The Shaping of a City: Race, Resistance, and Womxn
By Delia Fernández-Jones
After over eleven years of research and writing—a time spanning both graduate school and the tenure track—my book Making the MexiRican City: Migration, Placemaking, and Activism in Grand Rapids, Michigan was recently released in late February. This book argues that from the 1920s to the 1970s, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans transformed the places around them via placemaking to meet their cultural, economic, political, and educational needs. Their actions resulted in making an inhospitable place into one where Latines could live and thrive. Although only 5% of the population in the conservative town of Grand Rapids, Mexican and Puerto Rican friendships and relationships served as an anchor for the community to make spaces for themselves and pose challenges to the local power structure that worked to oppress them.
[Cover of Making the MexiRican City, 2023]
In a recent book talk, I was asked which women in my life have had the greatest influence on me and the book. While I explained that there are countless women in my family and women among the oral history participants whose stories are in this book that have impacted me, I also highlighted four Black, Black-Latina, and Afro Latina women whose friendship, mentoring, and scholarship have shaped Making the MexiRican City.
There are several ways to theorize the type of care that these women have shown me over the course of writing this book. Critical Sisterhood Praxis (CSP) is one such theory. In their work on spiritual reclamation for Women of Color in the academy, Ada D Reynolds, Ree Botts, and Farima Pour-Khorshid argue that CSP “creates the space, with and among WOC [women of color], to name and disrupt these continuations of terror that manifest themselves at each phase of our schooling and careers” (15). Indeed, the four women who mentored me not only created spaces of joy and belonging for me at our Midwest institution, but through their scholarship, exposed me to theories, praxis, and research tools that helped me to write a more accurate, more compelling narrative. In graduate school, in a traditional history program, I was not exposed to the types of epistemologies or research methodologies that I used in my book—I learned those from these women.
Through conversations and listening to Black/Black Latina/Afro Latina women scholars and friends, I was able to write a book on Latines that critically engages with ideas of place and community; that places Afro Latine experiences in the forefront; and recognizes the radical power of small acts of rebellion and resistance. While my scholar-friends-sisters and I do not share a geographical or even temporal scope, their scholarship informs my own analysis of Latines in the Midwest and Michigan. What follows is an overview of Making the MexiRican City and the ways that four amazing scholars and their work shaped my book.
My book begins with an overview of how imperialism, racism, and displacement led to a labor migration from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Texas that is often told through the lenses of male migrants. In trying to combat these male-oriented narratives, I found inspiration in other historical works, such as that of Tamar Butler, a former colleague and currently the director of the Avery Research Center in Charleston, South Carolina. Her work centers on Black Girlhood, placemaking, and land via the fields of education, literature, and African American Studies. I have sat in her classes as she and students mapped out migration journeys and connections that existed among Black women in literature and history. According to her scholarship on this topic in “Rooted Relations: Toward Black Girl Placemaking,” “by engaging in Black and decolonial feminist mapping practices, we place Black women and girls’ knowledge and ways of knowing at the center of placemaking practices” (71).
Through my experiences learning from my friend and colleague, I was inspired to prioritize women’s knowledge and ways of knowing by excavating it from documents and narratives that excluded them. Butler’s engagement with a variety of epistemologies helped me to see that traditional historical methods like reading census data or looking at city maps could not reveal women’s role in migration.
[As a new faculty member, I was fortunate to find a community of Black, Black-Latina, and Afro Latina women at my institution who immediately welcomed me. From baseball games to happy hours, these informal spaces offered me an opportunity to learn and grow]
After chronicling migration, Making the MexiRican City explores the racial politics of Grand Rapids among Latines in their process of making a home in the area. Latine history and Latine studies, as my colleague/friend Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez, points out, relegates Afro Latine voices to the margins. Indeed, I did not leave graduate school with a firm understanding of Afro Latine experiences or how to theorize or approach colorism rooted in anti-Blackness that functioned among Latines. However, with Yomaira and Jessica Johnson, a former colleague and now associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, I quickly learned to reconceptualize my approach to understanding Latines experiences of discrimination within Grand Rapids. Both scholars pushed me early on in my tenure track to consider anti-blackness in Latinidad. With small questions, “what did Afro Latines say about this,” or even directly asking, “how will this work engage Afro Latines” I learned to make race a central lens for evaluating lived Latine experiences.
In addition, they led by examples with their work. In Decolonizing Diasporas, Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez reveals how clearly Afro Latines and Black Spanish speaking peoples’ exclusion from Latine conversations has harmed them and continues to harm them. Relegation to the margins is not just theoretical. That led me to reading my interviews with Latines closely to reveal the specific marginality they faced. This allowed me to understand the placemaking efforts of Latines in the 1950s and 1960s via religious and leisure events in the community. It was within those spaces that the racial politics and anti-Blackness emerged. For example, a MexiRican woman whose father was Afro Puerto Rican and whose mother was a light-skinned, Mexican woman, recalled that it was at community dances where she realized her hair texture made her feel different from her siblings and other Latinas in the community. While a graduate student, I was invested in understanding panethnic identity and quickly glossed over her comments, but upon revisiting the interview I realized I missed this opportunity to follow up with her on the anti-Black sentiment she experienced.
