September 2006
Immigrants: The Last Time America Sent
Her Own Packing
Fueled by the Great Depression, an
anti-immigrant frenzy engulfed hundreds of thousands of legal American citizens
in a drive to ‘repatriate’ Mexicans to their homeland.
By STEVE BOISSON
A 9-year-old girl stood in
the darkness of a railroad station, surrounded by tearful travelers who had
gathered up their meager belongings, awaiting the train that would take her
from her native home to a place she had never been. The bewildered child
couldn't know she was a character in the recurring drama of America's
love-hate relationship with peoples from foreign lands who, whether fleeing
hardship or oppression or simply drawn to the promise of opportunity and
prosperity, desperately strive to be Americans. As yet another act in the long
saga of American immigration unfolds today, some U.S. citizens can recall when,
during a time of anti-immigrant frenzy fueled by economic crisis and racism,
they found themselves being swept out of the country of their birth.
Emilia Castañeda will never
forget that 1935 morning. Along with her father and brother, she was leaving
her native Los Angeles.
Staying, she was warned by some adults at the station, meant she would become a
ward of the state. "I had never been to Mexico," Castañeda said some
six decades later. "We left with just one trunk full of belongings. No
furniture. A few metal cooking utensils. A small ceramic pitcher, because it
reminded me of my mother…and very little clothing. We took blankets, only the
very essentials."
As momentous as that
morning seemed to the 9-year-old Castañeda, such departures were part of a
routine and roundly accepted movement to send Mexicans and Mexican-Americans
back to their ancestral home. Los Angeles County–sponsored repatriation trains
had been leaving the station bound for Mexico since 1931, when, in the
wake of the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the economic collapse and dislocation
that followed, welfare cases skyrocketed. The county Board
of Supervisors, other county and municipal agencies and the Chamber of Commerce
proclaimed repatriation of Mexicans as a humane and utilitarian solution to the
area's growing joblessness and dwindling resources. Even the Mexican consul
stationed in Los Angeles praised the effort, at
least at the outset, thanking the welfare department for its work "among
my countrymen, in helping them return to Mexico." The Mexican government,
still warmed by the rhetoric of the 1910 revolution, was touting the
development of agricultural colonies and irrigation projects that would provide
work for the displaced compatriots from the north.
By 1935, however, it was
hard to detect much benevolence driving the government-sponsored train rides to
Mexico.
For young Castañeda's father, Mexico
was the last resort, a final defeat after 20 years of legal residence in America. His
work as a union bricklayer had enabled him to buy a house, but -- like millions
of other Americans -- his house and job were lost to the Depression. His wife,
who had worked as a maid, contracted tuberculosis in 1933 and died the
following year. "My father told us that he was returning to Mexico because he couldn't find work in Los Angeles,"
Castañeda said. "He wasn't going to abandon us. We were going with him.
When L.A. County
arranged for our trip to Mexico,
he and other Mexicans had no choice but to go."
Francisco Balderrama and
Raymond Rodríguez, the authors of Decade of Betrayal, the first
expansive study of Mexican repatriation with perspectives from both sides of
the border, claim that 1 million people of Mexican descent were driven from the
United States during the 1930s due to raids, scare tactics, deportation, repatriation
and public pressure. Of that conservative estimate, approximately 60 percent of
those leaving were legal American citizens. Mexicans comprised nearly half of
all those deported during the decade, although they made up less than 1 percent
of the country's population. "Americans, reeling from the economic
disorientation of the depression, sought a convenient scapegoat,"
Balderrama and Rodríguez wrote. "They found it in the Mexican
community."
