"A Visit to an Unknown Portion
of Their Own Country":
Mexicans in the United States, 1900-1940
Between 1900 and 1930, more than a million Mexicans came north to work in the United States. There were few guards and fewer records kept at the border. The U.S. was concerned with immigrants who came by sea, not over land. After the Mexican Revolution began in 1910, the U.S. set up a few more controls. But even after American troops invaded northern Mexico in pursuit of Mexican revolutionary Francisco Villa (who had attacked a border town), Mexicans could cross the border without restriction, after being washed and checked for infectious diseases. As late as 1926, when the U.S. had virtually closed the door on immigration from Europe and Asia, the head of the Immigration Bureau told the press that Mexicans could enter without difficulties. Even illegal immigrants, if caught, were only asked to pay a $18 fee and taken to the border, so that they could re-enter legally.
The Mexican immigrants also saw the border as open. As a report to the U.S. Secretary of Labor recognized in 1922, the feeling of "the average Mexican unskilled worker from Mexico is that when he enters in any manner into the United States that he is only upon a visit to an unknown portion of his own country. He is independent and does not consider he is an immigrant alien... To him there is no real or imaginary line." By 1930, Mexican immigrants could be found as far north and east as Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Mississippi. But the great majority were in the Southwest, in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. It was natural that Mexicans should feel like this was part of their territory. After all, it had been Mexican territory –until the United States conquered it by force in 1848. And traces of that past remained, in the community of Mexicans who had lived through the conquest to become second-class U.S. citizens. Politically and economically excluded, these first Mexican-Americans knew the limits of American openness.
The truth was that the U.S. welcomed Mexican immigrants as temporary workers, not permanent citizens. A 1911 report to the U.S. Congress claimed that Mexicans "are not easily assimilated, [but] this is of no very great importance as long as most of them return to their native land. In the case of the Mexican, he is less desireable as a citizen than as a laborer." The 1922 report to Secretary of Labor emphasized that Mexicans were making a "visit" –and would return home eventually. Mexicans could enter the U.S. easily –but first they had to be washed and even have their heads shaved, an experience that was degrading and marked them off as different. Within the United States, they were often greeted with fear and prejudice. Some rejected Mexicans as dangerous, and tried to have restriction on European immigration extended to them. According to a professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University, Mexicans were "human swine... [they] sleep by day and prowl by night like coyotes... [and] their minds run to nothing higher than animal functions." Others tried to remake Mexicans, through "Americanization" programs that had already been tried out on other immigrant groups. But no group welcomed them as equals, or full citizens, and when the Great Depression struck in 1929, they became easy victims.
Nearly a half-million Mexicans were "voluntarily" deported between 1930 and 1932. Among them were thousands of American citizens, children of Mexican immigrants, illegally expelled from the country of their birth. Some of the deportees had hoped to re-establish themselves in Mexico, but they has been away too long, and were often criticized and rejected by Mexicans as having become "too American." Using oral histories and documents from the period, this lesson will trace the experiences of these Mexican workers, caught between two nations, pioneers of North American space. But in order to understand their testimonies, we need to consider in more detail what brought Mexicans to the north in the first place.
Heading North
The Spanish, and later the Mexican, government had claimed the northern region since the sixteenth century. But it had remained a frontier, and outside of Indian missions in California and more dense settlements in New Mexico, the area remained underpopulated. It was this that led the Mexican government to encourage the migration of Americans into what would become Texas, in the hopes they would make the area prosper. Along with the legal immigrants, many more also came, bringing slaves and a growing desire for freedom from Mexican rule that eventually led to revolt, the formation of the Republic of Texas in 1836, and the war that resulted from Texas joining the United States in 1846. After the U.S. defeated Mexico, this land became part of the U.S. –and its inhabitants U.S. citizens– by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The California Gold Rush, the flood of settlers to the West, and the rapid expansion of railroads across the continent quickly integrated the region into the growing United States.
At the same time, Mexico was also growing. During the government of President Porfirio Díaz (1876-1910), Mexico was trying to build railroads and encourage development, promoting mining and industry and granting huge stretches of government land to private owners. The original idea of the railroad network was to bring Mexico together, so that no region of the country would ever again be as distant or vulnerable as California or Texas had been. But the foreign capitalists who built the railroads had other ideas: Díaz had wanted the railroads to tie Mexico together from east to west, but most of those built ran north-south, connecting the Mexican network with the U.S.
