The Other California: Land, Identity, and Politics on the Mexican Borderlands 9780520966727

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Tables and Maps
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Mexican Borderlands
1. Building The Mexican Borderlands
2. The Making Of Baja California’s Multicultural Society
3. Revolution, Labor Unions, and Land Reform in Baja California
4. Conflict, Land Reform, and Repatriation in the Mexicali Valley
5. Mexicali’s Exceptionalism
Conclusion: The “All-Mexican” Train
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Other California

western histories William Deverell, series editor Published for the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West by University of California Press and the Huntington Library

1. The Father of All: The de la Guerra Family, Power, and Patriarchy in Mexican California, by Louise Pubols 2. Alta California: Peoples in Motion, Identities in Formation, edited by Steven W. Hackel 3. American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California, by Joshua Paddison 4. Blue Sky Metropolis: The Aerospace Century in Southern California, edited by Peter J. Westwick 5. Post-Ghetto: Reimagining South Los Angeles, edited by Josh Sides 6. Where Minds and Matters Meet: Technology in California and the West, edited by Volker Janssen 7. A Squatter’s Republic: Land and the Politics of Monopoly in California, 1850–1900, by Tamara Venit Shelton 8. Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster, by Norris Hundley Jr. and Donald C. Jackson 9. The Other California: Land, Identity, and Politics on the Mexican Borderlands, by Verónica Castillo-Muñoz

The Other California Land, Identity, and Politics on the Mexican Borderlands

verónica castillo-muñoz

University of California Press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Castillo-Muñoz, Verónica, author. Title: The other California : land, identity and politics on the Mexican borderlands / Verónica Castillo-Muñoz. Description: Oakland, California: University of California Press, [2016] | Series: Western histories ; 9 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016018249 | isbn 9780520291638 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520966727 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Baja California (Mexico : Peninsula)—History. | Land reform—Mexico—Baja California (Peninsula) —History. | Baja California (Mexico : Peninsula)—Social conditions—History. | Mexican-American Border Region—History. Classification: lcc f1246 .c195 2016 | ddc 972/.2—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016018249 Manufactured in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

List of Tables and Maps

viii

Acknowledgments

ix

introduction: the mexican borderlands

1

1. building the mexican borderlands

9

2. the making of baja california’s multicultural society

31

3. revolution, labor unions, and land reform in baja california

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4. conflict, land reform, and repatriation in the mexicali valley

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5. mexicali’s exceptionalism

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conclusion: the “all-mexican” train

107

Notes

115

Bibliography

147

Index

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Illustrations

1. Diegueños and European Americans by the Colorado River, 1905

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2. Mexicali’s downtown, 1915

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3. Postcard of the Santa Rosalía port, 1928

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4. Santa Bárbara Church in Santa Rosalía, 1910

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5. Compagnie du Boleo houses in Santa Rosalía, 1950

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6. Asociación China headquarters, 1916

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7. Chinese parade in Mexicali’s Colonia China, 1921

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8. Men arrive in old trucks to occupy CRLC lands, 1937

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9. Liga Femenil Carmen Serdán, from Ejido Durango, 1937

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10. Bracero recruitment center in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico, 1956

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Tables and Maps

tables 1. Land sold by Guillermo Andrade to U.S. investors, 1888–1904

26

2. Lease account, 1917

28

3. Workers in the Santa Rosalía mines, 1893–1899

34

4. Sample of intermarriages in coastal regions of Baja California, 1870–1900

38

5. Colonias in the Mexicali Valley, 1916

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6. Chinese applicants for Mexican citizenship, 1920s

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7. Labor unions in the Mexicali Valley, 1924–1927

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8. Colonias in the Mexicali Valley, 1937

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9. Sample of ejidos in the Mexicali Valley, 1937

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10. Sample of Jabonera del Pacífico loans to ejido-based cotton farmers, 1946–1947

102

11. Sample of Jabonera del Pacífico cotton loans for Asian Mexican farmers, 1946–1947

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maps 1. Ceded territory, 1853

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2. Baja California missions and rancherías, 1848

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3. CRLC lots leased by Chinese and Japanese farmers, 1919

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Acknowledgments

I grew up listening to myriad border crossings stories. My mother had immigrated from Nayarit, Mexico, to the United States in the late 1970s, with my sister in tow. Both were undocumented, and every three or four years they came to visit me, though they dreaded their return to the United States. They had to make the dangerous crossings through the mountainous terrain that connected Tijuana, Baja California, with San Ysidro, California, in the middle of the night. After I immigrated to North County San Diego in the 1990s, I kept returning to Tijuana and Mexicali. I realized that these booming cities at the edge of two nations kept our stories alive. The Baja California peninsula is a place of opportunity and despair, where indigenous people, global immigrants, mexicanos, and Mexican Americans made the peninsula their home against all odds. This book is dedicated to you. I feel overwhelmed with gratitude for all the support I have received from archivists, librarians, colleagues, foundations, and institutions to bring this book to fruition. I would like to first thank the archivists from Baja California and Baja California Sur for helping me unearth these hidden histories. Ingeniero Oscar Sánchez and Licenciado Oscar Hernández helped me find rare photographs of Baja California. Elizabeth Acosta Medina and Carlos Octavio Mendoza from the Pablo Martínez archive in La Paz helped me find valuable documents and images of Santa Rosalía. This book could not have been completed without their invaluable assistance. William O. Hendricks, Jill Thrasher, and Jennifer Martínez from the Sherman Library assisted me in finding papers from the Colorado River Land Company. I am also thankful to Peter Blodgett, Daniel Lewis, and Bill Frank, from the Huntington Library, who were so resourceful in helping me find critical documents and rare books on Baja California. ix

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Acknowledgments

This book benefited from generous financial assistance from different institutions. The UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship and the UC President’s Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities provided me with substantial financial support so I could focus on research and writing. A Graduate Opportunity Fellowship, the Trudy Topik Memorial Fellowship, the Peggy Marudin Award, the UC MEXUS, Humanities Travel Grants, and the Center for International Translation facilitated my travels to different archives in Mexico and in the United States. The Hellman Family Fellowship and the UC Regent’s Faculty Fellowship enabled me to finish the critical research for this book in France and Mexico. The ideas for this book matured during my time as a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at UC San Diego. The opportunity to devote two full years to research transformed this project. I am most grateful to Eric Van Young, who served as my postdoctoral mentor. His advice and valuable insights were critical to shaping this book. I am also thankful to UC San Diego faculty members in the Department of History, such as Natalia Molina, David Gutiérrez, Nayan Shah (now at USC), and John Marino, for their support. The Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies and the biweekly writing workshops provided a collegial setting that made my time at UCSD enjoyable and very productive. In 2011 I joined the Department of History at UC Santa Barbara. I am very grateful to my colleagues for supporting this project wholeheartedly. Paul Spickard, Sarah Cline, Sherene Seikaly, Michael North, and John Lee provided critical feedback. Kate McDonald, Xiawei Zheng, Mhoze Chikowero, Terence Keel, James Brooks, Lisa Jacobson, Adam Sabra, Peter Alagona, Ann Plane, Beth De Palma Digeser, John Majewiski, Sharon Farmer, Carol Lansing, Nelson Lichtenstein, Alice O’Connor, Sears McGee, Erika Rappaport, Luke Roberts, Salim Yaqub, Stephan Miescher, Mary Furner, Randy Bergstrom, Harold Marcuse, Laura Kalman, Tony BarbieriLow, Mary Hancock, Pat Cohen, Pekka Hämäläinen (now at Oxford), Debra Blumenthal, and Adrienne Edgar, thank you for your generosity and support. I am also thankful to my friends and colleagues from the Department of Chicano Studies, the Program of Latin American and Iberian Studies, and the Department of Black Studies at UCSB. Special thanks to Miroslava Chávez-García, Mario García, Casey Walsh, Emiko Saldivar, Inés Casillas, and George Lipsitz for engaging with my research. During my academic career I had the benefit of working with incredible colleagues and mentors. Heidi Tinsman inspired me to deploy a feminist perspective on my analysis of rural women in the Mexican countryside. I have a deep appreciation for Enrique Ochoa, who has supported my work at

Acknowledgments

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every stage of my career. I inspire to emulate his passion for social justice. My most heartfelt appreciation and gratitude goes to Vicki L. Ruiz, who became my mentor. Her high expectations and guidance helped me navigate life in academia—a terrain unfamiliar to a first-generation college student like me. Thank you for your continuous support in innumerable ways. I am truly inspired by your scholarly work, professionalism, and mentorship. I am greatly indebted to Bill Deverell, editor of the Western History series, for believing in this project and for supporting it every step of the way. At the University of California Press, Neils Hooper has been a wonderful editor and I so appreciate his patience and good humor. I am thankful to work with Bradley Depew, Jessica Ling, Jessica Moll, and Susan Silver at different stages of the publication of this book. My deepest gratitude is owed to Kelly Lytle Hernández and the anonymous readers who provided critical feedback on this book. I am thankful to the University of Nebraska Press for allowing me to print portions of chapter 1 that previously appeared in Globalizing Borderlands in the fall of 2016. I feel very fortunate to count on amazing friends. Margie Brown-Coronel, Dana Velasco Murillo, Kariann Yokota, Alicia González, Rosina Lozano, and Casey Christensen, thank you for offering your unconditional support and wisdom. Jerry González, Mary Romo, Matt García, Julian Lim, Roberto Alvarez, Li Wei Yang, Anne Reid, Jessica Kim, David Igler, Miriam Pawel, José M. Alamillo, Helene Demeestere, and Ernie Chávez made my days at the Huntington engaging and inspiring. I had the good fortune to receive excellent feedback from scholars I met at different conferences and writing workshops. Samuel Truett, Jaime Pensado, Mikael Wolfe, Ana Rosas, Ana Minian, Omar Valerio Jiménez, Elliott Young, Grace Delgado, Mae M. Ngai, Julia Schiavone Camacho, Ramón Gutiérrez, Gerry Cadava, Ben Johnson, and Pedro Castillo all provided their insights and research leads. Without the support of friends and family, I could not have finished this project. My dear vecinas and amigas, Mariana Rosas, Leti Berrios, Jeanette Villagrana Silva, Rosalba Guevara, Thelma Lozano-Aragón, Maricela Sarkis, and María Elena Martínez, became my village and support in Los Angeles. Thank you for believing in this project. I am forever indebted to my mother, Aurora Gómez, who immigrated to the United States, seeking a better life for her daughters. With optimism and smiles, she worked tirelessly at multiple jobs, in farms and factories. ¡Mil gracias mamá! My sisters, Ruty, Gely, and Marisol, were always cheerful as they gave unconditional support. My grandparents, María and Amado, and Antonia and Crecencio, taught me to love working on a farm, and my grandfather Amado inspired me to learn more about labor organizing in Mexico’s countryside.

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Acknowledgments

No words can express my gratitude to my husband, Juan, for his love, good humor, and cariño. I feel so fortunate to have you in my life. Thank you for your support in joyful and challenging moments. During my days as a graduate student, we welcomed two beautiful children, Paola and Alejandro, who have been a blessing. Thank you for reminding me what is truly important in life. ¡Los amo con todo mi corazón!

introduction

The Mexican Borderlands

In 1880 Petra Laguna Tambo, a Cocopah woman from Baja California, married Félix Portillo, a mestizo (mixed-race) cowboy from New Mexico who had moved recently to Baja California. Though a newcomer and Spanish speaker, Portillo quickly learned to speak Yuman, his wife’s native language, and joined the community in El Mayor, where he built a house next to his in-laws and eventually had ten children with his wife. Portillo worked as a cowboy while his wife cultivated corn, vegetables, and fruit with other Cocopah women near the Colorado River.1 Their ethnically mixed marriage, while unusual, signaled the rapidly changing ethnoracial landscape of a frontier region where agricultural and mining enterprises had taken hold on an unprecedented scale.2 During the first half of the nineteenth century, intermarriage between Cocopah women and mestizo men occurred infrequently in the Northern Territory of Baja California.3 Between 1794 and 1801 Spanish missionaries in Baja California had faced great resistance from the Cocopah and Kumeyaay peoples, who frequently attacked and destroyed churches, effectively curtailing the missionary project to settle the Northern Territory.4 Spanish Mexican soldiers in frontier Presidios, for the most part, did not marry indigenous women. Instead, priests encouraged single Spanish men to travel to the more populated missions in Sonora and Sinaloa to find mestizo or criolla (American-born Spaniard) brides.5 Almost a century later, following the end of the Mexican-American War (1846–48), Mexico’s loss of more than half of its territory to the United States remapped the border region politically, economically, and culturally. In 1853, in an effort to incorporate the newly acquired territories, the U.S. Congress approved well-financed expeditions to California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Wyoming, and parts of Colorado. Lieutenants 1

2

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Introduction

R. S. Williamson and J. G. Parks, both topographical engineers, led expeditions to identify the southern parts of Arizona and New Mexico, obtained under the 1854 Gadsden Purchase, near the Mexican border, as potential sites for the settlement of European American farmers in the Southwest.6 The Baja California peninsula was initially proposed as part of the ceded territories to the United States. The Mexican government, however, refused to give up the strategic peninsula that provided access to both the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean. The Baja California borderlands became a crucial geographic nexus between Mexico and the United States. The Portillo Laguna family witnessed drastic changes, as did everyone on the border. In the 1880s migration increased in Baja California, after French bankers invested in the Compagnie du Boleo, which became one of Mexico’s leading copper-mining companies. In less than a decade Santa Rosalía grew into a booming town of six thousand people, with a bustling seaport that connected Baja California with the United States, Europe, and Asia. These major changes paved the way for the emergence of the Baja peninsula as a key point of entry for U.S. business expansion into Mexico. In 1887 the International Mexican Company, an investment firm owned by U.S. nationals, purchased close to two hundred million acres of land in Mexico. This included almost half of the Baja California peninsula.7 In 1904 a consortium of Los Angeles–based land speculators led by Harry Chandler, owner of the Los Angeles Times, purchased approximately eight hundred thousand acres of agricultural land in Mexicali, Baja California, and created the Colorado River Land Company (CRLC). Despite the chaos of the Mexican Revolution elsewhere, Baja California remained prosperous. By 1920 cotton farmers cultivated close to one hundred thousand acres of land that produced eighty thousand bales.8 Agribusiness and mining companies in Baja first relied on local indigenous and Mexican labor, but when the scarcity of workers threatened production, managers recruited additional laborers from central Mexico, Japan, and China. The approval of the 1899 Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation between Mexico and China facilitated the migration of thousands of Chinese men to northern Mexico. Focusing on Baja California, this book examines the interplay of land reform and migratory labor in the making of borderlands between the years of 1850 and 1954. I argue that the Mexican borderlands emerged from efforts to keep labor moving across borders while fixing national communities in place. This intricate interplay shows how governments, foreign investors, and local communities engaged in the making of the Baja

The Mexican Borderlands

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3

California borderlands that led to the booming cities of Tijuana, Mexicali, and Santa Rosalía.9 During Prohibition era in the 1920s, Tijuana and Mexicali became tourist hubs for Anglos in the United States, who visited the infamous red-light districts and gambling dens at the border.10 But beyond the hustle and bustle of casinos, nightclubs, and restaurants lie many untold stories of immigrant families who made Baja California their home and changed the geography of the region. At the heart of The Other California is the story of how ethnically and racially diverse communities of laborers changed the social landscape of Baja California. Initially, the Mexican government mandated that mining and agricultural companies house workers in segregated lodging. And at first they did just that. But by 1921 a drastic demographic shift had occurred and along with it the blurring of racial lines. I contend that migration, combined with intermarriage between Mexican women (both mestiza and indigenous) and men from Asia, Europe, and the United States, transformed Baja California into a multicultural society. These new mixed-race families extended across national borders, shaping local communities by influencing labor, border politics, and migration in the Baja California borderlands.

borderlands and land reform Over the past two decades, borders and borderlands have become important fields of study in humanities and social science disciplines.11 More than two thousand miles long, the U.S.-Mexico border ranks among the longest borders in Latin America. Histories of the U.S.-Mexico border have prompted historians to expand the analysis of the borders beyond the colonial era and geographic boundaries.12 We have now more English-language studies on Sonora, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, and Nuevo León.13 But we know little about the history of land reform and migration in northern Mexico, especially in Baja California.14 By multiplying, complicating, and questioning the conventional narratives of the making of the Mexican borderlands, this book examines the politics of race, ethnicity, gender, labor, and migration and places the disciplines of Mexican history, gender studies, borderlands history, and Chicano history in close conversation. The study of land reform in Mexico has been directly connected to historiography on the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) and the formation of the modern Mexican state in the following two decades.15 During the revolution, anarchist and agrarian movements embraced the slogan, “Tierra y Libertad” (Land and Liberty). The Magonistas echoed these words as they took over Baja California in 1911, as did Emiliano Zapata in his famous

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Introduction

Plan de Ayala in Morelos.16 The Mexican Constitution of 1917 addresses land reform in article 27, granting the state the right to expropriate private land that could be distributed for “public use.” From Zapata’s Plan de Ayala to the more contemporary Zapatista critique of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, many scholars have viewed the politics of land tenure and the promise (or betrayal) of revolutionary democracy as intimately linked. Yet past and current scholarship still identifies agrarian reform as a nationalist project associated with the 1930s, as President Lázaro Cárdenas sponsored massive peasant mobilization and the redistribution of land in the form of communal holdings known as ejidos.17 Agrarian reform under Cárdenas has since served as the official story of Mexican nationalism. This project is a more comprehensive analysis of Baja California’s land reform that incorporates the 1930s and moves into the 1950s. A wider chronological view of agrarian reform is essential to understand labor and agrarian policy during the 1920s and the 1940s, the decades that precede and follow the more famous agrarian reform years of the 1930s. The Other California builds on the recent literature enriching our understanding of geographic and cultural spaces and the making of national borders in the Americas. Neil Foley, David Montejano, Eric Meeks, and Linda Gordon demonstrate that constructed notions of race and ethnicity played an important role in the making of the U.S.-Mexico border.18 Race and ethnic classifications often determined who benefited or were excluded from claiming U.S. citizenship, land ownership, and better employment and wages in the Southwest.19 Latin American historians have demonstrated that large U.S. investments and the region’s proximity to the United States did not immediately translate into the “Americanization” of Mexican border regions. Instead, parts of Anglo-American culture were incorporated into the Mexican borderlands to create a new norteño culture distinct from other parts of Mexico.20 Following these findings, this project examines how mestizos, Mexican Americans, and Asians progressively changed their identity from fuereños (immigrants) to Mexican nationals. Asian and Mexican American families challenged and appropriated conceptions of mexicanidad used by the Mexican government to determine who benefited or who could obtain land grants in northern Mexico. In Baja California communal farmland vastly improved the lives of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans who had previously toiled for large-scale U.S.-owned agribusinesses north and south of the border. From 1929 to 1934 more than one million Mexicans (a majority U.S. citizens) were deported or repatriated to Mexico from the United States.

The Mexican Borderlands

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The work of Chicano historians such as Francisco Balderrama, Raymond Rodríguez, and Vicki Ruiz exposed the impact of repatriation and deportation in Mexican American communities in the Southwest. Balderrama and Rodríguez, in particular, identify the difficulties and challenges Mexicans experienced throughout the 1930s, the period they termed a “decade of betrayal.”21 In Baja California approximately fifty thousand repatriados (repatriates) settled permanently in the region. Many of them fought for the Mexican government to act on land reform, land grants, fairer labor laws, and improved housing. They largely succeeded. After 1937 housing improved, public education programs expanded, and the rate of literacy increased in Baja California. Men and women formed agrarian unions and leagues to ensure the success of ejido communities. They also secured access to Mexican and U.S. markets for the products they produced. Despite the successes of agrarian reform, they were also marked by inequalities. As in other Latin American countries, agrarian reform in Mexico benefited men to a greater extent than women.22 Male-headed households were given priority for land grants under the assumption that wives, mothers, and daughters would indirectly benefit. Despite their marginalization, border women challenged these government restrictions. As this study demonstrates, single mothers petitioned the government for communal farmland, citing the 1923 amendment of the Mexican Constitution, and in most instances in Baja they proved successful. As a result, single mothers who received farmland no longer had to leave their children behind to work as migrant workers in the United States. Chinese men also benefited. Through intermarriage, Chinese men, though legally excluded from ejido land distribution, ultimately benefited through their Mexican wives. Similarly, indigenous people who received fewer agrarian reform benefits asserted their rights, and many eventually were awarded ejidos, separate from those of mestizo farmers. Exploring the ways that men and women of different races and ethnicities challenged land-holding patterns and entitlements illuminates how gender, race, and ethnicity shaped activism and land reform in Baja California.23 The Bracero Program had a profound impact in Mexico and the United States. Between 1942 and 1964 approximately five million Mexican men participated in this program. Mexican men migrated to the United States for work, causing labor shortages and long absences from family households in Mexico. The work of scholars such as Gilbert González, Steven Pitti, Frank Barajas, and Matt García has shown how Mexican workers contracted under the Bracero Program shaped Mexican American communities

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Introduction

in the United States during the 1940s. Historian Ana Elizabeth Rosas’s award-winning study reveals the extraordinary impact this program had on families living on both sides of the border.24 The Other California furthers the discussion by examining how government repression and the decline in land reform and government support during the 1940s influenced peasant participation in the Bracero Program. My analysis of the oral histories of Baja Californians collected through the Bracero History Archive sheds light on migration and on work and gender relations in both northern Mexico and the United States.25 My examination of how Chinese immigrants challenged prejudice and discrimination in Baja California contributes to the growing body of literature on Chinese Mexican history. The pioneering work of Evelyn Hu-DeHart on Chinese immigrants in the Mexicali Valley reveals the central importance of Chinese immigrants to the socioeconomic development of the region, particularly on Mexicali’s cotton farms. Additional scholars have published important works on the Chinese experience at the U.S.Mexico borderlands. Historians Grace Peña Delgado, Julia María Schiavone Camacho, Elliott Young, and Robert Chao Romero examine the transnational lives of the Chinese living in the Southwest and northern Mexico since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Notably, Robert Duncan’s “The Chinese and the Economic Development of Northern Baja California” brings to the forefront the diversification of Chinese investments in Baja California and the connection to migrant labor. He argues that this unique combination prevented the same level of repression and anti-Chinese sentiment experienced by Chinese immigrants in Sonora.26 My research reveals that the lessening of prejudice against the Chinese was not just the diversification of investments but also the formation of the Chinese Association, which counteracted government repression and anti-Chinese sentiment in the Mexicali Valley. The Chinese Association helped Chinese workers learn Spanish and English, establish relationships in the community, and, in many cases, apply for Mexican citizenship. To write the story of migrant workers, I followed their lives through the archives in Mexico, the United States, and France. Chapter 1 examines the migrations of Diegueño and Californio families from the United States to Baja California, a migration previously unknown to U.S. historians.27 It delves into the tumultuous aftermath of the Mexican-American War, especially how indigenous peoples living on the banks of the Colorado River dealt with U.S. expansion into northern Mexico. Writing about indigenous people was challenging since they left almost no written documents. Moreover, the cyclical destruction of Baja’s Catholic missions meant that

The Mexican Borderlands

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only a few church records survived. I spent three years piecing together small vignettes of indigenous people from scattered government and company minutes located in three countries. Chapter 2 tells the story of how migration and intermarriage changed Baja California’s social and racial landscape at the turn of the century. I relied heavily on census records and company reports written by managers and administrators who kept a close eye on the workers’ health and productivity and, to a greater extent, their personal lives. The Compagnie du Boleo kept detailed records of European managerial workers who married Mexican women. Baja Californian historian Pablo Martínez published birth, marriage, and census records of different municipalities in Baja California that allowed me to trace marriages and families into the twentieth century. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the formations of labor organizations of Mexican and Asian workers. Records from the Colorado River Land Company provided insights on contract leases to farmers in the Mexicali Valley. Collections at the Casa de la Cultura Jurídica in Mexicali and the Centro de Estudios de Investigaciones Históricas in Tijuana were vital to my analysis of how the owners of mines and agribusinesses used government policies to prevent workers from unionizing and attaining government land grants during the 1920s and 1930s. The extensive depositions, amparos (constitutional appeals), and applications for Mexican citizenship located at La Casa de la Cultura Jurídica proved invaluable to my examination of how anti-Chinese sentiment and Cárdenas’s expropriation of land owned by U.S. nationals in the Mexicali Valley ended the flow of Asian migration to the countryside. Chapter 5 examines the impact of Mexican migration to the United States during the era of the Bracero Program (1942–64). It addresses the question of why migration to border towns increased during the 1940s in spite of U.S. immigration restrictions. Existing oral histories collected by the Bracero History Archive of migrant and local Baja families enriched my understanding of the ways families migrated and looked for work and performed gender roles in Mexico and in the United States. The memories of braceros provided a window into the daily lives and struggles experienced by millions of Mexican workers who migrated to the United States, stories often suppressed in official records. The book’s title, The Other California, highlights the importance of Baja California’s intrinsic historical relation with California. Between 1850 and 1954 workers repeatedly crossed the border back and forth despite increasing immigration restrictions that took place during the 1940s and 1950s, especially during “Operation Wetback” in 1954. The nineteenth-century

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Introduction

couple Petra Laguna Tambo and Félix Portillo made Baja California their home while they worked on both sides of the border. Bound to the land, their children married Mexican mestizo and Asian immigrants. The five chapters that follow illuminate these mixed-heritage families and the longhidden side of agrarian reform and migration that shaped the Baja California borderlands.

1. Building the Mexican Borderlands Lower California, as little known as Africa, is today the American frontier. If ever earth and sky and air joined in invitation, it is here. International Mexican Company, “Lower California for Sale,” 1883

Before the Mexican-American War of 1846, Baja California was a backwater. At the turn of the nineteenth century, about 12,500 people lived scattered across the peninsula, making Baja California one of the most sparsely populated areas in Mexico (see map 1).1 Between 1794 and 1808 Franciscan and Dominican missionaries in Baja California faced great resistance from Cocopah and Kumeyaay people, who rebelled against practices of forced labor and conversions at the San Pedro Mártir de Verona and Santa Catalina Missions.2 Indigenous peoples consistently attacked and destroyed churches and thus succeeded in preventing the missionization of the northern part of Baja California, leading to the abandonment of several missions during the nineteenth century.3 Even after independence jefes políticos (appointed military chiefs) reported violent attacks by the Yuma and Cocopah people against the former missions. In 1836 Cocopah and Yuma people from Jacume attacked the San Diego Mission, forcing its families to flee in ships. A year later 400 Yumas attacked Guadalupe and destroyed the missions of Guadalupe and Santa Catalina, forcing the missionized indigenous population to move to Santo Domingo.4 In an attempt to assert better control over Baja California, Mexican president José Joaquín de Herrera issued a decree in 1849 that divided the peninsula into two districts, the Northern Territory and the Southern Territory (Partido Norte and Partido Sur). Approximately 70 percent of the population lived in the Southern Territory in the six municipalities of San José del Cabo, Todos Santos, Comondu, San Antonio, Mulegé, and La Paz. The town of La Paz, located near the southern tip of the peninsula, was the administrative center of the whole peninsula.5 A subjefe político (assistant to the military chief) was appointed to oversee the Northern Territory, which was inhabited mainly by indigenous people. Between 1849 and 1870 Baja California’s 9

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map 1.

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Chapter 1

Ceded territory, 1853.

small population made it susceptible to potential filibusters and vulnerable to Anglo-Americans who wanted Baja California for the United States. Developing northern Mexico became an important goal of Mexican president Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada (1872–76). He granted numerous land concessions and subsidies to both European and Mexican investors in an attempt to attract migrant workers to the Mexican side of the border. These land concessions continued under President Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911), who provided further incentives to foreign investors by expanding the Law of Terrenos Baldíos (vacant public lands) and by increasing subsidies to foreign investors.6 These subsidies facilitated the expansion of investments by U.S. nationals beyond the U.S. Southwest. Between 1860 and 1910 U.S. investors purchased over two hundred million acres of land in Mexico, most of it in northern Mexico.7

Building the Mexican Borderlands

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The Baja California borderlands became an arena of conquest, migration, and people’s settlement. During the 1860s a few families of Mexican heritage from California (known as Californios), who had lost political and economic influence in California after the United States took control, resettled on former Baja California missions near the coast. They established successful cattle ranchos (ranches), as they had done in the past in California (known to Mexicans as Alta California). In 1887 the International Mexican Company, a U.S.-owned investment company, purchased 186 million acres of land from the Mexican government, which included almost half of the Baja California peninsula.8 The Colorado River Land Company, based in Southern California, purchased eight hundred thousand acres of land near the Colorado River. Thus, in less than twenty years U.S. investors transformed Baja California from a Mexican backwater territory to one of the most prosperous cotton-producing centers along the U.S.-Mexico border. This boom coincided with the development of the Imperial Valley in California and the construction of dams along the Colorado River. Thousands of indigenous people found themselves caught in the middle of these economic and political changes that divided their communities and threatened their way of life. For example, indigenous families who had lived in the Colorado Desert near the Colorado River for many generations faced displacement after the Mexican government sold the land to Mexican and U.S. investors. This chapter examines the origins of land speculation in Baja California, how indigenous peoples employed various strategies to both resist and adapt to land displacements, the incursion of agribusinesses, and the migration of European Americans and Californios to Baja California.

indigenous peoples and others During the second half of the nineteenth century, indigenous peoples outnumbered those of European descent in the Northern Territory. Only 184 creoles lived scattered in small ranchos of 4 to 10 people near the former missions of Santo Domingo, San Telmo, San Ramón, La Grulla, and La Calentura. Jefe político Feliciano Esparza described them as the descendants of Spanish soldiers who came to the Baja California missions at the beginning of nineteenth century.9 Approximately 16 to 40 nonindigenous people lived in the towns of Santo Tomás, San Vicente, Ensenada, and El Rosario (see map 2). Life was difficult for creoles living in this arid environment. Some raised cattle and cultivated beans, corn, and vegetables for daily sustenance. At times they abandoned their ranchos and pueblos to seek

map 2. Baja California missions and rancherías, 1848.

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temporary work in Alta California. Subjefes políticos from the Northern Territory lamented the continuous migration of creoles to Alta California.10 In contrast, over 5,000 indigenous people lived in semisedentary communities in the Colorado Delta, which extended from the Sonora Desert to the Mexicali Valley on the Mexican side and to the Imperial and Coachella Valleys on the U.S. side of the border. The region had mild winters with sparse rainfall, followed by long summers with temperatures of up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. The Colorado River constantly shifted and flooded the delta, making the soil rich for cultivation. In contrast to the semidesert landscapes of the Mexicali Valley, green willow brush and cottonwood trees lined the banks of the Colorado River, where most indigenous lived in sedentary and seminomadic communities. In 1870 the secretary of interior in La Paz recorded 3,420 Cocopahs living in Baja California in semisedentary communities with more than 2,000 others residing on indigenous settlements, or rancherías.11 Cocopah life revolved around the family unit. Cocopah families worked and migrated in groups that usually included immediate and extended family members, known as shamules.12 Households usually formed along patrilineal lines and were typically extended and multigenerational. Annual ceremonies and celebrations in sacred sites facilitated social contact with other Cocopah families living in the desert. A temporary chief led the ceremonies and served as a council and mediator of disputes. The gendered division of labor among Cocopah communities shared many similarities with other indigenous communities in the desert, where women cultivated the land while men hunted, fished, and raised horses. Once a year Cocopah families temporarily settled along the banks of the Colorado River to fish and cultivate crops. Families built rectangular homes measuring approximately fifteen feet wide by six feet high, made out of willow brush to protect them from the extreme heat in summer.13 They depended on the yearly high waters of the river that naturally irrigated the land they cultivated in corn, beans, squash, and watermelons. Women collected wild plants and fruits along the riverbank in July and August. They wove large willow baskets used to store seeds and staples on the roofs. Women also made pottery for cooking and built underground storage structures to keep fruits and vegetables from spoiling. Cocopah men spent long hours crafting fishing nets. They fished every day at the river, and fish was a significant part of their personal daily diet. All family members weeded during the growing season. After the fishing and harvest seasons ended, Cocopah families moved away from the Colorado River and came back after the yearly overflow of the river subsided. Some

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Cocopah families lived part of the year near Yuma, while others moved to higher ground in Baja California.14 Intermarriage and cohabitation between different indigenous groups occurred. These tribal communities encouraged marriage outside familial units. Even at the turn of the twentieth century, anthropologist Carl Lumholtz encountered mixed indigenous households of Cocopah and Apache families living near the Colorado River.15 But food shortages threatened peaceful relations among indigenous communities in the Colorado Desert. Cocopah people had a close relationship with the Maricopa, Pima, and Papago (Tohono O’odham) communities in Arizona, and at times they joined forces with them to attack the Yuma and Mohave people on the U.S. side of the border. Other times they joined the Yuma people from Baja California to attack mestizo families from San Diego.16 Mexican officials viewed the constant movement of indigenous peoples with suspicion and questioned their loyalty toward the government. Officials often misunderstood intertribal relations in the U.S.-Mexico border area. Mexican consuls based in San Diego and jefes políticos from Baja California often expressed their fear of losing the Baja California territory to the United States due to fluid relations between indigenous communities in the borderlands.17 José María Villagrana, subjefe político of the Northern Territory, wrote a letter to the central Mexican government, pleading for a stronger military presence. He expressed his fears that these disagreements among indigenous people in the frontier may lead to war. If this would happen, he was certain that Mexico was going to lose the Baja California peninsula. He called on the Mexican government for protection on the border, which, he reminded them, they had completely “abandoned.”18 Villagrana saw indigenous people as a liability to the Mexican nation and assumed that if another war erupted between the United States and Mexico, indigenous people would side with the United States, not with Mexico. His views resonated with Mexican politicians and intellectuals from Mexico City who viewed the indigenous people’s lack of incorporation as citizens as an “Indian problem” that undermined the nation.19 Intellectuals and politicians also attributed Mexico’s slow progress to its large indigenous population and the low migration of European immigrants to the countryside. Academics such as Alfonso Luis Velasco lamented the fact that there were more “brazos” (arms for working the fields) than heads in the countryside, preventing Mexico from becoming an industrialized nation.20 This assessment of indigenous people was reflected in the government’s interest in increasing land-colonization programs near the border by attracting national and foreign investments. Such programs had

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already proven successful in the border regions of Sonora, Chihuahua, and Matamoros.21 Indigenous groups recognized their tense relationship with the Mexican government and formed alliances with other indigenous groups to protect their communities. In 1860 the Diegueño, Yuma, and Cocopah people selected Marto de la Cruz as their leader to communicate the needs and concerns of indigenous people to the Mexican government.22 A charismatic, multilingual natural leader and a diplomat, he spoke Yuman, Spanish, and intermediate English. He was also literate in Spanish.23 Mexican officials commented on his relentless determination. He would travel by horse the 850 miles from the Mexicali Valley to La Paz to meet with Mexican officials if subjefes políticos from the Northern Territory ignored his demands.24 In the decade from 1860 to 1870, the boom in steamboat traffic traveling on the Colorado River also increased tensions among the Mexican government, U.S. entrepreneurs, and indigenous groups. In 1870 Marto de la Cruz traveled to La Paz to report that U.S. merchants had illegally cut trees near indigenous settlements to meet the steamboat’s high demand for firewood as they traveled from Fort Yuma to San Francisco: The subscriber, Captain General Marto de La Cruz, who represents close to five thousand souls [people] who live in the Colorado [River]. These Yuma, Diegueño, and Cocopah [people], who are the defenders of the dividing line between Baja California and that part of the United States . . . request the attention [of the government] to manifest the mission that brought me to the port of La Paz, Baja California Sur.