While that interview referenced anti-Blackness, so many of the interviews I conducted about the community’s first placemaking efforts did not. As a graduate student, I assumed that the lack of mention regarding anti-Black racism within the Latine community meant it was not a factor. Jessica Johnson’s work on African women and women of African descent in New Orleans taught me to read the silences. Or as she calls it in Wicked Flesh, this act is “calling for an accountable historical practice that challenges the known and the unknown” (5). It became apparent that most documentation and many oral histories with Mexicans and Puerto Ricans were devoid of race. People preferred to talk about their identity in terms of ethnicity. Thus, the discrimination they faced was often couched through language or culture. The silence on the issue of race, including indigeneity or Blackness, revealed how avoiding these topics further marginalized Afro Latines (and Indigenous Latines for that matter). Reading the silences became a way to tell a much more comprehensive story about Latines racial position in Grand Rapids.
After examining racial and ethnic identity in placemaking, Making the MexiRican City then chronicles the ways that Latines in the 1960s and 1970s organized to challenge their marginalization in this smaller, conservative urban area. As part of my research on this period, I read a plethora of books that discussed radical activism including school walk outs, boycotts, moratoriums, church and courthouse takeovers, and armed protests.
In Grand Rapids, there was very little engagement with the radical politics seen elsewhere. At times, I was left wondering if what I did find was even worth writing about. I worried whether institutional activism in the form of petitions, lawsuits, or seeking out allies were really evidence of resistance. I also did not think much of it when I heard narratives of people quitting their jobs because their boss was racists or refusing to anglicize their names when their teachers, bosses, and priests tried to pressure them to do so. The only time Grand Rapids’ social movement history seemed to intersect with more canonical texts was within the discussions of a few Latino male leaders. Newspaper articles and oral histories alike touted the resistance of men and excluded women’s contributions altogether.
It was Vanessa Holden’s work on women and children in the Southampton Rebellion that shifted my lens on Latine activism in Grand Rapids. Holden, a former colleague and associate professor at the University of Kentucky, helped me to understand how every person in a community contributes to resistance and rebellion. One instance stands out in particular. Vanessa facilitated a discussion on the 2016 film, Birth of a Nation, that chronicles what most people know as Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia in 1831. She aptly pointed out that the film erased women and children’s contributions to the rebellion with its sole focus on Nat Turner. In her book, Surviving Southampton, she encourages her readers to see “the rebellion as a product of an interconnected community that includes enslaved women and children and free people of color” (8). It was after that film screening and discussion that I started to rethink how I would evaluate the various contributions and strategies Latines in Grand Rapids used.
My colleagues/friends embraced a politics of care in helping to guide me through the tenure track and writing a book. Through their gentle and authentic mentoring and teaching, I was able to reconceive of critical aspects of my book and my broader scholarship. This example of critical sisterhood praxis has not only created a more compelling book but has taught me how to provide the same type of mentorship to the next cohort of Womxn of Color scholars.
References
Butler, Tamara T. “Rooted Relations: Toward Black Girl Placemaking.” Black Girls’ Literacies: Transforming Lives and Literacy Practices. Eds. Detra Price-Dennis and Gholnecsar E. Muhammad. New York, NY: Routledge, 2021, 67-82.
Figueroa-Vásquez, Yomaira. Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2020.
Holden, Vanessa M. Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2021.
Johnson, Jessica Maria. Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.
Reynolds, Aja D., Ree Botts, and Farima Pour-Khorshid. “Critical Sisterhood Praxis: Curating a Woman of Color Feminist Intervention for Spiritual Reclamation in the Academy.” The Journal of Educational Foundations 34-1 (2021): 14-30.
Cover Photo Credit: Delita Martin, “Star Children” (2019).
Dr. Delia Fernández-Jones is an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University. She is a core faculty member of the Chicano/Latino Studies Program and the director of the Womxn of Color Initiatives. She was born and raised in Grand Rapids Michigan among a large, tight-knit Mexican and Puerto Rican community. Drawing on her lived experiences as a Latina in Michigan and extensive primary source research, her work centers on Latinx placemaking in the Midwest. She is particularly interested in how this population transforms the places they live in to suit their political, economic, and social needs. She has two award winning articles on Latinos in Michigan. She is the author of Making the MexiRican City, Mexican and Puerto Rican Migration, Placemaking, and Activism in Grand Rapids, Michigan.