Their brutal repression of the Mexican population was tantamount to state-sanctioned terrorism. Texas had been carved out of Mexico by pro-slavery forces who would go on to enshrine white supremacy in their state constitution.
Privacy Policy Contact Us You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message. Anglos were also victims of lynch mobs, of course, but without the ceremony and public spectacle. Carrigan and Webb date the last lynching of a person of Mexican origin to They attribute the ending of this social practice to constant pressure from Mexico forcing the U. In one notorious case, the burning alive of a Mexican national by a Texas mob sparked riots outside the U.
Embassy in Mexico City and led to a boycott of U. JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. Related Articles. New Book on W.
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Issue: Winter Categories: Books. But though mob brutality eventually quelled, hatred of Spanish-speaking Americans did not. In the late s, anti-Mexican sentiment spiked as the Great Depression began. As the stock market tanked and unemployment grew, Anglo-Americans accused Mexicans and other foreigners of stealing American jobs. Mexican-Americans were discouraged and even forbidden from accepting charitable aid. As fears about jobs and the economy spread, the United States forcibly removed up to 2 million people of Mexican descent from the country—up to 60 percent of whom were American citizens.
Sometimes, private employers drove their employees to the border and kicked them out. In other cases, local governments cut off relief, raided gathering places or offered free train fare to Mexico. Though no formal decree was ever issued by immigration authorities, INS officials deported about 82, people during the period. The impact on Spanish-speaking communities was devastating. Some light-skinned Mexican-Americans attempted to pass themselves off as Spanish, not Mexican, in an attempt to evade enforcement.
People with disabilities and active illnesses were removed from hospitals and dumped at the border. His wife refused to accompany him and the family never saw him again. Though both the state of California and the city of Los Angeles apologized for repatriation in the early s, the deportations have largely faded from public memory.
Another little-remembered facet of anti-Latino discrimination in the United States is school segregation. Unlike the South, which had explicit laws barring African American children from white schools, segregation was not enshrined in the laws of the southwestern United States. Nevertheless, Latino people were excluded from restaurants, movie theaters and schools. At first, the schools were set up to serve the children of Spanish-speaking laborers at rural ranches.
Soon, they spread into cities, too. By the s, as many as 80 percent of Latino children in places like Orange County, California attended separate schools. Among them was Sylvia Mendez, a young girl who was turned away from an all-white school in the county. Nine years later, he helped found the civil rights group the League of United Latin American Citizens, which exists today. Recently, a group of academics, activists and journalists formed a group called Refusing to Forget to educate the public about violence against Mexican Americans and set up historical markers to memorialize the most brutal episodes.
John Moran Gonzalez, director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas, said the group has faced resistance from local historical societies. Why are you inflaming racial tensions? Valencia eventually got a historical marker near the site of the Porvenir massacre, about a four-hour drive east of El Paso. Nothing remains of the village, and the bodies of those killed rest in shallow graves across the Rio Grande in Mexico. In researching the massacre, Valencia found an affidavit by her great-grandmother describing the killing of her husband and her search for justice.
But justice never came. Cedar Attanasio reported from El Paso, Texas, where he covers immigration.
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