Deborah Kanter's compact, useful book examines Mexican-American Catholicism by focusing on two historic Chicago parish communities. It consults many familiar secondary sources, introduces some new ones and thoughtfully depicts faith and devotion. The introductory chapter, based on the diary of Elidia Barroso, an immigrant from Guanajuato who arrived in Chicago in 1924, recalls one family's early struggles through personal reminiscences, photos and archival material. Barroso joined the church of St Francis of Assisi (the city's ‘Mexican cathedral’), a former Italian parish staffed by the Claretian Missionary Fathers, and promptly became involved in its activities in the Near West Side community. The next chapter examines that parish from 1940 to 1962 through contemporary secular and ecclesiastical sources. Chapter iii covers ‘Mexican Americans in mid-century Chicago’, during the wartime years and the post-war decade. By this time a US-born contingent of Mexican Americans had swelled the neighbourhood's original Mexican immigrant population. This interesting but somewhat impressionistic chapter ends by noting the impending destruction of the Near West Side's tenements and businesses in the process of slum clearance and urban renewal. Significantly, many displaced residents embarked upon a pronounced westward procession, forming the nucleus of the sprawling Pilsen-Little Village neighbourhood extending well beyond the city's boundaries. Chapter iv explores Pilsen from 1947 to 1970 as it matured into a Mexican-American secular and religious urban hub. One sign of its emerging presence appeared in the 1960s when clergymen in charge of several large parishes originally built for Bohemian (Czech), Lithuanian and Polish immigrants began to introduce, undoubtedly with archdiocesan approval, special Spanish-language masses to serve its newcomers. Ultimately these congregations became de facto Mexican parish communities as European ethnic membership dwindled. Many residents maintained an allegiance to more than one parish and ‘continued to return to St. Francis in the 1970s’ for Sunday mass, where attendance on special occasions rose to 4,000 (p. 135). In the epilogue the author looks forward, but this snapshot does not address the development of suburban parish communities, despite their early appearance (for instance, in boxcar chapels in outlying Aurora and its vicinity served by itinerant Mexican exile priests in the 1920s) and their current importance throughout the metropolitan region. Finally, there is a noticeable absence in the book of indications of conflicts among parishes or between religious communities, which is surprising given the problems bubbling to the surface in the 1960s and the 1970s. Indeed, cultural and ideological differences between clerical and lay leaders had existed since the 1920s, having been imported during waves of anticlericalism during the Mexican Revolution. Tensions also appeared in the post-war implementation of archdiocesan church and school site planning, staffing and liturgical and related strategies, which pitted the city's Catholic groups against one another in competition for scarce brick-and-mortar resources. Immigrant Catholicism in the United States, moreover, has historically involved competition between urban Catholics and non-Catholics. Identifying and analysing the many structures of urban stratification would therefore seem to be an integral piece in the puzzle of ethnic parish formation. None the less, Chicago Católico constitutes a welcome addition to the literature on Chicago Catholicism.