By strategically describing indigenous people as “defenders” of the Mexican border, de la Cruz asserted indigenous peoples loyalty toward the Mexican government. De la Cruz reported that the indigenous peoples he represented were becoming increasingly “resentful” toward U.S. nationals, who intentionally excluded them in the trade of woodcutting and cattle grazing and hired them only when they needed temporary assistance.25 De la Cruz proposed taxing the merchants and ranchers who benefited from the indigenous people living near the river. According to de la Cruz, a tax on timber and cattle would help build schools for indigenous children. “Even a small taxation on Americans is going to improve the quality of life in our communities,” explained de la Cruz in his letter to Pablo María Castro, secretary of the interior. In exchange for this authorization, he promised alliance and loyalty toward the Mexican government. De la Cruz’s propositions of opening schools in indigenous communities signaled their loyalty to the Mexican government, as schools were used for cultural assimilation.26 De la Cruz did not

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leave La Paz until the government approved his petition. In 1870 de la Cruz was officially recognized as “Tribal Captain” by the Mexican government. His responsibilities included promoting good behavior and hard work among native people, while maintaining a peaceful relationship with travelers and merchants. He was authorized to collect a small tax from AngloAmericans engaged in timber cutting, while at the same time he regulated this practice. De la Cruz also received authorization to charge a small tax to cowboys who crossed the border from Arizona to graze cattle.27 Clemente Rojo, subjefe político from the Northern Territory, objected to de la Cruz’s new position, since it undermined his own authority. Rojo immediately wrote a letter to Pablo María Castro to ask him to revoke de la Cruz’s title as well as his authority to collect taxes at the border. In his letter Rojo attempted to discredit de la Cruz’s reputation by casting him as an “impostor” mestizo whose real name was Chino Cobarrubias. According to Rojo, Cobarrubias had previously worked as a cowboy for the Bandini family ranch in Guadalupe, where he learned to speak different indigenous languages from his coworkers. He questioned de la Cruz’s loyalty to the indigenous groups he represented by insinuating that he was an opportunist. Rojo told Castro that de la Cruz took advantage of the indios in the Northern Territory by selling them goods and staples provided by the Mexican government rather than giving them away, as the government had intended. It is unclear what de la Cruz’s background was. Rojo’s allegations do not prove that he was an impostor mestizo from Guadalupe. Rojo’s story is not corroborated by other sources. Perhaps de la Cruz was a displaced Diegueño who arrived in Baja California from San Diego to work as a cowboy for Juan Bandini at Rancho Guadalupe in the 1850s. Although de la Cruz’s background remains uncertain, it is clear that indigenous people from the Colorado Desert selected him because he could effectively communicate with indigenous, Anglos, and Mexicans. In spite of the effort to discredit de la Cruz, he continued to work as a liaison. Government reports show that de la Cruz continued his periodic trips to La Paz and Ensenada as a representative of the allied Yuma, Diegueño, and Cocopah peoples.28 After returning from La Paz in 1870, de la Cruz continued to collect taxes from U.S. merchants for more than two years, in spite of Rojo’s opposition. As a result, indigenous people gained employment in the timber trade. As the traffic of steamboats increased along the Colorado River, indigenous seasonal laborers sold wood and also served as guides for steamboat companies. They sold wood for three dollars per cord to steamboats that operated with twelve cords on frequent routes between San Francisco and Fort Yuma. T. H. Stanton, who traveled this route, recounts seeing

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Cocopah and Yuma laborers working as crewmembers on steamboats. Until the steamboat era ended in 1877, steamboat captains relied on the expertise of indigenous people from the delta to help them navigate the unpredictable and often dangerous waters of the Colorado River.29 In 1873 a shooting incident ended the indigenous taxation program. When a U.S. merchant refused to pay taxes for selling wood, de la Cruz brought five armed men to force the merchant to pay. A group of AngloAmerican gunmen from Arizona was waiting, which led to a shootout that killed one man and injured three more.30 This episode marked the end of de la Cruz’s leadership in the Colorado Desert. When the Mexican government stopped supporting de la Cruz’s work, he escaped from the valley and went into hiding.31 The incident further complicated the relationship between indigenous groups and the Mexican government. In addition, Mexican officials feared the United States would use it as a pretext for war against Mexico. After this incident the Mexican government increased its efforts to sell land for colonization purposes to Mexican investors. In 1874 Manuel Aspiroz, Jacobo Blanco, Guillermo Andrade, and the Gaxiola brothers purchased over one million acres of land in Baja California and Sonora and formed La Compañía Mexicana Agrícola Industrial y Colonizadora de Terrenos del Río Colorado (the Mexican Agricultural Industrial Company and Colonizer of Land of the Colorado River). The Gaxiola brothers and Andrade had been business partners before their venture with Blanco and Aspiroz. Their previous business venture was the Gaxiola and Andrade Wood, Wool, and General Commission Merchants, headquartered in San Francisco.32 Blanco and Aspiroz, who at the time worked for the Mexican government, were familiar with this group of Mexican businessmen working in San Francisco. Andrade and his associates found markets for plant products, including a hardy twelve-foot wild hemp used for cordage, known as cáñamo silvestre, which grew along the riverbed. Mesquite trees for timber and another native wild plant known as tule were sold in a decayed state as fertilizer for U.S. crops. The company hired Cocopah people and approximately two hundred migrant workers from Los Angeles, California, and the Santa Rosalía mines in Baja California Sur. They planned a new colonia (settlement) near the Colorado River. Colonia Lerdo, named after Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, president of Mexico, became the first migrant and indigenous village established near the Colorado River. Only a few workers brought their families with them. The majority of the workers were single men.33 In contrast, the man who came to manage the enterprise and supervise the hiring process, I. Foncerrada arrived with his wife and nine children. Italian

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immigrants such as G. Giuliani, Federico Aker, and Zesone Cesare (who probably came from San Francisco) assisted Foncerrada with the processing of the fiber. The team was international: Francisco Fermín (from Chile) and Juan Bautista (from Brazil) assisted with shipping and export.34 Approximately 150 mestizo Mexican migrants worked to cut fiber. Within three years Colonia Lerdo grew from 200 to 800 worker-residents.35 It is very possible that indigenous families from El Mayor and the Cocopah Mountains migrated to Colonia Lerdo as the demand for cáñamo (hemp) fiber increased. On average, workers cut about five thousand tons of hemp per year.36 By the four-year mark the massive plant and tree-cutting enterprises near the Colorado River may have caused its channel to shift toward Colonia Lerdo, with unfortunate results. In 1877 the runoff swept away houses, horses, and fiber-cutting equipment and left two-thirds of the village completely underwater. While there were no reports of human fatalities, there is a possibility that some people perished and were undetected by local authorities. Scholars previously argued that the community completely disappeared after the river shifted toward Colonia Lerdo. Nonetheless, personal accounts written by travelers and contemporary anthropologists indicate that parts of Colonia Lerdo survived.37 The end of steamboat travel along the Colorado River in 1877 and the flooding of Colonia Lerdo led to the demise of the Compañía Agrícola. Most Mexican investors pulled out, leaving Andrade as the sole investor. He later embarked on a new venture with Thomas H. Blythe, a U.S. businessman and developer.38 In an effort to bring more mestizo and Mexican migrant families to work in the region, Andrade petitioned President Manuel González (1880–84) to allow him to create a new colonia of 200 families near the border. The Mexican government, eager to populate this region with nonindigenous residents, agreed to exempt him from paying property taxes on the assigned lots. In spite of his efforts, Andrade had difficulty attracting mestizo laborers to the Mexicali Valley. By 1886 only 53 mestizo families lived on the company’s property.39 Mestizo and indigenous workers built a nine-mile levee to protect the company’s land from flooding, planted fruit trees, and experimented with different crops on the property. Still, Andrade could not attract enough people to come and work in the Northern Territory. He could not compete with the higher wages offered by the copper mines in Arizona. Mexican mestizo workers also had the option to cross the border and work in Los Angeles, which, according to census records, they did in large numbers.40 The presence of Mexican migrants in Los Angeles increased by 20 percent after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.41 After his failure to attract more

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mestizo families to the region, Andrade wrote to the Mexican president, asking him for permission to count 140 Cocopah families as residents. The government agreed to count half of the Cocopah families as residents and asked him to bring another 70 “foreign” families to the Mexicali Valley.42 In the meantime developers began purchasing property in the Northern Territory. In 1871 William Denton, a British engineer who made most of his fortune mining in Baja California, purchased 6,175 acres of land in the Jacume Sierra from Hijinia Costoledo. He purchased the property even though he knew there were Kumeyaay rancherías on it. A year after Denton purchased the Jacume ranch, Andrade and Blythe, who were interested in building a road connecting the Mexicali Valley to the Gulf of Mexico, attempted to cancel his title. Denton, who had recently become a naturalized citizen of Mexico, hired attorneys and made personal visits to the president in Mexico City to challenge Andrade’s petition. The bitter dispute continued for years, until the Mexican government sided with Andrade and declared part of Denton’s property (named Algodones) as terreno baldío.43 Possibly, Andrade’s close relationship with Jacobo Blanco (who worked for the Mexican government) contributed to Andrade’s victory in court. In 1882 Blanco helped Andrade and Blythe negotiate the purchase of Algodones, enabling their dominance in most of the Mexican delta. While no records exist of indigenous people challenging land sales to investors near the Mexican border, they did challenge their evictions. Most indigenous people refused to move from land purchased by U.S. and Mexican land developers in the Colorado Desert. In 1896 Eugenio Romero, Andrade’s representative, requested help several times from the Mexican government to help remove the Diegueño and Yuma people from the property he had purchased in Baja California. Romero sent a letter to the jefe político Agustín Sanguines: I am respectfully writing to you to report that for some years now some indios from the Yuma and Diegueño tribes are illegally trespassing on Guillermo Andrade’s property located in the Northern Territory, very close to the dividing line. These indios are not from Mexico; they belonged to reservations from the United States. . . . We believe that the settlements of these groups in our territory could be harmful. They could rebel against our government like the indios in Sonora. These indios are violent, and no families will want to come and settle in the Northern Territory if they know they are putting their lives at risk.44

Andrade opposed having Diegueño and Yuma communities on his property, most likely because they refused to work for him. He attempted to

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persuade the Mexican government to deport Yuma and Diegueño people by comparing them to the Yaqui from Sonora. Andrade, who also had properties in his native state of Sonora, was very familiar with the long-standing Apache and Yaqui insurrections against the Mexican government and their resistance to being ejected from their native land in the Sonora Valley.45 On the morning of December 14, 1896, a Mexican judge summoned Diegueño and Yuma families to a Mexican court in Algodones. The court was packed with families, lawyers, and representatives from Mexico and the United States. W. F. Heffernan and Francisco Estudillo, representatives from the Yuma reservations in Arizona, were called on to assist with the deportation process. As the judge and interpreter began calling each family, he was told that most of them were born in the territory of Baja California. “If you don’t believe us, we will take you to the place we were born,” said Diegueño and Yuma family members.46 They argued that they had lived for generations in this region, and they refused to be deported to Yuma, Arizona. At the end of the day, only two men were formally deported. This is an example of how indigenous people challenged and resisted deportation by claiming their close ties to the land in the delta region.47 It also demonstrates how native people, who for generations crossed freely from Yuma to Baja California, were suddenly caught between political and economic boundaries imposed by the U.S. and Mexican governments and investors from both countries. The frontera had been transformed into the border.

back to the missions Immigration and colonization expanded beyond the Colorado Desert. During the 1860s Californio families from Alta California migrated to Baja California and settled on former mission lands. Some of these families had received mission land grants between 1824 and 1833, when the Mexican government enacted colonization laws in Alta and Baja California to promote new settlements.48 Pío de Jesús Pico, governor of Alta California, oversaw the secularization of the missions in Alta and Baja California.49 Land in Alta and Baja California was granted to close friends of Pico, including the heads of the Machado, Bandini (Pico’s secretary), Stearns, Yorba, Arce, Crosthwaite, Gilbert, Verdugo, MacAller, and Argüello families. They concentrated most of their financial investments in the ranchos they owned in Alta California while leaving their land grants in Baja California idle for many years.50 In 1853 Francisco Castillo Negrete, jefe político, reported that most of the former mission lands in the Northern Territory were abandoned:

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The missions granted by Pío Pico are in ruins, except for the missions of Guadalupe and Santo Domingo that have gotten better. Descanso Mission has few cattle. The landowners have never taken care of or lived on their lands. We can populate these missions with families that could make good use of these lands, but savage Indians are currently occupying the land. No families want to go near them, because they are afraid of the Indians.51

Castillo Negrete requested that the Mexican government cancel land titles for mission lands not inhabited by the landowners. He planned to sell or grant former mission lands to creole or mestizo families interested in moving to Baja California to become ranchers or farmers.52 He hoped that these new settlements would discourage indigenous families from inhabiting mission lands. It is not clear if the Mexican government approved Castillo Negrete’s petition. Perhaps the Mexican consuls in San Diego and Los Angeles communicated to these families the intention to cancel their land titles in Baja California if they remained idle. This happened at the same time that many Californio families faced bankruptcy and land displacements in California. The 1851 Land Act (the U.S. equivalent to the Law of Terrenos Baldíos) in the United States required Californio families to provide documentation for the land they owned prior to the annexation of Alta California.53 Many families lacked such documentation. Even those who had it still had to hire surveyors, translators, and lawyers and also pay hefty fees to file their claims in U.S. federal courts. Some Californios faced bankruptcy due to these expenses and the concurrent decline of cattle ranching in California.54 A will from 1859 written by a Californio from San Diego reveals that his wealth was in jeopardy. Juan Bandini owed large sums of money to Benito Nichols and his son-in-law Abel Stearns, among others.55 In his will Bandini ordered his albacea (executor) to pay Stearns two thousand U.S. dollars in cash and to pay the balance with land.56 Stearns helped Bandini to stay afloat from financial ruin, but Bandini was ultimately forced to sell his house in San Diego to pay off debt.57 Nichols would receive a portion of Bandini’s land in San Bernardino near Jurupa (Riverside).58 Members of the Machado family from San Diego were the first nonindigenous to arrive in Baja California. José Manuel Machado and his wife, Josefina Valdés, had raised their family on a rancho near San Diego. On July 31, 1851, Joaquín Machado, Machado’s son, wrote a letter to the jefe político of Baja California to request the Mexican government to verify his father’s ownership of Rancho Rosario, which had remained unoccupied since the land was granted in 1829. The jefe político immediately wrote them back, welcoming them to Baja California.59 After relocating to their rancho, the

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Machado family established a productive ranch with five thousand heads of cattle. They also cultivated cash crops for the U.S. market.60 In the next few years other Californio families followed. In 1855 Bandini moved with his second wife, Refugio Argüello, and their five young children to Baja California.61 During the secularization of the missions in 1833, Pico had granted Bandini two ranches, Rancho Guadalupe and Rancho Tecate, both near the Guadalupe Mission in Baja California.62 Bandini had three thousand heads of cattle and four hundred horses at Rancho Tecate. His ranches together totaled sixteen leagues (122,046 acres). His son-in-law Stearns also owned a ranch in Baja California, Rancho Santo Tomás, which averaged five thousand to seven thousand heads of cattle and four hundred horses. Stearns, who continued to prosper in the new California, did not relocate to Baja California and seldom visited his ranch. Bandini administered Stearns’s ranch and oversaw cattle transactions between 1855 and 1859.63 Members of the Gilbert and Verdugo families from San Juan Capistrano moved near the Descanso Mission. The Argüello and Yorba families settled in Ranchos Jesús María, Tía Juana, and Florido, near the U.S.-Mexico border. To expand cattle ranching in Baja California, transplanted Californio families requested an expansion of the number of cattle allowed per ranch from three thousand to five thousand heads of cattle. In 1851 Joaquín Machado wrote a letter to the jefe político in La Paz to expand the Deputy Law of February 12, 1851, which would allow them to bring more cattle to Rancho Rosario. The Mexican government permitted Californios to increase their herds, thus making it easier for Californio families to expand the market distribution of beef and cattle to California and Arizona. Even though most of the Californio ranchers used mission lands for cattle grazing, others became farmers. Civil marriage records from the 1860s indicate that José de la Gracia Yorba, José Argüello, José Matías Moreno (who served as subjefe político in Baja California), and Abram Gilbert identified themselves as farmers.64 These families grew wheat and other cash crops to sell to mining camps in Real del Castillo (thirty miles east of Ensenada), where the population grew to two hundred people after U.S. miners found small amounts of gold during the 1860s and 1870s.65 Californio families hired Paipais who lived near the Jacume Sierra (now called Sierra Juárez) to work as vaqueros (cowboys) and agricultural workers on their ranchos. They also hired Diegueños who had moved from San Diego to Baja California during the 1860s (after European Americans removed them from their lands near the San Diego Mission). Delfina Cuero, a Diegueño from San Diego, remembers how her family left Mission Valley in San Diego and moved to Baja California:

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My father and mother left Mission Valley, they told me, when a lot of Chinese and Americans came into the valley and told them that they had to leave. They did not own the land that their families and ancestors have always lived upon. . . . My grandparents crossed the line first [the border]. In those days we didn’t know it was a line, only that nobody chased them away from Willow [a small Diegueño Indian village in the mountains twenty miles south of Tecate] Ha-a people gave my grandfather and grandmother a place to stay.66

Delfina’s story illustrates the journey of Diegueños to Baja California. During the 1880s David Goldbaum, a surveyor appointed by the Mexican government, visited indigenous communities in northern Baja California and found about twenty rancherías near the Jacume Sierra.67 The climate was temperate, and indigenous people had access to water from the numerous streams running along the mountain range, where they planted fruits, vegetables, and grains. Californio ranchers offered temporary housing and food staples to indigenous families in exchange for their labor. According to the testimony of Silvestre Machado, indios mansos (“domesticated” Indians) migrated seasonally to Rancho el Rosario to herd cattle to San Diego and Arizona. The Yorba, Argüello, and Machado families owned slaughterhouses near the border, from which they transported beef in loaded cars to San Diego, and from San Diego on to San Francisco. Juan Cunur, an indigenous community member from San José, became a trusted worker for the Machado family. His father brought him to Rancho el Rosario as a baby. Since Cunur’s mother had died (probably in childbirth), María Serrano de Machado was his wet nurse and raised him. He then worked for several years as a cowboy for the Machado family.68 The Mexican government accommodated most needs of Californio families and approved their petitions to reinstate their Mexican citizenship.69 Some even became representatives of the Mexican government. For example, the Californio José Matías Moreno was appointed subjefe político of Baja California in 1861.70 Before coming to Baja California, he worked as a personal secretary to Pío Pico until 1846. He was married to Prudencia Vallejo, the daughter of a former Californio general, Guadalupe Vallejo. Matías Moreno was known as a very effective administrator who also served as a broker between Californio families and the Mexican government in the 1860s. But not all Californios were so readily accepted. Some Mexicans called Juan Bandini a traitor for aiding U.S. soldiers in San Diego during the Mexican-American War. After learning that Bandini had moved to Baja California, Castillo Negrete sent a letter to the military commander in La

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Paz, asking that Bandini be jailed for treason.71 He distrusted Bandini and was convinced that Bandini had moved to Baja California to help U.S. filibusters in an alleged plot to take over Baja California. Two years earlier William Walker from California had attempted to take over the Baja California peninsula for the United States.72 Castillo Negrete had in fact struggled to defeat Walker, since he received no military assistance from central Mexico. He felt that Baja California was still vulnerable to future filibuster attacks. Although archival documentation does not show that Bandini was tried for treason in Baja California, the Mexican government did go after Bandini’s ranchos through confiscation. To save his properties Bandini appealed to the Mexican Superior Court, which denied his request based on an 1853 law prohibiting foreigners from owning land within twenty leagues (sixty miles) from the U.S.-Mexico border.73 Bandini’s ranchos were too close. Unlike most Californios who moved to Baja California, Bandini was not considered a Mexican citizen. He was identified as a U.S. citizen with no right to own land near the border. Without land in Baja California, Bandini moved back to Los Angeles four years later, where he died in 1859. Matías Moreno, who later became a farmer, purchased Rancho Guadalupe.74 The ranchos owned by Californio families provided a good living. They raised cattle and horses and grew grains, vegetables, and fruit for the local market and presumably for their own use. They bought consumer goods from San Diego’s Larco and Company, which shipped purchases by steamboat to the port of Ensenada.75 As they had already done in Alta California, these families strengthened ties with other Californio families through marriage. Civil records recorded more than twelve marriages among Californio families between 1860 and 1880. For instance, the children of the Machado family married the children of the Yorba, Crosthwaite, Gilbert, and Verdugo families. Families brought old traditions from Alta California. Today, their legacy lives on with the annual celebration of the branding of cattle. These wealthy families gathered at ranchos Descanso, Tía Juana, Rosario, and Santo Domingo to celebrate weddings, baptisms, the harvest, and the branding of the cattle.76 Extended families from Alta California traveled to attend these special celebrations. These Californios became the new elite in Baja California.

u.s. investment in northern mexico While Californios expanded cattle ranchos in the former missions, investors from the United States extended their economic influence in northern

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Mexico after the Mexican government approved an expansion of the Law of Terrenos Baldíos in 1883. The government granted permission to private companies to survey land in the Mexican countryside. In exchange, the companies received one-third of the surveyed land. These companies had the right to purchase more land as long as they agreed to colonize the region.77 In 1886, three years after the approval of this law, Porfirio Díaz’s government authorized the International Mexican Company (based in Hartford, Connecticut) to survey Baja California. It became the formal agency for the distribution of land titles in the region. As historian William O. Hendricks notes, the Mexican government identified most of the Baja California territories as terrenos baldíos and had little idea about how much of the land was granted to private owners, since the land had not been properly surveyed.78 The International Mexican Company purchased 186 million acres of land from the Mexican government. With operations in Ensenada, the company sold land titles to U.S. and European investors and also ran a steamship operation to transport raw materials to manufacturers based in Mexico’s interior and the United States. J. W. Snyder, John C. Amend from Chicago, and G. S. Erb from Salt Lake City purchased approximately three thousand acres of land on Todos Santos Bay to build a hotel.79 They also ran steamships for passengers traveling to Ensenada, San Diego, and San Francisco. The U.S. government in California and Arizona also spearheaded efforts to survey the Colorado Desert and then made land grant concessions to developers. In 1893 C. P. Huntington sold five hundred thousand acres along the Salton Lake to investors involved in land and irrigation projects. Huntington, who lamented being “too old” to engage in this new business, commented on the profitability of these irrigation and land projects: If the purposes of the capitalist are realized, the entire territory of southern California and below the national boundary in northern Mexico will be so reclaimed that it will be possible to establish there an empire of more than 3,000,000 people who will not be only able to support themselves but furnish the east end of Europe with fruits, honey, nuts, and some vegetables, which the soil is abundantly able to produce.80

Published in English-language newspapers, the interview read like propaganda to attract investors to California and Baja California. At the time Huntington served as the president of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company and owned real estate investments throughout California.81 Many heeded Huntington words. In 1893 the engineer Charles Rockwood and some associates formed the Colorado Development Company and began

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table 1. Land sold by Guillermo Andrade to U.S. investors, 1888–1904 Date

Buyer

Acres

Cost (in pesos)

October 1888 March 1889

Alonso Daunhan William Hill, John Merrit, W. Fiehler, A. Blasell Isaac A. Burton Colorado River Land Company Compañía Lago Vulcano Irrigación y Terrenos Colorado River Land Company

Not disclosed 122,246

105,000 35,062

200,000 772,248

12,500 Not disclosed

Not disclosed 120,000 457,144

Not disclosed Not disclosed 173,000

November 1889 October 1897 July 1903 August 1903 June 1904

source: Protocolo del Juzgado de Primera Instancia, bk. 1, Archivo del Registro Público.

irrigation works in the Imperial Valley in California. The goal was to maximize water access from the Colorado River from the Mexican side of the border.82 The company began negotiations with Guillermo Andrade to initiate the irrigation project on the Mexican side of the border. It was a huge project. Canals were dug to move water from the Mexican side to the U.S. side, where developers started opening up more land for cultivation, and more water was diverted toward the Imperial Valley.83 By 1903 approximately twenty-five thousand acres of land were under cultivation, and the area was set to double the number of farms by the following year.84 Some seven thousand people lived in the Imperial Valley, and its population grew quickly. Even more U.S. farmers and investors jumped at the opportunity to purchase land near the Colorado River. Andrade, who had extensive connections with developers and bankers in the United States, profited by selling the company’s land concessions to U.S. businessmen eager to invest near the border. Table 1 shows the number of transactions and land sales made by Andrade to U.S. investors. Between 1888 and 1904 Andrade sold most of the land he had acquired in 1874 and made hundreds of thousands of dollars. In 1904 Southern California developers such as Harrison Gray Otis, Harry Chandler (then owner of the Los Angeles Times), W. H. Allen, and M. H. Sherman purchased approximately eight hundred thousand acres of agricultural land from Guillermo Andrade and created the Colorado River

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Land Company (CRLC). Andrade met these entrepreneurs when he served as Mexican consul in Los Angeles under President Díaz.85 The president’s support for foreign investment facilitated the registration of the CRLC as a Mexican enterprise.86 As a result, the company enjoyed the same privileges and rights as a domestic company. CRLC investors knew that the success of cultivating their semiarid lands directly depended on the flow of the Colorado River running through both the United States and Mexico.87 The 1904 federal water agreement between Mexico and the United States entitled the Mexicali Valley equal access to water from the Colorado River.88 Imperial Valley farmers on the U.S. side constantly challenged this agreement and demanded total control of the water.89 But Chandler had the money and influence to negotiate federal water rights, and he made sure his company received half of the water from the Colorado River. Having access to water from the Colorado River facilitated the subdivision of CRLC lands into farms. After 1906 the CRLC leased medium and large plots of arable land to U.S. companies and individual farmers interested in cash-crop cultivation or cattle grazing. At the same time, they provided loans for farmers with less capital. The owners of the CRLC used the Los Angeles Times to advertise and attract buyers and investors from across the United States. They also received support from Mexican government officials, who organized tours for potential investors in agribusiness.90 Leases were for one to ten years, with the opportunity to renew the contracts when they expired.91 Some companies and farmers then subleased the land to farmers with less capital, in plots averaging from one hundred to one thousand hectares, under the same conditions. The CRLC dictated what could be cultivated on the holdings, and renters were obligated to sell their products to specific buyers from U.S. markets. The benefits of leasing land from the CRLC included low rental fees and easy access to U.S. markets.92 The first tenants, however, had the challenge of clearing the land for cotton and other crops. CRLC shareholders rarely visited the Mexicali Valley. As historian Dorothy Kerig points out, Otis, Chandler, Allen, and Sherman were developers, not farmers.93 They relied on a general manager who kept them abreast of all their leases in the Mexicali Valley. Walker K. Bowker and H. H. Clark managed the CRLC between the years of 1904 and 1930 and took on the important task of making sure that water flowed to CRLC farms. In addition, they served as administrators and mediators between shareholders and farmers. They kept a detailed balance of renters’ fees and harvest gains and were in constant communication with both farmers and

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table 2. Lease account, June 30, 1917 (in dollars) Name James Lynch Black Butte Company R. C. Shaw Geo. A. Long Brandenberger M. J. Non Law Hing and Chew On Lee Lum J. P. Lorden Jim Hing H. S. Abbott Anselmo Ramírez Guillermo Martínez

Credits 4,082.00 2,625.00 2,484.24 0.00 0.00 13,784.30 4,250.00 1,579.55 3,500.00 1,060.40 60,586.87 2,500.00 2,500.00

Total

Unpaid

4,082.00 2,625.00 2,484.24 0.00 0.00 13,784.30 4,250.00 1,579.55 3,500.00 1,060.40 60,586.87 2,500.00 2,500.00

6,418.00 0.00 15,271.26 0.00 0.00 2,417.38 3,750.00 3,618.02 9,568.72 298.60 0.00 0.00 0.00

note: This table includes fourteen examples from the fifty-eight transactions by farmers recorded by the general manager in 1917. source: Lease accounts, 1917–18, box 67, Colorado River Land Company Records, Sherman Library.

major shareholders (see table 2). Like the shareholders, Bowker and Clark lived on the U.S. side of the border in the Imperial Valley. They crossed the border every day to work in Mexicali. Guillermo Martínez and Anselmo Ramírez were among the four Mexican tenants registered in the CRLC’s records. Most holding leases were European American or Asian American farmers. James Lynch, H. S. Abbott, J. P. Lorden, M. J. Non, and Law Hing came from California (San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the Imperial Valley, respectively). But there were numerous investors from other states, including Colorado, Nebraska, and Washington.94 CRLC records show the Denver-based Black Butte Company as a lessor. Most likely the Black Butte Company brought in a general manager to hire workers and supervise the cultivation of cotton. In 1909 the Southern Pacific Company completed the railroad connecting Mexicali with California and Arizona, thus facilitating the export of cash crops to the United States. To expedite the completion of the railroad through Baja California, Guillermo Andrade sold approximately a hundred thousand acres to the Southern Pacific Company and its subsidiary, Compañía de Terrenos y Aguas de la Baja California.95 Although this agreement strength-

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figure 1. Diegueños and European Americans by the Colorado River, California Baja, 1905. BANC PIC 17157, vol. 12, no. 51. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

ened commerce between the Mexicali Valley and the greater United States, it at the same time isolated the valley from the rest of Mexico, as there were no railroads connecting the valley with other Mexican states. Reliable access to the Colorado River as a source of irrigation was key in establishing the CRLC as a major force in the Mexicali Valley.96 On the other hand, these irrigation projects, initiated in 1905 by the California Development Company in the Imperial Valley and the CRLC in the Mexicali Valley, directly transformed the Cocopah way of life, because they altered the river’s natural course.97 In 1906 the damming of the Colorado River and the building of massive canals designed to distribute water to CRLC and Imperial Valley farms disrupted the Cocopah people’s seasonal cultivation of vegetable gardens along the river. To make way for canals, irrigation companies cut cottonwood and willow trees along the riverbank, further transforming the landscape of the Colorado River.98 The forty miles of lateral canals changed the course of the river, leaving parts of the riverbed completely dry.99 In the ranchería of El Mayor, indigenous families later recalled the abrupt transformation of the landscape from lush green to dreary brown. Fish lay dead all over the dry riverbed, and after a few weeks the smell of rotting fish became unbearable.100 Cocopah families who used to plant fruits, grains, and vegetables on the banks of the river were forced to look for seasonal work at irrigation companies and farms in Mexicali, Yuma, and the Imperial Valley. Only

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nineteen people remained in El Mayor after 1910.101 Cocopah women and children could no longer cultivate crops near the river. Furthermore, they could no longer rely on extended family for help, since the male population had dispersed to work for different farms and irrigation companies in the United States and Mexico.

conclusion There was no turning back for U.S. nationals investing in the region. The CRLC successfully transformed Mexicali’s semiarid lands into fertile soil that became an extension of California’s Imperial Valley. As more AngloAmerican farmers settled in the Imperial Valley, more developers began purchasing land on the Mexican side of border. The Colorado River Land Company was on its way to becoming one of the most successful cotton producers in Latin America. Californio families benefited from the colonization of Ensenada and from U.S. investment along the coast. They increased the number of cattle on their ranchos and cleared more land for the cultivation of cash crops, which they sold at booming local markets. These Californio families emerged once again as powerful elite families. In 1889 the Argüello family fractioned parts of Rancho Tía Juana to make way for residential houses that later became the city of Tijuana. Irrigation projects and land development in the Colorado Desert directly transformed indigenous people’s way of life. By 1907 indigenous families could no longer cultivate their land and thus had to labor for companies on both sides of the border. The Cocopah people became increasingly dependent on U.S. companies for work, and many indigenous families settled permanently in the Mexicali Valley. Often, they were paid with food and clothing instead of cash. By the turn of the twentieth century, indigenous communities began to merge with newly developed settlements formed by migrant workers from central Mexico, Asia, and Europe.

2. The Making of Baja California’s Multicultural Society The population of the Mexicali irrigated district is composed of Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, and Hindus. capt. harrington wilson cochran, report, 1919

In 1919 the San Francisco satellite bureau of the U.S. Intelligence Office commissioned Capt. Harrington Wilson Cochran to gather intelligence on rising migration patterns of Asian workers to Baja California, Mexico. The agency was concerned that the uptick in migration at the Mexico-U.S. border would undermine the enforcement of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement, which prevented unskilled workers to enter the United States. Cochran submitted an alarming report about the increasing migration of Chinese workers to Baja California. According to Cochran’s report, there were 3,500 Chinese, 300 Japanese, and 200 Southeast Asian people working on both a seasonal and permanent basis in agricultural communities in the Mexicali Valley.1 This included a growing colony of Japanese fishermen near the U.S. border.2 Mexicali’s downtown was booming with stores that catered to its diverse clientele in Chinese, English, and Spanish. By the turn of the twentieth century, these stores became commonplace in Baja California, where mining, fishing, and agribusinesses attracted a diverse labor force to the Mexican border. Chinese migration to Mexico was part of a larger transpacific migration to Latin America, Canada, and the United States that took place during the second half of the nineteenth century. Around 113,000 Chinese workers emigrated to the United States and Canada, and about 80,000 went to Latin America.3 According to historian Robert Chao Romero, Chinese immigrants numbered about 24,000 by 1924, making them the second largest group of immigrants in Mexico.4 The Mexican government benefited from the Chinese Exclusion Act enacted in the United States in 1882, because the act prohibited unskilled Chinese workers to immigrate to the United States. By contrast, Mexico signed treaties with Japan in 1889 and with China in 1899 to facilitate efforts to bring Asian men to work in Mexico.5 31

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figure 2. Mexicali’s downtown, 1915. Courtesy of the Archivo Histórico del Municipio de Mexicali, Baja California.

Historians have previously attributed the success of settlements near the U.S.-Mexico border to mining and agribusiness and to colonization projects sponsored by the Mexican government.6 While these factors were important, they do not fully explain why more single men who were transient in the past began to permanently settle, leading to the formation of ethnically diverse border communities. By 1921 more than 93 percent of Baja California’s population was racially mixed, according to Mexican census records.7 Residents spoke at least nineteen different languages.8 What led to this transformation? Census records and oral testimonies reveal that migration and mixed-race unions contributed to the increase of permanent settlements in the region. Indigenous and mestizo women enabled migrant men to succeed and permanently settle in Baja California. For example, in the Mexicali Valley, mestizo, European, Japanese, and Chinese men intermarried and cohabitated with mestizo and indigenous women. Chinese and Japanese surnames became widespread in agricultural communities in the valley, while European and Chinese surnames became commonplace in coastal communities. This chapter examines how migration, colonization, and intermarriage transformed Baja California’s social and racial landscape at the turn of the twentieth century.

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the santa rosalía mines Five hundred miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border in Santa Rosalía (located in Baja California’s Southern Territory), the French mining enterprise Compagnie du Boleo recruited Chinese and Japanese workers. This occurred notably after 1892, when the Mexican government prevented the company from hiring indigenous men during the Yaqui Wars. The Yaqui staunchly resisted the dispossession of their land in Sonora. As in Baja California, the Mexican government of Porfirio Díaz seized land in Sonora near the Yaqui River and sold it to Mexican and U.S. investors. This led to violent confrontations between the dispossessed Yaqui and the new landowners. In 1885 the Mexican government declared war against the Yaqui and Mayo who had lived and thrived in the Pacific regions of river valleys. Combat lasted for several years. President Porfirio Díaz prohibited the Compagnie du Boleo from hiring the Yaqui, probably fearing they would spend their earnings in arms and ammunition.9 Boleo managers attempted to recruit Mexican mestizos from the nearby states of Sinaloa, Sonora, and Nayarit. But many of these workers left after only a year. Competing recruiters from the United States traveled to Santa Rosalía to recruit mestizos with the promise of higher wages. Between 1895 and 1899 the mestizo population declined from 4,115 to 2,975 workers (see table 3). The French population remained under 300 in Santa Rosalía. These foreigners represented a skilled group that occupied managerial positions as supervisors, engineers, and merchants.10 French newspapers advertised positions for young engineers interested in jobs outside of France. The Compagnie du Boleo offered them free transportation from France to Santa Rosalía and covered all their housing expenses.11 Santa Rosalía also served as an important port of entry for Chinese and Japanese migrant workers. The Compagnie du Boleo contracted German and French vessels to transport Chinese workers who embarked in Hong Kong or Vladivostok, a Russian port city near the Chinese border.12 In 1900 the company contracted with the Toyo Imin Gaisha (Oriental Immigration Company) to bring Japanese workers to Santa Rosalía.13 Within ten years Boleo recruited approximately 3,000 Chinese and 1,000 Japanese workers. This trend coincided with the discovery of large deposits of copper in Baja California that had the potential to produce an average of eleven thousand tons of copper per year.14 Company records indicate that the Mexican Department of Development approved every single petition to bring Chinese workers to Santa Rosalía over objections from the Mexican Department of Health.

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figure 3. Postcard of the Santa Rosalía port in 1928, with a smeltery in the background. Courtesy of the Archivo Histórico Pablo L. Martínez, La Paz, Baja California Sur.

table 3. Workers in the Santa Rosalía mines, 1893–1899 Year 1893 1895 1899

Mexican mestizos 3,706 4,115 2,975

Indigenous peoples

Europeans

805 600 200

281 212 140

source: Compagnie du Boleo, census records, 1895, 1899, vols. 305–15, exp. 311893, Archivo Histórico Pablo L. Martínez.

The Department of Health was established under President Díaz to prevent the introduction and spread of disease in rural indigenous communities, ports, and cities. The policing and health control of the working poor during Porfirian Mexico was used as a tool for the segregation of Asian immigrants and indigenous people. Mexican health inspectors conducted physical examinations of Chinese and Japanese immigrants before they exited their vessels. Similar to indigenous people in Mexico, Asians were at the bottom tier in the labor strata. Asian immigrants were believed to be carriers of contagious diseases since they were considered of a “lower race” compared to European immigrants.15 In 1907 the Department of Health

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inaugurated the first national campaign against tuberculosis in Mexico. The National Medical Academy, in conjunction with the Council of Advanced Health Association (El Consejo Superior de Salubridad), believed that this contagious disease endangered the modernization of Mexico, since it took the lives of poor working people.16 For this reason, the Department of Health launched its most aggressive campaign at ports of entry and the Mexican countryside. The Department of Health denied Boleo’s request to bring more workers from Hong Kong to Santa Rosalía, citing tuberculosis as a common health problem among Asian workers.17 Pablo Macedo, the company’s manager, wrote to the Department of Development and the Department of Health to ask them to approve his petition. He argued that it would “jeopardize” the company if Chinese workers could not come to Santa Rosalía. As expected, the Department of Development overruled the Department of Health’s decision, and the company continued to bring workers to Santa Rosalía from China and Japan.18 Chinese and Japanese workers lived in segregated housing from Mexican indigenous and mestizo workers, as mandated by the Department of Health.19 At that time, the Compagnie du Boleo owned approximately twenty thousand acres of land in Santa Rosalía, and it had the authorization to expand housing projects for single and married mining workers.20 Chinese workers lived in the “Pekín” and “China” colonies in the community of San Antonio, while Japanese workers lived in the Japanese colony near San Ignacio.21 Both colonies had separate offices to serve these communities. Boleo deliberately segregated Asians from Mexican and indigenous workers, not only to address “health concerns” but likely also to prevent Mexican, Chinese, and Japanese workers from forming labor unions. Nor did the company want Asian laborers to learn that they were paid lower wages compared to their Mexican counterparts. Chinese and Japanese earned an average of 40 centavos per day, while mestizo and indigenous workers earned an average of 1.25 pesos.22 It was only a matter of time before Chinese and Japanese workers discovered the wage disparity, and they held strikes against the company several times. In 1904 a total of 500 Japanese workers refused to work until the company agreed to a salary increase. Unhappy with the company’s broken promises, 400 Japanese workers returned to Japan. In response, Boleo brought over more Japanese workers. But by 1912 only 450 remained.23 The 1908 strikes turned particularly violent after the Compagnie du Boleo called on the Porfirian rurales (rural police) and the Mexican federal army to detain Chinese strikers. The first strike occurred on May Day,

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figure 4. Santa Bárbara Church in Santa Rosalía, 1910. Courtesy of the Archivo Histórico Pablo L. Martínez, La Paz, Baja California Sur.

when Chinese workers walked out of the mines and organized a sit-in at the entrance to the company’s main office in Santa Rosalía. Agustín Sanguines, the jefe político from the Southern Territory of Baja California, instructed the Santa Rosalía chief of police, Enrique Jiménez, to be “assertive” when dealing with Chinese strikers to prevent more disruptions. He also called in the Mexican military to support the rural police.24 Labor enforcement officials and Mexican soldiers beat and jailed the strikers. To further intimidate Chinese strikers, Boleo sent 334 Chinese men to the Lazaretto de Mausallo, an institution in Guaymas designated to quarantine patients with infectious diseases, and then deported them to China.25 The remaining Chinese workers continued their vigil until the company finally agreed to increase their wages.26 In an effort to reduce dependence on Chinese workers, the Compagnie du Boleo offered free transportation to the mines to Mexican laborers and their families. Mestizo and indigenous workers lived in the communities of Providencia, Purgatorio, Soledad, and Santa Rosalía. The company established three different communities in Santa Rosalía: Mesa Francia, which housed European administrators and engineers; Mesa Mexicana, for families of government employees and Mexican administrators; and Arroyo, the

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figure 5. Compagnie du Boleo houses in Santa Rosalía, 1950. Courtesy of the Archivo Histórico Pablo L. Martínez, La Paz, Baja California Sur.

settlement for Mexican workers and their families. Mesas Francia and Mexicana had two-story homes with separate patios and stunning views of the Sea of Cortes. Arroyo was located far down the hill, away from the other settlements. These workers’ housing was similar to homes in Purgatorio, Soledad, and Providencia: small wooden boxes or shacks with a small kitchen and running water, but no electricity.27 At an exhibition in France in 1894, Boleo bought a prefabricated metal church, most likely built by Gustav Eiffel, the famous French engineer.28 It was shipped to Santa Rosalía, assembled between Mesa Francia and Arroyo, and named Santa Bárbara. It was the only church in town. Most marriages between Mexican women and European men were celebrated there.29 Outside the church was a large plaza with cafes, restaurants, and bars where women and men could stroll and mingle. Even though the space was considered a segregated area for workers, French engineers and administrators frequented this lively public square, where they met and sustained romantic relationships with Mexican women. The Mexican Revolution, which erupted in 1910, further increased the migration of thousands of families to Baja California in an effort to escape the violence from other states such as Sonora, Coahuila, Sinaloa, and Chihuahua.30 As a result, more women arrived in Baja California. In addition, agricultural companies desperate to hire more permanent labor began to provide more incentive for men to travel with their family and settle in the Mexicali Valley and Santa Rosalía. In the decade between 1910 and 1920, intermarriages increased in Baja California. By 1920 approximately

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table 4. Sample of intermarriages in coastal regions of Baja California, 1870–1900 Husband’s Name

Husband’s Place of Birth

Wife’s Name

Wife’s Place of Birth

Nicolás Minar Pierre Mathiot Francisco Bragg Julio Barbieri Thomas Gray Frank Ulbrich Gustavo Strickroth

Greece France United States Italy England Austria Germany

Ma. Jesús Serrano Agustina Mejía Lupe Serrano Trinidad Espinosa Domitila García Carolina Legaspy Flavia Guzmán

Baja California Baja California Sonora Baja California Sinaloa Sinaloa Sinaloa

source: P. Martínez, Guía Familiar.

71 percent of the French immigrants had married Mexican women.31 Mexican women who married engineers and administrators enjoyed the benefits of upward mobility and gained better housing with electricity and running water in Mesa Francia. Table 4 offers a small sample of intermarriages celebrated in Baja California’s coastal region. Marriage records reveal that Mexican women were usually the daughters of migrant mestizo workers or politicians from Baja California. In 1897 Nicolás Minar, a Greek mechanic at the Compagnie du Boleo, married Ma. Jesús Serrano, a widow from Mulegé, Baja California. A year later Pierre Mathiot, a French engineer at Boleo, married Agustina Mejía, also from Mulegé. Engineers and managers who married Mexican women eventually applied for Mexican citizenship, which the government granted after they had been in the country for more than five years.32 Polish and German Jews emigrated from California to Ensenada to work for British and U.S. investment companies. In 1887 Maximiliano Bernstein, a Jewish businessman, served as director for the International Mexican Company in Ensenada. He later invested in mining and cattle in San Rafael, near Ensenada. Bernstein married a mestiza woman, Guadalupe Riveroll, and they had five children. His Jewish business partner, Luis Mendelson, came to Baja California to work as a broker for the Lower California Development Company. He married Carmen La Madrid, a mestiza from Baja California. Both Bernstein and Mendelson settled permanently in Baja California and became Mexican citizens.33 Mendelson later served as attorney general of Ensenada.

