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THE COLORS OF SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2014

Alice O'Connor
Alice O'Connor*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara
*
Professor Alice O'Connor, Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9410. E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

In the early 1930s, with worldwide economies sinking deeper into what would become the Great Depression, upwards of 400,000 people crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. They were en route to what for most would be permanent relocation to Mexico.1 Though many traveled from established enclaves in the Midwest and Northeast, the vast majority came from the Southwest, where Mexican America was concentrated. Claims on both sides of the border to the contrary, the mass exodus could hardly be described as voluntary. In addition to the tens of thousands of immigrants subject to stepped-up deportation efforts and state-sponsored repatriations, countless individuals and families were intimidated, “scare-headed” (the term used by an influential local official to describe the Los Angeles campaign) or otherwise coerced into leaving lest they become burdens on the country's overtaxed relief rolls. Significant numbers of the departed were U.S. citizens, swept up in what the progressive journalist Carey McWilliams called “a determination to oust the Mexican.”2

Type
State of the Discourse
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , Fall 2013 , pp. 549 - 553
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2013 

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References

REFERENCES

Esping-Andersen, Gosta (1990). The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Guerin-Gonzales, Camille (1994). Mexican Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900–1939. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Hoffman, Alexander (1974). Unwanted Mexicans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1920–1939. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.Google Scholar
Ngai, Mae M. (2004). Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Sanchez, George J. (1993). Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar