Part VII
Aguantar
Aguantar
is a Spanish word that means "to endure one's fate bravely and with a
certain style." There has long been a tendency to assume that Mexican
Americans adopted a tragic view of life, suffernig disappointments and
reversals with passive acceptance. But far from being fatalistic in the face of
prejudice and discrimination, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
Mexican Americans created a wide range of organizations to preserve their
cultural and religious traditions and to better their economic condition.
As
late as the early 1900s, people of Mexican origin were being lynched in the
lower Rio Grande Valley. They also faced a dual-wage system that paid lower
"Mexican wages" to Spanish-speaking employees. But through self-help
organizations and labor activism, Mexican Americans directly addressed the
problems they confronted.
1 /
Community Institutions
Faced
with discrimination and worsening economic circumstances, Mexican Americans in
the Southwest looked to one another, and to Mexico and their ethnic heritage.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, they built a wide range of self-help
organizations.
Among
the earliest were mutualistas--fraternal and mutual aid societies, which
provided members with services that included credit, low-cost sickness and
death benefits, and social and educational activities. Some organized libraries
or provided lectures on Mexican culture and history. Often named for the Virgin
of Guadalupe or other symbols of their ethnic heritage, the mutualistas
frequently functioned as labor unions, providing economic support during labor
disputes. Most mutualistas were organized locally, though the Alianza
Hispano-Americana, founded in Arizona in 1894, had ten thousand members in
Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas by 1930.
In
the 1920s came civic clubs and regional organizations oriented to politics. The
League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), one of the largest, most
influential, and most long-lasting Mexican American organizations, was formed
in Corpus Christi in 1929 out of the merger of three earlier Texas
organizations: La Orden de Hijos de America, the Knights of America, and the
League of Latin American Citizens. Drawing its support largely from the urban
middle class, it sought to bring Mexican Americans into the main current of
American society and combat discrimination in education, jobs, wages, and political
representation. Strongly rooted in local communities, it promoted the learning
of English, improvements in schools, and political power through voting.
Today,
LULAC has 250,000 members in six hundred chapters nationwide. It had a major
effect in desegregating schools, winning the right of Mexican Americans to
serve on juries. It also opened up many public swimming pools, restrooms, and
lunch counters to Hispanics. It helped create the Mexican American Legal
Defense and Education Fund; formed SER-Jobs for Progress, the country's largest
worker training program; and founded the "Little School of 400,"
which served as the model and inspiration for the Head Start early childhood
education program.
LULAC
The Aims
and Purposes of This Organization Shall Be:
1. To develop within the members of
our race the best, purest and most perfect type of a true and loyal citizen of
the United States of America.
2. To eradicate from our body
politic all intents and tendencies to establish discriminations among our
fellow citizens on account of race, religion, or social position as being
contrary to the true spirit of Democracy, our Constitution and Laws.
3. To use all the legal means at our
command to the end that all citizens in our country may enjoy equal rights, the
equal protection of the laws of the land and equal opportunities and
privileges.
4. The acquisition of the English
language, which is the official language of our country, being necessary for
the enjoyment of our rights and privileges, we declare it to be the official
language of this organization, and we pledge ourselves to learn and speak and
teach same to our children.
5. To define with absolute and
unmistakable clearness our unquestionable loyalty to the ideals, principles,
and citizenship of the United States of America.
6. To assume complete responsibility
for the education of our children as to their rights and duties and the
language and customs of this country; the latter, in so far as they may be good
customs.
7. We solemnly declare once for all
to maintain a sincere and respectful reverence for our racial origin of which
we are proud.
8. Secretly and openly, by all
lawful means at our command, we shall assist in the education and guidance of
Latin‑Americans and we shall protect and defend their lives and interest
whenever necessary.
9. We shall destroy any attempt to
create racial prejudices against our people, and any infamous stigma which may
be cast upon them, and we shall demand for them the respect and prerogatives
which the Constitution grants to us all.
10. Each of us considers himself
with equal responsibilities in our organization, to which we voluntarily swear
subordination and obedience.
11. We shall create a fund for our
mutual protection, for the defense of those of us who may be unjustly
persecuted and for the education and culture of our people.
12. This organization is not a
political club, but as citizens we shall participate in all local, state, and
national political contests. However, in doing so we shall ever bear in mind
the general welfare of our people, and we disregard and abjure once for all any
personal obligation which is not in harmony with these principles.
13. With our vote and influence we
shall endeavor to place in public office men who show by their deeds, respect
and consideration for our people.
14. We shall select as our leaders
those among us who demonstrate, by their integrity and culture, that they are
capable of guiding and directing us properly.
15. We shall maintain publicity
means for the diffusion of these principles and for the expansion and
consolidation of this organization.
16. We shall pay our poll tax as
well as that of members of our families in order that we may enjoy our rights
fully.
17.
We shall diffuse our ideals by means of the press, lectures, and pamphlets.
18. We shall oppose any radical and
violent demonstration which may tend to create conflicts and disturb the peace
and tranquility of our country.
19. We shall have mutual respect for
our religious views and we shall never refer to them in our institutions.
20. We shall encourage the creation
of educational institutions for Latin‑Americans and we shall lend our
support to those already in existence.
21. We shall endeavor to secure
equal representation for our people on juries and in the administration of
governmental affairs.
22. We shall denounce every act of
peonage and mistreatment as well as the employment of our minor children of
scholastic age.
23. We shall resist and attack
energetically all machinations tending to prevent our social and political
unification.
24. We shall oppose any tendency to
separate our children in the schools of this country.
25. We shall maintain statistics
which will guide our people with respect to working and living conditions and
agricultural and commercial activities in the various parts of our country.
Source:
"The League of United Latin-American Citizens: A Texas-Mexican Civic
Organization," by O. Douglas Weeks, in Southwestern Political and
Social Science Quarterly, December 1929.
2 / Labor
Activism
In
July 1917, shortly after the United States entered World War I, armed men in
Cochise County, Arizona, under the direction of a local sheriff, rounded up
1,186 strikers at the Phelps Dodge copper mine. These workers, many of whom
were Mexican Americans, the possee forced at gunpoint into boxcars without food
or water and railroaded them into the New Mexico desert, 180 miles away. The
Los Angeles Times editorialized: "The citizens of Cochise County have
written a lesson that the whole of America would do well to copy."
For
many years, there was a pervasive misbelief about the passivity of Mexican
American workers. Mexican American workers have a long history of labor
activism in the face of indifference or hostility from the Anglo labor
movement.
Among
the earliest efforts were those of stevedores in the port of Galveston who
attempted to unionize immediately following the Civil War; and employees of
central Texas cattle companies who tried to organize in the early 1880s. A Mexican
American version of the Knights of Labor was known as the Caballeros de Labor.
The mining industry was another early focus of Mexican American labor activity.
The expansion of mining in southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico, and
southern Colorado during the late 1880s led in 1896 to the formation of a
number of Mexican unions.
Mexican
Americans were at the forefront of efforts to improve wages and working
conditions for migrant farm workers. As early as 1903, more than a thousand
Mexican and Japanese sugar beet workers carried out a successful strike in
Ventura, California. The Mexican Protective Association, founded in 1911 in
Texas, was one of the earliest agricultural unions. During the Great Depression
of the 1930s, Mexican Americans had a leading role in the establishment of some
forty agricultural unions in California.
