The Trump administration’s endless, bigoted campaign against immigrants may seem shocking. But the rhetoric accompanying that campaign, down to the metaphors comparing immigrants to small, loathsome animals, is nothing new. Much of what we hear today echoes opinions like the ones expressed in that editorial, published in the San Antonio Light, during the early years of the nation’s worst economic downturn, the Great Depression.
William Randolph Hearst’s own eugenicist views were proliferated throughout the newspaper titan’s media empire, which included the San Antonio Light. Hearst, who, as Fortune noted, owned “the biggest pile of newspapers in the world,” had a platform that reached an estimated 5 million daily and 7 million Sunday subscribers in major American cities.
In San Antonio, the Hearst editorial messages reverberated through both English- and Spanish-language media. The Light’s “vermin” editorial, along with its other anti-immigrant diatribes, were at once xenophobic and ironic, as they were published in a city that represented the crucible of Spanish-colonial culture and the U.S.’s Mexican American future. These immigration arguments, however, were far from parochial—they were regional, national, and even transnational. In turn, they made San Antonio’s print culture a case study for the nation’s immigration debates of that day—as well as our own.
While media technology was very different in the early 1930s, at least one important thing was the same then as now: News organizations were divided into camps with polarized ideas about who might be considered American. Many newspapers, including the Spanish-language outlet La Prensa, met the Hearst attacks with equally vociferous counternarratives extolling the virtues of immigrants to the United States.
In examining the 1930s back-and-forth between the news camps, something emerges that might be called “the mediated immigrant.” Unlike the real-life immigrant, composed of flesh and blood and known through personal experience, the “mediated” or “newspaper” immigrant is constructed of the themes, narratives, and rhetoric that U.S. broadsheets and tabloids offered their readers.
In Hearst’s newspapers, Mexicans were vicious criminals who constituted vermin. On La Prensa, Mexicans were indigenous heroes who conquered vermin. For the San Antonio Express, the immigrant was a critical economic component whose existence Texas depended upon to thrive.
San Antonio was a perfect environment for cultivating this mediated immigrant. There, the arguments over immigration weren’t theoretical; the United States was in the process of kicking hundreds of thousands of immigrants out of the country, and Texas sat at the center of the story.