HISTORIAN AND AMERICAN STUDIES SCHOLAR

ABOUT

Who is Michael Innis-Jiménez?

Michael Innis-Jiménez is a Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Alabama. Previous to accepting a position at the University of Alabama, he was an assistant professor of history at William Paterson University of New Jersey. He has also served as a scholar for The Latino New South Project, a public history project sponsored by a three museum consortium consisting of the Levine Museum of the New South (Charlotte, NC), The Atlanta History Museum, and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. He is also co-editor of the Latinx Histories book series at the University of North Carolina Press.
 

Steel Barrio: The Great Mexican Migration to South Chicago, 1915-1940

“The richly documented history of Mexican South Chicago here yields a sophisticated, rounded, and compelling study of the evolution of an immigrant place. Attentive to structural factors shaping migration and assimilation, Innis-Jiménez also tells textured human stories of the work, play, and solidarity that created and recreated an enduring community, snatching life from discrimination and hardship.”

 David Roediger, University of Kansas

More Than Just Peloteros: Sport and U.S. Latino Communities

A microcosm of the significance of sport to community history anywhere

Civic Labors: Scholar Activism and Working Class Studies

“At once an introduction to the long tradition of engaged scholarship among labor historians and a guide to the richly varied ways many have found to make a difference today, Civic Labors is a perfectly timed treasure trove of inspiration.”–Nancy MacLean, author of Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace

The Latina/o Midwest Reader: The Latina/o Experience in a Changing Midwest

The Latina/o Midwest Reader makes a vital contribution to Latina/o Studies in the United States, not merely by filing a proverbial gap in the literature, but by demonstrating that the multi-layered, multi-textured intersection of diverse historical and socio-political formations of Latinidad in this region supplies some of the necessary conceptual keys for understanding Latino identity, historicity, and place-making anywhere in the United States.”—Nicholas De Genova, author of Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago

City of Lake and Prairie: Chicago’s Environmental History

Known as the Windy City and the Hog Butcher to the World, Chicago has earned a more apt sobriquet—City of Lake and Prairie—with this compelling, innovative, and deeply researched environmental history.  Sitting at the southwestern tip of Lake Michigan, one of the largest freshwater bodies in the world, and on the eastern edge of the tallgrass prairies that fill much of the North American interior, early residents in the land that Chicago now occupies enjoyed natural advantages, economic opportunities, and global connections over centuries, from the Native Americans who first inhabited the region to the urban dwellers who built a metropolis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As one millennium ended and a new one began, these same features sparked a distinctive Midwestern environmentalism aimed at preserving local ecosystems. Drawing on its contributors’ interdisciplinary talents, this volume reveals a rich but often troubled landscape shaped by communities of color, workers, and activists as well as complex human relations with industry, waterways, animals, and disease.

LECTURES & PRESENTATIONS

Speaking Topics:

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"Made in Chicago: Mexican Food, Tourism, and Cultural Identity"

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“Chicago's Latinx Workers and Midwestern Environmental History”

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"Mexican Chicago's Colonia Hull House: Food, Tourism, and Belonging"

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“Mexican Work, Mexican Workers: Life in Early Mexican Chicago"

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“The Latinx South Today”

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“Navigating the Steel Barrio: the Making of Mexican South Chicago.”

TEACHING

Michael Innis-Jiménez is a professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Alabama

University of Alabama

(2008-present)

William Paterson University

(2004-2008)

NEWS

Latest News & Updates

Michael Innis-Jiménez

Michael Innis-Jiménez is associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of Alabama.

Research Interests

Latinos/Latinas in the U.S.;

U.S. social, cultural, urban,

and labor history, food studies,

the American West; race and

ethnicity in the Americas

 

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Steel Barrio

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