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Marriages between Chinese men and Mexican women were rarely recorded in the Boleo census. Based on the company’s experience with the Department of Health, the company managers probably did not want to disclose that Mexican women intermarried or cohabited with Chinese laborers. Only three marriages appeared in the census. Perhaps the company survey excluded Chinese workers cohabitating with Mexican mestizas outside of marriage. The Chinese men who married Mexican women left the bachelor housing provided by Boleo and moved into the emerging towns of Santa Rosalía and Mulegé, away from the company. By 1926 Chinese people made up 26 percent of the population of Santa Rosalía. Civil records show that twelve out of twenty-nine Chinese men living in Santa Rosalía had married Mexican women.34 Based on the few records available, we do know that Chinese merchants were the first people to settle outside the company town. As in Mexicali, Chinese stores were established in Santa Rosalía outside the Boleo mines. Some stores sold vegetables, shoes, and staples at lower prices than the company store. Jobs at Chinese stores and restaurants provided alternative employment options for Chinese workers.

migration and settlements in the mexicali valley In the Mexicali Valley similar migration patterns emerged in agricultural communities with a burgeoning demand for laborers. In 1912 the Colorado River Land Company (CRLC) introduced cotton to the Mexicali Valley, leasing and developing 676,024 acres of land near the Colorado River.35 Seasonal farm labor led to a jump in population from 462 to 11,700 people during the cotton season. At the same time, census takers noted a remarkable decline in the indigenous population in Baja California. According to a 1921 census report, the indigenous population represented only 6 percent in Baja California. The Cocopah population declined from 5,000 in 1890 to 1,817 in 1920.36 The census also revealed that many indigenous women intermarried or lived in consensual unions with Mexican mestizos, thus accounting for a substantial increase of the mestizo population in the Mexicali Valley.37 Indigenous and mestizo families initially lived in separate communities. While Mexican workers lived on CRLC farms, indigenous farmers were displaced by the 1906 damming of the Colorado River. In response, indigenous people moved closer to the U.S.-Mexico border. They did not leave willingly, and they also resisted the settlement of immigrant mestizo workers. Zaragoza Contreras, one of the first mestizo migrants, described the Cocopah as “wild Indians who did not speak a word of Spanish. We could not live in peace because they would shoot at us almost every time we went

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outside in the evenings.”38 His narrative reveals the tensions between the native population (trying to survive under new conditions) and the mestizo newcomers (who viewed the Cocopah as savages because they did not speak Spanish). Ethnic tensions increased after the CRLC opened additional land to European American farmers and mestizo workers. Many mestizo men first came to the Mexicali Valley by themselves, and then brought their families a few years later. Between 1901 and 1907 the Sumaya, Villarino, and Barrios Arias families were among the thirty mestizo families who migrated to the Mexicali Valley from nearby Mexican states.39 The 1910 census reported 989 men and 428 women living in Mexicali.40 They made homes out of cachanilla and other native plants that provided protection from the extreme climate. Leaving his wife and family, Ramón Sumaya came in 1901 from the Ensenada mining camps. Seven years later his wife, Bernarda, joined her husband in Mexicali, bringing her widowed comadre (her child’s godmother), Delfina Moreno. These two women were among the first mestizas who worked as temporary farm laborers for the CRLC, clearing land and planting trees along the Colorado River. CRLC still preferred to hire men over women for labor-intensive tasks such as clearing the land and the installation of irrigation works. By 1909 the Sumayas saved enough money to purchase a vacant lot from Antonio J. Flores. They opened a small shop that supplied goods and staples for mestizo migrant workers in the valley.41 The two women probably ran this shop, while Sumaya continued working as a seasonal laborer at different CRLC farms. CRLC farmers did not offer permanent housing for farmhands. Workers built improvised open-air structures (known as ramadas) out of grass, loose boards, and wood. The farmers did not want to invest in worker housing, and the CRLC did not provide them with any incentive to do so.42 In fact, the CRLC contract stated that all improvements by the renter (including the construction of housing and fences) would become property of the CRLC after the lease expired. No extra compensation would be provided for these upgrades.43 The lack of CRLC support for worker housing made it difficult for farmers to retain workers and build a stable workforce. After their contracts ended, many workers left the farms to find other agricultural jobs in Mexico, while others migrated to the United States. The CRLC investors feared that the permanent settlement of Mexican workers on farms would lead to the confiscation of substantial portions of their property if those workers stayed for more than one year. This seemed to be the policy after the company had a difficult time evicting indigenous and Mexican tenants who claimed to have a permanent lease and work agreements with (former owner) Guillermo Andrade.44

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With the cotton boom in 1914, more men were contracted from the nearby states of Sonora, Sinaloa, and Nayarit. Mestizos and indigenous workers were side by side in the cotton fields. There is evidence that daily interactions changed their perceptions of one another. Some mestizos, who formerly viewed indigenous people as “savages,” started to appreciate the Cocopah people’s knack for building homes resistant to the extreme heat. In turn, the Cocopah people who had grown up listening to their parents’ stories about “evil” mestizos found their own perspectives changing as they spent time working with mestizos on CRLC farms. Previously, Cocopah children believed in a mestizo “boogie” man who would come at night to take them away if they misbehaved, and Cocopah adults perceived the mestizos as foreigners not worth trusting.45 In spite of these common misconceptions, indigenous women continued to marry mestizo men in greater numbers. In 1927, out of 1,006 civil marriages celebrated in Baja California’s Northern Territory, 537 were between indigenous women and migrant men. Marriage and consensual unions became central to the survival of indigenous and mestiza women in the Mexicali Valley. More than 80 percent of women between the ages of sixteen and sixty were married or lived in consensual unions with migrant men, while about 20 percent were widows or abandoned single mothers.46 For single mestizo men, finding wives or women with whom they could cohabitate was one with meeting their needs. Women were not only homemakers; they also contributed financially to the household. The nature of seasonal labor reinforced gender and labor inequalities in the Mexicali Valley. In spite of the flourishing cotton industry, single women struggled to find permanent jobs. Between 1910 and 1920 the majority of women were identified as part-time workers. Cotton farms and ranchos offered housing and year-round work to male heads of household and single men since men were assumed to be better equipped to perform physical labor. In 1920 cotton farms had a population of 8,237 men and 4,675 women.47 Women were usually offered only part-time work, and only during the cotton-picking season. Oral testimonies of indigenous women reveal that single mothers and widows often agreed to live in consensual unions with mestizo men as strategies of survival, to escape extreme poverty and hunger. Juana Portillo Laguna lived in a consensual relationship with Estanislao Sandoval, a mestizo who worked as a cowboy near Sierra Juárez. When Sandoval left Juana for another woman, she shortly moved in with Juan Valenzuela, a worker from Guaymas Sonora. Valenzuela helped raise her children, and they had more children together. Because he was well connected in the Mexicali

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Valley, Valenzuela had steady work even in the off-season. The couple remained together for many years, until their children became adults.48 In some cases, single mothers who lived in consensual unions with mestizos endured domestic abuse. The experience of Delfina Cuero provides a glimpse into the lives of indigenous single mothers. A Diegueño, she was widowed when her four children were small. In her autobiography she describes her traumatic experience with different mestizo men: I tried to live with several different men, each one said he would take care of me but each time it was always the same. I did all the cooking, washing, ironing, and everything, all the work I had always done, but it wasn’t enough. I had to clear land and cut fence posts. I had to work like a man, as well as the house and garden work, hard, heavy work. If I didn’t do enough to suit him, he would beat me. I have been black and blue so many times because there was still more work to do. Even with all that, each man would get mad about feeding my children and beat me for that. When the man would not let me feed my children, I would have to find someone else to work for.49

Cuero’s narrative demonstrates how unmarried women faced enormous challenges in the countryside. Life for Delfina and her children became more precarious as she moved around with her children to work temporary jobs. In between relationships Delfina worked as a part-time farmhand, took in laundry, and begged for food when she was unemployed. Her perilous situation forced her to ask her comadre, Matilda, to help her raise Eugenia, one of her younger daughters. Left with no other recourse, given the gender discrimination of the worksites, she also negotiated consensual unions for her two teenage daughters, Lupe and Lola, hoping each would find a better life with a male partner. Meanwhile, her two older sons had found well-paying jobs on nearby farms. As more men and women moved around to work on different farms in Baja California, the Mexican government began looking for ways to motivate seasonal workers to remain. To do so, subjefe político Esteban Cantú approved land colonization projects in Mexicali. Cantú’s strategy was to populate the valley with Mexican residents to ward off the constant threat of U.S. annexation. Between 1910 and 1920, when Mexico was in the midst of the Mexican Revolution, the U.S. Senate made different attempts to approve the purchase of Baja California. In 1919 Elwood Mead, a former professor at the University of California and the appointed chair of the California Commission on Colonization and Rural Credit, advocated for the U.S. purchase of the Mexican territory. His idea was to shift the boundary line far enough south to place the Colorado River wholly within the borders of the United States.50

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table 5. Colonias in the Mexicali Valley, 1916 Colonia Abasolo Benito Juárez Herradura Sonora Grupo Oriental Grupo Occidental

Hectares

Individual lots

129 640 240 685 580 50

12 64 24 63 50 40

source: Herrera Carrillo, Reconquista y Colonización, 162–63.

Cantú expropriated approximately 6,500 hectares from the Compañía de Terrenos y Colonización (an English company) and the Compañía de Terrenos y Aguas de la Baja California (a U.S. company) to form Mexican colonias.51 These companies had purchased the land from the CRLC, and Cantú targeted them because they had defaulted on their property taxes. Cantú’s support for the settlement of Mexicans in new colonias proved successful. By 1919 there were four thousand Mexicans living in the Mexicali Valley who owned or leased an average of 10 hectares per family. Colonia Herradura had approximately 240 hectares for twenty-four families; Abasolo had 129 hectares for twelve families; and Sonora (among the largest colonias) had 685 hectares for sixty-three families.52 As a result, between 1910 and 1919 the number of Mexicans in Mexicali tripled (see table 5). Families living in colonias did not have enough land for subsistence farming, so they still needed to work on CRLC farms to make ends meet. The Mexican government designed an optional plan, where a tenant could either purchase the lot or lease it for three years or more.53 In an effort to increase the size of the Mexican army at the border, Cantú offered men the option to stay in colonias at no cost as long as they served in the army.54 Cantú was clearly concerned about the region’s U.S.-dominated agribusiness and fearful of losing the rich Mexicali Valley to the United States. The boom in cotton production during World War I led to a labor shortage. CRLC farmers complained about the high turnover of Mexican laborers. Most of those recruited as seasonal cotton pickers did not return. Instead, they crossed the border and worked for agricultural enterprises in Arizona and in California’s Imperial Valley, where growers proved more successful at attracting and retaining workers than their counterparts in Mexicali because they offered higher wages.55 According to Lawrence

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Cardoso, Mexicans earned an average of twelve cents per day in Mexico and between $1.00 and $3.50 per day in the United States for the same type of work.56 From 1910 to 1920 irrigation development transformed the Colorado Desert into the Imperial Valley, some of the most fertile farmland in the United States. By 1920 the Imperial Valley was called “America’s Amazing Winter Garden” and the “American Valley of the Nile.” Growers increased the cultivation of cantaloupe, lettuce, cotton, and alfalfa. The cantaloupe industry alone yielded $9.5 million in profits in one year.57 Imperial Valley farmers were desperately in need of labor. The Chinese Exclusion Act, which went into effect in 1882, prohibited U.S. farmers from hiring Chinese laborers, so they instead hired Mexicans in greater numbers.58 In 1917 the U.S. secretary of labor was pressured by growers to omit the required literacy test for the contracting of foreign labor at the U.S.-Mexican border. As a result, between 1910 and 1930 more than 750,000 Mexicans migrated to the U.S. Southwest to work in agriculture, transportation, and mining.59 Historian Vicki Ruiz writes that by 1920 Mexican migrant workers and Mexican Americans emerged as the primary labor force in the mining, agricultural, and railroad industries in the U.S. Southwest.60 To attract more workers, CRLC managers employed ruthless recruiters, known as enganchadores, to trick Mexican, Chinese, and Japanese workers from mining towns in Santa Rosalía and Ensenada into jobs with CRLC. These recruiters used deceiving tactics to attract Chinese and Japanese workers from Santa Rosalía to work in the Mexicali Valley. Recruiters told them that they would own land and get paid a higher wages if they worked for the CRLC. Some Chinese and Japanese workers left the mines in search of better opportunities. Mariano Ma left his job at the mines near Ensenada to go to the Mexicali Valley, only to find out wages there were actually lower.61 The labor shortage persisted, and the CRLC could not attract enough Chinese or Japanese immigrants. By 1912 the CRLC began formal talks with the Mexican government under Francisco I. Madero to contract Chinese workers. Some renters were actually wealthy Chinese American farmers from California who recruited their own labor force from Canton, China.62 Cantú approved the contract of Chinese laborers, under the condition that each one pay a hundred-dollar tax when they entered the territory.63 But not all Chinese workers arrived through the ports of Baja California. Many arrived at the port of San Francisco, California, where they were sent on a “sealed” South Pacific train to Calexico.64 Other Chinese workers already living in the northern states of Sonora and Coahuila moved to Mexicali after they experienced racial persecutions during the Mexican Revolution.65

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At the CRLC there were two basic labor agreements. Some farmers paid an hourly wage for time on the job cultivating and picking cotton, while others divided the profits among the workers after the harvest. While Chinese laborers who belonged to transnational Chinese associations based on regional, family origin, or political associations chose the latter agreement, Mexican workers preferred a set wage. Workers with management skills, such as Mariano Ma, eventually landed better jobs in the Mexicali Valley. His story provides an example of how Chinese workers moved up into leadership positions at the CRLC. In 1884 Mariano Ma emigrated from China to work at the Ensenada mines. In 1906 the CRLC recruited him to clear land for farms. Between 1884 and 1906 Ma learned to speak English and Spanish, which allowed him to work first as a contractor, then later as a supervisor for the company’s irrigation projects. As a supervisor, Ma managed thousands of men from different backgrounds: As a mayordomo [supervisor] I oversaw men from different countries: Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, and Anglo workers. . . . There were some occasions where I had to supervise and mobilize 2,000 men as if they were soldiers.66

His trilingual abilities and managerial skills were the key to his upward mobility from seasonal worker to supervisor. Ma later became a Mexican citizen and worked for the company until 1937. As more Asian American farmers from San Francisco subleased mediumsize plots from the CRLC, the Asian working population increased in Baja California. Farmers subleased an average of one hundred to three thousand hectares, known as ranchos.67 According to historian Evelyn Hu-DeHart, there existed approximately 125 Chinese-operated ranchos on CRLC land, which employed 1,314 Chinese men.68 Some Chinese cotton ranchers invested in other enterprises in Mexicali as well. Wong Kee, a well-respected cotton rancher, had stores and other business ventures in Baja California. In 1915 two Japanese farmers, K. Lato and Ben Kodoma, leased a medium-size plot from the CRLC and employed about 30 Japanese laborers on their ranch. They also opened stores in Mexicali.69 Chinese laborers worked in fields other than agriculture; some of them even had jobs in Mexicali’s redlight district. As historians Casey Christensen and Eric Schantz note, gaming houses and bars emerged in Baja California in 1909 and became part of the border economy.70 In the 1920s, when alcohol was prohibited in the United States under the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, U.S. and Chinese investors opened gaming houses, restaurants, and bars in

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Mexicali and Tijuana. Many Chinese men worked in these red-light districts as cooks, bartenders, and waiters. U.S.-owned land companies in Baja California continued to rely on Asian and Mexican laborers. By 1910 intermarriage between mestizas and Asian men was changing the racial ethnic makeup of the Mexicali Valley. Census records show that after 1910 more Chinese and Japanese workers married or lived in consensual unions with Mexican women. In 1927 approximately 300 out of 1,006 weddings in Baja California were between Asian men and mestiza women.71 This number is consistent with the mixed-race marriages recorded in Chihuahua and Sonora, which also had a large migration of Chinese workers.72 As Grace Peña Delgado and Julia María Schiavone Camacho note, Mexican wives could help their Chinese husbands establish social ties within the local community.73 In Baja California the Chinese farmworkers who worked on Chinese farms in Mexicali were members of associations. Most likely, agricultural workers relied on the credit provided by Chinese and Mexican merchants during the cultivation period and then repaid those debts after the harvest. Both court records and applications for Mexican citizenship filed by agricultural workers reveal the close connection those workers had with Mexican merchants and Chinese renters in the city and in the countryside. All nineteen citizen applications for Mexican citizenship filed by Chinese agricultural workers between the years of 1921 and 1924 listed Chinese and Mexican merchants as their witnesses, as the court required the witnesses to be “respectable” people from the community who had known the applicant for at least five years.74 Many of these Chinese merchants who served as witnesses were naturalized Mexican citizens themselves, thus increasing the odds for applicants to be granted Mexican citizenship. From the testimonies of merchants we learn of the close connections they had with agricultural workers (see table 6). For example, Henry Wong was an agricultural worker in the Mexicali Valley who came from Canton, China, as a teenager. At the age of twenty-nine, Wong filed a petition for Mexican citizenship in the municipality of Mexicali. Wong Luen, a merchant from Mexicali, testified that he had known Wong since he was chiquito (young) and that he was worthy of Mexican citizenship because he was a decent man. Mexican merchants Carlos Saracho and Enrique Uribe testified on behalf of Luis Ma Chew, José Lim, and Antonio Foy. Luis Ma Chew came to Baja California Norte from Canton in 1917. He worked on farms in Baja California for six years.75 After he married a Mexican woman in 1922, then applied for Mexican citizenship. His application was approved, and he became a naturalized Mexican citizen. Chinese men previously confined to

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table 6. Chinese applicants for Mexican citizenship, 1920s Name

Age

Year

Merchant Witnesses

Santiago Chen Vicente Chang Wong Way Luis Wong Lee Francisco Lee Luis Ma Chew Henry Wong Jesús Yee Cai Fau De Wong José Lim Antonio Foy Francisco Yuen Manuel Ping

25 52 23 18 29 27 29 18 33 25 30 30 29 28

1920 1920 1923 1923 1923 1923 1924 1924 1924 1924 1924 1924 1924 1924

Antonio Fung Patricio Lee Manuel Wong Julio Wong Julio Wong / José Chin Carlos Saracho / Enrique Uribe Wong Luen Luen Wong / Luis Le Luen Wong / Luis Le Luis Le / Julio Wong Carlos Saracho / Enrique Uribe Carlos Saracho / Enrique Uribe Rafael Luong / Julio Wong Kee Wong

note: Witnesses were Mexican citizens and naturalized Mexican citizens of Chinese descent. source: Applications for naturalization, 1920–24, Juzgado Primero de Distrito, Casa de la Cultura Jurídica.

CRLC farms moved to the northern part of Mexicali, which they called Chinatown, while other people moved onto CRLC lands rented by Chinese farmers. In 1913 Manuel Lee Chew immigrated to the Mexicali Valley to work for Rancho del Pacífico, a CRLC cotton farm. Lee Chew had two older brothers who had worked in the valley since 1910, and they had arranged the job for him. In 1920, while working as a supervisor at Rancho del Pacífico, he met Flavia Mancilla Camacho, a mestiza migrant from Santa Rosalía who worked part-time on the ranch during cotton-picking season. Her father had come to Mexicali a few years prior from Santa Rosalía, where he had worked at the Compagnie du Boleo. Lee Chew asked Mancilla Camacho to marry him after a long courtship. She loved him and was determined to marry him, although her father was opposed. Her father finally gave his consent, and in 1920 Lee Chew arranged a big wedding celebration at Casa Blanca, one of the most expensive restaurants in Mexicali’s Chinatown. The bride’s family and Chinese and Mexican workers from the farm all attended the wedding. Lee Chew borrowed a new Cadillac from a friend (a Chinese merchant from Tijuana), and he drove his new bride back to Rancho del

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Pacífico.76 Over time marriages between Mexican women and Chinese men transformed segregated neighborhoods assigned to Chinese bachelors into diverse Chinese Mexican communities.

mixed-race children and the state By the 1920s mixed-race marriages became part of a larger public debate in postrevolutionary Mexico. President Álvaro Obregón, from Sonora, envisioned a new government that incorporated rural indigenous into the mainstream of Mexican society through education and the emphasis of mestizo roots. At the same time, Mexican politicians began to politicize civil marriages and increasingly condemn marriages between Mexican women and Chinese men. The children of mixed-race couples fit this new image of postrevolutionary Mexico. Growing up in the 1920s, Cocopah mestizos forged new identities as Mexicans in Baja California. The local government categorized the children of mestizo and Cocopah parents as “Cucapá Mestizo” because most of these children spoke both Yuma and Spanish. Locally, the second Cocopah mestizo generation was known as cuarterones (one-quarter indigenous) because they spoke more Spanish than Yuma. Interviews with Cucapá Mestizo children reveal that their identities where shaped according to the place where they grew up. For example, the sons and daughters of Félix and Petra Portillo, a mestizo-indigenous family, identified themselves as Cocopah. When their parents worked as seasonal laborers in the United States, the children stayed with their maternal grandparents in El Mayor. The children grew up around Cocopah people, learned indigenous cultivation techniques, spoke mainly Yuma and frequently traveled to visit relatives in Yuma, Arizona.77 Still, when the Portillo Laguna children got older, they worked on U.S. farms with mestizos. Adelina, María de Jesús, Felipa, and Juana Portillo all married mestizo migrant men.78 Cocopah mestizo families who moved near the Mexicali municipality spoke more Spanish than Cocopah, and their children attended local schools with mestizo children. By 1921 only 457 reportedly spoke an indigenous language. Most Cucapá Mestizo men dressed like their mestizo fathers in pants and shirts but wore their long hair braided. Women chose dresses instead of indigenous attire and, like the men, wore their long hair braided.79 Mestizo children visited relatives in El Mayor, Yuma, and Somerton, but only a few learned the Yuma language and their fishing and farming techniques. Adela Sandoval Portillo, granddaughter of Petra Laguna and Félix Portillo, lamented that the second generation of

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Cocopah mestizos did not want to learn indigenous fishing techniques and instead chose to work as seasonal laborers on irrigation projects and cotton farms, much like mestizo migrant workers.80 Chinese Mexican children had similar experiences as Cocopah mestizo children. Most spoke both Cantonese and Spanish, because their fathers spoke to them in Cantonese, and their mothers spoke to them in Spanish. For example, the eight children of Flavia Mancilla Camacho and Manuel Lee Chew spoke both languages fluently. Their son Manuel Lee Mancilla recalls how his mother, Flavia, taught him how to write and speak in Spanish to prepare him for elementary school. But Manuel felt more comfortable speaking Cantonese, the language spoken at the farm where his father worked as a manager and where he and his siblings spent most of their time. When he was a young child, his favorite foods were the ones given to him by the Chinese cook who prepared meals for the workers and maintained a vegetable garden near the cotton farms. On the farm young Manuel learned which vegetables and meat were used to prepare authentic Chinese meals. He and his siblings ate with the Chinese workers, who often talked about various dishes from their villages back in China. But as Manuel and his siblings got older, they spent their days in school instead of on the ranch. The Lee Mancilla children spoke Spanish at school and Cantonese at home. As an adult, Manuel volunteered as an interpreter for Chinese workers in the Mexicali Valley. Like his father, he married a Mexican mestizo woman, Enriqueta Sandoval, from Tecate. Lee Mancilla and Sandoval later opened a restaurant called La Paloma Oriental, which fused the flavors of Chinese and Mexican cuisines. As Julian Lim has observed, the testimony of Manuel Mancilla provides a window to examine how Chinese Mexicans lived and challenged daily life on the border.81 Nevertheless, as intermarriage between Chinese men and Mexican women became more common in northern Mexico, xenophobia and antiChinese sentiment was also on the rise. In Sonora, merchants and politicians pressured the Mexican government to pass laws banning marriages between Mexican women and Chinese men. Scholars note that during the 1920s the Mexican government restricted the immigration of Chinese workers to Mexico using “health safety” and nationalism as a justification for violent anti-Chinese movements.82 Anti-Chinese zealots scorned Mexican women who married Chinese men, who they considered genetically inferior.83 They argued that the Chinese were of a lesser race and that such marriages jeopardized the future of the Mexican nation.84 During the 1920s the states of Sonora and Sinaloa passed laws prohibiting intermarriage between Mexican women and

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Chinese men.85 In 1923 Sonora passed Law 31, prohibiting marriage not only between Mexican women and Chinese men but even between Mexican women and Chinese Mexican men who were naturalized Mexican citizens of Chinese descent.86 Violators were fined from 100 to 500 pesos. Women who married Chinese men were categorized as Chinese and were forced to register as foreigners. In addition, the newspapers published the names of Mexican women married to Chinese men to bring shame on the wife and her extended family.87 In Baja California there was no law prohibiting such marriages, but the Department of Immigration enforced the registration of Mexican women married to Chinese men. Isabel Barrera Wong, a mestiza woman from El Triunfo, Baja California, had to register as a foreigner because she married Mr. Wong, a migrant merchant from southern China.88 The children of the Wong Barrera family were also registered as foreigners, even though they were born in Baja California. In 1921 Álvaro Obregón appointed José Vasconcelos, a noted scholar and politician, as head of Mexico’s Department of Education. His mission was to overhaul the educational system. Vasconcelos changed the school curriculum and launched a campaign to send teachers to rural communities, with the goal of incorporating indigenous peoples into what he called the “Raza Cósmica” (Cosmic Race). Vasconcelos was a critic of U.S. segregation policies on Native American reservations and believed that the incorporation of indigenous communities would modernize the Mexican countryside. According to Vasconcelos, the mixing of people of European and indigenous origins (mestizaje) would produce the race of the future, or what he called the “fifth race.”89 But Vasconcelos opposed intermarriages between Mexican women and Chinese men, using the same rhetoric used in the antimiscegenation laws approved by the state of Sonora. This would eventually lead to policing of mixed-race marriages and the exclusion of Chinese Mexican children in northern Mexico.

conclusion As the stories attest, regional and transnational migrations were crucial to the success of mining and agribusiness in Baja California at the turn of the twentieth century. Between 1900 and 1921 the Santa Rosalía mines brought in about three to six million pesos yearly from the export of copper, making them some of the most productive mines in Mexico.90 Santa Rosalía’s wellestablished seaport connected the Baja California peninsula with the United States, Europe, and Asia. By 1920 the Mexicali Valley became one of the

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leading cotton producers in Mexico. The railroad connecting Mexicali to California and Arizona made the region increasingly dependent on the United States, as it became a hub for the export of cotton and other goods to markets in the U.S. Southwest. Though overlooked in the past, intermarriage played a central role in shaping border communities. Government plans to separate workers by race and ethnicity were initially supported by land developers and mine management. For example, the Compagnie du Boleo designed a company town with strict boundaries separating Asian and Mexican workers and also separating workers from managers. In the Mexicali Valley Chinese workers lived on CRLC ranchos, while mestizos and indigenous workers lived in Mexican colonias. Over time intermarriage and cohabitation challenged these racial boundaries. As this research shows, Chinese, Japanese, and European workers did not live in what would be described as solely bachelor communities, as contended by earlier scholars. Many intermarried with local mestizo and indigenous women and settled permanently in Baja California. In Santa Rosalía 70 percent of European engineers who came to work at the Compagnie du Boleo married Mexican women. Chinese workers from Boleo also intermarried and cohabitated with Mexican women, and they moved out of company housing to settle in mixed-race communities with their families. In the Mexicali Valley mixed-race families moved to Mexicali’s downtown, near the international border with Calexico, California, an area initially occupied by displaced indigenous families. After 1910 Mexicali became a booming town with Mexican, Chinese, and mixed-race colonias. New government buildings were built in Mexicali’s downtown after Cantú moved his post from Ensenada to Mexicali, near to the Mexican customs office. Mexicali became a municipality in 1914, and by 1917 government offices were relocated from Ensenada. Between 1917 and 1920 Chinese merchants and farmers purchased more than twenty lots in downtown Mexicali (for 100 to 1,000 pesos per lot) to open casinos, restaurants, stores, and hotels. In 1917 Wong Wa Fey purchased two lots, which later became the first Chinese Association in Mexicali, later known as La Chinesca (Chinatown).91 After 1920 anti-Chinese movements that swept northern Mexico eventually affected racial dynamics in Baja California, leading to an increase in the policing of marriages and the exclusion of mixed-race Chinese Mexican children. Despite that, multiracial border towns such as Santa Rosalía and Mexicali extended across transnational borders and shaped communities by influencing labor practices, politics, and migration patterns in the MexicoU.S. borderlands.

3. Revolution, Labor Unions, and Land Reform in Baja California Fellow comrades: May Day is approaching and presents an opportunity to protest against the company. We will organize a parody that will be called the Slave and the Bourgeois. Maybe they will imprison us or kill us. macrina lerma álvarez, qtd. in Everardo, Disputa por la Tierra

In the early morning of May 2, 1930, armed soldiers detained Felipa Arellano, a migrant worker from Sinaloa, for leading an underground labor union of four hundred members in Mexicali, Baja California. Arellano and her three children, Sebastián, Francisca, and Soledad, were snatched from their beds and handcuffed before being taken to a Mexicali prison. Soon they learned that other union members and recent Mexican repatriates from the United States were also imprisoned with their families. The local jefe político identified them as the main organizers of multiple sit-ins on U.S.-owned lands that culminated in a play at the local plaza on May Day.1 The play criticized the Mexican government for protecting U.S. agribusinesses. A week later the detainees and their migrant families were sent to the María Islands, a maximum-security prison off the coast of Nayarit, where they were jailed and did forced labor for more than five months.2 As word of the detentions spread, there was a sense of outrage toward the Mexican government, transforming Mexicali into a contested terrain where more workers organized into unions demanding higher wages and access to land grants. The workers’ demand for better wages and land grants was part of a growing national movement after a new constitution was enacted in Mexico in 1917. Migrant workers such as Felipa Arellano were aware of land reform projects approved by the government in other Mexican states. Between 1917 and 1937 the Mexican government was forced to deal with the “land problem,” which had been at the heart of the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910. As many scholars have rightfully noted, land redistribution became a tool used by the Mexican government for nation building after the revolution.3 Following the decade of revolutionary upheaval, the population of Baja California increased from 23,537 in 1921 to 48,327 in 1930.4 During the 52

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same time frame the CRLC abandoned large tracts of uncultivated land, which led to an increase in unemployment and stiffer competition between Asian and Mexican workers. This was the second time in a decade that workers suffered an economic crisis in the Mexicali Valley. The end of World War I in 1918 had led to a decline in the demand for cotton, leading to Baja’s first economic recession and the resulting labor surplus in the valley. In response, Mexican workers formed labor unions to pressure the government and U.S. agribusinesses for an increase in wages and access to land grants (ejidos). By 1930 unemployment, combined with the housing shortage caused by a new wave of Mexican migrant workers from the United States, led to the formation of labor unions where indigenous peoples, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans demanded access to farmland and called for restrictions on Chinese immigration. Chinese workers formed Chinese associations in the face of repression and forced deportations. While these struggles reveal how workers dealt with hard financial times, they also show how race, gender, and ethnic affiliations shaped activism and early land reform movements in the Mexicali Valley in the 1920s.

the revolution of 1910 and the movement for land reform In Baja California’s Northern District, the movement for land reform was closely connected to the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The Mexico-U.S. border was a strategic place for the unfolding of the Mexican Revolution.5 Between 1910 and 1920 the states of Sonora, Chihuahua, and Coahuila and the Baja California territory became the epicenters of major battles, leading to the emergence of a new leadership of norteño revolutionaries. Francisco I. Madero, Pancho Villa, Pascual Orozco, and the Flores Magón brothers recruited rebels and gathered ammunition at the U.S.-Mexico border to challenge the Porfirio Díaz regime. Madero, from Coahuila, was a member of one of Mexico’s richest families whose wealth was based on hacienda agriculture. He became a strong critic of the president and organized a political campaign against his authoritarian policies. When Díaz ordered the arrest of Madero, he fled to San Antonio, Texas, where he organized a rebellion against Díaz’s government, which had remained in power after a fraudulent election. In Texas Madero drafted the Plan de San Luis Potosí. The plan demanded the end of the Díaz regime and the restoration of democracy in Mexico. The plan also included a demand for the return of lands of communities taken illegally, which gave hope to peasants. Madero called for all Mexicans to rise up in arms on November 20, 1910, under the banner

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“Effective Suffrage, No Re-election” (Sufragio efectivo, no reelección). He formed a clandestine committee to raise money, purchase ammunition, and recruit rebels to take over border cities. Pancho Villa and Pascual Orozco supported Madero’s campaign in Chihuahua. Soon the Plan of San Luis Potosí, distributed by anti-reelectionist supporters, resonated with Díaz’s oppositional groups in different parts of the country. In Baja California the Flores Magón brothers became the most influential oppositional voice to the Díaz regime. In 1904 Ricardo and Enrique went into exile to the United States to organize a revolutionary campaign against the Díaz regime. The brothers published Regeneración, an anarchist newspaper supported and distributed by the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World in Los Angeles, California, and by their Mexican and Mexican American supporters in Mexican and U.S. border towns. From Los Angeles Ricardo also led the Liberal Mexican Party (Partido Liberal Mexicano), which demanded the reestablishment of a four-year presidential term, the abolition of child labor, and the approval of the eight-hour workday.6 The manifesto also demanded the redistribution of land to workers in the countryside. The Flores Magón brothers were staunch critics of Díaz’s generous concessions to foreign investors. By 1910 the Magonistas claimed that their newspaper, Regeneración, had a subscription of twenty-seven thousand readers in Baja California.7 This was significant, since the newspaper served to increase support in their movement against the Díaz regime. Ricardo’s article, “Tierra y Libertad” (land and freedom), published in Regeneración, resonated with mestizo and indigenous peasants in Mexico: When you are in possession of the land you will have liberty and justice, for liberty and justice are not decreed but are the result of economic independence. They spring from the fact that the individual is able to live without depending on a master, and to enjoy, for himself and his family, the product of his toil.8

In line with anarchist ideals, “Tierra y Libertad” called for the right for peasants to own land and become independent farmers. According to the Flores Magón brothers, this was the best way for rural workers to enjoy their freedom. Embraced by anarchist and agrarian movements in Mexico, the slogan “Tierra y Libertad” was also included in Emiliano Zapata’s “Plan de Ayala” in 1911, when he rebelled against the Madero government for its interference in enacting land reform in Morelos.9 Ricardo Flores Magón recruited indigenous workers from Baja California based on the promise that they could retake possession of the land taken away by the government and by U.S. investors.10 On January 29, 1911, the

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Flores Magón brothers and supporters of the Industrial Workers of the World crossed the Calexico border to take Baja California. Once they arrived in Mexicali, approximately fifty Cocopahs and a few mestizo workers joined the rebels. The first attack took place in Mexicali under the leadership of José María Leyva, who had been instructed to raid the local jail and free rebel prisoners. He killed the jailer, freed the rebels, and then occupied the customs house and the government office.11 A red flag with the slogan “Tierra y Libertad” replaced the Mexican flag.12 In the next few weeks approximately three hundred insurgents crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, including African Americans and Anglo-American members of the Industrial Workers of the World.13 Kiliwas and Paipais from Baja California also joined the rebels. Simon Berthold and Stanley Williams, both from Los Angeles, became Leyva’s assistants in Mexicali. On February 22, 1911, President Díaz’s foreign minister, Enrique Creel, sent an urgent telegram to Victoriano Salado Álvarez, Mexican ambassador to Washington, to report the insurgents’ attack on the customs house in Algodones: Reports by Consuls based in Yuma and Calexico and Colonel Vega revealed that 60 Americans including African Americans and Anglo Americans from Los Angeles, California burned the customs house at Algodones. Since then, 300 more rebels joined them. It is urgent to stop them before they damage irrigation works at the Colorado River. The Mexican government should send more troops and the U.S. should send troops, but not cross the line.14

Mexicans feared that U.S. insurgents would take advantage of Mexico’s preoccupation with its own revolution and grab the opportunity to retake Mexicali and other parts of the Mexican border. In response, Díaz took decisive measures. Col. Celso Vega mobilized an army of five hundred men to retake Mexicali and Algodones.15 The Magonistas continued the uprising and took over Tijuana and Tecate in May 1911. Rumors of a filibuster movement grew in Baja California, as hundreds of Anglo-Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans crossed the border to fight with the Magonistas. Ricardo Flores Magón fiercely rejected these rumors and stated, “The Liberals do not intend to separate Baja California from Mexico.” He saw Baja California as his headquarters, where he would carry out a social revolution that would have an impact on the rest of Mexico and beyond.16 Díaz’s government claimed that U.S. fighters had clear intentions to annex Baja California to the United States. Mexican consuls reported closely on the actions of Stanley Williams and Richard Ferris, two of the AngloAmerican leaders who led the attack at different posts in Baja California.17

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But the government was also well aware of the increasing number of indigenous people joining the Magonista movement. As Roger C. Owen and Marco Antonio Samaniego López have noted, the indigenous role in the Magonista uprising was small but significant.18 It was no accident that Cocopahs who were disposed from their land by U.S. companies in the valley joined the Magonistas. Emilio Guerrero, a Cocopah from Baja California, led a group of fifty indigenous and mestizo men to attack San Quintín and San Telmo and later joined forces with other members of the Partido Liberal Mexicano to take over Tijuana.19 Even when mestizo rebels changed alliances to support the movement led by Francisco I. Madero, Cocopahs continued supporting the Magonistas. But when President Díaz was forced to renounce the presidency in May 1911 in the Treaty of Ciudad Juárez and went into exile to France, the movement weakened and more rebels changed Magonista alliances to support Madero. Francisco León de la Barra, a Díaz supporter, became interim president with elections to be served later in 1911. Madero toured the country campaigning for his election as president of Mexico. In the meantime, interim president de la Barra sent more federal troops to Baja California and defeated the Magonistas in Tijuana.20 Hundreds of rebels crossed the border back to the United States to avoid prosecution from the Mexican government. A year later Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón and other U.S. insurgents were indicted in Los Angeles for violating neutrality laws between Mexico and the United States. Interim president de la Barra authorized the repatriation of two thousand Mexican families from the United States to Baja California’s Northern Territory in an effort to lessen the support for the Magonista movement in Baja California. He hoped that the repatriation of “patriotic Mexican families” from the United States would outnumber the “bad” Mexicans who jeopardized the country’s future.21 At the same time, the Mexican army went after indigenous men who supported the Magonista movement. On June 10, 1911, Col. Lerdo González rounded up approximately eleven men accused of supporting the Magonistas. They were executed point-blank in Jamau, a ranchería located near Álamo.22 The bodies were laid bare for the community to see. The massacre became a symbolic act of intimidation, intended to prevent future rebellions from indigenous people in Baja California. After the defeat of the Magonistas, working conditions became even more repressive. Jefes políticos continued to support large-scale agribusiness barons, who employed repressive tactics to prevent more uprisings. Francisco I. Madero was overthrown and assassinated by his federal army commander, Victoriano Huerta, in 1913. In the meantime, jefe político

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Esteban Cantú became a powerful figure in Baja California. As Alan Knight notes, Cantú brought a period of peace and prosperity to the region.23 He was left alone to implement business deals with U.S. investors in the Northern Territory. Cantú also prevented labor and agrarian organizations from gaining traction in the region. In the Mexicali Valley, workers who participated in land reform movements faced incarceration. Yet by 1921 male and female mestizo workers who had migrated to the valley from the Southern Territory of Baja California, Durango, Sonora, and Sinaloa organized labor unions. They also petitioned the government for land grants in opposition to U.S. ownership of Mexican land. The most noteworthy U.S. owner was the Colorado River Land Company. In 1917 the drafting of a new constitution reenergized land and labor movements in Mexico. President José Venustiano Carranza approved the Constitution of 1917, which established a foundation for the reinforcement of labor laws by the Mexican Department of Labor in the 1920s. The two most progressive points, articles 27 and 123, reflected Carranza’s effort to gain the support of distinct revolutionary factions. Article 123 became the legal foundation for the labor policy in Mexico, delineating for the first time that all workers (including day laborers, domestic servants, and artisans) should work no more than eight hours a day. It established the right to form unions. Furthermore, it stated that men and women had the right to “equal wages for equal work,” regardless of their nationality. Women were to be paid maternity leave for three months after giving birth.24 The Mexican Constitution broke new ground. It was the first in a Latin American country to guarantee such progressive labor rights for men and women. Article 27 entitled Mexico as a nation to full sovereign control over its land and laid the bases for the expropriation of land and the policy of communal farms. The article also provided for the “recovery of national lands and waters illegally alienated or held in prejudice of the public interest.”25 The Mexican government now had the power to expropriate land from foreign and domestic companies for the national good. In contrast with article 123, article 27 did not guarantee women equal access to governmentgranted communal land. The concept of communal land was defined vaguely as a community or family patrimony to which a jefe de familia (male household head) would be entitled. The article granted the state with new powers to oversee and control both land expropriation and land redistribution and established the legal framework to resolve land grievances throughout the countryside. As a result, the number of agrarian leagues multiplied, as people organized to demand their right to land guaranteed by article 27.

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In 1918 a major labor convention took place in Saltillo, Coahuila, to form the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers. This organization of labor unions represented urban and rural workers from northern Mexico. The Zapatistas, a group of peasants, on the other hand, continued fighting for access to land grants in Morelos.26 In the 1920s agrarian reform took shape mainly through the sale of small land holdings to rural workers, property expansions known as colonization projects.27 Presidents Álvaro Obregón and later Plutarco Elías Calles (both former revolutionary generals from Sonora) envisioned colonization as the best way to transform rural workers into efficient farmers. More land was distributed under colonization projects than as communal farmland, particularly in Baja California, Nayarit, Sonora, and Chihuahua. Colonization projects could be implemented more easily in northern Mexico because of the region’s smaller population and the greater availability of open land. Article 27 articulated the following guidelines for colonization projects: Colonization projects on national lands may be carried out directly by the federal government or by the national agricultural credit bank or through contracts with private corporations. If the owner of a property that has come under colonización wishes to conform, he must within 60 days elect either to colonize the property himself or join with the government. . . . Failure of the owner to conform leads to expropriation at a taxable value plus ten percent.

Under these colonization projects, land holdings were divided into small plots of land and sold on credit to men who had the desire and economic means to become small independent farmers. The Mexican Agrarian Department and the National Agricultural Credit Bank administered financial and legal transactions, while the federal government controlled the colonias until the new owners paid 50 percent of the total purchase price. Once the owners paid the total amount, they were free to sell or lease the property.28 Many indigenous and mestizo communities saw no benefit to colonization, and instead they demanded the restitution of their land, which they claimed had been taken over by foreign investors and hacienda owners in the previous century. In 1920 Obregón reluctantly enacted the Law of Ejidos, which allowed communities, towns, and rancherías to petition the government for land in the form of restitution and dotación (land grants).29 The law specified that each household head over eighteen years of age should receive between three to six hectares, depending on family size and type of soil. This law, however, benefited only communities that had official documentation to prove their claim. The Agrarian Department turned away numerous petitions for lack of documentation.

