"Well-researched and argued. Flores is the historian who has done the best work on how Mexico, as an 'imagined community,' bonded immigrants as 'Mexicans' and, at the same time, how the politics of Mexico divided them as a community. He does an excellent job in examining the role of political leadership and the political culture of Mexican Chicago."--Juan Mora-Torres, author of The Making of the Mexican Border: The State, Capitalism, and Society in Nuevo León, 18481910
"Flores reminds us of the political heterogeneity of immigrants by exploring the Mexican Revolution's influence on the political development of Chicago's Mexican community in the 1920s and 1930s. Digging into original and relatively unmined Spanish-language sources in the city, he offers an account of both 'liberals' and 'traditionalists' and how their worldviews differed so dramatically. He also tells the tragic story of beloved leftist labor activist, Refugio Roman Martinez, whose untimely deportation symbolizes the legacy of the Cold War's Red Scare for Mexican Americans."--Lilia Fernandez, author of Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago