Making "Mexican-ness" in Pilsen: Perspectives on the Meaning of Cultural Production in City Space.

Pilsen, a neighborhood on Chicago's near Southwest side, has served as the principal port of entry for a series of immigrant groups. Most recently, in the 1950s, Mexicans began to move into the area in large numbers. Pilsen is today home to the largest Mexican-American community in Chicago and is known as the "heart" of the city's Mexican population. It is emphatically marked as a "Mexican" neighborhood, with streets filled with Mexican-themed murals, museums, galleries, and other forms of material culture. The extreme density of symbolic markers of Mexico in Pilsen is surprising given the fairly recent settlement of Mexicans in the neighborhood and the fact that Mexicans and Mexican Americans live in many other parts of the city. Why is Pilsen such an important symbolic center of the community? This paper considers how four different perspectives from the sociology of culture might help us understand the making and meanings of "Mexican-ness" in Pilsen. The discussion of the use of Mexican culture in Pilsen demonstrates that culture can be a useful tool in claims-making projects and can draw attention to economic concerns. When making arguments in class terms is ineffective, calling attention to distinctions based on lifestyle or ethnicity may be seen as more legitimate, even when these map closely onto class. But culture also has a flexible and inclusive element to it and may be subject to commercialization. Cultural production in public space can thus have contradictory consequences. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]