They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression 9781477314074

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They Came to Toil

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They Came to Toil

Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression Melita M. Garza

University of Texas Press Austin

Copyright © 2018 by University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2018 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-­7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-­form ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-­i n-­P ublication Data Names: Garza, Melita M., author. Title: They came to toil : newspaper representations of Mexicans and immigrants in the Great Depression / Melita M. Garza. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017005518| ISBN 978-­1-­4773-­1406-­7 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-­1-­4773-­1405-­0 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-­1-­4773-­1407-­4 (library e-­book) | ISBN 978-­1-­4773-­1408-­1 (non-­library e-­book) Subjects: LCSH: Immigrants—Press coverage—Texas—San Antonio—20th century. | Mexicans—Press coverage—Texas—San Antonio—20th century. | Mass media and immigrants—United States. | Race relations and the press— United States. | United States—Emigration and immigration. | Emigration and immigration—Press coverage. | Depressions—1929—United States. Classification: LCC PN4888.I518 G37 2017 | DDC 070.4/4930482—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017005518 doi:10.7560/314067

To my parents, Lt. Col. Carlos Mario Garza Ortiz and Linda Rosa Caballero Hinojosa de Garza: In living the American Dream, you served the United States in war and peace.

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Much of the content of the press is intended solely for its own day. . . . Yet, just because it is the day’s report of itself, it is the permanent record of that day to all other days. The Commission on Freedom of the Press, 1947

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Contents

Preface xiii Acknowledgments xvii Introduction. The Crisis: They Came to Toil . . . but They Could Not Stay 1 Chapter 1. 1929: To Pave a Way through Hostile and Barren Lands 27

Chapter 2. 1930: A Thousand Times Better Off with Mexican Labor 64 Chapter 3. 1931: The Tragedy of the Repatriated 104

Chapter 4. 1932–1933: A New Deal for American Pioneers 133 Chapter 5. Conclusion and Epilogue 164 Appendix 183 Notes 187 Bibliography 219 Index 229

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Figures, Illustrations, and Tables I.1 Frank G. Huntress, San Antonio Express publisher, c. 1929 20 I.2 William M. McIntosh, San Antonio Light publisher, 1926 22 1.1 Mexican cotton pickers, Béxar County, August 1930 33

1.2 Mission San José and the old granary undergoing CWA repairs, 1934 58 2.1 Mexican jobless march, downtown San Antonio, 1930 65 2.2 Ignacio E. Lozano, La Prensa publisher, film star Antonio Moreno, and Mexican singer Alfonso Ortiz Tirado, 1930 68

3.1 Matilde Elizondo and Salome Rodriguez, Mexican repatriation, 1931 112 3.2 Customers of San Antonio’s failed City-­Central Bank and Trust Co., 1931 131

4.1 Domingo Cortinas, San Antonio Central Relief Committee worker, 1933 137 Table 4.1 La Prensa Circulation by Region 144

5.1 Rafael Romero, San Antonio Light newsboy, 1925 165 A.1 San Antonio Daily Newspaper Circulation 184

A.2 San Antonio Sunday Newspaper Circulation 185

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Preface

It was my serendipitous encounter with a YouTube movie clip while in graduate school that sparked the questions that ultimately led me to write this book. The video depicted a Mexican American family—mother, father, and young children—in an idyllic 1930s Southern California setting. The charming scene quickly grew ominous as the camera panned around an empty home and a sonorous voice intoned: “Then came the day everything changed—when my mother didn’t come home from the market. It was the time of the Great Depression—I guess some politicians got it into their heads that Mexicans were responsible for the whole thing.” The clip from Gregory Nava’s 1995 movie Mi Familia/My Family showed uniformed men picking Mexicans and Mexican Americans off the street and forcing them into wooden train cars to be “returned” to Mexico. The mother in the movie, played by a young Jennifer Lopez, was a US citizen, a status that didn’t stop her from being herded away with the others to a distant Mexican village far across the border. Perhaps because the storyline ached with the melodrama of Hollywood, and the imagery evoked Nazi Germany, the narrator adamantly stated: “All these things really happened. The year was 1933.” But, I thought, if such a thing had happened in the United States, why hadn’t I learned about it in school? Coming of age as a journalist in the rough-­and-­tumble shadow of the now-­defunct Chicago News Service, then jointly owned by the Chicago Tribune, where I worked, and the Chicago Sun-­Times, our archrival, my skepticism was honed fine. I was trained to consider all representations suspect. The gospel according to the Chicago News Service was simple: “If your mother says she loves you— check it out.” I immediately set out to discover whether anything like the incident depicted in Mi Familia had occurred. As a longtime journalist and a journalism scholar, I wondered also whether and how this story had

xiv Preface

been reported. Who had stepped up, if anyone, to be a voice for the voiceless? How well did the news media relate the first rough draft of this story? The way to most accurately answer those questions, I knew, was to examine news in both English and Spanish. Growing up Mexican American, I’d long heard stories about how my great-­grandfather and grandfather would come home from a long day’s work and, after dinner, sit in the glow of an oil lamp to read La Prensa, the Spanish-­language daily newspaper in San Antonio, Texas. My grandparents had fled their homes in Mexico amid the chaos of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to make a new life in the United States. They were among thousands—before and since—who walked across the border with only drive and dreams. Many, like my grandparents, came of age and built families just as the harsh days of the Great Depression sparked xenophobic attitudes toward immigrants. Undoubtedly, La Prensa publisher Ignacio Lozano’s daily celebration of the Spanish language encouraged my grandfather, a sewing-­machine salesman, a Boy Scout leader, and a member of the Texas Cavalry, to set up a small blackboard in the family’s front room and run Spanish classes on Saturday mornings for his children, who were barred from speaking anything but English in San Antonio public schools. This book, then, was in part inspired by my family’s experience, particularly that of my mother, a US-­born American citizen. A child of the Depression, she attended an elementary school named for Alamo hero James Butler Bonham, where teachers made her—and other Mexican American students—sit in the back of the classroom. My own upbringing occurred in a more international setting, at another moment in US history. I was born on a US Air Force base in Madrid, Spain, and grew up in a world of two languages. Later, as a journalist, I reported on a range of beats, from federal court, to public housing, to business news. From the start, the story of immigrants—the story of new Americans—was one I wanted to tell. It began when I reported for the Los Angeles Times about the struggle of Cubans who fled their island nation via the Mariel boatlift “freedom flotilla” in 1980 to become US citizens. When applying for US residency in 1984, one of the “Marielitos,” as they were known, Jesus Palacios, then thirty-­two, told me how he saved enough money from his busboy’s job at Los Alamitos Race Course in Orange County, California, to open a religious bookshop. “The United States is our home now,” he told me while filling out immigration forms at a Catholic social services agency. “It is the only country which opened its arms to us in our desperation and misery.” Palacios’s belief in the United States was unshaken despite the

Preface  xv

American xenophobia that led some to label the Marielitos as criminals, malcontents, and mental patients. I went on to report on Hmong refugees and Mexican immigrants for the Milwaukee Journal, and in the early 1990s, I pioneered the ethnic affairs beat at the Chicago Tribune. There I reported and wrote about Tibetan, Vietnamese, Korean, Polish, Chinese, and many other immigrants that made their home in the “Second City.” In Chicago, I also wrote about the diverse Hispanic community, including the nation’s largest Mexican-­born community outside California. Major news organizations in cities far from the Texas border were beginning to grasp the market power of this group, and I wrote articles for national journalism publications about how metropolitan newspapers were trying to reach Hispanic readers with new Spanish-­language and bilingual publications. Growing up in a household where my father walked around with a book in English in one hand and a book in Spanish in the other, it seemed that the journalism world was just catching up to the reality I had long known. Later, on the heels of the Great Recession, I went on to earn a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I remained fascinated and inspired by immigrants whose cultural and linguistic skills allow them to lead rich, multidimensional lives despite enormous obstacles. That movie clip I saw in 2010 raised the banner of a buried history that beckoned me and unfurled itself across my bilingual background, my professional experiences, and my generational vantage point. But my investigation also revealed a complex and still unfolding story about how narratives—how news coverage—of issues like immigration shape the discourse about what it means to be an American. Ultimately, that work led to this account about the little-­told and mostly forgotten story of a people—like so many others before and since—who came to toil. It was the time of the Great Depression, and these are the things the newspapers said really happened.

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Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the help of many mentors, friends, and supporters across the country. I’d like to thank the scholars from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in whose classrooms and offices I was able to formulate the ideas that have ultimately led to this book. I am deeply grateful to Barbara Friedman, Betty Winfield, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Zaragosa Vargas, and Frank Fee. Numerous people generously provided research assistance: Hailey Branson-­Potts, Pulitzer Prize–­winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times, offered boots-­on-­the-­ground at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, California, where she panned the William Randolph Hearst Papers searching for archival gold related to the San Antonio Light. The professional staff at these libraries helpfully shared their expertise, making my research way easier. Tom Shelton, photographs curator at the University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries, was a font of knowledge about the extensive San Antonio Light photograph collection. Tom provided invaluable assistance in locating hard-­to-­find photos. Amy Rushing, the head of UTSA Libraries Special Collections, made my archive experience flow smoothly. Félix Gutiérrez, professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, lent guidance, support, and encouragement—not to mention dinner, on research trips to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. I am indebted to all those who read early drafts of this work and offered suggestions that bettered the manuscript. At Texas Christian University, my colleague Max Krochmal, of TCU’s History Department, read parts of this work and gave important guidance. My mother, Linda Rosa Garza, read numerous drafts prior to publication as did John Schmeltzer, Pulitzer Prize–­winning journalist for the Chicago Tribune who is now Engleman-­ Livermore Professor at the University of Oklahoma. I am also grateful to the University of Texas Press readers for their incisive suggestions, my UT

xviii Acknowledgments

Press editor Kerry Webb, and the entire staff of the press for their work on behalf of this project. I am also thankful for the financial benefactors who supported this work. Dean Kris Bunton of Texas Christian University’s Bob Schieffer College of Communication supported my research at the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California. The American Journalism Historians Association (AJHA) awarded me the national Margaret A. Blanchard Prize for the outstanding doctoral dissertation in mass communication history in 2013, which helped me with both added research funds and encouragement to advance my project. A fellowship from the Triad Foundation and Roy H. Park paid my way through graduate school. J. Walker and Joy D. Smith financed my summer research fellowship through the Graduate School of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The generous donors to the Joseph L. Morrison Award for Excellence in Communication History twice honored me with a monetary award. I extend a special note of gratitude to political scientist and human rights advocate Terry Lynn Karl of Stanford University, who has been an inspiration, mentor, and friend since serving as my undergraduate thesis advisor at Harvard College.

They Came to Toil

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Introduction

The Crisis

They Came to Toil . . . but They Could Not Stay

Well, I came from my homeland Intending to work In San Antonio, Texas And I could not stay . . . The Crisis, Sir, the Crisis, Everyone says as they go by . . . We all look for money And we all love money But the money belongs to Rockefeller and Henry Ford excerpt from “La crisis/The Crisis” Mexican folk ballad from the 1930s

I

n December 1929, Mexican deportee Carlos Espinosa recrossed the border into Laredo, Texas, and waited on the road for the US Border Patrol to apprehend him. He preferred prison in Webb County, USA, for illegally reentering the country over unemployment, and presumably hunger, in Mexico, he told the border patrolmen who finally showed up.1 The way three competing newspapers dealt with this event highlights how disparate news coverage socially constructs the reality of immigration and Mexicans in distinctive ways. Espinosa was front-­page fodder for San Antonio’s Spanish-­language daily, La Prensa, predicting that: “The day a civilized government replaces Mexico’s tyrannical one . . . most Mexicans . . . will return promptly to their native soil. With the repatriation of Mexicans ‘living on the outside,’ competition with North American workers that has lowered salaries will cease.”2 The La Prensa columnist saw Espinosa as the prototypical Mexican, caught between political chaos in Mexico and the demand for cheap labor in the United

2 Introduction

States, law or no law. The Express editors considered Espinosa less newsworthy, reporting his apprehension on page 9, next to a story about a survey showing brunettes were more popular than blondes.3 The San Antonio Express didn’t consider the broader implications of Espinosa’s predicament, dwelling instead on the surprise of the border patrol. The incident went unrecorded in the competing William Randolph Hearst–­owned San Antonio Light. In short, the Express’s placement suggested that he was just another Mexican drifter, while the Light found his story so banal as to not merit coverage. Espinosa’s reported “capture” on the verge of the Great Depression poignantly encapsulated the dilemma of the Mexican, as persons of Mexican descent were then called, whatever their nationality. The decade-­long economic crisis blended with nativist sentiments to create a pivotal new chapter in US immigration history.4 New laws were debated, immigration became a flashpoint in the furor over the country’s economic troubles, and tens of thousands of immigrants, mainly from Mexico, were deported. Frustrated at congressional dithering, some counties and cities nationwide developed their own repatriation plans, leading to the return of almost one half million Mexicans. Playing in the background were larger questions about who might be counted as American. With San Antonio, Texas, as a backdrop, this book focuses on Mexicans, immigration, and repatriation through an English- and Spanish-­ language media lens during the critical early 1930s period. News coverage of immigrants in Depression era San Antonio—a cornerstone of myth and memory—reveals profound differences in the way these three newspapers framed Mexicans and immigrants. The setting for this book’s analysis is the aftermath of the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the deepest years of the Great Depression, 1929 to 1934. The Alamo City had a thriving independent Spanish-­language daily newspaper, a locally owned English-­language daily newspaper, and a chain-­operated daily owned by William Randolph Hearst, then the nation’s grandest newspaper titan. The city was also located in a state that would ultimately report more repatriations than any other.5 Geographically situated about 150 miles from Mexico, San Antonio was nonetheless figuratively a powerful border city, one whose Mexican and Anglo culture remains enshrined in an artifact of Spanish architecture, the former Franciscan mission remembered for the Battle of the Alamo. Moreover, during the Great Depression “San Antonio was at the crossroads of Texan, Mexican, and US myth, memory, and identity, as well as

Introduction  3

trade, commerce, and geography.”6 It was a time, as John Bodnar puts it, when recovering the past became increasingly important to Americans. Destitute communities recovered and remade public memories of their pioneer heritage, finding comfort in memorializing past glories, conquests, and victories.7 San Antonio was a prime example. The city became enthralled with the legacy of the early eighteenth-­century Spanish-­speaking immigrants who founded San Antonio. Paradoxically, Spanish-­speaking immigrants of the Depression era often were on contested terrain and commonly met indifference, vitriol, or expulsion. The early 1930s period was pivotal in immigration history and in the formation of Mexican American identity. Literacy, hygiene, and financial tests were enforced with renewed vigor to keep Mexicans out as new laws restricting immigration from south of the border were debated in Congress. In 1929, for the first time, crossing the border without proper documents became punishable as a federal crime.8 Meanwhile, Mexicans living in the United States, including longtime residents and US citizens, were targeted in immigration crackdowns as the Hoover administration sought to keep more jobs for Americans. When Congress failed to pass Mexican quota laws, the government turned to administrative tools such as deportation to control the Mexican population. Mexicans accounted for more than 46 percent of all those deported between 1930 and 1939, though they represented only 1 percent of the US population.9 By the time of Espinosa’s encounter with the US border patrol, Mexican troubadours had written, performed, and recorded corridos, or folk songs, in music studios from New York to Los Angeles, about the plight of Mexican deportees and workers.10 “La crisis/ The Crisis,” which was recorded in New York City in 1932, told the story of an immigrant who failed to find a job in San Antonio and then “could not stay.” For Mexican immigrants, the corrido, along with language and customs, was one of the “intangible cultural expressions” carried everywhere, unlike material possessions they might be forced to discard if they were deported or repatriated.11 Moreover, “corridos are an important archive and outlet of the cultural memory of Mexicans, New Mexicans and Texans along El Camino Real,” also known as the Old San Antonio Road.12 Among other topics, these songs chronicled a story sketchily reported in US English-­language newspapers: the repatriation tale of about a half million people of Mexican descent, many of whom were US citizens. Desperate and denied relief, many voluntarily returned. Some were rounded up and “returned” to Mexico,