During the early years of
the 20th century, the U.S. Immigration Service paid scant attention to Mexican
nationals crossing the border. The disfavored groups among border watchers at
the time were the Chinese, who had been explicitly barred by the Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882, criminals, lunatics, prostitutes, paupers and those
suffering from loathsome and contagious diseases. In actuality, the Mexican
immigrant was often a pauper, but he was not, in the law's language,
"likely to become a public charge." Cheap Mexican labor was in great
demand by a host of America's
burgeoning industries. The railroads, mining companies and agribusinesses sent
agents to greet immigrants at the border, where they extolled the rewards of
their respective enterprises. Border officials felt no duty to impede the labor
flow into the Southwest.
The Mexican population in
the United States
escalated during the years following 1910. By 1914, according to author Matt S.
Meier, the chaos and bloodshed of the Mexican revolution had driven as many as
100,000 Mexican nationals into the United States, and they would
continue to cross the border in large numbers legally and illegally.
Immigration laws were tightened in 1917, but their enforcement at the border
remained lax. While laws enacted in 1921 and 1924 imposed quotas on immigrants
from Europe and other parts of the Eastern Hemisphere, quotas were not applied
to Mexico
or other Western nations. This disparity found its detractors, particularly East Texas congressman John C. Box, who was a vocal
proponent of curtailing the influx from the south.
Though none of Box's
proposals became law, his efforts drew favorable coverage in the Saturday
Evening Post and other journals that editorialized against the
"Mexicanization" of the United States. When a Midwestern
beet grower who hired Mexican immigrants appeared at a House Immigration
Committee hearing, Box suggested that the man's ideal farm workers were "a
class of people who have not the ability to rise, who have not the initiative,
who are children, who do not want to own land, who can be directed by men in
the upper stratum of society. That is what you want, is it?"
"I believe that is
about it," replied the grower.
Those who exploited cheap
Mexican labor, argued Box and his adherents, betrayed American workers and
imperiled American cities with invading hordes of mixed-blood foreigners. Those
who railed against quotas should visit the barrios in Los Angeles, wrote
Kenneth L. Roberts in the Saturday Evening Post, "and see endless
streets crowded with the shacks of illiterate, diseased, pauperized Mexicans,
taking no interest whatever in the community, living constantly on the ragged
edge of starvation, bringing countless numbers of American citizens into the
world with the reckless prodigality of rabbits."
Upon taking office in 1929,
President Herbert Hoover had to face the raging debate. He resisted imposing
the quotas demanded by Box and others, as Hoover
probably feared they would rankle the Mexican government and thus threaten
American business interests there. Instead, Hoover, hoping to appease the
restrictionists, chose the less-permanent option of virtually eliminating visas
for Mexican laborers and by bolstering the Immigration Service, which had grown
from a minor government operation to a force that included a border patrol of
nearly 800 officers.
After the Depression set
in, the removal of foreigners who were taking jobs and services away from
cash-strapped, struggling Americans seemed to be a salient solution, perhaps
the only tangible recourse to the desperation that had swept the country. Under
the direction of William N. Doak, Hoover's
newly appointed secretary of labor, immigration officers dredged the country
for illegal aliens. They raided union halls, dances, social clubs and other
ethnic enclaves where people without papers might be found. Their tactics
favored intimidation over legal procedure. Suspects were routinely arrested
without warrants. Many were denied counsel, and their deportation
"hearings" were often conducted in the confines of a city or county
jail. Frightened and ignorant of their rights, many suspects volunteered to
leave rather than suffer through deportation.
While Mexicans were not the
only target in the drive against illegal aliens, they were often the most
visible. This was certainly true in Los Angeles,
which, at that time had some 175,000 inhabitants of Mexican descent, second
only to Mexico City.
In early 1931, Los Angeles newspapers reported on an impending anti-alien sweep
led by a ranking immigration officer from Washington, D.C. Walter Carr, the
federal Los Angeles district director of immigration, assured the press that no
single ethnic group was under siege, but raids in the Mexican communities of El
Monte, Pacoima and San Fernando belied that official line. The final show of
force occurred with a raid on La Placita, a downtown Los Angeles park that was popular with
Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. On February 26, an afternoon idyll on Olivera Street was
shattered by an invasion of immigration agents and local police. Agents
searched every person on the scene for proof of legal residence. Though
hundreds were hauled off for questioning, few were ultimately detained. The
message was in the bluster, not the busts.
