“There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.
If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.
What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher.
What we can’t understand we call nonsense. What we can’t read we call gibberish.
There is no free will.
There are no variables.”
~Mass Deportation May Sound Unlikely, But It’s Happened Before~
Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s proposal to deport all 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally, along with their U.S.-born children, sounds far-fetched. But something similar happened before.
During the 1930’s and into the 1940’s, up to 2 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were deported or expelled from cities and towns across the U.S. and shipped to Mexico. According to some estimates, more than half of these people were U.S. citizens, born in the United States.
It’s a largely forgotten chapter in history that Francisco Balderrama, a California State University historian, documented in Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930’s. He co-wrote that book with the late historian Raymond Rodriguez.
“There was a perception in the United States that Mexicans are Mexicans,” Balderrama said. “Whether they were American citizens, or whether they were Mexican nationals, in the American mind – that is, in the mind of government officials, in the mind of industry leaders – they’re all Mexicans.
So ship them home.”
It was the Great Depression, when up to a quarter of Americans were unemployed and many believed that Mexicans were taking scarce jobs. In response, federal, state and local officials launched so-called “repatriation” campaigns.
They held raids in workplaces and in public places, rounded up Mexicans and Mexican-Americans alike, and deported them.
The most famous of these was in downtown Los Angeles’ Placita Olvera in 1931.
~~GRAPHIC SOURCE~~
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No intention of taking credit.
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~~GALLERY~~
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Today, Torres serves on the board of La Plaza de Cultura y Artes in Los Angeles, a Mexican-American cultural center. In front of it stands a memorial that the state of California dedicated in 2012, apologizing to the hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens who were illegally deported or expelled during the Depression.
“It was a sorrowful step that this country took,” Torres said. “It was a mistake. And for Trump to suggest that we should do it again is ludicrous, stupid and incomprehensible.”