4 Introduction

a nation many of them had never seen.13 Many who feared deportation left on their own or with the help of mutual aid societies or local governments.14 The voluntary and forced returns to Mexico swept Mexicans from their homes in Anchorage, Detroit, Chicago, and other northern points, as well as from southern borderlands such as Laredo, San Diego, and El Paso.15 This little-­reported episode received some scrutiny with Abraham Hoffman’s now out-­of-­print 1974 book, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929–1939. His book made Mexican repatriation a staple of Chicano studies programs. Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez revived the topic with Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, first published twenty years after Hoffman’s seminal work. Labor historian Zaragosa Vargas examined the way policies to deny relief to Mexican agricultural workers during the Great Depression made Mexicans disposable labor.16 The tragedy of Depression era repatriation made it into mainstream news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, NPR, and USA Today after 2005, when the state of California issued a public apology for violating the civil rights of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, some of whom were coerced to leave and defrauded of property.17 Despite the more recent academic attention and California’s official apology, repatriation remains a civil rights issue little known to most Americans, in part because it falls outside the racial binary through which such civil rights issues are traditionally viewed.18 Few scholars have written about repatriation in Texas or the widespread deportations that took place at the same time. Texas ranks as the largest state staging ground for this Depression era exodus of Mexicans, making this omission from historical study all the more surprising.19 Because the media’s role in interpreting these events has also been little studied, the book analyzes the framing of these issues in three different newspapers in San Antonio to see how stories were cast to meet the perceived needs of different audiences. The representations illuminated on these pages do more than that, however. They show the way independent, local journalistic voices in English and Spanish mapped the identity of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and immigrants in overlapping and sometimes contrary ways. They show the complicated role that English-­language news played in supporting Mexican labor and at times demonizing it. Their approaches varied, from depicting people as data points to telling human tales.

Introduction  5

Immigration: The Nation’s Ongoing Story This book touches on questions that resonate strongly with contemporary America, particularly as the US economy continued to sputter years following the Great Recession. The National Bureau of Economic Research calls this eighteen-­month downturn, which ended in June 2009, the longest since World War II.20 Crises, including periods of financial stress, often heighten tensions between individuals and groups and the nation-­state and may serve as catalysts for xenophobia and intolerance. Consider that Arizona, which shares a 370-­mile border with Mexico, passed a law in 2010 that, among other things, required police to verify the legal status of any person they stop or arrest if they have “reasonable suspicion” the individual entered the country illegally.21 Arizona’s statute, which was quickly challenged, led to a spate of similar state laws, five by August 2011.22 The US Supreme Court ruled on the constitutionality of Arizona’s law in June 2012, upholding the key “show me your papers” provision.23 The court left open the option to challenge the provision on the basis that it amounted to racial profiling. It also invalidated three other provisions, including two that barred persons illegally in the country from looking for work. A provision that permitted police to arrest anyone they suspected was deportable was also invalidated. These legislative and judicial actions eighty years after the Depression reprise the debate about immigration and US–­Mexico relations for a new era of economic strife. Activities concerning immigration rights that have sprung up in response to these laws, in fact, have roots in the struggles around Mexican immigration that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century.

The Long and Wide Civil Rights Struggle They Came to Toil, however, does more than shed light on immigration policy of the past and present. This examination of English- and Spanish-­ language news coverage of Depression era repatriation helps illuminate an episode of what has been an invisible part of US civil rights history. Repatriation is one of many incidents involving Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the United States omitted from this country’s dominant civil rights narrative.

6 Introduction

The more traditional civil rights saga, as enunciated by Julian Bond and Bayard Rustin, among others, has all the satisfying elements of narrative.24 This includes an iconic hero, Martin Luther King Jr., and a plot that starts in 1954, with the NAACP victory in Brown v. Board of Education. The story picks up with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Freedom Rides, and protest movements and concludes with enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.25 Historian Charles Payne called it “the Montgomery to Memphis framework.”26 Historians have picked up this traditional narrative path, in part by following journalism’s storyline. As Charles Payne, among others, has noted, this has played a role in limiting understanding of the black struggle for equality, which historians have sought to reframe more expansively as the Long Civil Rights Movement.27 The movement has also been expansively reframed as the Black Freedom Struggle, and most radically as the Long Black Power Movement. Historians have expanded understanding of the civil rights movement by focusing on local people acting in other parts of the country, using a longer chronology, and including more diverse events. Much of the debate about reconceptualizing the movement has centered on scholar Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s 2005 Journal of American History article in which she articulated a Long Civil Rights Movement framework.28 Hall posited that the media played a role in creating and perpetuating this myopic view through a largely sympathetic but selective and thus distorted view of events.29 “By confining the civil rights struggle to the South, to bowdlerized heroes, to a single halcyon decade, and to limited noneconomic objectives . . . it prevents one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history from speaking effectively to the challenges of our time.”30 Early civil rights histories followed the traditional media narrative, “replicating its judgments and trajectory,” including, as Payne points out, the limitations of its news frames.31 In Hall’s assessment, a more complete view of the civil rights movement is in keeping with the thinking of Dr. King, who saw race in America as “not a sectional, but a national problem.”32 While other historians have contested elements of Hall’s broader critique, the notion that civil rights history has been circumscribed and needs a more accurate, alternative framework enjoys broader agreement.33 Emilye Crosby, for instance, is among those calling for a focus on local studies, for an exploration of the experiences of people within the South, whose insights might challenge dominant stories about the move-

Introduction  7

ment’s agenda and character.34 Similarly, in his study of racial diversity and civil rights in California from 1941 to 1978, Mark Brilliant urges reconsidering the civil rights period as “wide” and not just “long.” To grasp the multiracial character of the nation’s civil rights past, it must be considered “wide geographically, wide demographically, and most importantly wide substantively in terms of the range of ‘race problems’ and responses to them.”35 From his Pacific coast vantage point, Brilliant views the Mexican American civil rights struggle as often intersecting with those of other groups, including African Americans. He found that these movements, however, often struggled largely along separate, multiple color lines. Building on Brilliant’s thinking, I posit that applying the late journalist Robert Maynard’s concept of fault lines to civil rights struggles would widen understanding of the dimensions of the movement. Maynard, the first African American publisher of a major metropolitan US newspaper— the Oakland Tribune—developed the fault lines framework to help explain the chasms that divide people. He warned reporters that looking at the world through the lens of race alone would lead them to misread events and people. Instead, Maynard urged journalists to weigh five immutable characteristics—race, class, gender, generation, and geography— in order to develop complex stories with nuance, depth, and accuracy.36 Considering the fault lines of the past and present would likewise lead to a fuller and more accurate reinterpretation of civil rights history. In keeping with Maynard’s metaphor, it would compel a seismic rethinking of the American civil rights movement. Whether viewed along color lines or fault lines, the omission of repatriation and other Mexican American civil rights issues cannot be explained by geographic and periodization constraints alone. Driving the omission of these civil rights issues is their occurrence outside the black–­ white race binary, a lens that perceives race in America consisting “either exclusively or primarily of only two constituent racial groups, the Black and the White.”37 This binary guides racial discourse, limiting how academics, the media, government officials, and others gather facts, investigate, report, think, and write about civil rights, in the view of legal scholar Juan Perea.38 This binary view is particularly problematic for Mexicans who were viewed as “other” though at times also as “white.” For instance, Raúl Ramos queried concerning the nineteenth-­century inhabitants of San Antonio, “Were they Mexicans, or mestizo, or Español, or Tejano, or Texan, or American?”39 In the larger picture of the nation in that era, Anglos had linked race and citizenship, and set about establishing white as “the natu-

8 Introduction

ral” or “the norm,” and working to dissociate that white identity from the Hispano, who derives from the original Spanish settlers in New Mexico.40 Against this backdrop of ambiguous identity came a spate of immigration legislation enacted between World War I and World War II. These laws, Mae Ngai argues, were significant in marking Mexicans racially, particularly the deportation measures that made Mexicans “iconic illegal aliens” in a way that Canadians and Europeans would not be.41 Mexicans, then, are a group that has never quite fit into the dominant binary. “They are discriminated against because they are only partly white, yet they have been spared the full impact of discrimination because they descend from Spaniards, one of the white peoples of Europe,” noted Martha Menchaca in her study of the Native American, black, and white origins of Mexican Americans.42 The question of whiteness has increasingly consumed historians, with some, including Neil Foley and Thomas Guglielmo suggesting that Mexican Americans, in the decades before and after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), claimed status as whites, seeking a place in the Jim Crow South far from that of blacks.43 Other historians saw Mexican Americans embrace whiteness merely as a legal tactic.44 In yet another view, Max Krochmal argues that members of the Mexican American civil rights movement were committed to multiracial organizing and “did not position themselves as ‘white’ ethnics opposed to black civil rights.”45 Nancy Hewitt notes that Texas and Oklahoma stand out as places in the Southwest where Mexicans and American Indians, among others, have pushed back against viewing race as binary.46 Many inside (and outside) the media are unaware of their unconscious reliance on the erroneous black–­white race paradigm. Yet, American journalism has played a significant role in constructing and perpetuating this simplified binary. A prime example is the Library of America’s two-­volume set Reporting Civil Rights, which was published in 2003.47 The compilation of civil rights news coverage starts the civil rights timeline during the New Deal in 1941, when A. Philip Randolph called for a march on Washington to protest segregation in the US military. The anthology’s chronology concludes in 1973, with the end of the Vietnam War and the election of Tom Bradley, the first African American mayor of Los Angeles, among other milestones. The editors offered no rationale for defining the civil rights movement within these limits, further contributing to the implicit conflation of civil rights with the African American experience alone.48 Whether journalists and others adopted the black-­white racial binary deliberately or unconsciously, the effect has been to ignore or margin-

Introduction  9

alize other racialized groups, including Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans, among other Latinos.49 This book offers a step toward correcting this, highlighting little-­remembered and untold episodes, including, for instance, the story of a massive march for jobs through downtown San Antonio on April 7, 1930, which demonstrated Mexican agency and political voice in contrast to a racialized stereotype suggesting a lack of civic engagement. This analysis of stories like this illustrates a primary methodology in my approach to this book. One such method, media framing theory, analyzes the way news narratives are constructed and helps contextualize the news stories. As Todd Gitlin explains, “Frames are principles of selection, emphasis, and presentation composed of little tacit theories about what exists, what happens, and what matters.”50 In other words, there are many ways to tell a story, and the way a story is told is socially significant, because it may shape and support the way readers think about people, policy, and events. It may even shape the way people in those stories think about themselves.51 Therefore, the conceptual framework for this book is drawn from an understanding of the news narrative and the social construction of reality, and the qualitative use of media frame analysis. Additional concepts that have bearing on this analysis include memory studies, in this case, media recall of the past; Orientalism, the Western style of “othering” another culture; and commodity racism, the appropriating of “the other” for commercial purposes.52 Newspapers’ interpretive function is integral to the media’s role in constructing ideas about Mexicans, Mexican Americans, immigrants, and their relationship, if any, to the dominant US culture. In sum, this study seeks in part to fill a gap in understanding the role media played in our construction of ideas about Mexicans and immigration. In so doing, it contributes to a repositioning of this episode of repatriation, deportation, and immigration in the public memory and in the study of the Long Civil Rights Movement. Through tracing a rich triptych of news coverage during the Great Depression, this book argues these early twentieth-­century newspaper accounts helped their respective readers learn what it meant to be Mexican and Mexican American in US society. The study probes how the mainstream English-­language newspapers and the ethnic Spanish-­language paper conveyed different visions of those identities. If newspapers set an agenda for remembrance, then by their omissions newspapers implied what might be forgotten. As George Lipsitz noted, “mass-­media images rarely grant legitimacy to marginal perspectives.”53 Instead, the ethnic

10 Introduction

community is “surrounded by images that exclude them” and “included in images that have no real social power.”54 In some ways, my book builds upon Natalia Molina’s work on “racialized scripts,” in immigration legislation from 1925 to 1930, in which she offers a window into how the “long immigration debate era,” helped cement a pejorative racialized image of Mexicans living in the United States.55 They Came to Toil raises questions about how the US media transmitted views about immigrants and how—or if—immigrants should be policed amid national economic calamity. It explores three areas within media history ripe for further study: immigrant and minority news, Spanish-­language news, and news coverage of labor and the economy. As James Carey said, “Journalism is a cultural form, a literary act” and “a symbolic strategy” that “sizes up elements” and tells us how people in the past “grasped reality.”56 This book departs from the work of Balderrama and Hoffmann and other disciplinary historians in that it looks foremost at what the newspapers said happened, and not at what happened per se. In other words, this book is not a history of events but a history of the representation of events that play a key role in shaping public memory. The comparative approach shows how the competing media viewed Mexicans and immigration, each through their own refracted lens. The focus on news coverage of these issues, therefore, is an invitation to understand the consciousness of the past, to encounter the ideas and imagination expressed in the cultural form known as journalism and the ways in which it racialized and stamped Mexicans and immigrants as either “other” or “American.” More than that, it places that consciousness of the past in the context of three competing newspapers, each, as Benedict Anderson might put it, imagining a community for their diverse respective audiences.57 Although perceptions of audience needs, along with biases and filters, inevitably played a role in coverage, journalists wrote about tangible events, even if it was for their imagined community of readers. The migration of persons of Mexican ancestry to and from the United States and Mexico occurred at various times before the 1930s. Most notably, thousands had repatriated during the economic recession of 1920–1921, a smaller-­scale yet precedent-­setting event of voluntary and forced removals.58 Repatriation in the 1930s constituted a different order of magnitude and significance. The depth and breadth of the Great Depression, which affected sectors from banking, to agriculture, to mining and manufacturing, forced the majority culture’s relationship to the “Mexican” into

Introduction  11

sharp relief. The comparative media frames explored in this book reveal how English- and Spanish-­language newspapers represented for their audiences the “reality” of the Mexican during this most storied period of economic despair.

