by Hispanically Speaking News
Jesse and Joy duoMexican duo Jesse and Joy have added one more success to a fruitful year of international recognition by being nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Latino Pop category for their album “Con quien se queda el perro?”
The siblings are competing in the category with Guatemalan singer-songwriter Ricardo Arjona (“Independiente”), Puerto Rico’s Kany Garcia (“Kany Garcia”) and Colombians Juanes (“MTV Unplugged Deluxe Edition”) and Fonseca (“Ilusion”).
The nominations for the prestigious prize bestowed by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences were announced Wednesday evening in Los Angeles.
This year, Jesse and Joy already walked away with five Latino Grammys at the Nov. 15 awards ceremony in Las Vegas and that same week it was also announced that they were nominated in five categories for Premio Lo Nuestro awards.
The performers of “Corre!” (a success on the social networks with almost 100 million views on YouTube), “La de la mala suerte” and “Me voy” are continuing their international tour in Mexico and soon will give concerts in Latin America, the United States and Spain.
“Brown in the Windy City” Tells of How Mexicans, Puerto Ricans Came to be in Chicago
A new book published by the University of Chicago deals with the issue of immigration and integration of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans after World War II in this city.
“Brown In The Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago” is the work of Lilia Fernandez, a history professor at Ohio State University.
Fernandez tells the story of the growth of these important communities and their difficult integration into the political dynamic of the Midwestern metropolis.
With figures and anecdotes, the author, who is of Mexican descent, details the problems that both communities have had to work through to be able to forge their own identities and carve out political space for themselves.
Both Mexicans and Puerto Ricans encountered racism and the hostility of other ethnic groups when they arrived in the city, and they had to put up with poorly-paid manual jobs, a lack of social services and schools that did not recognize their culture.
Although prior to the 1940s there was a small Mexican community in the city, this group began to arrive in large numbers during the war as guestworkers.
The Puerto Ricans began arriving almost at the same time seeking opportunities that were not available on their native island.
Chicago’s Mexican and Puerto Rican communities had to face displacement in the 1950s and ‘60s under programs of “urban renewal.”
The Puerto Ricans were the first, pushed out of the now-exclusive residential zone of Lincoln Park and into poor neighborhoods like Humboldt Park and West Town.
Then, the city also displaced about 4,800 Mexican-Americans who were living in the Near West Side to make room for the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Fernandez discusses how the community struggles began to orient Hispanics to seek their own path and forge their own identity.
“As a result of these experiences, already by 1980 the majority of the Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans in the central neighborhoods like Humboldt Park, West Town, Pilsen and La Villita consciously and intentionally were identifying themselves as ‘another’ race in the political landscape,” she told Efe.