As recounted in Decade
of Betrayal, Labor Secretary Doak's efforts proved to be highly successful:
Deportees outnumbered those who entered the United States during the first nine
months of 1931. There were, however, some detractors. A subcommittee formed by
the Los Angeles Bar Association found that Carr's tactics, such as inhibiting a
suspect's access to counsel, fell outside the law. Carr dismissed these charges
as nothing more than sour grapes over a lost client base and justified the
deprivation of counsel on the grounds that lawyers merely sold false hopes in
exchange for cash squeezed from needy immigrants.
Investigations into the
alleged abuses began on a national level, as well, by the National Commission
on Law Observance and Enforcement, which was appointed by President Hoover in
1929. Named for its chairman, former U.S. Attorney General George W.
Wickersham, the Wickersham Commission had made front-page news with its
investigations into the rackets of Al Capone and others. Like the L.A. Bar
Association, the commission also found the methods employed by Doak's
underlings to be unconstitutional. Regardless of the legality or illegality of
the practices, one thing was clear: Mexican immigrants were departing in great
numbers. According to a report by Carr, by May 1931, "There have been
approximately forty thousand aliens who left this district during the last
eighteen months of which probably twenty percent [were] deportable." Even
those who were here legally, he allowed, had been driven out by fear.
In retrospect, other
options were available. The Registry Act of 1929, for example, ensured permanent
residency status -- a version of amnesty -- to those who had been in the United States
continuously since 1921 and had been "honest, law-abiding aliens."
While this surely would have applied to many Mexicans, the act's provisions
were utilized mostly by European or Canadian immigrants. In many cases,
institutionalized hostility prevailed over legal rights. Anti-Mexican
sentiments convinced the father of author Raymond Rodríguez to return to Mexico. His
mother met with a local priest, who assured her that, as a mother of five
American children and a legal resident, she could not be forced to leave.
"So he left and we stayed," says Rodríguez, who never saw his father
again.
Instead of driving Mexican
aliens underground -- as was often the result of raids and other scare tactics
-- it became apparent to anti-immigrant proponents that it was more expedient
simply to assist them out of the country. "Repatriation" became a
locally administered alternative to deportation, which was a federal process
beyond the purview of the county and municipal officials. "Repatriation is
supposed to be voluntary," says Francisco Balderrama, Decade's co-author.
"That's kind of a whitewash word, a kind of covering up of the whole
thing."
Some 350 people departed on
the first county-sponsored repatriation train to leave Los Angeles in March 1931. The next month, a
second train left with nearly three times as many people, of which roughly
one-third paid for their own passage. The repatriates were led to believe that
they could return at a later date, observed George P. Clements, manager of
agriculture of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. In a memo to the chamber's
general manager, Arthur G. Arnoll, Clements, who wanted to keep the cheap labor,
wrote, "I think this is a grave mistake because it is not the truth."
Clements went on to state that American-born children leaving without
documentation were "American citizens without very much hope of ever
coming back into the United
States."
Los Angeles later developed a highly
efficient repatriation program under the direction of Rex Thomson, an engineer
who had impressed members of the Board of Supervisors with his nuts-and-bolts
know-how while advising them on the construction of the Los Angeles General Hospital.
After the county welfare caseload nearly doubled from 25,913 cases during
1929-30 to 42,124 cases in 1930-31, the board asked the pragmatic Thomson to
serve as assistant superintendent of charities. "It was one of the highest
paying public jobs in California,"
Thomson recalled during an interview nearly 40 years later. Having lost a
bundle in failed local banks, he continued, "I was interested in a
job."
Thomson proved to be a
tough administrator who excised bureaucratic fat and made welfare money work
for the county. Men dug channels in the Los Angeles River
in exchange for room and board. He put the unemployed to work on several local
projects: building walls along Elysian Park, grading the grounds around the California State Building.
