The U.S. Deported a Million of Its Own Citizens to Mexico During the Great Depression

[mfcorey1]

https://www.history.com/news/great-depression-repatriation-drives-mexico-deportation

In the 1930s, the Los Angeles Welfare Department decided to start deporting hospital patients of Mexican descent. One of the patients was a woman with leprosy who was driven just over the border and left in Mexicali, Mexico. Others had tuberculosis, paralysis, mental illness or problems related to old age, but that didn’t stop orderlies from carrying them out of medical institutions and sending them out of the country.

These were the “repatriation drives,” a series of informal raids that took place around the United States during the Great Depression. Local governments and officials deported up to 1.8 million people to Mexico, according to research conducted by Joseph Dunn, a former California state senator. Dunn estimates around 60 percent of these people were actually American citizens, many of them born in the U.S. to first-generation immigrants. For these citizens, deportation wasn’t “repatriation”—it was exile from their country.

The logic behind these raids was that Mexican immigrants were supposedly using resources and working jobs that should go to white Americans affected by the Great Depression. These deportations happened not only in border states like California and Texas, but also in places like Michigan, Colorado, Illinois, Ohio and New York. In 2003, a Detroit-born U.S. citizen named José Lopez testified before a California legislative committee about his family’s 1931 deportation to Michoacán, a state in Western Mexico.

[Soph0571]

1. Indeed

[underpants]

2. I had no idea

Wow

[Nevermypresident]

3. Serious question...Was I a bad history student or is this not common

knowledge to others at DU like myself?

"Repatriation Drives" in the 30's. Sickening.

[Spider Jerusalem]

4. More like "you were a student taught bad history"

which is the case for most US History students in public schools (the history taught in schools tends to be pretty slanted and mostly triumphalist; "the USA is awesome!", with the ugliness glossed over or elided...same way kids in Texas public schools don't learn that the Texas Revolution was fought over the right to own slaves and not 'freedom').

[eppur_se_muova]

16. Um, actually, I had read it was over the refusal to pay taxes.

The Mexican gov't saw how successful Southern cotton plantations were, and wanted some of that economic success for Texas. So they offered Southern planters incentives to move to Texas and grow cotton (using the same old plantation system, of course) and gave them a 15-year (IIRC) tax holiday as an incentive. The Southerners moved to Texas, grew cotton, successfully founded the cotton industry the Mexican gov't had wanted -- but when 15 years were up, and it was time to start paying taxes, the Southerners -- who now called themselves Texjans -- said, basically, "Pay taxes to Mexicans ?? Hell, no ! We've got guns !" And thus was born the glorious Texas Revolution -- a revolt of tax dodgers. Oh, but you're right -- Mexico did outlaw slavery, which the Texians ignored.

Wish I could find my copy of Loewen's "Lies My Teacher Told Me" to see what he had to say about it.

[Spider Jerusalem]

17. Nope, it was about slavery (which was abolished in Mexico).

[Takket]

8. i'd never heard of this until now......

[Lonestarblue]

5. The US was founded as a racist country.

The white Europeans who settled along the East Coast considered the Native Americans inferior. They believed that black people were not only inferior but some thought them animals incapable of feeling pain. For example, Dr. James Sims, the father of modern gynecology, performed horrifying experimental surgery on enslaved black women with no anesthesia.

The US Constitution considered black people inferior to whites until the 13th Amendment was passed, but even then racism was alive and well. After the Civil War, the Jim Crow laws ensured that black people would still be held down as the inferior race.

As whites moved ever further west, eventually reaching the Pacific, they deemed the Hispanic and Indio peoples they found as inferior.

Given that racism has been a significant part of this country since its founding, we should not be surprised to see it continuing to this day. But it is time for it to stop. We need to teach about racism in school, and we need to protest when slavery is taught as just another form of immigration. The Democratic Party needs a strong anti-racism plank in its platform (I must confess that I do not know what is in the current platform) that every Democratic candidate discusses publicly. The Republican Party today is a perpetrator of racism through its positions on school boards and its pernicious media influence. We need to call them on their racism at every opportunity.

[ROB-ROX]

6. I Took California History In College

I learned that about every 20 years in California there was an ethnic group which was the focus of discrimination. The first were the natives in California. After the Americans took over California it was the Mexicans. Then the Chinese (rail road workers.) It becomes a sick process which is not know to the most California residents. I understand there are still many TWISTED white people who live in this state. The good news is today these white people are the minority and they do not affect or infect the government like they did in the past. There are still parts of the state which harbor these social TURDS. This country has people who historically "focus" on minorities to get their "hate" fixation taken care of nationally. Hopefully this recessive gene is a the shallow end of the gene pool....

