About the Project
The Chicagolandia Oral History Project documents the history of the lives, work, and culture of Latinx suburban communities around Chicago including Elgin, Waukegan, Aurora, Joliet, and beyond. Project participants share and record stories of the triumphs and struggles of the past to create a more just and equitable future for all Latinx communities. The Project uses oral history to create community dialogue about the history and future of Latinx communities in Chicagoland.
What is Chicagolandia?
Today, the majority of the Chicagoland’s Latinx population lives in suburbs such as Aurora, Elgin, and Waukegan, not the city of Chicago. We call this collection of Latinx suburban communities “Chicagolandia.” The story of U.S. suburbanization usually focuses on the rapid growth of the suburbs through “white flight.” However, in recent decades Chicagoland’s most dramatic suburban population growth occurred among the Puerto Rican and Mexican communities, permanently changing the demographics of the five suburban collar counties. The Chicagolandia Oral History Archive documents the voices and experiences of suburban Latinx people to show that the Chicago suburbs are not only white, Latinx people are not only urban, and that Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and other Latina/os are not newcomers to the suburbs.
What is Oral History?
To create an oral history, an interviewer records a first-person story told by an interviewee, or narrator. Both the interviewer and narrator agree to create an oral history because they both want, as the Oral History Association explains, to create “a permanent record to contribute to an understanding of the past.” Segments and the full contents of oral histories gathered by the Chicagolandia Oral History Project will be available to community members and researchers, depending on the desires of the narrator.
Meet the Team
Project Director
Antonio Ramirez is Associate Professor of History at Elgin Community College. His PhD dissertation focused on race and labor in Chicago’s Latinx suburbs. Ramirez has worked as a historical consultant for the National Park Service, a journalist, bilingual high school teacher, and educator of agricultural migrant workers. Ramirez also served as Director of Outreach and Leadership Development at a transnational migrant rights legal center in central Mexico and as a low-wage worker organizer in Chicago. His written work has been published in The Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, The Progressive, and others.
Research Assistants, Past & Present
Sylvia Gutierrez Scoggin is the youngest daughter of Mexican immigrants who grew up in Little Village and the southwest suburbs in the Fox River Valley area. She is a recent NIU graduate with a Masters in Anthropology and certificates in Museum and Latin American Studies and a Public History concentration. She has conducted interviews for the NIU Latinx Oral History Project and Voces of the Pandemic for the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently the collections assistant at the Joliet Area Historical Museum and working on an archiving project at the Old Joliet Prison. Sylvia believes representation matters especially in underserved communities that have been systemically oppressed and left out of the historical narrative and that Latinx stories are important and should be part of the historical record because Latinx history is US history.
Anthony Villanueva is a Doctoral student at Northern Illinois University History Department in Dekalb, Illinois. Anthony’s area of concentration is the diaspora of Puerto Rican farm labor to the mainland post-World War II. He worked as an oral interviewer with the Voces Oral History Center-Voices of a Pandemic at the University of Texas-Austin. Collaborators in the two-year project included institutions of higher education across the country to record, archive, and disseminate interviews to help researchers, journalists, and the broader public gain a greater appreciation of the experiences in the Latino community during the Covid pandemic.
Andrea Rico is a Teaching Artist and Library Clerk in Illinois. She is also an avid reader, poet, short story writer and artist who uses history and art to try to understand the world around her. Rico has also been a part of the Elgin Poet Laureate Committee that worked in electing Elgin’s first Poet Laureate. She has also been the assistant coach for Dundee-Crown High School’s Poetry Squad. Her work has been featured in newspapers and zines around the Chicagoland Area.
María Borrero As a third generation educator, she continues the legacy to provide diverse families and students access to resources and support throughout their educational pathways. Maria was born on the island of Puerto Rico and moved to Illinois in 2008. She is passionate about ethnic minority representation in education, and has joined state and national efforts to increase awareness of social justice and equity in all aspects of education. She graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she also studied abroad and developed her community outreach skills. In July 2019, she was awarded a SCORE Grant- School and Community Outreach by Educators, sponsored by the Illinois Education Association. Maria currently works for the City of Elgin’s police department in the community relations and crime prevention unit. She serves on the board of directors for Centro de Información, Food for Greater Elgin, and Elgin Hispanic Network.