When Thomson visited Congress in Washington,
D.C., to seek funding for his
public works program, he challenged the feds to "send out people to see if
we aren't worthy of this federal help." By the end of the week, he later
reported: "I'll be darned if they didn't agree. The government got the
idea, and started this Works Progress [Administration], but they didn't always
impose the discipline that was necessary."
Along with putting the
unemployed to work on government-sponsored projects, repatriation would become
another of Thomson's social remedies that would merit emulation. Thomson would
later describe his program: "We had thousands of Mexican nationals who
were out of work. I went to Mexico
City and I told them that we would like to ship these
people back -- not to the border but to where they came from or where the
Mexicans would send them if we agreed it was a proper place. We could ship them
back by train and feed them well and decently, for $74 a family. So I employed
social workers who were Americans of Mexican descent but fluent in the
language, or Mexican nationals, and they would go out and -- I want to
emphasize offer repatriation to these people."
A child in 1932, Rubén
Jiménez remembers one such social worker, a Mr. Hispana, who convinced Jiménez's
father to exchange his two houses in East Los Angeles for 21 acres in Mexicali. "We were
not a burden to the U.S.
government or anybody," says Jiménez, whose father worked for the gas
company and collected rental income on his property. Still, Hispana convinced
the man that it was best for him to turn over his bungalow and frame house and
depart with his family to Mexico,
where their 21 acres awaited them. "We camped under a tree until Dad built
a shack out of bamboo," Jiménez recalls. Since there was no electricity
available, his parents traded their washing machine and other appliances for
chickens, mules, pigs and other necessities for their new life.
In the clutches of the
Depression's hard times, families sold their homes at low prices. In some cases,
the county placed liens on abandoned property. "While there is no direct
authority for selling the effects and applying their proceeds," a county
attorney informed Thomson, "we fail to see how the county can be damaged
by so doing."
"They are going to a
land where the unemployed take all-day siestas in the warm sun," wrote the
Los Angeles Evening Express in August 1931, which described children
"following their parents to a new land of promise, where they may play in
green fields without watching out for automobiles." The reality proved to
be far less idyllic. Emilia Castañeda first glimpsed Mexican poverty in the
tattered shoes on the old train porter who carried her father's trunk. "He
was wearing huaraches," she recalled. "Huaraches are sandals worn by
poor people. They are made out of old tires and scraps." Along with her
father and brother, Castañeda moved to her aunt's place in the state of Durango, where nine
relatives were already sharing the one-room domicile. "There was no room
for us," she said. "If it rained we couldn't go indoors." She
quickly learned that running water and electricity were luxuries left back in Los Angeles. She took
baths in a galvanized tub and fetched water from wells. The toilet was a hole
in the backyard. "We were living with people who didn't want us
there," Castañeda said. "We were imposing on them out of
necessity." They left after her father found work. In time her brother
would be working also and, to her great dismay, shuffling around in huaraches.
Contrary to what was being
propagated, Mexicans in Los Angeles
did not impose a disproportionate strain on welfare services during the
Depression. This is according to Decade and Abraham Hoffman, whose
dissertation and subsequent book, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great
Depression, examined repatriation from a Los Angeles perspective. Based on the
county's own figures, Mexicans comprised an average of only 10 percent of those
on relief. Nonetheless, repatriation was promoted and widely viewed as an
effective means of diminishing welfare rolls, and Mexico's proclaimed plans for
agricultural expansion conveniently complemented the movement. Indeed, Thomson
traveled extensively throughout Mexico
to survey proposed work sites and hold negotiations at various levels of the
Mexican government, including the ministry of foreign affairs and the
presidency. Some Mexican officials were so eager to get Thomson's repatriates,
he later recalled, he was personally offered a bounty of land for each.
