The Chicago area's Latino population grew in relation to labor needs in the steel mills, railroad lines and packing houses.  By the 1970s, the city had became the U.S. Latino population center most representing and combining the core Mexican a nd Puerto Rican immigration waves constituting the overall national population, and a center where large numbers of Central and South Americans, as well as Cubans and Dominicans, also found their homes.  In effect, Chicago had become an overall Latin o center, one in which cross-acculturation patterns were leading to the kinds of transformations in gender, class, religious and national identifications that enabled new pan-Latin American and explicitly Latino identifications to emerge and become rooted .  Indeed, because Chicago had a far more intensive Mexican migration than New York, and because its Mexican population was indeed mainly from Mexico rather than the Southwest, the city was one of the U.S. vanguard centers of extra and post-national Latino identifications, involving new orientations toward Latin American culture, community mobilization and citizenship matters which emerged in the Chicago Latino arts and letters emergence  (most known through such figures as Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo and Luis Rodríguez), as well as in political and social action initiatives.

By the late 1970s, Mexican economic crises and Central American wars had led to a virtual explosion in Latin American immigration to Chicago and this at a time when the city was entering a post-industrial phase.  The new immigrations led to an intensification of Latino relations and identifications, even as group enmities (between different nationals, between old-timers and new-comers, and between different class sectors) emerged and as tensions with other minority communities and the populati on (struggles for jobs, funding, space, etc.) intensified.   In relation to the Latino population explosion and the growing political involvement of Latinos was the development of a burgeoning Latino cultural infrastructure of restaurants night clubs, of cultural centers, newspapers, radio stations, music and film festivals, museums, galleries, workshops and studios, etc.

The city now boasts a major Mexican Fine Arts museum, a major Latino Film festival, a growing Spanish-language media sector and even a new post-Chicano/post-U.S. Rican sector of artists and Spanish-language writers.  These and other qualities spell the full emergence of Latin American identity in the city, even as Latin American immigration, especially from Michoacán and other Mexican states, became increasingly transnational, as increasing numbers of Latinos settled directly into the s uburbs or bordering rural centers, and as the overall configuration of Midwest Latino life has changed radically.   Recently,  the national anti-Latino backlash has come to Chicago and has joined with inter-group struggles over economic res tructuration, gentrification, bilingual education, affirmative action, etc., to place Latino advances and their meaning for less-established sectors  into ever-greater crisis.  Such situations, and the relation of Latinos to other ethnic groups and society at large,  require rethinking Chicago's role vis-a-vis Latin America and Latin Americans; Chicago Latino life remains in many ways a laboratory for understanding the Latin American future and the future of globalization in the Americas.