Repatriation Program

Deportations

The deportations began under President Herbert Hoover, who promoted them as a cure for the high unemployment of the Great Depression, known by Mexican Americans as La Crisis. He claimed that the action would protect “American Jobs for Real Americans.” This was a common theme throughout the next 10 years: Removing Mexican Americans from the country would remove them from competition for the reduced number of jobs while saving relief agencies money by reducing the number of recipients. The program was considered voluntary for legal residents but was coercive and targeted the vulnerable, such as hospital patients who needed medical care during their removal.

In 1931, the 11-member Wickersham Commission reported the practice of immigration checks and raids in various public places without warrants. Even when specific inducement was not provided, the anti-Mexican climate and the clear sense of Mexican Americans being unwelcome motivated many to leave the country. Mass-media coverage frightened those of Mexican heritage, and some immigrants of financial means voluntarily returned to Mexico with their belongings, but those were the rare exception and did not prove the rhetoric of voluntarism designed to appease Americans about the program.

In Los Angeles, the Chamber of Commerce openly encouraged the employment of men based not on legal status but on skin pigment. Los Angeles County welfare offices threatened to withhold assistance from Mexican Americans and provided inadequate food for those deported, as in a November 1932 incident in which 78 children on a train were poorly provisioned and several were deported without an adult. Those who refused to leave voluntarily were removed by police and taken by force to train stations. Once in Mexico, deportees often had no resources, often had no family, and were dumped in the desert on the other side of the border with little choice but to attempt re-entry to reclaim their lives in the United States. Obtaining a copy of a U.S. birth certificate from Mexico in the 1930s was nearly impossible. Some born in the United States did not speak Spanish and were in a country that they had never even visited. Once in Mexico, Mexican Americans faced discrimination as foreigners who were not welcome in a country even more devastated by the global economic crisis than the United States.

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