This book's content and interdisciplinary perspective provide a crucial intervention in the field of Latinx studies. The field of Latinx studies traditionally located itself within a bicoastal framework, predicated upon migration patterns that understand the East Coast to be the main home of Caribbean migrants and subsequent generations and the West Coast home to Mexican and Central American migrants and subsequent generations. This book emerges within the context of a significant cohort of research published in the early twenty-first century that has sought to challenge the bicoastal Latinx narrative and underscore Latinx communities’ historical and contemporary contributions to our understandings of Latinidad.

A range of scholars and disciplines reveal the ways that the Midwest can serve as a critical space to broaden our understandings of race, class, gender, (im)migration, and Intralatinx relations and identities. The editors identify three goals: “to distinguish those characteristics of the Midwest that are distinctive with respect to other regions of the United States, encourage further comparative work that integrates the Latina/o Midwest more fully into Latina/o studies scholarship, and challenge the bicoastal dominance of the field” (11). Valerio-Jiménez, Vaquera-Vásquez, and Fox also seek to highlight the Latinx presence in the urban and rural Midwest within the context of inequalities in housing, education, and social services.

The book positions readers to understand the Latinx Midwest from a topics-driven perspective, along the way defining the parameters and history of Latinx Midwest migration, labor, education, identity formation, and activism. An afterword is dedicated specifically to Intralatinx identity formation as a critical intervention for Latinx studies going forward. Part 1, “The Browning of the Midwest,” (re)claims the historical presence of Latinx communities in the Midwest, particularly the often silenced rural Latinx presence. Through interviews and ethnography-based fieldwork (Mendoza and Acosta), as well as historical narrative and cultural production (Limón), this section highlights the need for “critical regionalism” to understand the Midwest. It ranges from Luis Mendoza's critical journey through the region to José Limón's “trans-local” approach, to migration from Texas to the Midwest, to the local and transnational aspects of Latinization dealt with in Aidé Acosta's work on the broom-manufacturing factory and tradition in rural Lorraine, Illinois.

Part 2, “Essential Laborers and Neighbors,” connects migration history (Fernández) to Mexican labor recruitment in the steel industry (Innis-Jiménez) and ways of belonging beyond labor force participation. (Maldonado). Part 3, “La educación adelanta,” interrogates the limited ways that Latinx students and families’ language and identities have been integrated into schools (Potowski, Montes), and it debunks the myth of disengaged Latinx parents (Colvin, Arduser, and Willmore). Part 4, “Performeando the Midwest,” shows how Latinx communities have forged a space in the arts as an identity practice. The section includes photography and sculpture (Blocker), drag performance (Rivera-Servera), and museums (Cotera). Part 5, “Movimientos,” connects the historical presence, labor, education, and the arts to activist movements in the Midwest as Latinx subjects fight for rights in urban (Wanzer-Serrano), rural (Hinojosa, Weaver), regional (Delgadillo and Weaver), and internet (Schreiber) spaces. These struggles seek to redress systemic inequality and assert a collective voice for change.

The Afterword, “Intimate (Trans) Nationals” (Aparicio), compels Latinx scholars to reexamine Latinx identities, attending to Intralatinx subjects as a means to unpack the complexities of Latinx relations. This topic-driven interdisciplinary approach, particularly the intersection of local, regional, and transnational approaches as they inform the formation of the Latinx Midwest, provides a roadmap for the building and development of Latinx Midwest studies as a burgeoning subfield of Latinx studies, a field that is only beginning to fully engage in the often overlooked “fly-over” states as an important in-between space of Latinidad in the past, present, and future.