[AllaN01Bear]

13. the foregin miners tax , etc , etc. the illegeal take over of monterey by fremont

etc

[mysteryowl]

7. Also...19th Century - American Free-Born black persons were deported to Liberia

Proponents of slavery supported the efforts of groups like the American Colonization Society, who “sent back” tens of thousands of free black people – most of them American-born – to Liberia in the 19th century to prevent disruption caused by free descendants of slaves.


400 years since slavery: a timeline of American history
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/aug/15/400-years-since-slavery-timeline


DU thread;
https://democraticunderground.com/100212386532

[FailureToCommunicate]

9. You learn the darndest things on DU

Thanks.

Not surprised, though, since 'getting rid' of undesirables, like people with disabilities is always an aim of racist nationalists.

Hitler didn't just round up Jews.

[SaintLouisBlues]

10. They did not cross the border, the border crossed them:

https://geo-mexico.com/?p=10904

[Igel]

18. And yet, most of them arrived

after 1848.

Think of it as population spread. Part of the problem Mexico had was that much of the territory was very sparsely populated, and there wasn't a great rush of people from south of the Rio Grande rushing north.

You'd see the same kind of effect in a good census of the population of eastern Siberia.

[AllaN01Bear]

11. like a lot of "history " has been forgotton, covered up, buried . never made it ionto the the

history books intentionaly or unintenanaly.

[duforsure]

12. trumps attacks on all minorities

Will increase dramatically using any dirty tricks, tactics , ease dropping, and new declarations to hurt them with. The starting of his attacks on minorities , opposition, and people of different faiths are just the start to hurt them all as cruelly as he can. Immigrants are targeted now, but this will eventually include all others. it'll be the wealthy , and the most corrupt that'll be accepted and allowed to prosper, or like it is from Putin in Russia.

[dalton99a]

14. "American jobs for real Americans" -

BLOCK: And this wasn't just in California. It was in any number of other states: Texas, New Mexico, Michigan I've read, New York, Illinois. Explain how this all came about. Let's put this in some historical context. It's 1931. It's the height of the Depression. What's going on?

State Sen. DUNN: The phrase that the Hoover administration used was `American jobs for real Americans.' Well, if you were born and raised right here in the United States but just happened to be of Mexican descent, in the Hoover administration's eyes, you were not a, quote, "real American," end quote. But that was the designed purposed of the program, to create jobs due to the rising number of unemployment at that time.

BLOCK: Well, how was this policy of deportation carried out? How did they do it?

State Sen. DUNN: Unfortunately, most of the individuals that were forcibly deported literally were done under armed guard and lock and key. There was a raid in a park in Los Angeles in February of 1931 in which they literally rounded up all the folk in that park who appeared to be of Mexican descent, put them on flatbed trucks under armed guard to Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, on a train that was under lock and key and literally forced them on and--onto the train, and the train took them to the interior of Mexico. Most of the deportations were done by force.

BLOCK: And at least in some of these cases, they would have had no connection with the places where they were being sent.

State Sen. DUNN: That is the tragedy. Their familiarity was absolutely zero. I'm an Irish-American, born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, but deporting me to Ireland is meaningless because I don't know the land. Obviously I speak the language, but most of the deportees in 1930s that were shipped to Mexico did not speak the language. And they were not only thrown out of their country of birth, the United States, they were foreigners in the new land that they were shipped to, that being Mexico.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5079627

[melm00se]

15. There are 2 approaches to teaching history:

philosophic and civic.

Most school systems (below the the college level) teach from a civic point of view. Among the things this perspective is intended to do is to develop and inculcate a sense of what it means to be American (or British or French or or or).

While the name of the perspective has changed over the years/centuries, this educational paradigm has been in place since antiquity, specifically ancient Greece.

Why has this been in place? In my opinion (at least in America), this is dates back to the earliest days of teaching in America. If you look back to the last 18th and early 19th century, the American founding fathers were as close to being deified as you can get. Washington, Jefferson, et. al. all had their backgrounds whitewashed and ascribed with nothing but greatness. Because of this, the American teachers are faced with an incredible amount of cultural inertia. Altering the method is a challenge especially when faced with (most) parents who say "I wasn't taught this" when faced with alternative events/interpretations.

It should be pointed out that this is not unique to America. Other countries also follow this paradigm as they understand the need to establish a sense of national identity in their children.

[roamer65]

19. I hope Mexico gets its territory back.

It was illegally stolen in 1848.

The border needs to be restored to the line created by the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819.

[melm00se]

20. so if you live in

San Diego, LA or San Francisco, you lose it all...