When Mexicans first began arriving in the Windy City in the early 1920s, the region offered them a particularly cold welcome. This was true not only in the literal sense—Midwest winters offer a brutal contrast to the gentle Mexican climate—but also because Mexicans had to work especially hard to carve out social space in neighborhoods claimed by earlier, better-established, and occasionally unwelcoming European-origin immigrant groups.

Eventually, however, they would create thriving communities. Central to this process was their Catholicism—and their persistent efforts to bring Mexican devotional practices to existing parishes. Deborah E. Kanter describes this history vividly in her book Chicago Católico: Making Catholic Parishes Mexican. Using a tremendously rich variety of sources—including parish bulletins and newspapers, archdiocesan archival material, Catholic school records, family photographs, diaries, and a number of oral history interviews—Kanter presents a dynamic story that offers a complement and a corrective to the existing scholarship on Mexican community formation in Chicago.

In the first half of the book (chapters 1–3), Kanter describes how Claretian missionaries advocated for Mexican migrants to claim St. Francis of Assisi, a formerly German church on the city's Near West Side. St. Francis would eventually became the most important parish for the city's Mexican immigrants and their children between 1920 and the 1960s—a “Mexican cathedral” (30) where Mexican parishioners could express devotion through specifically Mexican observations, such as the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe. At the same time, its clergy offered much-needed social welfare to newly arrived immigrants by allowing them to sleep in parish buildings and helping them to find jobs.

By midcentury, the children of the first wave of Mexican migrants had come of age; many in this second generation had grown up attending St. Francis's parochial school. Quite a few of the community's young men went off to war in 1945, and Kanter opens chapter 3 with a brilliantly written vignette about one soldier, Teófilo Arévalo, reading the St. Francis Crier in an army camp in Europe. Kanter devotes welcome attention to these youth, many of whom were educated at St. Francis's parochial school and—after 1947—could spend their leisure hours at its gym and youth center. This generation “lived easily with their hybrid identity” (61).

By the late 1950s, however, the Mexican population on the Near West Side began to decline, partly due to increasing gang violence and crime. An even more acute problem was the city's destruction of the area in order to build both a new freeway and a university campus. Ultimately, “entire residential blocks were erased. Halsted Street, north of St. Francis, lost its supermercados, taquerias, Italian shops, and Greek diners and gave way to expansive parking lots” (86). As people moved out, attendance at St. Francis dropped steeply. Yet it would remain a destination parish for Mexicans in Chicago: to this day, it attracts Mexican and other Spanish-speaking immigrants and their descendants, many of whom travel there from other neighborhoods.

In the latter half of the book (chapters 4–5 and epilogue), Kanter tells the story of Mexican arrival and settlement in the Pilsen neighborhood, which had long been home to large numbers of Czech and other Slavic immigrants. As Mexicans moved in, there was some resistance from European-origin residents, including Catholic priests and nuns, but this did not present a permanent impediment. At the formerly Czech parish of St. Procopius, for example, the pastor, Fr. Mizera, “was undoubtedly critical, condescending, and driven to stereotype. . . . Yet a sense of priestly duty compelled him not to turn Mexicans away” (110). Furthermore, while Mexicans experienced hostility from neighbors, it was minimal in comparison to that directed at African Americans.

Eventually, Mexican Catholics were able to remake parish after parish in Pilsen. Kanter provides a window into this process in her examination of St. Ann Church, a formerly Polish church that became a Mexican one thanks in large part to the efforts of Matías and Lupe Almendarez, who worked tirelessly to promote Mexican devotional practices and “gained their pastor's respect and encouraged the parish's integration” (116).

By the 1970s, “a committed Mexican laity, partnering with sympathetic European American clergy, [had] indelibly stamped Pilsen as católico, Catholic, and Mexican” (128). At the same time, the neighborhood saw increasing challenges: a crime wave, poor schools, and the economic crisis of the early 1970s. Pilsen turned into an epicenter of political activism as a new generation of activist Chicano leaders took to the streets in the 1960s and 1970s. This activism was closely tied to their religious devotion. In a beautiful description of the Holy Week Procession of 1977, Kanter portrays how Mexican Catholics celebrated their faith against the backdrop of neighborhood change: “The centurion mounted his horse. Ten lanes of traffic from the Dan Ryan Expressway roared above them. Matías, the costumed actors, and the crowd crossed the narrow sidewalk, stepped down from the curb, and literally occupied 18th Street with a tableau from another time” (124). Today, Kanter notes in a poignant epilogue, “ubiquitous and visual reminders of Catholic faith abound in Pilson” (137). The neighborhood is still full of stores selling devotional items; people take over the streets for seasonal processions and street Masses, and they continue to enact the Via Crucis. Yet at the same time, “the mosaic of parishes has diminished” (144): by 2019, only three Catholic parishes remained open in Pilsen, reflecting a nationwide process of parish consolidations and closings. Still, Kanter reflects, “these enduring parishes certainly continue to anchor community, ethnic identity, and the very present spiritual lives of Mexican people in the United States” (150).

Kanter's book is a potent reminder of how essential the Catholic Church—and Catholic devotion—has been for generations of Mexican communities in the United States. Historians and students of both Mexican immigration and Catholicism will find much to enjoy in this beautifully written and eminently readable study.