The more things change the more they remain the same.
JULIE: My parents came here from Mexico in 1919… met, got married, had us. Everything was great until the Depression, when people started blaming Mexicans for the lack of jobs… and started sending them back to Mexico.
As I conceived the character of Julie — and headed the Season 2 plot towards the Zoot Suit Riots (on which there will be a post soon) — I learned about the “Mexican Repatriation,” the repatriation or deportation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans from the United States during the Great Depression between 1929 and 1939. From Wikipedia:
“… About 82,000 people were formally deported, and others repatriated on their own accord, with disputed estimates ranging from a few hundred thousand to 2 million. An estimated forty to sixty percent of the voluntary repatriations were citizens of the United States, overwhelmingly American-born children who left with their families… Although the federal government supported repatriation, city and state governments largely organized and encouraged it, often with support from local private entities. The government formally deported at least 82,000 people, with the vast majority occurring between 1930 and 1933.
“Some scholars contend that the large number of deportations between 1929 and 1933 was part of a policy by the administration of Herbert Hoover, which implemented stricter immigration policies. The vast majority of formal deportations happened between 1930 and 1933, as part of a Hoover policy first mentioned in his 1930 State of the Union Address…. Widely scapegoated for exacerbating the overall economic downturn of the Great Depression, many Mexicans lost their jobs. Mexicans were further targeted because of ‘the proximity of the Mexican border, the physical distinctiveness of mestizos, and easily identifiable barrios.’… Estimates of the number who moved to Mexico between 1929 and 1939 range from 300,000 to 2 million, with most estimates placing the number between 500,000 and 1 million.”
If you’d like to read further, this transcript of a 2015 Terry Gross NPR interview is an excellent read. It is with Francisco Balderrama, a Cal State LA professor and the co-author of the 1990s book “Decade Of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation In The 1930s.” The interview gets into specifics about what went down in Los Angeles, which was, in many ways, the epicenter of the “repatriation.”
At one point Gross asks Balderrama:
GROSS: I didn’t learn about the mass deportations of the 1930s until I was led to it by reading about Donald Trump’s plan to deport Mexicans who are not here legally. How come – I don’t know if you can really answer this. I’m sure you cannot. But how come I didn’t know about it, and how come so many people I know didn’t know about it either? How come this wasn’t in the history books I read in school?
I had wondered the same thing. Balderrama’s answer:
BALDERRAMA: Well, for some 40 years or so in Chicano studies history classes, it’s been taught. But nobody knew the impact that it had in terms of the United States as well as in Mexico. When we did “Decade Of Betrayal” – first came out in the 1990s – it was talked about as a book of revelation. And in 2003, California Sen. Joe Dunn read the book, and he shared your same sentiments. He had never heard about it. He was disgusted to learn about it. He wanted to give it attention. And we had hearings in Sacramento. In short, what occurred is the state of California has issued an apology. The LA Plaza Museum has an historical monument memorializing what happened to American citizens of Mexican descent.
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