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Obregón and subsequently Calles opposed the notion of communal farmland distribution, because they viewed it as a threat to large-scale agricultural production.30 Calles concluded that land distribution did not improve day-to-day life in Mexico’s countryside, because those who received plots used them only for subsistence farming rather than for growing crops to sell to the external market. Calles also believed that land expropriations to haciendas, in line with Obregón’s land distribution program, jeopardized Mexico’s economy.31 In spite of presidential opposition, about eight hundred thousand peasants received 7.6 million hectares of farmland between 1917 and 1934.32 Although many scholars categorize the amount of land redistributed during this period as “marginal,” it illustrates how three consecutive presidents could not ignore the movement spearheaded by the revolution and how they went ahead with land distribution, even if it conflicted with their beliefs.33 For most mestizo laborers working in Mexicali, the Law of January 6 and the 1920 Law of Ejidos for land restitution had little relevance, but they did make a difference to indigenous people. These laws enabled them to organize to petition for land restitution, since they had been pushed off their land by the CRLC. Executives from CRLC considered these laws a potential threat, and, in response, they launched a campaign against President Carranza. Thomas Gibbon, an attorney hired by the CRLC, played an important role in lobbying U.S. politicians, who then put pressure on the president to not act against the interests of U.S.-owned businesses in Mexico.34 In the end, the CRLC’s lobbying strategy proved effective. Between 1910 and 1929 those who had their applications for plots of communally owned farmland denied found themselves increasingly at odds with the Mexican government. The push for land reform in Mexicali came from a caudillo, Marcelino Magaña Mejía, who had fought with Pancho Villa during the revolution. In 1922 Magaña Mejía submitted two hundred applications for land grants, while he and his followers occupied land owned by the Signal Mountain Company. They also took over five hundred hectares from Rancho Progreso, land leased to the U.S. investor Victor Carruso by the Mexican Agrarian Department in Mexicali. Magaña Mejía justified the land occupation by stating that the “land owned by foreign companies belonged to the Mexican nation.”35 Magaña Mejía’s statement directly alluded to article 27 of the 1917 constitution. He denounced the domination of foreign-owned agribusiness and announced his bold plans to occupy land owned by the CRLC. Magaña Mejía felt compassion for the hundreds of Mexicans returning to Mexicali from the United States in search of jobs on cotton farms. Some

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migrant workers joined Magaña Mejía because they hoped to receive a grant for land on which their families could settle. Many of his supporters were repatriated Mexicans and Mexican Americans who had recently arrived back in Mexicali after losing their jobs in the United States. Magaña Mejía wrote, “I see with sadness how in front of national lands and along the roads hundreds of improvised homes provide shelter to hundreds of our compatriots who come from the United States hoping to receive a piece of land from the government.”36 Magaña Mejía’s surging popularity among his 2,800 or so supporters forced the local government to increase the number of land grants and colonization projects in the Mexicali Valley. Magaña Mejía also had the support of indigenous people and proagrarian attorneys, such as Rogelio Escalona Gallardo, who volunteered to file for land grants on behalf of workers. Finally, President Obregón approved the expropriation of five thousand acres of CRLC land, known as Volcano Lake, for colonization and expansion and canceled the corresponding CRLC land titles.37 Harry Chandler, chair of the company, had no choice but to accept the partial land expropriation. Volcano Lake was to be divided into small lots for the colonization of workers who supported Magaña Mejía’s movement.38 However progressive Obregón’s proposition may have been, Magaña Mejía rejected the plan because the government did not offer to assist with the high cost of irrigation. “These lands are not for poor peasants. . . . It will be impossible to cultivate the land without access to irrigation,” he wrote.39 Magaña Mejía and his supporters intentionally selected the Signal Mountain and Progreso farms because they already had irrigation canals. Magaña Mejía’s rejection of the government’s offer and the inauguration of the new jefe político Abelardo Rodríguez in Mexicali had a negative impact on the agrarista push for land grants. In 1923 President Obregón appointed Brig. Gen. Abelardo Rodríguez as Mexicali’s governor and head of the military in the Northern Territory of Baja California.40 Unlike his predecessor, Rodríguez did not engage in negotiations. He swiftly implemented armed forces to oust Magaña Mejía and his supporters from the occupied lands. He then dismantled the agrarista revolt by offering the land from Rancho Progreso to migrant workers presumably not involved with the movement. Rodríguez refused to grant land to the 2,805 petitioners whose applications had been submitted by Magaña Mejía, who then appealed that decision. In a letter to the minister of the interior in Mexico City, Magaña Mejía described how the local government had ignored the petitions of his followers and instead distributed smaller plots of land to individuals who were not even peasants.41 Magaña Mejía’s appeal failed and

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his movement dissolved. He sought exile in California and joined an opposition group that plotted to overthrow the government of Mexicali. Later U.S. customs agents detained Magaña Mejía and his U.S.-based comrades before they even crossed the border on charges of violating the neutrality laws between the two countries. In spite of Magaña Mejía’s failure, ongoing petitions for land put pressure on the Mexican government, and soon federal officials began to plan a larger land reform project in the Mexicali Valley. In 1927, during the presidency of Plutarco Elías Calles, community members from Álamo Mocho formally requested partial land expropriation from the CRLC.42 They cited article 27 of the Mexican Constitution of 1917, which guaranteed their right to land grants through expropriation. As a preventative measure, the CRLC opted to lease more land to Mexican citizens under the condition that they sign a legal document acknowledging the CRLC as the sole owner of the rented property.43 In addition, the CRLC had very effective representation in the Mexicali Valley and Mexico City, which further reduced the threat of land occupation. Presidents Obregón and later Calles both saw the advantage of maintaining good relations with Chandler, who lobbied lawmakers in Washington on their behalf for equal access to water rights at the U.S.-Mexico border.44 When CRLC attorneys in Mexicali confronted difficulties with regard to peasants, Chandler personally contacted Obregón.45 Similarly, Rodríguez, a supporter of private agribusiness, maintained close ties with CRLC lawyers. He even had a family connection: his sisterin-law was married to Edmundo Guajardo, a prominent CRLC attorney.46 The increase of land petitions, however, forced Rodríguez to find solutions to the agrarian problem. From 1924 to 1927, during Calles’s presidency, Rodríguez approved land expropriations from agribusinesses to create various cooperatives. His plan for colonization had some similarities to the ejido system of communal farmland, since it organized land into farm cooperatives where the members received government subsidies.47 Still, the new colonos (residents) paid 150 pesos per hectare and agreed to pay back the money loaned by the government within a period of ten years.48 After making the last payment, residents would receive an official land title from the Mexican Agrarian Department. The Mexican government would pay foreign owners in full for the expropriated land. In 1925 the government expropriated Rancho Progreso from Victor Carruso and paid him 34,000 pesos. Likewise, Juan Ching, a Chinese Mexican farmer who sublet most of Rancho Progreso for the cultivation of cotton, was paid 112,454 pesos.49 Rodríguez then hired Erick Meyer, an expert on cooperatives from Germany, to form a family-centered cooperative of 2,230

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hectares split up among 230 families. Each family received about 8 hectares on which they could farm and build a house. For the first two years, the Mexican government provided irrigation, seeds, machinery, farm tools, and even money for the construction of wooden homes.50 But these subsidies provided by the Mexican government were discounted at the end of the year from the farmers’ profits, because Rodríguez was determined to recuperate the 294,365 pesos that the government spent during the colonization process.51 Initially, most of the families who gained land through the program had to keep working for large agribusinesses, even while they were busy clearing the land on their own small plots to prepare for farming. Households headed by men were the main beneficiaries of land titles in colonias, under the assumption that providing land to men would benefit whole families. On these farms the labor of family members (not to mention women’s reproductive labor) proved central to the success of the cooperative. Rodríguez moralized that women had the civic duty to bear as many children as possible to increase Mexicali’s nonindigenous, non-Asian population. Women and children were expected to labor in the fields alongside men. In one of his reports, Governor Rodríguez stated the importance of women’s labor in agricultural cooperatives: To no surprise, the participation of wives and daughters of colonos is central to the success of their plots. Women show their excellent skills using tractors or mules for clearing the plot. Or what is more usual is how they use the mattock for cleaning cotton after harvest. These factors are very important in the success of the plot. It is a fact that colonos who receive family assistance produce more than those who work by themselves.52

Each family cultivated corn, alfalfa, and beans and raised chicken and cattle for subsistence. They also cultivated cotton and wheat in larger quantities to pay off their debt. During the first two years, the colonization program had mixed results. On one hand, residents had the opportunity to farm their own land and receive a farm subsidy. On the other hand, they had to repay their loan based on profits from selling their crops, while the government dictated what they could grow. The first year resulted in a loss for Colonia Progreso residents, since they sold their cotton below market value. They could not repay their loan after the harvest. Many residents left the cooperative and went on to work full-time in the private agribusiness sector. Tenants complained about the limited number of hectares allocated and requested a total of 16 hectares for each family, double the amount they were originally granted. To prevent more people from leaving, Rodríguez approved their request, and he also increased the budget for

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the development of schools, additional irrigation canals, and other public services.53 Even with 16 hectares and government subsidies, residents faced many challenges. Eustaquio Romero and his wife, Josefa Manríquez, were among the first farmers to purchase land in the new Colonia Progreso. Originally from the Southern Territory of Baja California, they had migrated north to Mexicali when Romero was recruited to work on the Long Ranch in 1919. Once they moved to Colonia Progreso, their older children married residents from the same colonia and petitioned the government for land from the same cooperative. Their daughter, María Luisa Romero, later recalled her family’s struggles: The first years of cultivation were very difficult in Colonia Progreso. With a lot of sacrifice we planted cártamo, cotton, cebada and wheat. Later the irrigated water had an excess of salt that made the land more difficult to farm, and the following year we lost the cordamon crop for lack of irrigation.54

Harsh conditions and limited access to irrigation forced low-income migrant families to leave Colonia Progreso. Cooperatives were more successful among repatriated Mexicans who returned from the United States than for those who had stayed in Mexico. In fact, Rodríguez favored repatriated Mexicans and Mexican Americans over workers who came from elsewhere in Mexico because they had more cash for the down payment and farm equipment. By 1927 Rodríguez purchased 404 hectares from the Imperial Valley Farms and 5,015 hectares from the Compañía de Terrenos y Aguas de la Baja California for 116,000 pesos. He then sold the land to Mexican and Mexican American repatriates to create more cooperative farms.55 Rodríguez viewed the expansion of colonization for repatriated Mexicans as his “patriotic” duty. He believed the cooperatives provided a home where these reverse migrants could resettle and invest in their homeland, while also bolstering the Mexicali economy. Rodríguez also hoped that by living in these colonias, Mexican migrant workers developed a closer connection to Mexico.56 The proliferation of colonias generated a new class of somewhat more wealthy migrants resettling in the Mexicali Valley, people who came with enough financial means to purchase land at Colonia Progreso. The newly arrived colonos became a more advantaged group who had more in common with CRLC lessors than with CRLC workers. This new group lived in solidly constructed homes of wood or adobe, while the laborers, at the bottom of the social pyramid (some Mexican, some Chinese), lived in labor camps in rough homes improvised out of loose boards and brush. Colonos

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formed their own unions and distanced themselves from the community organizations and unions that represented the CRLC laborers. By 1928 colonos joined the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers.57 The division between colonos who joined the confederation and the workers who joined independent unions slowed the process of land reform in the Mexicali Valley. The gap between the two became a chasm: colonia members became more dependent on the government, and ultimately more loyal, while independent unions grew even more militant.

the surge of local labor associations and unions In Baja California independent labor unions rejected colonization projects and played a central role in organizing a movement for land reform. These coalitions challenged the government’s top-down philosophy imposed by Rodríguez. Migrant workers, especially single women with no access to cash, were excluded from his land distribution program. Laborers outside colonias did not have access to subsidies or government aid, and their only asset was the product of their own labor. Between 1924 and 1927 Mexican migrant workers organized unions with the primary goal of obtaining better employee benefits. As Filiberto Crespo noted, Mexican migrant workers who joined independent unions in Mexicali were tired of feeling like “foreigners in their own country.”58 Later these unions were instrumental in petitioning the government for the right to communal farmland. In 1927 there were eleven labor unions in rural Mexicali, as identified by the local government. These unions played an important role in negotiations. Workers and union leaders met on Sundays to discuss and advocate for fair labor conditions, housing, wages, and limits on work hours. Union leaders also visited cotton farms during the week to recruit new members. Unions in the Mexicali Valley were not exempt from corruption. There were reports of union members who denounced their leaders for “selling out” to farmers. For example, Pedro Pérez, a farm laborer, joined the Álamo Mocho Union after its lead organizer, Don Pablo, invited him to join. Pérez attended the meetings where members guaranteed the union would protect his right to better wages, all the while improving overall labor conditions. After Pérez joined the union, he was fired from his job and evicted from the farm. Pérez told Don Pablo, who promised Pérez that he would get his job back. They returned to the farm, and Pérez stayed outside while Don Pablo spoke to the grower. Pérez learned then that the grower had written a check

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for fifteen pesos, which Don Pablo pocketed. Don Pablo then told Pérez that he would get his job back, but only on a part-time basis. The grower agreed to hire him once per week at a lower wage. Pérez became very upset because the union leader’s broken promises left his family in a situation even more precarious than before. Now he had lost his housing and his full-time job on the farm. In this case, Don Pablo had wielded his power as a negotiator for his own personal gain.59 In spite of corruption and disagreements among the various unions, the unions’ drive to organize workers facilitated the movement for petitioning the government for the right to communal farmland. In 1927 the Agrarian Department received petitions for land expropriations from various mestizo and indigenous peasant unions from the Cucapá Delegación de Hechicera, Paredones and Álamo Mocho.60 Cocopah people who had lost their lands to the CRLC organized a union to request land. Rather than requesting land as restitution, they chose the uncommon path of petitioning the government for the right to communal farmland. Although there is not much information about the Cocopah union members, it is likely they were both Cocopahs and the mixed-race people known as Cocopah mestizos. Rodríguez refused to grant land except for the purpose of creating colonias, and he was particularly averse to the ejido system, which he viewed as a potential threat to Mexicali’s cotton cash-crop economy. To prevent an increase of petitions from workers who came from elsewhere in Mexico, Rodríguez stopped the recruitment of migrant workers from the northern states of Sonora and Sinaloa and instead relied more heavily on Chinese workers, who could not file claims for agricultural land. Table 7 shows a sample of a total of 1,387 diverse rural workers who belonged to unions in the Mexicali Valley from 1924 to 1927. The official roster does not include groups formed underground due to government repression; most union rosters also did not record the names of female members. But it is clear from oral histories and interviews with female members that they actively participated in union life. For example, in 1929 Macrina Lerma Álvarez and her husband joined part of the Rojo y Negro Union, run by Marcelino Velázquez Calleros, Benjamín Magaña, and Leonardo Prado.61 Lerma Álvarez convinced her husband to join the union to fulfill her dreams of becoming a ranchera (land owner), as she was tired of laboring as a farmworker in Mexicali and the United States. Members met in secret after work and discussed various tactics for attaining land from private agribusinesses. Lerma Álvarez took on the dangerous job of working as a messenger for the Rojo y Negro Union. She traveled to Calexico with hidden memos and meeting minutes in her clothes and in

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table 7. Labor unions in the Mexicali Valley, 1924–1927 Labor Union

Date Founded

Men

Women

Obreros y Campesinos de Mexicali Campesinos Colonia Gómez Campesinos Berry Álamo Mocho Campesinos de Paredones Campesinos de Bataques Campesinos de Cuervos Campesinos de Hechicera Campesinos Stevenson Campesinos Tecolote Cucapá

July 1924 November 1924 March 1926 March 1926 May 1926 May 1926 May 1926 July 1926 October 1926 February 1926 March 1925

566 125 82 30 75 120 45 105 27 30 80

0 0 0 0 0 42 7 0 0 0 0

source: Rodríguez, Memoria Administrativa, 356–57.

those of her son. She then mailed the documents to the union headquarters in Mexico City. Lerma Álvarez clearly put herself and her family members at risk of incarceration. But she even expanded her role in the union, taking on the responsibility of visiting and inquiring about union members jailed by the local government.62 By 1930 the Rojo y Negro Union became affiliated with the Mexican Socialist Party, led by Gen. Francisco J. Mújica, governor of Michoacán. The union’s affiliation with this political party strengthened its connections with other labor movements in central Mexico. Felipa Arellano, a migrant worker from Sinaloa, became the leader of the Rojo y Negro Union in Mexicali. She had previously left Sinaloa after receiving death threats from antiunion hacienda owners there. Stepping up the movement, Arellano openly requested land for union members. Within a year Rojo y Negro was four hundred strong, and its main goal was attaining the right to communal farmland through the ejido system rather than by colonization. The union’s activities included public demonstrations and sit-ins on CRLC farms. Miguel España, who worked for the CRLC as a supervisor, criticized Arellano for encouraging men and women to occupy CRLC lands: The group led by that woman [Felipa Arellano] occupied CRLC lands. They entered by force. The company inspectors offered them the opportunity to lease the occupied lands, but this woman had the nerve (muchos calzones) to demand land without a contract. It was then that

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the Mocho Guagardo, the CRLC representative, reported them to the authorities for illegal occupation.

España contended that the Rojo y Negro members were apprehended, not for participating in the demonstration but for illegally occupying CRLC lands and burning a CRLC bridge with the intention of obstructing justice.63 These were the legal grounds on which Gov. José María Tapia approved their transfer to the María Islands in Nayarit. This account illustrates the increasing militancy of unions in the face of government repression. As Mexican unions became more militant, they in turn became more critical of Chinese workers in Baja California.

asian associations The 1924 cotton crisis and the 1929 economic crisis forced Chinese and Mexican workers to compete for the same jobs in Baja California. In addition, political pressure began to build from the United States to limit Chinese immigration to the U.S.-Mexico border. At the International Waters Association meeting in Riverside, California, on March 20, 1923, U.S. representatives accused Mexico of using Colorado River waters to harbor an “Asian Empire” at the border. They used this argument in an attempt to invalidate Mexico’s right to equal access to the water supply from the Colorado River.64 In response, the Mexican government took steps to curb Chinese immigration to northern Mexico. Journalists, merchants, and politicians began to use photos of successful Chinese businesses in northern Mexico to highlight what they called the “Chinese problem” in Mexico. This rhetoric against Chinese Mexicans led to the approval of myriad antiChinese laws that resulted in higher taxes for people of Chinese descent and the deportation of thousands of Chinese and Chinese Mexican people from Sonora, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, and Durango during the 1920s.65 Between 1910 and 1920 the Mexicali Valley, Tijuana, and Ensenada were home to the largest Chinese populations in Baja California. Chinese workers from Sonora and other parts of northern Mexico moved to Baja California after experiencing violent persecutions during the Mexican Revolution (1910–20). Chinese merchants and workers revitalized Mexicali’s downtown with stores, hotels, restaurants, and casinos that catered to Mexicali’s diverse population. Chinese Americans from California began to invest in the Mexicali Valley, as word of the thriving Chinese Mexican community in Baja California spread. In 1919 Wong Siw Nam, a Chinese American banker from San Francisco, opened several general stores in Mexicali that catered

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figure 6. Asociación China headquarters, Mexicali, 1916. Courtesy of the Archivo Histórico del Municipio de Mexicali, Baja California.

to farmers and workers across racial lines. That same year C. B. Williams, an Anglo-American entrepreneur, established a hardware store with his sons in the newly established city of Mexicali. The store sold everything from tools for cotton farming to wagons and met the needs of a diverse clientele. The fact that most business owners had signage in Chinese highlights the importance of entrepreneurs of Chinese descent and workers in Baja California. Chinese American entrepreneurs Samuel Chong, Gee Wo, and A. Pak Quan joined ventures with Charlie Ming, a Mexican naturalized citizen from Tijuana, and formed the Chinese Mexican Mercantile Company. At first they sublet three thousand acres of land from the CRLC (see map 3). A year later their company purchased a hundred thousand acres of land from Charles Robinson Rockwood, the well-known engineer involved with the damming of the Colorado River.66 The investors from the Chinese Mexican Mercantile Company were not the only Asians leasing land from the real estate giant; CRLC documents from 1919 also include nineteen Chinese and four Japanese farmers who leased large tracts of land. The combined annual rents of these farmers generated more than $200,000 U.S. dollars in revenue per year. According to CRLC lease records, the Asian farmers were all under the age of fifty and residents of Baja California. More important for the company, they had the financial resources to afford a down payment of more than $2,000 and to sign a contract that averaged from one to ten years.67

map 3.

CRLC lots leased by Chinese and Japanese farmers, 1919.

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A CRLC lease signed by Tom Quong Ming and Ng Hawk in 1919 provides a small glimpse of how these contracts were conducted in the Mexicali Valley. On April 22, 1919, Quong Ming and Hawk traveled to Ensenada, where they met with a Mexican judge, Manuel Piña Cuevas, and Curtis L. Gómez, an attorney from Los Angeles representing the CRLC, to sign a four-year lease for a total of $32,425. Gómez verified that the lease agreement and the payment plan were noted on the official document. Quong Ming and Hawk brought along Ramón M. Tam, a Chinese Mexican merchant from Mexicali, as their interpreter. Quong Ming and Hawk agreed to pay $2,494 every three months and then make two $5,000 payments during the last year of the lease. The payment was to be deposited at the Mercantile Banking Company in Calexico, California.68 In 1921 President Obregón approved an amendment to the MexicanChinese Treaty of Amity that, among other things, restricted the entrance of unskilled Chinese workers into Mexico.69 Chinese Americans and U.S. farmers challenged this amendment. To discourage farmers from hiring Asian workers, the municipality of Mexicali doubled its efforts to collect a per-head tax on Asian immigrants. Consequently, many Chinese and Japanese workers were arrested in their place of work under allegations of evading these taxes. For example, on May 28, 1920, the Mexicali police rounded up thirty-two Japanese workers for not paying 480 pesos in taxes.70 Japanese farmers K. Sato and Ben Kodoma hired an attorney and demanded the immediate release of their workers, citing a violation of Mexican labor laws. In a letter to the judge, the workers themselves denounced the constant harassment they endured, even though they paid their taxes. In 1923 Samuel Chong, J. Nand, and other farmers wrote to Ramón de Negri, the president’s secretary, and requested permission to bring three thousand more laborers from China to work on their cotton farms.71 In spite of government restrictions, the number of Chinese laborers in Mexico increased in the 1920s. In 1925 Governor Rodríguez stated that due to the massive numbers of letters and appeals he had received from numerous Mexican unions, he would endorse a labor resolution mandating that businesses in all sectors in the Northern Territory of Baja California would be required to maintain a workforce composed of at least 50 percent Mexican workers: Because Asian workers, especially those of Chinese nationality, accept wages so low that they are not even enough to pay for basic necessities, [a situation] that only they can stand. Second, because the managers of the agricultural farms are also usually Asian, it is only natural that they would prefer to hire their own conationals.72

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Like politicians and merchants in Sonora, Rodríguez (who initially supported Chinese migration to Baja California) indirectly blamed Asian workers for driving wages down in the region. He made racist assumptions and stated that growers and administrators favored them because of their supposedly “natural” tendency for living in precarious conditions. He failed to recognize the economic success that many Chinese and Japanese immigrants had attained in Mexicali as merchants, farmers, and investors. During Baja California’s economic recession, Asian immigrants formed labor organizations to maintain social ties and counter government repression. Asian associations did not campaign for land grants, since they were legally barred from owning land in Mexico. Instead, they offered social and legal services to Asian immigrants. In 1927 the local government reported that 5,000 out of 5,889 Chinese workers in the Mexicali Valley belonged to the Asociación China and 350 Japanese workers belonged to the Asociación Japonesa.73 Since nearly all Asian workers were men, these associations played a crucial role in facilitating their transition to a new place and culture, while at the same time keeping them connected to their place of origin. The Asociación China also offered legal counseling and defense on behalf of its members. The Asociación China spread throughout Baja California. In 1920 Chinese merchants formed the Union Fraternal China de la República Mexicana, with offices in both La Paz and Mexico City.74 In 1908 Chinese workers from Santa Rosalía who were members of the Chinese Empire Reform Association requested permission from the local government to celebrate the Chinese New Year in Santa Rosalía. On February 2 León Yuen, a local merchant and member of the association, was authorized by the local jefe político to raise a flag with the association’s colors downtown in the city.75 The Mexicali Valley had the largest Asociación China in Baja California, consisting of about 5,000 members. The association president was usually a wealthy merchant, farmer, banker, or casino owner.76 Most Chinese farm laborers who worked on the thirty-two Chinese-owned farms in Mexicali were members. These members worked without a salary during the planting season and then shared the profits at the end of the harvest season. Most likely, agricultural workers relied on the credit provided by Chinese and Mexican merchants during the cultivation period and repaid their debts after the harvest. Due to its effective organization, the association in Mexicali had the financial strength to build a hospital providing free medical care (for both physical and mental health) to Chinese and non-Chinese patients. According to historian Catalina Velázquez Morales, the association

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figure 7. Chinese parade in Mexicali’s Colonia China, 1921. Courtesy of the Archivo Histórico del Municipio de Mexicali, Baja California.

even founded an educational center, where Chinese immigrants took classes in Spanish, English, and mathematics. The center also served as a meeting place for association leaders.77 For all their success, the Chinese associations continued to face antiChinese sentiment from the government and increasingly from Mexican laborers and merchants. As Fredy González notes, Mexican citizenship did not protect Chinese Mexicans in the era of the anti-Chinese movement.78 In 1932 Mexican workers and business owners formed a coalition known as the Partido Nacionalista Antichino in Mexicali. This coalition portrayed Chinese workers as an inferior race who could not assimilate to Mexican society. The Partido Nacionalista Antichino sent a letter to Agustín Olachea, governor of Baja California, calling for the deportation of Chinese immigrants because they supposedly carried the genes of depravation and degeneration.79 In both Mexicali and Sonora the most vehemently anti-Chinese people (including members of the Partido Nacionalista Antichino) were Mexican merchants competing with Chinese merchants in the retail sector.80 But Mexicali differed from Sonora in that the movement did not succeed in influencing actual deportations, likely because there were more Chinese associations in Mexicali. These associations were successful in curtailing the anti-Chinese movement and also in preventing violence against Chinese and Chinese Mexican people.

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conclusion The land and labor unions formed in Baja California in the 1920s had lasting influence on both the labor movement and the movement for land reform. Men and women joined labor unions and agrarian leagues, and they demonstrated the same level of militancy against hacienda owners and local governments. Women such as Felipa Arellano and Macrina Álvarez became important leaders in the movement for land reform in Baja California. But the labor organizations formed by Mexicans from the interior versus those formed by repatriated Mexicans and Mexican Americans supported different kinds of land reforms. Most repatriated Mexican Americans joined colonias, while most Mexican nationals rejected this type of agrarian reform. Regardless of the chosen path, their level of militancy and organization paved the way for the massive land distribution that took place in the next decade, during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40). The economic crisis, which caused the decline in the price of cotton and the simultaneous increase in demand for land, generated a climate that favored the organization of Mexican labor unions, while at the same time increased animosity against Asian laborers. Anti-Chinese campaigns in Mexicali became more prevalent during the economic recessions of 1924 and 1929, and they continued into the next decade, as Asians became associated with the movement against foreign investors.

4. Conflict, Land Reform, and Repatriation in the Mexicali Valley The land belongs to those who work it. movimiento agrario, 1937, Mexicali

On the morning of January 27, 1937, trucks carrying hundreds of campesinos rolled onto land owned by the CRLC and surrounding farms subleased by Chinese and Chinese Mexican farmers. Proagrarian activists (agraristas) arrived on the scene, waving red banners with the Magonista and Emiliano Zapata’s famous slogan, “Land and Liberty.”1 They announced that they would remain on the property until it was divided into ejido plots. Campesinas such as Petra Pérez (a Mexican repatriate) took turns delivering food to the occupiers.2 The independent agrarian unions formed by seasonal Mexican workers back in the 1920s now pressed for agrarian reform in the 1930s. They organized meetings and formed a coalition with Mexican and Mexican Americans repatriates. Campesinos from several colonias formed the Federación de Comunidades Agrarias, with the dual goal of mobilizing CRLC workers and persuading them to fight for land reform.3 Hipólito Rentería, Gilberto Crespo, and Petra Pérez led the coalition. As in the 1920s, the proagrarian activists in the Mexicali Valley confronted a local government whose policies supported the CRLC. This time, however, the agrarista movement coincided with President Lázaro Cárdenas’s plan for expropriating land owned by U.S. and European companies in Mexico. Cárdenas’s land reform and nationalism also reinforced the anti-Chinese movement in the Mexicali Valley. His supporters viewed foreign ownership and Chinese migration to northern Mexico as a threat to Mexican sovereignty.4 A nationalist to the core, Cárdenas believed that populating Baja California’s rural landscape with Mexican campesinos would solve the pressing issues of foreign ownership, land reform, and the need to incorporate thousands of deported and repatriated Mexicans and Mexican Americans into Mexican society. According to his plan, the Northern 74

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figure 8. Men arrive in old trucks to occupy CRLC lands, 1937. Courtesy of the Archivo Histórico del Municipio de Mexicali, Baja California.

Territory of Baja California was the ideal place for Mexican repatriates to settle and ultimately take the place of foreign laborers. In 1936 the National Confederation of Mexican Workers demanded the expulsion of both Asian workers and American owners from the Mexicali Valley.5 Yet Cárdenas did not have immediate plans for expropriation in Baja California. Instead he instructed the CRLC to sell approximately sixty-five thousand hectares of land as medium-size plots to Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals within five years and the rest of the company land within twenty years.6 Unaware of this ruling, and confident that Cárdenas would support their movement, agraristas in Baja California began to occupy CRLC lands immediately. Within forty-eight hours federal troops removed the agraristas and jailed them for trespassing on private property.7 In prison, members of the Federación de Comunidades Agrarias met members from other agrarian groups, then unified and broadened their coalition. Once out of jail, they sent a delegation to Mexico City to meet with President Cárdenas. At the same time, Mexicali Valley–based agrarian leagues sent press releases to the newspapers and to the Agrarian Department in Mexico City to publicize the unjust jailing of their fellow members. The news of the incarceration of campesinos in Baja California had already spread throughout Mexico before the delegation even arrived

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in Mexico City. The notion that federal troops had protected private property owned by “foreigners” outraged agrarian and labor organizers.8 This incident compromised Cárdenas’s position against foreign ownership in Mexico. Harry Chandler, CRLC president, reached out to powerful politicians, including former president Abelardo Rodríguez, to lobby on his behalf.9 But the delegation of Mexicali Valley–based union members met with union workers from Mexico City, and together they effectively put pressure on the president. Although Chandler was a powerful Southern California businessman with long-standing relationships among the political elite in Mexico, Cárdenas needed the support of Mexican labor organizations because he had plans to expropriate petroleum and mining companies from U.S. and European investors. Once the agrarista delegation met with the president in Mexico City, he agreed to support the expropriation in Baja California and organized a change in the Mexicali government. Cárdenas replaced Gov. Navarro Cortina with Col. Rodolfo Sánchez Taboada, who had previously worked as his own personal secretary.10 He sent engineers to the Mexicali Valley and began to divide up most of the CRLC land, as well as other private properties owned by other U.S. ranchers. In response, the CRLC used the Mexican courts to challenge Cárdenas’s actions. The company’s attempt to fight back failed, however, because of a new law Cárdenas had approved a year earlier that eliminated the right of foreign business owners to appeal land expropriation through the courts.11 The CRLC continued to protest the legal irregularities, but to no avail. Most of the CRLC’s land was expropriated within the next two years. In 1937 Cárdenas expropriated approximately 237,360 acres of CRLC land, enough to create 60 ejidos and 4,500 small farms.12 CRLC shareholders went to court and demanded full indemnification for the land. As historian John Dwyer notes, Cárdenas refused to negotiate with investors or the U.S. government, which stepped in on their behalf.13 In 1944 the Mexican government (under President Manuel Ávila Camacho) paid CRLC shareholders 25 million pesos, a fraction of the amount they had demanded from the Mexican government.14 The expropriation land from the Colorado River Land Company marked the end of a firm that had held a farmland colonization contract with the Mexican government for almost half a century.

cárdenas’s land reform Mexico’s agrarian reform policy was one of the earliest land reform programs of its kind in Latin America. The inclusion of article 27 in the

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Constitution of 1917 meant the foundation had already been laid. Mexico would begin to address its agrarian problem. Cárdenas, chosen by the Partido Nacional Revolucionario seventeen years after the article was passed, believed communal farmland distribution was the best option for increasing agricultural production and minimizing foreign ownership, both in the southern states and throughout Mexico. In his first speech as president, Cárdenas criticized the previous administrations for not distributing enough farmland in the form of ejidos. He vowed to carry out the 1917 promise of reform: Even though there are critics who oppose land distribution in form of ejidos, we must say that the government will continue with the politics of land redistribution in the form of ejidos or farming cooperatives, as our goal is to promote abundance and the most efficient production to facilitate the progress of our towns.15

Cárdenas’s plan for modernizing Mexico’s rural areas included the organization of land into communal holdings of hacienda land developments and government lands He classified two types of ejidos: either a family farmed one plot while sharing water and machinery with the rest of the community, or an entire community of families collectively farmed a communal plot. The Cárdenas administration introduced the latter type, for which farmers received a temporary title, but they were not allowed to sell the property or rent it, because it belonged to the state. Beneficiaries of land grants were required to continuously cultivate the land; otherwise, the government would confiscate it if it was fallow for two years.16 Each ejido was managed by a comisariado ejidal, a board elected by the ejido members to oversee agricultural production. Cárdenas revised the Law of Agricultural Credit and extended credit to ejido members by founding the National Bank of Ejidal Credit in 1935. The key feature of this unique bank was that ejido members could apply for loans without pledging their ejidos as collateral. Cárdenas believed that the state had the responsibility to aid peasants with credit to modernize Mexico’s rural regions. For instance, he wrote in his journal that the ejidal bank would aid the farmers who worked the land expropriated from haciendas in Nueva Italia, Michoacán, his home state, in the following manner: The Ejido Bank will modernize agricultural systems by using mechanized tools instead of oxen, which was inefficient. Why did not hacienda owners use mechanized technology in the first place? Simply because they relied on cheap labor, and thus they also faced constant problems, like strikes due to labor violations.17

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Cárdenas criticized the hacienda system and its reliance on outdated farming methods. The ejidal bank was established so farmers could modernize their equipment and techniques. Cárdenas sought to maintain large collective farm holdings as a way of boosting production. He did not want to make the same mistake that he had made in the Laguna region, where cotton production drastically decreased due to the distribution of individual plots. Cárdenas did impose limitations that subjected campesinos to the financial conditions and crop selection dictated by the state. Members could borrow only from their respective ejido banks, for instance. Also, ejido members who borrowed money had the responsibility of paying back the loan even if they lost their entire crop (as elsewhere in Mexico). Agrarian reform was not a smooth process in the Mexicali Valley. Mexican CRLC renters and Mexican American owners of private property opposed Cárdenas’s land reform policies. In 1935 Mexican lessors of farmland formed the Unión Agrícola, which represented them in contracts and loan negotiations with the CRLC.18 When armed campesinos took over the most productive and irrigated land in the Mexicali Valley, Mexican renters and private landowners were outraged. Fernando España, a Mexican CRLC supervisor and lessor, questioned the timing of the occupation and accused protesters of opportunism, because they took over CRLC lands in January, four months before the harvest.19 In the same manner as foreigner owners of farmland, agraristas would reap the profits of someone else’s capital and labor. Even Mexican landowners who cultivated small- to medium-size plots in colonias near CRLC-owned land also faced the prospect of having their land expropriated by the government. Even though CRLC renters qualified for ejido land distribution, they preferred the right to own private property. Consequently, workers and farmers organized a committee known as the Comité Pro Justicia and planned a strike outside the governor’s palace in Mexicali to protest land expropriation and the confiscation of crops. In a matter of days Mexicali’s downtown became the epicenter of protests against Cárdenas’s land reform policies, and the protestors essentially shut down the town.20 Within three weeks the crowd outside the governor’s palace grew from two hundred to approximately ten thousand protesters.21 Entire families lived on the streets through the cold winter and the hot early spring. News spread that two women gave birth outside the governor’s palace.22 The Mexicali Chambers of Commerce supplied food and other goods to protestors.23 The regional Confederation of Mexican Workers and the National Confederation of Mexican Workers broke their ties with Cárdenas and supported the strikers. CRLC farmwork-

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table 8. Colonias in the Mexicali Valley, 1937 Colonia La Mariana Lerma Madero Silva Rentería Valdés

Number of plots 53 18 47 72 29 38

Total hectares 1,790.30 900.00 2,280.28 3,644.93 1,087.78 2,024.37

source: Periódico Oficial, May 20, 1948, exp. 27, caja 7, Fondo Pablo Martínez, Archivo Histórico del Gobierno.

ers pulled out of regional groups in 1935 to join the ranks of the Unión Agrícola.24 The disagreements between farmers who leased CRLC land and landless campesinos intensified after Cárdenas distributed land to former CRLC workers. Newspapers reported constant fights between farmers involved in the proagrarian movement and CRLC lessors.25 Those who benefited from land expropriations labeled the strikers as anti-Cardenistas and “sell outs.” One striker, Fernando España, voiced the opinion of many when he called ejido land policies “immoral” and “degenerate.”26 España was shot to death outside a bar in Mexicali, sparking further violence between strikers and campesinos active in the agrarista movement.27 Strikers viewed the expropriation of CRLC farmland not as a national issue but as a personal matter that directly affected their livelihood. President Cárdenas modified his approach to land reform policies in Baja California, and the strike ended. He agreed to recognize private land holdings (pequeñas propiedades) owned by Mexican farmers, and he relocated the agraristas to other areas.28 Cárdenas initially denied CRLC workers the right to receive land in the form of private property, but renters succeeded in their demands for private land distribution.29 In 1938 Cárdenas approved the distribution of sixty-seven thousand hectares in the form of private property.30 Table 8 includes a small sample of colonias established in the Mexicali Valley. These colonias had farmers with bigger plots of land. Colonias from the Mexicali Valley illustrate how local agrarian organizations and CRLC lessors shaped the course of agrarian reform in Baja California. Small landowners represented an important part of Mexicali’s agricultural economy, owning more land than campesinos on collective ejidos.

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While collective ejidos had an average of twenty hectares per person, colonias had an average of forty hectares per plot.

repatriados, lessors, and workers The role of Mexican and Mexican American repatriates in the land reform movement in Baja California during the 1930s has been overlooked in the historiography. Reports of participants show that these repatriates played a crucial role in the movement. Starting in 1929, when the Great Depression affected markets in the United States, the U.S. government and its local agencies launched campaigns for the deportation and repatriation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans to Mexico. Between 1930 and 1939 U.S. immigration services raided Mexican American communities in the United States to deport hundreds of thousands to northern and central Mexico.31 Some families repatriated voluntarily after facing job loss and discrimination in the United States. Historians Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez note that during the 1930s more than one million Mexicans and Mexican Americans were deported or repatriated to Mexico.32 Many of them went to Baja California. In 1934 the Mexican consul in Los Angeles reported that fifty thousand Mexicans had been repatriated to northern Mexico.33 The scale of repatriation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans to Mexico from the United States was far greater than that of the era following World War I. The negative impact of the financial crisis and the massive flow of repatriates to Mexico led Mexican presidents Emilio Portes Gil (1928–30) and Pascual Ortiz Rubio (1930–32) to allocate limited funds to cover repatriates’ free transportation to destinations in Mexico, as well as loans and subsidies for colonization projects.34 In Baja California some repatriados purchased land through colonization projects, while others joined the agrarian movement’s campaign against the CRLC in the Mexicali Valley. The Mexican government provided land through colonization projects to those who settled in San Quintín, Bahía, and Valle de Las Palmas in Baja California.35 Colonization projects provided a viable desirable option for those who could afford the down payment. Repatriados with farming experience were given priority for spots in colonization projects over those with no experience. Repatriados who returned to Mexico without money or farming experience were excluded from the colonization projects. People who petitioned for colonization projects in Baja California paid 5 percent down in cash to a government bank and received a twenty-five-year loan at 4 percent interest.36

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Repatriates Guadalupe Loya and Dolores Murillo lived for fifteen years in California until they repatriated with their Mexican American children to Baja California in 1929. They purchased fifty hectares in Colonia Rivera in Mexicali, established a productive farm, and grew alfalfa and other cash crops to sell at the local market. A few years later Loya and Murillo sold the plot in Colonia Rivera to buy a bigger plot in Colonia Abasolo, where they continued to grow cash crops. Loya and Murillo became ranchers, purchasing cattle and training mules, which they sold to CRLC farmers. Mules were in high demand in the Mexicali Valley because they could be used to clear the land for cotton in the same manner as oxen. The Loya family enjoyed a middle-class life in Mexicali and became well acquainted with Chinese merchants and farmers, who became their main clients.37 Those repatriated men and women who did not have money to buy land associated with colonization projects settled in the Mexicali Valley. One such repatriada was Petra Pérez, whose husband had abandoned her and their children after his fruitless search for a job in Mexico. He returned to the United States, and Pérez never heard from him again. She worked as a housekeeper for a family in the city of Mexicali and hoped to one day save enough money to move back to the United States. In the meantime, her brother and other family members, also recently returned to Mexico, moved in with her. Her brother, Pedro Pérez, worked for a Japanese farmer who cultivated cotton on land leased from the CRLC. By 1936 Pérez and her family abandoned their plans to move back to the United States and instead became involved in the agrarista movement. Petra Pérez married Hipólito Rentería, a cotton delivery driver from Mexicali who became a leader in the agrarista movement. The two became active members of the Michoacán de Ocampo agrarian league, one of the pioneer groups that took over CRLC lands in 1937.38 Pérez and Rentería served as leaders and mediators. They unified diverse groups in the name of their movement, even connecting repatriated families in the north with seasonal workers in the south. The involvement of repatriados like Pérez and Rentería in the struggle for agrarian reform illustrates how repatriated Mexicans who did not benefit from colonization projects nonetheless participated with seasonal workers in the movement for land reform in Mexicali. Pérez became a leader in the women’s agrarian leagues in the years Cárdenas was in power, and Rentería became a congressman who represented Mexicali from 1936 to 1940. Once the government planned and established ejidos in the Mexicali Valley, there still remained the available uncultivated land of the CRLC. Cárdenas’s efforts to populate the northern borderlands with Mexican

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nationals led to a recruitment campaign targeting Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the United States. In 1939 Ramón Beteta, undersecretary of state in Mexico, toured Texas and California, promising land, access to irrigation, and credit to Mexicans who repatriated to the Mexicali Valley. “To Mexico will go sharecroppers, renters or families on small ranch salaries. Thus the pressure on the United States agriculture will be relieved and Mexico’s long-idle border will be populated,” Beteta told the Los Angeles Times.39 In the same year the Agrarian Department granted two entire communal farm communities (Chapultepec and Porvenir) exclusively to repatriated families who had come from California. Juan Dunn, a resident from Tijuana, noted that ejido members gathered at the U.S.-Mexico border to welcome “hundreds and hundreds” of repatriating families who accepted grants for communal farmland in Tijuana.40 The recruitment of Mexican nationals and U.S. citizens of Mexican descent in the United States illustrates how Cárdenas defined who was a Mexican citizen and who would benefit from agrarian reform in the context of his nationalistic projects. Ironically, while the United States deported Mexicans and Mexican Americans to Mexico, the state governments of Sonora and Sinaloa engaged in the deportation of Chinese and Chinese Mexicans. In 1931 the Sonora government expelled all Chinese and Chinese Mexican people from the state.41 This expulsion followed an anti-Chinese campaign throughout Mexico, supported by legislation approved by the Mexican government. Nationalism and ideologies of race played an important role in the antiAsian campaigns that manifested in northern Mexico between 1920 and 1937.42 In 1937 the Mexican government mandated the compulsory registration of all foreigners, to “protect the small industry of the nation.”43 The push for registration was enforced in the northern cities along the U.S.Mexico border, where more Chinese entrepreneurs tended to live. In the same nationalistic vein, Cárdenas’s agrarian reform program excluded foreigners from grants for communal farmland. He used article 27 to justify the distribution of ejidos exclusively to Mexican nationals.44 The program also excluded Asians who were naturalized Mexican citizens.45 Agrarian reform in the Mexicali Valley forced many Asian laborers and farmers to move to the city of Mexicali because they no longer qualified for access to land. Census records show that by 1942 most foreign workers in the Mexicali Valley lived in the city of Mexicali, even those who still worked in the countryside.46 As in earlier times, Asian and Asian Mexicans who married Mexican women gained access to communal farmland through their spouses. Adela Sandoval Portillo, a Cocopah mestizo ejido farmer from the Mexicali

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table 9. Sample of ejidos in the Mexicali Valley, 1937 Ejido Aguascalientes Campeche Ciudad Victoria Coahuila Colima Cucapá Indígena

Hectares

Beneficiaries

2,180 2,380 1,080 3,440 2,157 2,160

106 116 51 169 67 42

source: Ejidos in Mexicali Valley, 1937, exp. 27, caja 7, Fondo Pablo Martínez, Archivo Histórico del Gobierno.

