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1946 — present
The community began in the fields west of the city: the founding record is the companion study the IUSB Ethnic Heritage Studies Program published in June 1975, The Mexican-Americans of the South Bend-Mishawaka Area, by Viviana Fotia and Bernice Calvin. As early as 1946, it documents, migrant families from the Southwest came to work the farms of South Bend's west side — two of the first families were the Lopezes and the Frank Martinezes — leaving the migrant stream so their children could finish a school year, and staying. The community grew suddenly between 1965 and 1971 through the recruiting of El Centro, an organization dedicated to improving living conditions, which recruited workers passing through the city and sent representatives to Texas, then found the families jobs and housing in a northern industrial city; Notre Dame Magazine's later account of the west side corroborates the course — Mexican migrant farmworkers arriving in the 1940s, Latino immigration rising through the 1960s and 1970s.
The institution the community built for itself came on 17 October 1973, when Father John Phalen of Holy Cross and Latino community leaders formed La Casa de Amistad — the House of Friendship — as a youth outreach program for Latino teenagers, particularly those from migrant-worker families. Incorporated as a nonprofit in 1975 and housed first in an old house on Warren Street, it moved in 1980 to a repurposed two-story neighborhood store at 746 South Meade Street, its home for forty years; it became a United Way agency in 1985, and its programs grew with the community — a bilingual preschool, after-school tutoring, English and citizenship classes, a legal clinic, a food pantry. (La Casa's own community-center page dates the Meade Street years "from 1975–2021"; its About page gives the Warren Street house for 1975 and the Meade Street move for 1980, and the About sequence is followed here, the variant named.) In 2021 La Casa completed a $3.25 million capital campaign and moved to a building of some 40,000 square feet at 3423 South Michigan Street; on 19 March 2024 MacKenzie Scott's Yield Giving awarded it $2 million, the largest single gift in its history.
The parishes turned as the west side turned: when St. Stephen's closed in 2003 its Spanish-speaking parishioners, like its Hungarians, were divided between St. Casimir's and St. Adalbert's, and St. Adalbert's — the largest of the Polish parishes — counted more than eight hundred Latino families in Notre Dame Magazine's 2020 account, its Masses now in Spanish and English; Our Lady of Hungary, the Hungarian parish, serves Mexican families alongside its own. The census series in the population file carries the community's growth to 17,249 Hispanic residents in 2020, the first or second ancestry of the modern city, and the 2000 census's own trace of the migration — 3,607 of the city's 6,854 foreign-born residents of that year had entered the country between 1990 and March 2000 — is the statistical shadow of the El Centro decades. The community's present geography is the Western Avenue corridor, where West Side South Bend — the organization grown from the West Side Wednesdays gatherings of 2015 — opened a community center in 2018 and promotes the Latino business district of taquerias, markets and bakeries its own pages name, among them Taqueria Chicago and Rosales Super Market.
Sources:
- Fotia & Calvin, The Mexican-Americans of the South Bend-Mishawaka Area, IUSB Ethnic Heritage Studies Program, June 1975 (ERIC ED 117 026; full text, archive.org) — abstract and "Why They Came to Stay" sections read first-hand
- La Casa de Amistad — About and community-center pages (founding, 17 October 1973; Warren Street 1975; Meade Street 1980; Michigan Street 2021; Yield Giving, 19 March 2024) — lacasadeamistad.org
- Today's Catholic — "La Casa de Amistad celebrates 50 years," 28 April 2022
- Notre Dame Magazine — "West Side Alive," 2020 (St. Adalbert's Latino families; the Western Avenue corridor)
- Population & Demographics, this history (Hispanic series to 17,249 in 2020; the 2000 census foreign-born entry years) — banked fragment