Liberty Belote

they/them

Education: Bachelor of Arts in English (May 2024)

McNair Project: 'To unite, all that is possibly Mexican, in Kansas City': Analyzing El Cosmopolita as a Lost Archive of Mexican American Voices in the Midwest" (2023)

Mentor: Steffi Dippold, Ph.D.

“Unite all that is possibly Mexican in Kansas City” explores the first Midwestern
Spanish language newspaper publication, entitled El Cosmopolita, and its intellectual, political agenda. Printed in Kansas City, Missouri from 1914-1919, my research explores the newspaper’s ties to Mexican nationalism, immigrant rights, and the local labor union, la Union Mexicana Benito Juárez, for which El Cosmopolita served as a mouthpiece. I also recover, through research in the local archives, the lives and possible motivations of the two brothers and founders, Manuel and Juan Urbina. Though the brothers left barely any paper trail--a silence and erase that is typical for marginalized and dismissed groups such as Mexican immigrants in the United States--I use census records, naturalization documents, and contextual information to unpack the message of Mexican pride and self-definition at the core of El Cosmopolita’s agenda. Overall, I argue that the newspaper was not only a labor union rendezvous or community hub supplying information for translation, legal and employment services, but also an important public space promoting autonomy and resistance amongst Midwestern Mexican immigrants, and an alternative if forgotten regional past overlooked to this day in scholarly discussion of Missourian and Kansas history.