Valley, married a Japanese Mexican after she divorced her Cocopah husband. Sandoval Portillo praised her second husband’s diligent work on the ejido: I used to work very hard with my shovel and hoe, but as soon as I met him, my luck and lifestyle suddenly changed. I never had to work with those tools anymore. He built a new house for us, and we lived happily together for twenty-three years. Everything that I have is because of him.47

During their time together, Sandoval Portillo and her husband cultivated the land and built a new house in Ejido Cocopah, where they lived together. Because Asian men who married Mexican women from ejidos did not appear in the agrarian records, it is not clear how many Asian and Asian Mexican men gained access to ejido farmland in Baja California or other parts of northern Mexico through their wives.

ejidos, mexicali style Names given to ejidos formed in the Mexicali Valley reflected the farmers’ place of origin, kinship, and ethnicity.48 Of the thirty-six ejidos in the Mexicali Valley, twenty-eight of them were named for the places from where their members had come, for instance, ejidos Aguascalientes, Campeche, and Colima (see table 9). In contrast, ejidos in central and southern Mexico were usually named after nearby towns, saints, or indigenous communities. “We called our ejido Oaxaca because this was our place of origin,” explained Filiberto Crespo, one of the original members of Ejido Oaxaca in the Mexicali Valley. Crespo stated that ejido members were often

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part of the same extended family, worked the land collectively, and together decided how much land should be cultivated each year.49 Not all ejido members embraced the philosophy of collective ejidos. In fact, many ejido members requested the government divide ejidos into individual plots. Unlike in southern and central Mexico, ejido members from the Mexicali Valley lacked a culture of working the land collectively. For more than three decades, the CRLC had played an important role in influencing workers’ way of labor and agricultural techniques. Members preferred to work their own plot, and they complained of the unequal work distribution on collective ejidos. “We were working and working while the other ejido members were just sitting under the tree,” complained Pedro Pérez, who belonged to the Ejido Michoacán de Ocampo. There were reports that many ejido members had neither the farming experience nor interest in learning new skills.50 When the Agrarian Department refused to divide the collective ejidos into individual plots, members went ahead and divided them up anyway, and then they worked in smaller groups.51 The local Agrarian Department conceded to the needs of the farmers, and there are no records of penalty against these ejidos. Members of Ejido Cucapá also requested that their ejido be divided into individual plots and additionally requested the division of land based on ethnicity. A conflict divided the ejido, where Cocopahs wanted to graze cattle, while mestizos wanted to grow cotton. Mestizos accused Cocopahs of laziness because they were more interested in cattle than cotton: We had numerous fights with these compañeros (comrades) because they owned a large number of cattle and horses that constantly went through and trampled our plots, damaging our canals and plots. It seems that instead of farming, they had only raised cattle.52

The preference of the Cocopah for grazing cattle was rooted in a genderbased division of labor. Before agrarian reform most Cocopah men worked on the irrigation canals or as cowboys on ranches (on both sides of the U.S.Mexico border), while the women worked on cotton farms on the Mexican side. Women had fewer options to migrate or seek jobs in the United States. The Cocopah residents of Ejido Cucapá also sent letters to the governor and to the Agrarian Department in favor the division of the ejido by ethnicity and accused the mestizos of exclusion and corruption.53 They reported that mestizo members never notified them of ejido meetings and used ejido money for personal use. Agrarian Department officials agreed to divide Ejido Cucapá into Cucapá Indígena and Cucapá Mestizo. Yet this division solved the problem only temporarily, because the Ejido Bank provided credit only for the cultivation of specific crops and excluded cattle grazing. By 1946 many

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of the original members, unable to sustain their individual plots of land without government subsidy, abandoned the ejido and migrated back to the United States. A 1946 report by the Agrarian Department in the Mexicali Valley identified most Ejido Cucapá members as non-Cocopahs indigenous.54 Agrarian records show that some Cocopah women stayed on the ejido and continued to work the land. These records indicate that Cocopah women such as Adela Sandoval Portillo, Felicidad Durán, and Florentina Delgado kept ejido plots after they separated from their husbands and that other women, like Sixta Blanco, gained access to ejido land when their husbands died. The women who continued working the land were identified as ejidatarias in agrarian records.55 “I spent most of my youth working with the axe and the shovel; I never learned how to do anything else,” said Sandoval Portillo, when she was asked about her experiences growing up in the Mexicali Valley.56 Because of the Cocopah tradition of a gendered division of labor, Cocopah women proved more willing to keep and cultivate ejido plots than their male counterparts.

gender and agrarian leagues in the valley By 1940 there were sixty-one ejidos and fifty-four colonias in the Mexicali Valley.57 President Cárdenas provided loans through the Ejido Bank as well as farm machinery for the cultivation of cotton and grains. Ejido residents built their homes out of adobe and the cachanilla plants that grew near their ejido plots. They grew cotton, cáñamo, and wheat. It was backbreaking work. Campesino men and women participated in the political and cultural life of their ejidos and in government-sponsored unions that influenced Mexicali politics. Unlike states in central and southern Mexico, the Federación Campesina rather than the National Confederation of Peasants (CNC) facilitated the incorporation of agrarian leagues into one union.58 Between 1937 and 1938 Federación Campesina represented the newly formed ejidos in the valley. The CNC was introduced at the end of the year and incorporated both the Federación Campesina and independent farmers into one union. Even though the CNC improved people’s access to government loans and machinery, it failed to solve frictions between ejido members and small private farmers. Ejido members who had once worked for CRLC lessors resisted and challenged any type of association with them under the new system. The CNC and the Agrarian Department continually received complaints from both sides.59 Ejido distribution shaped gender relations and the concept of campesino identity in the Mexicali Valley. It forged a new ideal of masculinity based on

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manly pride and honor. Male campesinos were no longer portrayed as poor migrant workers but as hombres valientes (valiant men) and “pioneers” who had stood up against the CRLC, a powerful U.S. enterprise. The local and federal government reinforced this type of manly pride. In 1938, just prior to Cárdenas’s visit to Baja California, Gov. Rodolfo Sánchez Taboada substituted all military men occupying local government positions with ejido members.60 For instance, Filiberto Crespo first became an ejido representative and was later appointed as the president of the Cooperativa de Consumo, a federal program that delivered staples to ejido members in Mexicali. Public celebrations strengthened the emerging notion of campesino and Baja Californian identity. For four consecutive days, from January 25 to 28, members from all sixty ejidos organized an annual fiesta to celebrate the Asalto a las Tierras (the assault on CRLC lands). On the last day of the celebration, agrarista men and their children paraded around the plaza, while women cheered from the sidelines. Women from ejido communities competed in a beauty contest in which ejido members selected la flor más bella del ejido (the most beautiful flower on the ejido). Men showed off their new clothes and sombreros, recounted the events of January 27, 1937, and congratulated one another on their valor in taking over the CRLC lands. Later that night, they ate and danced to norteño and mariachi music. Ejido members refused government financial assistance because they wanted full control over the organization of the fiesta. It was not until 1957 when the state took control of the celebrations.61 On January 1, 1957, Gov. Braulio Maldonado declared January 20 as a state holiday, where the federal and local governments participated in the celebration of Ejido Day in Mexicali.62 This holiday became an annual celebration, shaping the regional identity of Baja Californians and infusing them with a sense of Mexican pride. At the same time, ideas of temperance and family-centered activities shaped women’s role on the ejido. Mexicali’s numerous casinos and bars represented a threat to Cárdenas’s plans for helping the peasants to become modern Mexicans. Government temperance and antivice campaigns became a priority in the region. Campesina women became the guardians of the family household and ejido communities. The Cárdenas administration assigned Gavino Vázquez, secretary of the Agrarian Department, the task of organizing the women’s agrarian leagues in the Mexicali Valley. In 1937 schoolteachers began to run workshops on how to improve family hygiene and promote temperance. Teachers organized brigades of women who monitored bars and casinos, making sure that no men were spending money on alcohol or gambling.63

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figure 9. Liga Femenil Carmen Serdán, from Ejido Durango, 1937. Courtesy of the Archivo Histórico del Municipio de Mexicali, Baja California.

As historians Stephanie Mitchell and Patience A. Schell note, women who joined the agrarian leagues in the state of Michoacán asserted more power outside the home.64 In the Mexicali Valley Petra Pérez, who worked as the secretary of the agrarian league on the Ejido Michoacán de Ocampo, described her additional duties in the liga femenil (women’s league): Together but not in each other’s way, the women’s league worked with men on the ejidos for the benefit of our communities. The league’s mission exercised strict rules, including that our men did not spend money designated for farming in bars or casinos. We also made sure that no alcohol was sold near ejidos, and alcohol was not consumed in any ejido household.65

Women from the agrarian leagues took a strict position against vice due to their proximity to Mexicali’s red-light district.66 Some women even carried firearms to break up gatherings where alcohol was served.67 Women’s agrarian leagues were well connected with other leagues in the region, and they hosted training sessions that recruited more women into the leagues. Women from the Liga Femenil Carmen Serdán waved a banner and carried tools traditionally used in the cultivation of cotton as evidence of their participation on communal farms. Single women and widows participated in the monthly meetings organized by the CNC, which were usually considered the domain of male ejidatarios. For instance, Adela Sandoval Portillo and her sister attended the monthly meetings on Ejido Cucapá. Men set the agenda, determined which issues would be discussed, and dominated the meetings. Although some

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women were very involved in ejido meetings, their ability to set agenda items was limited. Government antivice projects contributed to the success of antialcohol campaigns sponsored by the women’s league in the Mexicali Valley. Cárdenas supported the women’s goals by refusing to renew government-issued licenses to serve alcohol at bars and casinos near ejido communities.68 Ultimately, ejido men from the Mexicali Valley called for the dissolving of women’s agrarian leagues on the ejidos because they were constantly challenging male authority.69

conclusion Agrarian reform was not a top-down process in Baja California. In the Mexicali Valley the labor unions that had formed in the 1920s became crucial to the movement for land reform in the 1930s. Although, under the two waves of agrarian reform, most land was distributed to single men and male heads of household, some women seized the limited opportunities they had to gain farmland. For instance, the ejido program gave women the chance to be granted a plot of land to work. Agrarian records indicate that some widows and single mothers who headed their households attained land in ejidos. Similarly, women had additional opportunities to participate in the formal economy by raising small livestock and selling produce from their gardens. Anti-Chinese sentiment and Cárdenas’s expropriation of U.S.owned land in the Mexicali Valley ended the flow of Asian migration to the valley’s rural areas. Most Asian workers were excluded from obtaining communal farmland. Nevertheless, some Asian farmers purchased property and continued their commercial relationship with U.S.-owned companies on a smaller scale. By the time Lázaro Cárdenas turned over the presidency to his handpicked successor, Manuel Ávila Camacho, in 1940, he had expropriated land and nationalized the oil industry in the name of national interest. Much of the land in the Mexicali Valley had been transformed into ejidos and private plots, most of them owned by Mexican nationals and repatriated Mexicans who had returned from the United States. The Colorado River Land Company, once a powerful agricultural economic enterprise, was reduced to a small plot of land. Mexican and Mexican American farmers came to dominate the cultivation and harvest of cotton, which continued to be the major cash crop.

5. Mexicali’s Exceptionalism There is no Statue of Liberty in this small, dusty Mexican border town but it presents a more cordial welcome to would-be immigrants to the United States than the port of New York. —New York Times, March 27, 1951

In 1951 the New York Times published a three-part report on Baja California, which described Mexicali as a “typical wetback village,” a destination that encouraged undocumented Mexican workers to enter the United States. According to this report, approximately one million undocumented Mexican workers entered the United States through Mexicali every year, overwhelming the U.S. Border Patrol at the twin border cities of Mexicali and Calexico, California. Similar media reports fueled an antiimmigrant sentiment in the U.S. Southwest, prompting the U.S. Congress to demand an investigation based on the need to “secure” the U.S.-Mexico border and curtail further unauthorized crossings.1 During the 1950s the term wetback, a symbolic reference to the crossings of the Rio Grande, became a racialized phrase to describe unauthorized Mexicans working in the United States. Scholars point out that this term became synonymous with illegality and criminality, as the United States rolled out new sanctions to prevent the crossings of undocumented Mexican workers.2 In 1954 President Dwight Eisenhower approved “Operation Wetback,” which led U.S. federal agents and police officers to deport over one million undocumented Mexicans working in the Southwest.3 Immigrants apprehended while crossing the border without legal documentation were charged with a misdemeanor the first time and with a felony and up to two years in prison the second time. Mexican workers permitted to cross the border into the United States for work fell into two categories: “legalized” workers with visas and those contracted under the Farm Emergency Labor Program. Twelve years earlier President Manuel Ávila Camacho had signed a reciprocal trade agreement with the United States that included the reduction of tariffs on all imports to the United States and the launch of the labor program, which provided for 89

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contracted Mexican laborers to work in the United States.4 The program (commonly known as the Bracero Program, after the workers, who were called braceros) was deemed one of the most controversial agreements ever signed by Ávila Camacho. Mexican politicians and intellectuals viewed this labor agreement with distrust, as the numerous U.S.-approved repatriations and deportations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans back to Mexico in the 1930s were still fresh in their minds. Mexican farmers from northern Mexico were also critical of the Bracero Program. In fact, they even supported U.S. sanctions against undocumented Mexican workers in an effort to keep more Mexican farmworkers in northern Mexico. During Mexicali’s cotton boom of the 1940s, Mexicali Valley farmers requested the Mexican Labor Commission to lobby on their behalf to convince Ávila Camacho to modify the Bracero Program and send enlisted workers to the Mexicali Valley instead.5 In spite of the controversy the program caused, Ávila Camacho continued to support the program by portraying it as a temporary program that would teach Mexican farmworkers up-to-date agricultural techniques that they would eventually bring back to Mexico for the greater good.6 When analyzing Mexican immigration to the United States in the 1940s, historians often single out the Bracero Program as a direct outcome of the U.S. labor shortage caused by World War II.7 Yet we know very little about the reasons 4.5 million Mexicans volunteered to work as braceros in the United States when the program was in effect, between 1942 and 1964. The effects were profound. Chicano labor historians note that Mexican workers contracted under the Bracero Program transformed Mexican American communities into booming towns.8 Men who left for jobs in the United States caused labor shortages in Mexico, and their long absences affected countless family households there.9 For thousands of braceros who wanted to keep their wives and children close, moving their families to Mexican communities near the U.S.-Mexico border proved a viable option. This massive migration led to the urbanization of Mexican border towns. Coming from a probusiness background, both President Ávila Camacho and his successor, President Miguel Alemán Valdés, initiated an economic approach, referred to as the “Mexican Miracle,” that supported urban industrial development and rural agribusiness.10 A closer look at the changes in Mexican agrarian policies in the 1940s shows the link between the decline of agrarian subsidies and the increase in migration of Mexican farmworkers to northern Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. Ávila Camacho and Alemán blamed the ejido program in part for Mexico’s food shortages during World War II.11 Both presidents described ejidos as “ineffective” and said they led to the weakening of the agrarian policies that had been initi-

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ated by Cárdenas. Newly implemented policies prohibited campesinos from invading and occupying farmland. They also made it easier for the Mexican government to deny petitions for land grants, as well as expel those who illegally occupied farmland.12 In 1947 Alemán approved an amendment to article 27 that allowed an increase in hectares of small private landholdings (pequeñas propiedades) and the further protection of large estates from expropriation.13 The amendment allowed private landowners to increase their holdings from one hundred to three hundred hectares, significantly more land than what could be obtained by petitioning the government for an ejido.14 Agrarian reform in the 1940s led to the displacement of small-scale farmers and, at the same time, spurred their migration. While ejido production decreased almost everywhere else in Mexico, Mexicali Valley ejidos experienced an agricultural boom. The years from 1940 to 1950 are known in Mexicali as the “golden” decade, thanks to the increased demand for cotton during World War II.15 Mexicali again became a major cotton-growing region and surpassed the previous production record set by the former Colorado River Land Company in 1930.16 In just one year farmers from the Mexicali Valley cultivated a total of 250,000 acres of cotton.17 The Bracero Program and Alemán’s colonization projects attracted more farmworkers and private farm owners to Baja California than to any other part of northern Mexico.18 Between 1940 and 1970 the population of the Northern Territory of Baja California grew from 66,376 to 754, 998. In contrast, Sonora’s population grew from 49,000 to 215,136.19 Mexicali Valley became one of the few places in Mexico where both private farmers and ejido members could run profitable farms. Mexicans from the interior viewed Mexicali as a land of opportunity, where landless workers could aspire to become farmers and homeowners, or even as a home base to live while working temporary jobs on the other side of the border as braceros or as undocumented workers. These migrants living along the CalexicoMexicali border challenged immigration-related policies and laws in both Mexico and the United States. Their experience redefined common notions of labor and family.

baja california and the bracero program President Ávila Camacho saw the events unleashed by World War II as an opportunity to improve relations with the United States. The nationalization of the oil industry and expropriations of U.S.-owned land authorized

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by President Cárdenas in the 1930s had strained the relationship between these two countries. When Mexico entered the war in 1942 against the Axis forces, Ávila Camacho signed the Bracero Contract with the United States. This carefully crafted agreement specified that Mexican workers would fill jobs in the farming and railroad sectors caused by the U.S. labor shortage. As part of the agreement, U.S. employers paid for workers’ housing and round-trip transportation. The Dirección General de la Oficialía Mayor and the Dirección General del Servicio Consular negotiated workers’ wages with the U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S. State Department. Local Mexican municipal governments would be in charge of recruiting Mexican male workers between the ages of seventeen and forty from selected areas of Mexico. Every recruit received a letter from a local agency that they took to recruitment centers to begin the application process.20 The spread of recruitment centers throughout Mexico demonstrates the Mexican government’s support for the Bracero Program. In 1942 Mexico City, Irapuato, and Guadalajara hosted recruitment centers. These cities were initially selected because they had the highest unemployment in the country. Between 1944 and 1950 eight new recruitment centers were inaugurated in the territory of Baja California and in the states of Aguascalientes, Zacatecas, Chihuahua, Tampico, Sonora, Monterrey, and Coahuila. Consequently, Bracero recruitment increased even after the war was over. Between 1942 and 1950 approximately 430,000 braceros worked in the United States under the program.21 One direct consequence of the Bracero Program was a shortage of labor in northern Mexico. As a result, Mexican farmers from the Mexicali Valley contested the agreement and asked the labor commission to convince Ávila Camacho to stop sending braceros to the United States.22 Cotton farmers from Empalme, Sonora, used a different tactic: they formed an agreement with the local bracero recruitment center that forced enlisted braceros to first pick cotton in Empalme without compensation. Tomás Pelayo remembers, “I had to pick two thousand kilos of cotton as a condition for getting a [Bracero Program] contract letter from Empalme.”23 Thousands of rural workers wanted to enlist as braceros, and some traveled long distances to recruitment centers, only to wait outside for days for the opportunity to obtain a bracero contract. In 1944, under pressure from border farmers, Ávila Camacho endorsed a campaign for women to join the workforce in northern Mexico to offset the shortage of labor caused by the Bracero Program. The government circulated ads that included an illustration of a woman carrying the Mexican flag with one hand and her child on the other arm. The caption read,

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figure 10. Bracero recruitment center in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico, 1956. Photograph by Leonardo Nadell, NAMH. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Collection, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington, DC.

“Mexican Women, your country solicits your service! Serve your country working: in industry, the countryside, at home, whatever the working need calls you and enrobe yourself with the flag of liberty.”24 Thus both ejido farmers and private farmers in the Mexicali Valley came to rely on women’s labor for the cultivation and picking of cotton. Mexican newspapers reported that hundreds of women in northern Mexico had taken over agricultural jobs traditionally performed by men. The National Confederation of Peasants also reported an unprecedented increase in female workers on ejidos throughout northern Mexico. Previous reports had shown that men constituted the majority of seasonal laborers.25 The government’s propaganda was effective in northern Mexico partly because unaccompanied women and their children traveled to the border to be closer to their husbands (or other family members) who worked in the United States. Cotton ensured that the demand for laborers remained high in the Mexicali Valley, and a new bracero recruitment center was inaugurated, thus attracting even more Mexican families to the area. For example, in 1942 Genaro Navarro, originally from Zacatecas, was contracted as a bracero in the Imperial Valley. After he married in Tijuana, he moved his family to the Mexicali Valley. For almost twenty years Navarro crossed the border back and forth to see his family whenever he had a day off work.

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Braceros usually received contracts from one to five years, and they were only allotted a few days to visit their family during the span of the contract.26 Many of the women whose husbands had joined the Bracero Program worked on ejidos and on new large-scale farms, each one heading her own household in the absence of the husband. These trends were a departure from the values promoted by previous government administrations, which had advocated for family-centered communities where only men headed households. Navarro’s daughter, Rosa Navarro, describes how her mother had eleven children because she got pregnant almost every time her father came to see them in Mexicali. When Navarro was unable to send remittances, his wife and children worked in various temporary jobs. At age five, Rosa picked cotton on several privately owned farms and ejidos with her older siblings, while her mother washed and ironed clothes for families in Mexicali. As a teenager, Rosa put on men’s clothes when she went to work, so men would not harass her.27 Navarro joined his daughter Rosa after he could no longer obtain contracts as a bracero. They made Mexicali the family’s permanent home. Many young men between the ages of fifteen and forty were attracted to the Bracero Program after they saw braceros returning to the village wearing new shoes and clothes. In some cases, young men who were braceros in the United States recruited their younger brothers or other male relatives. For example, Nazario Ramírez migrated from San Pedro, Durango, to the Mexicali Valley at the age of fifteen in search of employment. He decided to follow the steps of his older brothers who had previously migrated to Mexicali to pick cotton on both sides of the border. Once Ramírez was in Mexicali, he secured a contract as a bracero in the Imperial Valley to pick cotton and vegetables. Ramírez and his brother never returned to Durango. It was easier for them to stay in Mexicali until they received another contract. Once his last bracero contract ended, Ramírez decided to live permanently in the Imperial Valley, while his brother stayed in the Mexicali Valley.28 Single women also migrated to the Mexicali Valley in search for work.29 Bracelicia Meza Peraza moved from Durango to Mexicali at the age of fourteen. Meza Peraza’s mother asked her sister who lived in Mexicali to assist her daughter in finding employment. Meza Peraza’s parents struggled financially because they had sixteen children on their small ejido in Durango. Once in Mexicali, Meza Peraza worked as a bookseller until she secured a job as an undocumented worker, picking vegetables in the Imperial Valley. She quit work at age twenty-three, after she married a bracero who lived in Mexicali and worked in the Imperial Valley.30 Many bracero and

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migrant families purchased homes on the Mexicali side of the MexicaliCalexico border to make it easier for bracero and undocumented workers to travel back and forth to the United States. At the same time, the men who were braceros and undocumented workers became the object of public hostility in the United States. Reports of “illegal” crossings to the United States made it to the front page of both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. These reports exacerbated anxieties that the United States was losing control of its borders.31 After 1940 the U.S. Border Patrol shifted its attention from the policing of Chinese workers to the policing of Mexican workers at the U.S.-Mexico border. In 1951 Herbert Brownell, U.S. attorney general, sent eight hundred additional border patrol officers to Southern California to conduct raids and detain undocumented Mexican farmworkers.32 In 1954 the first year Operation Wetback went into effect, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended approximately two thousand undocumented Mexican workers per day.33 Four hundred additional officers were sent to the California–Baja California border to continue raids on farms and in Mexican and Mexican American communities. Why did the number of undocumented workers increase in spite of U.S. sanctions? Growers from California, Texas, and Arizona preferred to hire undocumented Mexican workers over contracted braceros, since they could pay even lower wages and there was not even nominal protection by the U.S. and Mexican governments. Farmers from the Imperial Valley and San Diego even provided daily buses to shuttle undocumented workers from the border to their farms.34 U.S. Border Patrol records indicate an increase in the number of deportations of undocumented Mexican workers two years after the Bracero Program went into effect. Between 1944 and 1954 the number of deportations increased from 6,082 to 1,108,900.35 In 1953 the U.S. Department of Labor estimated that 200,000 undocumented Mexican laborers worked in the U.S. Southwest.36 The Mexican government, on the other hand, argued that the number of undocumented laborers in the United States was over one million, not 200,000.37 The growing discontent among northern Mexican farmers and the lack of commitment from U.S. farmers to honor the Bracero Program led to frictions between Mexico and the United States. In 1953 the Mexican government increased security in Mexican border communities to prevent undocumented workers from crossing to the United States. As historian Kelly Lytle Hernández notes, the U.S. Border Patrol collaborated with the Mexican Border Patrol since the 1940s to control the flow of Mexican immigrants.38 In Baja California, Vega Mendoza, a police subchief, was in charge of supervising patrol cars near the dividing line.39 The local police

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also supported Mexican immigration officers near the bracero recruitment center and had the authority to prevent illegal crossings into the United States. On many occasions U.S. Border Patrol agents found themselves at odds with U.S. farmers who hired undocumented Mexican farmworkers. When the Farm Emergency Labor Program was up for renewal in 1953, the Mexican government took a hard-line position against U.S. farmers. They demanded that U.S. growers stop hiring undocumented Mexican workers, because it undermined their authority to negotiate on behalf of contracted Mexican workers. Mexican negotiators also demanded higher wages and better housing conditions for Mexican workers in the United States. During the first ten years of the program, reports of labor abuses against contracted workers in violation of the program’s labor contract continually appeared in Mexican Council reports.40 In Stockton, California, for example, the DiGiorgio farm hired undocumented workers to break a labor strike (which was prohibited by the contract). Reports of unpaid wages and poor housing conditions were often reported on farms in the U.S. Southwest.41 U.S. growers’ refusal to increase Mexican workers’ wages slowed down negotiations. To put pressure on the growers, the Mexican government temporarily suspended the bracero contracts altogether. This decision affected Mexican border communities, as recruitment centers began to fill to capacity. To prevent undocumented workers from crossing the border into the United States, the Mexican government sent its military to assist the Mexican Department of Immigration and the Baja California police to reinforce the border. The Mexican military first arrived in Texas in 1948, after Texan growers, with the assistance of the U.S. Border Patrol, opened the gates to allow undocumented Mexican migrants to work on Texan farms.42 Before 1948 the Mexican government had relied mainly on its Department of Immigration and the police from Mexican border towns to control border crossings. On January 20, 1954, during the suspension of bracero contracts, a riot broke out in Mexicali. Thousands of aspiring braceros (aspirantes) gathered at the Mexicali-Calexico gate after hearing the news that U.S. growers would soon be using contract workers. U.S. Border Patrol agents (in complicity with Imperial Valley farmers) opened the gate to allow Mexican workers to enter the United States, while the Mexican military and the police attempted to block the tide of aspirantes from crossing the U.S.Mexico border. A riot ensued. After the mayhem ended, many workers were injured and rushed to Mexicali hospitals. Some workers were crushed by the crowd; others were beaten by the Baja California police. This riot was reported very differently in Mexican and U.S. newspapers. While the U.S. newspaper criticized the Mexican government for suspending negotiations,

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Mexican newspapers called the president’s decision “patriotic” for not bending over to the needs of U.S. growers.43 Growers in northern Mexico were gratified with the government’s decision to curb labor negotiations with the United States. They hoped more Mexican men would stay in northern Mexico to work on their farms. Aspiring braceros were caught in the middle when the negotiations between Mexico and the United States stalled. In spite of the Mexican government’s recommendation for them to stay home, aspirantes kept pouring into Mexican border towns. Many had borrowed money from family members and then traveled a long distance, in hopes of obtaining a bracero contract at the border. For example, González Anaya, who had traveled to Mexicali from Palo Alto, Michoacán, was frustrated with the Mexican government’s decision to discontinue the Bracero Program. He was one of thousands of hopefuls in line at the Mexicali recruitment center, waiting for days to receive a bracero contract.44 González Anaya was tired of crossing the border as an undocumented worker and even more tired of the U.S. Border Patrol agents, who often detained him and sent him back to Mexico. The last time he had worked in California, he had been deported without pay after the U.S. Border Patrol raided the ranch where he was working. He hoped that a bracero contract would provide him with a higher salary and protect him from raids. González Anaya’s dreams, like those of thousands of other aspirantes, were on hold while they awaited the Mexican government’s decision to resume negotiations with the United States. After months of waiting, the workers’ frustration turned to anger, which led to a second antigovernment riot in Mexicali. On the morning of February 2, 1954, three thousand aspirantes gathered at the CalexicoMexicali gate and attempted to cross the border into the United States.45 The gathered workers outnumbered Mexican Border Patrol agents and the Mexicali police. As Manuel García y Griego notes, these incidents at the U.S.-Mexico border worked to the advantage of U.S. growers in need of labor.46 After the last riot in Mexicali, the Mexican government resumed talks with the United States and extended the Bracero Program for an additional ten years. In the meantime, undocumented Mexicans continued to work on U.S. farms in the Southwest. Between 1942 and 1964 about ten million undocumented Mexicans worked in the United States.

the decline of ejidos Migrant workers who settled in Mexicali found employment on cotton and vegetable farms that offered better wages than the farms in their place of

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origin. However, due to a change in Mexico’s agrarian policies on ejidos in the 1940s, these migrant workers found it nearly impossible to qualify for communal farmland in the Mexicali Valley. In 1940 migrant workers from Zacatecas settled on a vacant lot in the Mexicali Valley and dubbed it Colonias Nuevas Zacatecas. Workers from this improvised colonia lived under precarious conditions, with neither electricity nor running water. By 1944 members of Colonias Nuevas Zacatecas organized and wrote the following letter to petition the governor of Baja California for communal land so they could create a new ejido: The neighbors from Colonias Nuevas Zacatecas, from the Northern Territory of Baja California, applied for land grants and water rights, which is guaranteed by article 27. . . . We feel that as Mexican nationals, we have the right to receive land in the form of an ejido to satisfy our needs. Because we do not have access to land we are subjected to low wages, and at times we are unable to educate our children.

Mexicans who applied for communal farmland often cited article 27 of the Mexican Constitution. The farmworkers from Colonias Zacatecas soon realized that it had become more difficult to secure land grants under President Ávila Camacho. The Agrarian Department denied their request and stated that no more land was available for ejidos.47 Three years earlier President Ávila Camacho had removed from office Gov. Rodolfo Sánchez Taboada of Baja California and other politicians who had assisted in the massive land distribution under President Lázaro Cárdenas in the 1930s. Sánchez Taboada ceased being governor of Baja California after he attempted to expropriate 5,000 acres (out of the remaining 12,500 hectares) from CRLC.48 In Sánchez Taboada’s place, Ávila Camacho appointed Juan Felipe Rico and then Edmundo Sánchez Cano, neither of whom favored communal farming or farmland distribution. In 1945 Governor Sánchez Cano scolded the agrarian director after he approved the initiation of a census on behalf of workers from Colonias Nuevas Zacatecas.49 In a letter Sánchez Cano told the director that he would not approve the distribution of any more land for ejidos in Mexicali: Mr. Eulogio said that the governor was very upset at him and told him that he should not have done the census for the initial process of land distribution. He reiterated that there would be no land distribution in the form of ejidos as long as he was Mexicali’s governor. Mr. Gómez told me that the governor also admonished Olviedo, commissioner from the Agrarian Department.50

This letter confirms that this territory government’s new administration would not stand for land occupations that had previously been supported

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under Governor Sánchez Taboada. Workers in Mexicali who applied for land grants for communal farms received the same response from President Miguel Alemán (1946–52). In a report in the Diario Oficial, Alemán pledged to solve the “agrarian problem” in Mexicali by providing more land for colonization projects, but not for ejidos.51 Perhaps this explains why there were more privately owned farms than communally owned farms in the Mexicali Valley by 1950. Between 1946 and 1952 Alemán decreased credits and subsidies to available ejido farmers, in stark contrast to the promises he made during his presidential campaign. In 1945 he had toured the country as a presidential candidate as a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. On the campaign trail, he met with representatives from the National Confederation of Peasants (CNC) and promised them that if he were elected, he would step up Mexico’s land distribution as a solution to the country’s food shortages: By adding only three hundred thousand more hectares of irrigated land, we will overcome the major shortages of wheat, corn and sugar. This new land distribution will benefit ejido members and private farmers alike, and at the same time will make them more responsible.52

In his speech Alemán pledged to grant ejido members and small-scale farmers with additional farmland and credit, which would lead to increased food production for both domestic consumption and export. He also laid out a plan for a second phase of what he called the “Revolución Agrícola.”53 He envisioned the expansion of irrigation systems and genetically modified seeds for ejidatarios and pequeños propietarios that would finally end the food crisis in Mexico. Alemán was a convincing campaigner. In his speeches he highlighted the campesinos’ needs, most notably for reliable irrigation. Alemán promised to continue to distribute land and to modernize the country’s rural areas. He recognized the importance of securing the vote of more than three million CNC members, which represented a decisive constituency in Mexico’s countryside.54 Alemán also campaigned to reach out to peasants outside the CNC. For example, in July 1945 he delivered a speech at the convention of peasants from the Zapatista Front, reaffirming his supposedly unconditional support for ejido members: “It is urgent that the federal government and private investors provide ejido members with better access to credit at a lower cost to the borrowers.”55 Alemán vowed to expedite loans from public and private banks at a lower interest rate. Like Cárdenas, Alemán claimed that the Mexican government had a responsibility to upgrade farming techniques and improve the lives of rural Mexicans overall.

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When Alemán was elected, he improved the infrastructure in a way that benefited agribusinesses rather than ejidos, ensuring that large-scale farming would dominate Mexico’s agricultural economy. He provided large subsidies to individual farmers and increased land distribution for colonization projects under a campaign he called the “Green Revolution.” This campaign included the construction of dams, the mechanization of farms, and the improvement of seeds and fertilizers.56 As with Ávila Camacho’s project, Alemán’s land distribution project was a major departure from Cárdenas’s communal land distribution programs. In fact, it had more in common with the land distribution programs approved by Presidents Obregón and Calles in the 1920s. As soon as he took office in 1946, Alemán went in a different direction than he had promised ejido members during his campaign. In his first year as president, Alemán petitioned Congress to approve an amendment to article 27 to protect private property from future land expropriations. He called pequeños propietarios “the most unprotected social class in Mexico,” and he promised to assist them by authorizing government loans and largescale government-subsidized irrigation works.57 The same year Alemán applied for a loan for 1.7 billion pesos from the newly formed World Bank and began the projects for irrigation in the northern region of Sonora, Baja California, Sinaloa, and Tamaulipas.58 On September 1, 1947, Alemán announced the success of the irrigation projects he had carried out in northern Mexico in his first six months as president: So far, twenty-four wells and nine hundred and seventy-four new hectares have been open for wheat cultivation. . . . The Banco Nacional de Crédito Agrícola is in charge of providing loans to further support the needs of farmers.59

This acreage went to private investors under the president’s colonization program.60 Between 1940 and 1960 private farmers purchased approximately 1.8 million hectares of the best-irrigated land from the Mexican government. Alemán’s colonization program proved popular among private investors, because the amendment to article 27 enabled them to purchase three hundred hectares of land instead of one hundred. In addition, private farmers had access to government loans through the Banco Nacional de Crédito Agrícola (BNCA) and the Banco Nacional de Crédito Ejidal (BNCE). Alemán also made credit available to private landowners through the BNCE. This meant that private landowners had access not only to private banks but also to public banks, which provided loans at a lower interest rate. These farmers prospered.61 On the other hand, ejido members suffered.

