I wrote an essay for a class I took at UHD, The History of the New South, that focused on the creation of a distinct Mexican American identity in Houston before WWII. While rereading it, and preparing it for submission as a writing sample for my grad school apps, I couldn’t help but post a piece of it here. This excerpt describes the problems people of Mexican descent (citizen and not) faced during the Great Depression. Looking at that now and considering the xenophobic rhetoric of the current political debates, this history is ever-more prescient.
Houston’s place in the Jim Crow South is as significant as any other major city in the Deep South. De Leon describes the bigotry Mexican Americans faced at the time because “Jim Crow codes applicable to black people extended to Mexicans.”[10] Barred from services and establishments specified for Anglos, the Mexican American community suffered deplorable conditions in their neighborhoods. Despite upward social mobility, many were forced to remain there because unspoken agreements in white society kept real estate agents from selling to the undesirable ethnic group.[11] Not allowing Mexican Americans to buy homes in districts other than the established barrios was only one aspect of the troubles facing the developing community. Terrible violence marked the first three decades of the 1900s in Houston for both citizens and non-citizens because as an insignificant sector of the city to local Anglo leaders; the barrios were not eligible for police protection. In fact the police perpetrated many of the most devastating acts of savagery, such as the murder of Elepidio Cortez in 1936.[12] By that time the leadership of the Houston colonia, along with others in the state, began to move to different methods of resisting the mounting oppression from the Anglo community, one that focused on assimilation and ultimately on citizenship.
By the mid 1930s, with the economy in shambles, the large, proud, and self-assured Mexican American population became the scapegoat for the financial troubles facing the nation. The history of Mexican Americans in Houston, and their ability to prosper amidst direct opposition became reasons for attack. Even though the local economy did not sink to the same depths as other cities did, the need for public services spotlighted the ethnic group in the eyes of Anglos. As more and more Anglos succumbed to the effects of the depression, Mexican Americans, legal and not, were singled out as foreign drains on the economy. In Houston the anti-minority sentiments had a chilling effect on those seeking help in the form of work relief and social aid. By 1932 even established institutions such as the Rusk Settlement House felt the crunch of the ballooning population of destitute individuals and famlies.[13] It is in this climate that large-scale repatriations occurred across the country and by the end of the decade one half million people of Mexican descent would either be forced or willingly return to Mexico.
Grasping how massive the number of people repatriated was can be explored when related to the Houston population, which in 1930 hovered around 300,000, and of that, 14,000 were of Mexican descent. Scholars Marilyn Rhinehart and Thomas Kreneck, in their article for the Houston Review, describe from oral interviews how the repatriations affected the colonia saying, “at least two thousand Mexican residents of Houston, or approximately fifteen percent of the city’s Mexican community in 1930, left during the early Depression years.”[14] For many people in the ethnic community being driven from their homes exposed a vile contradiction that traumatized many born in the United States. The desperate times of the Great Depression caused many of the colonia’s elites to re-examine their efforts for equality. The belief that economic prosperity and a semblance of class equality would equal social equality faded from the minds of Mexican Americans because the actions and ideology of Anglo Houstonians readily asserted that being an American, and thus having all the rights of a citizen, meant being white.
Chronicle of Higher Education