Making the Suburbs Brown: A History

By the mid 1960s, the largest plurality of Americans grew up in or moved to the suburbs. Few people have considered the experience of Mexicans and other Latinxs in this quintessentially American situation.  Urban Studies historian Jerry González, author of In Search of a Mexican Beverly Hills, will center Latinos in his discussion of the ways colonias became subdivisions, farms split-levels, and renters homeowners while some people moved across national and regional boundaries to take up place in ‘Suburbia’ with its attendant inequalities.

Jerry González is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is the Principal Investigator for the Mellon Foundations Pathways Program and the director of the Mexico Center. His research centers on the historical relationship between Latinos and the growth and social development of American metropolitan places. His regional focus includes San Antonio’s ethnic Mexican and Latino communities after 1960 and their role in shaping the city, region, and global south. Similarly, his work on Los Angeles extends the research of his first book to recover the transnational dimensions of American suburbs. He is the author of In Search of a Mexican Beverly Hills.