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1,500 Mexicans loaded on trains in Denver | Boulder County Latino History Project

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The quality of newspaper images in this website varies. Some were taken by a professional photographer who volunteered with the project, while others were taken by community members using their own cameras or iphones. Further, some of the old microfilms are extremely fuzzy. Please remember that this is a grass-roots initiative with diverse contributors.

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Mexican deportation in the 1930s, by Emma Gomez Martinez | Boulder County Latino History Project

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© The Boulder County Latino History Project, 2013-2018. This website is open to Fair Use by school and community groups if the Boulder County Latino History Project is credited as the source. Commercial use of website materials is prohibited.

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Mexican and Mexican American migrant farm workers expected conditions like those pictured above as they sought farm work in California and other states in the early 1900s. At that time, the Mexican Revolution and the series of Mexican civil wars that followed pushed many Mexicans to flee to the United States. Many U.S. farm owners recruited Mexicans and Mexican Americans because they believed that these desperate workers would tolerate living conditions that workers of other races would not.

Mexican and Mexican American workers often earned more in the United States than they could in Mexico's civil war economy, although California farmers paid Mexican and Mexican American workers significantly less than white American workers. By the 1920s, at least three quarters of California's 200,000 farm workers were Mexican or Mexican American.

As this rapid shift of Mexico's working population occurred, the first labor agreement between the United States and Mexico was formed. Mexico required that U.S. farm owners provide legal contracts for all Mexican workers guaranteeing conditions such as wages and work schedules. The U.S. government, in turn, enforced the border between the United States and Mexico, checking that all Mexican immigrants had the proper work contract so they would not be exploited.

As the Great Depression took a toll on California's economy during the 1930s, however, Mexicans and Mexican Americans became targets for discrimination and removal. White government officials claimed that Mexican immigrants made up the majority of the California unemployed. White trade unions claimed that Mexican immigrants were taking jobs that should go to white men. In reality, a new supply of white refugees desperate for jobs was flooding California from the Midwest, making up the majority of the unemployed.

At the same time that wages were dropping due to the new white refugee labor, established Mexican and Mexican American farm workers had become a threat by banding together, often with other non-whites, and organizing strikes to protest lowered wages and worsening living conditions. Agriculture in the United States was crippled due to the ongoing Dust Bowl drought in the Midwest, while California was relatively untouched - the farm owners had a chance to profit immensely from the supply of cheap labor, but not if these protests succeeded.

California state and local governments responded to white farm owner pressure and implemented "repatriation" plans to send Mexican immigrants back to Mexico in busloads and boxcars. Many Mexican Americans were also sent out of the United States under these programs, there being no differentiation between Mexicans and Mexican American U.S. citizens. Mexican American U.S. citizens who were children at the time were also deported to Mexico along with their Mexican parents.

Despite a hundred years of effort, economic exploitation of farm workers of all races continues to this day in California and across the United States. As long as farm owners can continue forcing people to live in such conditions, the farm workers' struggle seems doomed to continue.

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Depression Era: 1930s: Repatriation for Mexican & Filipino Farm Workers | Picture This

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Mexican and Mexican American migrant farm workers expected conditions like those pictured above as they sought farm work in California and other states in the early 1900s. At that time, the Mexican Revolution and the series of Mexican civil wars that followed pushed many Mexicans to flee to the Unit…

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Mass Deportations to Mexico in 1930s Spurs Apology

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The little-acknowle dged history of Mexican Americans repatriated in the 1930s became embedded in the mind of state Sen. Joe Dunn, D-Santa Ana, after he read "Decade of Betr ayal" on a flight to Washington, D.C.

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In an often-hidden part of the American past, an estimated million American citizens and legal immigrants of Mexican descent were deported to Mexico in the so-called "repatriation movement" of the 1930s. We might not know about this if not for a scholar named Raymond Rodriguez, who we recently learned died of a heart attack at age 87 in his Long Beach home in late June.

Raymond Rodriguez was nearly 80 when he testified before a state committee on the California repatriation. But in his voice, you can hear the pain of the boy he once was.

"My dad left in 1936, when I was 10. I never saw my dad again," he said.

That emotional testimony became part of a series of hearings into what is sometimes called the Mexican repatriation of the 1930s. That's when the federal government rounded up more than a million people of Mexican ancestry from across the U.S., sometimes going door to door, and forced them into Mexico. More than 60 percent of the displaced were American citizens.

Former California state senator Joseph Dunn said the measure was designed to keep scarce jobs and government benefits safe for whites in Depression-ravaged America.

"Literally, the Hoover administration's tag [line], that they used publicly for illegal deportations, was 'American jobs for real Americans,'" said Dunn.

Dunn, now the CEO of the State Bar of California, met Raymond Rodriguez after he read Decade of Betrayal, which chronicled displacement. Rodriguez wrote the book with Francisco Balderrama, a Chicano studies professor at California State University in Los Angeles. Balderrama and Rodriguez, along with others, worked with Dunn to seek an official apology from the state to the displaced families. And in early 2006, the Apology Act For Mexican Repatriation became official.

Dunn said the repatriation may have been the template for a later, better-known injustice.

"Many of the folks who examined this period believed that the internment of the Japanese-Americans went so efficiently because of the lessons that were learned during the illegal deportations of the 1930s," Dunn said.

Balderrama said he and Rodriguez knew the repatriation's history was being lost as the people who had experienced it began to die. Balderrama said it was important to remember the period for those folks.

"The significance of understanding this that happened in the 1930's, is that one has a context of understanding what's happening today, as well as in the 50s, the 60s the 70s," said Balderrama.

Balderrama has personal and professional motivations to tell this story: His great-uncles were repatriated. But, he said, as close as he and Rodriguez had been for many years, Rodriguez never told Balderrama that his father had also returned to Mexico under pressure. Rodriguez didn't divulge that until their book was going to press.

Rodgriguez still felt seared by the loss of his father. The fact that Rodriguez used that pain to ensure that another generation wouldn't have to feel it, said Balderrama, was characteristic of who Ray Rodriguez.

"So I think that's the value of Ray, the inspiration of Ray: to take something that you've suffered through, your family's gone through, and to make this a public issue - an educational issue - for the American public," Balderrama said.
Copyright NPR 2018.

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Rodriguez Kept 'Mexican Repatriation' From Being Forgotten

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In an often-hidden part of the American past, an estimated million American citizens and legal immigrants of Mexican descent were deported to Mexico in the so-called "repatriation movement" of the 1930s. We might not know about this if not for a scholar named Raymond Rodriguez, who we recently learned died of a heart attack at age 87 in his Long Beach home in late June.