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Some leased out or abandoned their small plots of land because they could not qualify for government credit. Thousands of campesinos who lacked credit opted to leave their ejidos and migrate to Mexican border towns, where they could find work on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border. In the 1940s the illegal rental of ejido farmland became commonplace in several Mexican states, especially on collective farms where members had fewer than five acres of land. For example, ejido members from Tequisquiapan, Guanajuato, rented their plots to private farmers and business investors. Not far from Tequisquiapan, members of the Ejido Ovejas abandoned almost two thousand hectares of farmland and either enlisted as braceros or went to the United States as undocumented workers.62 This case was not unique to the state of Guanajuato. For example, historian John Gledhill notes that in 1950 the number of ejidos leased to nonejido members in Huaracha, Michoacán, increased by more than 50 percent.63 In northern states such as Sonora, ejido farmland was confiscated and sold by the Agrarian Department to individual farmers. Historian Cynthia Hewitt de Alcántara notes that in the 1940s private farmers from the United States and Sonora created a new business model, where U.S. growers provided machinery and farm technology, while Mexican landowners provided land and bank credit.64 Interestingly, the new agrarian policies did not have the same impact in the Mexicali Valley as they did elsewhere in Mexico. High cotton prices during World War II and access to private loans had set already Mexicali Valley ejidatarios apart from those in central Mexico. When the Mexican government decreased subsidies in 1947, ejido members from Mexicali turned to private banks. Crop records from Jabonera del Pacífico, a cottonginning company that manufactured cottonseed oil, show that they loaned money to both private farmers and ejido members. Between 1946 and 1947 Jabonera del Pacífico loaned a total of 611,000 pesos to approximately 978 private landowners and ejido members from the Mexicali Valley before the planting season.65 Farmers then paid the loan in full after the cotton harvest.66 Jabonera del Pacífico competed with other cotton-ginning companies in Mexicali and the Imperial Valley, which provided similar credit plans in exchange for farmers’ cotton.67 In 1946 Francisca Barragán from Ejido Torreón received a loan for 4,400 pesos to plant 16 acres of cotton. In some cases, an ejido president would apply for a loan on behalf of multiple farmers from his ejido. For example, Jesús Andrade from the Ejido Oaxaca requested a group loan for 31,020 pesos to plant 160 acres of cotton. The list of borrowers from Jabonera del Pacífico also includes members from Ejido Cocopah Indígena, such as Manuel Cabral who requested 4,575 pesos (see table 10). Records indicate that the company also loaned money to

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table 10. Sample of Jabonera del Pacífico loans to ejido-based cotton farmers, 1946–1947 Customer Andrés Acosta Guadalupe Acosta Luis Acosta Francisca Barragán Jesús Andrade Samuel Armenta Benito Arrequín Manuel Cabral Juan Cruz Justo Covarruvias Esteban Chávez Manuel Domínguez Ramón Gómez Clemente Guillén

Loan (in pesos) 6,911 6,721 2,625 4,400 31,020 7,108 7,115 4,575 3,832 5,845 3,560 2,772 2,838 3,900

Ejido Durango Durango Durango Torreón Oaxaca, lots 5–25 Irapuato Aguascalientes Cucapá Indígena Saltillo Nayarit Quintana Roo Islas Agrarias Nuevo León Colima

source: Crop loans, 1946–47, Archivo Histórico del Municipio.

ejidatarios and individual farmers who planted wheat and flax seed in the Mexicali Valley.68 Mexicali Valley ejido farmers enjoyed a middle-class living standard compared to other individual farmers in the area. Ejidatarios had positioned themselves as independent farmers who were not tied to state government banks that dictated the prices of cotton and who were at liberty to sell their cotton to ginning companies in either Mexico or the United States. Ejido members took pride in their land and the handsome revenues they earned for selling cotton in U.S. markets in the 1940s. The homes of ejido farmers were no longer made out of willow brush and grass. Their spacious, wellventilated homes of many rooms were constructed from concrete. Some even purchased highly detailed decorative ironwork for their windows and balconies from the artistic welders in Mexicali. One such artist, Manuel Álvaro, a Mexican American blacksmith, could not keep up with orders made by homeowners interested in showing off their new status as successful farmers.69 As mentioned in the previous chapter, ejido members were politically well connected in the Mexicali Valley. In the 1940s many ejido members

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served as deputy representatives in Mexico City and were perceived in the community as the pioneers and founders of the Mexicali Valley. Yet as ejidatarios received higher returns from selling cotton, they also asserted more power over women at home. Many women went back to taking care of children at home while men worked in the cotton fields. The reopening of bars and casinos authorized by presidents Ávila Camacho and Alemán renewed the conflict between men and the female agrarian leagues. Men felt ridiculed by the notion of being policed by women, and they did not appreciate how the members of the leagues challenged their right to drink with friends at bars and casinos. The staunch opposition of men to the women’s temperance movement ultimately led to the decline of the female agrarian leagues in the 1940s. During this era, women’s participation in ejido meetings also declined. Ejido minutes from Ejido Cucapá Mestizo in 1946 indicate that the participation of men greatly outweighed that of women, compared to the minutes from the same meetings on the same ejido in 1938.70 Despite their economic influence in the Mexicali Valley, ejido members could no longer obtain more land to incorporate family members into their existing ejidos in the 1940s as they had in the 1930s. Under President Cárdenas, ejido members could petition the government for additional land if they had at least twenty new male heads of household interested in becoming ejido members.71 In 1948 Ejido Aguascalientes, formed by 58 heads of household, more than the minimum required by Cárdenas, petitioned the Agrarian Department for the expansion of their ejido to incorporate additional family members. In the official petition they submitted an ejido census that included the names of 106 new candidates who qualified for land tenure. This ejido requested land owned by the CRLC, which at the time was still in negotiations with the Mexican government to sell the rest of its land affected by expropriation in 1937. A few months later members of Ejido Aguascalientes received a letter from Raúl Uro Monraz from the Agrarian Department denying their request. In the letter he informed the members of Aguascalientes that the department no longer approved ejido expansions. He then explained that the Agrarian Department granted land only in the form of private property, that is, for colonization projects. This marked the end of ejido expansion in the Mexicali Valley.

new colonization projects President Alemán had big plans for Baja California. He envisioned the region as a hub for commercial agriculture. During his tenure as president,

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Alemán took several trips to Baja California and even purchased a ranch near Tijuana to closely oversee transportation and irrigation works in the region.72 Alemán also increased the number of colonization projects in the Mexicali Valley. Census records show that in just ten years the number of individual farmers increased exponentially in Baja California. By 1950 there were 25,327 private farmers and only 3,627 ejido members in the Northern Territory of Baja California.73 The remaining land from the CRLC purchased by the Mexican government in 1944 was sold to private farmers.74 The Agrarian Department renewed the project introduced by Gov. Abelardo Rodríguez in the 1920s, where landowners paid the down payment, then paid the balance in ten years.75 Financial records from Banco del Pacífico show that 334 individual farmers obtained loans to purchase lots ranging from 123 to 350 acres. In total, these farmers purchased 21,817 acres (8,829 hectares) in just one year.76 Asian Mexican farmers benefited from changes at the National Colonization Commission, which by 1940 had adopted fairer practices in terms of selling land to naturalized Mexican citizens. The commission now required only a letter of naturalization and two letters of recommendation from established merchants in Mexicali.77 Further research is needed to examine how many Asian Mexican farmers benefited from colonization programs throughout Mexico from the 1940s onward. In the case of the Mexicali Valley, loan crop records show that Jabonera del Pacífico loaned 413,069 pesos to Chinese Mexican farmers. Chee C. Yee and Quan Yee, Mexicali Valley farmers, were among those who received loans from the company. Chon León, F. Chon León, and Gonzalo León most likely were the sons of Julio León, a Chinese merchant who became a naturalized Mexican citizen in 1919 and owned businesses in Ensenada and Mexicali.78 The three brothers planted a total of 870 acres of cotton in 1946 and owned farms in Colonia Rodríguez and Colonia Irrigación (see table 11). Some Asian farmers who appeared as landowners on this list had formerly rented land from the CRLC back in the 1920s. After Cárdenas expropriated most of the farmland belonging to the CRLC, many Asians and Asian Mexicans lost their farm leases and, to add insult to injury, were excluded from obtaining communally owned farmland or participating in the ejido system on racial grounds. Some, however, reversed their future as the Mexican government’s agrarian policy shifted. In 1937, at the time of government land expropriations from the CRLC, Chinese and Chinese Mexicans left the Mexicali Valley and relocated to the city of Mexicali, where they opened laundries and other small commercial establishments such as stores and restaurants.79 The list of crop loans

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table 11. Sample of Jabonera del Pacífico cotton loans for Asian Mexican farmers, 1946–1947 Name Chee León Chung Chi Chan Y. Lee Ching Ling Lee Chon León F. Chon León Gonzalo León Wong Lew Hing Loo Chee C. Yee Quan Yee Wing Get León

Total loan (in pesos) 40,950 32,700 35,000 48,800 106,050 49,600 16,180 1,325 4,500 14,040 31,296 32,618

Acres planted 120 160 160 200 500 250 120 10 35 60 140 208

Colonia Silva Silva Coahuila Silva Irrigación Rodríguez Rodríguez Centinela Ahumada Villarreal Progreso Doctor

source: Crop loans, 1946–47, Archivo Histórico del Municipio.

from Jabonera del Pacífico shows that Asian Mexican farmers planted an average of 160 hectares of cotton on selective lots. The company loaned larger sums to Chinese Mexicans than to ejido members and private farmers of Mexican descent. Asian and Asian Mexican farmers became successful participants in the cotton industry. For example, Chi-Chong Chan planted cotton on five lots, while Lon Fong used only three lots with 250 hectares of cotton. In the 1940s, after the Mexican government confiscated farms owned by Japanese and Japanese Mexican farmers in 1942, Chinese and Chinese Mexican farmers expanded their vegetable business in Baja California. President Ávila Camacho ordered their relocation in Mexico City and Guadalajara during World War II.80 At the time of the war, approximately 3,634 Japanese and Japanese Mexican people lived in Baja California. The fear that Japan would attack the United States by way of Baja California led to the Mexican government’s implementation of a massive relocation of Japanese and Japanese Mexican people to central Mexico.81 Chinese Mexican farmers often sold vegetables to stores in Baja California’s booming cities of Mexicali, Tijuana, and Ensenada. Both these farmers and the Chinese merchants reestablished themselves in the Mexicali Valley as independent business owners.

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conclusion The slashing of government agrarian subsidies in the 1940s led to vast inequalities in rural Mexico, forcing landless workers and ejido members to migrate to the U.S.-Mexico border. By the time the Bracero Program ended in 1964, close to five million Mexicans had participated in the program, and approximately ten million more had worked as undocumented workers. Contrary to the way the New York Times described it, Mexicali was not just a heaven for undocumented workers. Mexicans from the interior of the country viewed the Northern Territory of Baja California as a land of opportunity, where landless workers could secure temporary employment in Mexicali or even aspire to become homeowners. Families living near the border challenged immigration policies and laws implemented by both Mexico and the United States that restricted their mobility and redefined their expectations regarding labor and family. In the 1940s Mexicali farmers relied mainly on Mexican laborers, and, unlike in any other decade, women became the main source of labor on the cotton farms. This was a sharp departure from the early migratory labor patterns in the 1900s, when most farmworkers were Asian. Alemán’s policies, which proved detrimental to many ejido communities throughout Mexico, did not have the same negative effect in the Mexicali Valley. Mexicali’s proximity to the United States and the high demand for cotton during the war proved crucial to ejido members’ access to private loans and financial success. In the 1940s the Mexicali Valley regained the position it had had in the 1920s as one of the most productive regions for cotton farming. Competitive cotton prices combined with the freedom to select private and public lenders allowed ejido members to become more independent from the state. Asian Mexican farmers in the Mexicali Valley who had been excluded from Cárdenas’s ejido land distribution program purchased land in colonias instead, which helped them integrate into the valley culture. At the same time, the boom of colonias signaled Mexicali’s shift to private farming, led by the federal government’s probusiness approach to agricultural matters. Mexican migrant workers who decided to make Mexicali their permanent home could not obtain communal farmland, so, in response, they moved to the outskirts of the city of Mexicali, which ultimately led to the rapid expansion of the city’s boundaries. By 1950 both Mexicali and Tijuana were on their way to becoming major urban centers, each with a population of almost 200,000 people. In contrast, Mexicali’s twin city across the border, Calexico, California, remained small with a population of 1,159.82

conclusion

The “All-Mexican” Train

On April 8, 1948, President Miguel Alemán Valdés rode the rails on the maiden whistle-stop tour of the first “All-Mexican” train to Baja California from Mexico City. Governors from northern Mexico accompanied him on the tour. Just before entering Baja California, the train made its first stop in Benjamín Hill, Sonora. Baja California’s governor, Alfonso García González, expressed his enthusiasm before hundreds of spectators who came to celebrate the completion of the Sonora–Baja California railroad. “This railroad makes us part of Mexico at last,” said García González. A three-day celebration was scheduled in Baja California, including a government-sponsored party at every train stop, where President Alemán greeted Baja California residents.1 The second day concluded with an elegant ball in Tijuana, attended by business owners and bankers from Mexico City interested in investing in Baja California. On the final day of his stay, President Alemán inaugurated an interstate highway that connected Mexicali to two other cities in Baja California, San Felipe and Tijuana. Both the highway and the Sonora–Baja California railroad connected Baja California by land with the rest of Mexico for the first time, ending Mexico’s dependency on the U.S. railroads, which had lasted for almost half a century.2 The railroad and the highway were significant, not just to Baja Californians but also to the Mexican government, which had previously relied on U.S. trains to transport the Mexican army to Baja California. As the All-Mexican train drew Baja Californians closer to Mexico, their fear of annexation by the United States finally began to fade. By 1950 the Mexican government had expropriated most of the U.S.- and European-owned companies. Notably, the Colorado River Land Company, the U.S.-owned company that rented out farmland, no longer dominated the Mexicali Valley. The strong connection Southern California investors had with Baja 107

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California ended when Mexican workers mobilized and put pressure on President Lázaro Cárdenas to expropriate lands from foreign investors. In Mexicali most of the CRLC farmland was expropriated in 1937. The company closed its doors in 1944, after President Ávila Camacho purchased the company’s remaining farmland and sold most of it to individual Mexican farmers, rather than grant the land in ejidos. Looking back at how Baja California was transformed from a backwater to one of the most productive regions in northern Mexico, one could easily conclude that foreign investment was a catalyst for Baja California’s dramatic economic success. But this is only part of the story. This book demonstrates that intermarriage, land reform, and migration, both voluntary and forced, proved vital to the development of the Baja California peninsula and the Mexican borderlands.3 Without Asian, mestizo, and indigenous workers, it would have been impossible for the Compagnie du Boleo and the CRLC to become some of the most productive enterprises in Latin America. Every year Boleo and the CRLC paid recruiters to hire men from nearby Mexican states and from as far away as Asia. Intermarriage between mestizo and indigenous women and mestizo, Asian, and European men transformed the racial makeup of the region. From 1860 to 1900 men vastly outnumbered women in the Mexicali Valley. As time went on, however, intermarriage challenged the racial boundaries and segregation initially supported by foreign companies and the Mexican government. As a region of Mexico that did not experience the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution, after 1914 Baja California prospered and population grew, under the government of Esteban Cantú. By 1920 the Baja California peninsula stood out as one of the most diverse communities in northern Mexico, with a growing population that spoke nineteen languages. Yet it was not just the transnational labor market that influenced labor migration to the Baja California peninsula. In the preceding chapters, I show how labor and migration policies directly impacted the movement of workers between Asia, Mexico, and the United States. Mexican border regions, including Baja California, experienced firsthand the impact of these policies. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement barred Asians from entering the United States. These exclusionary policies diverted thousands of Chinese and Japanese workers to the Baja California peninsula, as it became an important agricultural region. When examining land reform, scholars must take into account how the participation of Mexican and Mexican American repatriates from the United States shaped the outcome of land reform in northern Mexico. In the 1920s repatriado families with more economic means were the main

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beneficiaries of colonization projects established by Gov. Abelardo Rodríguez and by the CRLC in the Northern Territory. In fact, the administrators of these projects preferred repatriated families over Mexican seasonal workers, because not only could they afford the down payment and annual payments, but they also had the means to purchase modern farm equipment. The Mexican government sought a continued proactive and modern agricultural sector, not the creation of ejido holdings dependent on the government. In contrast, repatriados who did not qualify for colonization projects became proagrarian activists and joined the agrarista movement in the Mexicali Valley. In 1937 repatriados Pedro and Petra Pérez became leaders in the Michoacán de Ocampo Union. They organized repatriado families and seasonal workers from central and southern Mexico, strengthening the movement by forming the Federación de Comunidades Agrarias. In the 1930s this coalition effectively pressured Cárdenas to support their proagrarian movement and land expropriation and break his initial agreement with the CRLC to support colonization projects (directed by the same company). Although Cárdenas’s nationalistic projects of populating the Mexicali Valley with Mexican nationals benefited Mexicans and Mexican Americans, it excluded Asian and Asian Mexican people from petitioning for communal farmland. In the rhetoric of the era, they were not real Mexicans of the “Cosmic Race.”4 Chinese and Chinese Mexican farmers were the first targeted during CRLC land expropriations in 1937. In spite of Mexico’s efforts to exclude them specifically, on racial and ethnic grounds, some Asian men did benefit from land reform policies. Asian men who married Mexican women received land through their wives. Asian Mexican farmers who had saved enough capital purchased private land in the Mexicali Valley, where they planted cotton and vegetables on a smaller scale. Asian Mexicans who did not purchase land either migrated to the United States or lived in the city of Mexicali, where they worked for Chinese and Chinese Mexican merchants, restaurateurs, and casino owners in Mexicali’s Chinatown. In the 1940s Chinese and Chinese Mexicans who remained in Mexicali continued to participate in the Chinese Association, which promoted the interest of the region’s Chinese community throughout the twentieth century. To this day the association offers Spanish and English classes for recent immigrants, and it sponsors Chinese schools for Chinese Mexican children. The association’s continuity exemplifies that, in many ways, Asian and Asian Mexican workers in Baja California succeeded at challenging marginalization and discrimination by appropriating their own conceptions of mexicanidad.

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gender and land reform For a time women’s activism proved crucial in the movement for land reform in northern Mexico. Women such as Felipa Arellano and Macrina Álvarez became important leaders in the movement, even in the face of government repression. Ejido distribution shaped gender relations and campesino identity in the Mexicali Valley, where women saw their role on the ejido as equally important to that of men. Female agrarian leagues in the 1930s were staunch supporters of Cárdenas’s modernizing project in the valley. He sought to turn campesinos who loved certain pleasures into responsible men. Cárdenas closed numerous casinos and bars in the region. Women’s leagues stood behind Cárdenas’s antialcohol project by fiercely patrolling all-male gatherings and by reporting the illegal operation of bars near ejidos. They were met with male opposition, as even their own husbands challenged their success. Men’s opposition to the women’s leagues led to their final decline in the 1940s. Men from ejidos filed many complaints against the leagues, challenging their authority over alcohol consumption. Men commonly complained about women policing the bars, because they felt ridiculed when women disrupted their gatherings and confiscated alcohol. They pushed back against the women’s exercise of power over their social spaces. Women’s leagues did not receive the same government support from Ávila Camacho and Alemán. They authorized the reopening of bars and casinos in Mexicali during the 1940s. Despite the decline of women’s activism on the ejidos in the 1940s, it is clear that land distribution generally improved the living standards of rural women. Between 1920 and 1939 agrarian records show a drastic increase in the number of Mexicali Valley ejido members who were widowed women. Ejido land distribution improved the living standards and literacy rates of unmarried women, which decreased their dependence on seasonal labor. An unmarried woman who qualified to receive communal farmland no longer migrated to the United States; she stayed on her ejido. Yet, although campesinas exerted power in their farm communities, they did not become as incorporated as campesinos into the political culture. In 1935 Congress denied women full suffrage, despite Cárdenas’s support for their vote. Mexican women did not get the vote until 1953. In the meantime, land reform in the 1930s promoted a new kind of masculinity based on honor and citizenship. In the Mexicali Valley ejidatarios considered themselves the heroes and founding fathers of the valley. The annual fiesta celebrated not campesino migration to the valley but bravery and heroism for expropriating CRLC lands. Thus, yearly celebrations

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played a crucial role in shaping campesinos’ identity as Baja Californians. Cárdenas reinforced these notions of masculinity and nationhood by incorporating independent unions into the National Confederation of Peasants and by opening up local and national politics to campesinos.

impact of cardenismo and the bracero program The interplay of land reform and migratory labor in Baja California is closely connected to how people responded to land reform policies in Mexico. When we examine Cárdenas’s land reform policies from a new angle, we see the complexities of land reform in Baja California. Labor unions were central to the outcome of land reform in the Mexicali Valley. Men and women formed an alliance and mobilized by formally petitioning the Agrarian Department and by occupying CRLC farms. Agraristas adopted Cárdenas’s nationalistic discourses to show how the CRLC was detrimental to their families and the future of Mexico. They succeeded. By 1937 Cárdenas expropriated some of the best-irrigated CRLC farmland. Importantly though, CRLC’s individual leasing and colonization systems proved to be one of the most enduring legacies in the Mexicali Valley. CRLC lessors opposed the redistribution of farmland for the purpose of establishing ejidos. They challenged Cárdenas ejido land distribution because they wanted their autonomy to work the soil as individual farmers. Some ejido members refused to farm communally, and they divided their ejidos into individual family farms, regardless of Cárdenas’s objections. In the end, both ejidos and private colonias became equally important in the Mexicali Valley. In the 1940s, while the Mexicali Valley experienced a decrease of communal farmland distribution, ejidos’ agricultural production actually increased. Mexicali experienced a second boom in cotton production, where ejidatarios had the option to sell their cotton either to Mexican ginning companies or to markets in the United States. A decline of ejido subsidies and the redistribution of land led to an increase of migration of young men who enlisted in the Bracero Program (1942–64). This labor program transformed gender relations and family dynamics across Baja California. Mexicali became an attractive place for the families of both contracted and undocumented laborers working in the United States. With so many men working far away, Mexicali Valley farmers depended heavily on women’s labor during the cotton harvest. Although wages were low, women’s farm earnings equaled those of men in the 1940s. But their earning power hardly liberated women from raising children and

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doing all the “women’s work” of running a household. It was not until 1956 that Baja California’s governor inaugurated day care centers and nursery schools for the children of working women.5 In Mexicali the restriction of government agricultural credit did not adversely affect ejidatarios, as opposed to ejido members in central and southern Mexico, because private cotton-ginning companies such as Jabonera del Pacífico provided credit to both private farmers and ejido members. Mexicali Valley ejido members could sell their cotton at higher than average prices due to their proximity to U.S. markets and the high demand for cotton during World War II. Access to competitive private loans made ejido members less dependent on state loans and thus encouraged them to expand their operations. By 1950 the amount of irrigated land in the Mexicali Valley totaled 450,000 acres, which was three times more than what the CRLC had cultivated in 1929 or 1930.6 The booming cotton industry combined with the Bracero Program contributed to the significant increase in Baja California’s population. For most of the second half of the twentieth century, the All-Mexican railroad network and highway system facilitated the migration of thousands of workers to the region. This population surge and transportation infrastructure led to the territory’s industrialization and ultimately to Baja California gaining statehood in 1952. In 1992 President Carlos Salinas de Gortari amended article 27, ending more than seven decades of land redistribution in Mexico.7 This amendment became part of his neoliberal economic plan, which also included Mexico’s incorporation into the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and the United States. The privatization process seemingly went according to Salinas’s plan, which facilitated private-market incursion in the countryside once NAFTA was enacted. The same year, however, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation led an uprising in the state of Chiapas condemning NAFTA and the end of land reform in Mexico. The Zapatista uprising rearticulated some of the demands written in Emiliano Zapata’s Plan de Ayala, such as the basic right to own a piece of land and make a better life.8 The 1994 Zapatista uprising brought to the forefront questions about Mexico’s agrarian reform and the legacies of Zapata and Cárdenas. Although Mexico’s postrevolutionary government increasingly tried to dictate the day-to-day life of peasants, it could not completely end the land distribution program. Campesinos adopted revolutionary language and challenged policies that threatened their way of life. For most of the twentieth century, campesinos continued to petition the government for farmland, basing their claims on article 27 of the Mexican Constitution. The

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campesino desire to own a piece of farmland and the strong belief that land ownership is a right help to explain why Mexico’s agrarian reform program was one of the longest-lasting programs of its type in Latin America. In the post NAFTA era, Baja California continues to be a strategic place for commerce and migration. The boom of maquilas (assembly plants) and agribusinesses persist in attracting migrant workers from different parts of Mexico. Some migrants come to Baja California hopeful to cross to the United States, in spite of the increasing militarization of the border. Since the 1980s Baja California’s border region has also become a migratory corridor for Central American migrants crossing to the United States. Regional and transnational migrants continue challenging and redefining the Mexico-U.S. borderlands.

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Notes

introduction 1. Adela Sandoval Portillo, quoted in José Alfredo Gómez Estrada, La Gente del Delta del Río Colorado. Indígenas, Colonizadores y Ejidatarios (Mexicali: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2000), 110–11. 2. Census records and letters written by jefes políticos show that during the second half of the nineteenth century approximately 184 creoles and about 5,000 indigenous people lived in the Northern Territory. Feliciano Esparza, letter, 1859, doc. 1167, caja 74, Documentos sobre la Frontera, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Tijuana; David Piñera Ramírez and Jorge Martínez Zepeda, Fuentes Documentales para la Historia de Baja California (Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México / Tijuana: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 1984); Gómez Estrada, Gente del Delta, 48. 3. In colonial Mexico the Spanish Crown created a formal system of racial hierarchy known as the caste system, which divided racially mixed families into different categories. Initially, the word mestizo applied to the offspring of indigenous women and Spanish men, but by the nineteenth century it evolved to indicate a broader range of racially mixed families, such as the children of African and indigenous parents (eventually Asians were categorized as such). For more information on the concept of mestizo, see R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination in Colonial Mexico City (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); and E. Wickberg, “The Chinese Mestizo in Philippine History,” Journal of South Asian History 5, no. 1 (1964): 62–100. 4. Kumeyaay people are tied to the Ipai and Tipai. They were called Diegueño after missionization. Bárbara Reyes, Private Women, Public Lives: Gender and the Missions of the Californias (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009); Pablo Martínez, Guía Familiar de Baja California, 1700–1900 (Mexico City: Editorial Baja California, 1965).

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5. Dirección General de Estadística Nacional, Baja California, México en Cifras (Mexico City: Dirección General de Estadística Nacional, Baja California, 1921); P. Martínez, Guía Familiar. 6. “The Eastern Part of San Diego County to Be Irrigated,” Panama Star and Herald, June 19, 1893; Charles Robinson Rockwood, Born of the Desert: Personal Recollections of the Early History of the Imperial Valley (Calexico, CA: Calexico Chronicle, 1930); Elwood Mead, Irrigation Institutions: A Discussion of the Economic and Legal Questions Created by the Growth of the Irrigated Agriculture in the West (New York: Macmillan, 1903). 7. “Lower California for Sale,” land report and description, July 1887, International Mexican Company, Lower California, Mexico, Don Meadows Papers, 1824–1994, Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine. 8. See Casey Walsh, Building the Borderlands: A Transnational History of Irrigated Cotton along the Texas-Mexico Border (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), 35. 9. Although Santa Rosalía is currently part of Baja California Sur, during the time of my analysis Santa Rosalía was closely connected with Baja California’s Northern Territory. Baja California Sur became a state in 1974. 10. Eric Schantz, “From the Mexicali Rose to the Tijuana Brass: Vice Tours of the United States–Mexico Border, 1910–1965” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2001); Catherine Christensen, “Mujeres Públicas: American Prostitutes in Baja California, 1910–1930,” American Historical Review 82 (May 2013): 215–47; Paul Vanderwood, Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 11. Some historians identify this movement as the “new” social history or the “new” Western history. See David J. Weber, “The Spanish Borderlands: Historiography Redux,” History Teacher 39, no. 1 (2005): 43–56; and Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett, “On Borderlands,” Journal of American History 98, no. 2 (2011): 338–61. For Spanish conquest and colonization, see Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); James Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture / Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Gilbert R. Cruz, Let There Be Towns: Spanish Municipal Origins in the American Southwest, 1610– 1810 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1988); Oakah L. Jones Jr., Los Paisanos: Spanish Settlers on the Northern Frontier of New Spain (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979); M. Martínez, Genealogical Fictions; Gabriel Meléndez, The Multi-Cultural Southwest: A Reader (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001); Fernando Operé, Indian Captivity in Spanish America: Frontier Narratives, trans. Gustavo Pellón (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); John Charles Anderson, Borderlines in Borderlands: James Madison and the Spanish-American Frontier, 1776–1821 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Henrietta H. Stockel, Salvation through Slavery: Chiricahua Apaches and Priests on the Spanish Colonial Frontier (Albuquerque: University

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of New Mexico Press, 2008); James Diego Vigil, From Indians to Chicanos: The Dynamics of Mexican American Culture, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1998); and David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 12. Eric V. Meeks, Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007); Oscar Martínez, Border Boom Town: Ciudad Juárez since 1848 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978); Grace Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012); Julia María Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migrations and the Search for a Homeland, 1910–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Geraldo Cadava, Standing a Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 13. See for example, Ana María Alonzo, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico’s Northern Frontier (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995); Juan Mora-Torres, The Making of the Mexican Border: State, Capitalism, and Society in Nuevo León (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Miguel Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles: Sonora and the Transformation of the Border during the Porfiriato (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Ángela Pahissa Moyano, Frontera: Así se Hizo la Frontera Norte (Mexico City: Ariel México, 1996); Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans; and Walsh, Building the Borderlands. 14. Most studies of Baja California focus on the infamous red-light districts at the border. For example, see Susan Tiano, Patriarchy on the Line: Work and Ideology in the Maquila Industry (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Josiah M. Heyman, Life and Labor on the Border: Working People of Northeastern Sonora, 1886–1986 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991); Ramón Ruiz, The People of Sonora and the Yankee Capitalists (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988); O. Martínez, Border Boom Town; and Schantz, “From the Mexicali Rose.” Some exceptions are John Dwyer, The Agrarian Dispute: The Expropriation of American-Owned Rural Land in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); P. J. Vanderwood, Juan Soldado; and Dorothy Pierson Kerig, “Yankee Enclave: The Colorado River Land Company and Mexican Agrarian Reform in Baja California, 1902–1944” (PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 1989). 15. For scholars who focus their attention on the heroic and popular nature of agrarian reform in Mexico, see Frank Tannenbaum, The Mexican Agrarian Revolution (New York: Macmillan, 1929); Eyler Simpson, The Ejido: Mexico’s Way Out (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937); Nathan Whetten, Rural Mexico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948); and Jesús Silva Herzog, El Agrarismo Mexicano y la Reforma Agraria (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1974). The following scholars argue that the Mexican Revolution paved the way for the formation of a single-party state, facilitating the manipulation of the masses that benefited the interests of the

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upper classes: David Brading, ed., Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Arnaldo Córdova, La Política de Masas del Cardenismo (Mexico City: Era, 1974); Paul Friedrich, The Princess of Naranja (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986); John Gledhill, Casi Nada: A Study of Agrarian Reform in the Homeland of Cardenismo (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991); and Jean Meyer, La Cristiada: The Mexican People’s War for Religious Liberty (Garden City Park, NY: Square One, 2013). The following historians illustrate how popular culture and social movements played an important role in agrarian reform and in the formation of the Mexican state: Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiations of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); Adrian A. Bantjes, As if Jesus Walked on Earth: Cardenismo, Sonora, and the Mexican Revolution (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1998); Christopher Boyer, Becoming Campesino: Politics, Identity, and Agrarian Struggle in Post-revolutionary Michoacán, 1920–1935 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003); Dwyer, Agrarian Dispute; and Timothy J. Henderson, The Worm in the Wheat: Rosalie Evans and Agrarian Struggle in the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley of Mexico, 1906– 1927 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 16. Emiliano Zapata’s Plan of Ayala included a strategy for land expropriation: “The immense majority of Mexican villages and citizens own no more land than that which they tread upon, and they suffer the horrors of misery. They are unable in any way to better their social condition or dedicate themselves to industry or agriculture because the land and forests are monopolized in only a few hands; for this reason, we expropriate, without initial compensation, one-third of those monopolies from the powerful proprietors so that the villages and citizens of Mexico should obtain ejidos, colonias, and fundos legales for the villages, or fields for sowing or laboring, and this shall correct the lack of prosperity and increase the well-being of Mexicans.” Emiliano Zapata, “Plan de Ayala,” in Documentos Inéditos sobre Emiliano Zapata y el Cuartel General: Seleccionados del Archivo de Genovevo de la O, que Conserva el Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico City: Archivo General de la Nación, 1979). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 17. Some of the most important studies on Cardenismo are Arturo Anguiano, El Estado y la Política Obrera del Cardenismo (Mexico City: Era, 1975); Bantjes, Jesus Walked on Earth; Marjorie Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants, and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Dwyer, Agrarian Dispute; Nora Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982); Ben Fallaw, Cárdenas Compromised (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Gledhill, Casi Nada; and Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930–1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997). 18. Neil F. Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); David

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Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987); Meeks, Border Citizens; Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). See also David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Mario T. García, Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880–1920 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980); Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); Lytle Hernández, Migra!; and Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 19. See Douglas Monroy, Thrown among Strangers: Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Raúl Ramos, Beyond the Alamo: Forging the Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821–1861 (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 20. Tinker Salas, Shadow of the Eagles; Alonzo, Thread of Blood; Paul Vanderwood, The Power of God against the Guns of Government: Religious Upheaval in Mexico at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Elliott Young, Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 21. Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); Vicki Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). See also George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican Americans: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and the American Dream: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900–1939 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994). 22. Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena León, La Mujer y la Política Agraria en América Latina (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1986); Deere and León, Empowering Women: Land and Property Rights in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001); Heidi Tinsman, Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950–1973 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Lynn Stephen, Viva Zapata! Generation, Gender, and Historical Consciousness in the Reception of Ejido Reform in Oaxaca, Transformation of Rural Mexico 6 (La Jolla: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1994); Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution; Heather Fowler-Salamini and Mary Kay Vaughan, eds., Women of the Mexican Countryside, 1850– 1990: Creating Spaces, Shaping Transitions (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994). 23. Some racial categories were self-ascribed, while others were imposed by the census.

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24. Gilbert G. González, Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County, 1900–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Steven Pitti, The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Frank P. Barajas, Curious Unions: Mexican American Workers and Resistance in Oxnard, California, 1888–1961 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012); Matt García, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Ana Elisabeth Rosas, Abrazando el Espíritu: Bracero Families Confront the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 25. In 2008 the Institute of Oral History at the University of Texas at El Paso provided me with the recordings of testimonies of Bracero families before the testimonies were transcribed and posted on the Bracero History Archive website in 2009. 26. Evelyn Hu-DeHart, “Immigrants to a Developing Society: The Chinese in Northern Mexico, 1875–1932.” Journal of Arizona History 21, no. 1 (1980): 46–86; Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican; Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans; Elliott Young, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era to World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Robert Chao Romero, The Chinese in Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010); Robert H. Duncan, “The Chinese and the Economic Development of Northern Baja California, 1889–1929,” Hispanic American Historical Review 74, no. 4 (1994): 615–47. See also Erika Lee, “The Yellow Peril: Asian Exclusion in the Americas,” Pacific Historical Review 76, no. 4 (2007): 537–62; Evelyn Hu-DeHart, “China Towns and Borderlands: InterAsian Encounters in the Diaspora,” Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 2 (2012): 425– 51; Fredy González, “Chinese Dragon and Eagle of Anáhuac: The Local, National, and International Implications of the Ensenada Anti-Chinese Campaign of 1934,” Western Historical Quarterly 44, no. 1 (2013): 48–68; Jason Oliver Chang, “Racial Alterity in a Mestizo Nation,” Journal of Asian American Studies 14, no. 3 (2011): 331–59; and Julian Lim, “Chinos and Paisanos: Chinese Mexican Relations in the Borderlands,” Pacific Historical Review 79, no. 1 (2010): 50–85. 27. “Diegueño” is the Spanish assignation of the Kumeyaay, Ipai, and Tipai peoples, once the missions were established in Alta and Baja California.

chapter 1 1. See “Censo de Población de Baja California,” Gobernación 43, caja 179, Archivo Histórico Pablo L. Martínez, La Paz, Baja California Sur; Miguel León Portilla and David Piñera Ramírez, Historia Breve de Baja California (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2010). 2. Between 1683 and 1834 Franciscans, Jesuits, and Dominican priests established approximately fifty-one missions in Alta California and Baja California, with the common goal of spreading Christianity among the indigenous population

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and increasing Spanish settlements in the northern frontier. For more information on California and Baja California missions, see Miguel León Portilla, La California Mexicana (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2000); Steven Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Hackel, Junípero Serra: California Founding Father (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013); and Edward Vernon, Las Misiones Antiguas: The Spanish Missions of Baja California, 1683–1855 (Santa Barbara: Viejo, 2005). 3. Reyes, Private Women, Public Lives; Pablo Martínez, Historia de Baja California (Mexico City: Editorial Baja California, 1960). 4. Luis del Castillo Negrete, jefe político of Baja California, report, 1837, in P. Martínez, Historia de Baja California, 338–39. 5. In 1888 President Porfirio Díaz approved the division of the two districts into two separate political territories: the Northern District and the Southern District. See David Goldbaum, Towns of Baja California, a 1918 Report, trans. William O. Hendricks (Glendale, CA: Siesta, 1971), 15. 6. Díaz served as president of Mexico from 1876 to 1884 and again from 1884 to 1911. 7. Anglo-Americans invested mainly in mining, railroads, and agribusiness in Sonora, Chihuahua, Baja California, and Coahuila. “Lower California for Sale,” Special Collections and Archives; John Mason Hart, Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 8. “Lower California for Sale,” Special Collections and Archives. 9. Feliciano Esparza, letter, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas; Piñera Ramírez and Martínez Zepeda, Fuentes Documentales; Gómez Estrada, Gente del Delta, 48. 10. José Matías Moreno, box 17, Helen P. Long Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA; José María Villagrana to Gobernación, 1873, Fondo Gobernación, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Tijuana. 11. Pablo M. Castro, minister of interior, report, June 14, 1879, La Paz, Baja California Sur, caja 47, Archivo General de la Nación (Documentos de la Frontera), Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas. 12. William H. Kelly, Cocopah Ethnography (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977), 66. 13. Ibid., 47. 14. Lieutenant George H. Derby, 1852, cited in Kelly, Cocopah Ethnography, 9–10. 15. Lumholtz found that the elder indigenous men and women living in the camp were of mixed descent. New Trails in Mexico (New York: Scribner, 1912), 250. 16. L. Castillo Negrete, report, in P. Martínez, Historia de Baja California, 338–39; Jacobo Blanco, jefe político of Baja California, 1850–60, report, doc, 155, vol. 49, leg. 3, in Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez.

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17. Jacobo Blanco, minutes to Mexican consul, San Diego, exp. 1, caja 48, Límite México-Estados Unidos, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City. 18. Villagrana to Gobernación, 1873, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas. 19. Charles Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821–1853 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968). 20. Alfonso Luis Velasco, quoted in Daniel Cosío Villegas, Historia Moderna de México, (Mexico City: Hermes, 1957). 21. Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.Mexico Borderlands (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Tinker Salas, Shadow of the Eagles; St. John, Line in the Sand; Mora-Torres, The Making of the Mexican Border; Anthony Mora, Border Dilemmas: Racial and National Uncertainties in New Mexico, 1848–1912 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Pahissa Moyano, Frontera. 22. Diegueño people are now called the Kumeyaay, Tipai-Ipai, or Kamia. 23. Marto de la Cruz to Secretary of Interior, June 14, 1870, docs. 316, 330, vol. 102, leg. 6, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez; April 23, 1870, Archivo General de la Nación, exp. 137, caja 315; 3; 12, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas. 24. Marto de la Cruz to the Secretary of Interior, June 7, 1870, doc. 314, vol. 102, leg. 6, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez. 25. Ibid. 26. Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution. 27. Pablo M. Castro, “La Situación de las Indias en la Desembocadura del Río Colorado,” report to Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, April 23, 1870, docs. 1523–32, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas. 28. Marto was also named celador (guard) of Bahía María Magdalena until 1872. Marto de la Cruz to Secretary of Interior, August 2, 1872, doc. 202, vol. 108, leg. 8, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez. 29. Thaddeus Harlan Stanton, “Itinerary of a Journey to and through Arizona in the Winter of 1871–72,” Rare Page Manuscripts, Huntington Library, 16, 12. 30. Reporte de la Frontera, 1860–70, Límite México–Estados Unidos, Archivo General de la Nación. 31. De la Cruz disappeared from official records after this incident took place. 32. Other associates who later joined the venture were A. F. Somera, Estanislao Hernández, Gregorio Almada, Wenceslao Iberri, William Mathews, Camilo Martin, Gregorio Urriolagoitia, and Francisco Logan. See William Hendricks, “Guillermo Andrade and the Mexican Colorado River Delta, 1874– 1905” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1967). 33. The 1895 Mexican census recorded 1,786 single men and 773 single women in the Northern Territory of Baja California. Censo General de Habitantes, 1895, Baja California Distrito Norte y Sur, Departamento de Estadística Nacional, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, Baja California.

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34. Otis Tout, The First Thirty Years in Imperial Valley California (San Diego: Tout, 1931), 44. 35. Gómez Estrada, Gente del Delta, 61. 36. In one season workers cut approximately five thousand tons of hemp, then soaked it in water to release the fiber (Tout, First Thirty Years, 44). For more information on the wild plants of the Colorado Delta, see J. C. Allison, “Reclamation of the Lower Colorado River Delta in Mexico,” 1920, box 3, Los Angeles Times Company Records, Huntington Library. 37. Lumholtz, New Trails in Mexico, 251. 38. The sudden death of Blythe in 1882 made Andrade the main owner of the company. 39. Hendricks, “Guillermo Andrade,” 143. 40. Guillermo Andrade to Jacobo Blanco, July 2, 1894, folder IIH, vol. 20, Límite México-Estados Unidos, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas. 41. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited unskilled Chinese workers to immigrate to and work in the United States (see chapter 4 of this volume). 42. Andrade to Blanco, July 2, 1894, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas; Gómez Estrada, Gente del Delta, 121. 43. Denton wrote a letter to the secretary of development in Mexico admitting that he had purchased this land from Doña Ijinia and had known that there were permanent rancherías on the property. William Denton to Secretaría de Fomento, December 25, 1885, box 1, William Denton Collection, Special Collections, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA. 44. Eugenio Romero to Jefe Político of Baja California, January 31, 1896, Fondo Gobernación, Archivo General de la Nación, caja 315, exp. 208/1 (Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Herrera Carrillo, exp. 4.21). 45. For more information on the Apaches, Yaquis, and Mayos, see Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Missionaries, Miners, and Indians: Spanish Contact with the Yaqui Nation in Northwestern New Spain, 1533–1820 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981); Bantjes, Jesus Walked on Earth; Edward H. Spicer, The Yaquis: A Cultural History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980); Trudy GriffinPierce, Native Peoples of the Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000); Tinker Salas, Shadow of the Eagles; and St. John, Line in the Sand. 46. Court report from the justice of the peace, Sección Municipal de los Algodones, December 14, 1896, Límite México-Estados Unidos, Archivo General de la Nación. 47. Eric V. Meeks, William V. Flores, Rina Benmayor, and Renato Rosaldo define these relationships as “cultural citizenship.” Meeks, Border Citizens; Flores and Benmayor, eds., Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity Space and Rights (Boston: Beacon, 1997); Rosaldo, ed., Cultural Citizenship in Island Southeast Asia: Nation and Belonging in the Hinterlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 48. In 1833 Valentín Gómez Farías, vice president of Mexico, signed a bill to approve the secularization of the missions in both Alta and Baja California. He

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also ordered the reassignment of Franciscans with secular priests. David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest under Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), 64. 49. More research needs to be done to examine why Governor Pico had the authority to grant land in Baja California missions. A report written by Francisco Castillo Negrete reveals that Pío Pico had the authority to grant mission lands in Alta and Baja California. March 11, 1853, doc. 155, vol. 49, leg. 3, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez. 50. Pedro Castillo and Antonio Ríos-Bustamante, An Illustrated History of Mexican Los Angeles, 1781–1985 (Berkeley: Chicano Studies Research Center, University of California, 1986). 51. F. Castillo Negrete, report, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez. 52. In the Spanish system of racial hierarchy, creoles were American-born Spaniards. According to Ana María Alonzo in Thread of Blood, the indigenous and mestizo people who came with missionary priests to settle in northern Mexico called themselves criollos and Españoles. 53. Miroslava Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004), 124; W. W. Robinson, Land in California: The Story of Mission Lands, Ranchos, Squatters, Mining Claims, Railroad Grants, Land Scrip, Homesteads (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948). 54. During the 1850s Abel Stearns owned seven ranchos in Alta California (San Juan, Cajón de Santa Ana, Coyotes, Las Bolsas, Bolsa Chica, Rancho Jurupa, and La Sierra). 55. Bandini acquired debt due to unsuccessful business deals and expenses from protecting his lands in California and Baja California. Juan Bandini, will, January 12, 1859, call no. HM25658, Long Collection, Huntington Library. 56. Abel Stearns was married to Juan Bandini’s daughter, Arcadia Bandini. 57. Abel Stearns to Juan Bandini, file Juan Bandini, 1846–59, Huntington Library. 58. Bandini’s land was adjacent to that of Benjamin Wilson Davis, husband of one of Bandini’s daughters, Dolores Bandini. Bandini, will, Huntington Library. 59. “Reporte sobre el estado de la frontera,” vol. 54, doc. 1245. Archivo Pablo Martínez, La Paz, Baja California Sur, 1854. 60. Moreno Documents, Rancho Guadalupe, box 17, Long Collection. 61. Refugio Argüello was the daughter of Capt. Santiago Argüello and Pilar Ortega. 62. Moreno Documents, Rancho Guadalupe, box 17, Long Collection. 63. Juan Bandini to Abel Stearns, file Juan Bandini, 1846–1859, Huntington Library. 64. Registros de Matrimonio Civil, Ensenada, Baja California Norte, in P. Martínez, Guía Familiar. 65. Goldbaum, Towns of Baja California, 50. 66. Florence C. Shipek, ed., The Autobiography of Delfina Cuero: A Digueño Indian (Los Angeles: Dawson Bookshop, 1968), 26.