Workers
of Mexican descent could be found on opposite sides in labor disputes.
Employers sometimes recruited Mexican Americans as strikebreakers, which led
many union leaders to refuse Mexicans as members and to lobby for immigration
restrictions.
In
California's Imperial Valley in 1928, Mexican and Mexican American farm workers
staged a strike against cantaloupe growers. The excerpt here from a state
fact-finding commission discusses the conditions that gave rise to the strike.
Governor
C.C. Young's Fact-Finding Committee
In compliance with your
instructions, I visited the Imperial Valley to investigate the causes and
conditions of employment which led to the strike of the cantaloupe pickers and
to ascertain the facts surrounding the arrests of many Mexican laborers....
The picking of cantaloupes in the
Imperial Valley begins early in May and lasts about eight weeks. Approximately
between forty-five hundred and five thousand male workers are engaged in the
harvesting of this crop. The preponderant majority of these men are Mexicans,
but Filipinos and other Orientals are also working on some ranches....
Before the season's picking begins,
the grower of the melons, who in most cases leases the land from an absentee
landlord, enters into a picking agreement with a labor contractor. This
contractor is usually a Mexican, but there are also Japanese, Filipino, and
Hindu contractors....
The grower obligates himself to make
weekly payments to the labor contractor...for all crates of melons accepted by
the distributor, less 25 percent of the total amount of money.... This
percentage is retained by the grower until the completion of the contract as a
guarantee of the fulfillment of its conditions.... The contract further
provides that the contractor, not the grower, must comply with the requirements
of the Workmen's Compensation Act....
The difficulties with the contract
usually start toward the end of the season. Sometimes the contractor absconds
with the last payment he receives from the grower and leaves his workers
stranded without the wages for their last week's work and minus the 25 percent
withheld from the season's wages. If the contractor is honest enough and willing
to pay his workers, his intentions are sometimes checkmated by the failure of
the grower to make the last payment to the contractor. The growers are often
financed by other persons, and a bad market, poor management, or an
unsuccessful crop leaves them without funds before the season is over....
These defalcations are not
infrequent, and the Mexican laborers in the Imperial Valley have suffered
considerably on account of them.... Where the contractor absconds with the last
payment received from the grower, it is almost next to impossible to do
anything for the laborers affected. The grower cannot be held responsible
because it was the contractor, not the grower, who hired them and who was
supposed to pay them their wages. If a crop failure, a bad market, or poor
management is responsible for the financial reverses of the grower and the
contractor does not get paid, the workers are deprived not only of their last
week's pay but also of the 25 percent of the season's wages. The perennial
defalcations of the contractors or of the growers have resulted in genuine
dissatisfaction with the contract system on the part of Mexican laborers. Not
only do they complain that they often do not get their wages at the end of the
season but they also claim that the contractor often shorts them and pays them
for less crates than they pick.
Although the labor contractor is not
a new phenomenon in the Imperial Valley, at least one of the provisions of the
picking agreement, and of similar agreements, is probably illegal. It is very
doubtful whether the contractor who hires the picker on a piece-work basis may
legally withhold 25 percent of every week's wages.
Source: Report
of Governor C.C. Young's Fact-Finding Committee, Mexicans in California
(San Francisco, 1930).
One
of the largest farmworkers' strikes took place in California's San Joaquín
Valley, where thousands of Mexican and Mexican American cotton pickers demanded
higher wages and better working and living conditions. In this selection, Frank
C. McDonald, California's state labor commissioner, describes the conflict
between workers and growers.
Frank
C. McDonald
On...Sunday, September 17, 1933,
representatives of the cotton pickers in the San Joaquín Valley announced that
the cotton pickers had decided that they would pick cotton for $1 per hundred
pounds....
On September 19, 1933...it was
decided that cotton growers would pay 60 cents per hundred pounds for the
picking of cotton....
On Wednesday, October 4, 1933, an
extensive strike in which some ten thousand cotton pickers were involved was
declared....
On Saturday, October 7, 1933...the
growers notified the strikers that they would not permit any further public
meetings.
Then the growers went in automobiles
throughout the surrounding highway and took away from the pickets their banners
and signs and notified the strikers to leave the district within twenty-four
hours.
On October 9, 1933, the following
paid advertisement was published in the issue of the Tulare Daily Advance
Register:
[Paid
Advertisement]
Notice
to the Citizens of Tulare
We, the Farmers of Your Community,
Whom You Are Dependent Upon For Support, Feel That You Have Nursed Too Long the
Viper That Is at Our Door.
These Communist Agitators Must Be
Driven From Town By You, and Your Harboring Them Further Will Prove to Us Your
Non-Cooperation With Us, and Make It Necessary for Us to Give Our Support and
Trade to Another Town That Will Support and Cooperate With Us.
Farmer's
Protective Association
On the evening of October 10, 1933,
press dispatches stated that two strikers had been killed and eight wounded in
front of the cotton pickers' strike headquarters in Pixley, Tulare County.
Subsequently, eight cotton growers were indicted by the Tulare County Grand
Jury for the murder of the two striking cotton pickers. Press dispatches of the
same date also stated that one striker had been killed and a number of strikers
and cotton growers had been injured during a fight at the E.O. Mitchell Ranch
in Kern County. As a result of this fight, seven strikers were arrested on a
charge of rioting....
During the strike, the strikers had
continuously used what is known as "mass-picketing tactics." On
October 23, 1933, a large number of striking pickets, principally Mexican men
and women, proceeded along the highway until they came to the Guiberson Ranch
near Corcoran, where they found strikebreakers at work, picking cotton. The
strikers invaded the ranch, and in the fight which ensued between the strikers
and strikebreakers, a number of persons were struck with clubs and fists. It is
also reported that the sacks containing cotton were slashed and ripped open.
On that same day...your Fact Finding
Commission announced the following decision.
...It is judgment of [the]
Commission that upon evidence presented growers can pay for picking at [a] rate
of seventy-five cents per hundred pounds and your Commission begs leave,
therefore, to advise this rate of payment be established. Without question
civil rights of strikers have been violated. We appeal to constituted
authorities to see that strikers are protected in rights conferred upon them by
laws of State and by Federal and State Constitutions.
Source:
Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labor, U.S.
Senate, 76th Congress, 3rd session. Washington: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1940.
3 / Roman
Catholic Church
Willa
Cather's bestselling 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop presents
a highly sympathetic portrait of Jean Baptiste Lamy (1814-1888), the French
archbishop who reorganized the Catholic Church in the Southwest. It depicts
Archbishop Lamy as a man of patience and piety, who was forced to excommunicate
corrupt clergymen and to suppress superstitious religious rites. In recent
years, the history of the Catholic Church in the Southwest has undergone close
scrutiny and revision.
