The history of Latinos in Michigan is one of cultural diversity, institutional formation, and an ongoing search for leadership in the midst of unique, often intractable circumstances. While facing adversity as rural and urban immigrants, exiles, and citizens, Latinos have contributed culturally, economically, and socially to many important developments in the state’s history. They have coalesced into an internally diverse entity as they have engaged in work, residence, and religion, and this essay probes the interrelationship among the various constituent groups. The 2000 U.S. Census indicates that Latinos now comprise about 3 percent (324,000) of Michigan’s population,a 61 increase since...

In the early decades of the twentieth century Mexican Americans in the ranches, towns, and farms of the lower Rio Grande Valley and the Winter Garden area in Texas began expanding as far north as Montana and Minnesota. Large corporations involved in the growing and processing of beet sugar contracted with local growers for the employment of out-of-state seasonal labor, thereby introducing Mexicans into the Michigan economy. The Texas Mexicans, ortejanos, Michigan’s first Latinos, had lived in Texas for varying periods—sometimes decades, even centuries—because they or their ancestors were born there, because they had crossed the border...

Part of the Latino contribution to Michigan lies in the community’s importance to religious institutions, both in lay participation and in the changes the Latino presence brought for archdiocesan and parochial policies on the part of Anglo clergy. Detroit, among the oldest cities in the United States, has played a particularly significant role historically in the implantation of Roman Catholics in the Great Lakes region, a role it has maintained for native-born and immigrant Latinos. The founding of Detroit by Antoine De la Mothe Cadillac in 1701 occurred at a time when France controlled much of the North American interior....

Michigan Mexicans generally enjoyed more rapid assimilation of American culture than was possible in the Southwest. Nonetheless, prevailing prejudices since the 1920s portrayed Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Michigan, particularly those in agriculture, as cheap, docile, and temporary laborers to be forgotten when no longer needed. These sentiments were readily transferred to the first Caribbean contingent of Latinos—the Puerto Ricans. Technically considered migrants rather than immigrants because of U.S. citizenship bestowed upon that island territory (now called a commonwealth) in 1917, Puerto Ricans took advantage of the increased demand for seasonal workers by corporate agricultural interests to enter the...

The post–World War II decades brought about a rising awareness among Mexican Americans nationally of the need for collective mobilization to achieve full civil rights. One organization, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), had been active in Texas since 1929 in seeking equality regarding education, housing, and other issues. During the war the Fair Employment Practices Committee launched investigations regarding discriminatory hiring practices in defense-related industries in the Southwest. Returning Mexican American veterans formed the G.I. Forum to alleviate discriminatory treatment in southwestern institutions. Many areas in the public and private sector, however, particularly in the Midwest,...

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, since 1900 Latinos have accounted for more than half of the Midwest’s net population growth. More than ever, globalism, suburbanization, and neighborhood change have emerged as crucial determinants of Latino migration across borders and regions. Mexicans account for over two-thirds of the Midwest’s Latinos and for roughly three-quarters of Latino growth while the non-Latino white population has decreased. Other sending regions, however, such as Texas, the Caribbean, and the rest of Latin American, have included similar patterns of back and forth travel, the sending home of portions of industrial income, and the temporary placement...

The Latino presence in Michigan increasingly involves integration into all areas of the state and integration into a wide variety of the state’s political, social, and cultural institutions. Michigan’s Mexican American communities, concentrated since the mid–1900s around Detroit, the “thumb,” and a few counties bordering Lake Michigan, now extend throughout the Lower Peninsula and even show some inroads in parts of the Upper Peninsula. Areas of largely Puerto Rican ancestry are similar, but more tightly bound to the cities. Cubans are dispersed more generally throughout entire metropolitan areas. The predominantly middle-class Cubans, Colombians, Argentinians, and others have tended to...