Double Standards

DURING ECONOMIC hard times, people worried about their livelihood often come to see hard-working others as a very real threat. Nativism rose, not surprisingly, during the Great Depression. During the 1930s, between 500,000 and one million returned to Mexico, many by deportation, and according to one estimate, over half of those deported were actually U.S. citizens.1

According to historian Mae M. Ngai, although the Immigration Service did not organize or fund the “repatriation” of Mexicans, it “encouraged [it] by generating an atmosphere of fear of deportation.” In 1931, police and immigration officials raided La Placita, the center of the Mexican colonia in downtown Los Angeles, lining up about four hundred people and demanding to see passports. Such raids were commonplace during the Depression. According to the witness of an immigration raid in San Fernando, “The deputy sheriffs arrived in late afternoon when the men were returning home from working in the lemon groves. They started arresting people.… The deputies rode around the neighborhood with their sirens wailing and advising people to surrender themselves to the authorities. They barricaded all the exits to the colonia so that no one could escape.” In 1939, at the request of the Mexican government, the Immigration Service transported over 1,200 Mexicans throughout Texas – mostly families and about half being U.S. citizens – to Brownsville, where they were forced to cross the border and settle on small plots of agricultural land, which had been established for them by the Mexican government. Writes Ngai, “The repatriation of Mexicans was a racial expulsion program exceeded in scale only by the Native American Indian removals of the 19th century.”2

Notwithstanding the deportations of the ’30s, in 1940, the Census estimated over 2 million Hispanics living in the United States, of which about 78 percent were of Mexican origin; according to one estimate, about three-quarters of these were born in the United States.3 Still, by World War II, most Mexicans were still socially, culturally, and politically removed from the American mainstream. Historian David G. Gutiérrez notes that one source of interethnic tensions may have been the Anglo reaction to the emergence of a “pachuco gang” subculture among second generation youth. He writes:

These groups of pachucos (sometimes called cholos) were characterized by their use of a hybrid English-Spanish slang dialect known as caló, the adornment of their bodies with tattoos, and most conspicuously, by a distinctive style of dress, the zoot suit. Zoot suits were part of a fashion ensemble that included long jackets with exaggerated shoulders, pegged pant legs, thick-soled shoes, long watch chains, and wide-brimmed pancake hats worn over duck-tail haircuts that were then in style not only among many young Mexican Americans but among some urban African American and Filipino youths as well.4

Shortly after the outbreak of the war, two incidents intensified the public’s awareness of Pachuco gangs and provoked concerns about Mexicans living in the mainstream’s midst. One that received widespread press attention was the Sleepy Lagoon murder case in August 1942, which followed when the dead body of José Diaz was found near Sleepy Lagoon, a water-filled gravel pit in south-central Los Angeles used by Mexicans. Diaz may have been a member of a gang, the Downey Boys, and police suspected that members of a rival gang, the 38th Street Club gang had beaten him. In a flagrant miscarriage of justice, over six hundred youths were arrested, and 22 members of the gang were charged with criminal conspiracy. According to the prosecution, “every defendant, even if he had nothing whatsoever to do with the killing of Diaz, was chargeable with the death,” and during the trial, the judge, Charles W. Fricke, permitted many irregularities, including not allowing the defendants to cut their hair, change their clothes, or consult with counsel, and the press portrayed them as hoodlums. Captain E. Duran Ayres, the head of the Foreign Relations Bureau in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, submitted a report stating that the Mexican’s “desire to kill, or at least let blood” was an “inborn characteristic that has come down through the ages,” noting that Mexicans were descendants of Aztecs, who sacrificed 30,000 victims a day. Although the verdict was later overturned, twelve of the defendants were convicted of murder and five of assault.5

