Persuasive Essay 2 Pages Double Space about
El Norte
The Borderland of Chicano America
Mexican Migration Patterns
1900-1910 – 25,000
1910-1920 – 170,000
1920s – 1/2 million
Why the sudden increases?
Push Factors
Population shift from rural to urban centers
Land companies and speculators displaced small farmers
Unstable economic conditions due to uneven development led to discontent and eventually the Mexican Revolution in 1910
Toppled the Porfirio Diaz regime
Factional divisions manifested into civil war until 1920
Pull Factors
U.S.-Mexico border
Fluid, flexible, porous: easy movement of labor; minimum bureaucracy
Mexican International RR (1895) facilitated transport of workers (Durango-Eagle Pass, Texas)
Crossing the Rio Grande: TX, AZ, NM, CA into MI, IL
Immigration Act of 1924
5
Employment
CA/TX: construction, road building, public works
Chicago, IL: factories, steel mills, packing-house
Sacramento, CA: railroad tracks
Most worked in CA agriculture
1920s: three-fourths of CA’s 200,000 farm laborers
1942-1964: Mexican Farm Labor Program (bilateral labor recruitment)
Labor Shortage and Immigration Exclusions
1924 Immigration Act – 2% Quota
The new immigration law drastically reduced the total immigrant population from 706,896 during the fiscal year ending June 30, 1924 to 304,488 in 1926.
Prohibited immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe
Excluded “aliens ineligible for naturalized citizenship”
Did not apply to countries in the Western Hemisphere
Who is to do the manual labor?
Two Alternatives
Mexican: heavy immigration between 1924 and 1926
Filipinos: U.S. Nationals – 4,000 per annum, 1923-1929
Labor Discipline: Use and Discard
Search for labor over whom agribusiness could exert control:
While “the American negro, the Porto Rican negro and the Filipinos cannot be deported if they prove later to be a crime menace,” Taylor argued, “the Mexican can be.”
A lobbyist for the farm industrialists to Washington urged that “we in California would greatly prefer some setup in which our peak labor demands might be met and upon completion of our harvest these laborers would be returned to their country.”
“If charity spends one dollar on the Mexican in California, the State profits two dollars by having him here. The Mexican can be deported if he becomes a county charge, but the others are here to stay.”
Anti-Mexican American Orgs.
CA Joint Immigration Committee (CJIC): Citing Ozawa and Thind cases, the committee argued that Mexicans are members of the “red” race, not white, thus ineligible for naturalized citizenship.
Webb/Johnson – as CJIC members who authored the Alien Land Law
Native Sons of the Golden West (NSGW) – sought to bring a test case before court to settle the issue of race and citizenship for Mexicans
American Eugenics Society – Deportation of immigrants
Contesting Citizenship of Mexican Americans
Are they white?
Legal Attempts to Change Mexican Racial Status
1931 – Lemon Grove, San Diego, attempted to segregate Mexican American students
1935 – CJIC and NSGW – test case
U.S. District Court, Buffalo, NY
Timoteo Andrade: tried to apply the “one-drop rule” – Mexicans have a “strain of Indian blood”
1940 Nationality Act: extended citizenship to “white persons, persons of African nativity or descent, and descendants of races indigenous to the Western Hemisphere.”
Repatriation
Box and Harris Bill (1925, 1926) sought to restrict Mexican immigration but failed to pass
Great Depression
Repatriation: perception that they became public charge
Put in boxcars and sent back “home,” though some 60% were born on U.S. soil
400,000 repatriated