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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.
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
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A lot of Americans suffered tremendously during the Great Depression. When there isn't enough to go around, Americans have nowhere to go. Mexicans and their children had Mexico to go to, we only had the United States. Hard times often call for hard choices.
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American citizens were also sent to relocation camps in the 1940s.
The relocation of Japanese-Americans into internment camps during World War II was one of the most flagrant violations of civil liberties in American history. According to the census of 1940, 127,000 persons of Japanese ancestry lived in the United States, the majority on the West Coast.
Japanese-American Relocation - World War II - HISTORY.com
www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/japanese-american-relocation
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The internment of German Americans refers to the detention of German nationals and German-American citizens in the United States during the periods of World War I and of World War II. ... Many more had distant German ancestry.
Internment of German Americans - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans
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Yes, they were, because the government was afraid of a loyalty to Japan and spies. Of course many weren't, but I'm sure some were or would have been. There was no time to sort through who was or wasn't or who might be or become one. Same thing was done to Germans and Italians but no one talks about that. I guess because they're Caucasian.
The United States won that war on two fronts in 3 years and 8 months because by the grace of God, we were not a nation of wimps.
While 110,000 to 120,000 Japanese Americans were safe in their internment camps inside the United States, 12 million other Americans were fighting two wars on two fronts and 418,500 Americans died horrible deaths fighting WWII on foreign soils to protect all Americans, including the Japanese Americans in the camps, and their freedoms they would soon enjoy again.
So spare me your concern for Japanese Americans safe in their internment camps. Given the same circumstance, there's a good chance the same decision would be made today with some ethnic populations with dual citizenship, recent arrivals and new citizens.
But hey, don't let me get in your way of trying to trash America.
Hard times means hard choices. And Americans are well-known or should be by now that we'll make the hard choice, every single time, to win.