Newspapers as Sites of Memory This book shows how Depression era journalism operated as a site or repository of memory through newspaper accounts. Implicit in this approach is the notion that these newspapers, which elites managed and wrote for, framed the way everyday people understood their world. Journalism may help preserve and instill a national memory of the past.59 As Gladys Engel Lang and Kurt Lang put it, “historical ‘reality’ undergoes a continuous process of construction and reconstruction,” and the journalist’s role in mediating that reality is an early step in that process.60 In this role, journalism becomes what French historian Pierre Nora calls a site of memory, or a lieux de mémoire. These newspapers selected, identified, and sometimes analyzed events, issues, places, people, and even the past as they related to Mexicans and immigration. Mainstream English-­language press, through its coverage, then helped to shape the dominant culture’s notion of community through the appropriation of the oppressed “other,” as Edward Said and Stuart Hall have observed. By recognizing, celebrating, and romanticizing another culture, in this case San Antonio, newspapers and their readers in the 1930s exerted their editorial authority to rescue, preserve, and memorialize Spanish colonial culture as they defined it. In doing so they enacted an Americanized version of Said’s concept of Orientalism.61 Moreover, the romanticization involved in this effort, also known as Spanish nostalgia or Spanish fantasy, is emblematic of what Renato Rosaldo calls “imperialist nostalgia.” The conservationists in San Antonio were not simply resurrecting the Spanish missions. In lamenting past misuse and abuse, they sought to absolve Anglo destruction of the community and culture of Iberian pioneers by mythologizing and rebuilding the Spaniards’ architectural achievements.62 This book’s analysis is based on a critical evaluation of news coverage in three daily newspapers, the San Antonio Express, the San Antonio Light, and La Prensa, during a five-­year period from the end of the Roaring Twenties to the onset of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Microfilm and digital database editions of the San Antonio Express, the

12 Introduction

Light, and La Prensa newspapers from January 1929 to January 1934 were used to identify editorial content relating to deportation, repatriation, and Mexican ethnic issues. Identifying specific frames in editorial content and analyzing them in the context of the time and in terms of the nation’s long struggles concerning immigration, ethnicity, and their relationship to Mexico offers an innovative exploration of a seminal period of immigration history. Studying the San Antonio Express and La Prensa permitted to some degree an apples-­to-­apples comparison in that both were independent, non-­chain-­operated, local voices that interpreted daily reality through their news pages. Studying Hearst’s Light shows how a mega media organization headquartered far from the border framed an entirely different vision of immigration. The editorial content studied included news articles, editorials, letters to the editor and opinion pieces, retrieved via keyword searches and critical reading of the daily editions of the newspapers. Other primary sources include the Huntington Library’s Lozano family/La Opinión collection, 1875–2006, and the Bancroft Library’s Wil­ liam Randolph Hearst Papers, 1874–1951. This book emphasizes the period January 1929 through January 1934 because it encompassed the longest official recessionary period during the Great Depression, the forty-­three-­month span of declining growth from August 1929 through March 1933, as designated by the National Bureau of Economic Research.63 This time frame also included the peak period of the repatriation of Mexicans from the United States, which occurred in 1931, according to data from the Mexican Migration Service.64 Previous historical studies of repatriation and unconstitutional deportation drew on newspapers as source material but did not study the stories themselves, the editorial context shaping them, or the broader implications embedded in the discourse framing them. Balderrama and Rodríguez, the coauthors of Decade of Betrayal, the most comprehensive and recent history of repatriation, noted that the phenomenon was widely covered by Spanish-­language newspapers in the Southwest.65 Balderrama and other historians cited newspapers, including Ignacio Lozano’s La Prensa, to supplement other sources and to fill narrative gaps. This book departs from those works in its focus on the newspapers’ interpretive, mediating role in transmitting news about this epic movement of Mexican people. Furthermore, by comparing the three sets of frames, the research assesses whether the news accounts suggest a view of the economy divided by culture. As Lipsitz noted, “because their marginality involves the pain

Introduction  13

of exclusion and exploitation, racial and ethnic cultures speak eloquently about the fissures and frictions of society.”66 This book amplifies this racial and ethnic cultural voice by placing the Spanish-­language media on the same playing field with English-­language news, and not merely evaluating the ethnic press as “alternative media” or advocacy journalism, as has often been done in the past. A study of the media’s role in illuminating the past requires drawing on some historical background, both of events and of the journalists and media outlets involved in their interpretive reporting. Knowing the context mitigates the tendency to present-­mindedness, to viewing the journalists, news consumers, and newsmakers of the past in the light of today. A few scholars have made a case for Texas newspapers’ role in shaping ideas. Patrick Cox, author of The First Texas News Barons, for instance, contributed to the historiography of early twentieth-­century Texas by illustrating the pivotal modernizing role Texas newspapers played during the Depression years. This is in contrast to most histories, which credit federal government investment and the petroleum industry for fueling state growth. At the same time, Cox acknowledged the English-­language papers in Texas were not consistently forward-­looking in their minority coverage. Many papers, including the Express, battled the Ku Klux Klan but often omitted news about Mexican American and black success.67 Whereas the San Antonio Express and other English-­language Texas daily newspapers expressed a modern consciousness for Texans, La Prensa and other Spanish-­language newspapers performed a more complex function. In the view of pioneering Spanish-­language newspaper researcher Félix Gutiérrez, these newspapers operated as “institutions of social control, institutions of activism,” and reflections of Mexican American life.68 Expanding on these ideas, Carlos Cortés described the newspapers as transmitters of history, language, and culture, and invigorators of pride.69 La Prensa, according to Roberto Treviño, served “as both mirror and agent of cultural change and continuity” for Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Texas.70 In this book, however, I argue that La Prensa, with its base in San Antonio, the critical hub of emerging Mexican American identity, and its circulation throughout the United States and Mexico, served these roles for Mexicans and Mexican Americans nationwide, not just in Texas. La Prensa was an expatriate newspaper, owned and operated by Ignacio Lozano, who had left Mexico in 1908.71 Lozano’s newspaper reinforced a Mexican outlook that was simultaneously elitist and intellectual and supportive of equality for Mexicans in the United States. Lozano viewed

14 Introduction

Mexicans in the United States as “still part of a historical consciousness of a Mexican collectivity” even if they failed to return to Mexico.72 Lozano was “the personification of Mexican culture, tradition and gente decente (good breeding) and this profile, espoused through his news pages, helped make him famous throughout Texas and the Southwest.”73 A writer, a publisher, and a businessman, Lozano has been justifiably described as an “elite opinion leader,” who, in the view of Maggie Rivas-­Rodriguez, used journalism and his relative position of privilege to uplift Mexicans living in the United States.74 He achieved this in part by publishing newspapers and books produced by a rich stable of influential writers, including the noted Mexican journalists Nemesio García Naranjo and Rodolfo Uranga. Lozano also accomplished this by covering issues, including civil rights issues, “that reflected the political needs of middle-­class Mexican immigrants in the United States.”75 While his newspapers have often been criticized for having an elitist orientation, their widespread circulation in two nations suggests that Lozano’s imagined community of readers was broader and more diverse than that assessment permits. The inclusion of Spanish-­language press in this study highlights a long Texas newspaper tradition that began in the early 1800s. The Gaceta de Tejas was purportedly the first newspaper in any language to be published in Texas. The Gaceta, which appeared in 1813, was written in Texas and possibly printed in Louisiana.76 The Nacogdoches (Texas) Mexican Advocate, which began printing in 1829, is more authoritatively documented as the first Texas-­based newspaper. Others followed, including papers in both English and Spanish. El Bejareño, a Spanish-­language paper published in San Antonio in 1855, predated the founding of the San Antonio Express by a decade.77 In sum, a premise of this study is the notion that English- and Spanish-­ language news construct significant, differing versions of reality. In fact, “through language, an entire world can be actualized at any moment,” according to the architects of the social construction of reality, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann.78 For Mexican Americans, who figure prominently in this book, language has almost a mystical significance.79 In a poetic restatement of Stuart Hall’s idea, Sabine Ulibarrí, the poet and Spanish professor, asserted that the link between language and culture was inextricable: “The language, the Word, carries within it the history, the culture, the traditions, the very life of a people, the flesh. Language is people. We cannot even conceive of a people without a language or a language without a people. The two are one and the same. To know one is to

Introduction  15

know the other. To love one is to love the other.”80 That said, loathing and revenge, more typically than love, colored the historical backdrop for this story of Great Depression immigration.

Mexican and Immigrant News in Historical Context To understand how these media frames contributed to cultural memory, it is essential to briefly overview the history preceding the era and some of the political dynamics that characterized it. The Great Depression era issues featured in this book were rooted in racial, ethnic, and economic tensions between Mexicans and Anglos from the prior century, and from memories, including mediated memories, of them. The stage was set in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the bloody war between the United States of America and Mexico, which is known across the border as the US Invasion of Mexico. The treaty ended everything and ended nothing, a contradiction that can be understood by what David Montejano calls the culture of “race-­thinking” and the idea of “Mexican inferiority” that to some degree had long delineated Mexican and Anglo relations.81 Social connections were at times more complex and negotiated between the two groups. In the early 1800s, for instance, as Raúl Ramos notes, Tejanos—Mexican Texans—served as “cultural brokers” between Anglo-­American immigrants to the region and the Mexican state.82 Subsequently, Tejanos allied with Anglos to help make Texas an independent republic in 1836. In short order, however, “the cross-­ethnic future Tejanos had imagined” was replaced with the reality of their dispossession and decline in the social order. Tejanos began uniting into ethnic lines across class. Many were stripped of lands, particularly in Central and East Texas, “from the very towns they had founded.”83 Much of this was accomplished through the rebel-­created Texas Rangers, a force of “frontier heroes” who often took vigilante action in their zeal to eliminate Mexicans from now-­ perceived Anglo territory.84 That elimination process would continue after the War with Mexico when the two countries created a border between them, a manufactured construct that became a permanent prop in the nation’s immigration narrative. Under the treaty, Mexico ceded one-­third of its landmass, including Texas and land that now comprises all or part of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico.85 In theory, the treaty protected Mexicans annexed into the

16 Introduction

United States, stating that their legal rights and property would be preserved. They were permitted to opt for US citizenship or legal residency if they remained, though hostility persisted toward Mexicans, particularly in Texas. In practice, many lost property and other rights, nonetheless.86 The one hundred thousand or so Mexicans left in the United States were “relegated to an inferior caste-­like status in the region’s evolving social system.”87 Mexicans became “strangers in a strange land, a minority struggling for acceptance in a sea of Americans.”88 This turn of events was all the more peculiar because San Antonio, the most Spanish and Mexican of cities, had become the leading city in the Republic of Texas.89 Overshadowed by new European immigration and geographically isolated, Mexicans in the United States lived in relative obscurity until a confluence of late nineteenth-­century events facilitated increased economic and cultural integration with Mexico.90 First, the development of railroads and irrigation, especially in California, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah, coupled with political chaos in Mexico (which included the Mexican Revolution of 1910), sped Mexican immigration.91 Mexican immigrants also benefited from laws that restricted Asian laborers: first, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the subsequent Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1908, which restricted Japanese immigrants prior to World War I. Many Japanese were ousted after they moved from contract farm labor and formed cooperatives, bought their own land, and competed with their former employers.92 Mexicans were perceived by some, such as Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler, as a rung above Asians on the hierarchy of color, leading US business to look to its own hemisphere for cheap, docile, and mobile labor.93 But the oil-­fueled boom that led to suburban expansion in the 1920s, rising sales of automobiles, and mechanization of the nation’s farms marked the start of nearly two decades of rural recession as Europe recovered from World War I and imported less food. 94 Mexicans soon became extraneous labor.95 This farming crisis and the political clout of eugenics advocates helped fuel the drive for immigration restrictions that led to the Immigration Act of 1924.96 The aftermath of World War I also marked a little-­documented repatriation episode, forcing out Mexican immigrants no longer needed.97 Repatriation as a practice began even earlier, at the end of the Mexican War, with Mexicans fleeing Austin, Seguin, and San Antonio, among other places. Discrimination, violence, and competition with Anglo-­Americans for land and resources forced many to return to Mexico during the latter

Introduction  17

part of the nineteenth century.98 Violent episodes continued to stoke enmity between the US and Mexico in the early twentieth century. These included President Woodrow Wilson’s invasion of Veracruz in 1914.99 Two years later, Pancho Villa’s rebel forces raided Columbus, New Mexico, provoking another Wilsonian intervention south of the border—General Pershing’s Punitive Expedition that failed to capture Villa.100 By mid-­ 1916, border skirmishes among US combat forces, Villa, and Mexican government troops nearly escalated into all-­out war between the United States and Mexico.101 Bowing to diplomatic pressure, Wilson in early 1917 ordered the withdrawal of Pershing’s expedition.102 With memories of these events still fresh, Mexican immigration opponent John C. Box, an East Texan from Jacksonville, won a seat in Congress in 1919. Box came from an area better known for small-­scale tomato farming than large-­scale cotton growing, then Texas’s biggest crop.103 Box’s constituents viewed low-­cost Mexican labor as an economic threat. In 1928 Box and Sen. William J. Harris of Georgia, who represented another cotton-­growing state, sponsored bills to restrict Western Hemisphere immigration. Their efforts failed, but Box and Harris fanned a national debate that elicited unflattering media depictions of Mexicans.104 The Saturday Evening Post, a potent anti-­ immigrant magazine that boasted a circulation of three million in 1936, plainly stated that Mexicans must go.105 “Mexican exclusion,” the Post editorialized, “is [the American worker’s] only salvation.”106 It was June 1929, and the Great Crash was four months away. An important exception to this outlook, though less well known, is the view of Mexicans and immigration found in a cradle of the old Spanish colonial empire—San Antonio—particularly in English and Spanish news coverage at the dawn of the Depression decade of economic woe. This view is important because, as communications scholar Michael Schudson asserted, “the American newspaper” is “the most representative carrier and construer and creator of modern public consciousness.”107 Moreover, Schudson made a case for investigating the qualitative difference of the ethnic press: “When minorities . . . are authors of news as well as its readers, the social world represented in the news expands and changes.”108 Until now, however, there has been no focused, comparative analysis of the English- and Spanish-­language press’s mediating role in construing and creating an American consciousness of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and immigration during the Great Depression.

18 Introduction

San Antonio San Antonio’s bicultural, bilingual Mexican American historical legacy makes it a particularly rich choice for this case study of a journalistic representation of immigration issues in the Depression economy. Almost three decades after the Spanish first explored the area, they built the San Antonio de Béxar Presidio in 1718. But it was not until fifty-­five settlers, most of them teenage or younger, arrived from Tenerife in the Canary Islands in 1731 that the town was incorporated. These newcomers joined the few earlier settler-­soldiers, Franciscan missionaries, and Indians in a frequently uneasy coexistence.109 After Texas gained its independence from Mexico at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the Republic of Texas established Béxar County and made San Antonio its seat. Historian David Weber argued that the blood spilt between Anglos and Mexicans in Texas, particularly in the battles at the Alamo in San Antonio, at San Jacinto, and at Goliad, Texas, was unprecedented in the Southwest and West. The violence embittered Anglos toward Mexicans, and at least initially, toward the Spanish too. More than a century later, during the Great Depression, some Anglos were determined to see Mexicans go, while others recognized their importance to the economy. San Antonio in the early twentieth century was the cosmopolitan heart of South Texas and the recognized gateway to Mexico.110 “San Antonio has . . . that intangible but potential asset—the good will and understanding of the Mexican people,” as the Express put it in a page-­one column.111 In part, this was because San Antonio had been a prime commercial and trade center for two centuries. In the 1930s it was also an important reservoir of Mexican labor, with many agricultural workers using San Antonio as a home hub between jobs elsewhere.112 San Antonio’s US Census numbers document the changing demographics of Mexicans in this period. In 1930 Mexican-­born residents of San Antonio had risen to 33,146, or 14.3 percent of the city’s 231,542 population.113 San Antonio, which had been the largest city in the state until 1920, fell to third place among Texas cities in the 1930 census, trailing Houston and Dallas. The year before the 1930 census, the US government made illegal border crossing a misdemeanor for first-­time offenders. Repeat offenders faced felony charges and fines of up to $2,000.114 Expulsions of Mexicans accelerated after President Herbert Hoover appointed William N. Doak to head the US Department of Labor in December 1930. Within a month of his appointment, Doak wrote the Senate that

Introduction  19

about 400,000 people were illegally living in the United States and that at least 100,000 were deportable.115 The number was “a fair estimate, or conjecture,” he wrote in his letter to the Senate. “It is obviously impossible to arrive at any concrete figures as to the number of aliens unlawfully in the country,” he added.116 By the end of June 1931, more than half of the 22,952 Mexicans who were deported or left Texas voluntarily (in many cases to avoid deportation) were processed through the San Antonio Immigration and Naturalization Service District.117 This book analyzes the story of how San Antonio’s three major daily newspapers chronicled their plight, and the Mexican Americans and immigrants who struggled to remain.

