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Thread ID: 8303 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2003-07-20
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[SIZE=2]1 million of Mexican descent paid heavy price[/SIZE] Sacramento Bee 07/16/03 Author: Stephen Magagnini Link: [url=http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/courts_legal/story/7041670p-7989982c.html]http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/courts_...p-7989982c.html[/url]
They were rounded up by the thousands, often jailed without charges, then forced from America -- even though more than half were U.S. citizens. The little-known saga of the 1 million people of Mexican descent, easily half of them Californians, forced into Mexico during the Great Depression unfolded at a Capitol hearing Tuesday.
The deportees -- including thousands of American-born children who had never been to Mexico -- were cast out of the United States in the 1930s so there would be more jobs for 25 million unemployed "real Americans."
Raymond Rodriguez and Francisco Balderrama, authors of "A Decade of Betrayal," told how federal and local authorities would raid dance halls, markets and theaters in barrios in Los Angeles and other cities and herd anyone who looked Mexican into vans or trains that dropped them south of the border, where they were often shunned by Mexicans who feared for their own jobs. Some immigrants bedridden with leprosy, tuberculosis or other diseases were literally carted out of county hospitals in their beds and dropped at the border. Many others, sick of racism and harassment, returned to Mexico voluntarily, leaving their wives and American-born children behind.
"My dad left in 1936, when I was 10," Rodriguez said, his voice breaking. "I never saw my dad again. How is anybody going to compensate me for my loss?"
State Sen. Joe Dunn, D-Santa Ana, who led Tuesday's hearing, vowed to bring the ugly episode to light -- and possibly seek reparations similar to those paid to Japanese Americans interned during World War II -- so that history doesn't repeat itself.
"Unfortunately, we are very close to seeing this again," he said, referring to Muslim immigrants who have been detained -- and U.S. citizens who have been surreptitiously investigated -- under the Patriot Act passed after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"The first step is to create commissions to investigate the local, state and federal role in the illegal deportations," said Dunn. "I suspect it is important for us as a nation to move forward with reparations for those victims. We're talking about U.S. citizens thrown out of their own country."
Rodriguez said his father had a small farm outside Long Beach. "We had no money, but we had food, so we always had guests for dinner," he said. "He had been orphaned very young in Michoacán, so he joined a wagon train, herding livestock, and knew all about the stars. Every night he'd tell us a story about the heavens, and by the time he finished, the sweet corn was ready to eat."
His father, like 60 percent of those forced into Mexico, was a U.S. citizen, but he got fed up with the threat of violence. "He said, 'If they don't want us here, vámanos (let's go).' But my mom said, 'I have five kids born here -- we're not going to Mexico.' When my dad left, my older brother and sister had to quit school and work in the fields."
The irony, he said, is that since World War I, Americans had been going to Mexican villages to recruit workers for America's fields, mines and factories.
But when the Great Depression hit in 1929, he said, "Hysteria hit and people demanded we get rid of the Mexicans to create jobs for 'real Americans' even though Mexicans made up only 1 percent of the labor force."
The hysteria was fueled by racist anthropologists who claimed Mexicans were dirty, lazy, immoral and had criminal tendencies, Rodriguez said.
But after the first "repatriation" trains left for Mexico in 1931 and thousands more people drove south on their own, Bank of America howled that they'd taken more than $7 million in deposits with them, businesses complained they were losing customers who paid their bills as a matter of honor, and ranchers said they were losing some of their best field hands.
Some families chose to go to Mexico, rather than be split apart.
After Emilia Castañeda's mother died of tuberculosis in 1934, her father, a stonemason and builder, moved the family from Boyle Heights in Los Angeles.
Castañeda, then 9, grabbed her Shirley Temple doll, and she and her father and older brother took the train to Gomez Palacio, Durango. Some families died of starvation on the way. Others were robbed by Mexican border guards, or forced to pay bribes.
Castañeda's family made it to her aunt's home, but it had no running water, and they were forced to sleep outside, sometimes getting drenched.
Even worse, "We were living with people who didn't want us there," she said. When she finally learned enough Spanish to go to school, she was called a repatriada (repatriate), "which was very offensive to me -- I was an American."
Castañeda said her family moved 18 times in nine years as her father went from job to job. She said they spent a few terrifying nights in a rat-infested cotton field. Later, she was stung by a scorpion, and she and her brother contracted typhoid fever from bad water. "I never went to a dentist -- I didn't even have a toothbrush," she said.
Balderrama, Castañeda's son-in-law, said women who were sent to Mexico were often criticized for the way they cooked, dressed and spoke to men, while men were accused of not being "man enough" to stay in El Norte and fight for their rights.
One desperate family resolved to walk home from Chihuahua. The parents died along the way, and one son, a U.S. citizen, was put in an American orphanage while the other, a Mexican national, went to a Mexican orphanage, Balderrama said.
Castañeda made her way back to Los Angeles in 1944, in time to donate blood to U.S. servicemen fighting in World War II.
Her daughters -- one a professor of education, the other a senior project manager for Pfizer -- looked on tearfully as Castañeda told those at the hearing that no American should have to suffer the way she and her family did.
Tuesday, attorney [url=http://kbla.com/firm/index.php]Raymond Boucher[/url] filed a class-action suit in Los Angeles Superior Court against the state and the city of Los Angeles seeking damages for Castañeda and more than 400,000 other Mexican Americans who were forced from California to Mexico.
"Many of these people lost their homes and property," he said. "It's a chapter that needs to be corrected, and the dignity returned to this large group of people."
ââ¬ÅNow there are so many people outing themselves the old rules cannot hold. It may take 50 years but Gen M, the millennial, multicultural generation, will change all that.ââ¬Â
[img]http://www.sacbee.com/ips_rich_content/519-0716mexican.jpg[/img] [SIZE=2] Emilia Castañeda, 76, told a Senate hearing Tuesday of moving with her family to Mexico when she was 9 years old. She is one of 1 million people of Mexican descent who were forced out of the United States during the Depression or left on their own under pressure.[/SIZE]
é 2003 The Sacramento Bee