mexican repatriation essay

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Immigration History

​Mexican Repatriation (1929-1936)

1929 - 1936.

During the economic and political crises of the 1920s and 1930s, the Border Patrol launched several campaigns to detain Mexicans, including some U.S.-born citizens, and expel them across the border.

Francisco Balderrama: author of  Decade Of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation In The 1930s

Discussion Questions

What was the justification for Mexican repatriation?

How did authorities identify Mexicans? How might U.S. citizens be swept up in these operations?

What impact do you think these deportations had on Mexican communities in the United States?

Mexican migration increased during the 1910s and 1920s, pulled by U.S. needs for workers, particularly with the departures of Chinese and Japanese agricultural laborers, and pushed by the Mexican revolution and other upheavals. Demand for their labor dropped sharply with the onset of the Great Depression.  The Border Patrol launched several campaigns to detain Mexicans, including many U.S.-born citizens, and expel them across the border. These deportations swept up approximately 2 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans. World War II reignited efforts to recruit Mexicans as the United States mobilized wartime production.

CALIFORNIA STATE APOLOGY (2006)

“Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program.” (Added by Stats. 2005, Ch. 663, Sec. 1. Effective January 1, 2006.)

The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:

(a) Beginning in 1929, government authorities and certain private sector entities in California and throughout the United States undertook an aggressive program to forcibly remove persons of Mexican ancestry from the United States.

(b) In California alone, approximately 400,000 American citizens and legal residents of Mexican ancestry were forced to go to Mexico.

(c) In total, it is estimated that two million people of Mexican ancestry were forcibly relocated to Mexico, approximately 1.2 million of whom had been born in the United States, including the State of California.

(d) Throughout California, 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.

(e) These raids also had the effect of coercing thousands of people to leave the country in the face of threats and acts of violence.

(f) These raids targeted persons of Mexican ancestry, with authorities and others indiscriminately characterizing these persons as “illegal aliens” even when they were United States citizens or permanent legal residents.

(g) Authorities in California and other states instituted programs to wrongfully remove persons of Mexican ancestry and secure transportation arrangements with railroads, automobiles, ships, and airlines to effectuate the wholesale removal of persons out of the United States to Mexico.

(h) As 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.

(i) As a further result of these illegal activities, United States citizens and legal residents were separated from their families and country and were deprived of their livelihood and United States constitutional rights.

(j) As a further result of these illegal activities, United States citizens were deprived of the right to participate in the political process guaranteed to all citizens, thereby resulting in the tragic denial of due process and equal protection of the laws.

The State of California apologizes to those individuals described in Section 8721 for the fundamental violations of their basic civil liberties and constitutional rights committed during the period of illegal deportation and coerced emigration. The State of California regrets the suffering and hardship those individuals and their families endured as a direct result of the government sponsored Repatriation Program of the 1930s.

A plaque commemorating the individuals described in Section 8721 shall be installed and maintained by the Department of Parks and Recreation at an appropriate public place in Los Angeles. If the plaque is not located on state property, the department shall consult with the appropriate local jurisdiction to determine a site owned by the City or County of Los Angeles for location of the plaque. (Added by Stats. 2005, Ch. 663, Sec. 1. Effective January 1, 2006.)

“Back in Hoover’s era, as America hung on the precipice of economic calamity—the Great Depression—the president was under enormous pressure to offer a solution for increasing unemployment, and to devise an emergency plan for the strained social safety net. Though he understood the pressing need to aid a crashing economy, Hoover resisted federal intervention, instead preferring a patchwork of piecemeal solutions, including the targeting of outsiders.

According to former California State Senator Joseph Dunn, who in 2004 began an investigation into the Hoover-era deportations, “the Republicans decided the way they were going to create jobs was by getting rid of anyone with a Mexican-sounding name.”

From: Alex Wagner, “America’s Forgotten History of Illegal Deportations,” The Atlantic , March 6, 2017.