A second well-reported outbreak of violence occurred during the so-called Zoot-Suit Riots, in Los Angeles, which erupted in June 1943 after a group of Mexican-American men allegedly attacked a group of sailors flirting with some Mexican-American women. That night, sailors broke into the Carmen Theater and beat up the Mexican-American men in the audience, tearing off their zoot-suits. Police arrested the victims. The following evening, a group of 200 sailors and their allies rented cabs, cruised down Whittier Boulevard, and beat up Mexican-American youth. The press portrayed the sailors as heroes, with headlines such as “Zoot-Suiters Learn Lesson in Fight with Servicemen.” Two days later, thousands of soldiers, sailors, and civilians descended on pachucos in downtown Los Angeles, pulling them from streetcars and movie theaters, beating them, and tearing off their zoot-suits. Over the next few days, hundreds of Hispanics were arrested, and fear gripped the Mexican community of Los Angeles. When First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her nationally syndicated column that “longstanding discrimination against the Mexicans in the Southwest” was the cause of the riots, the Los Angeles Times responded with the headline “Mrs. Roosevelt Blindly Stirs Race Discord.”6

World War II may not have put an end to White America’s bigotry against those of Mexican descent in their midst, but it did end the perceived economic threat that Mexicans posed. Mexicans were essential to the American war effort, and an estimated 350,000 Mexican Americans fought in the Armed Forces. Unlike African Americans, they did not fight in segregated units, which resulted in not only an intimate interchange with non-Hispanics, but following the war, the demand for equal rights, dignity, and respect. Writes historian Mario T. García:

The convulsions of the Great Depression combined with new economic and political opportunities during World War II and with the historic discrimination in the Southwest against Mexicans and rising expectations among Mexican Americans to give birth to a new leadership, cognizant of its rights as U.S. citizens and determined to achieve them … Together this generation forged a spirited and persistent struggle for civil rights, for first-class citizenship, and for a secure identity for Americans of Mexican descent. Mexican Americans identified with the World War II slogan: “Americans All.”7

As had occurred during World War I, World War II also brought with it acute labor shortages, particularly agricultural labor, and once again, the United States turned to Mexico. Given the past experience of Mexican immigrants to the U.S., the Mexican government, an ally in the war, insisted on having a say, and there were high level negotiations between the two countries that resulted in the promise that workers would receive a minimum wage, decent working and living conditions, and round-trip transportation. Established by an executive agreement between President Roosevelt and Mexican President Manuel Ávila Camacho in July 1942, the bracero program (named for the Spanish term meaning “manual laborer,” or more literally “one who works using his arms”) was legalized by Congress in 1943. Between 1943 and 1949, an estimated 400,000 braceros came to work under the program.

Despite the guarantees extended to workers, braceros were essentially “bound” by the terms of the contract. They were forced to put money into a “savings fund” into which they were required to deposit 10 percent of their wages, with the promise that it would be paid to them upon their return to Mexico. Additionally, wives and children were not allowed into the country, and any “breach” of the contract, such as stopping work, resulted in deportation.8

Although the bracero program did grant braceros the formal right to join American unions, when they did speak out or attempt to unionize, growers, with the support of government forces, undermined their efforts. Historians Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis write: “By individualizing the contract, collective bargaining was precluded. This secured a way to detach bracero labor from the rest of the working class and legally redefine temporary workers as the virtual property of the owners.”9

Well aware of this, the government in Mexico City, which moved considerably to the right under Miguel Alemán, had much to lose should there be a rift with the United States, as American capital began to flow into Mexico. Additionally, the Mexican government benefited by having an escape valve for dispossessed farmers, and the Mexican economy was the beneficiary of about $30 million in remittances, making the Bracero Program the third largest “industry” in Mexico.10 Despite the remittances, with the resulting outflow of labor, Mexican landowners pressured the Mexican government to take action. In December 1943, the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C. wrote to the U. S. Secretary of State requesting that the U.S. government “adopt the measures which may be appropriate to prevent the illegal entry of Mexican workers not in possession of bracero contracts.” The Embassy warned that if control was not established over the flow of illegal immigration into the U.S., Mexico would “affect a complete revision of the [Bracero] agreements.” Within six months, the chief supervisor of the U.S. Border Patrol, W.F. Kelly, launched an “intensive drive on Mexican aliens” by deploying Special Mexican Deportation Parties throughout the country, armed with planes and trucks “to target, apprehend, and deport undocumented Mexican nationals.”11

