Hada Matías was born in Dover, New Jersey and grew up in Elgin, Illinois. In this interview, she examines her family’s Puerto Rican heritage and her own racial identity. She shares insights into her childhood and her growth as a trans woman and a human being. She also explains the challenges and joys of being trans in the United States today.
by Antonio Ramirez
In April 1972, a young Mexican American woman in Aurora, Illinois made history.
That month, twenty-eight-year-old Maria Margarita Decker won election to the Kane County Board. She was likely the first Latinx person to be elected to a county board in Illinois.
When we think of important events in American history, we rarely think of Latinas or Latinos. If we do, we tend to celebrate the accomplishments of Mexicans or Puerto Ricans living in big cities in California, New York, or Texas.
Latino Americans, though, have lived, struggled, and thrived in unexpected places throughout the history of the United States. The tales of lesser-known, everyday Latinx trailblazers in surprising places–suburbs and rural towns, isolated farms and factory floors–are an essential part of American history. Without their stories, the history of the United States is incomplete.
Maria Margarita Decker’s historic election in suburban Kane County is a good example. Many have long believed that Cook County Commissioner Irene C. Hernández was the first Latino or Latina to be elected to county-level political office in Illinois.Hernández’s personal story fits the pattern of a likely “first” in Latinx history: she lived in Chicago, the Midwest’s largest urban center, and was a respected public servant in the city’s Latinx community for many years. She was appointed Commissioner by Mayor Richard J. Daley in 1974 and won four subsequent elections. Today a Chicago middle school and park both bear her name.
Last year, though, I saw Decker’s name mentioned in a fifty-year-old Chicago Tribune article. I wondered if it was correct that a young Mexican American woman in a distant Chicago suburb had been elected two years before Hernández’s historic Cook County appointment.
I decided to try to track Decker down. I got help from Kane County archivists, the former mayor of Aurora, a historian, and a tiny south Texas newspaper.
One day, my phone rang. It was Maria Decker.
She told me how she was born Maria Margarita Rodriguez in south Texas and moved to Aurora, Illinois as a young girl. Her father founded the Aurora Latin American Club, which is still in existence. Her mother helped new immigrants settle in the suburb.
Maria eventually married Stanley Decker, became a realtor, and found lots of work selling homes to Spanish-speaking newcomers. Soon she was well-known in Aurora’s Mexican community. When she ran for county board in 1972, she wasn’t sure she could win the votes of Aurora’s white residents. So, she ran for office as “Mary Margaret” Decker, rather than using her ethnically Mexican names. Decker’s strategic move followed the practice of generations of Latinx people who have Anglicized their names to counteract racism.
After winning her the election, Decker called out the racial discrimination against candidates with Latinx last names like those of two other candidates that year: Martínez and Plata. The election results were “indicative of an ingrained prejudice,” Decker told local newspapers. “I, with an Anglicized name, won, while Mr. Martínez and Mr. Plata lost,” she explained.
Decker kept speaking up on behalf of Aurora’s Latinx community. In 1973, she led a protest against a massive immigration raid at Aurora’s Hi-Lite 30 Theater. Immigration officials had roughed up dozens of local Latinx residents and arrested or deported eighty more. Decker led rallies in which hundreds of Latinx Aurorans showed up to demand justice, garnering media attention from across Chicagoland.
Mary Decker’s story points to the long, untold history of Latinx activism in unexpected places such as suburbs. In the early 1970s, the Mexican population in Aurora and the rest of greater Chicago was beginning a decades-long boom. By the early 2000s, the Latinx population in suburban Chicago was larger than that of the city of Chicago. Today, most Latinxs in the Midwest’s largest metropolitan area live in the Chicago suburbs, not the city. The Illinois county with the highest Latinx population percentage today is Decker’s suburban Kane County, not Chicago’s Cook County.
I should know. Latinx students at Kane County’s Elgin Community College, where I teach history, make up a large and growing part of the student body. For several years, my students and I have used oral history to document the history of these suburban Latinx residents through the Chicagolandia Oral History Project.
Our dozens of oral histories have made clear that, today, like in Decker’s time, Latinx voices still struggle to be heard. Latinx voters still battle to be fully represented in elected offices in Chicago’s suburbs and across the state. Despite the fact that Latinx residents of Illinois have had the largest population growth of any group, they are still sorely underrepresentedat all levels of government.
All of us should remember that unsung heroes like Maria Margarita Decker have made history in unexpected places across Illinois and our country. We should study forgotten accomplishments like Decker’s, and use them to inspire our own quests for justice. And we should recognize that, by knowing Latinx history, we better understand American history.
In this clip, Aracely García describes in Spanish how she lived in San Salvador, El Salvador, and worked as an assembler at a U.S. multinational corporation, Texas Instruments. The 1970s and early 1980s were a period of dramatic change in El Salvador. The deep and long-standing inequalities in Salvadoran society became unbearable for large segments of the population. Unions and social movements began making increasing demands on the state and the Salvadoran government responded with increasingly violent and bloody repression. Government death squads murdered two workers from Texas Instruments during this period. The Salvadoran labor movement called for a general strike on March 21, 1980. In her oral history interview, García called the strike a huelga de brazos caídos, or a sit-down, (literally “dropped-arms”) strike. When García and other Texas Instruments workers went on strike in 1980, the army stormed the factory. The manager fled in an army helicopter and the director of plant security paced the rows of machines with a pistol in each hand. The army captured and shot two workers. The following day Texas Instrument workers held a memorial at a union office. The army arrived again, killing two more workers and arresting the rest. Two days later, a death squad assassinated Archbishop Óscar Romero as he delivered mass in San Salvador, an act largely understood to have officially sparked the country’s civil war. García did not flee El Salvador immediately. She decided to leave only after her co-workers distributed a secret list at the factory for workers interested in purchasing a Black-market memoir called Las cárceles clandestinas de El Salvador, or The Secret Jails of El Salvador. It was written by Ana Guadalupe Martínez, a militant who was brutally tortured by U.S.-trained Salvadoran security forces. The book was distributed during a time when the Salvadoran government was officially denying rumors of its own brutality. García signed up to buy a copy. When workers who signed the list started disappearing, she decided to flee to the U.S. She eventually ended up in Elgin, Illinois.