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The Deportation Campaigns of the Great Depression

By: Becky Little

Updated: October 15, 2024 | Original: July 12, 2019

In the 1930s, the Los Angeles Welfare Department decided to start deporting hospital patients of Mexican descent. One of the patients was a woman with leprosy who was driven just over the border and left in Mexicali, Mexico. Others had tuberculosis, paralysis, mental illness or problems related to old age. Orderlies carried them out of medical institutions and sent them out of the country.

These were part of the “repatriation drives,” a series of informal raids that took place around the United States during the Great Depression . Local governments and officials deported up to 1.8 million people to Mexico, according to research conducted by former California State Senator Joseph Dunn, who in 2004 investigated the deportations under President Herbert Hoover . Dunn estimates around 60 percent of these people were actually American citizens, many of them born in the United States to first-generation immigrants.

The logic behind these raids was that Mexican immigrants were supposedly using resources and working jobs that should go to white Americans affected by the Great Depression. These deportations happened not only in border states like California and Texas but also in places like Michigan, Colorado, Illinois, Ohio and New York. In 2003, a Detroit-born U.S. citizen named José Lopez testified before a California legislative committee about his family’s 1931 deportation to Michoacán, a state in Western Mexico.

“I was five years old when we were forced to relocate,” he said. “I…bec[a]me very sick with whooping cough, and suffered very much, and it was difficult to breathe.” After both of his parents and one brother died in Mexico, he and his surviving siblings managed to return to the U.S. in 1945. “We were lucky to come back,” he said. “But there are others that were not so fortunate.”

The raids tore apart families and communities, leaving lasting trauma for Mexican Americans who remained in the United States. Former California State Senator Martha M. Escutia has said that growing up in East Los Angeles, her immigrant grandfather never even walked to the corner grocery store without his passport for fear of being stopped and deported. Even after he became a naturalized citizen, he continued to carry it with him.

The Largest Mass Deportation in American History

As many as 1.3 million people may have been swept up in the Eisenhower‑era campaign.

How Border‑Crossing Became a Crime in the United States

In 1929, Section 1325 criminalized undocumented immigration for the first time. Its aim was to decrease Mexican immigration.

This Mexican American Teenager Spent Years in a Japanese Internment Camp—On Purpose

Ralph Lazo wasn’t of Japanese descent, but he spent spent two years at Manzanar in solidarity with his friends.

The deportation of U.S. citizens has always been unconstitutional, yet scholars argue the way in which “repatriation drives” deported non-citizens was unconstitutional, too.

“One of the issues is the ‘repatriation’ took place without any legal protections in place or any kind of due process,” says Kevin R. Johnson , a dean and professor of public interest law and Chicana/o studies at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. “So you could argue that all of them were unconstitutional, all of them were illegal because no modicum of process was followed.”

Instead, local governments and officers simply arrested people and put them on trucks, buses or trains bound for Mexico, regardless of whether they were documented immigrants or even native-born citizens. Deporters rounded up children and adults however they could, often raiding public places where they thought Mexican Americans hung out. In 1931, one Los Angeles raid rounded up more than 400 people at La Placita Park and deported them to Mexico.

Although the federal government in the 1930s did prosecute 44,000 people under Section 1325 —the same law that criminalizes unauthorized entry today—these criminal prosecutions were separate from the local raids, which were informal and lacked any due process. Johnson points out that active groups of lawyers advocate on behalf of immigrants today. “In the 1930s, there was nothing like that,” he says.

Although there was no federal law or executive order authorizing the 1930s raids, President Herbert Hoover’s administration, which used the slogan, “American jobs for real Americans,” implicitly approved of them. His secretary of labor, William Doak, also helped pass local laws and arrange agreements that prevented Mexican Americans from holding jobs. Some laws banned Mexican Americans from government employment, regardless of their citizenship status. Meanwhile, companies like Ford, U.S. Steel and the Southern Pacific Railroad agreed to lay off thousands of Mexican American workers.

However, modern economists who’ve studied the effect of the 1930s “repatriation drives” on cities argue the raids did not boost local economies.

