Voces de la repatriación

At the onset of the Great Depression, native-born white Americans made Mexican emigrants the scapegoats for their joblessness and other economic ills. Across the country, individuals, political leaders, and local organizations began campaigns to deport Mexican immigrants. These repatriation drives kick-started a decade-long trend in which the number of Mexicans immigrating to the United States was eclipsed by the number returning to Mexico.US historians—including Francisco E. Balderrama, Raymond Rodríguez, Camille Guerin-Gonzales, and others—have done much to expose and describe the long-forgotten history of the repatriation campaigns, using US archival sources and oral and written histories from the repatriates themselves to examine how such a thing could happen in the United States. Far less has been written about the ways that these repatriations affected Mexico and were perceived by the Mexican public. Fernando Saúl Alanís Enciso, a Mexican historian who has written extensively about migration, repatriation, and the Mexican government, is well qualified to correct that historiographical imbalance. In Voces de la repatriación, Alanís Enciso uses a rich assortment of Mexican archival and historical documents, press clippings, and interviews with repatriates and their descendants. His research results in a vivid description of the variety of ways that Mexicans perceived and responded to the wave of returnees arriving in Mexico between 1930 and 1933, the period when the repatriation drives were most intense.The book begins with a useful introduction to the scholarly and colloquial definitions of repatriates and repatriation and continues with a description of the repatriation drives. The rest of the book focuses on how the Mexican press, the public, and political figures reacted to the waves of returnees arriving in their homeland as well as to US actors. Then as now, Mexicans were highly attuned to US politics and policies, especially as these affected Mexico. As a result, responses to the repatriation drives were often based on an “antiyanqui” nationalism: newspaper editorials called on readers to boycott US expatriates and their businesses and on Mexicans to reject US culture. There was an uglier side to this nationalist fervor: the period saw increasing attacks on minority communities within Mexico, including Chinese, Guatemalans, and Jews. At the same time, most political elites had no desire, courage, or ability to confront the US government at a policy level.The repatriations also inspired a surge of compassion and support from individuals, organizations, and local and national government officials. Alanís Enciso uses historical documents from towns and states along Mexico's northern border in order to demonstrate how Mexicans in these localities worked to provide relief for their returning compatriots. Sympathetic people formed committees, raised money, and organized charitable events. In Chihuahua, for example, local businesses collected, among other things, “500 tortillas . . . 20 liters of atole . . . 200 tacos . . . [and] 500 packages of sweets” for repatriated families (p. 143). On a national level, experts formed the National Repatriation Committee and launched a federal fund-raising drive, the Campaign of Half a Million.This initial burst of compassion was accompanied by a utopian vision: to put repatriates to work in Mexico's struggling countryside. Mexican intellectuals, editorialists, and politicians idealized the returning migrants, assuming that—since they had been exposed to the supposedly superior technologies of the US labor market—they would be the perfect people to revitalize the languishing Mexican countryside. This vision fueled a plethora of colonization schemes in which repatriates were granted uncultivated lands and invited to form agrarian colonies. By 1934, however, almost all these colonies had failed: the colonization program was plagued with corruption, and the lands were exceedingly difficult to farm. Other government campaigns to help repatriates were similarly underfunded and underplanned, despite the official rhetoric that welcomed them and promised support.Repatriates also had to contend with rejection and disdain from some who failed to share this utopian vision. Many Mexicans thought that repatriates were “despatriados,” “pochos,” and criminals (pp. 193–95). Furthermore, there was widespread concern that thousands of jobless, penniless arrivals would be a drain on Mexican society. Alanís Enciso points out that these fears were largely misplaced: most repatriates eventually found their way to their hometowns and families or found jobs in Mexico's growing cities, where they were able to eke out a living.By the mid-1940s, the problem had solved itself. The US economy (and labor demands) had recovered, and many repatriates were able to migrate northward once again as braceros. Perhaps this is why the story of the repatriations has been forgotten for so long. Yet Mexicans—and those who study Mexico—would be wise to reexamine this history, which, in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election, feels eerily like a manual for the future. Alanís Enciso's accessible, thorough, and well-researched book is a very good place to start

Deportation · Economic history · Emigration · Ethnic group · Ethnology · Government (linguistics) · Historiography · Immigration · Mexican americans · Political science · Politics · Repatriation · White (mutation) · History · Law · Media, Journalism, and Communication History · Spanish Literature and Culture Studies

• Gendered banishment

  Open Access•Marla Andrea Ramírez•Latino Studies•2022

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