Decade of Betrayal

Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s

Francisco E. Balderrama, Raymond Rodríguez

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780826339737
• eBook ISBN: 9780826339744
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Mexican History
• Index: Social Sciences

Decade of Betrayal focuses on the experiences of individuals illegally shipped from the U.S. to Mexico in the 1930s and the recent questions of a formal apology and fiscal remuneration.

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

Notes

Introduction

1. Abraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929–1939 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974) and Mercedes Carreras de Velasco, Los Mexicanos que devolvió la crisis, 1929–1932 (México, D.F.: Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, 1974).

The authors first explored aspects of Mexican repatriation in Francisco E. Balderrama, In Defense of La Raza: The Los Angeles Mexican Consulate and the Mexican Community, 1929–1936 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982); and Raymond Rodríguez, “Mexicans Go Home,” Southland Sunday Magazine, in Independent, Press-Telegram (14 October 1974), 8–14.

2. See: Richard A. García, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class: San Antonio, 1929–1941 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1991); Zaragosa Vargas, Proletarians of the North: A History of Mexican Industrial Workers in Detroit and the Midwest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Vicki L. Ruiz, Cannery Women/Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987).

3. George Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and the American Dream: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900–1939 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994); Fernando Saúl Alanis Enciso, El valle del Río Bravo, Tamaulipas, en la décade de 1930. (Ciudad Victoria: El Colegio de Tamaulipas-El Colegio de San Luis, 2003).

Immigration

1. See Los Angeles Times, 8 October 1991, for an extensive report on immigration movements throughout the world.

2. México, Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Informe de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (México, D.F.: Imprenta Nacional, 1900), 160.

3. Victor S. Clark, “Mexican Labor in the United States,” Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor 17 (September 1908), 496.

4. Interview: Daniel Torres; Safe-Conduct Pass, Agua Prieta, Mexico, 31 January 1916, courtesy of Daniel Torres.

5. Ibid.

6. México, Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Memoria de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores de agosto de 1928 ajJulio de 1929 presentada al H. congreso de la Unión por Genaro Estrada (México, D.F.: Imprenta de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, 1929), 1549–50.

7. United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930: Population, Special Report of Foreign-Born White Families by Country of Birth of Head (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1933), 199.

8. Manuel Gamio, Mexican Immigration to the United States: A Study of Human Migration and Adjustment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), 3; and Paul S. Taylor, Mexican Labor in the United States: Migration Statistics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1929), 254. Official immigration figures for this historical period and other eras are definitely undercounts, whether based upon American or Mexican sources. Ricardo Romo has shown Mexican figures to be significantly higher than American estimates, in “Responses to Mexican Immigration, 1910–1930,” Aztlán: International Journal of Chicano Studies Research 6 (Summer 1975), 178.

9. United States Immigration Commission, Reports of the Immigration Commission, Immigrants in Industries (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1911), pt. 24, 3:449. The report and commission was named Dillingham after its chairman, Senator William P. Dillingham of Vermont.

10. Interviews: Dr. Reynaldo Carreón and Eduardo Negrete.

11. Interviews: Pablo Alcántara; Hicks interview: Jesús Casárez, and Ramón Curiel.

12. Mario T. García, Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880–1920 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 46–47.

13. Mark Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow: Mexican Immigrant Labor in the United States, 1900–1940 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976), 12; Lawrence A. Cardoso, Mexican Emigration to the United States, 1897–1931: Socio-Economic Patterns ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Saludos
• Immigration: Al Norte
• The Family: La Vida
• Deportation: Adiós, Migra
• Welfare: El Condado
• Repatriation: Afuera
• Revolutionary Mexico: Para Los Mexicanos
• Colonization: Pan y Tierra
• Adjustment: Agringados
• Accommodation: Al Otro Lado
• Repatriation in Retrospect: ¿Qué Pasó?
• Epilogue: Fin
• Sources and Methodology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index