It was those north-south trains that many Mexicans would board, starting around 1900. Driven off their land by government policy and population growth, many looked to a short or long trip to the north to secure a better future. First men went alone, but soon they began to bring their families, to work on railroads and in agriculture across the border. Ironically, the people they went to work for in the U.S. were precisely the kinds of people –railroad owners and large landowners and agricultural growers– who had driven them out of Mexico in the first place.
The enormous inequality that came along with Porfirio Díaz' development program burst into violence in 1910. The Mexican Revolution would last ten years and cost millions of lives; it produced extraordinary idealism and renewed nationalism, but also unemployment, disease, suffering and cynicism. In any case, as scholar Manuel Gamio noted, the Revolution "predisposed the individual to mobility and experiment"; for many, that mobility meant heading across the border. In El Paso, one observer tracked those fleeing the revolution, after having "wandered or been driven from town to town, often far from their homes... their personal histories have been blowen away and obliterated by years of demoralizing and destructive warfare."
This migration continued, and even intensified, in the 1920s. Only a limited range of jobs were open to Mexicans, generally in agriculture and in railroads. Immigrants obtained these jobs through labor contractors, who traveled across northern Mexico telling stories of American success or met recent arrivals at the border. Some contractors were Americans; others were earlier Mexican arrivals; all took a share of workers' income for finding them work. The kinds of work Mexicans found were mostly limited to agriculture and railroads: hard, often unskilled, manual labor. At first, they replaced earlier Chinese and Japanese workers who had been banned from entering the U.S. by immigration laws in the 1880s. As the U.S. moved to limit European immigrants, they replaced those groups too. Already by 1920, Mexicans were a majority of workers in agriculture.
Although the wages Mexicans earned in the U.S. were low compared to other American workers, they were high compared to what could be earned in Mexico. In 1900, for example, common Mexican laborers earned $1 a day in El Paso –but an average of 23 cents a day in the Mexican interior. Yet the jobs Mexicans could do were limited.
Few other jobs were open to Mexicans.There were sharp limits on Mexican advancement. Officials at the border commonly ignored the literacy tests that were required of all entrants after 1917, maintaining that the work Mexicans would do did not require literacy. This was not a gesture of acceptance, but of power. Within the U.S., Mexicans were educated poorly, and in segregated schools, if at all. As one Texas grower put it, "educating the Mexican is educating them away from the job, away from the dirt. He learns English and wants to be the boss." A Texas school superintendent agreed, "You have doubtless heard that ignorance is bliss; it seems that it is so when one has to transplant onions. If a man has very much sense or education either, he is not going to stick to this kind of work." Others justified this lack of education by describing Mexicans as "birds of passage," temporary workers who were destined to return to their homes.
There were those who wanted to "Americanize" Mexicans, and their efforts –especially in cities– were significant. But these efforts were also based on the idea that Mexicans were inferior; like the washing and inspection at the border, these programs wanted to douse migrants in American culture, in order to make them possible citizens. These programs would inspire the Mexican government itself to pay more attention to "outside Mexicans", sponsoring Spanish-language schools and programs to promote Mexican culture among migrants in major cities like Los Angeles. They would also, eventually, offer the tools for some Mexican migrants to become Mexican-Americans. But the idea of truly incorporating Mexicans into American politics and culture was very lightly held.
When the Depression struck in 1929, some began to blame Mexicans for taking jobs away from Americans. "The slogan has gone out over the city and is being adhered to –employ no Mexican while a white man is unemployed: get the Mexican back into Mexico regardless by what means," the secretary of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce wrote. "All this without taking into consideration the legality of the Mexican's status of being here. It is a question of pigment, not a question of citizenship or right." But even if he saw this as injustice, the secretary still thought of Mexicans in economic terms: his real worry was that employers would find themselves "high and dry as far as agricultural labor is concerned."
The very people who had been involved in "Americanization" programs came up with the solution to the "Mexican problem": deport them. Since formal deportation was expensive and complex, they proposed instead "voluntary" deportation, with local governments paying the way of all who wanted to leave. Many of those who left thought this was a momentary adjustment; just as they had left Mexico when there was no work there, so they would be leaving the United States temporarily. Others were simply forced to leave. In any case, the people supervising "voluntary" deportation made sure to secretly stamp the migrants' papers with the seal of the county welfare group. Because entry could be denied to anyone "likely to become a public charge" (to receive welfare), this stamp guaranteed that they could never enter the United States again.