“The repatriation of Mexicans, who were mostly laborers and farm workers, reduced demand for other jobs mainly held by natives, such as skilled craftsman and managerial, administrative and sales jobs,” write economists in a 2017 academic paper circulated by the non-partisan National Bureau of Economic Research. “In fact, our estimates suggest that it may have further increased their levels of unemployment and depressed their wages.”

Hoover lost the presidential election in 1932 because voters—who now referred to shanty towns as “Hoovervilles” —blamed him for the ongoing Depression (indeed, Hoover’s decision to raise import tariffs did prolong the Depression at home and abroad). The next president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt , didn’t officially sanction “repatriation drives,” but neither did he suppress them. These raids continued under his administration and only really died out during World War II , when the U.S. began recruiting temporary Mexican workers through the Bracero Program because it needed wartime labor.

In 2005, California state Senator Joseph Dunn helped pass the “Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program.” California deported about 400,000 people during that time, and the act officially apologized “for the fundamental violations of their basic civil liberties and constitutional rights committed during the period of illegal deportation and coerced emigration.”

The act also called for the creation of a commemorative plaque in Los Angeles. In 2012, the city unveiled the plaque near the site of a 1931 La Placita Park raid. The next year, California passed a law requiring its public schools to teach “repatriation drive” history, which had been largely overlooked.

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Over 1 Million Were Deported to Mexico Nearly 100 Years Ago. Most of Them Were US Citizens

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A bill making its way through the California state legislature would commemorate a little-known chapter of U.S. history: a large-scale deportation of Mexicans — and Mexican Americans — nearly a century ago. And the bill’s backers say it’s all the more relevant in this election year when mass deportation is again a political topic .

The yearslong episode, referred to as the Mexican Repatriation by those who enacted it, began in 1930, as the Great Depression took hold. As employment dwindled, hostility toward immigrants grew. President Herbert Hoover had announced a plan to ensure “American jobs for real Americans,” implying that anyone of Mexican descent was not a “real” American.

The bill , SB 537, would authorize a nonprofit organization representing Mexican Americans or immigrants to build a memorial in Los Angeles recognizing the people who were forcibly deported from the U.S. during the Great Depression.

Historians say more than a million people — and possibly as many as 1.8 million — throughout the country were forced to go to Mexico. But not all of them were Mexican. Indeed, scholars estimate that more than half of those pushed out of the country were American citizens, often the U.S.-born children of immigrants.

One of those deported was Martin Cabrera’s grandfather, Emilio, who was born in 1918 in Wilmington, California, in Los Angeles County.

Cabrera, the CEO of Cabrera Capital, an investment firm in Chicago, said that when he was a boy, his grandfather told him stories about being deported, along with his mother and little sister.

“He was about 12 years old in 1930,” Cabrera said. “He was put into a box car over by Los Angeles at Union Station, and they’re shipped out and ended up in San Luis Potosí in Mexico.”

He said his grandfather never complained about what he had been through and worked hard to build a good life for his family. But when Cabrera became an adult, he began to realize how hard it must have been for the family to leave everything behind.

“They didn’t have a lot of belongings that they took with them when they were being deported,” he said.

‘A lawless deportation’

UC Davis Law School Dean Kevin Johnson said government officials flagrantly disregarded people’s constitutional rights .

“It was a lawless deportation,” he said. “There were no removal procedures. There’s no process, there’s no nothing. And [under law] you can’t deport a citizen. You can’t force a citizen to leave the country.”

Johnson points out that “repatriation” is a misnomer for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who had never lived in Mexico, including his former colleague, the late California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso .

“I view the repatriation as an ethnic cleansing that took place in the greater Southwest, including Los Angeles, in the Great Depression,” he said. “And it’s had significant impacts…. For generations, Mexican identities were kept, some might say, ‘in the closet.’ It was kept quiet.”

Officials in places like Los Angeles adopted the term “repatriation” because they were waging pressure campaigns to induce Mexicans to “voluntarily” depart, as well as collaborating with federal immigration authorities to carry out formal deportations.

