This article was originally published in the Sep/Oct 2021 issue of San Diego Lawyer Magazine.
By Renée N.G. Stackhouse
In the wake of the past year’s racial justice movement, including calls to action from Black Lives Matter and Anti-Asian Racism movements, the Latino community has faced its own rise in hate crimes. Memories have arisen of a dark time in U.S. history when Mexican nationals and U.S. citizens were “repatriated” to Mexico after the call to deport them because they were “lazy,” “criminal,” and it was feared they were “taking away American jobs.” And I’m not talking about 2015: this was the 1930s and 1940s. It was just last year that I learned about the euphemistically named “Mexican Repatriation Program,” so if you haven’t heard of it before, you are not alone. It is a little-known (and for many a never-known) chapter of American history, and the danger in not knowing our history is that we may be doomed to repeat it.
Almost 100 years later, we are close to repeating offenses for which we are only just beginning to acknowledge, teach, and apologize. Latino hate crimes hit their highest level in 2019 (1) since data began being collected in the early 1990s. (2) The El Paso massacre shooter posted a statement before his rampage, which killed 23 people, mostly Latinos, blaming Mexicans for “invading” the United States. A 14-year-old was intentionally run over in Iowa for “looking Mexican.” (3) In California, hate crimes against Latinos surged 38% from 2019 to 2020. (4) In the last few years, mass deportations were promised and enacted, and children were separated from their families and placed in literal cages. Mexicans have been called “drug dealers, rapists, and criminals” by the highest authority in our country.
This is not a large leap from “American jobs for real Americans,” which was President Hoover’s slogan in the 1930s. What made a “real American”? It may surprise you that citizenship wasn’t part of the criteria. It is estimated that anywhere from 350,000 to 2,000,000 people were “repatriated” through a combination of voluntary repatriation, coercion, threats, harassment, and deportation. Of those, 60% are believed to have been U.S. citizens. Most were children born in the United States who had never been to Mexico, and some did not even speak Spanish. Even those adults who were “repatriated” returned to a country they had not seen in years and which was markedly different from what they had known. Many were forced to leave with only the clothes on their backs. Some were lucky to be allocated a small number of boxes they were allowed to bring.
In 2005, Senator Joe Dunn wrote SB 670, a bill which would enact the “Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program.” The bill acknowledged that “massive raids were conducted on Mexican‑American communities, resulting in the clandestine removal of thousands of people, many of whom were never able to return to the United States, their country of birth,” and that “[a]s a result of these illegal activities, families were forced to abandon, or were defrauded of, personal and real property, which often was sold by local authorities as ‘payment’ for the transportation expenses incurred in their removal from the United States to Mexico.” The result? California apologized, though no reparations were approved. The U.S. government has still not apologized for its actions, despite being called to do so by Congresswoman Hilda Solis in 2006.
As of 2006, of the nine most commonly used American history textbooks in the United States, four did not mention the topic, and only one devoted more than half a page to it. (5) In 2015, Assembly Member Cristina Garcia introduced AB 146, which amended California’s Education Code to include the teaching of “the unconstitutional deportation to Mexico during the Great Depression of citizens and lawful permanent residents of the United States.”
This is an incredibly superficial introduction to the history and deep trauma caused by the Mexican Repatriation of the 1930s. I highly recommend reading Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s by Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez if you are interested in taking a deeper dive into the personal accounting of those who experienced the Repatriation. As the authors note: “One of the most tragic aspects of the movement was the wholesale violation of basic human rights.”
“No lloro, pero me acuerdo.”
“I don’t cry, but I remember.”
— Mexican Proverb
Renée N.G. Stackhouse (renee@stackhouseapc.com) is the 2021 SDCBA President and is the founder of Stackhouse APC.
Footnotes
- The 2020 statistics have not been released as of this writing.
- https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2019/topic-pages/incidents-and-offenses
- https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/02/us/hate-crimes-latinos-el-paso-shooting/index.html
- https://fox5sandiego.com/news/california-news/report-california-hate-crime-up-31-in-2020-led-by-anti-black-bias/
- https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-04-04-history-books_x.htm