When the Bracero Program was first announced, countless Mexicans were rejected by the recruitment center, which had been established in Mexico City, or refused the terms of the six-month long contracts, and many crossed the U.S. border, often through Texas, as undocumented workers, or mojados, wetbacks, as they were known. According to historian Kelly Lytle Hernández, total apprehensions doubled from 16,330 in 1943 to 33,681 in 1944, while the number of interrogations reported by the U.S. Border Patrol increased nearly twentyfold, from 473,720 in 1940 to 9,389,551 in 1943. By the early 1950s, Border Patrol officers were apprehending so many Mexicans that INS centers were filled beyond capacity.12

Mexicans were not the only Spanish-speaking group to migrate to the United States in large numbers after the Second World War. The war’s end coincided with the first large influx of Puerto Ricans, whose population on the mainland increased from 69,967 individuals in the 1940s to 887,662 in the 1960s. Although the Jones Act of 1917 granted citizenship to Puerto Ricans, thereby eliminating any legal barriers to migration, it was not until the 1950s that Puerto Ricans began to arrive in large numbers, due to high unemployment in Puerto Rico and the introduction of low-cost air travel; the six-hour flight from San Juan to New York City cost less than $50. Another contributing factor was the 1951 referendum in which the Puerto Rican population voted overwhelmingly to become a U.S. commonwealth, renouncing its prior status as a colony.

In 1960, 21 percent of Puerto Ricans migrated from the island, and most went to New York City. In 1970, nearly 70 percent of the Puerto Rican born population on the U.S. mainland lived in the New York metropolitan area.13 During these peak years of Puerto Rican migration, known as the “Great Migration,” those arriving were typically young and urban, with little education and limited occupation skills. They came to the U.S. because of limited employment opportunities in Puerto Rico and the lure of plentiful low skilled manufacturing jobs in New York City.

Life in the metropolis was difficult, and most were severely economically disadvantaged. It was during the Great Migration that social scientists began to examine the “Puerto Rican problem” in New York City, and they focused on Puerto Ricans struggling with English, dropping out of school, working in in low-paying, dead-end jobs, unemployment, and living in dilapidated housing.14 Wrote one scholar in 1951:

A primary evil for the new migrants is the lack of decent housing. High-rent slums are typical of Harlem. Yet to these areas must the Puerto Rican go because he is an out-cast in other areas until he is properly adjusted or because of his dark skin. It is difficult to get “started” as high rents and food costs continue to keep living standards and savings down. New York officials hope to relieve the conditions by housing projects with rents costing $9.00 per room per month.15

Another obstacle facing Puerto Ricans was racial discrimination, and they were frequently stigmatized as “lazy, ignorant, criminally prone, sexually obsessed, physically unfit, culturally unassimilable, and dark-skinned aliens [even though they were U.S. Citizens].”16 The musical drama West Side Story accurately illustrates many of the hardships faced by Puerto Rican immigrants living in New York City in the 1950s. The Puerto Ricans in the story are harassed and assaulted by the Jets, a neighborhood gang composed of White immigrants that occupied the neighborhood before. The police in the musical, Officer Krupke and Detective Schrank, treat the Puerto Ricans with contempt, referring to them as “Spics” and other racial slurs. Detective Schrank confides to Riff, the leader of the Jets, that they are on the same side and that he will “lend a hand” in the fight against the Puerto Ricans. Writes sociologist Clara Rodríguez:

Puerto Ricans presented an enigma to Americans because, given the European-American perspective, Puerto Ricans were an ethnic group comprising more than one racial group. From such a perspective, Puerto Ricans were racially both Blacks and Whites; ethnically, they were neither. Thus placed, Puerto Ricans early found themselves caught between two polarities yet dialectically at a distance from both. Puerto Ricans were considered neither White nor Black. Yet they considered themselves more than White or Black.17

