approximately half a million people of Mexican descent were deported under the guise of “repatriation.” (1 gen 1929 anni – 1 gen 1937 anni)

Descrizione:

By the 1920s, agriculture in California had become a big business — intensive, diversified, and export-oriented. Large-scale corporate-owned farms produced specialty crops — lettuce, tomatoes, peaches, grapes, and cotton — whose staggered harvests relied on transient labor. Thousands of workers, immigrants from Mexico and Asia, as well as white migrants from the midwestern states, trooped from farm to farm and from crop to crop during the long picking season. Some migrants settled in the rapidly growing cities along the West Coast, especially the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles. Beginning under Hoover and continuing under FDR, the federal government promoted deportation of Mexicans, in the belief that removing aliens would cut relief spending and preserve jobs for American citizens. Between 1929 and 1937, approximately half a million people of Mexican descent were deported under the guise of “repatriation.” But historians estimate that more than 60 percent of those deported were in fact American citizens.

Despite these illegal deportations, many Mexican Americans benefitted from the New Deal and generally held Roosevelt and the Democratic Party in high regard. People of Mexican descent took jobs with the WPA and the CCC, and received relief in the worst years of the depression. The National Youth Administration, which employed low-income young people and sponsored a variety of school programs, proved particularly important among Mexican Americans in southwestern cities. Even though New Deal programs did not end discriminatory practices or fundamentally reform the migrant farm labor system, the New Deal coalition attracted Mexican Americans in large numbers because of the Democrats’ commitment to ordinary people. “Franklin D. Roosevelt’s name was the spark that started thousands of Spanish-speaking persons to the polls,” noted one Los Angeles Mexican American activist.

Among the most hard-pressed workers during the Great Depression were those who labored in the nation’s fields, orchards, and food processing plants. Here, a family of Mexican American beet workers in Minnesota gathers over coffee and conversation at the end of the workday. The New Deal era brought mixed blessings for such families. Some workers were able to join unions and improve their wages and working conditions. But others were swept up in repatriation programs, large-scale federal and state efforts to deport Mexican citizens in the United States — and even many U.S. citizens of Mexican descent — to Mexico.

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