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. For instance, commencing in the 1920s (and continuing to the present) groups of Mexicanos all over the region gathered for celebrations such as the dieciséis (September 16, Mexican Independence Day). These galas brought Mexicanos together from across the state, transforming small towns into what some local Anglos referred to as temporary “Mexican villages.” For those few days, the festival grounds became their space, a place to project a positive and vibrant historic culture as well as engage in the political sphere. In a similar manner, sports – including baseball, basketball, and football – became vital placemaking spaces. The recreational activities forged intrastate and intra-regional communal ties that ignored the supposed rural/urban divide, allowed Mexicanos to contest their imputed position as weak and passive sojourners by displaying masculinity, and helped defy segregation. The athletic endeavors also displayed the creation of distinct Michigan-centric (and Midwestern-centric) Mexican American identities.

Moreover, within the labor arena, Mexicanos embraced interethnic union activism in the United Auto Workers (UAW) union. Mexicanos were active participants in the UAWs first major victory over General Motors in the 1937 Sit-Down Strike and have been loyal union members since. Participation in the UAW enabled many Mexicanos to remove their families from the cycle of migrant farm labor involvement. The UAW would assist in drawing the attention of the larger Michigan population to the issues facing farmworkers in the 1970s. However, the union was also often slow in addressing lingering inequality on the shop floor. To combat this, Mexicanos engaged in concurrent factory and farm work to achieve a more stable economic footing and actively pushed the union for change from within, getting Mexicanos involved in the political process. In doing so, Mexicanos reasserted their dignity in the face of Anglos who viewed them as first-class laborers but second-class citizens.

Finally, Making Michigan Home argues for the need to bridge the rural/urban divide when examining any ethnic group, not just in Michigan but across the country. There was often great fluidity between the two arenas. In this case, Mexicanos took advantage of Michigan’s dual economy, further demonstrating Mexicano agency and adaptability. Examining the state as a whole depicts the important development of fictive familial kinships that bound seemingly disparate communities. This process facilitated the creation of both intra-state and intra-regional networks that allowed for Mexicano communities to engage in larger placemaking activities as well as a larger number of Mexicanos to engage the political sphere to push for civil rights.

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