Turning to focus specifically on historical interpretations of the process of immigration, the most important texts of the last four decades include David G. Gutiérrez’s Walls and Mirrors; Lawrence Cardoso’s Mexican Emigration to The United States, 1897–1931; Mario García’s Desert Immigrants; and Douglas Monroy’s Rebirth. Both Gutierrez and Cardoso survey the factors that catalyzed Mexican migration to the United States and the forces that coalesced to create a new Chicana/o identity. Focusing on Mexican migration, activism, and immigration and public policy in the twentieth century, Gutiérrez maintains that the Mexican population in the United States was politically targeted by increasingly racist and nativist immigration policies and explores how this shaped the community’s cultural and political identity. Cardoso applies a traditional historical approach to examine the thirty-year presidential regime of Porfirio Díaz in Mexico to clarify why so many Mexicans chose to migrate to the United States before the Great Depression. He pays less attention, however, to the economic and industrial boom of the early-twentieth-century United States, which was also a major draw for migrant workers.
García and Monroy provide urban historical accounts of Mexican migration to and settlement in El Paso, Texas, and Los Angeles, California, respectively. García’s monograph, which is the first to examine community immigration settlements in El Paso, presents the area as a major geographical migration corridor given its location along the U.S.-Mexico border. It is an essential regional case study of Mexican migration and settlement. In his case study of Mexican migration to Los Angeles, Monroy uses his own father’s family history to document the urban experience of Mexican Americans in the city. He details how the city’s urban and industrial growth made it an appealing destination for Mexican migrant workers, who would come to play important political and cultural roles in the making of urban Los Angeles during the first three decades of the twentieth century. This is another foundational case study on Mexican urban migration and settlement.
Abraham Hoffman’s Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression and the revised edition of Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez’s Decade of Betrayal shift perspective from migration to deportation and repatriation during the 1930s, offering different historical accounts of the social and political effects that repatriation had on the Chicana/o community. Hoffman critically argues that Mexicans were politically targeted due to the rise of nativist immigration policies, which manifested in response to the pressures of the Great Depression. Balderrama and Rodríguez assert that Mexican Americans were convenient scapegoats for the sense of despair that characterized this period, and many were unjustly deported, including American-born children who had never been to Mexico. Both books are strong rebuttals to traditional Anglo-American scholarship on the Mexican American experience during the Great Depression. Balderrama and Rodríguez’s study is bolstered by the inclusion of interviews they conducted with Mexican subjects who were politically and culturally impacted by repatriation to Mexico. By contrast, Hoffman does not include firsthand accounts of working-class Mexican Americans in his scholarship.
Barbara Driscoll de Alvarado’s The Tracks North and Erasmo Gamboa’s Mexican Labor and World War II investigate the Bracero program from both regional and national perspectives, documenting how it displaced and oppressed working-class Mexican Americans. Driscoll de Alvarado centers her study on Mexican braceros working in the railroad industry during World War II—a specific focus she maintains past scholarship on the Bracero program has overlooked, despite the fact that the railroad Bracero program was the most successful bilateral agreement between the two countries. However, perhaps because of her focus on the program’s positive elements, Driscoll de Alvarado does not grapple with the racist and nativist undercurrents of the Bracero program. Gamboa examines the Bracero program through the lens of the agricultural industry in the Pacific Northwest during the 1940s, arguing that the industry pulled the majority of its workforce from the program. Gamboa’s text is notable for being one of the first major studies published on the Bracero program outside the American Southwest. Although neither Gamboa’s nor Driscoll’s book acknowledges the Bracero program as a political and ideological mechanism of American class stratification, Gamboa’s scholarship is still distinguished by its recognition of the fact that the agricultural industry in the Pacific Northwest benefited economically from the program.
Juan Ramon García’s Operation Wetback and Armando Navarro’s The Immigration Crisis explore immigration policy, Mexican deportation, immigration rights, nativism, and vigilantism in the United States. Focusing on undocumented Mexican workers and deportation in the 1940s and early 1950s, García highlights the push-pull factors, such as the flagging American economy, that first encouraged mass migration to the United States and then spurred mass deportation efforts. García’s book was the first scholarly monograph to delve into the subject of Operation Wetback, a U.S. immigration law enforcement program carried out in 1954, which resulted in the largest mass deportation in American history. Although García decently outlines the program and how it operated, he does not challenge the historical foundation of this racist immigration policy. By contrast, Navarro takes a more expansive view of Mexican immigration to the United States. Following an opening chapter that charts immigration patterns to the New World, and later the United States, from 30,000 BCE to the 1930s, the book centers on the phenomenon, and responses to it, over almost two centuries. Situating American immigration policies as offshoots of the country’s reliance on cheap labor to fuel its economy, Navarro draws on participant observations to convey the Mexican American community’s responses to these policies, particularly efforts by Chicana/o activists and social movements. Importantly, the book considers contemporary immigration policies and the Mexican and Latino immigration rights movement in North America.
