"What history can tell us about anti-immigrant zeal"

[Bridget Burke]

"Anti-immigrant zeal" is not new in American History. But this article doesn't hark back to the days of the Know-Nothings & Nativists. Did you know that thousands of Mexican-Americans were forcibly deported from the USA back in the 1930's? I didn't.

What history can tell us about anti-immigrant zeal

By CRAGG HINES
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

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.

California state Sen. Joe Dunn remembers being "absolutely devastated" as he read the story of concerted government action to force at least 400,000 Hispanics out of the United States as economic woes mounted in the Great Depression. Some historians estimate total Hispanic departures at closer to 2 million if the tally includes families, fearing deportation or further financial hardship, whose departure was nominally voluntary.....

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.

www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/hines/3774368.html

An apologetic plaque will be mounted in the Olvera Street area (Los Angeles). Further inquiries are planned--some insurance companies & banks may find themselves involved. The article mentions a couple of books about this mostly unknown bit of American history.

[fasttense]

1. It wasn't just illegals and immigrants that were being kicked out of

California during the depression. My uncles and grandmother got sent back to Oklahoma after trying to get jobs picking fruit in California. Just like in the Grapes of Wrath, my uncles and grandmother (my father was too young to work and was with his grandmother) were forced to return to the dust bowl in Oklahoma after applying for jobs to pick fruit. They had to return to their farm in Oklahoma that was nothing but a big field of dust.

It was called the Great Depression for a reason. There was no work. People became very protective of the few jobs available.

[Bridget Burke]

2. Some kicked out of California were native born Californians....

Children whose parents may have been immigrants. Children who did not even speak Spanish. Were your people sent back to Oklahoma in sealed trains? Believe me, I KNOW the Depression was rough all over--I was raised on Depression stories. But this deportation was massive & government-sponsored.

Ry Cooder did a fine medley of "Viva Seguin" & "Do Re Mi" on his Showtime album. With backing by Flaco Jimenez.

[fasttense]

5. No trains, they had to find their own way back to Oklahoma, frequently

at the point of a rifle. California wasn't the only state chasing off starving poor farmers from Oklahoma. The chasing away of "Okies" was massive also but got little attention.

[nuxvomica]

3. I wonder if any of today's illegal immigrants are their offspring

That would be an interesting twist. If we could find out who these folks are, and they want to come back, their citizenship and that of their children should be restored, along with an property they may have owned. Thanks for posting this but it just leaves me with more questions.

[Bridget Burke]

4. That's possible.

This long-ignored episode in US & Mexican history is just now being brought to light.