'A community of the nations': Institutional responses to Mexican migration at the urban edge

This dissertation investigates the ways that community institutions transform in response to the arrival of a transnational migrant population. Using interviews and participant observation, I examine the impact of a working class Mexican immigrant population on two gateway institutions, churches and schools, in Aurora, Illinois, a community on the western edge of the Chicago metropolitan area.;Since the 1990s Aurora's Mexican immigrant population has increased dramatically. The Chicago metropolitan area, like many others across the country, has experienced dramatic demographic and socio-economic changes as a consequence of global economic transformations occurring in recent decades. One of these changes is the movement of Mexican immigrants and their families to the outer suburbs.;Combining key insights from the literatures on assimilation, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism and reframing them for an analysis of change within local community institutions, I examine the consequences of assimilating transnational migrants, who maintain strong social, cultural, economic, and sometimes political connections to their homelands, for two of the cornerstone institutions of any community: churches and public schools. This perspective recognizes the intertwined nature of assimilation and transnationalism and acknowledges that migration has consequences not only for the migrants, but also for the communities in which they settle.;My findings in Aurora suggest that one consequence of assimilating transnational migrants is the cosmopolitanization of local institutions, a process by which these institutions are reorienting themselves, albeit subtly, into a broader social, cultural, economic and political network that is not fully contained by the nation-state.;In varying degrees Aurora's churches have altered their practices to incorporate elements of the language, culture, and religious rituals of the city's growing Mexican population. Similarly, a local school district responded by partnering with the Mexican government to develop a distance learning program for adult migrants and by recruiting teachers directly from Mexico.;Globalization is transforming the nation and the world. This dissertation provides a useful analytic framework for understanding these transformations at the local and institutional level. In addition, the findings represent a cosmopolitanization of local institutions that is obscured by current perspectives and that has important implications for both immigrant and non-immigrant residents.