The Newspapers The San Antonio Express, the San Antonio Light, and La Prensa differed in language, audience, and ownership, among other things. The Express and La Prensa trace their roots to the aftermath of seminal events in Texas–­Mexico history. The Express printed its first edition twenty-­nine years after the Alamo fell and is the longest continuously operating newspaper in San Antonio.118 La Prensa was founded three years after the Mexican Revolution of 1910.119 The Express and its younger sibling, the Evening News, battled William Randolph Hearst’s San Antonio Light for English-­language readers.120

San Antonio Express Union sympathizers founded the Express in 1865, borrowing the presses of the San Antonio Freie Presse für Texas, a German-­language newspaper.121 Frank Granger Huntress, a child of post–­Civil War San Antonio, started his sixty-­year run at the Express as a newsboy, which he became at fifteen. By the time of the Depression, he was already running the paper. Huntress represented old and new San Antonio. He was the son of a wealthy businessman and the grandson of a former New York City newspaperman. His mother descended from a Mexican ranching and business family, but whether this background informed his journalism is difficult to gauge, because his personal papers have never been found. Huntress eventually became part owner, general manager, president, and later, chairman of the Express.122 On the eve of the Depression, in 1929, Huntress moved the newspaper into an eight-­story office build-

Figure I.1. Frank G. Huntress, publisher of the San Antonio Express, published in the Light, May 30, 1929, photo by Smith Studio, possibly circa 1929. San Antonio Light Photograph Collection, UTSA Special Collections–­Institute of Texan Cultures (ITC), No. L-­1133-­L. Used with permission, © San Antonio Express-­News/ZUMA.

Introduction  21

ing in downtown San Antonio. Like his Depression era counterpart at the Light, Huntress retained control of his newspaper until his death. Huntress died in his hotel room in San Antonio in 1955. His holdings were strengthened after George W. Brackenridge, founder of San Antonio National Bank, died in 1920, leaving his fortune, including his one-­third ownership in the newspaper, in an estate trust that Huntress ultimately headed. As a young man, Brackenridge had come from Indiana with his family. He had been a Union sympathizer during the Civil War and had worked in the Treasury Department of his father’s friend Abraham Lincoln, a move that may have indicated his willingness to take unpopular stands in his adoptive hometown of San Antonio, the site where in 1861 the Union surrendered, giving $3 million in armaments to the Confederacy in Texas.123

The San Antonio Light The afternoon daily and Sunday morning newspaper was founded in January 1881 as a Republican newspaper. Three decades later, when Harrison L. Beach and Charles S. Diehl, “veteran correspondents of national standing,” assumed control, they added wire service news and expanded business news by publishing “the first full market reports in a San Antonio newspaper.”124 Circulation at the newspaper more than doubled to 25,000 subscribers from 11,000, though it is unclear whether it reflected the paper’s new traditional Southern Democratic perspective or merely the city’s growing population. William Randolph Hearst brought chain ownership to the Light in 1924 and declared a full-­scale newspaper war against the Express.125 At the height of the Depression, Hearst was “the owner of the biggest pile of newspapers in the world,” twenty-­eight in all, with an estimated 5.5 million daily subscribers and 7 million on Sunday in major American cities, including San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and, of course, San Antonio.126 Light publisher William McKay McIntosh, whom Hearst brought on to take charge of the paper, began his career as a printer’s devil. McIntosh worked initially for the Scripps newspaper chain, starting with the Cleveland Press and the Cincinnati Post, and then managed the Kentucky Post, across the Ohio River in Covington. After moving to Texas in 1921 to launch the Fort Worth Press for Scripps, he joined the Hearst chain as business manager of the Fort Worth Record. In contrast to his Express competitor Huntress, who was a native Texan, McIntosh was a Canadian who had

22 Introduction

Figure I.2. William M. McIntosh, publisher of the San Antonio Light (left), Alejandro P. Carrillo, consul general of Mexico in San Antonio (center), and City of San Antonio mayor John W. Tobin (right), published in the Light, June 20, 1926. San Antonio Light Photograph Collection, UTSA Special Collections–­ITC, No. L-­0004. Used with permission, © San Antonio Express-­News/ZUMA.

spent most of his career outside the state. Nonetheless, he fit in well in San Antonio, joining civic organizations such as the Order of the Alamo.127 During the Depression, McIntosh lobbied Hearst to allow a measure of regional flavor in his newspaper, particularly the popular newspaper columns of Will “the Cherokee Kid” Rogers.128 McIntosh, known as a wit and a raconteur, served as president of the Texas Newspaper Publisher’s Association, an early state news business group. He remained publisher of the Light until 1946, when he died of a heart attack at his birthplace in Ontario, Canada.129

La Prensa La Prensa, started in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, was a “respected national and international political voice” and arguably the

Introduction  23

most notable US Spanish-­language paper in the first half of the twentieth century.130 La Prensa targeted Mexican expatriates and longtime Mexican residents, as US citizens of Mexican descent and Mexican immigrants were called then.131 Lozano started La Prensa with $1,200— his life savings—supported by a brief tutelage at a San Antonio–­based Spanish-­language magazine, and an earlier stint as a poet for a newspaper in his hometown in Durango, Mexico. With presses rolling three years after the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Lozano became one of several émigré editors who helped shape a Mexican American consciousness that laid the groundwork for a “contemporary intellectual and political movement” that “championed the cause of the non-­white peoples of the Third World.”132 Eyeing the growing Los Angeles market, Lozano started a sister paper, La Opinión, in 1926. He leveraged connections with emerging Mexican stars in Hollywood for the benefit of both newspapers and, no doubt in his view, the Spanish-­speaking community as a whole.133 In San Antonio, La Prensa, the Light, and the Express were three newspapers that had covered the Great War and now were on the cusp of another “Great,” the Great Depression.

Organization of the Book This book chronologically examines the way three Texas newspapers constructed coverage of divergent and, in some cases, overlapping realities of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and immigrants during the nation’s most storied period of economic privation, January 1929 through January 1934. Chapter 1 launches an examination of the news coverage of Mexican repatriation and immigration as the Roaring Twenties came to an end and new laws criminalizing crossing the US border illegally were enacted. This chapter shows that repatriation was little covered in La Prensa, the Express, and the Light in 1929. Nonetheless, news frames concerning Mexicans and immigrants began to emerge, some of which would recur throughout the period covered in this study; the chapters analyze the evolution or reconfiguration of these frames over time. Repatriates were often framed dichotomously, as for instance, in La Prensa, where they were often either patriots or pariahs. Chapter 2 studies news coverage as repatriation escalated through 1930 and analyzes news frames during this period of heightened political controversy over Mexican immigration. The Express and the Light were

24 Introduction

at loggerheads, with the former outlining the need for Mexican labor in numerous editorials, while the Light argued for only “fit” immigrants and more comprehensive deportation. The Hearst-­owned Light discussed deportation and immigration focusing on “communists,” almost oblivious to the drama surrounding Mexicans in the United States. The Express trained its editorial eye on the impact of business interests in Texas, linking Mexican labor issues and immigration in the same financial frame. Chapter 3 assesses news coverage during 1931, the peak year of Mexican repatriation. This was a reverse biblical exodus, a dispersion from the promised land of the United States to Mexico, a place where few promises were made, and even fewer kept. During the year, 138,519 Mexicans left the United States for Mexico as government and local welfare agencies initiated formal repatriation programs. Among other things, this chapter analyzes reporting on a caravan of thousands of destitute cotton pickers who left Karnes County, Texas, with the support of the Mexican American communities they passed through along the way. News about this exodus of persons of Mexican descent contrasted starkly with stories celebrating San Antonio’s bicentennial, as the Spanish nostalgia frame in Express coverage showed how the Anglo-­Texan culture celebrated the past of those it oppressed. Chapter 4 examines coverage from 1932 through 1933, as repatriation continued at a slower pace, and disillusionment about resettling in Mexico set in. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inaugural speech linked economic recovery to the American pioneer spirit. But, as an analysis of news frames in these years shows, San Antonio, as continuously articulated in the Express, had already tied its Spanish pioneer past to its plans for a rosier future. Some news frames were inflected by New Deal rhetoric. For instance, Hearst and his newspapers found a new topic to focus on: promoting Roosevelt’s policies. La Prensa alone continued to tell the sad story of repatriates and deportees, reporting on an emerging civic and charitable consciousness as Mexican Americans in Texas, and Mexicans in Mexico, raised money and supplies to assist returnees. Chapter 5 explores the meanings and implications of the way Englishand Spanish-­language newspapers represented Mexicans and immigrants during the 1929-­to-­1934 period. The ways in which persons of Mexican descent were active or absent from the polity and society in these news pages construct versions of realities that are as dichotomous as those Alice saw through the looking glass. Taken together these three newspapers pub-

Introduction  25

lished an important chapter in an early rough draft of US immigration history, one whose omissions and commissions have a bearing on how we think about Mexicans, immigrants, and civil rights today. The story of Mexicans and immigrants during the Great Depression of the 1930s was echoed in the Great Recession, which started in December 2007. During the latter economic debacle, hundreds of thousands of immigrants were deported in a crackdown that continued well after the downturn officially concluded in June 2009. Congressional inaction on immigration reform legislation led then-­president Barack Obama to create in 2012 the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA). Designed for young people between fifteen and thirty who had been brought to the United States illegally as children, the initiative offered temporary relief from deportation, and a two-­year work permit. Despite this effort, Obama became known as the “Deporter-­in-­Chief,” and in 2013 the administration expelled a record 435,000 immigrants who were in the country without authorization.134 The large-­scale deportations did not deter desperate young people. In 2014 Obama declared an “immediate humanitarian crisis,” as tens of thousands of children from Central America and Mexico traveled alone across the southern US border fleeing violence and poverty.135 Then as in the 1930s, and many times in between, questions over how and whether to incorporate immigrants into American life arose. As this book’s conclusion notes, another of those times surfaced during the presidential election in 2016. The man ultimately elected to succeed Obama, Donald Trump, announced his candidacy for office by denouncing Mexican immigrants, saying in part: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. . . . They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”136 Trump made immigration, particularly from Mexico, a cornerstone of his campaign and also made it the theme of his first campaign advertisement, which ran in Iowa. “He’ll build a wall on our southern border that Mexico will pay for,” the Trump TV ad stated.137 Citing in part the rhetoric of the 2016 US presidential election, Dictionary.com made xenophobia the word of the year for 2016.138 The ambiguous racial othering of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, recorded in mainstream news coverage, an important site of memory, has helped metaphorically typeset them outside the black–­white race binary. This final chapter considers how similarities and differences in Spanishversus English-­language news coverage have implications for the way Mexicans, immigrants, and repatriation have been documented and re-

26 Introduction

membered or forgotten historically. The Spanish-­language news coverage evaluated here adds an important missing dimension to an understanding of our nation’s truly Long and Wide Civil Rights Movement. At the same time, this use of little-­studied evidence enhances our understanding not only of American journalism, but also of the persistent question of what it means to be American.

Chapter 1

1929

To Pave a Way through Hostile and Barren Lands

N

ot all Mexicans chose jail the way La Prensa’s celebrated deportee Carlos Espinosa did. Most deported Mexicans did not opt to return and face a felony conviction. Many preferred to stay in the United States, which had until 1929 mostly proven a land of opportunity, jobs, and peace. By staying, Mexicans escaped the gun battles between peasants and anticlerical Mexican government troops that raged into the fourth year of the Cristero Rebellion.1 Nonetheless, Mexicans of varying economic fortunes decided it was time to return. News coverage suggested that some fled as fierce US policy debates over Mexican immigration incited animosity toward them. Others left in fear and confusion after Congress in 1929 created misdemeanor and felony penalties for entering the country illegally.2 Moreover, the Alien Registry Act of 1929, which gave immigrants who arrived in the country before June 3, 1921, an opportunity to legalize their status, created panic among those who were unable to find pertinent documents. News coverage of Mexicans and repatriation, immigration, and deportation began shifting in 1929 as the nation slipped into the Great Depression. The election of Herbert Hoover set the tone for anti-­immigrant sentiments. He was inaugurated president in March 1929, seven months before Black Thursday—the stock market crash of October 24, 1929. The effects of the financial crisis bowed the nation and, as is often the case during economic slumps, exacerbated tensions over those viewed as “the other” in society. Hoover explained his action in his 1952 memoirs: “In view of the large amount of unemployment at the time, I concluded that directly or indirectly all immigrants were a public charge at the moment—either they themselves went on relief as soon as they landed, or, if they did get jobs, they forced others onto relief.”3 The congressional battle over Mexican labor intensified, but Hoover sidestepped the House and Senate. Chaf-

28 They Came to Toil

ing at Congressional delay as debate raged over a proposed new quota law to keep Mexicans out, Hoover adopted Coolidge’s tactical use of administrative tools, including one that allowed the State Department to deny visas to most Mexicans.4 Another provision, first included in the Immigration Act of 1882, barred any immigrant liable to become a public charge from entering the United States, and Hoover lost no time applying these measures to Mexicans. Businessmen, farmers and ranchers, politicians, and some San Antonio women’s clubs took various stands on the Mexican question, the newspaper coverage showed. Some Anglos took steps to protect their workers, friends, and neighbors, trying to help longtime Mexican residents remain in the country legally. Mexican workers were on tenuous ground, their presence often questioned and threatened.5 This contrasted with the memory of their Spanish colonial forebears, whose four-­centuries-­old historical legacy in the Southwest was revived, celebrated, and stirringly retold in San Antonio and particularly in the Express and Light news pages. Repatriation, though, was little covered in the Express and the Light in 1929. La Prensa, in contrast, referenced the repatriation of Mexican workers or the term repatriation in forty-­two stories.6 The Express, however, ran a single one-­paragraph story using the term.7 Some Express news coverage simply observed that Mexicans were returning, without using the term repatriate or repatriation. An August 21, 1929, story noted that the Mexican government had provided $100,000 to help about 2,000 Mexicans families in the Valley return.8 The Light mentioned repatriation in only two stories, both related to events in Paraguay, not Mexico.9 But both the Express and the Light reported on the October 1929 Texas visit of Felipe Canales, undersecretary of the Mexican Interior Ministry, who invited Mexicans to move to their homeland. “The Mexican government is encouraging its citizens to return to Mexico from your country,” Canales told the Express on the San Antonio leg of his trip. The Mexican government paid the railroad fare for more than three thousand Mexicans who “returned of their own free will” last month, he added.10 For policy makers in the far and high reaches of the Mexican and American governments in 1929, moving Mexicans back across the border or—better yet—keeping them out of the US entirely seemed a simple, easy solution. However, for those near to the action, in the barrios, ranches, factories, foundries, fisheries, construction zones, and other areas of labor, news reports showed that nothing about the policy was simple or easy.

