Debrah E. Kanter's study of Mexican and Latinx Chicago makes a significant contribution to the fields of Latinx History, Latinx Studies, and Religious Studies. The author combines the migration and settlement history of Mexicans and to a lesser extent other Latinx communities, especially Puerto Ricans, to the city. This study fills a gap in our understandings of the role of Catholicism in the migration history, assimilation, and identity formation of Mexican and Latinx communities in Chicago, and can serve as a template for such research in other cities. According to Kanter, “This book underlines religion's critical role in immigrants’ urban adjustment and racial politics while recasting the Eurocentric assumptions of immigration history narratives” (6). She accomplishes this through a rigorous methodology that includes archival research in parish records and interviews with parishioners and clerical staff at Chicago's most important Latinx-serving Catholic churches, tracing this history from Mexican Chicago's roots on the Near West Side, to its migration further south to the Pilsen neighborhood, and more recently further south and west.

The work spans a roughly 100-year historical period, from 1920 to the present. Chicago's early twentieth-century Mexican immigrants arriving either directly from Mexico or via migration from the Southwest sought support for their faith and adjustment to the city in Catholic parishes, particularly St. Francis of Assisi, which came to be known as “la cathedral mexicana.” The history of the integration of Mexican Catholics into various parishes across the city illustrates the tensions and eventual community formation for Mexicans and other Latinxs amid churches that previously served European ethnic groups. This history parallels the struggles for community in which Latinxs engaged in other institutions, such as schools. The argument outlined by Deborah Kanter demonstrates that the church played an integral role in various historical and political events, including World War II, Vatican II, and the Chicano movement. She situates this narrative within the Mexican Revolution as a critical point of Mexican migration to the United States.

This historical and cultural journey begins in Chapter 1, “Paths to Chicago,” with the migration of Mexicans to Chicago in the early twentieth century as they established an enclave on the Near West Side, where previous European immigrants had settled, and continued to settle. They nurtured their faith at St. Francis of Assisi, under the auspices of Spanish Claretian priests who could serve their linguistic if not all of their cultural needs as practicing Mexican Catholics. Once established as a Mexican parish, St. Francis of Assisi became not only a house of worship but also a point of contact for newly arrived immigrants to find networks as they transitioned to Chicago, such that its reputation reached Mexico, as outlined in Chapter 2, garnering it a transnational significance.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 detail how the sustained ethnic and racial tensions between European and Mexican neighborhood residents played out in church kitchens and other social spaces, as well as via the reluctance of many priests to incorporate Spanish masses and Mexican and Latinx Catholic traditions into their faith communities, amid neighborhood ethnic succession and later gentrification. These chapters document the evolution of Catholic churches as their neighborhood demographics shift, an evolution marked by racial, ethnic, and class tensions.

The epilogue makes the case for the crucial role of Catholic churches as a refuge for newly arrived immigrants, and for Latinx communities as the future of US Catholicism, as numbers of Catholics dwindle among other racial and ethnic groups. The trajectory of Kanter's study lays the groundwork for future studies in Chicago and beyond as it invites future research that engages more deeply with the religious histories of Latinx national groups beyond Mexicans, and religions beyond Catholicism, as they intersect with race, class, gender, migration, and Latinidad across the United States.