Marc Rodríguez

• Northwestern University, Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at Portland State University

Each spring during the 1960s and 1970s, a quarter million farm workers left Texas to travel across the nation, from the Midwest to California, to harvest America's agricultural products. During this migration of people, labor, and ideas, Tejanos established settlements in nearly all the places they traveled to for work, influencing concepts of Mexi...

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This chapter focuses on twenty-two-year-old Jesus Salas, a college student and the son of a migrant contractor and restaurant owner from Crystal City, Texas. Salas organized a “March on Madison” to bring attention to the problems of Wisconsin's migrant farmworkers. This was the third farmworker march of the year. In March, the fledgling National Fa...

This chapter describes how mainstream public school systems of the Southwest became increasingly open to Mexican American students. A variety of changes, including statewide public school reform and a shift in attitudes among some parents, brought large numbers of Mexican American teens into high school for the first time, where they began an epist...

This chapter shows that, as Mexican American and U.S. Latino activism became national in scope in the late 1960s, a variety of movements emerged from within the Mexican-ancestry community and the urban trans-Latino communities of the Midwest. As it had in the past, the migrant stream linking Crystal City to Wisconsin and other locations continued t...

This book concludes by showing how Tejanos played an increasingly important political and social role in the manufacturing-based economy of Milwaukee while Crystal City experienced decades of stagnation and decline. Even as that city underwent the deindustrialization common to the large cities of the Midwest and Northeast, Tejano and other Latino m...

This chapter illustrates how a large group of “concerned south-side citizens” packed the Milwaukee offices of United Migrant Opportunity Services, Inc. (UMOS), a social service agency established under the auspices of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), to protest the mismanagement of this poverty program. The demonstrators sought a meeting w...

This chapter focuses on the fact that, for Mexican Americans throughout the Southwest, the post-World War II period witnessed increasing civil rights activism. Among the southwestern states, Texas served as a central location of postwar militancy on the part of Mexican Americans, in part for reasons of demography: although California would surpass...

On any given summer night in Chicago, Miami, San Antonio, Los Angeles, or New York, one does not have to go far to find the diverse rhythms of Latin music. It is in the air, emanating from homes, cars, clubs, and from informal groups of musicians on the streets. In the alleys of Humboldt Park in Chicago, for example, one hears salsa and meringue co...

This paper reframes the development of post-WWII political activism in Crystal City, Texas, one of the primary sites of post 1960 Mexican American and Chicano Movement activism. Most studies of begin with the development of militant activism in 1963 and the emergence of Chicano politics after 1969 as the city became a central location in the nation...

This history of the Chicano civil rights movement blends the histories of Crystal City, Texas, and Wisconsin, and their interconnection across the interstate migrant stream. This revisionist account presents a corrective to traditional one-place-bound community studies common within Chicano Movement historiography as it argues for the centrality of...

Thesis (Ph. D, History)--Northwestern University, 2000. Includes bibliographical references (p. 302-325). "UMI number: 9994733"--T.p. verso. Photocopy.