1929  29

Diverse Representations of Mexicans in 1929 News Coverage Immigration, deportation, and repatriation were closely connected topics, and all three newspapers reported on the impact new immigration laws and enforcement actions had on the decisions Mexicans made to return to their country. These issues dealt with the role of the Mexican laborer in US society, a role imagined in contested and contrary ways. As the 1920s came to a close, several discernible frames about Depression era Mexicans emerged in news coverage. Repatriates, immigrants, and deportees were dichotomously framed in news stories as patriots or pariahs. Framed as patriots, returning Mexicans were national heroes expected to boost Mexico’s human capital in the aftermath of a devastating revolution. Framed as pariahs, repatriates and deportees were pathetic figures whose destitute homecoming threatened the already faltering Mexican economy. Another frame—one might call it “the good-­ citizen frame”—­ documented the Mexican community’s civic and philanthropic efforts to support repatriating countrymen. The notion of self-­help was part of this angle of vision on immigrants. News coverage filtered through a prescriptive frame provided potential repatriates and current immigrants with advice and sometimes, particularly in editorials, provided instruction to the government and other authorities about the best course of action. News frames that emerged in 1929 also included a financial frame, viewing the Mexican as integral to the southwestern and Texan economy. Another frame, the somos amigos, or “we are friends,” frame, emphasized diplomatic relations with Mexico and its people. In contrast, another frame stressed the hierarchy of color, which relegated Mexicans to a role in society based on perceived racial status relative to Anglos and other races. Last but not least, a frame built about Spanish nostalgia resurrected the memory of a Spanish colonial past. These frames were often blended, particularly in immigration policy arguments, and suggested the conflicted relationship of the United States with Mexico.

Patriot Frame: Battling Caciques, Caudillos, and Thugs News coverage written in the patriot frame associated returning Mexicans with qualities such as “knowledgeable” and “skilled.” These stories often spoke of the repatriates’ “high-­quality farm equipment,” their where-

30 They Came to Toil

withal to triumph in the strange northern land of the United States, and their noble intent to help “reconstruct” Mexico. In the Light, Mexico’s vice consul in Houston, Fernando Rueda, went so far as to say, “It would be better for Mexico if her citizens were deported,” because “if they return they will improve Mexico.”11 A prime holder of this view was Mexico’s provisional president, Emilio Portes Gil, who described repatriates as economic heroes who would supply Mexico with a $50 million cash infusion. In an article in La Prensa, he predicted that 500,000 Mexicans would repatriate with $100 apiece and their superior farm machinery.12 But Rodolfo Uranga, a notable intellectual who wrote La Prensa’s “Daily Glossary” (“Glosario del dia”) column, rebuked Portes Gil for failing to grasp the intrinsic heroic worth of returning Mexicans. Uranga quibbled with the president’s accounting, noting that railroad workers would return with between $200 and $500; and beet harvesters, miners, and workers from St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, and similar metropolitan areas would bring back even more.13 In this way the repatriates would “compensate for what our little generals and high functionaries wasted on their ‘research’ and pleasure trips to foreign lands,” Uranga wrote. More importantly, according to the columnist, President Portes Gil saw repatriates merely as a $50 million bonanza. In Uranga’s view, they represented much more.14 “Repatriating Mexicans will take with them riches more valuable than dollars, including the habit of constant and productive work, of saving, of preserving, of the tenacity to overcome obstacles and prejudice, to triumph in lopsided battles and to pave a way through hostile and barren lands,” he wrote.15 The other “treasures” the repatriates would take with them to Mexico included “their zeal to be independent, their ideas about freedom of thought, their interest in public affairs, and a hatred for caciques, caudillos, and thugs,” Uranga wrote.16 Uranga was pro-­Mexican, not necessarily pro-­Mexico; by that, I mean he was not in favor of a Mexico that trampled the rights of the people. La Prensa at this time actively framed repatriation as the ideal— a patriotic act. Moreover, the newspaper proclaimed itself “the farmer’s moral supporter in finding a way to return to the homeland under favorable conditions.”17 This was particularly true in the case of knowledgeable and skilled farmers and ranchers. They had the resources to develop their own lands in Mexico and might agree to participate in a Mexican government relocation program. San Martin, where the Mexican government had bought 150,000 acres for families picking cotton in Texas to colonize,

1929  31

was one such development, according to the March 13, 1929, La Prensa.18 In light of the newspaper’s patriotic framing, it is not surprising that it published a story about a meeting of Mexican farm workers in Harlingen with a subhead: “Our countrymen want to repatriate to better their interests and help in the reconstruction of the homeland.”19 To help achieve that aim, La Prensa asked Mexican farmers and ranchers in Texas to explain under what circumstances they would repatriate. Ventura Gonzalez, a farmer from Floresville, Texas, a rural town outside San Antonio, told La Prensa: “We do not want to return to our country to work for the hacendados for one or two kilos of corn, as the saying goes. We want them to give us every guarantee that we can live there the way we have come to live here.”20 Gonzalez unequivocally stated his skepticism about the promise of a better life in Mexico. La Prensa’s farmer-­in-­the-­field interviews were a departure from the government-­sourced or expert-­opinion-­based reporting typically found in the newspaper. Commenting on the evolution of the practice of journalistic interviewing, Michael Schudson noted that journalists used the technique not to show “that the reporter speaks truth to power but that he or she speaks close to power.”21 In other instances, Schudson wrote, the interview “represents an act of solidarity between a reporter and a source.”22 In this case, La Prensa’s reporter used the interview to get closer to the powerless, in keeping with the newspaper’s mission to be the voice of México de afuera, or expatriate Mexico.23 These interviews are also in line with sociologist Robert Park’s assertion that an aim of the immigrant press is “to maintain contact and understanding between the home countries and their scattered members.”24 Publishing in Spanish fulfilled another aim, to prevent the language of the homeland from “disintegrating into mere immigrant dialects,” of “hyphenated English.”25 La Prensa was in conversation with cohorts of regular readers. Some were wealthy exiles; many were among the struggling working class. The newspaper’s patriot frame aimed to connect them cohesively as “countrymen” united by allegiance to Mexico. After the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero Rebellion, the bloody fight between defenders of the Roman Catholic Church and the Mexican government that led to the assassination of President-­elect Alvaro Obregón in 1928, the time to rebuild the country seemed at hand.26 But Mexico, like the rest of the world, had yet another foe to fight: the Great Depression.

32 They Came to Toil

Pariah Frame: The “Plague” of Repatriates Idealized optimism about the return of highly skilled Mexicans collided with unforgiving reality. Repatriation was more often reported as a parable of pain in La Prensa, and occasionally the repatriates were depicted as pariahs, not proud compatriots. These stories used terms such as “lamentable,” “pathetic,” “sad,” “poor,” “oppressed,” “starving,” “suffering,” “painful,” and “miserable,” among others, to describe the plight of the hapless repatriates. These stories tended to show Mexicans as pitiful and powerless, taking the brunt of police and border patrol harassment or community scorn. The dichotomous characterization, as either re-­patriot or pariah, is not solely attributable to economic exigencies. As historian Gilbert González noted, repatriation remained a “symbolic expression” and “never assumed a priority status on the agenda of domestic Mexican politics until pressured by US demands.”27 The Great Depression was another seismic shudder for the country as it struggled to reconstruct itself in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution.28 Mexican exports fell dramatically, particularly in the petroleum and mining sectors, and the national income fell 25 percent from 1929 to 1933.29 Throughout Mexico, factories shut down, from mines in Sonora to breweries in Toluca to textile mills in other cities.30 As Mexican historian Ramón Eduardo Ruiz put it, “Armies of jobless begged for work, while the return of Mexicans expelled from the United States exacerbated their plight.”31 This was true despite official pronouncements from Mexico’s secretary of industry and labor, Ramón de Negri, who promised “there will be work for everyone,” including “Mexicans returning from the United States,” La Prensa reported.32 President Portes Gil was studying solutions to the unemployment problem, including the creation of employee-­run businesses operating under government supervision, de Negri stated in the September 26, 1929, La Prensa news story.33 However, the scene was less promising a month later, as Mexicans were “returning sad and starving,” in caravans and on foot, “through the inhospitable desert of Northern Mexico,” La Prensa reported on November 2, 1929.34 Many repatriates, jobless and without resources in the United States, were returning on their own. Others had been deported after they were unable to provide immigration authorities with documentation required under the new, rigorously enforced immigration law.35 “It would be impossible to describe in a few lines the suffering of these poor and oppressed

1929  33

Figure 1.1. Mexican cotton pickers in Béxar County, near San Antonio, circa August 1930. San Antonio Light Photograph Collection, UTSA Special Collections–­ITC, No. L-­1238-­C. Used with permission, © San Antonio Express-­News/ZUMA.

people,” La Prensa stated.36 As the repatriates and deportees traveled south on foot and in caravans, they found Mexico’s “production centers paralyzed” and many Mexicans starving, the article continued. They also encountered the police outside Saltillo, Mexico, who were there to monitor them, not to lend them aid. The police patrolled a highway crossroads north of Saltillo to “safeguard the city from the plague” of repatriates, the November 2, 1929, article stated, without attributing the quote. This was just the beginning. A week later, La Prensa reported, “An interminable caravan of fellow citizen laborers have been passing morning and afternoon through the Port of Laredo, headed toward the interior of the Mexican Republic.”37 Jobless Mexicans also faced police harassment on the US side of the border. La Prensa warned that the Chamber of Commerce of an undisclosed town near San Antonio persistently recruited Mexican cotton pickers before the crop was ready. The workers were forced to borrow against

34 They Came to Toil

future wages for provisions and were becoming deeply in debt to the growers as they waited for harvest time. Many recruits gave up and walked back to San Antonio, where they joined “enormous groups” of laborers who congregated daily in the city’s Milam Park.38 Under the shadow of the statue of Ben Milam, a Texas revolutionary who rallied forces against the Mexican siege of San Antonio, the jobless Mexicans awaited opportunities.39 City police occasionally forced them out as they swept the park of “vagrants” and “filled the jails with the unemployed,” La Prensa wrote in an article that evinced the pariah frame.40 The “bitterly disillusioned” workers became so wary of out-­of-­town recruiters that they turned down railroad work that paid $2.25 a day without food, or $1.25 with food, for fear that they would only wind up destitute and away from home.41 While enduring shabby treatment on the part of some farmers and ranchers, many Mexican immigrants had an added worry beyond job insecurity: struggling to understand the Alien Registry Act of 1929. The law, which was passed March 2, 1929, permitted immigrants who entered the country illegally before June 3, 1921, the opportunity to become legal residents and ultimately apply for citizenship. The law also included a penalty for immigrants who entered the country illegally after May 4, 1929. Consequently, “hundreds of laborers” fled to Mexico in “confusion,” fearing deportation, the Express reported.42 The local Immigration Service office “was deluged with countless inquiries” about the new federal registration law.43 In San Antonio and surrounding areas, “widespread misunderstanding” of the law led many Mexicans “to sell out and leave the country,” the Light reported in early June.44 “Agitators who have taken advantage of the confusion” pushed some Mexicans to leave, William A. Whalen, the local Immigration Service district director told the Express in a June 20, 1929, article. Complicating the issue was the National Origins Law of 1924, which was not put into effect until June 1929. That quota law changed the numbers of immigrants permitted to enter legally from European countries and particularly impeded emigrants from southern and eastern European countries.45 But the law included no quotas for Western Hemisphere nations. In a page-­one story, the Express quoted US representative John C. Box, an ardent immigration restrictionist, who said the origins law “affects in no way Mexican immigration.”46 Box strongly opposed naturalization bills that would have made it easier for Mexicans, and “probably hundreds of thousands” of other immigrants, to become US citizens.47 Instead, Box said he would keep fighting for laws to restrict Mexican immigration, con-

1929  35

jecturing that Mexicans were fleeing because they lacked the proof needed to stay legally in the country. The Express reported Mexicans had reason to fear: “Rumors concerning incoming restrictions against Mexico along the border, which have created near panics among the Mexican laborers, causing them to make hurried departures, much to the despair of American employers, are not without some foundation.”48 The Express went on to note that the Coolidge administration had taken two recent actions to curb legal and illegal Mexican immigration. First, in January 1929, Coolidge had instructed US consuls general to strictly adhere to visa and passport requirements. The move halved the number of Mexicans that were legally admitted in 1929 compared with 1928 figures.49 The second move was yet another law, this one passed March 4, 1929, that for the first time made entering the United States illegally a federal crime, punishable by a $1,000 fine or a year in prison, or both. “Although this has been the law since last March, many apparently believe it was to go into effect today,” the Express stated.50 The article included no quotes from Mexican immigrants or their employers attesting to the direct role the law played in spurring the exodus. However, the article did summarize the employers’ perspective. The phrase “much to the despair of their employers” suggests that businesses reliant on Mexican labor made the link between the law and the flight of their workers to Mexico. As players in the dominant white power structure, businessmen would also have been better able than Mexican workers to bring their concerns to a mainstream newspaper and influence its coverage. Stepped-­up border enforcement had an impact on San Antonio, particularly when the Eagle Pass, Texas, jail overfilled and the apprehended Mexicans were transported 142 miles to less crowded San Antonio facilities.51 Some Express coverage in the pariah frame took a bemused tone that played up some immigrants’ bumpkin qualities. A prime example is an Express article describing the San Antonio federal court appearance of one dozen short, identifiably illiterate “Indian-­Mexicans”—code, no doubt for their dark complexions—who spoke in singsong.52 Federal judge Charles A. Boynton sentenced the men to prison, asking them to return to Mexico after serving their terms and tell their countrymen the penalty they paid for illegally entering the United States. The Indian-­Mexican defendants, small-­statured, open-­faced men in overalls who waded the Rio Grande in search of work, chorused “Si, senor!” [sic] to his request. “No, senor!” to the declaration that the court

36 They Came to Toil

was sure they would not violate the law again, and “Muchas gracias!” to his expression of good wishes as they retraced their steps to prison. Not one could speak English, and practically all were illiterate in their own language.53 The Express article noted that one defendant, Manuel Zuniga, had “the most unique reason” for entering the country. Zuniga told the judge: “I came across to the United States to earn money to take out my passport.”54 The nonsensical quality of Zuniga’s explanation, and the linking of the simplistic nature of his fellow defendants with indigenous characteristics, represents one way Mexicans were metaphorically typeset in racially derogatory ways. These clownish, yokel-like characteristics in the pariah frame were also visible in a September 18, 1929, Express story about how some “wet” immigrants who had “waded across the river” into the United States were detected. They gave themselves away to immigration officers because “they had not been in this country long enough to learn to properly handle American clothing,” the Express reported.55 Several illegal immigrants were apprehended “because of their obvious unfamiliarity with shoes.”56 The article attributed these clues to William A. Whalen. One apprehended immigrant had been sent a letter with detailed instructions on comportment necessary to evade immigration authorities. “You must,” the letter read in part, “be very careful to wash your ears and your hands. You must wear American clothes and be sure to act like you were used to wearing shoes.”57 The letter writer forgot to include information about neckwear, which became the undoing of the immigrant. “He came into Texas wearing a red necktie draped across his shoulders like a serape and was picked up.”58 This caricature of the illegal Mexican immigrant contrasted sharply with the gallant framing of their pursuers: “Young men, lured by tales of adventure and excitement to be found in life along the Mexican border as immigration officials.”59 Government functionaries often characterized Mexican immigrants as pariahs, irrespective of whether they were repatriates or expatriates, or to which side of the border they ventured, the news coverage in the Express and La Prensa showed. The Light published few articles about the predicament of Mexicans in San Antonio, and none about Mexicans in Mexico. The pariah frame coverage of the repatriates’ reception in Mexico reflected observations of the American consul at Saltillo, who described municipal authorities there as “noticeably” anxious for the charity-­dependent

1929  37

repatriates to move on. Monterrey, Mexico, which had gone bankrupt supporting the repatriates, exhibited “a similar policy,” he stated.60 González, writing in his book Mexican Consuls and Labor Organizing, asserted that repatriation as a Mexican policy amounted to little more than an opportunity to generate the rhetoric of revolutionary nationalism.61 “High-­ranking officials were known to have looked unfavorably upon repatriates and considered them undesirable, something akin to unwanted aliens,” González wrote. 62 While Mexican government officials grappled gracelessly with a policy that was at least in part foisted on them by the United States government, ordinary Mexicans and Mexican Americans did what they could on their own to assist their compatriots.