Tony Figueroa describes his parents’ lives in Puerto Rico and their arrival to Waukegan, Illinois in the 1940s. The Figueroas were among the earliest Puerto Rican migrants to the Chicago area.
Tony Figueroa describes his father’s experience working in foundries in Waukegan. He remembers the vibrant African American neighborhood where he and many other Puerto Ricans lived.
Tony Figueroa describes the founding of the Puerto Rican Society in the 1950s and its development into one of Waukegan’s most important organizations under the leadership of Edwin Montano and others.
The Latin American Civic Organization was one of Elgin’s first Latino-run organizations. It was founded after an incident between Elgin police and three Latina women in downtown Elgin in 1967. The women were chatting in Spanish when police officers told them to disperse. The women, who didn’t understand English, kept talking. Police arrested them and took them to jail.
Community residents quickly contacted Felix Santana, a leader in Elgin’s Puerto Rican community. Born in Naguabo, Puerto Rico in 1927, Santana served in the U.S. Army Infantry in Puerto Rico during World War II and in Korea with the Air Force. He later moved to Elgin where he worked as a histology technician at St. Joseph’s Hospital. Santana and his wife Geraldine raised four children while Santana ran a weekly Spanish radio show, a Chicago-based Spanish- language newspaper, and sold Spanish-language records from his home at 283 Brook Street.
Santana spoke with police, who released the women. He called a community meeting that was attended by an estimated 600 Mexican and Puerto Rican residents of Elgin, more than a quarter of the suburb’s entire Latina/o population at the time. That night attendees began organizing the Latin American Civic Organization, whose primary goal was to establish a better rapport between Latino Elgin and the police. The organization elected Santana as its first president. Over the next several years, the organization helped Elgin Latina/os find employment, learn English, and secure housing. The organization ran a space on State Street between Chicago and Highland where it organized dances and parties and helped needy families buy Christmas gifts.
(Photo: Elgin Courier News, Oct. 2, 1968. Santana is seated in center of the front row.)
Latinxs have taken over many of Chicago’s biggest suburbs. In the past few decades, cities like Aurora, Elgin, Waukegan, and Joliet have become majority or near-majority Latino.
Since 1980, suburban Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Central Americans have grown from small groups of a few thousand to bustling Latino communities full of culture, pride, and political power.
In fact, today most Latinxs in Chicagoland live in the suburbs. That’s right. Since 2004, the suburban Latinx population has been larger than the number of Latina/os living in the city of Chicago.
The Chicagolandia Oral History Project was created to document this dramatic change. We are asking Chicagoland suburban Latinxs: What brought you to the suburbs? What kinds of economic and cultural contributions have Latina/os made to Chicagolandia? What challenges and opportunities have you found in the suburbs?
If you are Latino and grew up in Chicago’s suburbs, we want to hear from you!
Click on “Share Your Story” on our website to tell us about being Latinx in Chicago’s suburbs.
Or search “Chicagolandia Project” on Instagram and to check out pictures of suburban Latinxs.
If you have a picture to share, let us know and we’ll share it!
Alma Nevarez has worked at Elgin Community College since 2007 and is currently a Custodian Lead.
She describes her first job after high school at City Hall in her hometown in the Mexican state of Durango. Her family, though, was poor and Nevarez eventually decided to migrate to the United States in the early 1980s for higher wages.
Nevarez describes living in Franklin Park and working at a brush factory in the early 1980s. There were few Mexicans living in the area. Nevarez studied English and eventually earned enough to rent her own apartment. She also describes how she fell in love with her future husband at a dance in Mexico. In 1987, the couple married and settled in Elgin.
Nevarez describes the positives and negatives of doing custodial work at Elgin Community College. She explains that she has always taught her own children to treat everyone with respect regardless of their social status or job.
Jaime García was born in Mexico City but immigrated as a young boy with his family to Rockford, Illinois in the early 1960s. As a lifelong United Methodist, Jaime was hired by the church to do outreach to the Spanish-speaking community in Elgin in 1970. Two years later, he helped found social service agency Centro de Información. Today, Centro continues to be the most important Hispanic-serving social service agency in Elgin and the region. In this interview, conducted by students at Elgin Community College, García talks about Elgin in the 1970s and the founding of Centro.
Luis and Lorena Muñoz are originally from Talca, Chile. In this interview, they describe coming of age under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, the fear-filled climate of their youth, friends who were arrested or disappeared, and facing Chilean police during protests against the regime. The couple shares the joys and difficulties of moving to Mexico and later the United States. They raised their children in the Elgin area.
Mary Decker was born María Margarita Rodríguez in 1944 in Crystal City, Texas. Her parents moved to Aurora, Illinois in 1950 where her father worked at Austin-Western’s manufacturing facility. Margarita was a precocious and athletic child. She later became a community leader in Aurora, married welder Stanley Decker, and worked for the Aurora Urban League. Decker eventually became one of two Spanish-speaking real estate agents as Aurora’s east side Mexican immigrant population boomed in the 1960s. In this interview clip, Ms. Decker describes her advocacy on behalf of immigrants in Aurora and her successful campaign running for Kane County Board in 1972. It is likely that Ms. Decker’s victory in that election made her the first Latino or Latina elected to a county-level political office in Illinois history.
