Chicago: Immigrant Metropolis

Over a century-and-a-half ago, Chicago emerged out of the marshy coast of the great inland sea like an ungainly colossus. As the steady waves of humanity pressed upon its shores, the city's population rose in dramatic spurts to become the teeming immigrant metropolis of the midcontinent. Each wave of immigrants has left its distinctive marks on Chicago that has long enjoyed the nickname "City of Neighborhoods." Those who travel to Chicago for the AAG Annual Meeting, March 7-11, 2006, will follow in the footsteps of those immigrants, and will encounter a city that boasts 130 foreign-language media outlets and an emergency service system that can respond to phone calls in twenty-seven languages.

One of Chicago's many ethnic neighborhoods, Chinatown is easily accessible from the AAG's meeting site.

In fancy multi-page advertising sections in targeted business journals, the city's boosters point out that even the New York Times has hailed Chicago as "the quintessential American city." The ads proclaim the city's population is made up of "immigrants from everywhere--from 200 nations during just the past thirty years" and that "there is no majority race in metropolitan Chicago." The purpose of such boasts is to underpin claims that Chicago offers lifestyles "filled with an abundance of cool, classic, global, and authentic options for cosmopolitan ways of life." In March, geographers will have ample opportunity to taste their way through evidence of Chicago's cosmopolitan ways as they undertake gastronomical expeditions in search of the city's famed ethnic fare. The AAG will provide useful guides to some such venues that are more accessible from the annual meeting headquarters hotel, the Palmer House Hilton.

A mural in Chicago's Latino neighborhood of Pilsen.

But culinary diversions aside, Chicago's ethnic diversity and immigrant identity are key elements in an intricate set of socio-spatial arrangements, legacies of processes of urbanization and industrialization. From the day that eighteenth century French fur traders ventured down from Québec to trade with the Potawatomi, Chicago found itself ensconced in a web of exchange that stretched across the continent to the eastern seaboard and over the Atlantic Ocean.

This was the site permanently settled by the first immigrant in the late 1770s, approximately where the Tribune Tower stands today. Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable, a "free Negro" from the French colony of Haiti, took a Potawatomi woman as his wife and fathered the first child to be born in the new settlement. The Potawatomi are long gone, ignominiously displaced by the exclusionary frontier practices of Yankee settlers that soon arrived from the East to claim the area near du Sable's cabin as their own, destined for "highest and best use." While in Chicago, geographers can sneak a visit to the DuSable Museum of African American History (www.dusablemuseum.org) and the Chicago Historical Society (www.chicagohistory.org) for glimpses into the lives of the city's earliest settlers.

The promise of fortunes fueled the growth of Chicago as Irish (irishamhc.com), German (dankhaus.net), and Scandinavian (samac.org) immigrants flowed into town, their numbers increasing dramatically with the advent of the railroads. On the eve of the U.S. Civil War, the population of Chicago had reached over 112,000 people, of whom more than half were foreign-born. Thirty years later, as the population passed the one million mark, almost four out of five residents where either European immigrants or their children. By this time, Germans constituted the largest immigrant group, with nearly two out of every five foreign-born residents being German.

A general division of labor, mostly along ethnic lines, was imposed early on. The most recent arrivals tended to be the ethnic groups with the least desirable jobs and were most often used by the bosses as spoilers against more established workers, fueling ethnic antagonisms and dividing the working class. This carried over onto the built environment, where ethnic and class hostility shaped the emergence of residential segregation and the formation of ethno-class clusters, to produce the famed City of Neighborhoods.

