I consider myself fairly enlightened in areas of race relations in this country.  Yet frankly, more often than I’d like to admit, I stumble upon some fascinating piece of history.  All my life, I have known about the itinerant Mexicans who have worked the fruit groves of the west coast.  What I didn’t know until recently was the historical context around the use of “foreign fruitpickers”.

Consider the following quotation from Austin E. Anson, managing secretary of the Salinas Vegetable Grower-Shipper Association, as told to the Saturday Evening Post, with my stipulation that I have purposely removed certain ethnic references:

We’re charged with wanting to get rid of [them]  for selfish reasons. We do. It’s a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men. They came into this valley to work, and they stayed to take over… If all […]  were removed tomorrow, we had never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything [that] grows. And we do not want them back […], either.

This sounds like a pretty obvious reference to the latino fruit and vegetable picker, who was viewed as a threat to the white interests in California.  However, allow me to share a similar quote in which I have not withheld the identity of the ethnicity under consideration, this time from newspaper columnist Henry McLemore.

I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. I don’t mean a nice part of the interior either. Herd ’em up, pack ’em off and give ’em the inside room in the badlands… Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.

The original quote was from 1942, and actually establishes much of the motivation for the removal of over 100,000 Japanese residents, the majority who were actually US citizens. The second quote shows the power of fear propaganda when directed against a particular race of people.

Mr. McLemore got his wish, as USAmerican citizens by the tens of thousands were summarily stripped of their possessions including their real estate and other holdings, and herded up and packed off to certain secured areas.

But what exactly does this have to do with Mexican fruit-pickers?  Well, as it turns out, after the removal of  the Japanese-Americans, and the simultaneous recruitment of white males for the foreign war efforts, no one was left to pick fruit and vegetables.  So through a series of so-called Bracero  (guest worker) agreements over 100,000 Mexicans were brought in to fill the void.

Even before the last of these agreements ended in 1964 Mexican and other hispanic workers continued to make themselves available, often bypassing the legal agreements, and any protections thereby offered.  In fact, many companies preferred the cheaper “non-bracero” worker, and as the US economy grew, so did other opportunities in construction and other manual labor.

Since it is difficult to quantify the “shadow work force” that subsequently developed in this country, one can only suggest that the contributions to the US economy by Hispanic workers have been vast.  Meanwhile, several generations  have been born to these families and now comprise much of the growing population of native born Hispanic US citizens.

However, the US economy has faltered against the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression.  If history has any instructive or predictive value, then some serious reflection is in order.

It turns out that that in the decade prior to the Second World War,  there were many Hispanics  in California, Texas and elsewhere.  As the Great Depression gripped the world’s economies, a concern developed regarding the large number of people of Mexican ancestry in this country.

Between 500,000 to 1,000,000 persons of Mexican ancestry were encouraged by whatever means available to leave the United States during the Great Depression.  This action, usually called the Mexican Repatriation forced hundreds of thousands of USAmerican citizens, often children of undocumented parents out of the country.

An online Texas history source explains:

Efforts to implement the deportation 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.

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/MM/pqmyk.html

In recent years, these children and their children have started to speak up concerning this action.

My grandparents were repatriated in 1931 after living peacefully and honestly in the U.S for twelve years. Their children were U.S. born and thus citizens who did not have any protection from this “repatriation”. Their return to Mexico was painful and traumatic since they had been raised in the U.S. and spoke English well and were culturally as much American as Mexican. They went to a country they did not know to suffer poverty and years of struggle before they could re-establish themselves economically and psychologically.

 

When my grandparents entered the U.S. there was no border, no border patrol, no real immigration laws. In 1917 all they had to do was pay $2.00 and present a doctor’s health clearance. Thus, they entered legally,worked hard and contributed to the economy of the U.S. Unfortunatelly, the laws were changed on them and in 1931 they were told “to go back” victims of a policy brought about by fear and prejudice.

Rosalinda Martinez http://history1900s.about.com/b/2004/09/12/mexican-repatriation-during-the-great-depression.htm

One historian suggests that this action by the federal and state governments dwarfs the removal of Japanese-Americans but has received little attention.

However in 2005 the following official apology was made to the Mexican-American community:

8722. 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.
http://law.justia.com/california/codes/gov/8720-8723.html

I do not question the sincerity of this legislation or the apology contained therein. However, I am concerned that in this, the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, the same blind forces of fear and inappropriate blame are again at play.

Is it enough to target with impunity an entire community based on faulty assumptions and stereotypical thinking, and then to offer an apology many years later?

Or, is there not place for our country’s self-examination of motives before we commit the same errors again?