The
early southwestern church suffered from a severe shortage of priests, and in
the late eighteenth century, a Catholic lay order emerged known as Penitentes,
which was responsible for preserving religious life and traditions. The
Penitentes acted as ministers. They supervised wakes and funerals, performed
charitable works, and organized religious ceremonies, including reenactments of
the suffering of Christ. The Penitentes were vilified in the mid-nineteenth
century by Anglo Protestants and some Catholics, who were appalled by their
practice of flagellation. Anglo-Americans also charged that the Penitentes,
perhaps instigated by the Mexican priests, took part in a revolt against rule
by the United States that took the life of the governor, Charles Bent.
Following
the conquest of the Southwest by the United States, Lamy became the first
bishop of Santa Fe. Finding only nine priests in New Mexico when he arrived in
Santa Fe in the early 1850s, he brought in a large number of priests from
France and other European countries. Unappreciative of Mexican and Mexican
American culture, he quickly came into conflict with the small number of
Mexican clergy in his diocese. He eventually excommunicated five Spanish-speaking
clergymen, ostensibly for concubinage, and attempted to suppress the
Penitentes. Lamy also suppressed the santos, carved saints and icons that are
now prized as southwestern folk art.
Before
the 1850s, Padre Antonio José Martínez de Taos had been the ecclesiastical
leader of northern New Mexico. His bishop was in Durango in Mexico, six hundred
miles to the south. In Willa Cather's bestseller, Martínez is portrayed as
cruel and corrupt, whose mouth was "the very assertion of violent uncurbed
passions and tyrannical self-will," a debauched man who fathers numerous
illegitimate children, steals the land of peasants, and foments armed rebellion
against the Anglos. In recent years, Padre Martínez's defenders have depicted
him in a far more favorable light, as a deeply religious protector of the poor
who resisted Bishop Lamy's threat to withhold the sacraments from church
members who refused to tithe, giving the church ten percent of their income.
Bishop
Lamy succeeded in driving the Penitentes underground. In 1947, the brotherhood
was embraced by the Catholic Church. Today there about forty communities of the
brotherhood in New Mexico and southern Colorado.
Even
though Mexican Americans make up about two-thirds of the Southwest's Roman
Catholic population, there is a sense that the Church did not begin adequately
to address their needs until quite recently. Between 1850 and 1970, only one
Mexican American bishop was appointed. As recently as the late 1970s Hispanics,
who constituted twenty-seven percent of the nation's Catholics, made up only
about one percent of priests in the United States.
In
the report here, Archbishop Lamy describes the state of Catholicism in the
Southwest in 1866.
Archbishop
Lamy
In New Mexico we have only the most
rigorously necessary things for our existence, as bread and meat. There are no
factories of any kind here. The majority of the inhabitants raise sheep and
cattle and horses, but they get very little profit out of it. It may be for
lack of a market or on account of the savage Indians who steal the flocks, kill
the shepherds or take them prisoner.... New Mexico is the most populated of the
three territories that to this day comprise the Diocese of Santa Fe; we have
110,000 Mexicans and 15,000 Catholic Indians. Colorado has 10,000 Catholics in
a settlement of 40,000 souls. Arizona has 8,000 Catholics. The present number
of our Priests in missions is 41, five in charge of Colorado, three in Arizona,
the rest in New Mexico. I have made three pastoral visits into Colorado, and
only one into Arizona, but this took me six months, from the 1st of November
1863 to the 1st of May 1864. I traveled over a thousand leagues on horseback.
In some places we had to sleep under the moon and to travel spaces from 20 to
25 leagues without a drop of water, walking to rest my horse. But we find
ourselves rewarded for all this hardship, at finding such faithful souls. Not
having seen a priest for many years, they take advantage of the visits of the
missionary to receive the Sacraments with fervor and gratitude....
Until now, communication between New
Mexico and the rest of the United States is difficult and transportation very
costly. But railroads are building in the west in California; and from the east
in Missouri and Texas. As soon as these are established, the working of the
mines, the raising of the flocks, the cultivation of vineyards, will change
entirely the condition of things. We will be able to employ laborers at more
reasonable wages, construct houses and churches as in the east. We may probably
see factories established in this country, where wool is to be obtained in
great abundance. In this general increase of resources, this mission will
without doubt find extension and a way of sustaining the great, heavy loads, which
are always found in new undertakings. Providence will never abandon us, and the
Order of the Propagation of the Faith, will, as we hope, continue to help us as
heretofore, since the beginning of this See in Santa Fe, of which despite our
personal unworthiness we have the honor to be the first Bishop.
Source:
Louis H. Warner, Archbishop Lamy: An Epoch Maker, Santa Fe, 1936, Chap.
14.
Archbishop
Lamy had a fellow cleric, Father Joseph B. Macheboeuf, remove José Manuel
Gallegos from his position of parish pastor. In this selection, Father
Macheboeuf describes his actions.
Father
Joseph B. Macheboeuf
My position was sufficiently
delicate and difficult, for he [José Manuel Gallegos] was very popular in his
set. I took advantage of his temporary absence in Old Mexico to take possession
of the church and to announce from the pulpit the sentence of the Bishop,
suspending him from the exercise of any priestly function. Some time later,
when I was visiting some Indian parishes in the mountains, about seventy‑five
miles from Albuquerque, I heard that the Padre had returned and was going to
dispute the possession of the church with me the next Sunday. This did not
alarm me, but I thought it best to be prepared.... On Sunday morning I went to
the church an hour earlier than usual in order to be on the ground and ready
for anything that might happen. What was my astonishment upon arriving here to
find the Padre in the pulpit and the church filled with people whom I knew to
be his particular friends. These he had quietly gathered together, and now he
was inciting them to revolt, or at least to resistance. I tried to enter the
church through the sacristy, but this communicated with the presbytery, which
he still occupied, and I found the doors locked. Going then to the main door of
the church I entered, and assuming an air of boldness I commanded the crowd to
stand aside and make room for me to pass. Then, as one having authority, I
forced my way through the crowd and passed up by the pulpit just as the Padre
pronounced the Bishop's name and mine in connection with the most atrocious
accusations and insulting reflections. I went on until I reached the highest
step of the sanctuary, and then turning I stood listening quietly till he had
finished. Then all the people turned to me as if expecting an answer. I
replied, and in the clearest manner refuted all his accusations, and I showed,
moreover, that he was guilty of the scandals which had brought on his
punishment....
From that moment the Padre lost all
hope of driving me away, and, abandoning the Church, he went into politics.
There was no doubt about his talents, and he used them to good effect in his
new field, for through them he worked every kind of scheme until he succeeded
in getting himself elected to the Congress of the United States as Delegate
from the Territory of New Mexico.
Source:
Ralph Emerson Twitchell, ed., The Leading Facts of New Mexican History.
Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1912, II: 832-34.
Part VIII
North
from Mexico
At
the end of the Mexican War relatively few Mexicans lived in what had become the
southwestern United States. Outside of New Mexico, there were probably no more
than fifteen thousand Mexican Americans in 1848. In the second half of the
nineteenth century, however, migration from Mexico increased sharply. This
massive movement of people was a product of economic dislocation and civil
unrest in Mexico and booming demand for cheap unskilled and semi-skilled labor
in the Southwest, resulting from the growth of commercial agriculture, mining,
transportation, stockraising, and lumbering. Western railroads, construction
companies, steel mills, mines and canneries recruited Mexicans as manual
laborers. So, too, did large commercial farms in Arizona's Salt River Valley,
Texas's lower Rio Grande Valley, and California's Imperial and San Joaquín
valleys. By 1890, more than 75,000 Mexicans had migrated to the United States.
By 1900, the Mexican and Mexican American population in the United
States--including immigrants and the native born--totalled between 381,000 and
562,000. Since then, Mexican American history has been shaped by surges of mass
immigration from Mexico, punctuated by recurrent efforts at deportation.
Between
1910 and 1920, at least 219,000 Mexican immigrants entered the United States,
doubling the Hispanic population in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, and
quadrupling California's. Mass migration was the product of push and pull. The
Mexican Revolution and the expansion of haciendas threw many Mexicans off the
land, while the rapid growth of jobs in mining, smelting, railroads, and
irrigated agriculture in the Southwest created intense demand for low-wage
physical labor. Railroad lines integrated the economy of northern Mexico with
that of the southwestern United States and made it easier for Mexican migrants
to travel northward.
The
economic recession that followed World War I produced a backlash against
Mexican immigration. Between 1920 and 1921, nearly 100,000 Mexicans were
shipped across the border or left voluntarily. The mid-1920s brought another
wave of large-scale migration: half a million Mexicans entered the United
States on permanent visas--one-ninth of total U.S. immigration. This migration
was stimulated partly by another revolution in Mexico, the Cristero Revolution
fought from 1926 to 1929, and in part by the Southwest's ongoing demand for
low-wage labor. Much of the migration from 1910 through the 1920s came from the
economically depressed central Mexican states of Jalisco, Guanajuato, and
Michoacan. By the late twenties, Mexicans and Mexican Americans made up
three-quarters of Texas's construction workers and four-fifths of the state's
migrant farmworkers. In California, Mexican immigrants comprised three-quarters
of the agricultural workforce. By 1930, the 100,000 Mexicans and Mexican
Americans who lived in Los Angeles comprised the largest Mexican American
population.
Depression-era
unemployment reduced immigration to less than thirty-three thousand during the
1930s. The United States and Mexico sponsored a repatriation program that
returned half a million people to Mexico, about half of whom were United States
citizens. Although the program was supposed to be voluntary, many were
pressured to leave.
Demand
for Mexican American labor resumed during World War II. In 1942, the United
States and Mexico instituted the Bracero Program, which allowed Mexican
contract laborers to work in the United States in seasonal agriculture and
other sectors of the economy. Following the war, however, a new deportation
effort sought to expel resident Mexicans who lacked United States citizenship.
1 / Mexican
Americans and Southwestern Growth
Americans
are familiar with the huge industrial complexes that arose in the late
nineteenth-century Northeast and Midwest: the Carnegie Steel Company or the
Pullman. Far less attention is paid to parallel developments in the Southwest.
During the late nineteenth century, the southwestern economy underwent a series
of wrenching transformations in mining, smelting, transportation, and agriculture.
Especially after passage of the Newlands Act (the Reclamation Act of 1902),
which promoted development of large scale irrigation projects, southwestern
agriculture shifted from a ranch-based economy to seasonal commercial
agriculture using migratory workers. The rapid growth of mining, railroads, and
large-scale commercial agriculture in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries in the Southwest could not have occurred without low-cost labor from
Mexico.
The
nature of employment in the Southwest--in commercial agriculture, mining, and
railroads--carried profound consequences for the lives of Mexican immigrants.
Many lived in isolated mining towns or worked as migratory farm laborers or
railroad construction workers. Even in cities, they tended to live in
segregated neighborhoods. Distinctive words describe these many communities.
Rural communities called colonias were located near agricultural or railroad
work camps; barrios, segregated urban neighborhoods, were to be found near
factories or packinghouses.
More
than any other ethnic group, Mexican Americans were able to maintain a high
degree of cultural continuity. Within segregated communities Mexicans and
Mexican Americans were able to maintain distinctive social, cultural, and
family customs, as well as fluency in Spanish. They were also able to develop
an internal economy of restaurants, funeral homes, grocery stores, barbershops,
tailorships, and other services catering to other members of the community.
In
a 1912 article in the Progressive Era journal The Survey, Samuel Bryan
analyzes the growth in Mexican migration, the conditions in which the migrants
lived, and the discrimination they faced.
Samuel
Bryan
Previous to 1900 the influx of
Mexicans was comparatively unimportant. It was confined almost exclusively to
those portions of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California which are near the
boundary line between Mexico and the United States. Since these states were
formerly Mexican territory and have always possessed a considerable Mexican
population, a limited migration back and forth across the border was a
perfectly natural result of the existing blood relationship. During the period
from 1880 to 1900 the Mexican‑born population of these border states
increased from 66,312 to 99,969‑-a gain of 33,657 in twenty years. This
increase was not sufficient to keep pace with the growth of the total
population of the states. Since 1900, however, there has been a rapid increase
in the volume of Mexican immigration, and also some change in its geographical
distribution....
...In 1908, it was estimated that
from 60,000 to 100,000 Mexicans entered the United States each year. This
estimate, however, should be modified by the well‑known fact that each
year a considerable number of Mexicans return to Mexico. Approximately 50
percent of those Mexicans who find employment as section hands upon the
railroads claim the free transportation back to El Paso which is furnished by
the railroad companies to those who have been in their employ six months or a
year. Making allowance for this fact, it would be conservative to place the
yearly accretion of population by Mexican immigration at from 35,000 to 70,000.
It is probable, therefore, that the Mexican‑born population of the United
States has trebled since the census of 1900 was taken.
This rapid increase within the last
decade has resulted from the expansion of industry both in Mexico and in the
United States. In this country the industrial development of the Southwest has
opened up wider fields of employment for unskilled laborers in transportation,
agriculture, mining, and smelting. A similar expansion in northern Mexico has
drawn many Mexican laborers from the farms of other sections of the country
farther removed from the border, and it is an easy matter to go from the mines
and section gangs of northern Mexico to the more remunerative employment to be
had in similar industries of the southwestern United States. Thus the movement
from the more remote districts of Mexico to the newly developed industries of
the North has become largely a stage in a more general movement to the United
States. Entrance into this country is not difficult, for employment agencies in
normal times have stood ready to advance board, lodging, and transportation to
a place where work was to be had, and the immigration officials have usually
deemed no Mexican likely to become a public charge so long as this was the
case. This was especially true before 1908....
Most of the Mexican immigrants have
at one time been employed as railroad laborers. At present they are used
chiefly as section hands and as members of construction gangs, but a number are
also to be found working as common laborers about the shops and powerhouses.
Although a considerable number are employed as helpers. Few have risen above
unskilled labor in any branch of the railroad service. As section hands on the
two more important systems they were paid a uniform wage of $1.00 per day from
their first employment in 1902 until 1909, except for a period of about one year
previous to the financial stringency of 1907, when they were paid $1.25 per
day. In 1909 the wages of all Mexican section hands employed upon the Santa Fe
lines were again raised to $1.25 per day. The significant feature is, however,
that as a general rule they have earned less than the members of any other race
similarly employed. For example, of the 2,455 Mexican section hands from whom
data were secured by the Immigration Commission in 1908 and 1909, 2,111 or 85.9
percent, were earning less than $1.25 per day, while the majority of the
Greeks, Italians, and Japanese earned more than $1.25 and a considerable number
more than $1.50 per day.
In the arid regions of the border
states where they have always been employed and where the majority of them
still live, the Mexicans come into little direct competition with other races,
and no problems of importance result from their presence. But within the last
decade their area of employment has expanded greatly. They are now used as
section hands as far east as Chicago and as far north as Wyoming. Moreover,
they are now employed to a considerable extent in the coal mines of Colorado
and New Mexico, in the ore mines of Colorado and Arizona, in the smelters of
Arizona, in the cement factories of Colorado and California, in the beet sugar
industry of the last mentioned states, and in fruit growing and canning in
California. In these localities they have at many points come into direct
competition with other races, and their low standards have acted as a check
upon the progress of the more assertive of these.
Where they are employed in other
industries, the same wage discrimination against them as was noted in the case
of railroad employees is generally apparent where the work is done on an hour
basis, but no discrimination exists in the matter of rates for piecework. As
pieceworkers in the fruit canneries and in the sugar beet industry the
proverbial sluggishness of the Mexicans prevents them from earning as much as
the members of other races. In the citrus fruit industry their treatment varies
with the locality. In some instances they are paid the same as the
"whites," in others the same as the Japanese, according to the class
with which they share the field of employment. The data gathered by the
Immigration Commission show that although the earnings of Mexicans employed in
the other industries are somewhat higher than those of the Mexican section
hands, they are with few exceptions noticeably lower than the earnings of
Japanese, Italians, and members of the various Slavic races who are similarly
employed. This is true in the case of smelting, ore mining, coal mining, and
sugar refining. Specific instances of the use of Mexicans to curb the demands
of other races are found in the sugar beet industry of central California,
where they were introduced for the purpose of showing the Japanese laborers
that they were not indispensable, and in the same industry in Colorado, where
they were used in a similar way against the German‑Russians. Moreover,
Mexicans have been employed as strikebreakers in the coal mines of Colorado and
New Mexico, and in one instance in the shops of one important railroad system.
Socially and politically the
presence of large numbers of Mexicans in this country gives rise to serious
problems. The reports of the Immigration Commissions show that they lack
ambition, are to a very large extent illiterate in their native language, are
slow to learn English, and most cases show no political interest. In some
instances, however, they have been organized to serve the purposes of political
bosses, as for example in Phoenix, Arizona. Although more of them are married
and have their families with them than is the case among the south European
immigrants, they are unsettled as a class, move readily from place to place,
and do not acquire or lease land to any extent. But their most unfavorable
characteristic is their inclination to form colonies and live in a clannish
manner. Wherever a considerable group of Mexicans are employed, they live
together, if possible, and associate very little with members of other races.
In the mining towns and other small industrial communities they live ordinarily
in rude adobe huts outside of the town limits. As section hands they of course
live as the members of the other races have done, in freight cars fitted with
windows and bunks, or in rough shacks along the line of the railroad. In the
cities their colonization has become a menace
In Los Angeles the housing problem
centers largely in the cleaning up or demolition of the Mexican "house
courts," which have become the breeding ground of disease and crime, and
which have now attracted a considerable population of immigrants of other
races. It is estimated that approximately 2,000 Mexicans are living in these
"house courts." Some 15,000 persons of this race are residents of Los
Angeles and vicinity. Conditions of life among the immigrants of the city,
which are molded to a certain extent by Mexican standards, have been materially
improved by the work of the Los Angeles Housing Commission.... However, the
Mexican quarter continues to offer a serious social problem to the
community....
In conclusion it should be
recognized that although the Mexicans have proved to be efficient laborers in
certain industries, and have afforded a cheap and elastic labor supply for the
southwestern United States, the evils to the community at large which their
presence in large numbers almost invariably brings may more than overbalance
their desirable qualities. Their low standards of living and of morals, their
illiteracy, their utter lack of proper political interest, the retarding effect
of their employment upon the wage scale of the more progressive races, and
finally their tendency to colonize in urban centers, with evil results, combine
to stamp them as a rather undesirable class of residents.
Source:
Samuel Bryan, "Mexican Immigrants in the United States," The
Survey, 20, no. 23 (September 1912).
2 /
Immigration Restriction
The
United States and Mexico share one of the longest international borders in the
world--1,951 miles in length. The history of Mexican migration to the United
States involves sharp shifts between periods of labor shortages, when employers
aggressively recruited cheap Mexican labor, and periods of intense anti-Mexican
sentiment, when many Mexicans and even Mexican Americans were deported or
pressured to leave the country.
Until
the 1920s, the Mexican border was basically open. Mexicans were specifically
excluded from the immigration quotas of 1921 and 1924 that radically reduced
immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Convinced that cheap Mexican
laborers were indispensable to southwestern agriculture, Congress imposed no
limit on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, though it did establish a
patrol along the Mexican border and imposed an eight dollar head tax and a ten
dollar visa fee. In 1929, the federal government required Mexicans to obtain
visas in order to enter the United States. During the late 1920s, professional
labor contractors and border-crossing experts helped immigrants avoid the head
tax and the expense of a visa and bureaucratic delays at the border.
During
the Great Depression, when dust bowl farmers from Texas and Oklahoma poured
into California, Mexicans were unneeded. Between 1929 and 1935, more than
415,000 Mexicans were expelled and thousands more left voluntarily. The legal
pretext for deportation was that many Mexicans lacked proof of legal residency
(even though no visa had been necessary prior to 1929).
World
War II created another labor shortage. The Mexican and United States
governments established the Bracero Program, a system of labor permits for
temporary workers, which lasted until 1964. In the early 1950s, however, rising
unemployment led to mass roundups and deportations. This wave of
"repatriation," known as Operation Wetback, sent more than one
million Mexicans to Mexico in 1954. The Immigration Act of 1965, which
established immigration quotas for the countries of the Western Hemisphere, had
the ironic effect of encouraging undocumented entry into the United States.
Bitter over the demise of the Bracero Program in 1964, the Mexican government
refused to restrict emigration. In addition, the quotas for Mexicans were far
lower than the demand for Mexican immigrants in agriculture, construction,
manufacturing, and service industries.
During
the 1980s, the United States responded to public anger about undocumented
immigration by adopting the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (the
Simpson-Mazoli Act), which prohibited the hiring of undocumented aliens and
proclaimed an amnesty for those who had been in the country continuously since
1982.
In
this speech delivered in the House of Representatives in 1928, Congressman John
Box calls for restrictions on Mexican immigration.
John
Box
Every reason which calls for the
exclusion of the most wretched, ignorant, dirty, diseased, and degraded people
of Europe or Asia demands that the illiterate, unclean, peonized masses moving
this way from Mexico be stopped at the border....