Research shows some families were coerced into “self-deporting” through persuasion, threats or intimidation. Others were rounded up by force, even taken from hospitals. Johnson notes that, though immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility, local officials were often the ones conducting the raids.

One of the most notorious incidents took place in Los Angeles in February 1931, where city police corralled hundreds of people at La Placita, the plaza in front of Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic Church, in a Mexican neighborhood. Officers checked papers and trucked dozens of people to the train station to send them to Mexico.

‘Obviously it could happen again’

Tamara Gisiger was a high school junior when she learned about the Mexican Repatriation. Her class was studying the Great Depression, and she wanted to focus her final paper on how it had affected people of Mexican heritage like her. She said she was shocked by what her research turned up.

“When I brought it up to my teacher, I was even more shocked when she didn’t know about it,” said Gisiger, who’s starting her first year at Bowdoin College. “So, I started talking to family members about it.”

She learned that a cousin’s grandfather was deported and the family had to start over at the southern tip of Baja California, a region where “repatriates” were promised land but, with no water, found it nearly impossible to farm.

“It’s very un-talked about because it’s shameful,” she said. “It’s traumatizing and hidden from the family.”

Gisiger’s paper came to the attention of California State Sen. Josh Becker, and together, they wrote the bill to place the memorial at La Placita park in Los Angeles.

Becker said Americans need to learn this history because the inflammatory way that former President Donald Trump speaks about immigrants as he campaigns for president echoes the anti-immigrant climate that made Mexican Repatriation possible.

“Today we are seeing the same kind of hateful, vile rhetoric coming from political leaders, and actually calls for mass deportation,” Becker said at a recent press conference promoting the bill. “I think many people think, ‘Oh, that’s just rhetoric that will never happen.’ We’re here to say: ‘This happened in the past and obviously it could happen again.’”

There were an estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States as of 2022. The Republican party platform pledges to “Carry out the largest deportation operation in American history,” something analysts predict would be complicated and very costly. A growing share of Americans — though still a minority — support large-scale deportations, polls show.

The U.S. has more rigorous due process protections than it did in the 1930s, including a deportation process in the immigration courts, notes Johnson, the law school dean. But those protections could be overridden, he said, if a president were to declare a state of emergency for deportations and sympathetic courts were to uphold it.

“We could end up with mass removals or at least mass removals for a time,” he said. “So I think damage could be done.”

In 2006, California issued a formal apology for its role in the Mexican Repatriation, acknowledging that it violated people’s civil liberties and constitutional rights.

Becker’s bill to erect a commemorative monument passed the state assembly unanimously Wednesday and is expected to pass the senate this week. It must make it to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk by Saturday if it’s to be signed into law.

Martin Cabrera thinks that recognition is needed to help raise awareness about what he calls “a dark part of our American history.”

“How do you learn from those negative points in our history? One: recognize it and then document it. But also educate people and what transpired,” he said.

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America's Forgotten History Of Mexican-American 'Repatriation'

With a scarcity of jobs during the Depression, more than a million people of Mexican descent were sent to Mexico. Author Francisco Balderrama estimates that 60 percent were American citizens.

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Mass deportation may sound unlikely, but it's happened before, decade of betrayal, buy featured book.

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1930s: Repatriation of Mexicans - Ana Minian

By Time Staff

21 Lessons From America's Worst Moments

As many Americans prepare to toast their country’s past on the Fourth of July, there’s no escaping that not every facet of that history has been worth celebrating. In fact, for a great number, this very moment may fall into that latter category, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rock the nation   and a growing number of people confront the inescapable facts of past and present racism . June   polling revealed that Americans are unhappier now than they have been in decades, and a majority believe the U.S. is heading in the wrong direction.

It is hardly consolation to be reminded that this is not the first low point in American history. But a look back at that past does reveal that, at the very least, even the worst moments contain lessons that can still apply today. And if we listen to those lessons, perhaps a better future will be possible. With that in mind, TIME asked 21 historians to weigh in with their picks for “worst moments” that hold a lesson—and what they think those experiences can teach us.

