Depression
and the Struggle for Survival
The Great
Depression of the 1930s hit Mexican immigrants especially hard.
Along with the job crisis and food shortages that affected all
U.S. workers, Mexicans and Mexican Americans had to face an additional
threat: deportation. As unemployment swept the U.S., hostility
to immigrant workers grew, and the government began a program
of repatriating immigrants to Mexico. Immigrants were offered
free train rides to Mexico, and some went voluntarily, but many
were either tricked or coerced into repatriation, and some U.S.
citizens were deported simply on suspicion of being Mexican. All
in all, hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants, especially
farmworkers, were sent out of the country during the 1930s--many
of them the same workers who had been eagerly recruited a decade
before.
The farmworkers
who remained struggled to survive in desperate conditions. Bank
foreclosures drove small farmers from their land, and large landholders
cut back on their permanent workforce. As with many Southwestern
farm families, a great number of Mexican American farmers discovered
they had to take on a migratory existence and traveled the highways
in search of work.
Many found
temporary stability in the migrant
work camps established by the U.S. Farm Security Administration,
or FSA. The FSA camps provided housing, food, and medicine for
migrant farm families, as well as protection from criminal elements
that often took advantage of vulnerable migrants. The FSA set
up several camps specifically for Mexican Americans in an attempt
to create safe havens from violent attacks.
The camps also provided an unexpected benefit.
In bringing together so many individual farm families, they increased
ties within the community. Many residents began organizing their
fellow workers around labor issues, and helped pave the way for
the farm labor movements that emerged later in the century. This
interview
with a leader of the FSA camp in El Rio, California describes
some of the day-to-day issues that the camp residents dealt with.
Although farming
was an important source of employment for Mexican immigrants,
by the end of the 1930s Mexican Americans were established throughout
the American workforce. Mexican immigrants and their descendants
could be found in most of the industries of the Southwest, including
ranching
and mining.
America's growing rail network was particularly important for
Mexican immigrants. The railroad industry had long turned to immigrants
from Mexico as a source of low-cost labor. In return, Mexican
workers found that the railways offered not only employment, but
also mobility. They often used this relatively inexpensive form
of travel to move their families further into the North and East
of the U.S., and into a more urban way of life. |