The admission of a large and
increasing number of Mexican peons to engage in all kinds of work is at
variance with the American purpose to protect the wages of its working people
and maintain their standard of living. Mexican labor is not free; it is not well
paid; its standard of living is low. The yearly admission of several scores of
thousands from just across the Mexican border tends constantly to lower the
wages and conditions of men and women of America who labor with their hands in
industry, in transportation, and in agriculture. One who has been in Mexico or
in Mexican sections of cities and towns of the southwestern United States
enough to make general observation needs no evidence or argument to convince
him of the truth of the statement that Mexican peon labor is poorly paid and
lives miserably in the midst of want, dirt, and disease.
In industry and transportation they
displace great numbers of Americans who are left without employment and drift
into poverty, even vagrancy, unable to maintain families or to help sustain
American communities....
The importers of such Mexican
laborers as go to farms all want them to increase farm production, not by the
labor of American farmers, for the sustenance of families and the support of
American farm life, but by serf labor working mainly for absentee landlords on
millions of acres of semiarid lands. Many of these lands have heretofore been
profitably used for grazing cattle, sheep, and goats. Many of them are held by
speculative owners.
A great part of these areas can not
be cultivated until the Government has spent vast sums in reclaiming them....
Their occupation and cultivation by serfs should not be encouraged....
Another purpose of the immigration
laws is the protection of American racial stock from further degradation or
change through mongrelization. The Mexican peon is a mixture of
mediterranean-blooded Spanish peasant with low-grade Indians who did not fight
to extinction but submitted and multiplied as serfs. Into that was fused much
Negro slave blood. This blend of low-grade Spaniard, peonized Indian, and Negro
slave mixes with Negroes, mulattoes, and other mongrels, and some sorry whites,
already here. The prevention of such mongrelization and the degradation it
causes is one of the purposes of our laws which the admission of these people
will tend to defeat....
To keep out the illiterate and the
diseased is another essential part of the Nation's immigration policy. The
Mexican peons are illiterate and ignorant. Because of their unsanitary habits and
living conditions and their vices they are especially subject to smallpox,
venereal diseases, tuberculosis, and other dangerous contagions. Their
admission is inconsistent with this phase of our policy.
The protection of American society
against the importation of crime and pauperism is yet another object of these
laws. Few, if any, other immigrants have brought us so large a proportion of
criminals and paupers as have the Mexican peons.
Responding
to demands that Mexican migration be shut off, Ernesto Galarza, a Mexican
American scholar, describes the problems that Mexican Americans face.
Ernesto
Galarza
...Something must be done in the way
of social and economic amelioration for those Mexicans who have already settled
in the United States and whose problem is that of finding adjustment. Thus far
in the discussion the Mexicans who have settled more or less permanently here
have been taken into account negatively....
For the moment...everyone has
presented his side of the case except the Mexican worker himself.... I speak to
you today as one of these immigrants....
First, as to unemployment. The
Mexican is the first to suffer from depression in industrial and agricultural
enterprises.... I flatly disagree with those who maintain that there is enough
work for these people but that they refuse to work, preferring to live on
charity. On the contrary, it is widely felt by the Mexicans that there are more
men than there are jobs.... The precariousness of the job in the face of so
much competition has brought home to the Mexican time and again his absolute
weakness as a bargainer for employment....
He has also something to say as to
the wage scale.... The Mexican...recognizes his absolute inability to force his
wage upward and by dint of necessity he shuffles along with a standard of
living which the American worker regards with contempt and alarm....
The distribution of the labor supply
is felt by the Mexican to be inadequate. At present he has to rely mainly on
hearsay or on the information of unscrupulous contractors who overcharge him
for transportation....
...The Mexican immigrant still feels
the burden of old prejudices. Only when there are threats to limit immigration
from Mexico is it that a few in America sing the praises of the peon.... At other
times the sentiments which seem to be deeply rooted in the American mind are
that he is unclean, improvident, indolent, and innately dull. Add to this the
suspicion that he constitutes a peril to the American worker's wage scale and
you have a situation with which no average Mexican can cope....
...I would ask for recognition of
the Mexican's contribution to the agricultural and industrial expansion of
western United States.... From Denver to Los Angeles and from the Imperial
Valley to Portland, it is said, an empire has been created largely by the brawn
of the humble Mexican, who laid the rails and topped the beets and poured the
cubic miles of cement.... If it is true that the Mexican has brought to you
arms that have fastened a civilization on the Pacific slope, then give him his
due. If you give him his earned wage and he proves improvident teach him
otherwise; if he is tuberculous, cure him; if he falls into indigence, raise
him. He has built you an empire!
Source:
Ernesto Galarza, "Life in the United States for Mexican People: Out of the
Experience of a Mexican" from Proceedings of the National Conference of
Social Work, 56th Annual Session, University of Chicago Press, 1929.
3 /
Americanization
The
history of Mexican Americans during the twentieth century can be understood, at
least partly, by a succession of generations, each with a distinctive identity,
outlook, culture, employment profile, and set of social institutions.
Migrants
in the very early part of this century tended to think of themselves as Mexican
and abhorred what they considered lax moral and religious standards in the
United States. By the 1920s and 1930s, many Mexican Americans expressed a
growing sense of themselves as at once Mexican and of the United States. But
many early twentieth-century educators and social workers pressed for campaigns
of assimilation. As early as 1909, a Stanford University professor called for a
"breakup of these groups...to implant in their children...the Anglo-Saxon
conception of righteous, law and order...." Progressive reformers visited
Mexican American homes and encouraged families to eat bread instead of
tortillas. Few Mexican Americans, however, were willing to abandon their
identity, language, or cultural traditions. The Mexican government meanwhile
was afraid that Mexican Americans were losing their Mexican heritage and took
steps to reverse this process. During the 1920s, the Mexican government
instituted a program to set up schools in California, foster patriotism for
Mexico, and encourage migrants to return. But Mexican Americans tended to
resist this program much as they resisted efforts at
"Americanization."
By
the late 1920s, a new Mexican American generation had begun to claim its
rightful place in society. This self-image can be seen in the establishment of
organizations that emphasized not only communal self-help, preserving cultural
traditions, or promoting assimilation, but political activism. During the 1930s
and 1940s, a distinct Mexican American youth culture emerged, with its own
styles of dress and behavior. "Pachucos" or "zoot suiters"
were suspended between two worlds. They were disaffected from their parents'
rigid social code but not accepted by mainstream culture. A distinctive
music--jump blues--became the anthem of the defiant zoot suit-clad pachuco. It
fused swing, rumba, and jazz, and the lyrics were sung in Calo, the Spanish
hipster dialect.
In
this article, an educator, writing in 1931, describes the Americanization
program in San Bernardino County, California.
Merton
E. Hill
One of the most momentous problems
confronting the great Southwest today, is the assimilation of the Spanish‑speaking
peoples that are coming in ever increasing numbers into that land formerly
owned by Mexico and since 1848 owned by the United States....
The program to be presented . . .
sets up those activities that will bring about the acceptance by aliens of
American ideals, customs, methods of living, skills, and knowledge that will
make them Americans in fact....
