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Latinx Encounters : How Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans Made the Modern Midwest - Juan Ignacio Mora

Latinx Encounters

How Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans Made the Modern Midwest

By: Juan Ignacio Mora

Paperback | 22 September 2026

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The fields and orchards of the Midwest have offered seasonal agricultural work for countless Latinx migrant laborers. For more than a century, Mexican, Mexican American, and Puerto Rican migrants converged in the heartland's agricultural industry to perform some of the most grueling labor needed to sustain the vital agribusiness of the region. In return, they were rewarded with dismal working conditions, poor government protections, and fierce hostility to their organizing efforts. Juan Ignacio Mora uncovers the everyday strategies these migratory laborers employed to fight for better economic conditions, offering a new history of the farmworker justice movement that transforms our understanding of the US heartland. Mexican, Mexican American, and Puerto Rican migrants arrived in the Midwest with vastly different circumstances of class, ethnicity, and immigration status, which fueled complex collaborations and conflicts. Contested notions of race tested their relationships, but migrant workers and their families made inroads in workers' rights and nurtured a shared culture, negotiating collective bargaining agreements and forming the first punk rock band. Capturing the relationship between the Midwest, the Texas-Mexico borderlands, Mexico's interior, and the colonial archipelago of Puerto Rico, Latinx Encounters unravels a transnational history of migratory labor, farmworker's rights, and the rapidly changing food industry.
Industry Reviews
"Juan Ignacio Mora beautifully weaves together the many threads of US Midwestern Latinx history to show how migration provided the foundation for mobility for some and continued hardship for others."-Marc Simon Rodriguez, author of Rethinking the Chicano Movement "A magnificent study of the social, economic, and political consequences of increasingly corporate agribusiness labor systems that centers migrants' own expressions of identity, justice, and belonging."-Veronica Martinez-Matsuda, author of Migrant Citizenship: Race, Rights, and Reform in the U.S. Farm Labor Camp Program

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