1930s: Repatriation of Mexicans

As unemployment rose to record levels during the Great Depression, Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans were simultaneously blamed for taking jobs from U.S. citizens and, paradoxically, for living off public welfare. In response, immigration officials started deportation campaigns to rid the country of unauthorized migrants, while those who could not be deported because they were legal residents or citizens were pressured to leave “voluntarily.” With the support of the Mexican government, county officials in the United States often sponsored trains to return ethnic Mexicans to the border. The number of repatriated Mexicans is hard to know but estimates range from least 350,000 to as high as 2 million, out of which 60% are believed to have been American citizens—most of them children. However, only a few years after the final episode of repatriation in 1939-40, U.S. officials were desperate to bring Mexican workers back to replace American citizens who had gone to fight in World War II. The repatriation campaigns show us that the problems for which migrants are often blamed are not solved by their deportation. This moment is a reminder of the importance of not seeing those who live among us as “others” who can be welcomed or shunned based only on the need for their work.

Migrant familyf rom Mexico fixing a tire in California, February 1936.

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Article Contents

• The Formation of a Mexican Diaspora
• Migration Documents for the Journey to Mexico
• Navigating the U.S.-Mexico Border: More Documents
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Paper Trails: Repatriates, Mexican Consuls, and Transnational Mobility during the Great Depression

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Romeo Guzmán, Paper Trails: Repatriates, Mexican Consuls, and Transnational Mobility during the Great Depression, Journal of American History , Volume 109, Issue 2, September 2022, Pages 336–347, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaac237

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On February 7, 1930, the Mexican Consular official Alfredo Vazquez woke up at 5:30 a.m. and began a 710-mile trip from Kansas City, Missouri, to Scottsbluff, Nebraska. Despite car trouble and a snow storm, Vazquez arrived at his destination the next day, in time to host a large meeting about the Great Depression and the potential repatriation of Mexican migrants and expulsion of their families, which included U.S. citizens. This meeting was followed by several more gatherings and individual appointments at the home of the president of the local honorary commission (a migrant organization under the tutelage of Mexican consuls). Vazquez was but one of many Mexican consular officials throughout the United States who reached out to and engaged Mexican migrants during this economic crisis. Officials visited large cities and rural communities, corresponded with honorary commissions and other migrant organizations and individuals, and regularly published notices in Spanish-language newspapers. 1

Vazquez's labor was part of a campaign between the United States and Mexico, often referred to as Mexican repatriation, to encourage Mexicans to depart for Mexico. We know that approximately half a million Mexican nationals and U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry moved to Mexico during the depression. While Mexicans had played important roles in numerous industries throughout the twentieth century, Americans now viewed Mexican laborers as competition and Mexican families as a drain on vital resources. The Mexican government tried to balance nationalist sentiment, which could include the desire to bring back its nationals, with Mexico's economic reality. Rather than one event or program, the process labeled by scholars as “Mexican repatriation” can be characterized as a series of efforts to move Mexican nationals and U.S. citizens from the United States to Mexico. U.S. immigration officials conducted fear campaigns and deported Mexicans, local charities sought to remove Mexican migrant families from relief rolls (this included working with U.S. consular officials in Mexico to locate and secure aid from family members who resided in Mexico), state and nonstate actors provided Mexicans with free transportation to a city or pueblo in Mexico, and the Mexican government launched colonization and resettlement projects in Mexico. 2

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Borderlands: Mexican Repatriation in 1930s 36 (with 2018 update)

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Mexican Repatriation in 1930s is Little Known Story (with 2018 update)

By Rosa Prieto, Veronica Smith, Rosa Moreno, Jonatán Jaimes, Adri Alatorre and Ruth Vise.   Article first published in Vol.   24 (2005-2006) 

  2018 update

The 1930s. Financial panic. Rampant unemployment. Soup kitchens. The Great Depression. During this time, the United States underwent several years of uncertainty and worry. Before the system of national welfare programs went into effect, another attempt to improve the financial problems of the country involved our neighbor to the south, Mexico. The U.S. began a program of “repatriation” of Mexicans in the United States. 