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67. Anita Alvarez de Williams, Primeros Pobladores de la Baja California (Mexicali: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2004), 108. 68. Silvestre Doroteo Machado, oral statement, 1981, cassette 1/1; Cipriano Machado, oral statement, 1991, cassette 1/1, both in Archivo de la Palabra, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas. 69. Applications for Mexican citizenship, 1852–59, leg. V-740 BS, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez. 70. For more information on José Matías Moreno, see the Long Collection, Huntington Library. 71. “Sumario Instruido a Juan Bandini, Subdito de los Estado Unidos por Considerarlo contra la Integridad del Territorio Mejicano,”1855, doc. 1222, vol. 59, leg. 7, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez. 72. Military reports on Walker’s invasion of Baja California, 1853, docs. 583, vol. 51, 657, 881, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez. 73. Robert W. Long, “Life and Times of José Matías Moreno” (PhD diss., Western University, 1972) 263. 74. Moreno Documents, box 18, Long Collection. 75. On November 6, 1858, San Diego–based Larco and Company sent cookies, bread, sugar, onions, and wheat to Juan Banidini that totaled 300 pesos. Stearns to Bandini, Huntington Library. 76. See the records of marriages and baptisms, in P. Martínez, Guía Familiar. 77. See códigos 2 and 3, in Francisco F. de la Maza, Código de Colonización y Terrenos Baldíos de la República Mexicana (Mexico City: Secretaría de Fomento, 1893), 941–42, Rare Books 95764, Huntington Library; Wistano Luis Orozco, Legislación y Jurisprudencia sobre Terrenos Baldíos, vol. 1 (Mexico City: Tiempo, 1895). 78. Hendricks, “Guillermo Andrade,” 12. 79. “Lower California for Sale,” Special Collections and Archives, 17, 13. 80. “Salton Lake Sold,” Panama Star and Herald (Panama City), June 19, 1893. 81. For further information on C. P. Huntington, see the Huntington Library; and Oscar Lewis, The Big Four: The Story of Huntington, Stanford, Hopkins, and Crocker and of the Building of the Central Pacific (New York: Knopf, 1938). 82. Edgar F. Howe and Wilbur Jay Hall, The Story of the First Decade in Imperial Valley, California (Imperial Valley: Howe, 1910); David O. Woodbury, The Colorado Conquest (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1941), 101–29. 83. Robinson Rockwood, Born of the Desert, 26–27; Woodbury, Colorado Conquest, 143. 84. Records show that California ordered 6,220 acres wheat; 14,423 acres barley; 750 acres oats; 1,540 acres corn; and 573 acres alfalfa. Howe and Hall, First Decade, 96. 85. Tout, First Thirty Years, 363–66; María Eugenia Anguiano Téllez, Agricultura y Migración en el Valle de Mexicali (Tijuana: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 1995).

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86. Kerig, “Yankee Enclave,” 16. 87. The Colorado River flows for approximately twenty miles through Mexico before it goes back to the Imperial Valley. 88. Kerig, “Yankee Enclave,” 51. 89. Celso Aguirre Bernal, Compendio Histórico Biográfico de Mexicali, 1539–1966 (Mexicali, 1966), 363–66; Tout, First Thirty Years, 52; Kerig, “Yankee Enclave.” 90. Harrison Gray Otis to President Porfirio Díaz, April 11, 1906, exp. IIH 11.40, foja 6, col. Porfirio Díaz, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas; Schantz, “From the Mexicali Rose,” 338–41. 91. Anguiano Téllez, Agricultura y Migración, 62. 92. H. H. Clark, the CRLC general manager, described the process: “We finance the growing of crops, and then we provide a cooperative selling agency through which their cotton is classified by experts, pooled, and sold to the highest bidder,” quoted in Tout, First Thirty Years, 366. 93. Kerig, “Yankee Enclave.” 94. Schantz describes how the Los Angeles Times organized tours for potential investors from various parts of the United States. “From the Mexicali Rose,” 340. 95. Tout, First Thirty Years, 364. 96. Ibid., 363; Kerig, “Yankee Enclave,” 132. Kerig discusses how the 1904 agreement between the United States and Mexico gave them access to water from the Colorado River. 97. Gómez Estrada, Gente del Delta, 88. 98. Chandler and Otis made use of the fallen cottonwood and willow trees for making newspaper pulp. See Gray Otis to Porfirio Díaz, April 11, 1906, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas. 99. Ibid.; Gómez Estrada, Gente del Delta, 83. 100. Statement by Adela Sandoval Portillo, quoted in Gómez Estrada, Gente del Delta, 110–11. See also Robinson Rockwood, Born of the Desert. 101. Censo General de Habitantes, 1910–21, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía.

chapter 2 1. Harrington W. Cochran, report on Baja California, 1919, box 001, Special Collections and Archives, 38, 130-E. 2. The Japanese colony was established in Tortuga Bay, near Santa Rosalía, Baja California Sur. 3. Lee, “Yellow Peril”; Hu-DeHart, “China Towns and Borderlands”; Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans; Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican. 4. Romero, Chinese in Mexico, 67. 5. For more information on transpacific migration to the Caribbean, Hawaii, and Latin America, see Trev Sue-A-Quan, Cane Reapers: Chinese Indentured

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Immigrants in Guyana (Vancouver: Riftswood, 1999); Clarence E. Glick, Sojourners and Settlers: Chinese Migrants in Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1980); and Young, Alien Nation. 6. Aguirre Bernal, Compendio Histórico Biográfico; Kerig, “Yankee Enclave”; Everardo Garduño, La Disputa por la Tierra . . . La Disputa por la Voz: Historia Oral del Movimiento Agrario en el Valle de Mexicali (Mexicali: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2004); St. John, Line in the Sand. 7. Censo General de Habitantes, 1920, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía. 8. Languages spoken in Baja California included Spanish, French, Chinese, Greek, German, Italian, Japanese, Basque, English, Swedish, Arabic, Danish, and Hungarian. Indigenous languages were defined in the census as dialects: Yuma, Mayo, Maya, Yaqui, Nahuatl, and Zapotec, among other languages. 9. For more information on the Yaqui, see Spicer, Yaquis; Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962); José Patricio Nicoli, El Estado de Sonora: Yaquis y Mayos (Mexico City: Díaz de León, 1885); and Edith González Cruz, “La Inversión Francesa en la Minería durante el Porfiriato” (master’s thesis, Universidad Veracruzana, Xalapa, 1985). 10. Compagnie du Boleo census records, 1893, 1895, 1899, doc. 330, vol. 306–15, exp. 31, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez. 11. León Diguet, “La Basse-Californie d’après,” Annales de Geographie 9, no. 45 (1900): 243–50. 12. Memorias de Gobernación, 1907–8, Grupo Gobernación, Sección Colonización, Archivo General de la Nación, 14; “Jefatura Política del Distrito Sur de la Baja California,” 1903–11, Ramo de Gobernación, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez. 13. María Elena Ota Mishima, Siete Migraciones Japonesas en México, 1890–1978 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1982) 53–54; Daniel M. Masterson, The Japanese in Latin America, with Sayaka Funada-Classen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Andrea Geiger, Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885–1928 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). 14. Ignacio Rivas Hernández, “La Industria,” in Historia General de Baja California Sur, vol. 1, La Economía Regional, ed. Deni Trejo Barajas and Edith González Cruz (La Paz: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2002), 303. 15. Abelardo Rodríguez, Memoria Administrativa del Gobierno del Distrito Norte de la Baja California, 1924–1927 (Baja California: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 1993), 58. 16. Ana María Carrillo, “Los Médicos ante la Primera Campaña Antituberculosa en México,” Gaceta Médica de México 137, no. 4 (2001): 368. 17. Report on Chinese immigrants, June 15, 1906, doc. 590, vol. 429, exp. 73; Report of arrival of 500 Chinese immigrants, June 13, 1906, doc. 570, vol. 427, exp. 26, both in Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez.

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18. In 1904 a vessel arrived from Japan with four hundred Japanese workers. Historical document, July 21, 1904, doc. 570, vol. 383, exp. 5, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez. In 1908 a vessel arrived from Vladivostok with 473 Chinese workers contracted by the company. Ramón Corral to Fondo Gobernación, December 28, 1908, doc. 460, vol. 469, exp. 74, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez; Archivo General de la Nación, 1907, 47. 19. The Department of Health insisted that the separation of Asian workers was a necessary preventive measure to prevent the spread of tuberculosis, as they believed it was a common health problem among Asian workers. Report on Chinese immigrants, June 15, 1906; 500 Chinese immigrants, June 13, 1906, both in Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez; Pablo Macedo, representative of Compagnie du Boleo, to Gobernación, 1908, Grupo Gobernación, exp. 4, sec. 5/5, vol. 767, Archivo General de la Nación. 20. Francisco Navarro to Secretaría de Gobernación, January 2, 1892, caja 233, exp. 4, vol. 767, Grupo Gobernación, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez. 21. Historical document, July 21, 1904, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez; Ota Mishima, Siete Migraciones Japonesas, 54. 22. Juan Preciado Llamas, “Los Chinos en el Sur de la Península de Baja California, 1876–1933,” in China en las Californias, by Mario Alberto Magaña (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes / Tijuana: Centro Cultural Tijuana, 2002), 50. 23. Compagnie du Boleo minutes, May 15, 1908, doc. 570, vol. 382, exp. 5; Compagnie du Boleo minutes, doc. 632, vol. 473, exp. 15, both in Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez. 24. Subprefecto Político, telegrams, May 5, 6, 7, 8, 1908, docs. 133, 702, vol. 478, exp. 133, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez. 25. Enrique Jiménez to Col. Agustín Sanguines, May 10, 1908, doc. 469, vol. 460, exp. 74, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez. 26. Subprefecto político telegrams describing the strike of Chinese workers, May 2, 1908, doc. 702, vol. 478, exp. 133; Subprefectco Político, telegram, Mulegé, Baja California, May 15, 1908, vol. 478, exp. 133; Secretaría de Gobernación, telegrams, November 2, 4, 1908, vol. 478, exp. 133, all in Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez. 27. Compagnie du Boleo, meeting minutes, March 2, 1893, Grupo Gobernación, vol. 250, exp. 139, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez. 28. There is still some debate about who built the church. The Compagnie du Boleo did not keep a receipt of the purchase. 29. Registry of weddings and baptisms, 1895–1900, Iglesia de Santa Bárbara, Santa Rosalía, Baja California. 30. In 1910 the census records reported a total of 42,272 people living in Baja California Sur and a total of 9,760 people living in Baja California’s Northern Territory. By 1921 Baja California Sur’s population remained steady, with a population of 39,294, with the exception of Santa Rosalía, Mulegé, San Ignacio, and Comondu, where the population surged to 8,000 people. The population in Baja California’s Northern District doubled by 1921, with a population

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of 23,537. See Censo General de Habitantes, 1910, 1920, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía. 31. Ibid., 1900, 1920, 1930. 32. File of applications for naturalization, 1917–24, Juzgado Primero de Distrito, Casa de la Cultura Jurídica, Mexicali, Baja California. 33. Norton B. Stern, Baja California: Jewish Refuge and Homeland (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1973). 34. Censo General de Habitantes, 1890, 1900, 1920, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía. 35. Out of the 823,620 acres owned by the CRLC, 146,596 acres were categorized as mountains, riverbeds, or lakes. Allison, “Reclamation,” Huntington Library. 36. Mexican census records, 1890, 1910, 1921, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía. 37. In 1917 some Cocopah families left the Mexicali Valley for Yuma, Arizona, after receiving reservation land grants approved by U.S. president Woodrow Wilson the same year. “Cocopah Tribe: Introductory Information,” Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, accessed May 6, 2016, www.itcaonline.com; Tout, First Thirty Years, 273; Anita Alvarez de Williams, The Cocopah People (Phoenix: Indian Travel Series, 1974), 42; St. John, Line in the Sand, 79. 38. Pablo Herrera Carrillo, Reconquista y Colonización del Valle de Mexicali y Otros Escritos Paralelos (Mexicali: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2002), 112. 39. “Pioneros y Fundadores de Mexicali,” oral statements, exp. 47, caja 5, Fondo Pablo Martínez, Archivo Histórico del Gobierno del Estado, Mexicali, Baja California; Gómez Estrada, Gente del Delta. 40. Aguirre Bernal, Compendio Histórico Biográfico. 41. Antonio J. Flores to Ramón Sumaya, report of purchases and sales, Protocolo del Juzgado de Primera Instancia, February, 12, 1909, bk. 1, Archivo del Registro Público de la Propiedad y Comercio, Ensenada, Baja California. 42. Cochran, report on Baja California, Special Collections and Archives; Herrera Carrillo, Reconquista y Colonización, 147. 43. CRLC rental agreement, 1933, box 67, Colorado River Land Company Records, Sherman Library, Corona del Mar, CA. 44. Aguirre Bernal, Compendio Histórico Biográfico; Kerig, “Yankee Enclave.” 45. Adela Sandoval Portillo, quoted in Gómez Estrada, Gente del Delta. 46. Censo General de Habitantes, 1910, 1921, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía. 47. Ibid. 48. Sandoval Portillo, quoted in Gómez Estrada, Gente del Delta; Mexican census records, 1910, 1921, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía. 49. Shipek, Autobiography of Delfina Cuero, 62. 50. Eric Boime, “Beating Plowshares into Swords: The Colorado River Delta, the Yellow Peril, and the Movement for Federal Reclamation, 1901– 1928,” Pacific Historical Review 78, no. 1 (2009): 49.

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Notes to Pages 43–46

51. Herrera Carrillo, Reconquista y Colonización; Kerig, “Yankee Enclave,” 162. 52. Cochran, report on Baja California, Special Collections and Archives; Anguiano Téllez, Agricultura y Migración, 77; Herrera Carrillo, Reconquista y Colonización, 162. 53. Cochran, report on Baja California, Special Collections and Archives. 54. Kerig, “Yankee Enclave,” 162. 55. Mexican laborers who migrated to the United States faced precarious living and labor conditions. Gilbert González explains how Mexican families lived in poor, segregated enclaves throughout the Southwest. Labor and Community, 8. 56. Lawrence A. Cardoso, Mexican Emigration to the United States, 1897– 1931: Socio-economic Patterns (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980). 57. “Imperial America’s Fertile Winter Garden,” Los Angeles Times, January 1, 1920. 58. Chinese people continued to go to the United States illegally, but the rate of Chinese immigration slowed. Romero, Chinese in Mexico, 1–16. 59. U.S. Department of Agriculture, published report, 1917, 18; G. González, Labor and Community, 7. 60. Ruiz, Out of the Shadows, 11–12. 61. Mariano Ma, quoted in Herrera Carrillo, Reconquista y Colonización, 439. 62. Almost all Chinese immigrants and merchants who applied for Mexican citizenship between 1917 and 1924 declared that they were from Canton, China. Applications for naturalization, 1917–24, Casa de la Cultura Jurídica. 63. Cochran, report on Baja California, Special Collections and Archives; Kerig, “Yankee Enclave,” 157. 64. Duncan, “Economic Development,” 623; Romero, Chinese in Mexico, 35. 65. In 1911, for example, Maderista troops and a mob of Mexican men massacred three hundred Chinese residing in the city of Torreón, Coahuila. Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 1:208. 66. Herrera Carrillo, Reconquista y Colonización, 439. 67. K. Lato and Ben Kodoma, court report, 1920, applications for naturalization, 1917–24, Casa de la Cultura Jurídica. 68. Evelyn Hu-DeHart, “La Comunidad China,” Revista Ciguatan, no. 17 (1988): 16. 69. Applications for naturalization, 1917–24, Casa de la Cultura Jurídica. 70. Christensen, “Mujeres Públicas”; Schantz, “From the Mexicali Rose.” 71. Calculated from marriage statistics in Rodríguez, Memoria Administrativa, 336. 72. Romero, Chinese in Mexico; Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans. 73. Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican; Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans, 31.

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74. Court report, May 6, 1924, applications for naturalization, 1917–24, Casa de la Cultura Jurídica. 75. Ibid. 76. Manuel Lee Mancilla, Viaje al Corazón de la Península: Testimonio de Manuel Lee Mancilla (Mexicali: Instituto de la Cultura de Baja California, 2000). 77. Statement by Adela Sandoval Portillo, exp. 47, caja 5, Archivo Histórico del Gobierno. 78. Adelina married Condrio García. Juana married Estanislao Sandoval; after he abandoned her, she cohabitated with Juan Valenzuela, a migrant mestizo worker from Guaymas Sonora. Agrarian Census, 1937, exp. Ejido Cucapá Indígenas, Archivo Histórico del Registro Agrario Nacional, Mexicali, Baja California. 79. Mexican census data on population, 1910, 1921, Secretaría de la Economía Nacional, Distrito Norte, Baja California. 80. Statement by Portillo, Archivo Histórico del Gobierno. 81. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al Corazón; Lim, “Chinos and Paisanos.” 82. Young, Alien Nation; Catalina Velázquez Morales, Los Inmigrantes Chinos en Baja California, 1920–1937 (Mexicali: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2001); Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican; Romero, Chinese in Mexico. 83. Letter to Gov. Agustín Olachea, Baja California Norte, cited in José Gómez Izquierdo, El Movimiento Antichino en México, 1871–1934: Problemas del Racismo y del Nacionalismo durante la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1991), 146. 84. José Ángel Espinoza, El Ejemplo de Sonora (Mexico City, 1932); Rodríguez, Memoria Administrativa, 58. 85. Velázquez Morales, Inmigrantes Chinos, 191. 86. Espinoza, Ejemplo de Sonora, 35. 87. Julia María Schiavone Camacho, “Crossing Boundaries, Claiming a Homeland: The Mexican Chinese Transpacific Journey to Becoming Mexican, 1930s–1960s.” Pacific Historical Review 78, no. 4 (2009): 545–77. 88. See Registro de Extranjeros, “Departamento de Migración,” Chinos, exp. 160, caja 1, Archivo General de la Nación. 89. José Vasconcelos, La Raza Cósmica, 4th ed. (Mexico City: Porrúa, 2007). 90. “Jefatura Política del Distrito Sur de la Baja California,” July 19, 1911, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez; Mexican census records, 1921, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía. 91. Protocolo del Juzgado, 1917, bk. 2, Archivo del Registro Público de la Propiedad y Comercio.

chapter 3 1. “Pioneros y Fundadores,” Archivo Histórico del Gobierno; Garduño, Disputa por la Tierra, 83–85. 2. “Pioneros y Fundadores,” Archivo Histórico del Gobierno.

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3. Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution; Héctor Aguilar Camín and Lorenzo Meyer, In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution: Contemporary Mexican History, 1910–1989, trans. Luis Alberto Fierro (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996). 4. Censo General de Habitantes, 1920, 1930, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía. 5. Colin M. MacLachlan and William H. Beezley, El Gran Pueblo: A History of Greater Mexico (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Englewood Cliffs, 1994), 197. 6. Junta Organizadora del Patido Liberal Mexicano, “Programa del Partido Liberal Y Manifiesto a la Nación,” July 1, 1906, Saint Louis, MO, in Isidro Fabela, Documentos Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico City: Jus, 1966), 5:68. 7. Lowell L. Blaisdell, The Desert Revolution: Baja California, 1911 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), 45. 8. Ricardo Flores Magón, “Tierra y Libertad,” in Land and Liberty: Anarchist Influences in the Mexican Revolution, ed. and trans. David Poole (Sanday, UK: Cienfuegos Press, 1977), 62. 9. The “Plan of Ayala” included a strategy for land expropriation: “In view of the fact that the immense majority of Mexican villages and citizens own no more land than that which they tread upon, and they are suffering in misery, unable in any way to better their social condition or dedicate themselves to industry or agriculture because the land and forests are monopolized only by a few hands; for this reason, we expropriate without prior compensation. . . . Mexicans, support this plan with arms in your hand for the prosperity and well-being of our patria.” Emiliano Zapata, “Plan de Ayala,” in Fabela, Documentos Históricos, 21:35–39. 10. Ricardo Flores Magón to his friend and collaborator, Julio Mancillas, from Arizona, where he notified him that they counted on the support of the indigenous people from Baja California, in Fabela, Documentos Históricos, 5:239. 11. “Bandits Sack Mexicali, across State Line,” Los Angeles Times, January 30, 1911. 12. “The Red Flag at Tijuana,” photograph, May 1911, Historical Collection Company, Union Title Insurance Company, San Diego, CA. 13. “Bullets Sing at Mexicali,” Los Angeles Times, February 23, 1911; “Bandits Sack Mexicali”; Señor Barron, report, February 22, 1911, in Fabela, Documentos Históricos, 10:160. 14. Enrique C. Creel to Victoriano Salado Álvarez, telegram, February 22, 1991, Washington, DC, in Fabela, Documentos Históricos, 10:162. 15. Fabela, Documentos Históricos, 10:162. 16. Ricardo Flores Magón to Pascual Orozco, September 18, 1911, in Fabela, Documentos Históricos, 5:354. 17. Carlos Pereira to the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, report, Mexico City, April 6, 1911; Enrique de la Sierra, report, Calexico, April 17, 1911, both in Fabela, Documentos Históricos, 10:194, 204.

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18. Roger C. Owen, “Indians and Revolution: The 1911 Invasion of Baja California, Mexico.” Ethnohistory 10, no. 4 (1963): 373–95; Marco Antonio Samaniego López, “La Revolución Mexicana en Baja California,” Historia Mexicana 56, no. 4 (2007): 1201–62. 19. Owen, “Indians and Revolution”; Gómez Estrada, Gente del Delta, 92–93; Blaisdell, Desert Revolution, 180. 20. Ricardo Flores Magón, letter published in Regeneración to note that Antonio I. Villareal had deserted the movement, March 11, 1911, in Fabela, Documentos Históricos, 10:176; “Federals Administer Crushing Blow to Mexicali Insurrections,” Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1911. 21. There is no documentation of the actual number of Mexican families who moved to Baja California from the United States in 1911. Dr. Horacio E. López to Francisco I. Madero, October 1, 1911, Ensenada, in Fabela, Documentos Históricos, 5:361. 22. Owen, “Indians and Revolution,” 379. 23. Knight, Mexican Revolution, 2:210. 24. Susie Porter and Jocelyn Olcott have demonstrated the limitations of this article, which affected the lives of thousands of women in the cities who worked night shifts at different factories by preventing them from working at night. Porter, Mujeres y Trabajo en la Ciudad de México: Condiciones Materiales y Discursos Públicos, 1879–1931 (Michoacán: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2003), 248; Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 25. Simpson, Ejido, 69. 26. For more information on the Mexican Revolution, see Thomas Benjamin, La Revolución: Mexico’s Great Revolution as Memory, Myth, and History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000); Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Knight, Mexican Revolution; Oscar J. Martínez, Fragments of the Mexican Revolution: Personal Account from the Border (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983); John Mason Hart, Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Tannenbaum, Mexican Agrarian Revolution; Simpson, Ejido; Whetten, Rural Mexico; Silva Herzog, El Agrarismo Mexicano; and José C. Valadés, Historia General de la Revolución Mexicana, vol. 2 (Mexico City: Editores Mexicanos Unidos, 1985). 27. The goal of colonization projects in northern Mexico was to populate vacant areas. The exception was in the state of Morelos, where land was distributed as communally owned farms after the Mexican Revolution. 28. Tannenbaum, Mexican Agrarian Revolution, 320, 285. 29. Sector Agrario, La Transformación Agraria: Origen, Evolución, Retos y Testimonios (Mexico City: Talleres de Centro de Diseño y Artes Gráficas, 1998), 49. 30. Aguilar Camín and Meyer, In the Shadow, 114. 31. Enrique Montalvo, Enrique Rivera Castro, and Óscar Betanzos Piñón, Historia de la Cuestión Agraria Mexicana: Modernización, Lucha Agraria y

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Notes to Pages 59–61

Poder Político, 1920–1934, vol. 4 (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno / Centro de Estudios Históricos del Agrarismo en México, 1988). 32. Sector Agrario, Transformación Agraria, 52. 33. Kerig, “Yankee Enclave,” 187; Tzvi Medin, El Minimato Presidencial: Historia Política del Maximato, 1928–1935 (Mexico City: Era, 1982); Aguilar Camín and Meyer, In the Shadow. 34. T. E. Gibbon Papers, box 31, Bergman Collection, Huntington Library. 35. Magaña Mejía to Agrarian Department, quoted in Herrera Carrillo, Reconquista y Colonización, 144. 36. Garduño, Disputa por la Tierra, 34. 37. Land petitions, exp. Presidente Obregón-Calles, 1922–26, Archivo General de la Nación, C-14, 803, 225. 38. William H. Allen to Fernando Torreblanca, January 22, 1924. The letter was later printed on the first page of the national newspaper published in Mexico City, Diario Oficial 32, no. 19 (1926). 39. Herrera Carrillo, Reconquista y Colonización, 144. 40. Abelardo Rodríguez became interim president of Mexico from 1932 to 1934, after the resignation of President Pascual Ortiz Rubio. Between 1928 and 1934 former President Plutarco Elías Calles was known as “Jefe Máximo” in Mexico because he continued to hold the power to appoint presidents and make major desicions. For more information on the Maximato, see Arnaldo Córdova, La Revolución en Crisis: La Aventura del Maximato (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1995); Patrice Elizabeth Olsen, Artifacts of the Revolution: Architecture, Society, and Politics in Mexico City, 1920–1940 (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008); Dana Markiewicz, The Mexican Revolution and the Limits of Agrarian Reform (Boulder: Rienner, 1993); Medin, Minimato Presidencial. 41. Rodríguez, Memoria Administrativa, 32, 33. 42. Aguirre Bernal, Compendio Histórico Biográfico, 315. 43. Legal agreement signed by the CRLC and the Mexican secretary of commerce and employment, Los Angeles Times Company Records, 1900–20, Huntington Library. 44. For more information on water negotiations between the United States and Mexico, see Kerig, “Yankee Enclave,” chaps. 3 and 4. 45. Chandler and H. H. Clark to President Obregón, letters, December 28, 1921, to December 2, 1922, Grupo Obregón-Calles 803-C14, Archivo General de la Nación. 46. Abelardo Rodríguez was also a business partner at the Agua Caliente Hotel-Casino in Tijuana. Rodríguez, Memoria Administrativa, 37; Kerig, “Yankee Enclave,” 213. 47. Colonization projects were approved by the federal government under the Ley Federal de Colonización as a way to solve the “agrarian problem” in the 1920s. See Tannenbaum, Mexican Agrarian Revolution. 48. Rodríguez, Memoria Administrativa, 139. 49. “Fundación de la Colonia Progreso,” exp. 44, caja 5, Fondo Colección Pablo Martínez, Archivo Histórico del Gobierno, 7.

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50. “Fundación de la Colonia Progreso,” exp. 44, caja 7, Fondo Colección Pablo Martínez, Archivo Histórico del Gobierno; Rodríguez, Memoria Administrativa, 133. 51. Rodríguez, Memoria Administrativa, 139. 52. Ibid., 145. 53. Colonia Progreso residents, oral statements, exp. 47, caja 5, Fondo Colección Pablo Martínez, Archivo Histórico del Gobierno. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Rodríguez, Memoria Administrativa, 278; Colonia Progreso residents, oral statements, Archivo Histórico del Gobierno. 57. Rodríguez, Memoria Administrativa, 126–27. 58. Testimony of Filiberto Crespo, quoted in Garduño, Disputa por la Tierra, 75. 59. Garduño, Disputa por la Tierra, 98–99. 60. Many labor associations (such as Sindicato de Campesinos de la Colonia Gómez) identified their organizations with the town in which they were located. See Aguirre Bernal, Compendio Histórico Biográfico, 315. 61. Velázquez was president, Magaña was secretary, and Prado was treasurer. See Aguirre Bernal, Compendio Histórico Biográfico, 317; and Garduño, Disputa por la Tierra, 83–85 62. Garduño, Disputa por la Tierra, 82–85. 63. Ibid., 90. 64. Gustavo P. Serrano, a Mexican engineer who represented Mexico at the International Waters Association meeting in Riverside, California, report, 1924, Archivo de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Mexico City; Rodríguez, Memoria Administrativa, 59. 65. For more information on the expulsion of Chinese workers from Sonora, see Romero, Chinese in Mexico; Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican; Duncan, “Economic Development”; and Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans. 66. Howe and Hall, First Decade, 60. 67. Colorado River Land Company rents collected from January 1, 1919, to April 7, 1920, Colorado River Land Company, lease records, 1919–20, file Mexicali Valley, 1900–20, Los Angeles Times Company Records, Huntington Library. 68. “First Testimonies of the Instrument of Lease Executed by the Representative of the Colorado River Land Company in Favor of Mrs. Tom Quong Ming and Ng Hawk Nun,” April 22, 1919, Mexicali, Baja California, caja 3, 1900–20, Los Angeles Times Company Records, Huntington Library. 69. Duncan, “Economic Development,” 633. 70. Archival documents, Registry of the Justice of the Peace, 1920, record 30, exp. Juicios de Amparo, Casa de la Cultura Jurídica. 71. Kim Mee-Ae, “Immigrants, Workers, Pioneers: The Chinese and Mexican Colonization Efforts, 1890–1930” (PhD diss., Washington State University, 2000), 159–60.

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72. Rodríguez, Memoria Administrativa, 281. 73. Ibid., 356. 74. Preciado Llamas, “Chinos en el Sur,” in Magaña, China en las Californias, 58. 75. Jefe Político to León Yuen, February 2, 1908, doc. 502, exp. 51, leg. 502, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez. 76. Magaña, China en las Californias, 112. 77. Catalina Velázquez Morales, “Organización y Ascenso en los Chinos de Baja California (1920–1937),” in Magaña, China en las Californias, 45–70. 78. F. González, “Chinese Dragon.” 79. Gómez Izquierdo, Movimiento Antichino en México, 146. 80. Duncan, “Economic Development.”

chapter 4 1. Leonardo Guillén, president of Michoacán de Ocampo, written record on the Colonia del Pacífico, January 30, 1937, exp. 17, caja 7, Fondo Pablo L. Martínez, Archivo Histórico del Gobierno. 2. “As women, we participated by making food and bringing prepared food, coffee, and tortillas to our brothers.” Petra Pérez, quoted in Garduño, Disputa por la Tierra, 110. 3. Campesinos from the Miguel Hidalgo, El Guadalupe, Francisco Javier Mina, and Michoacán de Ocampo colonias formed the Federación de Comunidades Agrarias. 4. Everardo Escárcega López, Historia de la Cuestión Agraria Mexicana, el Cardenismo: Un Parteaguas Histórico en el Proceso Agrario Nacional, 1934– 1940 (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1990), 149; Calexico Chronicle, October 4, 1937. 5. Calexico Chronicle, October 1, 1936. 6. Miguel España, in charge of selling CRLC farmland to Mexican nationals in 1937, quoted in Garduño, Disputa por la Tierra, 100. See also Dwyer, Agrarian Dispute, 47. 7. “El Asalto a las Tierras,” exp. 17, caja 7; “Acta Levantada de la Colonia del Pacífico,” January 30, 1937, caja 2; both in Fondo Pablo L. Martínez, Archivo Histórico del Gobierno, 2, 1. 8. Kerig,”Yankee Enclave,” 358. 9. Dwyer, Agrarian Dispute; Kerig, “Yankee Enclave.” 10. Filiberto Crespo, quoted in Garduño, Disputa por la Tierra, 119. 11. Kerig, “Yankee Enclave,” 354. 12. “Pioneros y Fundadores de Megicali,” caja 5, Fondo Colección Pablo Martínez, Archivo Histórico del Gobierno. 13. Dwyer, Agrarian Dispute, chap. 7. 14. “Boletín de Radio,” 1945, exp. 6, caja 377, Fondo del Gobierno del Estado, Archivo Histórico del Municipio de Mexicali, Baja California; Dwyer, Agrarian Dispute; Kerig, “Yankee Enclave.”

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15. Escárcega López, Historia de la Cuestión, 484. 16. Helga Baitenmann, “The Archeology of Gender,” in Decoding Gender: Law and Practice in Contemporary Mexico, ed. Helga Baitenmann, Victoria Chenaut, and Ann Varley (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 189. 17. Lázaro Cárdenas, journal entry, November 11, 1938, in Lázaro Cárdenas, Obras: Apuntes, 1913–1940 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1972). 18. Garduño, Disputa por la Tierra, 101. 19. Fernando España, quoted in Garduño, Disputa por la Tierra, 122. 20. “General Shutdown Imminent in Baja California,” Calexico Chronicle, May 10, 1937; Los Angeles Times, May 9, 1937. 21. “Farmer Ends Mexican Siege,” Los Angeles Times, May 13, 1937. 22. Pedro Amescua, quoted in Garduño, Disputa por la Tierra, 121. 23. “General Shutdown Imminent.” 24. “Manifiesto que Lanzan los Sindicatos Adheridos,” Confederation of Mexican Workers Papers, 1937, Fondo Colección Pablo Martínez, exp. 27, caja 7, Archivo Histórico del Gobierno. 25. “Ranchers Rage at Land Grabs,” Los Angeles Times, May 9, 1937. The Los Angeles Times reported that small-scale farmers were evicted at gunpoint from their farms by agrarista campesinos. 26. Fernando España, quoted in Garduño, Disputa por la Tierra, 120; Esteban Flores Díaz, state secretary of Baja California, reports on Miguel España, October 19–25, 1937, exp. 9, caja 54A, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas. 27. España was shot after the strike was over, which illustrates that divisions between proagrarian activists and CRLC farmers continued even after Cárdenas reached an agreement with the farmers. “Agrarian Party Foe Shot Down,” Los Angeles Times, December, 1937. 28. “Cardenas Will Restore Land,” Los Angeles Times, May 7, 1937; Dámaso Lemus Vargas, Mexican repatriate, “Precursores del Movimiento Agrario Baja California,” Voz a Nova, October 5, 1986. 29. Kerig, “Yankee Enclave,” 372. 30. Periódico Oficial (Mexicali) 61, no. 14 (1948): 3, exp. 27, caja 7, Fondo Colección Pablo Martínez, Archivo Histórico del Gobierno. 31. Pascual Ortiz Rubio, vol. 1930, exp. 49/1947, pp. 1–4; Lázaro Cárdenas, vol. 1937, exp. 33/18, pp. 1245–48, both in Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas. 32. This number does not reflect the total number of repatriates to Mexico, since many of them entered Mexico without contacting the Mexican consulate. For more information on repatriates to Mexico, see Balderrama and Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal; Cardoso, Mexican Emigration, 144. 33. “Return of Mexicans Scheduled,” Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1934; “Governor Olochea Welcomed as Mexicans Plan Unity,” Los Angeles Times, April 30, 1934; “Mexico to Repatriate Thousands: Los Angeles

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Consul Told to Send Home 50,000 to California,” Los Angeles Times, May 7, 1934. 34. In his 1932 annual address, President Pascual Ortiz Rubio reported that government employees’ salaries were reduced by 15 percent, while at the same time he approved the dismissal of civil police, who were to be replaced by federal troops. “Mexican Chief Gives Message,” Los Angeles Times, September 2, 1932, 7; Cardoso, Mexican Emigration, 150. 35. Colonia Cárdenas, established in the Valle de las Palmas in 1935, was formed exclusively by repatriated families who had returned to Mexico. For more information on Colonia Cárdenas, see L. Castro, state secretary to President Lázaro Cárdenas, archives on Lázaro Cárdenas, exp. IIH 8.47, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas; Balderrama and Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal. 36. Balderrama and Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal, 163. 37. Ruperto Loya Murillo, “Precursores del Movimiento Agrario,” Voz a Nova, October 26, 1986. 38. Pérez, quoted in Garduño, Disputa por la Tierra, 104. 39. “Mexican Repatriation Mission Offers Farms to Colonists,” Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1939. 40. In 1939 the Cárdenas administration allocated 45,000 pesos to help repatriates in the Mexicali Valley. Lázaro Cárdenas, exp. 503 11/3, foja 1, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas. 41. Philip A. Dennis, “The Anti-Chinese Campaigns in Sonora, Mexico,” Ethnohistory 26, no. 1 (1979): 65–80. 42. In 1931 the Mexican Secretaría de Gobernación made it mandatory that Mexicans made up 90 percent of the workforce hired by commercial employers. Excélsior (Mexico City), July 22, 1931. 43. “Mexico Asks Registration of Foreigners,” Calexico Chronicle, September 10, 1937, 1. 44. Lázaro Cárdenas, “Precursores del Movimiento Agrario,” April 14, 1936, Fondo Colección Pablo Martínez, caja 5, Archivo Histórico del Gobierno. 45. At this time census records did not differentiate between Chinese naturalized citizens and Mexican citizens of Chinese descent. See census, 1942, exp. CRLC, Archivo Histórico del Municipio. 46. There were forty-one Chinese people and fourteen Southeast Asians recorded in the 1942 census. See “Padrón del los Extranjeros Residentes de la Delegación de Mexicali,” 1942; Crop loans, 1946, both in exp. Jabonera del Pacífico, Archivo Histórico del Municipio. 47. Adela Sandoval Portillo, quoted in Gómez Estrada, Gente del Delta, 146. 48. The following ejidos were formed in 1937: Aguascalientes, Bataques, Campeche, Cucapá, Cuernavaca, Coahuila, Colima, Ciudad Victoria, Chihuahua, Chiapas, Durango, El Mayor, Guerrero, Guanajuato, Hidalgo, Hermosillo, Islas Agrarias, Jalisco, Jalapa, Michoacán de Ocampo, Nayarit, Nuevo León, Oaxaca,

Notes to Pages 84–89

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Pachuca, Puebla, Querétaro, San Luis Potosí, Sinaloa, Sonora, Tabasco, Tamaulipas, Tlaxcala, Toluca, Veracruz, Yucatán, and Zacatecas. Adalberto Walther Meade, El Valle de Mexicali (Mexicali: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 1996). 49. Filiberto Crespo and José B. Cardoso Tenorio, quoted in “Un Pionero del Movimiento Agrario en Baja Califonria,” Voz a Nova, July 13, 1986. 50. “Don German León Castello: Un Hombre Fuerte y Recio,” Voz a Nova, February 15, 1987. 51. Pedro Pérez, quoted in “Don German León Castello.” 52. “Don German León Castello.” 53. Ejido Cucapá, 1937–48, exp. General Cucapás 852, Registro Agrario Nacional, in Gómez Estrada, Gente del Delta, 270. 54. Ejido Cucapá, July 4, 1946, exp. General Cucapás 852, Registro Agrario Nacional, in Gómez Estrada, Gente del Delta, 272–74. 55. “Informe del Departamento Agrario de la Mesa Directiva,” 1946, Ejido Cucapá Indígenas, leg. 2/3 1942–46, Registro Agrario Nacional, in Gómez Estrada, Gente del Delta, 277, 217–76. 56. Sandoval Portillo, quoted in Gómez Estrada, Gente del Delta, 145. 57. “Organo del Gobierno del Territorio Norte,” Periódico Oficial (Mexicali), 61, no. 14 (1948), 1. 58. Members from Federación Campesina were incorporated into the CNC a year later. For more information on CNC’s role in Puebla, see Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution. 59. Garduño, Disputa por la Tierra. 60. José B. Cardoso, agrarista, interview by Alfredo Dipp Varela, in Voz a Nova, June 13, 1986. 61. Pedro Pérez, quoted in Voz a Nova, June 13, 1986. 62. See Aguirre Bernal, Compendio Histórico Biográfico, 329. 63. “Acuerdo Dictado el 14 de Marzo, 1937 por el Presidente Constitucional de la República, General Lázaro Cárdenas,” exp. 28, caja 7, Fondo Colección Pablo Martínez, Archivo Histórico del Gobierno. 64. Stephanie Mitchell and Patience A. Schell, eds., The Women’s Revolution in Mexico, 1910–1953 (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) chap. 8. 65. Pérez, quoted in Garduño, Disputa por la Tierra, 146. 66. Garduño, Disputa por la Tierra, 150. 67. Pérez, quoted in Garduño, Disputa por la Tierra, 145. 68. Francisco Dueñas M., Documentos y Datos. 69. Pérez, quoted in Garduño, Disputa por la Tierra, 146.

chapter 5 1. Emanuel Celler, a U.S. representative from New York, called for an investigation and for tightened control at the U.S.-Mexico border by the U.S. Border Patrol. “A Typical Wetback Village Near the U.S. Border,” New York Times, March 27, 1951; “Wetback Detention Camp Slated,” Los Angeles Times, June

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12, 1954; “Policy Shift Traps Mexican Workers,” Los Angeles Times, January 26, 1954. 2. For more information on the term wetback, see Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Juan Ramón García, Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980); Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); and Don Mitchell, They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). 3. “Thousands Sent Back to Mexico,” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1954; “1259 More Wetbacks Deported,” Los Angeles Times, June 19, 1954; “400 More Wetbacks Rounded Up,” Los Angeles Times, June 19, 1954; “Round Up of Wetbacks in LA,” Los Angeles Times, June 20, 1954; “Wetbacks Herded at Nogales,” Los Angeles Times, June 20, 1954; J. García, Operation Wetback; Kanstroom, Deportation Nation. 4. “U.S. Signs Mexico Pact: Reciprocal Trade Agreement Sweeps Aside Old Barriers,” Los Angeles Times, December 24, 1942; Manuel García y Griego, “The Importation of Mexican Contract Laborers to the United States, 1942– 1964,” in Between Two Worlds: Mexican Immigrants in the United States, ed. David Gutiérrez (Wilmington: SR Books, 1996), 45–85. 5. El Heraldo (Mexico City), February 9, 1944; El Heraldo (Mexico City), March 17, 1944. 6. Gustavo Hernández Enríquez and Armando Rojas Trujillo, Manuel Ávila Camacho: Biografía de un Revolucionario con Historia, vol. 2 (Puebla: Ediciones del Estado de Puebla, 1986), 123; Ana Elizabeth Rosas, “Flexible Families: Bracero Families across Cultures, Communities, and Countries, 1942– 1964” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2006), 50. 7. For more information about the Bracero Program as it relates to the U.S. labor shortage caused by World War II, see Matt García, World of Its Own; G. González, Labor and Community; Pitti, Devil in Silicon Valley; Ngai, Impossible Subjects; and David E. Lorey, ed., United States–Mexico Border Statistics since 1900 (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center, 1990). 8. For more information on how contracted workers transformed Mexican American communities, see Matt García, World of Its Own; G. González, Labor and Community; and Pitti, Devil in Silicon Valley. 9. Deborah Cohen, Bracero: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Rosas, Abrazando el Espíritu; Verónica Castillo-Muñoz, “Historical Roots of Rural Migration: Land Reform, Corn Credit, and the Displacements of Rural Farmers, 1900–1952.” Mexican Studies / Estudios Mexicanos 29, no. 1 (2013): 36–60. 10. Mexico’s rapid economic, manufacturing, and urban growth between 1940 and 1970 is known as the “Mexican Miracle” or Mexico’s “Golden Age.”