During the decades of vertiginous demographic growth, when Chicago was transformed into America's "shock city," it was predominantly European immigrants that flowed into the city?s infamous slums. No sooner did Bohemians (csafraternallife.org), Poles (pma.prcua.org), Lithuanians (lithaz.org/museums/balzekas), Ukrainians (ukrntlmuseum.org), Italians (italianculturalcenter.net), Greeks (hellenicmuseum.org), Jews (spertus.edu/museum), and dozens of other groups arrive, than they found themselves tied into a system of exploitative relations in both employment and housing. Community institutions, both religious and secular, became social and spatial anchors in the immigrant entrepôts of the teeming metropolis, as enclaves of ethno-class settlement scored Chicago's famed gridiron form. Parochial place-names, stacked one on top of the other, still roll off Chicago's tongues: Jewtown (for Maxwell Street's "Jewish Ghetto"), nearby Greektown, a Little Italy and a Little Sicily (the infamous "Little Hell" in the shadow of the Gold Coast), Scandinavian Andersonville, a German Lincoln Square, a Bohemian Pilsen, and an expanding Polonia.

In the City of Neighborhoods everyone was expected to know their place, none more so than the African- Americans who migrated, in large numbers, to the "promised land" from Jim Crow South during the Great Migration, only to find themselves in Jim Crow Chicago. A sliver of a settlement stretching like a "Black belt" down the city's South Side, Bronzeville became the "Canaan" of black farm-handsturned- factory hands who followed the trumpet call of the Chicago Defender north (bronzevillehistoricalsociety.com). Hemmed in on all sides by narrow minds and volatile ethnic neighborhoods, Chicago's African-Americans formed one of the most vibrant communities anywhere in North America.

It was in this crowded field of transecting insularities that Chicago's newest immigrant groups arrived in large numbers. As de-industrialization pockmarked the city with rusting hulks and derelict streetscapes, it was increasingly immigrants from Asia and Latin America that were drafted into vanishing, deskilled manufacturing jobs and emerging lower-tier service positions.

As Siyoung Park recounts in Chicago's Geographies (published in conjunction with the AAG's Chicago meeting) although there was a small, but solid, Chinese community in Chicago for nearly eight decades (ccamuseum.org), Mao Zedong's rise to power in China sent thousands of Chinese immigrants to the city's Chinatown (www.chicago-chinatown.com). Conflict in Southeast Asia led to thousands of Cambodians, Vietnamese, Laotians, and Chinese from that part of the world to seek refuge in Chicago during the 1970s and 1980s, forming a second "Chinatown," or "Little Saigon," on a disinvested strip in the North Side. A vibrant Korean community can still be found on Bryn Mawr Avenue, between Kedzie and Pulaski, and along Lincoln Avenue between Bryn Mawr and Peterson, while large concentration of Koreans and Japanese are now centered on Chicago's northwest suburbs.

Also in the North Side, roughly between Western and California Avenues, stretches the most prominent symbol of South Asian immigration in North America: Devon Avenue's bustling Indian-Pakistani marketplace. Home to dozens of restaurants and scores of stores, Devon caters to North America's Indo-Pak diaspora. Just a mile to the south is a Middle-Eastern enclave centered on Lawrence and Kedzie Avenues. This is matched by another, larger enclave in the southwest part of the city that spills over into the suburbs.

Chicago's Geographies also contains an article on Latino communities that describes how the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Latinos, primarily Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, nearly overshadows the settlement of all other ethnic groups in Chicago. Today, Chicago boasts the third largest Latino population of American cities with 753,644, as more than forty percent of the city's census tracts gained significant numbers of Latino immigrants. The suburbs, some of which have now become immigrant entrepôts, have seen an even more dramatic change, as over thirty-nine percent of the metropolitan area's Latinos now live there in tight clusters. Of the over than 650,000 suburban Latinos, more than half live in just seventeen of Chicago's 264 suburbs! AAG field trips are being organized to Puerto Rican Humboldt Park and Mexican Pilsen/Little Village.

Finally, as you prepare for your trip to Chicago for AAG's 2006 Annual Meeting, get an excellent overview of the city by securing a copy of the book Chicago's Geographies: A 21st Century Metropolis from the AAG (www.neiu.edu/~cgproj) edited by Richard Greene, Mark Bouman, and myself. We look forward to seeing you in March.

Dennis Grammenos
d-grammenos@neiu.edu

Please direct all queries to:

Association of American Geographers 1710 16th Street NW,br> Washington, DC 20009 Voice: (202) 234-1450 Fax: (202) 234-2744 E-mail: meeting@aag.org