Justin Akers Chacón’s Radicals in the Barrio is a magnificent, timely, and sizable contribution to twentieth-century labor history, particularly that of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants in the United States. Drawing from a vast array of sources—including secondary accounts, archival materials, periodicals, art, and even oral histories—and divided into four parts and thirty-five brief chapters spanning some six hundred pages, Radicals in the Barrio is a sweeping history of brown radicalism in the United States during the first part of the twentieth century. Chacón argues that ethnic Mexicans—both US-born Mexican Americans and immigrants—have been at the forefront of labor struggles in the United States since the late nineteenth century and suggests that we can learn important historical and organizing lessons from them today (19).
In tracing the roots of the radical Mexican American labor movement in the United States, Chacón focuses most of his attention on the periods immediately preceding...
