Thread: L.A. CA. deported 400,000 Mexican/Americans from 1929 to 1944

Feb. 28, 2012 Updated: 2:16 p.m.

Faces of Immigration: 83 years after her removal to Mexico

By CINDY CARCAMO / THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Eighty-three years ago, Virginia Yañez and her siblings suddenly found themselves in a foreign land, impoverished and unable to speak the language.

"It was just the worse... what we suffered. It still hurts," Yañez, now 89, said in Spanish as she recalled the move.

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Faces of immigration

This profile is part of a regular series of vignettes that feature local people describing how immigration — legal and illegal — has affected their lives.

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If you have a story to tell, email the writer at ccarcamo@ocregister.com
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Yañez, 6 at the time, was one of thousands of U.S.-born children who in the early part of the 20th century found themselves uprooted from their homes and driven to an unrecognizable place – Mexico.

Yañez, her family and millions of other Mexican-Americans were the target of an aggressive program sparked by the Great Depression and spearheaded by the U.S. government to send 1.2 million U.S. citizens of Mexican origin to their ancestral homeland of Mexico from 1929 to 1944.

During the Mexican repatriation of the 1930s, 2 million people of Mexican ancestry -- most here legally -- left the country under threats and acts of violence.

On Sunday, Yañez, who lived in Orange County for 20 years before moving to Hemet two years ago, held a small American flag at a ceremony in Los Angeles to honor of the survivors of the 1930 repatriation. Dwarfed by a black-stone plaque, she mouthed the words emblazoned in a permanent monument that acknowledges California's apology for its role in the mass removals.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and La Plaza de Cultura y Artes sponsored the ceremony, attended by hundreds of survivors, dignitaries and even celebrity Eva Longoria, to unveil the monument as part of a formal apology by the state. About 400,000 of the millions displaced were U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents living in California

Yanez said the monument and ceremony helped heal the wounds a bit.

The small, stout woman with big brown eyes and her older sister Consuelo -- equally as small with an impish smile -- could barely see past the wall of media lined up between them and the speakers at the event. Still, it didn't matter much, she said, because she was preoccupied with memories of the past that rushed through her mind.

In 1929, Yañez first listened to her parent's conversations about the many Mexican-Americans pressured to leave the country.

Her parents, Cleto and Dina De Anda, were both in the country legally after fleeing the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. It was a different time and they paid a one cent toll in 1919 to cross into the United States legally from Mexico, Yañez said.

Cleto De Anda worked at an ice house and later in a silver mine, making enough money to provide a comfortable life for his family, Yañez said.

He bought a house surrounded by lush fruit orchards, grapevines and a strawberry garden in Roseville -- a small rural Northern California town. The couple's seven children thrived, attending school and singing in the church choir. Yañez said she can't remember ever wanting for anything when she lived there.

"We always had a lot of food," she said. "I loved eating our strawberries. We lived very well."

Yañez, one of handful of Mexican-American students in her predominantly Caucasian school, said she never felt discriminated against.

This changed during the Great Depression.

In reaction to the spiraling economy, federal, local, state and private sector officials collaborated to drive out people of Mexican ancestry, targeting them in raids, indiscriminately characterizing them as "illegal aliens" even when they were United States citizens or permanent legal residents. The forcible and illegal deportations and roundups intimidated many to leave. This was the case for Yañez and her family.

Cleto De Anda's boss told him he'd soon be without a job because of his race and that he could stay and eventually be removed or take a one-way train ticket to Mexico.

He chose the latter, Yañez said.

"My mother did what father wanted," she said. "But she cried a lot. It hurt my mother more than my father."

De Anda sold his home for $300 and they packed as much as they could into a green and black trunk.

Yañez still remembers how excited she and her siblings were at the train station for the new adventure.

"We thought we were just going for a trip," she said.

Still, she could tell something was wrong.

"My mother cried and cried." she said.

Even now, her face flushes and her eyes well up with tears thinking of that moment.

"She thought, what is she going to do with seven children?" Yañez said.

The brown adobe house with a dirt floor and no indoor plumbing in a rural desert town in Jalisco state was a departure from the sunny California home crowned with a lush front yard trellis.

The girls who once went shopping for new shoes and dresses went barefoot. In the town with no schools or even a hospital, the girls spent their time hunting wild animals to help feed their family and even became experts in catching rattlesnakes.

"I yearned for sweet bread or fruit we used to eat," Yañez said. "I wanted to go to school."

The food -- mostly beans and tortillas -- in Mexico didn't sit well with Yañez and her siblings. A few months after moving to Mexico, the two youngest sisters, Dora and Filomena, fell ill. The toddlers died within hours of each other, Yañez said. At the same time, Yañez's mother suffered from various ailments, including back aches.

All the while, the Mexican natives made fun of Yañez and her siblings' little Spanish and different clothing, including their short dresses and bloomers -- in fashion then for young American girls. The Mexican girls wore long dresses without underwear, Yañez said.

The family moved to various towns before settling at a ranch.

"We never did again have what we used to have. What we had here," Yañez said.

During her whole time in Mexico, Yañez promised herself that one day she would return. At 27, she moved to South San Francisco but had to learn the language all over again. The only English she knew were the school rhymes and choir songs she learned at church.

"I still remember them," she said.

Yañez met her husband in the Bay Area, married and had children. While she'd make trips to Mexico to visit her parents, she never really enjoyed going back and stayed away in later years.

She eventually relearned English and is fluent. However, she feels more comfortable speaking in Spanish.

Despite that, she said she never felt comfortable in Mexico.

"I'm an American" she said in Spanish. "I was always an American."