In the Handbook of Texas Online , Robert R. McKay wrote that Mexicans had left the Southwest ever since Texas declared its independence from Mexico. In El Paso, Mexicans and Americans alike crossed the border freely for decades, and Mexican agricultural laborers made the trek back and forth season by season. But the return of Mexicans during the Depression involved much larger groups, with numbers ranging from 400,000-500,000 to a million or two, including many American-born children. McKay reminds us that the term “repatriate” is inaccurate since Americans cannot be returned to a foreign country. 

A national program of deportation began in 1928 and peaked in 1931. Secretary of Labor William N. Doak instigated a scare campaign against Mexicans with immigration officers, local police and newspapers publicizing deportation “raids” as a way to frighten Mexicans into leaving voluntarily. Dr. Jorge Chinea wrote that one problem with the mass departure lay in the fact that it included legal and illegal immigrants, temporary workers and permanent residents, U.S. citizens and aliens. 

Ironically, the demand for Mexican labor had been high just a decade before. These workers were willing to work for lower wages than American workers and, just like today, Mexicans filled many jobs that native Americans refused to do. Although they provided consistent and cheap labor, portions of the American public saw to attend only two more years of school in them as unimportant and even obstructive. Abraham Hoffman, author of Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Depression , stated that “most Mexican immigrants came from backgrounds of illiteracy, poverty, and harsh existence, but their opportunities for employment and advancement were also seriously narrowed by the limited view held by Anglo Americans toward them.” 

In 1924, Congress approved $1,000,000 in funds to establish the Border Patrol that would control and supervise the flow of immigration. Also in 1924, Congress passed the Quota Act, which restricted immigration from Asia and parts of Europe but did not include countries of the Western Hemisphere. In 1926, John C. Box of East Texas proposed a law to include Mexico in the national origin quota system, but Congress could not agree on it or similar bills. 

In hearings on these bills, representatives for ranching, agriculture, mining, railroad and other interests testified to the need for Mexican immigrants to work in these fields. In 1929, however, the State Department told Mexican consuls to enforce existing immigration laws strictly, particularly the “likely to become a public charge” clause, to eliminate any possible additions to American state welfare rolls.

McKay said, “In the last quarter of 1931 repatriation reached massive proportions; the roads leading to the Texas-Mexico border became congested with returning repatriates.” More than half of the repatriates left from Texas because many “desperate unemployed Mexicans from other states packed into its cities,” according to Phyllis McKenzie, author of The Mexican Texans. In Texas most repatriados departed from Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio and El Paso. 

Local businessmen witnessed the number of customers dwindling as Mexicans were repatriated. Tenements were vacated. Hundreds of small downtown El Paso businesses closed, with many owners forced to return to Mexico. By September 1931, immigration inspector Eugene Warren reported that “approximately 15,000 Mexicans from El Paso had repatriated in the previous ten to eleven months,” according to an M.A. thesis written by Yolanda Chavez Leyva. 

McKay wrote that the campaign “resulted in widespread violation of civil and human rights, including illegally imprisoning immigrants, deporting United States-born children, not permitting returnees to dispose of their property or to collect their wages, deporting many not legally subject to deportation because of their length of Texas residence, separating families, and deporting the infirm.” 

Antonio Prieto, the father of one contributor to this article, recalls that his father lost his job in Ranger, Texas, because he did not have papers to work legally where he did, the railroad. The young Prieto and his brothers caught crawfish in a nearby lake for his mother to cook for the family. They waited for the train to pass because once in a while a car would overturn, spilling out its load of fruit and vegetables, which they would gather and take home. Prieto, his parents and brothers were deported in May 1931, in El Paso, despite the fact that the children were all born in Texas. 

The Prietos went to Durango where they worked on a relative’s farm. Six months after their arrival, the parents, a daughter and the youngest brother died. The remaining children were divided among their grandparents, aunts and uncles. Prieto and his brothers had gone to elementary school in Ranger, but managed to attend only two more years of school in Mexico because they had to work. Prieto eventually returned to the land of his birth at the age of 31. He came to Juárez, found a job in El Paso and moved his wife to Juárez. Finally in 1977, Prieto applied for visas for his entire family and they moved to El Paso, wanting a better future than they could have in Mexico. 

