Decade of Betrayal
Decade of Betrayal

Author: Francisco E. Balderrama

Publisher: UNM Press

Published: 2006-05-31

Total Pages: 438

ISBN-13: 0826339743

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During the Great Depression, a sense of total despair plagued the United States. Americans sought a convenient scapegoat and found it in the Mexican community. Laws forbidding employment of Mexicans were accompanied by the hue and cry to "get rid of the Mexicans!" The hysteria led pandemic repatriation drives and one million Mexicans and their children were illegally shipped to Mexico. Despite their horrific treatment and traumatic experiences, the American born children never gave up hope of returning to the United States. Upon attaining legal age, they badgered their parents to let them return home. Repatriation survivors who came back worked diligently to get their lives back together. Due to their sense of shame, few of them ever told their children about their tragic ordeal. Decade of Betrayal recounts the injustice and suffering endured by the Mexican community during the 1930s. It focuses on the experiences of individuals forced to undergo the tragic ordeal of betrayal, deprivation, and adjustment. This revised edition also addresses the inclusion of the event in the educational curriculum, the issuance of a formal apology, and the question of fiscal remuneration. "Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, the authors of Decade of Betrayal, the first expansive study of Mexican repatriation with perspectives from both sides of the border, claim that 1 million people of Mexican descent were driven from the United States during the 1930s due to raids, scare tactics, deportation, repatriation and public pressure. Of that conservative estimate, approximately 60 percent of those leaving were legal American citizens. Mexicans comprised nearly half of all those deported during the decade, although they made up less than 1 percent of the country's population. 'Americans, reeling from the economic disorientation of the depression, sought a convenient scapegoat' Balderrama and Rodríguez wrote. 'They found it in the Mexican community.'"--American History

They Should Stay There
They Should Stay There

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 9781469634289

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Migratory movements between Mexico and the United States, 1880-1934 -- The Mexican community in the United States, 1933-1939 -- The Mexican government and repatriation: November 1934-June 1936 -- From the creation of the Demography and Repatriation Section to the elaboration of a repatriation project, July 1936-October 1938 -- The repatriation project, 1938-1939 -- Spanish refugees, the repatriated, and the Lower Rio Grande Valley -- The 18 March agricultural colony in Tamaulipas, 1939-1940 -- The end of the project, 1939-1940

They Should Stay There
They Should Stay There

Author: Smith College

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2017-08-10

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1469634279

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Here, for the first time in English—and from the Mexican perspective—is the story of Mexican migration to the United States and the astonishing forced repatriation of hundreds of thousands of people to Mexico during the worldwide economic crisis of the Great Depression. While Mexicans were hopeful for economic reform following the Mexican revolution, by the 1930s, large numbers of Mexican nationals had already moved north and were living in the United States in one of the twentieth century's most massive movements of migratory workers. Fernando Saul Alanis Enciso provides an illuminating backstory that demonstrates how fluid and controversial the immigration and labor situation between Mexico and the United States was in the twentieth century and continues to be in the twenty-first. When the Great Depression took hold, the United States stepped up its enforcement of immigration laws and forced more than 350,000 Mexicans, including their U.S.-born children, to return to their home country. While the Mexican government was fearful of the resulting economic implications, President Lazaro Cardenas fostered the repatriation effort for mostly symbolic reasons relating to domestic politics. In clarifying the repatriation episode through the larger history of Mexican domestic and foreign policy, Alanis connects the dots between the aftermath of the Mexican revolution and the relentless political tumult surrounding today's borderlands immigration issues.

Factories in the Field
Factories in the Field

Author: Carey McWilliams

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2000-04-15

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 0520925181

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This book was the first broad exposé of the social and environmental damage inflicted by the growth of corporate agriculture in California. Factories in the Field—together with the work of Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor, and John Steinbeck—dramatizes the misery of the dust bowl migrants hoping to find work in California agriculture. McWilliams starts with the scandals of the Spanish land grant purchases, and continues on to examine the experience of the various ethnic groups that have provided labor for California's agricultural industry—Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos, Armenians—the strikes, and the efforts to organize labor unions

Bringing Back History
Bringing Back History

Author: Elsie Guerrero

Publisher: Elsie Publishing

Published: 2018-12-02

Total Pages: 42

ISBN-13: 9781732757349

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Students at Bell Gardens Elementary School learned about the Great Depression in their history class and soon found out that the history book does not mention Mexican Americans. It did not mention the people who look like them. Curious about the topic, the students began to research. They created plays and book reports to present to students and teachers at school. One day, they enter the contest 'There Ought to Be a Law' hosted by Assemblymember Cristina Garcia, who soon helps the students change the law in California encouraging teachers in public schools to teach about the Mexican Repatriation during the Great Depression.

Mexican Workers and American Dreams
Mexican Workers and American Dreams

Author: Camille Guerin-Gonzales

Publisher:

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13:

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Earlier in this century, over one million Mexican immigrants moved to the United States, attracted by the prospect of work in California's fields. The Mexican farmworkers were tolerated by Americans as long as there was enough work to go around. During the Great Depression, though, white Americans demanded that Mexican workers and their families return to Mexico. In the 1930s, the federal government and county relief agencies forced the repatriation of half a million Mexicans--and some Mexican Americans as well. Camille Guerin-Gonzales tells the story of their migration, their years here, and of the repatriation program--one of the largest mass removal operations ever sanctioned by the U.S. government. She exposes the powers arrayed against Mexicans as well as the patterns of Mexican resistance, and she maps out constructions of national and ethnic identity across the contested terrain of the American Dream.