"One time I was met by the governor of Quintaneroo. He offered me 17 and a
half hectares (44 acres) for every repatriated individual I sent there to cut
sisal and I said 'Absolutely no.'" Thomson claimed repatriates were in
high demand across the border. "They brought across skills and industrial
discipline," he said. "At that time, if you could repair a Model T
Ford, that was quite an art."
Thomson's program -- and
its seemingly fantastic results -- attracted the attention of state and local
leaders from around the country, and his practice of engaging the Mexican
government was copied as well. In the fall of 1932, Ignacio Batiza, the Mexican
consul in Detroit,
urged his compatriots to return home and "accept this opportunity which is
offered them." While Batiza may have believed his country's promises of
cooperation, others did not. A pamphlet circulated by a group called the
International Labor Defense warned that thousands of workers choosing to return
to Mexico
would die of hunger. This was the end of 1932, and the feasibility of Mexico's grand
plans was not yet widely challenged.
With a population of less
than 15 million in the early years of the Depression, Mexico needed
more workers to attain its goal of land transformation. Even as the Depression
took hold, the Mexican government proceeded with its agricultural development
plans, which would include repatriated nationals -- especially those with
farming skills. During that time, "They are proclaiming workers'
rights," Balderrama explained. "If they're not accepting of the
repatriates, that calls into question what they're all about." In the end,
however, the government's post-revolutionary zeal eclipsed a hard reckoning of
the facts. The returning mass of impoverished pilgrims from the United States
would strain an already fragile economy. Officially, at least, the government
welcomed the compatriots from the north, underscoring its proclamation of
Mexicanism and support for workers' rights.
Mexico struggled to cope with the
deluge of new arrivals. Hungry and sick travelers crowded into border towns
such as Ciudad Juárez and Nogales,
where paltry food and medical supplies ensured a daily death count. There are
many accounts of border towns crowded with people, as the train connections
were not well organized. One repatriado reported: "Many that come here
don't have any place to go. They don't have any idea of where they are going or
what they'll do. Some families just stayed down at the railway station."
In an attempt to manage the
crisis, Mexican governmental agencies joined several private organizations to
create the National Repatriation Committee in 1933. The first colonization
project undertaken by this august assembly was Pinotepa Nacional, located in a
fertile tropical area of southern Mexico. Modern farming equipment
and mules, along with food and other provisions, were made available to the
farmers, who were to earn their equity through produce. And while the crops
grew quickly, this highly touted proletarian collective proved to be a
disastrous failure beset with complaints about mistreatment and meager food
rations. The project's final undoing came from disease, as the land was rife
with poisonous insects. Sixty people died within 20 days, according to a
settler who had left after one month, taking his three small sons with him.
"Some have families and can't leave very well," he told one
researcher. "But my boys and I could. We walked to Oaxaca. It took us eight days."
Though the government
welcomed repatriates, the general citizenry often did not. "Most of us
here in Mexico do not look
on these repatriates very favorably," remarked one Mexico City landlady. "They abandoned
the country during the revolution, and after getting expelled from the north,
they expected their old compatriots…to greet them with celebrations of
fireworks and brass bands." Castañeda remembers children taunting her as a
"repatriada." "The word was very offensive to me," she
recalled. "It was an insult, as is calling someone a gringo or a
wetback." As one Mexican ranch worker asked a repatriate in Torreón in the
northeastern state of Coahuila: "What you doing here for? To eat the
little bread we have?"
As news about the harsh
conditions in Mexico
traveled north, it became more difficult to convince people to leave the United States.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal provided work for some Mexicans,
such as veterans of the U.S.
military, and welfare was allotted to those who were barred from the work
projects. But, back in Los Angeles,
Thomson remained resolute in his efforts to repatriate Mexicans, eventually
turning his attention to nursing homes and asylums in his desire to purge what
he considered welfare leeches. In some cases, the bedridden were sent out on
the back of a truck.
Many American children of
repatriates never lost their desire for a true repatriation of their own.
