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.