We stand in solidarity with Latinx Midwesterners who have family and friends impacted by the recent shootings in El Paso, Gilroy, and Dayton; the political and economic crisis in Puerto Rico; the ICE raids in Mississippi; and, the ongoing detention of migrants and separation of migrant families at the U.S. border with Mexico.

We deplore the racially charged behaviors, discrimination, and state violence that are being targeted at Latinx communities and other underrepresented groups throughout the U.S.  As scholars, activists, and Midwesterners, our work recognizes the ways in which Latinx communities in our region continually assert their rights to safety, travel, belonging, and expression in the face of violence, to build sustainable worlds in the Midwest and beyond.

Geraldo Cadava, Northwestern University
Theresa Delgadillo, The Ohio State University
Claire Fox, University of Iowa
Ramón Rivera-Servera, Northwestern University

Co-Principal Investigators of Building Sustainable Worlds: Latinx Placemaking in the Midwest

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Giving Back

Due the emergency situation that arriving migrant families and migrant families in deportation face of losing contact with their own children, a number of organizations that assist immigrants are stepping up efforts. We include a few names and links here should you care to find further information and/or make donations to assist stranded children.

HOLA Ohio (http://holatoday.org/)
Centro Hispano of Dane County (http://www.micentro.org/)
Voces de la Frontera in Milwaukee (http://vdlf.org/)
MIRC – Michigan Immigrant Rights Center (https://michiganimmigrant.org/)
Unidos – Navigate, MN (http://www.navigatemn.org/)
La Luz Hispana – Hampton, Iowa (http://www.laluzhispana.org/)
Palomares Social Justice Center – Moline, Illinois (http://www.palomaresqc.org/)
Center for Worker Justice of Eastern Iowa – Iowa City, Iowa (https://www.cwjiowa.org/)
Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (http://www.icirr.org/)
Centro Romero (http://centroromero.org/)
RAICES Texas (https://www.raicestexas.org/)
ACLU (https://www.aclu.org/)

Updated on 06/25/2018
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Investigating How Latinx Communities in the Midwest Create Home and Engage the Issue of Sustainable Environments

How do Latinas/os in the Midwest define, create, and cultivate ecologically and socially sustainable environments and communities? How do considerations of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, socio-economic status, and disability intersect with those of environment, region, culture? How are Latinas/os, long recruited to the region for industrial and agricultural work, impacted by the physical and material climate and environments of the region? And how do Latinas/os reflect upon, react to, and transform these cultural, social, and physical environments to create sustainable communities?

“Building Sustainable Worlds: Latinx Placemaking in the Midwest” brings together professors and graduate students from across the Midwest to explore these questions. This project examines the significance of Latinx efforts in building sustainable communities in both urban and small-town environments of the region as these appear in formal and everyday performance; literature; and community, cultural, and arts centers. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the Midwest is a twelve-state region; however, our understanding of the Latinx Midwest recognizes the long history of translocal, transregional, and transnational interconnections that bind many Latinx communities to other parts of the U.S., and to places and countries throughout the Americas. The collaborative project began in February 2017 and will continue into fall 2018. Involving researchers at multiple universities, this project will generate new models of collaborative research training for graduate students, support Latina/o Studies networks in the region, inform regional audiences about Latinx experiences and cultures, produce research articles as well as resources for the study of Latinx groups in the Midwest, and generate a collective volume of our published research.

This project is funded by a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/Humanities Without Walls consortium, housed at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.