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Barrios Nortenos: St. Paul and Midwestern Mexican Communities in the Twentieth Century. By Dionicio Nodin Valdes. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. viii + 380 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $22.95. ISBN: Cloth 0-292-78743-X; paper 0-292-- 78744-8.
Reviewed by Brian Gratton
In this study of the urban Midwest, Dionicio Valdes extends a research plan that he began ten years ago in Al Norte: Agricultural Workers in the Great Lakes Region, 1917-1970 (1991). In Barrios Nortenos he examines the communities that slowly took form in cities, as migrants became permanent settlers rather than itinerant immigrants and sojourners from the Southwest. Valdes has two manifest aims: The first is to provide a detailed history of urban Mexican life, with the west-side barrio in St. Paul as his exemplary site. The second objective is to prove that Mexicans are not simply the latest in a line of groups that comprise American immigration history. In his view, racially based discrimination has ensured that they have not shared in the economic and social success enjoyed by descendents of European arrivals.
The amount of evidence available for the first goal is surprisingly extensive, given the small size of the Mexican American population in the region. Valdes commands a wealth of materials on Mexican life in St. Paul and in other cities in the Midwest. One noteworthy source is the series of community studies carried out by students of Paul Taylor, a noted labor economist at Berkeley, during the 1920s, which Valdes uses to great, if lengthy, effect. Such primary evidence provides a strong foundation for a history of persons of Mexican origin, who remained within identifiable barrios. It sustains an argument that these communities were centers for...