In 1940, the Mexican-origin population in the U.S. in 1940 was half what it had been in 1930. But this also suggests how many had remained, often becoming involved in labor protest, still drawn to the opportunities of a country that did not accept them as full equals, on their way to becoming Mexican-Americans.
Documents1. "Ballad of the Deported", around 1931
2. The Reluctant Foreman, 1910s-1920s
3. Running from the Revolution, 1910s-1920s
4. "To Work in Peace?", 1920s
5. Deportation, 1930sBack to Top
Sources and Further ReadingRecommended Books
Lawrence Cardoso, Mexican Emigration to the United States (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 1980)
Manuel Gamio, The Mexican Immigrant: His Life-Story (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1931)
Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1994)
David Gutiérrez, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1986)
Abraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1974)
Oscar Martínez, Border boom town : Ciudad Juárez since 1848 (Austin : University of
Texas Press, 1978)
Sources
As late as 1926... Cardoso, Mexican Emigration, 129
"are not easily assimilated"... U.S. Congress, Immigration Commission Report, 61st
Congress, 3rd Session, 1911: 690-691
"human swine"... Roy Garis, quoted in Mexican Emigration, 134
Nearly a half million... Hoffman, Unwanted Mexicans, 126
"predisposed the individual"... Gamio, The Mexican Immigrant, 1
"wandered or been driven"... Martínez, Border Boom Town, 44
$1 day in El Paso... Guerin-Gonzáles, Mexican Workers and American Dreams, 35
"educating the Mexican"... quoted in Gutiérrez, Anglos and Mexicans, 193.
"You have doubtless heard"... quoted in Gutiérrez, Anglos and Mexicans, 193.
"the slogan has gone out"... quoted in Guerin-Gonzáles, Mexican Workers, 115Back to Top
1. "El Deportado", around 1930
Corrido quoted in Philip Sonnichsen, Notes to "Texas-Mexican Border Music, Vols 2 & 3, Corridos Parts 1 & 2" (Berkeley: Arhoolie Records and Chris Strachwitz, 1975), 6-7 and Nellie Foster, "The Corrido: A Mexican Culture Trait Persisting in Southern California" (Master's thesis, University of Southern California, 1939), 180-182. The translation gives a sense of the power of the song, but not entirely. Compare, for example, the two lines beginning with "Gentlemen..", which in Spanish are "Cabelleros, tengo dinero para poder emigrar"/ "Su dinero no vale nada, le tenemos que bañar."
It must have been about ten at night,
the train began to whistle.
I heard my mother say, "There comes that ungrateful train
that is going to take my son.""Goodbye my beloved mother, give me your blessings.
I am going to a foreign land, where there is no revolution."Run, run little train, let's leave the station.
I don't want to see my mother cry for her beloved son,
for the son of her heart.Finally the bell rank, the train whistled twice.
"Don't cry my buddies, for you'll make me cry as well."Right away we passed Jalisco, my, how fast the train ran.
La Piedad, then Irapuato, Silado, then La Chona,
and Aguas Calientes as well.We arrived at Juarez at last, there I ran into trouble.
"Where are you going, where do you come from?
How much money do you have to enter this nation?""Gentlemen, I have money so that I can emigrate."
"Your money isn't worth anything, we have to bathe you."Oh, my beloved countrymen, I am just telling you this,
That I was tempted to go right back across.At last I crossed the border, and left with a labor agent.
And there, dear countrymen, was much that I endured.Back to Top
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2. The Reluctant Foreman, 1910s-1920s
Gumersindo Valdés, interview, in Manuel Gamio, The Mexican Immigrant: His Life-Story (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), 141-143.
Valdés was an illiterate indigenous worker from Ojos de Agua, Guanajuato. He had been living in the U.S. for twenty-three years when Gamio interviewed him in 1927.
From about the time I was eight years old I began to work, for my father died and I didn't want to see my mother and my sisters suffer. I was the only male member of the family. I brought them their food and the five dollars a month which I was paid for serving around the house on an estate. I kept growing, little by little, until I could work hard as a laborer. I then earned a little more and even had some animals and chickens. As my sisters also worked we lived a little better. I was about twenty-five years old when some friends said that we should go to the United States and they even loaned me money for the far. We came to El Paso and there I took a contract to go and work on the railroad at a place in Arizona. There they paid me $1.80 a day.
I was one of those who worked the most, so that I won the sympathy of the foreman, who was an old American. His liking for me grew so that when I had worked with him six or seven months he asked me to be second-foreman, and I accepted at once. I took charge of the man and the American, who understood Spanish, showed me how to direct them and how to do the work. This same American foreman got me sent to another railroad camp as first foreman and things went better with me there, I was recommended highly to the head of all the foremen whose name was John, although everyone called him Juan, for he also spoke Spanish.... [Juan had him take over for an American] I did as he said and went back with all the men. The American foreman didn't come back but in about three months he sent his wife for his things and we gave them all to her. What happened to me in the camp was that as I didn't know how to write -I don't know how even now- the telegraph operator, an American, kept all of my accounts and all the reports. In order to keep his good will I had his office swept and fixed and we always took care of it and even his house. We washed the floor for him, for between us all we did it quickly. But I got tired of that job or, to be honest, as I couldn't write, I came to San Bernardino, California. They were beginning to build the tracks for the little red cars there and I got a job there.
One day when I was digging a ditch with a pick with another man, Juan went by. He was the boss of all that work. He stopped his machine and said "You son of a gun! What are you doing there?" and since I could go a long way with him, I answered "It is none of your business, is it? You big rascal!" The man who wa working with me was frightened and told me to be quiet for it was the head of the whole works with whom I was talking.... Juan went by later and made other threatening gestures at me as though he was saying something against me. After a while the other foreman came and told me to stop working and that I should take charge of the gang, for he had received orders from Juan that I should take charge of all the men and stay there as foreman. Tired of that work on the tracks as a foreman, especially because I couldn't read or write so I couldn't do my job very well, I went from one place to another, working sometimes at one place and sometimes at others until I came to Whittier, California, near this place. I was with a very good American boss with whom I have been working until lately when I have become more enthusiastic over the matter of the colony [a settlement back in Mexico], more for the sake of my wife than for anything else, because she wants to go back to Mexico. She hasn't been there since she came her in 1907. I haven't gone to Mexico since 1904....
I haven't any property here, although I was going to get a lot of land in order to build myself a little house. But it has turned out that the company that sold it to me is very crooked. I have been paying them and paying them and they still want more than it is worth.... I told the landlord about that and he said that those real-estate people were thieves and that it was better not to give them another cent, so I haven't given them anything.
Although the foreman and the American landlords have treated me well I haven't enjoyed living in this country and I have always wanted to go from here. Now the way is opened for me to go and I have hoped of doing something again in Mexico.
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3. Running from the Revolution, 1910s-1920s
Pablo Mares, interview, in Manuel Gamio, The Mexican Immigrant: His Life-Story (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), 1-5.
A miner from a village near Guadalajara, Jalisco.
In my youth I worked as a house servant, but as I grew older I wanted to be independent. I was able through great efforts to start a little store in my town. But I had to come to the United States, because it was impossible to live down there with so many revolutions.... The Villistas [followers of Pancho Villa] pressed me into service, and took me with them as a soldier. But I didn't like that, and because I never liked to go about fighting, especially about things that don't make any difference to me. So when we got to Torreón I ran away just as soon as I could. That was about 1915.
I went from there to Ciudad Juarez and from there to El Paso. There I put myself under contract to go to work on the tracks. I stayed in that work in various camps until I reached California. I was for a while in Los Angeles working in cement work, which is very hard. From there I went to Kansas, and I was also in Oklahoma and in Texas, always working on the railroads.... Here in the Miami mine [Arizona] I leanred to work all the drills and all the minig machinery and I know how to do everything. The work is very heavy, but what is good is that one lives in peace. There is no trouble with revolutions or difficulties of any kind. Here one is treated according to the way in which one behaves and one earns more than in Mexico. I have gone back to Mexico twice. Once I went as far as Chihuahua and another time to Torreón, but I have come back, for in addition to the fact that work is very scarce there, the wages are too low. One can hardly earn enough to eat.
It is true that here it is almost the same, but there are more comforts of life here. One can buy many things cheaper and in payments. I think that as long as we have so many wars, killing each other, we will not progress and we shall always be poor. That is what these bolillos [white Americans] want. It is here that the revolutions are made. It is over there that the fools kill each other. It is better for the bolillos that we do that, for they want to wipe us out in order to make themselves masters of all that we possess. It is a shame that we live the way we do and if we go on we shall never do anything. I don't care about political matters. It is the same to me to have Calles or Obregón [two Mexican presidents in the 1920s] in the government. In the end neither one does anything for me. I live from my work and nothing else.... It is not, as I have already told you, that I like it more here. no one is betteroff here than in his own country. But to those of us who work, it is better to live here until the revolutions end. When everything is peaceful and one can work as one likes, then it will be better to go back there to see if one can do anything....