According to historians Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Reimers, “The Puerto Rican experience in New York and other major cities on the continent is probably closer to that of the European immigrants who landed on the East Coast and settled in urban areas than to that of the Mexicans in the West.” In New York, Puerto Ricans replaced the earlier European immigrants, particularly Italians and Jews, in the low-level factory jobs in which they worked and in the urban slums they had inhabited. Like the Europeans, they spoke a different language; unlike them, Puerto Ricans were not white. Although higher status is accorded to lighter skinned people in Puerto Rico, this was hardly preparation for the many Puerto Ricans who learned that, on the mainland, “the darker their skin, the greater the difficultly in gaining acceptance and adjusting to the dominant culture.”18

Another group to enter the United States in large numbers during this time were Dominicans, many of whom entered the country illegally. It is estimated that from 1960 to 1996, over 700,000 migrated to the United States, and most, like Puerto Ricans, settled in New York City. Lacking documentation, their opportunities for employment were limited; even among the legal immigrants, few spoke English, and many lacked skills and education, particularly among those coming from rural areas.19 Like Puerto Ricans, racial discrimination exacerbated the difficulties encountered by Dominicans. About 75 percent of the Dominican population is mulatto and 10 percent is Black. However as Latin American scholar Jorge Duany notes, “Racial prejudice and discrimination [against Blacks] have been central features of … Dominican identity,” and it is likely that the actual number of Blacks is significantly much higher, especially by the common standard of hypodescent applied in the United States, whereby a “single drop” of Black blood qualifies one as Black. Because of discrimination, many Dominicans in New York settled in areas adjacent to African-American neighborhoods or in Dominican enclaves, such as Washington Heights. Writes Duany, “The racialization of Dominican immigrants has been a prime obstacle to their successful incorporation into the labor and housing markets of the United States.”20

Meanwhile, tensions were brewing in the American West, spurred on by a marked increase in Mexican immigration. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a rebellion took place in south Texas between farmers and ranchers, who depended on illegal workers, and the U.S. Border Patrol. Writes historian Kelly Lytle Hernández, the former used “everything in their arsenal. They met officers at their gates with shotguns. They ostracized officers in the community. They charged the Border Patrol with violating American freedoms at home, and they accused officers of fostering communism abroad.”21

By the early 1950s, there was a “crisis of control” along the U.S.-Mexico border, which culminated in the notorious Operation Wetback in the summer of 1954, during which the INS, headed by Commissioner Joseph Swing, executed a blatantly military operation.22 According to Swing, the “alarming, ever-increasing, flood tide” of undocumented Mexican workers constituted “an actual invasion of the United States.” He responded with a campaign involving approximately 750 immigration officers, 300 jeeps, cars, and buses, and 7 airplanes, in an operation focused on South Texas and southern California, but extending as far as Chicago. At the campaign’s outset, about 3,000 undocumented workers were apprehended a day, about 170,000 during the first three months; in all, the INS apprehended 801,069 Mexican migrants from 1953 through 1955.23 In January of 1955, Swing declared, “The day of the wetback is over.”24

Still, under the Bracero Program, the Mexican population continued to grow, reaching a peak in 1956 when 445,000 Mexicans were contracted to work, mostly in agriculture, 75 percent in Texas and California alone. However, because of the increased mechanization of agricultural, the demand for workers began to decline, particularly after 1960. Additionally, the program came under increasing attack by Mexican activists such as César Chavez and Ernesto Galarza, as well as church groups, who were appalled at the conditions that braceros faced. In 1959, Congressman George McGovern introduced a bill to phase out the importation of Mexican contract laborers.25

In November 1960, the CBS documentary Harvest of Shame, presented by journalist Edward R. Murrow, exposed the plight of migrant workers and created a public clamor, which convinced the newly elected President Kennedy that braceros were “adversely affecting the wages, working conditions, and employment opportunities of our own agricultural workers.”26 In 1962, Congress passed legislation modifying the Bracero Program, limiting contracts to six months, increasing insurance benefits, and raising wages. By that year, fewer than 200,000 braceros were entering the U.S., the smallest number since Operation Wetback, and by 1964, the number of braceros was lower than at any other time since the program was institutionalized.27

