Immigration exodus a familiar story

DALLAS — The stock market tanked, unemployment rose and cries grew forceful against Mexican immigrants.

It was 1930.

In the decade that followed, an estimated 1 million people went to Mexico in a wave of deportations and voluntary repatriations. As many as half, it is believed, were U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry.

"There is this old saying that historians don't like to use, but here it is: History does repeat itself," said Francisco Balderrama, a professor at California State University, Los Angeles who helped chronicle the 1930s exodus in the book "Decade of Betrayal."

Indeed it has. In the past three years, more than 500,000 Mexicans have been repatriated from the United States. If their U.S.-citizen children joined them, that total is much higher.

The scope of the current exodus has historians and policymakers delving deeper into the almost-forgotten history of the 1930s deportations.

That history is personal for Roberto Alonzo, a 51-year-old Dallas lawyer and member of the Texas House. His now-deceased father was a toddler when he was taken to the northern Mexican state of Coahuila by his father in the 1930s. According to family lore, Alonzo said, his grandmother cried as her children left the U.S., saying, "What will they do in Mexico? They don't know Mexico."

"If that can happen in the '30s," Alonzo said, "it can happen now, and the kids will again be U.S. citizens."

The 1930 census tallied 640,000 Mexicans living in the U.S., said Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. By 1940, the figure was 380,000.

"Some of it was just physical removal in the Southwest," Passel said.

It is not known how many of those who left for Mexico were illegal immigrants. Many who left, according to scholars, were coerced.

Newspaper accounts filed in the archives of Mexico's Foreign Ministry document abuse and thefts on trains carrying Mexicans and Mexican Americans. According to "Decade of Betrayal," one article warned of raids on Mexicans by vigilante "unemployed groups."

In Mexico, there were reports of a backlash against U.S. citizens and proposed retaliatory moves by the Mexican government to repatriate Americans and to confiscate their property.

"American society hasn't realized what happened from that time frame. It is almost like an exodus that occurred," said Rep. Hilda Solis, D-Calif.

Two years ago, Solis pushed for federal legislation to form a commission to study the "deportation and coerced emigration" of Mexican Americans from 1929 to 1941. The bill never made it out of committee. Solis said she would like to raise the issue again.