I hardly read the papers for I know that they tell nothing but lies. They exaggerate everything and besides, I hardly know how to read, for my parents didn't have th means with which to send me to school. I, by myself, with some friends, have learned to read a little and to write my name. I had to do this when I went back to Mexico. If I hadn't, they wouldn't have let me come back in [because of literacy requirement].
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4. "To Work in Peace?", 1920s
Isidro Osorio, interview, in Manuel Gamio, The Mexican Immigrant: His Life-Story (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), 42-44.
Osorio was indigenous and came from Penjamo, Guanajuato. During the 1920s, the Mexican government, especially under President Calles, began a program of land reform and education. The government and its programs were opposed by the Catholic Church and, in many villages of the states of Jalisco and Guanajuato, by peasant leagues. This led to a long series of rebellions known as the Cristero Wars that only came to an end at the close of the decade.
I like this country very much because it is very pretty, but never as much as Mexico because among all the nations there is none which equals our dear country.... It is the same everywhere if one has money. Over there in Mexico or here, it is about the same for us ignoramuses because we always have to work. The only thing is that here one has to work harder and we wear ourselves out twice as fast as there. The first time that I came to this country was in 1921. I came very happy because I was about to learn about a new country which had been made known to us by boys of my town who had been here, because they all talked and talked about this thing and that. That was why I came, so that they couldn't tell me stories, and so that I could convince myself with my own eyes of what they were saying. I arrived in El Paso and there I put myself under contract in work on the railroad in Idaho. There the work isn't as bad, because the ground is soft, and there are only little stones which break very easly. But on the other hand it gets terribly cold and terribly hot. I was working in Idaho and other nearby places on the traque [railroad] for nearly two years until I finally went back to Mexico in 1923.... So I went back to Penjamo and worked there well enough in agricultural work on shares until 1926.
At the beginning of that year I came back [to the United States] for the following reasons: A friend of mine told me that some of the Catholics in the League wanted to talk with me. I went to see what they wanted and they were all together in the vestry of church. The priest talked to us saying that we should all take up arms to defend religion because it was endangered by some laws which Calles [President at the time] had made and they said that they were planning an uprising. I told them it was all right, but later I fled here because I knew that if I didn't take up arms with them they wouldn't let me work in peace and were going to be bothering me. I left all of my family there. But let me tell you why I didn't join the uprising. I am Catholic, but I am not a fanatic; and I think that what Calles is doing is well done. I once heard him on an estate where he spoke to us and if I don't remember wrongly what he said was this: "Comrades, what I want to do is destroy [the power of] Capital so that workers will be able to live well, that those who work the lands shall enjoy what it produces. I believe that you will all help me. The man who doesn't work, shouldn't eat".... I don't remember well, but I liked these those things that I have told you because they are the plain truth....
I haven't gotten mixed up with either the Americans or the pochos [Mexican-Americans]. I don't care what they think of us for after all we don't like them either. The Americans only say "puri gud man" when they see one working so hard that one almost coughs up one's lungs, but later when they don't need one or see that one is old, they give us our time [send us along].
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5. Deportation, 1930s
Carey McWilliams, "Getting Rid of the Mexican," American Mercury, March 1933.
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 as 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. Dr. Paul S. Taylor quotes this typical utterance from a merchant:
"Mexican business is for cash. They don't criticize prices. You can sell them higher priced articles than they intended to purchase when they came in. They spend every cent they make. Nothing is too good for a Mexican, if he has the money. They spend their entire paycheck. If they come into your store first, you get it. If they go into the other fellow's store first, he gets it."
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?... 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 unemployment 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 debt. He was a burden to the taxpayer. At this juncture, an ingenious social worker suggested the desirablility of 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 train 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 and continued for hours. More than twenty-five such special trains had left the Southern Pacific station before last April....
The repatriation programme is regarded locally as a piece of consummate statecraft. The average per family cost of executing it is $71.14, including food and transportation. It cost Los Angeles country $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 theat 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....
What of the Mexican himself? The repatriation programme, apparently, is a matter of indifference to this amiable ex-American. He never objected to exploitation while he was welcome, and now he acquisces in repatriation.... Considering the anti-scoial character commonly attributed to him by the sociological mythmakets, 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 worldy possessions, they are drifting back to 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 meantme, 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 contigency that the professors of sociology did not anticipate.
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