Mexican Repatriation Program

The Mexican Repatriation Program returned an estimated half million Mexican Americans (often unwillingly) to Mexico during the Great Depression.

The number of Mexican Americans had swelled in the previous decades, as hundreds of thousands of Mexicans immigrated to the United States looking for better job opportunities. By 1930, there were approximately 1.5 million Mexican Americans in the United States (illegal immigration makes the number difficult to pinpoint), largely concentrated in the Southwest, particularly in California and Texas, and near the bottom of the economic ladder. When the Great Depression began in the United States in 1929, Mexican Americans found themselves vulnerable to still higher levels of unemployment and poverty than before. Some 85,000 Mexican Americans voluntarily returned to Mexico from 1929 to 1931.

The rising unemployment rate exacerbated resentments toward Mexican Americans in the early 1930s. Typically assumed to be illegal immigrants, Mexican Americans were viewed as taking scarce jobs and draining RELIEE funds. In this atmosphere, and at the urging of Mexico (which had a critical shortage of agricultural workers), local, state, and federal government officials moved to crack down on illegal residents, mainly in California and the Southwest but also in midwestern cities like Chicago.

Most of the repatriation was carried out at the local level, with relief officials taking their cue to initiate deportation from New Deal programs requiring citizenship or legal residency for participation. Los Angeles, whose population was one-fifth Mexican American by 1930, took especially tough measures, subjecting Mexican Americans to harassment and detention, and providing relief recipients free one-way tickets to Mexico. By 1932, almost 75,000 Mexican Americans had left Southern California alone. But California was not alone in its efforts, and between 1929 and 1940, an estimated 500,000 Mexican Americans were sent to Mexico, up to half of them born in the United States or legal residents.

The rapid return of so many Mexican Americans created difficulties in absorbing them back into Mexico’s economy and society. By 1937, the repatriation of Mexican Americans slowed considerably, and when World War II opened up a need for industrial and agricultural workers, some returned to the United States. Then the U. S. government reversed the repatriation program and inaugurated the bracero program that imported some 220,000 Mexican agricultural workers on a temporary basis from 1942 to 1947. For many Mexican Americans, however, the experience of the repatriation program left a lingering suspicion of American authorities.

Further reading: Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995).

—Katherine Liapis Segrue