| On February 26th, a ceremony
is to take place in California apologizing
to the approximately 400,000 people of Mexican ancestry
who were deported from the USA
in a spate of ethnic cleansing that gripped the USA during the Depression. What is at stake in
this ceremony is not only the apology but what it says about
racism and ethnic cleansing in times of economic crisis.
Approximately two million people of Mexican
ancestry were deported from the USA during the Depression. This was not only Mexican
nationals, but Chicanos as well, i.e., US citizens of Mexican
ancestry. This was a blatant example of ethnic cleansing
taking place in the USA which destroyed
families and exiled family members, in some cases indefinitely.
 As
with many cases of mass trauma, this deportation process
was ignored in the general public. The “Repatriados,” as
those who were deported were referenced, existed in a twilight
zone. Those who were able to return often did not speak
of it and families that remained stuck in Mexico had to begin entirely new lives. It was
the work of people like Detroit activist Elena Herrada and
the Fronteras Nortenas organization that helped to re-raise
the issue, not only in California but also throughout the
USA.[note: for more information click here]
The 1930s, as a period, is often viewed as
one of increasingly progressive change. While there is certainly
some truth in this, the change was far from linear and far
from complete. When it came to race, intense white supremacy
was alive and well. And even many progressive organizations
failed to speak up in the face of such horrors. Mexicans
and Chicanos were being attacked in a wave of a specific
form of anti-immigrant mania. In a period of an intense
economic crisis, Mexicans and Chicanos were blamed for allegedly
taking the jobs of (white) Americans. Nothing comparable
was done to immigrants of European ancestry and it was only
a few short years later – 1942 - that in the midst of a
particular response to the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor, Japanese Americans were interned for the remainder
of the war (compared to the treatment of US citizens of
German and Italian ancestry).
One does not have to jump too far to see
the relevance of this historical horror to our situation
today. Just the other day, I was grabbed by an African American
in an airport who recognized me from my TransAfrica Forum
days. Among other things he wanted to say to me was the
matter of immigrants, and particularly about the competition
that is created through immigration. He refused to look
at the big picture but his conclusions were clear enough
that he did not need to express them: remove the immigrants.
Yet, just as the Great Depression was not
caused by Mexicans and Chicanos, today’s economic crisis,
and specifically the massive economic crisis faced by African
Americans, is not the result of immigrants, be they documented
or undocumented. It has to do with the system, and unfortunately
too many of us seem to be afraid that identifying the system
is the equivalent of looking into the face of the Gorgon,
turning us to stone. Thus, for right-wing populists and
for too many of our own people, it is easier to blame the
immigrant for our suffering than to recognize that capitalism
will use whoever it can to weaken the power of working people.
It used us in the period around World War I (and after)
as a cheap labor source, and it has used successive groups.
The mass, indiscriminate deportation of two million people
of Mexican ancestry was just one implication of this racist
irrationalism.
What’s to prevent this from happening again?
BlackCommentator.com
Editorial Board member, Bill Fletcher,
Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president
of TransAfricaForum and co-author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path
toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized
labor in the USA. Click here
to contact Mr. Fletcher.
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