...The problem of Americanization
involves not only the adults, but their children; . . . any program neglecting
a full consideration of the educational needs of the foreign children is
destined to fall short of complete success.... These and other problems can be
wholly or partially solved; special classrooms adapted to the needs of the
foreign element must be provided in the high school plant, in the elementary
school buildings, in Mexican camps, and in central buildings within certain
camps; a travelling school room on a bus chassis has been provided; teachers
must be trained for Americanization work; lessons must be prepared to meet the
needs of both children and adults; budgetary provisions must secure sufficient
amounts of money;... the public must be aroused to a realization of the great
and immediate need of making provision for educational, vocational, and
sanitation programs that will result in...promoting the use of the English
language, the right American customs, and the best possible standards of
American life.
...As the average Mexican adult has
had no training in the "home‑owning virtues," it will be
necessary to develop lessons regarding thrift, saving, and the value of keeping
the money in the banks. As the Mexicans show considerable aptitude for hand
work of any kind, courses should be developed that will aid them in becoming
skilled workers with their hands. Girls should be trained to become domestic
servants, and to do various kinds of handwork for which they can be paid
adequately after they leave school.
...Finally, there should be
established in the county...an intensive program of adult education. Funds
should be provided...to teach every Mexican the English language, to teach
every mother the care of infants, cleanliness, house sanitation, and economical
house management including lessons in sewing, cooking, and thrift. The men
should be trained in thrift, in gardening, and in the principles of the
American government. In order to bring all the Mexican groups up to a higher
level, parents and other adults must be taught as well as their children....
Class instruction... must exist for everyone; none should be allowed to escape
the educational campaign.
Source:
Merton E. Hill, "The Development of an Americanization Program." The
Survey 66, no. 3 (May 1931).
4 /
Repatriados
In
February 1930 in San Antonio, Texas, five thousand Mexicans and Mexican
Americans gathered at the city's railroad station to depart from the United
States for resettlement in Mexico. In August, a special train carried another
two thousand to central Mexico. Most Americans are familiar with the forced
relocation in 1942 of 112,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast to
internment camps. Far fewer are aware that during the Great Depression, the
Federal Bureau of Immigration (after 1933, the Immigration and Naturalization
Service) and local authorities rounded up Mexican immigrants and naturalized
Mexican American citizens and shipped them to Mexico to reduce relief roles. In
a shameful episode in the nation's history, more than 400,000 repatriados, many
of them citizens of the United States by birth, were sent across the
U.S.-Mexico border from Arizona, California, and Texas. Texas's Mexican-born
population was reduced by a third. Los Angeles lost a third of its Mexican population.
In Los Angeles, the only Mexican American student at Occidental College sang a
painful farewell song, "Las Golondrinas," to serenade departing
Mexicans.
Even
before the stock market crash, there had been intense pressure from the
American Federation of Labor and municipal governments to reduce the number of
Mexican immigrants. Opposition from local chambers of commerce, economic
development associations, and state farm bureaus stymied efforts to impose an
immigration quota, but rigid enforcement of existing laws slowed legal entry.
In 1928, United States consulates in Mexico began to apply with unprecedented
rigor the literacy test legislated in 1917.
After
President Herbert Hoover appointed William N. Doak as secretary of labor in
1930, the Bureau of Immigration launched intensive raids to identify aliens
liable for deportation. The secretary of labor believed that removal of illegal
aliens would reduce relief expenditures and free jobs for native-born citizens.
Altogether, 82,400 were involuntarily deported by the federal government.
Federal efforts were accompanied by city and county pressure to repatriate
destitute Mexican American families. In January 1931, the Los Angeles County
welfare director asked federal immigration officials to send a team to the city
to supervise the deportation of Mexicans. The presence of federal agents, he
said, would "have a tendency to scare many thousands of alien deportables
out of this district, which is the intended result." In one raid in
February 1931, police surrounded a downtown park popular with Mexicans and
Mexican Americans and held some four hundred adults and children captive for
over an hour. The threat of unemployment, deportation, and loss of relief
payments led hundreds of thousands of others to leave.
In
this selection, a letter distributed to San Diego's Mexican and Mexican
American population in August 1932, the Mexican Consulate invites these people
to take advantage of an offer to repatriate in Mexico.
Mexican
Consulate
The Government of Mexico, with the
cooperation and aid of the Welfare Committee of this County, will effect the
repatriation of all Mexicans who currently reside in this County and who might
wish to return to their country....
Those persons who are repatriated
will be able to choose among the States of Sonora, Sinaloa, Nayarit, Jalisco,
Michoacán, and Guanajuato as the place of their final destination, with the
understanding that the Government of Mexico will provide them with lands for
agricultural cultivation...and will aid them in the best manner possible so
that they might settle in the country.
Those persons who take part in this
movement of repatriation may count on free transportation from San Diego to the
place where they are going to settle, and they will be permitted to bring with
them their furniture, household utensils, agricultural implements, and whatever
other objects for personal use they might possess.
Since the organization and execution
of a movement of repatriation of this nature implies great expenditures, this
Consulate encourages you...to take advantage of this special opportunity being
offered to you for returning to Mexico at no cost whatever and so that...you
might dedicate all your energies to your personal improvement, that of your
family, and that of our country.
If you wish to take advantage of
this opportunity, please return this letter...with the understanding that,
barring notice to the contrary from this Consulate, you should present yourself
with your family and your luggage on the municipal dock of this port on the
23rd of this month before noon.
Source:
Mexico City, Archivo de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, IV-360-38.
In
the following selection, Carey McWilliams, a journalist who played an critical
role in bringing the plight of Mexican farmworkers to the public's attention,
condemns efforts to rid the Southwestern United States of Mexicans and Mexican
Americans.
Carey
McWilliams
In 1930 a fact‑finding
committee reported to the Governor of California that, as a result of the
passage of the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924, Mexicans were being used on a
large scale in the Southwest to replace the supply of cheap labor that had been
formerly recruited in Southeastern Europe. The report revealed a concentration
of this new immigration in Texas, Arizona, and California, with an ever
increasing number of Mexicans giving California as the State of their
"intended future permanent residence." It was also discovered that,
within the State, this new population was concentrated in ten southern
counties.
For a long time Mexicans had
regarded Southern California, more particularly Los Angeles, with favor, and
during the decade from 1919 to 1929 the facts justified this view. At that time
there was a scarcity of cheap labor in the region, and Mexicans were made
welcome. When cautious observers pointed out some of the consequences that
might reasonably be expected to follow from a rash encouragement of this
immigration, they were shouted down by the wise men of the Chamber of Commerce.
Mexican labor was eulogized as cheap, plentiful, and docile. Even so late as
1930 little effort had been made to unionize it. The Los Angeles shopkeepers
joined with the industrialists in denouncing, as a union labor conspiracy, the
agitation to place Mexican immigration on a quota basis....
During this period, academic circles
in Southern California exuded a wondrous solicitude for the Mexican immigrant.
Teachers of sociology, social service workers, and other subsidized
sympathizers were deeply concerned about his welfare. Was he capable of
assimilating American idealism? What anti‑social traits did he possess?
Wasn't he made morose by his native diet? What could be done to make him relish
spinach and Brussels sprouts? What was the percentage of this and that disease,
or this and that crime, in the Mexican population of Los Angeles? How many
Mexican mothers fed their youngsters according to the diet schedules
promulgated by manufacturers of American infant foods? In short, the do-gooders
subjected the Mexican population to a relentless barrage of surveys,
investigations, and clinical conferences.