Emilia Castañeda, who had relocated 17 times while living in Mexico, decided to return to Los Angeles as her 18th birthday approached,
some nine years after that dark morning in 1935. Her godmother in Boyle Heights
forwarded Castañeda's birth certificate, along with money for the train ride.
Ironically, this American citizen was again subjected to humiliation. At the
border crossing, immigration officials asked to see her tourist card. "I
had to pay for a tourist card because, according to them, I was a tourist. Can
you imagine? Me, a tourist, for nine years." It was 1944, and the train
was crowded with soldiers. "I sat on my suitcase in the aisle. The seats
were reserved for servicemen, but some were kind and they offered me their
seats. I spoke very little English by then. Here was this American girl coming
back to the United States."
Castañeda relearned English
in the same school she had attended as a child. As she would later admit, her
forced relocation "prevented me from completing my education and advancing
for better employment." Rubén Jiménez had attended school in Mexico, walking
12 miles a day to a one-room structure where six grades shared one teacher.
When he returned to the States, the transition back into Los Angeles schools was difficult. A high
school sophomore at age 17, Jiménez dropped out and joined the Army, serving as
a radar operator during World War II. After several years, he completed college
and eventually retired as a parole investigator.
While many American
citizens who were caught up in the repatriation movement returned and struggled
to readjust to their native country, thousands who had left without
documentation had no legitimate proof of citizenship and were denied reentry.
"We talked to one lady, part of her family came back, and part of it,
unable to prove their residency, settled along the border so they could get
together sometimes," recalls Rodríguez. "But the whole family was not
able to make it back. And that was not an unusual circumstance."
In 1972 Hoffman noted that
the history of Mexicans in the United
States was largely ignored. "A case in
point is that of the repatriation phenomenon," he said. "When I
started working on it as a dissertation there was really nothing. Historians
had neglected it as a topic, as they did essentially everything that today we
call ethnic studies. I was interested in the topic because I was born in East L.A., and although I am not a Mexican American, I
did have some concerns about what had been going on in an area where I had
grown up."
Repatriates often tried to
forget the experience, and they did not speak about it to their children. Many
saw themselves as victims of local vendettas rather than scapegoats of a
national campaign. "They really didn't understand the broad aspects,"
says Rodríguez. "They thought it was an individual experience. It wasn't
something pleasant. It wasn't something they could be proud of."
The silence, however, did
not dissuade a new generation from seeking answers. "I knew that my father
had spent his childhood in Mexico,
despite the fact that he was born in Detroit,
and I always had questions about it," says Elena Herrada, a union official
and activist in Detroit.
While at Wayne State University
in the '70s, Herrada and other students began collecting oral histories from
elders in the community, a practice she continues today. "All we wanted to
do was get the story told in our own families, and in our own communities, so
that we would have a better understanding of why we don't vote, why we don't
answer the census, why we don't protest in the face of extreme injustice. It
just explains so many things for us."
In the summer of 2003, the
subject of Mexican repatriation went beyond the confines of family and academic
circles and returned to the scrutiny of government. A hearing was held in Sacramento, Calif.,
presided over by state Senator Joe Dunne, who had been inspired by Decade of
Betrayal. The book's authors spoke at the session, and Rodríguez's voice
faltered as he recalled his own father's flight to Mexico in 1936. Other scholars
spoke, as did local politicians and two repatriates. A class action lawsuit on
behalf of those who had been unfairly expelled from California was filed in July, with Castañeda
as the lead plaintiff. The suit was eventually withdrawn, as two consecutive
governors vetoed bills that would have funded research and expanded statutory
limitations.
For a time, however, the
civil action and the forgotten history behind it were national news. This, in a
way, was the beginning of a more lasting restitution: an acknowledgement of the
past. "My idea is for it to be in the history books," says Emilia
Castañeda, "for children to learn what happened to American
citizens."
This article was written by Steve Boisson and originally
published in the September 2006 issue of American History Magazine.