Good-Citizen Frame: An Honor Roll of Donors Repatriation stories were not framed exclusively in terms of the “unfortunates” who left the United States. News articles sometimes had a dual good-­citizenship frame that emphasized the charitable work of Mexican civic associations in the United States, which raised funds and donated clothing and food to assist impoverished returning Mexicans. As Depression era repatriation developed as an issue in 1929 news coverage, stories about related Mexican community self-­help efforts also appeared in La Prensa. As González noted, US-­instigated repatriation programs were made more effective with Mexican government support, including from US-­based consuls.63 However, the latter did not act alone. Mexican consuls were often successful because they were able to enlist community support, as the good-­citizen frame showed. Heeding a call from the local Mexican consul general in Hidalgo, Texas, for instance, local Mexican Blue Cross groups, Masonic lodges, and others raised $200 to help 100 Mexican men, women, and children repatriate to Mexico, La Prensa reported on May 9, 1929.64 The US Border Patrol had apprehended the Mexicans and detained them in an Edinburgh, Texas, jail under deportation orders because they lacked necessary documents.65 The civic group bargained with the Mexican National Railroad Commission and obtained a 50 percent discount on their railroad tickets to return to Mexico. La Prensa listed the deported repatriates by name, including the children, along with the cost of their respective tickets, as though the families had made the honor roll. Listing the costs also demonstrated the lengths the Mexican community was willing to go to support down-­on-­their luck compatriots.66

38 They Came to Toil

La Prensa’s evolving good-­citizen-­frame coverage presented a Mexican and Mexican American community with agency and solidarity. On March 17, 1929, La Prensa announced on its front page that a Mexican Clinic, a project of the paper’s publisher, Ignacio Lozano, “should be constructed very soon,” thanks to the charitable giving of “hundreds” in the “great Mexican community in the United States.”67 La Prensa listed the most recent round of donors by name and location; they ranged from Round Rock, Texas, to Detroit, Michigan, and had helped drive the total funds collected to $13,852.39, or almost $200,000 in 2016 dollars. The appearance of such stories gave credence and legitimacy to the idea and power of the Mexican community. This self-­help frame was largely absent in the Express and the Light, omitting a dimension of Mexicans that might have helped English-­language readers see the community’s preparedness for citizenship. The Light, however, did note the activist role La Prensa played in community self-­help when it reported that the Beneficencia Mexicana, a charitable organization, asked for a tax exemption for the Mexican free clinic. “La Prensa, Mexican daily here, is backing the project,” the Light reported in a nod to Lozano’s crusade.68 As La Prensa’s news coverage defined the Mexican and Mexican American “community,” leaders emerged, agendas took shape, and at least some goals were achieved. Governments on both sides of the border might enforce, imprison, deport, tax, regulate, legitimate, and impose all manner of restrictions and requirements. But electing to assist, volunteering time, donating services, and giving what little money and resources they might have were ways that ordinary Mexican Americans and Mexicans might support one another and, in so doing, support themselves. As Nicholás Kanellos has noted, Lozano derived stature as a civic, cultural, and business leader from his elite journalistic role.69 A good measure of his success was predicated on the consumer culture of the Mexican community in the United States, which he helped create for a group whose options were limited by the dominant culture’s segregation efforts. Lozano, however, also undeniably provided members of the broader Mexican and Mexican American community rare and valuable media representations that demonstrated their own agency. A prime example of this was Lozano’s health clinic drive. By printing the names of all donors and the amounts they gave, from Sebastián Negrete, of Springfield, Illinois, who gave twenty-­ five cents, to Heriberto Correa of Hungerford, Texas, who gave a dollar, the Mexican community in the nation saw how individual actions, when considered collectively, added up to progress. This culture of self-­help,

1929  39

which Lozano spurred and illuminated on his news pages, planted seeds of solidarity that grew more visibly in later Mexican American civil rights actions. Just as newspapers, including Lozano’s, kept readers abreast of opportunities to make a civic contribution, they also served as a source for official help and advice.

Prescriptive Frame: News the Mexican Community Should Use Stories that offered counsel, warnings, advice, and other information that helped Mexicans understand what was expected of them whether they remained in the United States or repatriated, voluntarily or otherwise, fit a prescriptive frame. Some prescriptions were not directed at the Mexican community, but at authorities either in the United States or Mexico, as was often the case in opinion pieces. La Prensa wrote sympathetically about the plight of working-­class and poor Mexicans in San Antonio during the period. But the paper went beyond pointing out problems; it also prescribed solutions. Newspaper editors and owners, including those of the ethnic press, have always been community builders, and La Prensa’s publisher was no different.70 One of Lozano’s early twentieth-­century peers, Carlo Barsotti, founder of New York’s Italian newspaper Il Progresso Italo Americano, exemplified this role. Barsotti used his press to campaign for funds to build monuments to Italian pioneers, such as the explorers Giovanni da Verrazano and Christopher Columbus.71 In San Antonio, Mexicans might claim many memorials, from the Alamo to the Governor’s Palace, without trying. Lozano focused not on material constructions of remembrance, but on then-­current human needs of the ailing community. These were myriad, but La Prensa prescribed a figural and literal remedy to the suffering: a health clinic dedicated to Mexicans. The facility aimed to serve San Antonio’s West Side, the city’s largest Mexican enclave, where impoverished residents lived in run-­down homes, often without indoor plumbing, and children played on unpaved streets. Intestinal illnesses and tuberculosis were part of a “cycle of sickness” that threatened the San Antonio community’s existence, let alone its advancement.72 The reality of disease was not the only issue. By this time, as John Mckiernan-­González has noted, the United States had drawn a medical boundary between Mexican and American bodies, and

40 They Came to Toil

public health officials created a mobile medical border that changed venue as epidemics threatened Texas at various times.73 Disease was a bar to Mexicans—and Mexican Americans—being perceived as belonging in South Texas and, to paraphrase Natalia Molina, made them seem unfit to be US citizens.74 Yet La Prensa’s campaign to build the Mexican Clinic, as it was called, was not universally applauded. At least one local Mexican reader complained to the newspaper that efforts such as the Mexican Clinic made life easier for Mexicans in San Antonio and would deter repatriation. Uranga defended the founding of the clinic, pointing out in a February 16, 1929, column that many Mexicans wanted to return to their homeland but were waiting until Mexico would offer “work, liberty, and security.”75 In the meantime, “the Mexican colony was filled with illness and miseries that needed tending right away,” Uranga wrote.76 Most importantly, Uranga extended the notion of what was meant by the Mexican community: Some Mexicans will always remain here [the United States]. And these people, along with thousands of North Americans of Mexican origin, residing in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, California, etc., will always be members of our same race, of the Hispanoamerican race that in this continent has a great future, although we may be distant, although a border may divide us geographically and politically, we will not be divided in the spiritual, in the sentimental, in the traditional, in the language and in religion; their past and ours are the same; their future and our future are also the same; because they and we have been, are actually now, and will always be brothers, in the fraternity of our language and blood. For them and for us, we founded the Clinic. Uranga closed his column writing, “There will always be Mexicans in the United States, whether temporarily or permanently based. Even though some anti-­Mexicanists and xenophobes shout furiously for the removal and the exclusion . . . they will not achieve it because it is no longer possible in our century.” For Uranga, Mexicans were part of the land—in soul and spirit—and the drawing of an arbitrary, artificial border created a false division that would never erase history. Mexican Clinic or not, Mexicans did repatriate. Early in 1929, La Prensa was already publishing prescriptive articles that aimed to give returning Mexicans as much information as possible about the repatriation process. One front-­page news story in this prescriptive frame informed

1929  41

its readers of potential impending improvements to the Mexican government’s customs procedures. “It appeared that the Mexican government would seriously address problems created by the need to repatriate so many countrymen found in bad straits in the United States.”77 Among other things, the article explained that Mexico’s secretary of housing had ordered customs officers on the border to permit repatriates to bring their household goods and work tools into the country duty-­free.78 But returning to Mexico was not as simple as packing a suitcase and boarding a train or walking across the border. On March 17, 1929, La Prensa warned Mexicans planning to return that they must first obtain a certificate of repatriation from their local Mexican consul general or face delays at the border.79 Most repatriates at the time lacked such certificates. More dangerous, cautioned the newspaper, were coyotes. These criminals—long known for exploiting migrating Mexicans—were now taking advantage of the repatriated, enticing or entrapping returnees into taking automobiles and other goods illegally across the border using their duty-­ free status.80 Some prescriptive information inspired hope, such as when La Prensa broke the news to repatriating readers that they could obtain half-­price train tickets from the Southern Pacific Lines, the Chicago Rock Island and Pacific Railway Co., and the Panhandle and Santa Fe Railway Co. The page-­one story credited Mexican consuls general in San Antonio and El Paso for bargaining for a 50 percent discount for indigent Mexican returnees.81 In another example of the positive prescriptive frame, some Mexicans living in the United States politically mobilized to obtain government support for repatriates. A California-­based group of “Vasconcelistas,” or followers of Mexican presidential candidate José Vasconcelos, urged the noted intellectual to formulate a “methodical repatriation plan” that would place returning Mexicans in irrigated agricultural colonies to avoid inflating the number of jobless already in Mexico.82 For Mexicans based in the United States, Vasconcelos, if elected, should establish government-­ funded language and cultural programs to teach grammatical Spanish to Mexican youth, the group urged. They also sought more protection for Mexican women, who were “the most exploited” in the United States, they asserted.83 As noted earlier, some stories blended frames, including one in which the prescription punctured the notion that Mexico needed its most adept, heroic farmers living in the United States to return. For Mexican repatriation to succeed, Mexico should forget about attracting former residents

42 They Came to Toil

who had acquired advanced agricultural techniques and modern farm equipment, the agronomist M. R. Vidal Jr. advised in a January 27, 1929, article in La Prensa.84 “Our rural economy is one thing and that of the United States is another,” Vidal wrote.85 The notion that US-­trained Mexican farmers were the antidote for Mexico’s ailing agricultural sector was a “very frequent story in the press,” Vidal noted. “But it is false.”86 Vidal’s concerns manifested in both the prescriptive and financial frames. Much of Mexico’s farmland would not permit the use of fertilizers and heavy equipment that were more suited to US agriculture. Vidal wrote that instead of reclaiming its best and brightest, Mexico should focus on recalling its less sophisticated day laborers from the United States.87 Mexican presidential candidate Pascual Ortiz Rubio also suggested there might be a mismatch between the skills of some returning Mexicans and the state of Mexico’s agricultural industry. In his political convention speech, which La Prensa published March 6, 1929, Ortiz Rubio called for a stepped-­up modern irrigation program and a modernized agricultural sector as the only way to successfully integrate repatriated Mexicans in the farm economy.88 The business community also offered prescriptions, often exhorting the government to change its immigration policy. As the number of Mexican immigrants began dwindling, business also took action to protect and defend Mexican workers in the United States. The Express reported that the executive committee of the state’s sheep and goat industry association passed a resolution condemning federal authorities for “harsh practices” and for using “various stratagems to lure Mexicans to return to their native country.”89 Judge C. C. Belcher of Del Rio, Texas, said the “tactics . . . serve to show just how undesirable the Box bill would be.”90 Similar concerns roiled the rest of the borderlands and precipitated organized business efforts to “prevent a serious shortage of labor in this section,” the Express reported on May 11, 1929.91 City and regional business groups across South Texas aggressively organized to guide and protect their Mexican workforce—and thereby their harvests and profits. The Laredo Chamber of Commerce sent out thousands of bulletins outlining steps necessary to help Mexicans in the country become legal residents, and the Valley Chamber of Commerce reproduced thousands more as communities organized meetings with Mexican workers, according to a May 11, 1929, Express story.92 In Brownsville, the Mexican consul general and the Harlingen Chamber of Commerce in-

1929  43

structed about five hundred local Mexicans in how to legally remain in the United States, the Express reported.93 By July 20, 1929, J. E. Bell, the secretary of the San Benito Chamber of Commerce, exhorted the local Kiwanis Club that 25,000 Mexicans in the Lower Rio Grande Valley were at risk for deportation and that “quick action must be taken . . . to save this labor for the Valley.”94 The Light, whose editors showed they didn’t consider Mexican immigrants among their imagined community of newsreaders, understandably offered few prescriptions directly to Mexican immigrants. In early June 1929, however, it ran a news story with a plea from INS district director William Whalen. “He urges aliens to call at his office. He declares it is not necessary for any alien to sell out and leave.”95 The article directed immigrants to Whalen’s office on the fourth floor of the Hicks Building in downtown San Antonio. While the advice seemed simple enough, omitted from the story’s news frame was what that might entail for many immigrants who lived humbly. Daunting as it might have been to venture to the prominent five-­story Hicks building, they would, by the end of June, need to consult with immigration officials on the eighth floor of the new thirty-­ five-­story, $3 million Smith-­Young Tower, a Gothic skyscraper with Italian marble foyers that was the tallest building in the city.96 Meanwhile, La Prensa made its prescription an urgent front-­page plea, calling it “indispensable” for Mexicans “to understand the new law that went into effect last March 4.”97 The article described the fines and penalties for illegal entry and urged Mexicans to pay the passport fees and enter the United States at official border checkpoints, presenting the necessary documents. Otherwise, Mexicans risked deportation, a predicament that faced at least forty Mexicans already apprehended and imprisoned in Harlingen, Texas, for swimming across the river into the United States without passports. Round-­ups of Mexicans crossing the border illegally were one thing, but when border patrol agents started house-­to-­house searches in Texas looking for Mexicans without proper documents, the Express reported its own prescriptions directed to Mexicans. This one, from the Mexican embassy in Washington, DC, told Mexicans to keep their doors shut to US immigration inspectors unless they had warrants. The advisory came after Enrique Santibañez, the Mexican consul general in San Antonio, forwarded to the embassy “numerous alleged complaints, especially from the Lower Rio Grande Valley, that border patrol inspectors were forcibly

44 They Came to Toil

entering homes in search of illegally immigrated Mexicans.”98 The Express elicited comment from William A. Whalen, who said, “the severe procedure of the border patrol has been modified.”99 One story of such abuse documented by the Express involved Emilio Martinez, a fourteen-­year-­old who was arrested and jailed by the Border Patrol while working in Weslaco, Texas. Even though he had a birth certificate stating he was an American citizen, the border patrol officers argued he had been born in Reynosa, Mexico.100 Martinez had been in jail for three months when Col. Samuel A. Robertson, railroad builder and founder of San Benito, Texas, had himself appointed the boy’s guardian so that Martinez could be released.101 Robertson heard about the boy’s situation during a border fact-­finding trip by F. Stuart Fitzpatrick of the US Chamber of Commerce.102 The Great Depression did not officially start until August, the third quarter of 1929.103 Yet news framed prescriptively showed business and government already in emergency mode. La Prensa’s prescriptive reportage carried its own urgency. In keeping with the practices of the ethnic press, it did more than pass along useful advice and information. The newspaper’s management not only prescribed but also actively instigated solutions, as in the case of the Mexican Clinic.104 On the other hand, the prescriptive news frame in the Express strikingly illustrated the extent to which restrictive US government immigration policy threatened the iron triangle of business interests: the agricultural sector, railroads, and banking, all of which had a stake in efficient, low-­cost labor. The advice and legal prescriptions the Express hastened to offer Mexican workers were an effort to protect their own economic interests as well.