But a marked change has occurred
since 1930. When it became apparent last year that the programme for the relief
of the unemployed would assume huge proportions in the Mexican quarter, the
community swung to a determination to oust the Mexicans. Thanks to the rapacity
of his overlords, he had not been able to accumulate any savings. He was in
default in his rent. He was a burden to the taxpayer. At this juncture, an
ingenious social worker suggested the desirability of a wholesale deportation.
But when the Federal authorities were consulted they could promise but slight
assistance, since many of the younger Mexicans in Southern California were
American citizens, being the American‑born children of immigrants.
Moreover, the Federal officials insisted, in cases of illegal entry, upon a
public hearing and a formal order of deportation. This procedure involved delay
and expense, and, moreover, it could not be used to advantage in ousting any
large number.
A better scheme was soon devised.
Social workers reported that many of the Mexicans who were receiving charity
had signified their "willingness" to return to Mexico. Negotiations
were at once opened with the social‑minded officials of the Southern
Pacific Railroad. It was discovered that, in wholesale lots, the Mexicans could
be shipped to Mexico City for $14.70 per capita. This sum represented less than
the cost of a week's board and lodging. And so, about February, 1931, the first
trainload was dispatched, and shipments at the rate of about one a month have
continued ever since. A shipment, consisting of three special trains, left Los
Angeles on December 8. The loading commenced at about six o'clock in the
morning and continued for hours. More than twenty‑five such special
trains had left the Southern Pacific station before last April.
No one seems to know precisely how
many Mexicans have been "repatriated" in this manner to date. The
Los Angeles Times of November 18 gave an estimate of 11,000 for the year
1932. The monthly shipments of late have ranged from 1,300 to 6,000. The
Times reported last April that altogether more than 200,000 repatriados had
left the United States in the twelve months immediately preceding, of which it
estimated that from 50,000 to 75,000 were from California, and over 35,000 from
Los Angeles county. Of those from Los Angeles county, a large number were
charity deportations.
The repatriation programme is
regarded locally as a piece of consummate statecraft. The average per family
cost of executing it is S71.14, including food and transportation. It cost Los
Angeles county $77,249.29 to repatriate one shipment of 6,024. It would have
cost $424,933.70 to provide this number with such charitable assistance as they
would have been entitled to had they remained‑-a saving of $347,468.41.
One wonders what has happened to all
the Americanization programmes of yesteryear. The Chamber of Commerce has been
forced to issue a statement assuring the Mexican authorities that the community
is in no sense unfriendly to Mexican labor and that repatriation is a policy
designed solely for the relief of the destitute even, presumably, in cases
where invalids are removed from the County Hospital in Los Angeles and carted
across the line. But those who once agitated for Mexican exclusion are no
longer regarded as the puppets of union labor.
What of the Mexican himself? The
repatriation programme apparently, is a matter of indifference to this amiable
ax‑American. He never objected to exploitation while he was welcome, and
now he acquiesces in repatriation. He doubtless enjoys the free train ride
home. Probably he has had his fill of bootleg liquor and of the mirage created
by pay‑checks that never seemed to buy as much as they should.
Considering the anti‑social character commonly attributed to him by the
sociological myth‑makers, he has cooperated nicely with the authorities.
Thousands have departed of their own volition. In battered Fords, carrying two
and three families and all their worldly possessions, they are drifting back to
el terenaso--the big land. They have been shunted back and forth across the
border for so many years by war, revolution, and the law of supply and demand,
that it would seem that neither expatriation or repatriation held any more
terror for them.
The Los Angeles industrialists
confidently predict that the Mexican can be lured back, "whenever we need
him." But I am not so sure of this. He may be placed on a quota basis in
the meantime, or possibly he will no longer look north to Los Angeles as the
goal of his dreams. At present he is probably delighted to abandon an empty
paradise. But it is difficult for his children. A friend of mine, who was
recently in Mazatlan, found a young Mexican girl on one of the southbound
trains crying because she had to leave Belmont High‑School. Such an
abrupt severance of the Americanization programme is a contingency that the
professors of sociology did not anticipate.
Source: American
Mercury, March 1933.
5 / Mexican
Americans and the New Deal
The
plight of Mexican Americans during the Great Depression was bleak. In Crystal
City, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, the average family income was $506 a
year--at a time when authorities considered a subsistence income between $2,000
and $2,500. Less than one Mexican American child in five completed five years
of school.
The
New Deal did little for Mexicans and Mexican Americans who lived in rural areas
or worked in agriculture. This was the case despite the efforts of the Farm
Security Administration to improve the lot of farmworkers; it drafted and
persuaded Congress to adopt laws outlawing child labor and setting minimum
wages and maximum hours for adult workers. The National Labor Relations Act did
not extent to farmworkers its guarantees of the right to organize unions, and
the Social Security Act excluded them from its programs of unemployment
compensation and old age insurance. Landlords took advantage of New Deal farm
policies to evict tenants and sharecroppers from the farms they were working
and replace them with mechanical cotton pickers and other equipment.
6 / The
Bracero Program and Undocumented Workers
Initiated
in 1942 by an executive agreement between Mexico and the United States, the
program provided for Mexican braceros (laborers) to enter the United States as
short-term contract workers, primarily in agriculture and transportation.
Before the program ended in 1947, an estimated 200,000 braceros worked in
twenty-one states, about half of them in California. The program was
resurrected by Congress in 1951, largely because of agricultural shortages
created by the Korean War. It continued until 1964, peaking in 1959 when nearly
450,000 braceros entered the United States. In 1960 they formed twenty-six
percent of the nation's seasonal agricultural labor force. Even after the
program's termination, Mexican workers could enter the U.S. by green cards that
permit temporary employment.
In
practice, neither legal immigration nor the Bracero Program met the need for
labor in agriculture, construction, or domestic service. The desire to escape
poverty and underemployment in Mexico and the attraction of higher wages and
greater economic opportunities in the United States led an increasing number of
undocumented workers to enter the United States--workers who had to avoid
government border patrols and live under the constant threat of deportation.
In
1951 a presidential commission on migratory farm labor discussed the plight of
undocumented agricultural workers.
President's
Commission on Migratory Labor
Before 1944, the illegal traffic on
the Mexican border, though always going on, was never overwhelming in numbers.
Apprehensions by immigration officials leading to deportations or voluntary
departures before 1944 were fairly stable and under ten thousand per year....
The magnitude of the wetback traffic
has reached entirely new levels in the past seven years. The number of
deportations and voluntary departures has continuously mounted each year, from
twenty-nine thousand in 1944 to 565,000 in 1950. In its newly achieved
proportions, it is virtually an invasion. It is estimated that at least 400,000
of our migratory farm labor force of 1 million in 1949 were wetbacks....
Farmers in the northern areas of
Mexico require seasonal labor for the cotton harvest just as do the farmers on
our side of the Rio Grande. There is, accordingly, an internal northward
migration for this employment. American farm employers in need of seasonal
labor encourage northward migratory movements within Mexico.
This rapid economic development in the areas immediately south of the border has accelerated the wetback traffic in several ways. An official in Matamoros estimates that twenty-five thousand transient cotton pickers