The more you know…
Campaigns of mass deportations took place of many Mexicans and Mexican Americans during the 1930s.
After 1931, government agencies undertook well planned deportation campaigns, feeling it was more economical to deport people than have them drain relief sources indefinitely. Coordinators for such initiatives used a variety of approaches. Locally, relief agencies might offer to subsidize the return home for those willing to accept repatriation (or they might threaten others with deportation if they resided in the country illegally; if agreed, officials organized train convoys and escorted the repatriates to the border. Church groups, associations such as the Red Cross, Mexican-American mutual aid societies, and pro-repatriation committees having as the object the humane expulsion of Mexican nationals under their own campaigns, underwrote the cost of the trek to Mexico.
Castillo and De Leon, North To Aztlan (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), pg 87.
Unfortunately, what this quotes does not tell you is that legal residents of this country were “repatriated” due to the color of their skin. Some think that up to 60% of those who were deported where American citizens.
Here is a more info to read.
America’s forgotten History of Mexican-American ‘Repatriation’
Here is a scene from a movie I love called Mi Familia/My Family that describes what happened.
Rev. Joshua Serrano 