Among the repatriados were women traveling alone, either widows or women trying to rejoin their husbands who had already been deported. Adela S. Delgado and her three daughters made the trip from Pueblo, Colorado, to Santa Eulalia, Chihuahua (six kilometers south of Chihuahua City). Besides the obvious problems, women such as Mrs. Delgado had to obtain a Certificate of Residency in order to enter Mexico when reaching the border and prove paternity of their children in order for them to be recognized as citizens. These requirements were made difficult without the man of the family. 

Texas and California had the highest number of repatriates. One of the areas most affected by repatriation was Los Angeles County, California. Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, authors of the book Decade of Betrayal , say that 50,000 Mexicans and their children left Los Angeles in a five-month period following the departure of the first official repatriation train on Feb. 10, 1931. 

In the Midwest and other areas of the country, officials often were not cooperative in helping Mexicans arrive at the border ready to enter Mexico. Mary G. Wells, overseeing the repatriation of Mexicans from Gary, Indiana, repeatedly sent Nationals to Mexico without proper documentation, resulting in prolonged suffering and waiting to enter the country. Many repatriates were destitute by the time they reached the border, and others were homeless because there was no one to take them in once they returned to Mexico. 

Mexico, herself in a recession and still feeling the effects of her protracted civil war, tried to help the thousands of repatriados , especially through their consuls. Mexico offered free transportation from the border of Texas, and reduced or even eliminated tariffs on the repatriates’ belongings. Mexico also led drives to raise money for needy repatriates, and in the late 1930s, made land available for them to colonize and farm, an enterprise whose success was mixed. Some local governments and public welfare offices in the United States also offered free transportation for Mexicans. 

Balderrama and Rivera wrote that infants and the elderly, pregnant women, the sick and the mentally ill suffered the most, and many died along the way. One of Mexico City’s leading newspapers, El Excélsior, reported that 25 children and adults died on one repatriation train just on the trip to the border. Many repatriates fell victim to the scare tactics used and neglected to report to their consuls, arriving at the border without necessary documentation. 

Journalist Robert N. McLean wrote about the conditions in Juárez in 1931: “Up at the customs house, there is a large corral, where early in January more than two thousand repatriados camped and starved, huddled together, waiting for a kind government to provide them with transportation so that they could move on. … Women swarmed about the warehouses picking up one by one the beans spilled through the holes in the [gunny] sacks.” 

Although thousands of repatriates suffered both on their way back to and inside Mexico, others left voluntarily and endured little deprivation. In an interview by historian Oscar Martinez with Severo Marquez, preserved by the Institute of Oral History in Special Collections at the University of Texas at El Paso Library, this Mexican Revolution veteran reminisced about his life in the United States and his eventual departure. Marquez worked in California, Arizona and Texas. His last position was a foreman for the Griffith Co. in Culver City, California, near Santa Monica, where he worked four years until 1931 before voluntarily returning to Mexico. 

Government inspectors insisted that World War I veterans be given the jobs that Marquez and eight other Mexican Nationals held, but the Americans were not used to the hard work of a paving company, so the original crew stayed. Marquez, however, returned to Mexico because his children had never met their relatives in Chihuahua. The Marquez family and three others caravanned to their various hometowns in cars loaded with their possessions. They had no trouble with customs, even taking in several weapons with which to protect themselves. They had heard a rumor about a defenseless Mexican family that was attacked and killed by wolves. 

The phenomenon of repatriation is riddled with stories that cannot be verified, with numbers that cannot be documented and with people who have kept silent for decades. The Wickersham Commission, reviewing immigration policy, harshly criticized Secretary Doak’s attitude toward repatriation, and the detention and examination of immigrants showed methods that were “unconstitutional, tyrannic and oppressive.” 