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For more information, see Eric Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Julio Moreno, Yankee Don’t Go Home: Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov, eds., Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico since 1940. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Stephen R. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999). 11. Both President Ávila Camacho and President Alemán believed that it was time to prioritize agricultural production over peasants’ needs. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s, 104; Enrique C. Ochoa, Feeding Mexico: The Political Uses of Food since 1910 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000). 12. Land occupations by landless workers became the first step in the process of the expropriation of private land in the 1930s. The expropriated land was then divided into communal farms (see chapter 4 of this volume). 13. Cynthia Hewitt de Alcántara, La Modernización de la Agricultura Mexicana, 1940–1970 (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1985). 14. Under Alemán’s amendment to article 27, an ejido member could petition for an increase from twelve to twenty hectares of arable land. See Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s, 184. 15. The last time cotton prices were high was during World War I (see chapter 1 of this volume). 16. Irrigated land in Baja California went from 227,000 acres in 1930 to 482,000 acres in 1950. Lorey, United States–Mexico Border, 227. 17. “Mexico Plans Huge Acreage of Cotton,” Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1943, 6. 18. For more information on colonization projects, see chapter 2 of this volume. 19. Coahuila and Tamaulipas also saw increases in population, but to a lesser extent than Baja California. Lorey, United States–Mexico Border, 30. 20. Dirección Nacional de Estadística, Compendio Estadístico, Mexico City, 1952; Castillo-Muñoz, “Historical Roots.” 21. Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story (San Jose, CA: Rosicrucian, 1964), 52. 22. El Heraldo (Mexico City), February 9, 1944; El Heraldo (Mexico City), March 17, 1944. 23. Tomás Pelayo, interview by Mónica Pelayo, May 26, 2006, “Imperial Valley Interviews,” Bracero History Archive, accessed May 6, 2016, braceroarchive.org. 24. Michael Meyer, Susan Deeds, and William Sherman, eds., The Course of Mexican History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 612. 25. El Heraldo (Mexico City), February 16, 1944. 26. Genaro Navarro, interview by Adriana Sandoval, May 24, 2006, “Imperial Valley Interviews.”

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27. Rosa Navarro, interview by Alma Carrillo, May 24, 2006, “Imperial Valley Interviews.” 28. Ramírez, interview, “Imperial Valley Interviews.” 29. Rosas, “Flexible Families.” 30. Bracelicia Meza Peraza, interview by Mireya Loza, May 24, 2006, “Imperial Valley Interviews.” 31. “Wetbacks Headed to the Nogales Camp,” Los Angeles Times, June 20, 1954; “10 Busloads of Mexicans Leave LA,” Los Angeles Times, June 21, 1954; “Mexicans Convert Border into Sieve,” New York Times, March 27, 1950. 32. President Eisenhower approved this operation in 1954. Federal agents and police from California and Arizona deported thousands of undocumented Mexicans from California and Arizona to Mexico. “Thousands Sent Back”; “1259 More Wetbacks Deported”; “400 More Wetbacks Rounded Up”; “Round Up of Wetbacks”; “Wetbacks Herded at Nogales.” 33. “Border Patrol Drive in West Gains, Commissioner Says,” New York Times, June 28, 1954. 34. Galarza, Merchants of Labor, 60. 35. “Bracero Program Aids U.S. and Mexico,” Los Angeles Times, August 27, 1959; “Estados Unidos Problema de Braceros,” El Heraldo (Mexico City), January 4, 1954. 36. “Estados Unidos y el Problema de Braceros,” El Heraldo (Tijuana), November 1, 1953. 37. “Patriótica y Digna Postura en el Caso de los Braceros,” El Heraldo (Tijuana), January 22, 1954. 38. Lytle Hernández, Migra! 39. “La Policía Vigila Estrechamente la Frontera” El Heraldo (Tijuana), January 23, 1954. 40. A National Farm Labor Union organizer described in detail abuses against braceros and undocumented farmworkers in California by the DiGiorgio Fruit Corporation. See Galarza, Merchants of Labor. 41. For more information on the living conditions of braceros in the United States, see Matt García, World of Its Own; G. González, Labor and Community; Pitti, Devil in Silicon Valley; Ngai, Impossible Subjects; Lorey, United States– Mexico Border. 42. Lytle Hernández, Migra!, 138. 43. “Patriótica y Digna Postura”; “Bracero Asked Only a Chance to Work,” Los Angeles Times, February 7, 1954. 44. “Intentaban Cruzar para los Estados Unidos para ser Contratados,” El Heraldo (Mexico City), February 4, 1954. 45. “Tumultos de Braceros,” El Heraldo (Tijuana), February 3, 1954. 46. García y Griego, “Mexican Contract Laborers,” in Gutiérrez, Between Two Worlds, 45–85. 47. Colonias Nuevas Zacatecas members to C. Gobernador Gral. de División Juan Felipe Rico, October 29, 1944, 29/AHM/1414, exp. Colorado River Land Company Papers, Archivo Histórico del Municipio.

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48. Since Baja California was a federal territory, the president of Mexico had the authority to appoint and remove public officials. The Los Angeles Times, which was owned by Harry Chandler, former chair of the Colorado River Land Company, reported on the expropriation attempt. President Ávila Camacho removed Sánchez Taboada four months later. Los Angeles Times, August 2, 1941. 49. A census was considered the first step in the process of land distribution. 50. “Confidential Letter” about the disagreements between Gov. Sánchez Cano and Director Eulogio Olviedo from the Agrarian Department, January 1, 1945, 29/AHM/414/1, exp. Colorado River Land Company Papers, Archivo Histórico del Municipio. 51. In 1947 the Agrarian Department denied the petition for communal farmland submitted by workers from the Zona Federal Rio Colorado. “Organo del Gobierno del Territorio Norte de Baja California,” Periódico Oficial (Mexicali) 61, no. 14 (1948): 6–9. 52. Miguel Alemán Valdes, Un México Mejor (Mexico City: Diana, 1988), 99–100. 53. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s. 54. Aguilar Camín and Meyer, In the Shadow, 146. 55. Alemán Valdes, México Mejor, 118. 56. For more information on President Alemán’s Green Revolution, see Ochoa, Feeding Mexico; Tanalís Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax-Priísta, 1940–1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Robert Añorbe, Philantropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad (Boston: Hall, 1980); Edward H. Berman, The Influence of Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983); Joseph Cotter, Troubled Harvest: Agronomy and Revolution in Mexico, 1880– 2002 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Marcos Cueto, Missionaries of Science: The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); and Castillo-Muñoz, “Historical Roots.” 57. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s, 185; Ochoa, Feeding Mexico, 102. 58. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s, 172. 59. Alemán Valdes, México Mejor, 388. 60. These types of colonization projects were very similar to the colonization projects established in the 1920s (see chapter 2 of this volume). 61. Hewitt de Alcántara, Modernización, 27, 62–65. 62. “Miles de Hectareas Abandonadas,” Excélsior (Mexico City), April 12, 1948. 63. Gledhill, Casi Nada, 155. 64. Hewitt de Alcántara, Modernización. 65. Crop loans, 1946–47, Archivo Histórico del Municipio. 66. Some ejidos, such as Ejido Oaxaca, applied for group loans signed by the ejido president. See Crop Loans, 1946–47, Archivo Histórico del Municipio. 67. Ingeniero Óscar Sánchez, interview with the author, May 7, 2008, Mexicali, Baja California.

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68. Crop loans, 1946–47, Archivo Histórico del Municipio. 69. “A Timeless Art Flourishes Anew in Mexicali,” Los Angeles Times, August 5, 1956. 70. “Informe del Departamento Agrario y la Mesa Directiva del Ejido Cucapá Mestizo,” 1946, in Gómez Estrada, Gente del Delta, 271. 71. This law was enacted by President Cárdenas and applied only to Baja California; the purpose was to motivate relatives of ejido members (from both Mexico’s interior and the United States) to settle in Baja California. See “Organo del Gobierno del Territorio Norte de Baja California,”Periódico Oficial, March 14, 1937. 72. President Alemán purchased Rancho Matanuco, located between Tijuana and Ensenada. “Hoy Terminará la Gira del Licenciado Alemán,” Excélsior, April 12, 1948. 73. “La Población Agrícola de México,” Excélsior, April 7, 1951. 74. President Ávila Camacho approved the purchase of the remaining land from the Colorado River Land Company and created the National Colonization Commission. El Heraldo (Tijuana), April 19, 1944. 75. For more information on colonization projects in Mexicali under Governor Rodríguez, see chapter 2 of this volume. 76. Bank records, 1946, exp. Banco del Pacífico, Archivo Histórico del Municipio. 77. Comisión Nacional de Colonización, letter, November 29, 1949, exp. Colorado River Land Company, Archivo Histórico del Municipio. 78. Julio León, citizen file, 1917–24, exp. Aplicaciones de Naturalización, Casa de la Cultura Jurídica. 79. “Séptimo Censo General de Población, Territorio Norte de Baja California,” 1950, Departamento de Estadística, Tijuana, Baja California. 80. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s, 119; Catalina Velázquez Morales, Baja California: Un Presente con Historia (Mexicali: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2002), 152. 81. More research needs to be done to investigate the massive relocations of Japanese Mexicans and Japanese people to central Mexico. 82. Lorey, United States–Mexico Border, 33.

conclusion 1. “Spike Ceremony to Climax Rail Fete in Mexico,” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1948; “Alemán Feted on Arrival in Baja California,” Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1948; “Tijuana Fiesta Greets Alemán,” Los Angeles Times, April 11, 1948. 2. As mentioned in chapter 1, the Southern Pacific Company connected Mexicali with California and Arizona and the rest of the United States. In December 1951 the Mexican government purchased the Southern Pacific of Mexico, officially extending the Sonora–Baja California railroad with the rest of Mexico. See Jim Darling, ed., Brand Book II: The San Diego Corral, the Westerners (San Diego: San Diego Corral of the Westerners, 1971), 184.

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3. In 1952 Baja California’s Northern Territory gained statehood. It took another twenty-two years for Baja California Sur to become a state, due to its low population. The 2010 census recorded that Baja California currently has 3,155,070 people, while Baja California Sur has a total of 637,076 people. See Censo General de Habitantes, 2010, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía. 4. Asians were eventually integrated into the mestizo category and recognized as mestizos in northern Mexico. See Censo General de Habitantes, 1960, 2000, 2010, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía. 5. Los Angeles Times, July 5, 1956. 6. In 1929 the CRLC had 165,000 acres of irrigated land. Lorey, United States–Mexico Border; Tout, First Thirty Years. 7. Sector Agrario, Transformación Agraria, 7. 8. Communiqué from the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee-General Command of the EZLN, Mexico, March 1994, in Joseph Gilbert and Timothy Henderson, eds., The Mexican Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 639.

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Index

Abbott, H. S., 28 Acosta, Andrés, 102tab. Acosta, Guadalupe, 102tab. Acosta, Luis, 102tab. Agrarian Department, 58, 59, 61, 65, 75, 84, 143n51 agrarian leagues, 85–88, 103, 110–11 agraristas (proagrarian activists), 74 Agua Caliente Hotel-Casino, 134n46 Aguascalientes, 138n48 Aker, Federico, 18 Álamo Mocho Union, 64, 66tab. albacea (executor), 21 Alemán Valdés, Miguel, 90–91, 99–100, 103–4, 107, 141n11 Algodones property, 19–20 Allen, W. H., 26 All-Mexican train, 107–13 Almada, Gregorio, 122n32 Alta California: Californios and, 11, 20; migration of creoles to, 13 Álvarez, Macrina, 110 Álvaro, Manuel, 102 Amend, John C., 25 American born Spaniards (criollos), 1, 124n52 Amescua, Pedro, 137n22 amparos (constitutional appeals), 7 Andrade, Guillermo, 17, 18, 123n38; dispute with William Denton, 19; land sold to U.S. investors, 26tab., 28–29

Andrade, Jesús, 101, 102tab. Andrade Wood, Wool, and General Commission Merchants, 17 Anglo-Americans, 55, 121n7 appointed military chiefs. See jefes políticos Arce family, 20 Arellano, Felipa, 52, 66, 110 Arellano, Francisca, 52 Arellano, Sebastián, 52 Arellano, Soledad, 52 Argüello, José, 22 Argüello, Refugio, 22, 124n61 Armenta, Samuel, 102tab. Arrequín, Benito, 102tab. Arroyo community (Santa Rosalía), 36–37 article 27 (Mexican Constitution), 57–58, 61, 76–77, 82, 91, 98, 100, 112 Asalto a las Tierras fiesta, 86 Asian Associations, 67–72 Asians and Asian Mexicans: colonization projects and, 104; Compagnie du Boleo and, 33–36; land reform movement and, 109. See also Chinese and Chinese Mexicans; Japanese immigrants; migration Asociación China, 68fig., 71 Asociación Japonesa, 71 aspirantes (aspiring braceros), 96–97

161

162

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Index

Aspiroz, Manuel, 17 assembly plants (maquilas), 112 assistant to the military chief. See subjefe político Ávila Camacho, Manuel, 76, 89–90, 98, 141n11, 143n48, 144n74 Baja California: missions and rancherías, 1848, 12map; overview, 2. See also borderlands Baja California peninsula, 2, 50, 108 Baja California Sur, 116n9, 128n30, 145n3 Balderrama, Francisco, 5, 80 Banco del Pacífico, 104 Banco Nacional de Crédito Agrícola (BNCA), 100. See also National Agricultural Credit Bank Banco Nacional de Crédito Ejidal (BNCE), 100. See also National Bank of Ejidal Credit Bandini, Arcadia, 124n56 Bandini, Dolores, 124n58 Bandini, Juan, 21, 22, 23–24, 124nn55,58, 125n75 Barajas, Frank, 5 Barbieri, Julio, 38tab. Barragán, Francisca, 101, 102tab. Barrera Wong, Isabel, 50 Bataques, 138n48 Bautista, Juan, 18 Benjamín Hill, Sonora, 107 Bernstein, Maximiliano, 38 Berthold, Simon, 55 Beteta, Ramón, 82 Black Butte Company, 28 Blanco, Jacobo, 17, 19 Blasell, A., 26tab. Blythe, Thomas H., 18, 123n38 BNCA (Banco Nacional de Crédito Agrícola), 100 BNCE (Banco Nacional de Crédito Ejidal), 100 Bolsa Chica rancho, 124n54 Bolsas, Las, 124n54 borderlands: formation of, 1–3; indigenous peoples, 11–20; land reform and, 3–8; missions, 20–24;

overview, 9–11; territory ceded by Mexico to U.S., 1853, 10map; U.S. investment in Northern Mexico, 24–30 Bowker, Walker K., 27 Bracero Program, 5–6, 91–97; defined, 89–90; impact of, 111–13; recruitment center, 93fig. Bragg, Francisco, 38tab. Brownell, Herbert, 95 Burton, Isaac A., 26tab. Cabral, Manuel, 101, 102tab. cachanilla (plant), 40, 85 Cai Fau, 47tab. Cajón de Santa Ana, 124n54 Calentura, La, 12map Calexico, 89, 106 California Commission on Colonization and Rural Credit, 42 California Development Company, 29 Californios: Alta California, 11, 20; cattle ranching, 22; defined, 11; employment of indigenous people, 22–23; land dispute with U.S. government, 21; ranchos, 24; relationship with Mexican government, 23–24 Calles, Plutarco Elías, 58, 59, 61, 134n40 Campeche, 138n48 campesinos, 77–79 Campesinos Berry, 66tab. Campesinos Colonia Gómez labor union, 66tab. Campesinos de Bataques labor union, 66tab. Campesinos de Cuervos labor union, 66tab. Campesinos de Hechicera labor union, 66tab. Campesinos de Paredones labor union, 66tab. Campesinos Stevenson labor union, 66tab. Campesinos Tecolote labor union, 66tab. cáñamo silvestre (wild hemp), 17

Index Canton, China, 44, 130n62 Cantú, Esteban, 42–43, 57 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 73; agrarian reform under, 4; impact of land reform policies, 111–13; land reform, 74–80; nationalistic projects, 109; women’s (female) agrarian leagues support of, 110 Cardenismo, 111–13 Cardoso, Lawrence, 43–44 Carranza, José Venustiano, 57 Carruso, Victor, 59, 61 Casa Blanca restaurant, 47 Casa de la Cultura Jurídica, La, 7 caste system (colonial Mexico), 115n3 Castillo Negrete, Francisco, 20–21, 23–24, 124n49 Castro, L., 138n35 Castro, Pablo María, 15, 16 celador (guard), 122n28 Celler, Emanuel, 139n1 Centro de Estudios de Investigaciones Históricas, 7 Cesare, Zesone, 18 Chandler, Harry, 2, 26, 27, 60, 76, 126n98, 143n48 Chang, Vicente, 47tab. Chapultepec farming community, 82 Chávez, Esteban, 102tab. Chen, Santiago, 47tab. Chiapas, 138n48 Chi-Chong, Chan, 105 Chihuahua, 138n48 Chin, José, 47tab. Chinatown, 47, 51, 109 Chinese and Chinese Mexicans, 49; applicants for Mexican citizenship, 1920s, 47tab.; Asian Associations, 67–68; Compagnie du Boleo and, 34–36; intermarriage, 39; landholder rights and, 5; land reform movement and, 109; migration to Mexico, 31; role in socioeconomic development of Baja California, 6 Chinese Association, 6, 109 Chinese Empire Reform Association, 71 Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 18, 31, 108, 123n41

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163

Chinese Mexican Mercantile Company, 68 Ching, Juan, 61 Chong, Samuel, 68, 70 Christensen, Casey, 45 Ciudad Victoria, 138n48 Clark, H. H., 27, 126n92 CNC (National Confederation of Peasants), 85, 93, 99 Coahuila, 138n48 Cochran, Harrington Wilson, 31 Cocopah people, 1, 13–14; conflict with mestizos in ejidos, 84; effect of damming Colorado River on, 29–30; labor unions, 65; labor unions and, 55; population decline, 39; reservation land grants in U.S., 129n37; as residents in Mexicali Valley, 19; resistance to missions, 9; support of Magonistas, 56 Colima, 138n48 collective ejidos, 77, 79–80, 84 Colonia Abasolo, 43, 43tab. Colonia Benito Juárez, 43tab. Colonia China, 72fig. Colonia Grupo Occidental, 43tab. Colonia Grupo Oriental, 43tab. Colonia Herradura, 43, 43tab. Colonia Lerdo, 17–18 Colonia Progreso, 63 Colonias Nuevas Zacatecas, 98 Colonia Sonora, 43, 43tab. colonization projects, 58, 80, 103–5, 108–9, 133n27, 134n47 colonos (residents), 61–62, 63–64 Colorado Delta, 13 Colorado Development Company, 25–26 Colorado River: effect of damming river on Cocopah people, 29–30; path of. See CRLC Colorado River Land Company, 2 comadre (godmother), 40 comisariado ejidal, 77 Comité Pro Justicia, 78 Compagnie du Boleo, 2, 33–39 Compañía de Terrenos y Aguas de la Baja California, 43, 63

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Compañía de Terrenos y Colonización, 43 Compañía Lago Vulcano, 26tab. Confederation of Mexican Workers, 78–79 constitutional appeals (amparos), 7 Contreras, Zaragoza, 39–40 Cooperativa de Consumo, 86 cooperatives, 61–63 Cortina, Navarro, 76 Cosmic Race (Raza Cósmica), 50 Covarruvias, Justo, 102tab. cowboys (vaqueros), 22 Coyotes rancho, 124n54 Creel, Enrique, 55 creoles, 11, 13, 124n52 Crespo, Filiberto, 64, 83–84, 86 Crespo, Gilberto, 74 criollos (American born Spaniards), 1, 124n52 CRLC (Colorado River Land Company), 2, 11, 26–27, 39–48; expropriation of land, 76, 107–8; land purchased from Guillermo Andrade, 26tab.; land reform movement and, 59; leases, 126n92; lots leased by Chinese and Japanese farmers (1919), 69map, 70; occupation of property by proagrarian activists, 74, 75fig.; Rojo y Negro Union and, 66–67 Crosthwaite family, 20 Cruz, Juan, 102tab. cuarterones (one-quarter indigenous), 48 Cucapá labor union, 66tab. Cucapá Delegación de Hechicera, Paredones and Álamo Mocho, 65 Cucapá Mestizo, 48 Cuernavaca, 138n48 Cuero, Delfina, 22–23, 42 cultural citizenship, 123n47 Cunur, Juan, 23 Daunhan, Alonso, 26tab. de la Barra, Francisco León, 56 de la Cruz, Marto, 15–16, 17, 122nn28,31

Delgado, Florentina, 85 Denton, William, 19, 123n43 Department of Health (Mexico), 34–35, 128n19 Department of Immigration, 96 deportation: Bracero Program and, 95; of Chinese Mexicans, 67; indigenous people resistance to, 20; in Mexican American communities from 1929– 1934, 4–5; of Mexican Americans, 80; Operation Wetback, 89, 95, 142n32. See also repatriation De Wong, 47tab. Díaz, Porfirio, 121n5, 121n6; Compagnie du Boleo and, 33; Department of Health, 34–35; forced resignation, 56; land concessions, 10; norteño revolutionaries and, 53–54; support of foreign investments, 27 Diegueño people: by Colorado River, 29fig.; immigration to Baja California, 22–23; origin on name, 115n4, 120n27, 122n22; resistance to eviction from Algodones property, 19–20 Dirección General del Servicio Consular, 92 Dirección General de la Oficialía Mayor, 92 “domesticated” Indians (indios mansos), 23 Domínguez, Manuel, 102tab. dotación (land grants), 58 Duncan, Robert, 6 Dunn, Juan, 82 Durán, Felicidad, 85 Durango, 138n48 Dwyer, John, 76 Eiffel, Gustav, 37 Eisenhower, Dwight, 89, 142n32 ejidatarias (women working on ejidos), 85 ejidatarios (men working on ejidos), 87, 102, 103, 110 Ejido Aguascalientes, 83, 103 Ejido Campeche, 83 Ejido Colima, 83

Index Ejido Cucapá, 84, 87–88 Ejido Cucapá Indígena, 84 Ejido Cucapá Mestizo, 84, 103 Ejido Michoacán de Ocampo, 84 Ejido Oaxaca, 83 ejidos (land grants), 53; decline of, 97–103; defined, 4; formed in 1937, 138n48; Mexicali Valley, 83–85; race/ethnicity and, 5; types of, 77. See also names of specific ejidos Ejido Torreón, 101 enganchadores (recruiters), 44 Ensenada, 12map Erb, G. S., 25 Escalona Gallardo, Rogelio, 60 España, Fernando, 78, 79, 137n27 España, Miguel, 66–67 Españoles, 124n52 Esparza, Feliciano, 11 Espinosa, Trinidad, 38tab. Estudillo, Francisco, 20 ethnoracial, 4–5 executor (albacea), 21 extended family members (shamules), 13 Farm Emergency Labor Program, 89, 96 farmworkers: Chinese, 46; land grants, 98; Operation Wetback and, 95–96; women, 62, 65. See also Bracero Program Federación Campesina, 85 Federación de Comunidades Agrarias, 74, 75, 109 female agrarian leagues, 103, 110–11 Fermín, Francisco, 18 Ferris, Richard, 55 Fiehler, W., 26tab. Flores, Antonio J., 40 Flores Magón, Enrique, 53, 54, 56 Flores Magón, Ricardo, 53, 54–55, 56 Florido, 22 Foley, Neil, 4 Foncerrada, I., 17–18 Foy, Antonio, 46, 47tab. fuereños (immigrants), 4 Fung, Antonio, 47tab.

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García, Domitila, 38tab. García, Matt, 5 García González, Alfonso, 107 García y Griego, Manuel, 97 Gaxiola and Andrade Wood, Wool, and General Commission Merchants, 17 Gaxiola brothers, 17 Gee Wo, 68 gender: agrarian leagues and, 5, 85–88; gendered division of labor among Cocopah people, 13–14; labor inequalities, 41–42; land reform movement and, 110–11 Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907, 31, 108 Gibbon, Thomas, 59 Gilbert family, 20 Giuliani, G., 18 godmother (comadre), 40 Goldbaum, David, 23 Golden Age of Mexico, 140n10 Gómez, Curtis L., 70 Gómez, Ramón, 102tab. Gómez Farías, Valentín, 123n48 González, Fredy, 72 González, Gilbert, 5 González, Lerdo, 56 González, Manuel, 18 Gordon, Linda, 4 Gray, Thomas, 38tab. Green Revolution, 99 Grulla, La, 12map Guajardo, Edmundo, 61 Guanajuato, 138n48 guard (celador), 122n28 Guerrero, Emilio, 56 Guillén, Clemente, 102tab. Guzmán, Flavia, 38tab. Hawk, Ng, 70 Heffernan, W. F., 20 Hendricks, William O., 25 Hermosillo, 138n48 Hernández, Estanislao, 122n32 Hernández, Kelly Lytle, 95 Herrera, José Joaquín de, 9 Hidalgo, 138n48 Hill, William, 26tab.

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Index

Hing, Law, 28 household head (jefe de familia), 57 Hu-DeHart, Evelyn, 6, 45 Huerta, Victoriano, 56 Huntington, C. P., 25 Iberri, Wenceslao, 122n32 Imperial Valley, 26, 30, 44 indigenous people: building Mexican borderlands, 11–20; Compagnie du Boleo and, 36–37; intermarriage, 39–41; mestizaje (indigenous origins), 50; relationship with Mexican government, 14–16; during steamboat era, 16–17; support of Magonistas, 56; timber trade, 16, 17. See also specific indigenous people Industrial Workers of the World, 55 Institutional Revolutionary Party, 99 intermarriage, 1; among indigenous people, 14; Chinese immigrants, 39; effect on racial ethnic makeup in Mexicali Valley, 46; landholder rights and, 5; laws prohibiting, 49–50; mixed-race children, 48–50; reasons for increase in, 37–38; regions of Baja California, 1870– 1900, 38tab.; role in formation of multicultural society, 3 International Mexican Company, 2, 11, 25 International Waters Association, 67 investments: Anglo-Americans, 121n7; land sold to U.S. investors by Guillermo Andrade, 26tab.; U.S. investment in Northern Mexico, 10–11, 20–24 Ipai people, 115n4, 120n27, 122n22 Irrigación y Terrenos, 26tab. irrigation projects, 29 Islas Agrarias, 138n48 Jabonera del Pacífico company, 112; loans for Asian Mexican cotton farmers, 104, 105tab.; loans to ejidobased cotton farmers, 101, 102tab. Jacume Sierra (Sierra Juárez), 22, 23 Jalapa, 138n48

Jalisco, 138n48 Japanese immigrants: Compagnie du Boleo and, 34–35; migration to Mexico, 31; per-head tax, 70; relocation of during World War II, 105. See also Asians and Asian Mexicans jefe de familia (household head), 57 jefes políticos (appointed military chiefs), 19; Baja California peninsula, 9; concerns about indigenous people, 14; Esteban Cantú, 57; Feliciano Esparza, 11; Francisco Castillo Negrete, 20–21; land and labor movements and, 56–57 Jiménez, Enrique, 36 Kee, Wong, 45, 47tab. Kerig, Dorothy, 27 Kiliwa people, 55 Kodoma, Ben, 45, 70 Kumeyaay people, 1, 9, 115n4, 120n27, 122n22 labor associations and unions: Asian Associations, 67–72; overview, 64–67 Laguna Tambo, Petra, 1, 8 Land Act of 1851, 21 land grants. See ejidos land leases, 27, 28tab., 126n92 land owner (ranchera), 65 land reform: ejidos, 83–85; gender and agrarian leagues and, 85–88, 110–11; under Lázaro Cárdenas, 74–80; Mexican borderlands and, 3–8; Mexican Revolution (1910–20) and, 53–64; repatriation and, 80–83 Larco and Company, 24, 125n75 Lato, K., 45 Law of Agricultural Credit, 77 Law of Ejidos (1920), 58 Law of Terrenos Baldíos (vacant public lands), 10 Law of Terrenos Baldíos in 1883, 25 Lazaretto de Mausallo, 36 Le, Luis, 47tab. leasing land (land leases), 27, 28tab., 126n92

Index Lee, Francisco, 47tab. Lee, Luis Wong, 47tab. Lee, Patricio, 47tab. Lee Chew, Manuel, 47–48, 49 Lee Mancilla, Manuel, 49 Legaspy, Carolina, 38tab. León, Chon, 104 León, F. Chon, 104 León, Gonzalo, 104 León, Julio, 104 Lerdo de Tejada, Sebastián, 10 Lerma Álvarez, Macrina, 52, 65–66 Leyva, José María, 55 Liga Femenil Carmen Serdán, 87fig. Lim, José, 46, 47tab. Lim, Julian, 49 Logan, Francisco, 122n32 Lon Fong, 105 Lorden, J. P., 28 Loya, Guadalupe, 81 Luen, Wong, 47tab. Lumholtz, Carl, 14 Luong, Rafael, 47tab. Lynch, James, 28 Ma, Mariano, 45 MacAller family, 20 Macedo, Pablo, 35 Machado, Joaquín, 21–22 Machado, José Manuel, 21–22 Machado, Silvestre, 23 Machado family, 20 Ma Chew, Luis, 46, 47tab. Madero, Francisco I., 44, 53, 54, 56 Madrid, Carmen La, 38 Magaña, Benjamín, 65 Magaña Mejía, Marcelino, 59–61 Magonistas, 54, 55–56 Maldonado, Braulio, 86 Mancilla Camacho, Flavia, 47–48, 49 Manríquez, Josefa, 63 maquilas (assembly plants), 112 María Islands prison, 52, 67 Martin, Camilo, 122n32 Martínez, Guillermo, 28 Mathews, William, 122n32 Mathiot, Pierre, 38, 38tab. Matías Moreno, José, 23

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167

Mayo people, 33 Mead, Elwood, 42 Meeks, Eric, 4 Mejía, Agustina, 38, 38tab. Mendelson, Luis, 38 Mendoza, Vega, 95 Merrit, John, 26tab. Mesa Francia community (Santa Rosalía), 36–37 Mesa Mexicana community (Santa Rosalía), 36–37 mestizaje (indigenous origins), 50. See also indigenous people mestizos, 18, 115n3; Asian integration into, 145n4; Cocopah mestizo, 48–49; Compagnie du Boleo and, 33, 36–37; conflict with Cocopah people in ejidos, 84; defined, 1; intermarriage, 39–41; population increase, 39–40 Mexicali Valley: Asian Associations, 67–68, 71–72; attracting workers to, 18–19; Bracero Program, 91–97; colonias, 1916, 43tab.; colonias, 1937, 79tab.; colonization projects, 103–5; decline of ejidos, 97–103; downtown Mexicali, 1916, 32fig.; ejidos, 83–85; ejidos, 1937, 83tab.; gender and agrarian leagues in, 85–88; golden decade, 91; labor unions, 64, 66; migration and settlements in, 39–48; during Prohibition era, 3 Mexican Agricultural Industrial Company and Colonizer of Land of the Colorado River (La Compañía Mexicana Agrícola Industrial y Colonizadora de Terrenos del Río Colorado), 17–18 Mexican-American War (1846–48), 1–2, 6 Mexican borderlands. See borderlands Mexican-Chinese Treaty of Amity, 70 Mexican Constitution of 1917, 57 Mexican Miracle, 90, 140n10 Mexican Revolution (1910–20): land reform and, 3–4, 53–64; migration and, 37 Meyer, Erick, 61

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Index

Meza Peraza, Bracelicia, 94 Michoacán de Ocampo, 138n48 Michoacán de Ocampo agrarian league, 81 Michoacán de Ocampo Union, 109 migration, 6; Mexicali Valley settlements, 39–48; Mexican migrants working in U.S. Southwest, 1910 to 1930, 44; Mexican Revolution and, 37; Santa Rosalía mines, 33–39 Minar, Nicolás, 38, 38tab. Ming, Charlie, 68 missions, 120n2; Baja California, 1848, 12map; building Mexican borderlands, 20–24; indigenous peoples resistance to, 9 Mitchell, Stephanie, 87 mixed-race children, 48–50 Montejano, David, 4 Moreno, Delfina, 40 Moreno, José Matías, 22 Mújica, Francisco J., 66 multicultural society: Mexicali Valley, 39–48; mixed-race children, 48–50; overview, 31–32; Santa Rosalía mines, 33–39 Murillo, Dolores, 81 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), 112–13 Nand, J., 70 National Agricultural Credit Bank, 58. See also Banco Nacional de Crédito Agrícola National Bank of Ejidal Credit, 77–78. See also Banco Nacional de Crédito Ejidal National Colonization Commission, 104, 144n74 National Confederation of Mexican Workers, 75, 78–79 National Confederation of Peasants (CNC), 85, 93, 99 Navarro, Genaro, 93 Navarro, Rosa, 94 Nayarit, 138n48 Negri, Ramón de, 70

Nichols, Benito, 21 Non, M. J., 28 norteño, 4, 53 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 112–13 Northern Territory (Baja California), 9, 145n3; 1895 Mexican census, 122n33; 1910 census, 128n30; abandonment of missions, 20–21 Nuevo León, 138n48 Oaxaca, 138n48 Obregón, Álvaro, 48, 50, 58, 59, 70 Obreros y Campesinos de Mexicali labor union, 66tab. Olachea, Agustín, 72 Olcott, Jocelyn, 133n24 one-quarter indigenous (cuarterones), 48 open-air structures (ramadas), 40 Operation Wetback, 89, 95, 142n32 Oriental Immigration Company (Toyo Imin Gaisha), 33 Orozco, Pascual, 53, 54 Ortiz Rubio, Pascual, 80, 138n34 Otis, Gray, 26, 126n98 Owen, Roger C., 56 Pablo, Don, 64–65 Pachuca, 138n48 Paipai people, 22, 55 Parks, J. G., 2 Partido Nacionalista Antichino, 72 Partido Nacional Revolucionario, 77 Pelayo, Tomás, 92 Peña Delgado, Grace, 6, 46 pequeñas propiedades (small private landholdings), 79, 91 pequeños propietarios, 100 Pérez, Pedro, 64–65, 81, 84, 109 Pérez, Petra, 74, 81, 87, 109, 136n2 Pico, Pío de Jesús, 20, 124n49 Piña Cuevas, Manuel, 70 Ping, Manuel, 47tab. Pitti, Steven, 5 Plan de Ayala, 54, 112, 118n16, 132n9 Plan de San Luis Potosí, 53–54

Index

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169

Porter, Susie, 133n24 Portes Gil, Emilio, 80 Portillo, Adelina, 48, 131n78 Portillo, Felipa, 48 Portillo, Félix, 1, 8, 48 Portillo, Juana, 48, 131n78 Portillo, María de Jesús, 48 Portillo, Petra, 48 Portillo Laguna, Juana, 41–42 Porvenir farming community, 82 Prado, Leonardo, 65 proagrarian activists (agraristas), 74 Puebla, 139n48

Rodríguez, Abelardo, 60, 61–63, 65, 70–71, 74–80, 104, 109, 134nn40,46 Rodríguez, Raymond, 5, 80 Rojo, Clemente, 16 Rojo y Negro Union, 65–66 Romero, Eugenio, 19 Romero, Eustaquio, 63 Romero, María Luisa, 63 Romero, Robert Chao, 6, 31 Rosario, El, 12map Rosas, Ana Elizabeth, 6 Ruiz, Vicki, 5, 44 rurales (rural police), 35–36

Quan, A. Pak, 68 Querétaro, 139n48 Quong Ming, Tom, 70

Salado Álvarez, Victoriano, 55 Salinas de Gortari, Carlos, 112 Samaniego López, Marco Antonio, 56 Sánchez Cano, Edmundo, 98 Sánchez Taboada, Rodolfo, 76, 86, 98, 143n48 Sandoval, Enriqueta, 49 Sandoval, Estanislao, 41 Sandoval Portillo, Adela, 48–49, 82–83, 85, 87–88 Sanguines, Agustín, 36 San Juan, 124n54 San Luis Potosí, 139n48 San Ramon, 12map Santa Bárbara Church, 36fig., 37 Santa Rosalía: Arroyo community, 36–37; Mesa Francia community, 36–37; Mesa Mexicana community, 36–37; mines, 33–39; mine workers, 1893–1899, 34tab.; Santa Bárbara Church, 1910, 36fig.; Santa Rosalía port, 1928, 34fig. San Telmo, 12map Santo Domingo, 12map Santo Tomás, 12map San Vicente, 12map Saracho, Carlos, 46, 47tab. Sato, K., 70 Schantz, Eric, 45 Schell, Patience A., 87 Schiavone Camacho, Julia María, 6, 46 Serrano, Gustavo P., 135n64 Serrano, Jesús, 38, 38tab. Serrano, Lupe, 38tab.

ramadas (open-air structures), 40 Ramírez, Anselmo, 28 Ramírez, Nazario, 94 ranchera (land owner), 65 rancherías: Baja California, 1848, 12map; Cocopah people, 13 Rancho Guadalupe, 22 Rancho Jurupa, 124n54 Rancho Progreso, 59, 61 Rancho Rosario, 21–22, 23 ranchos, 11, 22, 24, 45 Rancho Santo Tomás, 22 Rancho Tecate, 22 Raza Cósmica (Cosmic Race), 50 Regeneración newspaper, 54 Regeneración newspaper (“Tierra y Libertad” article), 54 Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers, 64 Rentería, Hipólito, 74, 81 repatriados (repatriates), 5 repatriation: colonization projects and, 108–9; land reform movement and, 80–83; in Mexican American communities from 1929–1934, 4–5 residents (colonos), 61–62, 63–64 Rico, Juan Felipe, 98 Riveroll, Guadalupe, 38 Robinson Rockwood, Charles, 68 Rockwood, Charles, 25–26

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Index

shamules (extended family members), 13 Sherman, M. H., 26 Sierra, La, 124n54 Sierra Juárez (Jacume Sierra), 22, 23 Signal Mountain Company, 59 Sinaloa, 139n48 small private landholdings (pequeñas propiedades), 79, 91 Snyder, J. W., 25 Somera, A. F., 122n32 Sonora, 139n48; expropriation of land, 33; laws prohibiting intermarriage, 49–50 Southern Pacific Company railroad, 28, 144n2 Southern Territory (Baja California), 9 Stanton, T. H., 16–17 steamboat era, 16–17, 18 Stearns, Abel, 21, 22, 124nn54, 56 Strickroth, Gustavo, 38tab. subjefe político (assistant to the military chief): Baja California peninsula, 9–10; Clemente Rojo, 16; Esteban Cantú, 42; José María Villagrana, 14; José Matías Moreno, 22, 23 Sumaya, Bernarda, 40 Sumaya, Ramón, 40 Tabasco, 139n48 Tam, Ramón M., 70 Tamaulipas, 139n48 Tapia, José María, 67 taxation: Asian immigrants, 70; U.S. merchants in timber and cattle trades, 15, 17 Tía Juana, 22 “Tierra y Libertad” article (Regeneración newspaper), 54 “Tierra y Libertad” slogan, 3–4 Tijuana, 3 Tipai people, 115n4, 120n27, 122n22 Tlaxcala, 139n48 Toluca, 139n48 Toyo Imin Gaisha (Oriental Immigration Company), 33

Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation of 1899, 2 Treaty of Ciudad Juárez, 56 tule, 17 Ulbrich, Frank, 38tab. Unión Fraternal China de la República Mexicana, 71 Uribe, Enrique, 46, 47tab. Uro Monraz, Raúl, 103 Urriolagoitia, Gregorio, 122n32 vacant public lands (Law of Terrenos Baldíos), 10 Valdés, Josefina, 21–22 Valenzuela, Juan, 41–42, 131n78 Vallejo, Guadalupe, 23 Vallejo, Prudencia, 23 vaqueros (cowboys), 22 Vasconcelos, José, 50 Vázquez, Gavino, 86 Vega, Celso, 55 Velasco, Alfonso Luis, 14 Velázquez Calleros, Marcelino, 65 Velázquez Morales, Catalina, 71–72 Veracruz, 139n48 Verdugo family, 20 Villa, Pancho, 53, 54 Villagrana, José María, 14 Volcano Lake, 60 Walker, William, 24 water rights, negotiating, 29 Way, Wong, 47tab. wetbacks, 89 wild hemp (cáñamo silvestre), 17 Williams, C. B., 68 Williams, Stanley, 55 Williamson R. S., 2 Wilson, Woodrow, 129n37 Wilson Davis, Benjamin, 124n58 women’s agrarian leagues, 103, 110–11 Wong, Henry, 46, 47tab. Wong, Julio, 47tab. Wong, Manuel, 47tab. Wong Luen, 46 Wong Siw Nam, 67–68

Index Yaqui people, 33 Yee, Chee C., 104 Yee, Jesús, 47tab. Yee, Quan, 104 Yorba, José de la Gracia, 22 Yorba family, 20 Young, Elliott, 6 Yucatán, 139n48 Yuen, Francisco, 47tab. Yuen, León, 71

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171

Yuma people: resistance to eviction from Algodones property, 19–20; resistance to missions, 9 Zacatecas, 139n48 Zapata, Emiliano, 3–4, 54, 112, 118n16, 132n9 Zapatista Army of National Liberation, 112