The Bracero Program was allowed to expire on December 31, 1964. In 1965, passage of the Hart-Cellars Act ended the immigration quota system that had so dramatically favored northern Europeans and allocated visas on the basis of skills and family ties to U.S. residents, rather than national origins. The legislation initially created numerical quotas of 170,000 people from the Eastern Hemisphere and 120,000 from the Western Hemisphere, but in 1976, the hemispheric caps were abandoned in favor of a total ceiling of 290,000 visas, with each nation capped at 20,000 visas per year.28 Importantly, the new law placed numerical limits on Mexican migration, at the same time the Bracero Program was being shut down

Hart-Cellars was designed to redress “the wrongs done to those from Southern and East Europe,” and it was considered to be a modest proposal at the time. On October 3, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson, upon signing the bill at a ceremony in front of the Statue of Liberty, declared, “This bill we sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not shape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to our power.”29 Johnson, who was expressing what the experts had told him, could not have been more mistaken. While the bill had a minimal impact on European immigration, what the experts missed was the large number of Latin Americans and Asians who had come to the United States after World War II and would come after 1965. They became naturalized citizens in unprecedented numbers, making their family members eligible immigrants.30

1.      Sánchez, 106; Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis, No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S. – Mexico Border. (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2006), 193.

2.      Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 73.

3.      Gratton, Brian and Myron P. Guttmann. “Hispanics in the United States, 1850-1900: Estimates of Population Size and National Origin,” Historical Methods. Summer 2000, Volume 33, No. 3, 142.

4.      Gutiérrez, David G. Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995, 123.

5.      Acuña, 247; Neil Foley, Mexicans in the Making of America, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014), 91.

6.      Ibid., 251.

7.      García, Mario T. Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930-1960. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 2.

8.      Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, 90.

9.      Chacón and Davis, 140.

10.   Ibid., 145.

11.   Hernández, Kelly Lytle. Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 116.

12.   Ibid., 119.

13.   Borjas, George J. “Labor Outflows and Labor Inflows in Puerto Rico,” Journal of Human Capital, Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring 2008, 35.

14.   Perez y González, María E. Puerto Ricans in the United States. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 36.

15.   Hunker, Henry L. “The Problem of Puerto Rican Migrations to the United States,” The Ohio Journal of Science. Vol. 51, No. 6, November 1951, 344.

16.   Duany, Jorge. eds. Maura I. Toro-Morn and Marisa Alicea. “Puerto Rico: Between the Nation and the Diaspora – Migration to and from Puerto Rico,” in Migration and Immigration: A Global View. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004), 187

17.   Rodríguez, Clara E. “Puerto Rican Studies,” American Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 3, September 1990, 444.

18.   Dinnestein, Leonardo and David M. Reimers. Ethnic Americans: A History of Immigration. (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999, 143.

19.   Dinnerstein and Reimers, 144.

20.   Duany, Jorge. “Reconstructing Racial Identity: Ethnicity, Color, and Class among Dominicans in the United States and Puerto Rico, Latin American Perspectives. Vol. 25, No. 3, May 1998, 161.

21.   Hernández, 165k

22.   Rodríguez, 166,

23.   Ngai, 155.

24.   Hernández, 196.

25.   McWilliams, Corey. North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States. (New York, NY: Praeger, 1990), 316.

26.   University of California, Davis, “Braceros: History, Compensation,” Rural Migration News, April 2006, Volume 12, Number 2. https://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=1112.

27.   Calavita, Kitty. Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the I.N.S. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 155.

28.   Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, 134.

29.   Johnson, Lyndon B. “Remarks at the Signing of the Immigration Bill, Liberty Island, New York,” October 3, 1965. http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/651003.asp.

30.   Daniels, 137.