Financial Frame: The Burden and Bounty of Mexican Immigrants News coverage in the financial frame conceived Mexican labor as integral to the financial success of the southwestern economy, if not that of the nation. The financial frame often argued that Mexicans were “indispensable,” and “needed,” particularly in farming, ranching, and industrial work. Conversely, some articles in the financial frame characterized Mexicans as either “cheap” laborers who undermined the American wage or as a drain on public resources. If La Prensa’s English-­language counterparts had any idea of the enor-

1929  45

mity of the Mexican repatriation that was to come, they did not disclose it to their readers in 1929. As mentioned earlier, the Express used the term repatriation in a single one-­paragraph item, which ran on July 18, 1929. The article was published below the fold and near the fine-­print stock tables. If it was news at all, it was business news. The AP story, datelined Mexico City, noted that representatives of Texas Mexicans had arrived in the Mexican capital to negotiate with President Portes Gil for aid in obtaining agricultural land.105 La Prensa published the identical story—on its front page.106 The Light published no articles on Mexican repatriation in 1929. Coming or going, Mexican immigrants were largely invisible in the Light, and clearly outside of the imagined community of readers the Hearst editorial staff saw themselves writing for. The contribution of Mexican laborers to US farming constituted a core argument often manifest in the financial frame. La Prensa homed in on its inherent contradictions. “One view classified Mexicans as undesirable, and this view led to legislative efforts to restrict Mexican immigration,” wrote Andrés Landa y Piña, head of the Mexican Migration Department’s technical section, in an October 11, 1929, article.107 “The other viewpoint, on the contrary, sought to emphasize that the Mexican worker was irreplaceable, showing that agriculture and industry in a certain region of the United States would be seriously hurt if the Mexican labor contingent were absent.”108 Thus, news coverage framed Mexican immigrants dichotomously: they were wanted, yet unwanted, irreplaceable and undesirable. Maintaining a Mexican workforce in the United States was a paramount concern for the San Antonio Express in 1929, while the Light argued otherwise. The two English-­language dailies recognized that their editorial columns were “the only legitimate means by which a newspaper may exert leadership.”109 Their editorial voices, however, often led San Antonians in diametrically opposed directions. “Virtual Exclusion Is Not Sensible ‘Restriction,’” the Express admonished in a February 1, 1929, editorial that welcomed the failure of the House Committee on Immigration to pass the Box bill out of committee.110 “The [Mexican] influx can be kept within proper bounds” with literacy and health tests, as secretary of state Frank B. Kellogg asserted, the editorial stated.111 But through 1929 and the early Great Depression, using the language of eugenicists, the Light argued for “rigid restrictions” and “intelligent selection” of immigrants.112 Similarly, La Prensa published a page-­one story on January 26, 1929, that led with the US State Department’s view that a Mexican immigra-

46 They Came to Toil

tion quota was unnecessary because vigorous enforcement had effectively blocked entrants from south of the border.113 The Express, however, took up the cause of “farmers, cattlemen, truck-­growers, orchardists and other employers of seasonable labor throughout the Southwest,” all of whom had a “hope that the tests . . . will not keep out indispensable workers.”114 Quota proponents also mustered commercial and labor interests to their side. Moreover, they linked the cause of keeping Mexicans out of the country with patriotism. New York restrictionist Demarest Lloyd collected five hundred petitions, totaling thirty thousand signatures, endorsing Mexican quota restrictions, and filed them with the US Senate Committee on Immigration, the Express reported on January 19, 1929.115 Among them were members of “50 patriotic and American organizations,” including the American Legion, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars.116 “The astonishing thing about these petitions is that, in most instances, the persons circulating them were business men or women and the signatures are largely those of business men and women,” Lloyd said. Among these was the “general superintendent of one of the largest corporations in the United States,” who turned in two hundred signatures from company officers and employees.117 News of Lloyd’s anti-­Mexican-­immigration petitions merited page-­six coverage in the Express. The story was not mentioned in the Light. For La Prensa, however, Lloyd was front-­page news.118 Notions of patriotism gave restrictionists a patina of nobility; labor’s discourse was less lofty. This was illustrated in a May 25, 1929, La Prensa story headlined: “The Undersecretary of Labor Says We Don’t Like Cheap Workers.”119 Robe C. White, the labor undersecretary, explicitly expressed his antipathy to continued Mexican immigration: “This country doesn’t have anything cheap, not its institutions, not its traditions, not its schools, not its progress; consequently we don’t want anything cheap, not even labor.” White’s phrasing cleverly reframed the Mexican’s industriousness and bargain-­priced labor to something inferior and undesirable, or “cheap.” In the same breath, White suggested that this “cheap” feature of the Mexican would then infect other core facets of US culture. Although commercial interests in the South and West Texas border areas were generally opposed to the Box bill, the view was not monolithic. La Prensa gave prominent Box bill supporter O. W. Killam, president of the South Texas Chamber of Commerce, page-­one play on January 30, 1929. “Declaring that the prosperity of South Texas depends on the lower class is a grave error, in my conception. . . . If there is no limit or Mexican

1929  47

immigration to South Texas continues, educational and welfare spending will be a heavy burden on the American population.”120 As 1929 unfolded, Express news coverage in the financial frame depicted the Texas agribusiness and ranching industries increasingly in turmoil over Box and the various efforts to bar Mexican labor. The Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers’ Association “consistently opposed” the proposed Box bill, reiterating their condemnation in a December 1929 executive committee resolution, the Express reported.121 They added their voice to the Sheep and Goat Raisers’ Association of Texas, which at their meeting in July 1929 had “raked Representative John Box and his pet Mexican immigration quota bill over the coals for nearly three hours,” the Express reported.122 The dispute between East and West Texas hinged largely on financial advantage, with Box and the Mexican restrictionists aiming to rid the nation of low-­cost Mexican workers who undercut farmers who didn’t hire them. US representative Claude Hudspeth attended the Sheep and Goat Raisers’ meeting and explained Box’s position, according to the August 1, 1929, Express story. “John Box,” Hudspeth said, “is from East Texas, where there is plenty of negro labor.”123 To fight Box and his anti-­Mexican immigrant legislation, Hudspeth lobbied for a full public relations and press campaign. The industry association’s resolution should be “strong” against the Box bill. “I believe we can get the press of the Nation to wake up and offset some of the slanderous statements from the Box bill camp.”124 Several Texas business groups pressed the United States Chamber of Commerce in Washington to investigate the issue, leading to a meeting in October 1929 in San Antonio between F. Stuart Fitzpatrick, manager of the DC-­based chamber’s civic development department, and Felipe Canales, Mexico’s undersecretary for the interior, the Express reported on October 22, 1929.125 Fitzpatrick discovered divided sentiment in San Antonio. Farmers were generally opposed to the Box bill, as were the women’s clubs of San Antonio.126 The American Federation of Labor favored curbing Mexican immigration, a view reinforced by W. L. Hoefgen, editor of the Weekly Dispatch, San Antonio’s union newspaper. Some prominent, unnamed local businessmen also told Fitzpatrick they favored the Box bill even though they expected it might make it harder for them to do business.127 The Light reported Canales’s visit, but omitted most of the nitty-­ gritty of policy making the Express provided. Yet, in an article headlined “Mexican Labor ‘Coming into Own,’ ” the Light reported F. Stuart Fitzpatrick’s assessment: “As far as cotton is concerned, the Mexican through

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his labor has made possible the building up of a great cotton industry in Texas and other parts of the West. The way out of this difficulty, in my judgment, is to get over quota-­mindedness as far as Western Hemisphere countries are concerned.”128 The contradictory perspectives inherent in the financial frame were rooted in separate visions of the political economy. Most southwest Texas ranchers and farmers, as well as railroad and banking interests, viewed the Mexican laborer as the lynchpin of the agricultural and industrial sectors. Organized labor and some other business interests viewed Mexican labor as a financial threat, whereas some patriotic organizations cast Mexicans as a threat to America. This latter depiction might seem more a cultural frame than a financial one. However, business support gave Demarest Lloyd and other restrictionists a cloak of credibility. For those who opposed deportation, repatriation, or any kind of restriction of Mexican immigration, financial arguments were only one way to frame the issue. Diplomacy, neighborliness, and American friendship with Mexico represented others.

Somos Amigos/We Are Friends Frame: Sharing the Hope of Prosperity “Amity,” “understanding,” “friendship,” and “comrades,” were among the watchwords of the somos amigos/we are friends frame. This news frame couched an understanding of the role of the Mexican in US society under the rubric of diplomacy and the proper relationship between neighboring countries on friendly terms. For the most part, La Prensa and the Express exhibited this frame when writing about policy issues. For instance, the Express opined that House inaction would put more decision-­making authority into the hands of President Hoover, “who . . . is concerned with promoting understanding among New World peoples.”129 The newspaper’s position echoed its January editorial, which noted that secretary of state Frank B. Kellogg viewed the Box bill as “a serious threat to international amity.”130 The Light rarely framed immigration in this way. One notable example, however, appeared in Light columnist Harry Williams’s Texas Trails column. Williams explained how “young Del Rio ranchman” Shilling Parker appeared in the immigration office with a “young Mexican.” Said the

1929  49

young ranchman: “We were kids together.” In an effort to establish legal standing for the “young Mexican,” Parker went on to document his steady employment record. “He has worked for our family for 10 years and has not worked for anyone else in that time. I hope you can help him now with this new immigration problem.”131 The Light column did not specify the “new immigration problem,” but the incident occurred just after immigrants were able to file to become legal residents under the Registration Act of 1929. Omitted from the column was the possibility that the “young Mexican” was born in the United States, especially since his father used to work for Parker’s father. As the Light noted in a February 1929 editorial, almost half of all births were not registered. “A child, born in this country, and whose birth has not been registered according to law, is in much the same position as an alien who has become naturalized and whose records have become lost.”132 The Express consistently provided coverage of the Box bill in the somos amigos/we are friends frame, despite, as the newspaper noted, a divided Texas delegation that mostly favored the bill.133 In so doing, the Express represented its southwest Texas constituency, the bankers, the railroads, and the larger-­scale growers for whom San Antonio was a hub. In an August 24, 1929, Washington-­datelined story, the newspaper argued that the Box bill faced even stiffer opposition in Congress than previously.134 Administrative actions and new laws had successfully restricted immigration “without causing the bad feelings in South and Central America the proposed Mexican quota law would cause,” the story stated.135 To underscore the point, the Express noted that one-­third fewer Mexicans immigrated to Texas in 1929 than in 1928. Meanwhile, the pace of Mexicans leaving the United States increased. Some 5,311 Mexicans emigrated from Texas to Mexico in 1929, 55 percent more than in 1928.136 Box bill opponents argued in the Express that the United States had done enough to push Mexican immigrants out—and keep them from coming in the first place— without imposing a quota system. Moreover, some argued that the current restrictions had gone too far. “Many Mexicans who have lived in Texas and other Southwestern states for many years, and have made good citizens, are being deported” as a result, the Express reported in a story datelined Washington.137 The article noted that Texas-­born Mexicans were allegedly being deported, which the Immigration Service denied. This story did not equate citizenship with labor, positing simply that Mexicans of long-­standing US residence should

50 They Came to Toil

be considered citizens. The sub rosa argument, however, suggested that Mexicans with longtime residency in Texas were self-­supporting contributors to the economy and lifeblood of their communities. La Prensa also emphasized the somos amigos/we are friends frame, particularly in stories that dealt with diplomatic aspects of immigration policy. A January 19, 1929, front-­page story related that US consuls general would soon meet in Mexico to discuss the new US State Department policy to tighten passport requirements for Mexicans seeking US entry. Unlike the Box bill, the State Department plan would restrict Mexican immigration in “a way that would not destroy the good relations that existed with Mexico.”138 This idea was echoed in the Light, by none other than Senator David A. Reed, of Pennsylvania, coauthor of the Immigration Act of 1924. “Warning that serious international complications and legislative difficulties might arise from placing Mexico on a quota basis, Reed praised the ‘singularly successful’ diplomacy of President Hoover and Ambassador Morrow in promoting good feeling with Mexico.”139 The Express editorial page blended the somos amigos/we are friends frame with the financial frame. A prime example was an August 25, 1929, editorial, which rued the prospect that Box, ranking minority member on the House Committee of Immigration, would reintroduce his bill.140 The Express editorialist foresaw that in a new debate “some speaker will utter ill-­considered words, which will create a bad impression among New World peoples.”141 Passage of the Box bill would make Hoover’s recent goodwill tour of the Americas seem a hollow gesture and impede commercial relations. “Besides, the intensely practical considerations which moved Texas market gardeners, cotton farmers, and stockmen to oppose the Box bill remain unchanged.” The Box bill “would create a disastrous labor shortage,” and “advocates of the measure never have pointed to any adequate, dependable substitute supply.”142 Just two months later, on October 27, 1929, the short supply of workers made page 1 in an Express story headlined “Immigration Law Begins to Pinch Southwest Farms.”143 The somos amigos/we are friends frame also had a patriotic element. In San Benito, Texas, the Sam Jackson American Legion post, in contrast to the national organization, expressed solidarity with Mexicans. These local legionnaires invoked the collective memory of the way the English treated their ancestors in eighteenth-­century Canada, and their own more recent memory of serving in European combat with Mexicans. The post wrote an open letter to area Mexican workers, advising them to remain “with us, your friends,” rather than flee the United States in fear.144

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In the letter, which La Prensa published September 17, 1929, the Sam Jackson legionnaires said they acted with concern for the economy and out of friendship. “We recall that some of your sons were our comrades in the World War,” they wrote. “We will fight for your rights with the same vigor that we fought against the German Kaiser,” the letter stated.145 But the Sam Jackson American legionnaires had an even more profound sense of history that compelled them to take action: The way the immigration law is interpreted leads the government to commit an injustice as grave as the English government did in 1755, when it deported French Canadians to Louisiana. We, as American Legion members, can never forget that event because some of us are descended from those Frenchmen. We can’t permit our government to commit a similar stupidity.146 The legionnaires urged the Mexicans to “stay calm, plant their crops and keep their children enrolled in the schools of our country.” The school district director, World War veteran Frank Pierce, was a fluent Spanish speaker who had grown up in the area with Mexican families and who would treat their children well, the letter said. Moreover, the legionnaires warned that the Mexican government planned to relocate them to land that lacked irrigation. “You could eke out a mere existence in the province you came from, but you would not have the hope of prosperity like you have here.”147 News coverage through the somos amigos/we are friends frame portrayed Mexican immigrants and laborers in fraternity, proximity, and amity. Driving out Mexican and Mexican American families of long standing was not only undiplomatic and unneighborly but also came at tremendous financial cost, the Express reported. La Prensa’s coverage of the San Benito legionnaires took the frame beyond the realm of abstract policy and dramatized the extent to which at least some Anglos and Mexicans were truly friends. Although Texas was a former Confederate state, a place where the black–­white race binary was operative, there was no question that some friendships between Mexicans and Anglos crossed a color line, however ill defined.

