Experts compare current immigration situation to deportation of Mexicans in 1930s
10:36 PM CDT on Saturday, October 11, 2008
By DIANNE SOLÍS
dsolis@dallasnews.com
The Dallas Morning News
The stock market tanked, unemployment rose and cries grew forceful against Mexican immigrants.
It was 1930.
In the decade that followed, an estimated 1 million people went to Mexico in a wave of deportations and voluntary repatriations. As many as half of them, it is believed, were U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry.
"There is this old saying that historians don't like to use but here it is: History does repeat itself," said Francisco Balderrama, a professor at California State University, Los Angeles who helped chronicle the 1930s exodus in the book Decade of Betrayal.
Indeed it has. In the last three years, more than 500,000 Mexicans have been repatriated from the U.S. If their U.S.-citizen children joined them, that total is much higher.
The scope of the current exodus has historians and policymakers delving deeper into the almost-forgotten history of the 1930s deportations.
That history is personal for Roberto Alonzo, a 51-year-old Oak Cliff lawyer and member of the Texas House. Six years ago at a family funeral, Mr. Alonzo said, he learned from an aunt that his father and his siblings had been part of the 1930s repatriations. "I said, 'Tía, why didn't you tell us?' And she said, 'We didn't want to make you feel bad.' "
Mr. Alonzo's now-deceased father was just a toddler when he was taken to the northern Mexican state of Coahuila by his own father. Mr. Alonzo said that according to family lore, his grandmother cried as her children left the U.S., saying, "What will they do in Mexico? They don't know Mexico."
Mr. Alonzo said, "If that can happen in the '30s, it can happen now, and the kids will again be U.S. citizens."
Numbers cut in half
The 1930 census tallied 640,000 Mexicans living in the U.S., said Jeffrey S. Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. By 1940, the figure was 380,000.
"Some of it was just physical removal in the Southwest," Mr. Passel said.
It is not known how many of those who left for Mexico were actually illegal immigrants. Many who left, according to scholars who have studied the deportations, were coerced to do so.
Documents in Mexico City government archives show that at least one Mexican consulate in the 1930s was paying particular attention to U.S. citizen-children of Mexican immigrants and to those of Mexican ancestry who had no proof of citizenship.
Wrote Mexican consul Rafael de la Colina in Los Angeles: "I recognize fully the right that the authorities have in this country to make foreigners leave under these conditions, but I consider that in this work they ought to use methods that don't hurt those who reside here legally."
Backlash
Newspaper accounts filed in the archives of Mexico's Foreign Ministry document abuse and thefts on the trains carrying Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. "In Mexico, Worse Treatment," reads one headline.
According to Decade of Betrayal, one article even warned of raids on Mexicans by vigilante "unemployed groups." In Mexico there were reports of a backlash against U.S. citizens and proposed retaliatory moves by the Mexican government to repatriate Americans doing business in Mexico and to confiscate their property.
"American society hasn't realized what happened from that time frame. It is almost like an exodus that occurred," said U.S. Rep. Hilda Solís. "People from as far away as Chicago were gathered up and taken to Mexico and just dumped there."
Two years ago, Ms. Solís, D-Los Angeles, pushed for federal legislation to form a commission to study the "deportation and coerced emigration" of Mexican-Americans from 1929 to 1941. The bill got 21 sponsors but never made it out of committee. Ms. Solís said she'd like to raise the issue again.
In 2006, California became the first state to enact a measure that apologized to Latino families for the violations during the 1930s repatriations.
In Mexico, historian Fernando Saul Alanís of the University of San Luis Potosí has written a book on the Mexican government's limited care of returning citizens and their children. Its tenor is in its title, which translates to "Let them stay over there."
Dr. Alanís said newspaper stories from that period show that adjustment was difficult, as Mexico's economy was reeling, too.
But Dr. Alanís added, "Sooner or later, they go back. ... And because some were U.S. citizens, they could return easily to the United States.
"It is like a vicious circle," he said. "In moments of crisis, they are deported."
