Accidental Blogger

A little over a month ago, Anna reminded us in her informative post " Day of Remembrance," of a piece of US history many of us know little about – the plight of early Asian Americans. The US has since then apologized to its own citizens of Japanese descent for the unfair and cruel treatment meted out to them during WWII when a large number of Japanese Americans were interned. But hostility and xenophobia raise their heads again and again in times of political and economic upheavals. Arab and Muslim Americans have been living under precariously uncertain conditions since 9/11. (Non-Muslim south Asians too have been targeted by those who impatiently lump all similar looking "foreigners" into the same category in their eagerness to vent their anger). In the recent turmoil over immigration, the Hispanic community has become the "undesirable foreigners du jour".

Today I came across an eye opening article by Cragg Hines, columnist for the Houston Chronicle. It appears that in the depression era of the 1930’s, a large number of Mexican Americans, many of them American citizens, were forcibly and unceremoniously moved south across the Mexican border because they were perceived to be "taking away jobs" from needy Americans.  The pressure for the deportation was brought about by an aggressive domestic labor movement and politicians hostile to Mexicans for other reasons.

"THE sharp-edged, vigilante tone of the current immigration debate is as old as it is regrettable. Today’s rancor sounds all too familiar to academics who mine the often-neglected field of immigration history and to politicians who are beginning to pay attention to some startling findings.

It is a sordid story that echoes from the farm fields of the Rio Grande Valley and Winter Garden of Texas to the barrios of Los Angeles and as far north as Detroit and Gary, Ind. Most alarming, Dunn, D-Santa Ana, said, was that up to 60 percent of those forcibly stampeded across the border, some on locked trains, were U.S. citizens. So-called "repatriations," at least in those instances, were actually illegal forced removals from a homeland. It is as shocking as the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, except that very few people know about it.

Dunn’s reading of Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, by historians Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez (University of New Mexico Press, revised edition 2006) led him to introduce legislation offering an apology from California for the coerced relocations. After several attempts, and the removal of any suggestion of reparations, a bill was passed last year by both Assembly and Senate, was signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and became law Jan. 1.

A plaque marking the apology is to be erected in Los Angeles, possibly at La Placita, a downtown park in the historic Olvera Street area, where perhaps the most notorious deportation raid took place in February 1931.  An apology and plaque are not much, but it’s more than any other governmental or private entity with a hand in the sorry campaign has done. …..

Lack of knowledge about the mass deportations is a result of what historian Abraham Hoffman called "a kind of benign neglect."  Hoffman, author of Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929-1939 (University of Arizona Press, 1974) said that just as studies of blacks in American history suffered for a long time from the "Booker T. Washington and all the other Negroes" syndrome, study of Hispanics’ role was classed in many minds as "Cesar Chavez and all the other Mexicans."

Even Hispanics are generally unaware of the mass deportations, said Nora Rios McMillan, a historian at San Antonio College who has written about the removals. McMillan’s research, as well as that of others, shows many of the deportees were children, most of whom were citizens, even if their parents were not, and could not speak Spanish.

Balderama and Rodríguez write that the raids stemmed at least in part from Secretary of Labor William N. Doak’s "personal vendetta to get rid of the Mexicans." His motivation, they said, "was purely political, for he was acting under President (Herbert) Hoover’s orders to create a diversion to counteract organized labor’s hostile attitude toward his administration.

"Deportation meant jobs for real Americans," the authors said the reasoning went.

Sound familiar?"