Focusing on these issues in the Midwest, García’s Mexicans in the Midwest, 1900–1932 considers the experiences of the “Mexican Generation” in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, and Wisconsin during the first three decades of the twentieth century. These workers, the author argues, assumed that they were only temporarily migrating to the Midwest to fulfill the region’s economic need for cheap labor. Although García does not clearly define whom exactly the “Mexican Generation” encompasses, his volume is a major contribution to research on the cultural and political experiences of Mexicans in the Midwest. In Barrios Norteños, Valdés concentrates more specifically on the development of a Chicana/o community in St. Paul, Minnesota, as a window into other urban settings in the Midwest in the twentieth century. He traces the history of Mexicans in the Midwest back to early 1900s, when agricultural and industrial companies endeavored to attract working-class Mexican migrant workers to the region from Texas and Mexico. The book incorporates a great deal of archival research, making it an essential regional study of Chicana/o labor and migration.
In Working the Boundaries, Nicholas De Genova presents an ethnography of Mexican migrant workers living in Chicago, Illinois, providing a scholarly account of how they developed a significant community in this urban center and in turn changed the city’s political geography. De Genova considers the effects of nativist policies and processes of racialization that have shaped Chicago’s Mexican community. Gabriela Arredondo’s Mexican Chicago treats the early formation of this community, exploring Mexican migration and immigration to Chicago between 1916 and 1939. The book focuses more on race and identity politics—at the expense of greater consideration afforded to labor or immigration politics—to argue that Mexicans who migrated to Chicago were not seeking to assimilate into mainstream American society, especially compared to other minority groups in the city. Though different in scope and thematic focus, both De Genova’s and Arredondo’s texts are important contributions to the historiography of Chicana/o labor in Chicago.
Jim Norris’s North for the Harvest and Kathleen Mapes’s Sweet Tyranny both offer historical analyses of Mexican labor, growers, and public policy related to the sugar beet industry in Minnesota, North Dakota, Michigan, and Ohio. Norris charts the development of the sugar beet industry in the Red River Valley region of Minnesota and North Dakota and the arrival of Chicana/o migrant workers from Texas who came to work in the beet fields. Relying on archival sources, oral interviews, and secondary materials, Norris argues that companies that purchase and process sugar beets into byproducts, such as the American Crystal Sugar Company, increasingly recruited Chicana/o agricultural workers following World War I and the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, which reduced the number of agricultural laborers permitted to enter the United States from abroad. The book takes a nuanced view of the relationships between the workers, growers, and companies of the sugar beet industry in the Red River Valley region. Mapes adopts a more expansive view by looking at the development of the sugar beet industry across the rural Midwest more broadly. Using archival material, government documents, reports, and secondary sources, she argues that farmers, industrialists, Mexican migrant workers, state electoral officials, townspeople, and rural reformers all played a role in the development of the sugar beet industry, and she ties the growth of this sugar-producing industry in the United States to American imperialism abroad, linking local and global history. The text’s intellectual development is hindered by the author’s use of Frederick Jackson Turner’s historical methodology to write about local history in American society and by the chapters on Mexican immigrant labor, migration, and immigration policies. Still, Mapes makes a noteworthy contribution to the study of the sugar beet industry in Michigan.
The books outlined here are all significant historical interpretations of American immigration policy and Chicana/o labor and migration through regional case studies, and they have had a major scholarly impact on the development of the historiography of Chicana/o labor and migration. Navarro, Acuña, Gonzalez, and Valdés in particular are leading the small group of Chicana/o labor and migration historians and scholars who continue to produce scholarship in this field. The research covered here on the political and ideological foundations of Mexican migration and labor in the United States has changed the historical profession. Looking ahead, it is important to consider how current Chicana/o labor and migration scholars will influence the continuing evolution of this field.
Mexican Emigration to the United States, 1897-1931
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