Middle West US
Exploring Midwest History and Culture
Making Michigan Home: Mexican Americans Bridging the Rural Urban Experience
February 25, 2026
By Brett T. Olmsted
Making Michigan Home examines how Mexicans and Mexican Americans dynamically engaged in placemaking in Michigan (and the Great Lakes Region more broadly) from the 1920s to the 1970s to confront the social, economic, and political exclusion they encountered in the north. Michigan Mexicanos actively negotiated, constructed, and molded the space around them, redefining how and where they belonged. Because Michigan Mexicanos never constituted a numerically significant population in any one area, they pursued inclusion via leisure spaces and labor unionism. By gathering together for activities such as celebrations, sports, movies, and music, Mexicanos claimed physical and social space within Michigan’s cities and towns, connected with other Mexicano communities across the state, and constructed their own sense of identity and community…Read More
Interested in being involved?
“Here on the prairies of Illinois and the Middle West we can see a long way in many directions…Here there are no barriers, no defenses, to ideas and aspirations. We want none; we want no shackles on the mind or the spirit, no rigid patterns of thought, no iron conformity.”
-Adlai Stevenson