Today, younger Mexican-Americans are discovering that members of their families were repatriados , and two or three generations know little or nothing about this part of their history. A California group has sued for compensation, similar to that granted to Japanese who were interned during World War II. Other communities are conducting their own research and establishing organizations to educate their children and the greater community about this part of the Mexican immigrant’s story in America. Meanwhile, the Mexican immigrant is still in demand by American agribusiness and service industries, and the United States continues to try to find new ways to stem illegal immigration. 

UPDATE 2018  Since our article was published, several books and articles on Mexican Repatriation have been published, including Decade of Betrayal : Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s by Francisco E. Balderrama and They Should Stay There: The Story of Mexican Migration and Repatriation During the Great Depression b y Fernando Sa Alanís Enciso. But according to an Arizona Daily Star article by retired professor and college provost Edward Thompson III, the topic isn’t covered in textbooks and in a recent lecture, even educated baby boomers did not know the history. It is probably safe to say until perhaps recently, most Americans are not aware of the phenomenon, even El Pasoans, whose bridges saw many of the repatriates on their way back to Mexico, many of them American citizens.  A monument to the Depression Era Repatriation was erected in downtown Los Angeles’ Plaza de Cultura y Artes in February 2012, a place where hundreds were rounded up and forcibly deported. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) had sought to obtain reparations and an apology for survivors from California officials and received an apology in 2005. According to MALDEF president Thomas Saenz, at the time of the monument’s unveiling, the federal government had yet to apologize or acknowledge the mass deportation and “continues to allow unjustified deportations.”  That trend has accelerated with the current administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy. Critics say that this policy and removing the Obama era policy of prioritizing groups of immigrants to deport has led to fear in the immigrant community. In efforts to keep families together, children born in the United States may be taken by their deported parents to Mexico, echoing the forced repatriation of the 1930s. 

In our area, there have been several programs to repatriate undocumented border crossers in the past two decades, including an unpopular program in 2003 known as lateral repatriation that transported migrants apprehended in Arizona to El Paso and then released into Juárez. From 2004 to 2012, various iterations of a program known as the Interior Repatriation Program flew immigrants to Mexico City who were then transported to their hometowns in the interior. Since then, the issue of returning immigrants has been complicated by Central American refugees arriving in record numbers through Mexico. 

Mexican Repatriation Sources

• America’s Forgotten History of Illegal Deportations (The Atlantic, 2017)
• Hasta La Vista: Mexican Repatriation in Depression Era Tejas (Journal of South Texas, vol. 29, no. 2, Spring 2016) EPCC users only
• (lack of) INS Records for 1930s Mexican Repatriations
• McKay, Robert R. “Mexican Americans and Repatriation,” Handbook of Texas Online.
• Texas Mexican repatriation during the Great Depression.(full text dissertation)
• Severo Márquez interview (Institute of Oral History #175)
• Wickersham Commission Report
• Internment of San Francisco Japanese (sfmuseum.org)

• US and Mexico resume interior repatriation initiative ICE
• Fear itself: Donald Trump's real immigration policy VOX

Los Angeles Unveils the Apology Act Monument

Volume 36 Articles

• Volume 36. Best of Borderlands 2001-2010 (full issue) Volume 36 pdf
• Best of Borderlands 2001-2012 - Volume 36 issue page
• Letters from the Editors & Acknowledgements 36
• Olga Kohlberg Pioneered Many Local Organizations (with 2018 update)
• Union Depot Witnessed Growth of El Paso (with 2018 update)
• Houchen Settlement House Helped New Arrivals 36 (with 2018 update)
• Marcelino Serna Became World War I Hero 36 (with 2018 update)
• Mexican Repatriation in 1930s 36 (with 2018 update)
• Bataan Death March and POW Camps) 36 (with 2018 update)
• The Chew Legacy: The Story of Herlinda Wong Chew 36 (with 2018 update)
• Lucy Acosta’s Legacy Continues in LULAC 36 (with 2018 update)
• Forgotten No More: Korean War POW Tells Story of Survival 36 (with 2018 update)
• Last Updated: Oct 21, 2024 2:31 PM
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