Contact the writer: 714-796-7924 or ccarcamo@ocregister.com or Cindy Carcamo (@theCindyCarcamo) on Twitter

Faces of Immigration: 83 years after her forced removal to Mexico | yañez, mexican, mexico - News - The Orange County Register

Raymond Rodriguez dies at 87; documented 1930s mass deportations to Mexico

Raymond Rodriguez co-authored 'Decade of Betrayal,' focusing on the unjust roundup and deportation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans by federal officials seeking remedies for the Great Depression.

Raymond Rodriguez, left, and Francisco Balderrama co-wrote a book about the raid at La Placita in 1931 that triggered the deportation of more than 1 million people to Mexico, many U.S. citizens. (Wally Skalij, Los Angeles Times / February 25, 2001)

By Elaine Woo, Los Angeles TimesJuly 6, 2013, 2:13 p.m.

Raymond Rodriguez was 10 years old in 1936 when his immigrant father walked out of the family's Long Beach farmhouse and returned to Mexico, never to see his wife and children again.
The son would spend decades pondering the forces that had driven his father away, an effort that reached fruition in "Decade of Betrayal," a social history of the 1930s focusing on an estimated 1 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans unjustly deported or scared into leaving their homes in the United States by federal and local officials seeking remedies for the Great Depression.
"Americans, reeling from the economic disorientation of the depression, sought a convenient scapegoat. They found it in the Mexican community," Rodriguez and co-author Francisco Balderrama wrote in the 1995 book, which sparked legislative hearings and formal apologies from the state of California and Los Angeles County officials.
Rodriguez, 87, a former Long Beach City College administrator and columnist for the Long Beach Press-Telegram, who believed "the greatest tragedy of all" was public ignorance of the deportations, died June 24 at his Long Beach home. The cause was believed to be a heart attack, said his daughter, C.J. Crockett.
"It is no exaggeration to say that without the scholarly work by Ray and Francisco, no one but a handful of individuals would ever know about the illegal deportations of Mexican Americans in the 1930s," said former state Sen. Joseph Dunn (D-Santa Ana), who sponsored 2005 legislation that apologized for California's part in "fundamental violations" of the deportees' constitutional rights.
Last year the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors apologized for the county's role in the roundups.
The deportations began a decade before the World War II internment of 110,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Federal and local authorities rounded up Mexican immigrants and their families at dance halls, markets, hospitals, theaters and parks, loading them onto vans and trains that dumped them on Mexican soil.
One of the most notorious raids occurred in 1931 at La Placita, a popular gathering spot for immigrants outside Olvera Street in Los Angeles. A team of Immigration and Naturalization Service agents armed with guns and batons sealed off the small public park and herded 400 terrified men and women into waiting vans. The success of the raid galvanized authorities in other localities across the country.
By 1940, Rodriguez and Balderrama found, more than 1 million people of Mexican descent had been deported. Government officials used the term "repatriation" to describe their actions, but the researchers found that 60% of the expelled were U.S. citizens. "They might as well have sent us to Mars," Rodriguez once said, recalling the words of one "repatriate."
Most of the deportees were not welcomed in Mexico. They were criticized for their American ways, for not fighting to remain in the U.S., and for being a burden on Mexico's economy.
"Ultimately, it was the children who bore the brunt of rejection and discrimination," wrote Rodriguez and Balderrama, whose book relied on oral histories as well as archival records. "They were neither Americans nor Mexicans as defined by their respective cultures."
The authors included in their estimate thousands of legal residents and U.S. citizens who left the U.S. on their own.
Rodriguez considered his father one of them.
"He figured: 'If they don't want me, I'm going back,'" the scholar told The Times in 2001.
His parents had immigrated around 1918 and became tenant farmers in Long Beach. "We had no money, but we had food, so we always had guests for dinner," Rodriguez recalled in 2003 in the Sacramento Bee.
When his father announced he was leaving, his mother refused to go, saying "I have five kids born here — we're not going to Mexico."
The older children plowed the fields, but hard times worsened and the family depended on welfare for awhile. Rodriguez, who was born in Long Beach on March 26, 1926, dropped out of high school his senior year and joined the Navy, serving in the Pacific during the war.
Later, he went to college on the GI Bill, earning a general education degree from Long Beach City College in 1951 before entering Long Beach State, where he received a bachelor's in elementary education in 1953 and a master's in education administration in 1957. In 1962 he earned a master's in U.S. history from USC.
He taught elementary and secondary students in the Long Beach Unified School District for almost a dozen years, until 1969. Over the next two decades he taught history and political science at Long Beach City College and also served as its affirmative action officer and dean of personnel, retiring in 1988.
In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his wife, Almira; son Craig Smith; sisters Angelina Ayala and Mary Johnston; and five grandchildren.
Rodriguez supported reparations for the deportees and their survivors, although "he wasn't a real strong supporter," Balderrama, an emeritus professor of Chicano studies and history at Cal State Los Angeles, said last week. Proposals to provide redress have failed to win legislative support and Rodriguez did not believe it was possible to place a monetary value on the suffering caused by the coerced departures.
"How is anybody going to compensate me for my loss?" he said, nearly overcome with emotion, when asked by the Sacramento Bee.
He saw public education as a more important goal.
"Over 1 million Mexicans were deported and yet, have you read about it in your history books?" Rodriguez asked a class at Cal State Long Beach several years ago. "Not knowing is the greatest tragedy of all. We know about the Holocaust. We know about the Japanese camps in World War II, but we don't know about the Mexicans."
elaine.woo@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-raymond-rodriguez-20130707,0,2536503.story

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