Emiliano Aguilar is a political and labor historian of the United States, specifically the Latina/o Midwest. His manuscript-in-progress, Building a Latino Machine: Caught Between Corrupt Political Machines and Good Government Reform, explores how the ethnic Mexican and Puerto Rican community of East Chicago, Indiana, navigated machine politics in the 20th and 21st centuries to further their inclusion in municipal and union politics. The project further outlines this inclusion’s costs (and paradoxes) for generations of residents and reformers. In grappling for political power and claiming rights to their community, these Latina and Latino residents renegotiated their place within the city, particularly under the threat of urban renewal and later deindustrialization. Beyond the first manuscript, he hopes to continue work documenting the lived experiences of the Calumet Region, a vital bi-state space for understanding working-class communities and the post-industrial world.
His work has appeared in The Metropole, Belt Magazine, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s Blog, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, and the Indiana Historical Society Blog, among others. A chapter of his research appeared in Building Sustainable Worlds: Latinx Placemaking in the Midwest (University of Illinois Press, July 2022).
Project Statement: Steel and the Calumet Region
In 1980, the abrupt closure of Wisconsin Steel on the Southeast Side of Chicago caused immediate panic in the community. Without warning, more than 3,000 steelworkers were left without employment. Wisconsin Steel became emblematic of the extremes of deindustrialization; the overnight loss of a vital community employer. Although deindustrialization elsewhere in the Calumet Region proved more gradual, such as at ACME Steel or U.S. Steel South Works, Wisconsin Steel’s closure catapulted a cohort of steelworkers into action as the Save Our Jobs (SOJ) Committee. This committee, a multiracial alliance set to fill the void of the ineffective, independent union that represented Wisconsin Steel’s employees, fought for seventeen years against what they decried as the manipulative tactics of Envirodyne, who deliberately drained the mill for any potential profit before declaring bankruptcy. Frank Lumpkin, a Georgia native and lifelong member of the Communist Party, won multiple court settlements amounting to $19 million for the approximately 2,500 steelworkers SOJ represented. While a small fiscal win for the workers, SOJ demonstrated the resiliency of collective efforts by steelworkers to combat the changing nature of the industry and the uncertainty of a post-industrialist city. This chapter proposes to explore the uncertainty brought about by Wisconsin’s closure and subsequent slowdowns and factories shuttering and how steelworkers across the bi-state Calumet Region understood and responded to this moment. Particularly, how did a region of steel productivity imagine its future without steel or without the availability of employment that steel and adjacent industries provided?
Email: eaguilar@nd.edu
