MORE SECURE?

ED: Now, there never was a coordinated program or a top-down mandate from President Hoover or Roosevelt to expel people of Mexican descent, but the White House did set the tone by staging raids across the country to deport Mexican-American families. Francisco Balderrama, a historian who has studied these repatriation programs, says the goal was to ease unemployment for Anglo-Americans.

FRANCISCO BALDERRAMA: This expulsion of Mexican nationals and American citizens of Mexican descent is done frequently because of the argument there’s not enough jobs, that jobs were for real Americans.

ED: Balderrama says that Mexican nationals were targeted because they were one of the more recent immigrant groups to arrive at the start of the 20th century.

FRANCISCO BALDERRAMA: And the key thing to keep in mind– under more prosperous times, particularly the roaring 1920s– Mexican workers were regarded as essential. But now with the Great Depression, they are regarded as foreign. They’re regarded as unwanted. They’re regarded as they’re not supposed to be here.

ED: The private sector also tried to get Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans to leave the country. In some cases, businesses would simply refuse to hire Mexican workers.

FRANCISCO BALDERRAMA: At the same time, we have private businesses– we have US Steel, Southern Pacific Railroad– that are telling their Mexican workers, you would be better off in Mexico and providing them with transportation to the border and to Mexico.

ED: Anti-Mexican sentiment was so pervasive that it even trickled down to local governments. Balderrama says Los Angeles County is a perfect example.

FRANCISCO BALDERRAMA: And it’s important to focus on LA county because it had the largest concentration of Mexican nationals and American citizens of Mexican descent at that historical moment. And it became kind of the model about how to do this elsewhere in the country.

CHRISTINE VALENCIANA: This is an interview with Mrs. Emilia Valenciana for the–

ED: Christine Valenciana has spent the past four decades collecting stories of those affected by this Depression-era repatriation, including her mother’s.

CHRISTINE VALENCIANA: OK, Mom, now why don’t you start by telling me where you’re from, first.

EMILIA VALENCIANA: Los Angeles, California.

CHRISTINE VALENCIANA: When were you born?

EMILIA VALENCIANA: April 10, 1926.

ED: Valenciana recorded this interview back in 1971. It was part of a college oral history project. She collected the voices of people who’d been affected by LA County’s repatriation program.

CHRISTINE VALENCIANA: My grandfather, Natividad Castanada, who had been here in Los Angeles since 1909, he was employed as a stonemason bricklayer, skilled craftsman, and then there’s no work for him.

EMILIA VALENCIANA: You know that here he was left with a family and a couple of children to raise and no work, living off of welfare. And we went to Mexico because my dad asked the county– he asked to be sent.

CHRISTINE VALENCIANA: My mother was nine years old when this happened. She had never been to Mexico.

EMILIA VALENCIANA: My dad asked if we wanted to go with him. We told him, yes, you know, that our place was with him. He was our father. We weren’t going to be left here and be made wards of the state. That’s what we would’ve been, wards of the state. So we left with my father.

CHRISTINE VALENCIANA: Now do you know for sure if he asked the county?

EMILIA VALENCIANA: He told me–

CHRISTINE VALENCIANA: Did he tell you he asked the county?

EMILIA VALENCIANA: He told me he asked the county that he wanted to be sent back to Mexico. So I guess, I guess they paid for our fare, Christine.

ED: Many of Valenciana’s interviewees said the same thing. No one had forced them to go to Mexico. Rather, their families wanted to go back, and they went of their own accord.

CHRISTINE VALENCIANA: Perhaps listeners are going to say it’s voluntary. Well, that’s the easy way out, and that’s not really looking at the complexity of the problem. We’re really looking at human beings. I mean, I can’t believe that my grandfather who had been here since 1999 had any intentions of ever returning to Mexico.

ED: But she says Los Angeles County actively encouraged people to leave. One of the county officials who ran this program was Rex Thompson. He was the head of charities for Los Angeles County during the early 1930s. Valenciana interviewed him in the early 1970s. Thompson acknowledged that he weighed the costs of providing aid to a Mexican family versus sending them to Mexico.

REX THOMPSON: We had thousands of Mexican nationals who were out of work and Mexican families were costing us $110 a month. I can remember those figures. We could ship them back and feed them well and decently by train for $74 a family.

FRANCISCO BALDERRAMA: You know, there was a campaign to get Mexicans to be removed, and so the county agencies, they would send out people. They were recruiters, basically.

REX THOMPSON: Social workers that were Americans of Mexican decent but actually fluent in the language or that were Mexican nationals fluent in the language to go out– and I want to emphasize– offer repatriation to these people. Well, I’m glad to say that they were a proud people, and most of them didn’t want to be on relief.

FRANCISCO BALDERRAMA: That interview is very important because it really is the voice and the thinking of the time of the policymakers, and the predominant voice that people think they’re doing something good. I mean, he really believed that what he did was the greatest humanitarian act that they could have been done.

ED: The reality was harsher. Balderrama says these social workers didn’t explain the full consequences of repatriation.

FRANCISCO BALDERRAMA: According to American law, then if a county pays for your transportation to return to Mexico or to go to Mexico, then your stamped that you can’t re-enter the country.

CHRISTINE VALENCIANA: Well in the case of my grandfather, his passport– and again he had been here since 1909– stamp it deported. Well, he had no way to get back here.

ED: Balderrama says that more than half of those who went to Mexico during the Great Depression were American citizens.

FRANCISCO BALDERRAMA: Well, simply it’s unconstitutional because you cannot deport an American citizen from his or her country.

ED: Many of them were children who’d never even been to Mexico.

EMILIA VALENCIANA: Because kids, you know, used to pick on me because I was an American citizen. There are a lot of people who did discriminate against us because we were Americans. We didn’t belong there. Isn’t it strange now, here the Anglos discriminate us, discriminate against us because we’re Mexicans. So really, where do we belong?

ED: Valenciana’s mother eventually made it back to the United States, but many others never returned to the land of their birth.

FRANCISCO BALDERRAMA: It’s a lost Generation. I mean, there are people that were lost in Mexico, people without the documentation, people that were denied their right to a life as an American.

ED: It’s hard to know if these programs actually provided more jobs or relief for so-called real Americans, but Valenciana thinks that’s beside the point. If the government wants to ease unemployment, it should try to help all Americans.

CHRISTINE VALENCIANA: In terms of unemployment, well, who has the right to be employed? Who has the right to make that determination?

EMILIA VALENCIANA: I feel that this country should have done something for their citizens instead of getting rid of them like the way they did.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Christine Valenciana and Francisco Balderrama helped us tell that story. Valenciana is a professor emerita in education at California State University Fullerton. And Balderrama is emeritus professor at California State University Los Angeles and co-author of Decade of Betrayal, Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s.