Fig 01.
A Los Angeles newspaper published a front-page story about La Placita the day after the raid.
A Los Angeles newspaper published a front-page story about La Placita the day after the raid.
On a Sunday afternoon in February 1931, two police officers blocked each of the two entrances to Los Angeles’s La Placita Park and “rounded up all the people with brown skin,” [#39] demanding proof of citizenship or legal residency.
Mexican and Mexican-American families wait to board Mexico-bound trains in Los Angeles on March 8, 1932.
Those who couldn’t immediately prove their right to be in the country were detained, with some being made to board one of the flatbed trucks lining the park’s perimeter. The trucks were taken to the local train station where, regardless of documentation status, Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans were forced to board chartered trains that would deposit them deep into Mexico. [#40]
Many U.S. citizens who had never lived in Mexico were unable to return home for years.
Relatives and friends wave goodbye to a train carrying 1,500 people being expelled from Los Angeles back to Mexico in 1931.
This was one of the most visible of the “repatriation raids” that took place throughout the 1930s. As the Great Depression wreaked havoc on the job market, people of Mexican descent were scapegoated both for taking jobs some claimed would otherwise be going to white Americans and for overwhelming government relief programs.
In reality, less than 10% of recipients of government aid were Mexican immigrants or Mexican Americans, and studies decades later would suggest that these repatriation drives actually harmed the economy because they reduced the demand for other jobs.
Official Presidential portrait of Herbert Hoover, the 31st President of the United States.
While these raids were not explicitly part of federal policy, the Herbert Hoover administration reimbursed municipalities for the cost of chartering trains and buses, and its campaign of “American jobs for real Americans” indicates more than tacit support.
Hoover also convinced a number of large companies, including the Ford Motor Company, U.S. Steel, and Southern Pacific Railroad, to lay off employees of Mexican descent.
Conservative estimates state that between one million and 1.8 million people were deported, as many as 60% of whom were U.S. citizens. [#41]