and director of the Latina/o Studies Program at Penn State, provides readers with an expansive view of how the Latino community’s deep influence on cities allows for a rethinking of American urban history.

The University of Chicago Press recently published “Metropolitan Latinidad: Transforming American Urban History,” a collection of 12 essays examining the rich and multifaceted Latino experience in cities and suburbs throughout the United States.

The book’s 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 — developed their essays while participating in a fall 2021 conference hosted by the Latina/o Studies Program with support from the College of the Liberal Arts and the Equal Opportunity Planning Committee.

“The conference was terrific,” Sandoval-Strausz said. “Everyone came to it with real intensity, and we had these substantive discussions that we audio recorded and videotaped. It allowed the scholars to think more broadly about the subject and then from there they produced these exceptionally sharp pieces of work.”

The book was conceived as a response to Latino urban history’s still marginal status within the broader field of urban history. As the scholars make clear in their essays, the Latino experience in metropolitan areas like Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami and New York City goes back many decades and has been much more far-reaching in its influence than conventional wisdom suggests.

“What we wanted to do was look at the relationship between Latino history and urban history and why they have so often tended to be studied in isolation from one another, despite the fact that of the 25 most populous cities in America, two are majority Latino, eight are one-third or more Latino, and 13 are one-quarter Latino,” Sandoval-Strausz said. “This is a transformative occurrence.”

The book’s contributors are a mix of early-career and well-known veteran scholars in the field, and the terrain they cover is similarly diverse.

Nicolaides’ essay examined the growth of Latino suburbs, or “ethnoburbs,” while Contreras goes all the way back to the 19th century to show that Latinos were a part of life in large pan-American cities much earlier than commonly known.

Rodriguez used her family’s experience as construction workers in suburban Atlanta to illustrate the growth of the Latino community there.

“When you read the essay, you get a real sense that she had the absolute trust of the people she was interviewing. You get really honest, raw thoughts of what it was like for them,” Sandoval-Strausz said. “She starts with this very intimate story of her family building big new homes in suburban Atlanta. When the first Mexican migrants showed up there, there weren’t really any Mexican restaurants or clubs for them to go to, so instead they would take them to these housing sites. And through that you get a real sense of their pride in being creators of this new metropolitan Atlanta. And then she zooms out to the present and how the Mexican community is such an indispensable part of the construction industry there.”

Sugrue is considered one of the country’s preeminent urban history scholars, so it was a coup getting him to contribute to the book, Sandoval-Strausz said.

“The fact that he is now writing Latino history is terrific,” Sandoval-Strausz said. “He looks at a community on Long Island that has rapidly diversified since about the 1990s, and the ways residential segregation still persists there and why it happens. It comes out of some of his work on voting rights issues, where you have white Anglo city or town councils in places that are 50% Latino. How do you bring more representative voices onto these important political bodies that really affect people’s everyday lives?”

Gosin wrote the book’s final essay, which explored the diversity that exists within specific Latino communities.

“She writes about Cuban immigrants, especially Afro-Cuban versus more European-appearing, white-presenting Cubans in Miami and Los Angeles, where the dominant Latino population is Mexican,” Sandoval-Strausz said. “How does that look different? Let’s think about what the experience for Cubans has been like.”

Currently, Sandoval-Strausz is editing another book that came out of Latina/o Studies’ April 2024 conference. The book, titled “America Política: Latina/os and U.S. Political History,” will be published next year by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

And in his role as president of the Urban History Association, Sandoval-Strausz will coordinate the organization’s 11th biennial conference in Los Angeles this October. The conference’s theme is “Metropolitan Majorities,” and the list of speakers includes Susan Welch Dean of the College of the Liberal Arts Clarence Lang, a specialist in African American urban history who recently co-edited the book, “Black Urban History at the Crossroads: Race and Place in the American City.”

“Latino history looks to African American history as an older, wise sibling — and it’s incredibly easy to see how African American history has transformed urban history,” Sandoval-Strausz said. “Looking to that older history of scholars who really do manage to change the way we look at cities is really inspiring. Now that Latinos are a huge, important population in cities, what’s our contribution in terms of how we think of the history of cities and nations?”