Chicago Católico

This book uses the Catholic parish to view Mexican immigration and ethnicity in the United States with a focus on Chicago. For Mexican immigrants, the parish had an Americanizing influence on its members. At the same time, many Mexican Americans gained a sense of mexicanidad by participating in the parish’s religious and social events. This process of building a Mexican identity and community in Chicago began in the 1920s. The first parishes served as refuges and as centers of community and identity. Mexicans fiercely attached themselves to specific parishes in Chicago, much like European American groups before them. The book explores how Chicago’s expanding Mexican Catholic population, contained in just two parishes prior to 1960, reshaped dozens of parishes and entire neighborhoods. The laity, often with Spanish-speaking clergy, made these parishes Mexican. The third largest archdiocese in the United States has, in many ways, become “Chicago católico,” a place where religious devotions hold sway well beyond church doors. With its century-old Mexican population, Chicago presaged a national trend. Today Latinos comprise 17 percent of the US population. This book’s parish-level research offers historic lessons for myriad communities currently undergoing ethnic succession and integration around the nation.

Adherence to guidelines on documentation required for registration to London GP practice websites: a mixed-methods cross-sectional study

BackgroundThe most common obstacle to registration with a GP practice in the UK is difficulty presenting proof of address. NHS guidelines stipulate that inability to provide ID or proof of address is not reasonable grounds to refuse registration. Practices may ask patients to present ID/proof of address, but need a policy in case patients cannot.AimTo find out how many London GP practice websites ask for documentation without a policy for where this cannot be provided and compare how GP practice websites describe the registration process in patient-facing material.Design and settingCross-sectional study of practices from 10 London boroughs (n = 100).MethodA proforma was piloted and then implemented, recording whether practices ‘demanded’, ‘requested’, or ‘mentioned’ photo ID or proof of address and whether there was a plan for patients without documentation. Text relating to documentation from all 100 practices for registration was subjected to thematic analysis.ResultsOut of 100 practices 75% asked for documentation. The majority of these were ‘demanded’. A plan was included for people without documentation in 12% of practice websites. Five themes emerged from analysis of website content: reassuring people without documentation; diverse requirements between practices; conflating administration and treatment; withholding treatment; and immigration and ethnicity.ConclusionMany practice websites breached NHS Standard Operating Principles and possibly the Equalities Act 2010. All practices should create a clear policy for patients who do not have photo ID/proof of address (for example, including a named receptionist), and update their websites accordingly.

Mexican Musical Theater and Movie Palaces in Downtown Los Angeles before 1950

The Plaza was the first site of Spanish colonial civilian settlement in 1781, it was also the first entertainment district in Los Angeles. From the mid-nineteenth century through the 1950s, Plaza district buildings housed immigrant-oriented businesses, churches, restaurants and cafes, grocery stores, social clubs, billiard halls, saloons, music stores, dance halls, rooming houses, phonograph parlors, penny arcades, nickelodeons and ten-cent motion picture houses, and vaudeville theaters. The development of the Plaza area over time mirrors the transition of Los Angeles from a small Spanish and Mexican pueblo to an American frontier city, and ultimately to one of the world's major cities and metropolitan areas. This chapter explores how musical theater directly relates to physical location, civic identity, immigration, and ethnicity. A recurring process of cultural conflict, maintenance, and accommodation played out over time on stage in Los Angeles's Latino theatrical world. Music and theater served as conduits for communal self-expression, as powerful symbols of Mexican identity, and as signs of tradition and modernity.

From Statistics by Country of Birth to the System of National Origins

This chapter discusses changes in the categories of ethnicity and immigration in the US census. From the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1930s, statistics on immigration and ethnicity took first place in schedules, published reports, and public policy. Not only did census figures establish immigration quotas, but census statisticians, with their methods and their culture, constructed the mechanism for exclusion by national origin. However, after 1928 there was a retreat from measuring ethnicity, which became evident in the 1930 and 1940 censuses by a marked lack of interest in questions of place of birth, mother tongue, and degree of assimilation. The history of the categories that made it possible to measure ethnicity is a complex one, involving three main groups of actors: advocates of immigration restriction, representatives of immigrant populations, and Census Bureau statisticians, with each group attempting to respond to contradictory demands and to defend their own interests.