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Hierarchy of Color Frame: “No Race Other than the Mexican” Congressman Box was a highly visible proponent of the idea that Mexicans were an inferior caste relative to whites. A racial national palette in which white was the primary color informed his rationale for curtailing Mexican immigration. Box spoke for eugenics adherents, who had lobbied for restrictions under the aegis of scientific racism that flourished in the Progressive Era. These views helped gain passage of the 1917 Immigration Act, which required immigrants to pass literacy and health tests. They also provided impetus for approval of the 1924 Immigration Act, which imposed quota restrictions based on national origin, limiting southern Europeans’ entry to the United States. Park Avenue patricians and state university scholars were among the diverse voices arguing that Mexicans were “other” and should also face quota restrictions. New York socialite and zoologist Madison Grant’s 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race categorically proclaimed that races do not blend.148 Texas tenant farmers also shared this view, as historian David Montejano shows in his book Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of East Texas, 1836–1986. Academicians joined the fray. University of Texas sociologist Max Handman, among others, decried the influx of Mexico’s “partly colored races,” suggesting they “may mean trouble.”149 These arguments highlight the artificiality of the black–­white race binary in civil rights history. For Box, Mexicans were more than trouble; they were a “menace.” In a December 4, 1929, story that depicted Mexicans as undesirables in the hierarchy of color, Box announced his plan to reintroduce a new version of his bill to curb the “influx of Mexican peon laborers and their families into the Southwest.”150 The Mexican population was “increasing rapidly” and taking jobs from American industrial and farm workers, he concluded after a fact-­finding tour of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and the Mexican border. He found the “Mexican peon population . . . injuring farmers and farm life and working and middle class Americans of every group, injuring public health, burdening charities, raising another big race question, aggravating corruption in politics in many localities and increasing every mischief which our immigration laws and policy are designed to check.”151 Box dismissed business supporters of Mexican immigration as interests “temporarily profiting” from their labor. Among these

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were “large railroads, mining, beet sugar, and other employers, including some cotton manufacturers.”152 Some who sought to protect Mexicans from deportation, such as Col. Samuel Robertson, the San Benito railroad builder who was a member of the US Chamber of Commerce’s immigration committee, interpreted the hierarchy of color frame to the benefit of Mexicans. In a Light story headlined, “Growers Flay Plan to Bring in Negroes,” Robertson criticized a US Department of Labor and Immigration effort to replace deported Mexicans in South Texas with “Porto Rican negroes [sic].” He pointed out that when 1,100 “Porto Rican negroes” were taken to Arizona as cotton pickers, “they demanded equality with whites, refused to pick cotton, and ultimately became public charges.”153 J. E. Bell, secretary of the San Benito Chamber of Commerce, supported Robertson’s view: “To import negroes would seriously disarrange the social structure of the community.” The Universal wire service article— datelined Harlingen—concluded with an unattributed summation of the situation in the Rio Grande Valley: The department of labor had deported “thousands of Mexicans, many of them landowners during the last 12 months . . . with a view to opening the way for employment of white labor. But northern whites, with few exceptions, decline the work and planters face heavy losses, and ruin in some cases because of their inability to secure field hands.”154 La Prensa columnist Rodolfo Uranga offered a window into Robertson’s thinking and the actions Robertson and others in the border area took to protect the Mexicans and Mexican Americans who had lived and worked in their communities for years. Uranga lauded Robertson for writing hundreds of identity cards for Mexicans in the Lower Rio Grande Valley in an effort to keep them from being deported. Robertson attested to the Mexicans’ long tenure living in Texas and their excellent work records.155 “If in the United States there were more people such as Col. Robertson, Mexicans would have nothing to fear,” the columnist wrote. Uranga quoted Robertson dismissing criticism that Mexicans were a weak, inferior race: Neither the Americans of the pure white race, Englishmen, Welshmen, Italians, Germans, Irishmen, not even the negroes could have opened these lands, infested with snakes, coyotes and vermin; no race other than the Mexican has been macerated in the hands and legs, by the

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strong spines of the cactus; these workers of Indian blood are forgotten heroes who have made civilization possible in this Valley.156 Robertson concluded by posing a rhetorical question to the Welsh-­born secretary of labor James J. Davis. “Why do you try to deport foreigners born in Mexico and not in Wales?”157 The hierarchy of color frame, therefore, was also inherently dichotomous—dividing whites from various peoples of color. Whites had long stood atop the hierarchy of color in the United States, while Indians, blacks, Mexicans, and others were stigmatized and ranked as a lower order. Countering the view of Box and his fellow eugenicists, who saw Mexicans as innately inferior, others, such as San Benito’s Robertson, recognized that Mexican labor made the Southwest.158 Box’s views were reported in the Express, the Light, and La Prensa. La Prensa most eloquently chronicled Robertson’s praise of the Mexicans. In showcasing this defense of the Mexican people on page 1, La Prensa actively fought discrimination and sought to boost community morale, once again fulfilling a typical advocate role of the Spanish-­language and ethnic press.159 No such defense was required to memorialize the first Spanish-­speaking immigrants to San Antonio, the Franciscans and Canary Islanders who founded the settlement two centuries earlier.

Spanish Nostalgia Frame: Recalling “Heroism Unsurpassed” The past has many uses, most often to serve the present. In the 1930s there was no place like the past. Resurrecting ineffable moments—and monuments—became the pastime of the nation.160 The trend had started years earlier, as exemplified by Californians who resurrected their Spanish missions in a tourism development effort in the 1870s and 1880s. After that, at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, also known as the Columbian Exposition, California offered its own Spanish fantasy showcase of Mission Revival architecture with its state pavilion designed by Arthur Page Brown.161 While many Texans recognized their heritage and economy were inextricably bound with Mexico, that knowledge didn’t change the focus of their cultural appreciation, which also had turned to the remnants and artifacts of the Spanish Empire in America. Spaniards had once been vilified, especially in Texas. Their deeds were retold as the Black Legend, which painted them as cruel, bloodthirsty, and indolent. Now the Spanish

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were venerated, even in Texas, where they had been most hated, according to historian David Weber.162 The conquistadors represented a pioneer legacy of derring-­do in Texas. Their crumbling missions, decaying Alamo, and worn-­out El Camino Real were manifestations of a proud past that offered economically shaken Texans something to believe in. Powerful political interests, in this case Anglo Texans, excavated long-­buried historical memories and reshaped them into something that, as Bodnar might put it, would be of service to their present and their future as well as their past.163 Ultimately, the Spanish colonial legacy would help launch San Antonio’s transformation into a tourist mecca, a civic strategy that the Light and the Express supported. As Renato Rosaldo’s imperialist nostalgia concept suggests, however, not only buildings were being transformed. San Antonians also were being transformed as they expiated the sins of their forebears for having played a role in destroying what the Spaniards built, architecturally and culturally. Some of the news coverage hinted at a southwestern inferiority complex, as did a piece that the Light reprinted from the Boston Sunday Advertiser, a 550,000-­circulation newspaper that Hearst had bought in 1917. How come the Yankees are so self-­centered? How is it that they know all about Lexington and Bunker Hill and Paul Revere and Ben Franklin and Daniel Webster, and are ignorant of Sam Houston, James Bowie, David Crockett, and the Alamo? We will show it to our visitors down in San Antonio, the chapel built by Franciscan missionaries in 1774, as the chapel of their mission. Old? Before Concord and Lexington by all of three years! With no end of old Missions, and 45,000 Mexicans amongst us, and so on, we’ve got the best hotels.164 The Light’s reprint of the Boston Advertiser piece was notable for another reason—it used present-­day Mexicans as a tourism feature, something rarely seen in the 1930s San Antonio press. San Antonio during the Great Depression was poised to capitalize on attitudes that began changing at the end of the prior century as Hispanophobia began to give way to awe of the Spanish legacy in the late 1800s, especially in California. The shift was spurred in part by a romanticized Mission Revival style of architecture displayed at the 1893 World’s Fair.165 As Weber noted, the “Spanish Revival’s evocation of sense of place beguiled many Americans.”166 Cities with little original Spanish influence, such as Kansas and Dallas,

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during the 1920s and 1930s abounded with buildings, public and private, designed in the Spanish style.167 San Antonio, however, boasted original and authentic Spanish architecture. The city found itself on the cutting edge of a national trend; one that the powers-­that-­were, including the Express and the Light, sought to exploit for commercial gain. During the Depression years in Texas, the Express ran articles and numerous editorials promoting Spanish cultural conservation, a trend increasingly discernible in 1929. The Express coverage highlighted the city’s pioneer heritage, something that many communities tried to profit from during the hard times, as Bodnar noted. But Spanish nostalgia more than buoyed morale for San Antonio; it meant money. Express coverage bolstered development of the city’s recreation and tourism industry, a role in keeping with the newspaper’s booster function. Spaniards had built the foundation for the city, and the Spanish nostalgia frame blended with the financial frame. The Spaniards’ initial investment in stone and structure was paying off generations after their arrival. In early January 1929, the Express documented the San Antonio city attorney’s search for all former ownership records of the historic Spanish Governor’s Palace.168 The year before, San Antonio approved a $55,000 bond issue to buy the palace property, although lamentably San Antonio still lacked the money to undertake its restoration.169 The newspaper’s readers might well have found it hard to believe that the dilapidated building once hosted “many characters later famous, who passed over the threshold of the governor’s palace on official business,” as the Express reported.170 Among those characters was Col. Zebulon Pike, who also visited Mission San José. Pike noted in his journals that he had met with then-­ governor Manuel Antonio Cordero, who, the Express wrote, was “famed in history for his statesmanship, his diplomacy and his social polish. It was this governor who did so much to establish the brilliant court life in the frontier settlement.” Later, Texas rebels drafted important revolutionary documents inside the palace. But, “after the Revolution, the glory of the foreign power passed away, and the old building was ultimately almost forgotten in time,” the Express article stated.171 As the palace’s rich history increasingly became a staple of journalistic discourse, conservation mania erupted between two groups who fought over how the structure would be reimagined. The two organizations—the Daughters and Sons of the Heroes of Texas and the Texas Historical and Landmark Association—lobbied San

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Antonio’s mayor, each arguing “they alone were responsible for keeping alive the history and tradition regarding the old building.” Mayor C. M. Chambers turned them both down.172 The collective tone of Express reportage on the Governor’s Palace had the air of a historical mystery. New stories appeared as valuable nuggets of information were uncovered, some hidden in plain sight. These included an article about an oil painting portraying elegantly attired couples dancing a lively folkdance from northern Spain, known as a jota, at the palace. The 1880s era canvas had been discovered at the San Antonio home of the painter’s descendants.173 Other stories took readers behind the scenes and deep into state and Béxar County archives at the University of Texas in Austin, where San Antonio historian Frederick Chabot searched for accurate details required to restore the palace. While there, Chabot studied translated excerpts of the 1803 will of Luis Menchaca, an alcalde, or powerful mayor, of San Antonio, whose references to the palace might offer clues to how the building might be authentically restored.174 The Express also editorialized that it was time to remember the Alamo, urging the state legislature to expend $1 million to build a memorial park around the site of Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie’s last stand. “Texas is most fortunate in possessing so rare a treasure as the Alamo—‘scene of heroism unsurpassed.’”175 By April 18, 1929, the Texas Senate had approved the measure, and it was pending in the House. “No public spirited Texan rejects the appeal that the Alamo—shrine of Texas liberties, relic of a heroic past—be safeguarded from the encroachments of trade and provided with an environment worthy of its glorious traditions.”176 Gov. Moody vetoed it—along with all other appropriations bills. The Express protest was swift: “As the State prizes the sacrifice of Travis, Bowie and Crockett, and the example they set to posterity, it should show a proper respect to their memory. To consecrate the ground hallowed by their deeds, to rescue it from a commercial encroachment, would be a relatively small service.”177 The Alamo was just one among many Franciscan-­constructed prizes that the Express’s news coverage symbolically revived. As 1929 concluded, the Franciscan Missions on the city’s South Side became another conservation cause célèbre. The newspaper’s page-­one “Think” column gave its editorial seal of approval to the campaign: “Old Franciscan Missions on the South Loop are among the community’s principal attractions for the tourist. Besides, these structures are priceless architectural works and historical monuments.”178 The columnist complained about the clutter of

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Figure 1.2. A photo showing progress made on the restoration of the old granary and the walls of Mission San José, with the aid of laborers hired through the New Deal’s Civil Works Administration (CWA). The photo was published February 14, 1934. San Antonio Light Photograph Collection, UTSA Special Collections–­ITC. No. L-­0207-­B. Used with permission, © San Antonio Express-­News/ZUMA.

business advertising surrounding the missions, especially the tacky “hot dog” stand near Mission San José. “Surely these fine old structures deserve a setting altogether worthy of the spirit that built them.”179 The San Antonio Conservation Society gained momentum from the Express’s endorsement, pursuing restoration of Mission San José’s old granary, built in 1720. The society announced plans to give new life to what the Express described as a “somewhat disorderly rock pile.” In its proposed new life as a curio shop, it would “one day present the appearance the toiling hands of the padres once gave it,” the Express reported.180 The society previously purchased the original granary doors and then displayed them in the city’s Witte Museum, which opened in 1926. Significantly, the Express-­backed conservation efforts also included major colonial transportation routes. The Express editorialized in favor of rebuilding El Camino Real, an important colonial communication line

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whose restoration was endorsed by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Noting that it was also known as the Old San Antonio Road, the Express argued the new El Camino Real should become a primary route maintained by the State Highway Commission.181 All three newspapers covered another road-­related conservation effort—the ultimately failed campaigns to eliminate some Spanish street names. When citizens petitioned to rename newly paved Zarzamora Street to Aviation Boulevard because the name was “difficult to spell and of no historical value,” the San Antonio Conservation Society campaigned to preserve the name.182 The society told commissioner of streets Paul E. Steffler that the city’s original Spanish settlers chose the name in honor of the native dewberry bushes they found on the land. “Zarzamora is a name of beauty and rhythmical in sound,” the Express reported. “Its structure tells the story of the Spanish colonist’s adaptation of his language to a new environment,” the committee members told the Express.183 The Light also covered the dispute, writing its first story four days after the initial reporting by the Express. The Light also offered a slightly different translation: “Zarzamora means ‘mulberry’ and is a Spanish name typical of San Antonio.”184 La Prensa’s story was published the following day, noting that the conservation society was not alone in its protest, with many neighbors on the street writing letters urging that the name not be changed.185 The city refused to change the name and declared its opposition to renaming any other streets bearing historic names.186 The Light was not to be outdone in extolling the Franciscan contribution to tourism. Reporting on the “thousands of tourists” who visit San Antonio yearly to see the missions, the Light credited “this great religious conquest, converting Indians from savages into educated workers for the upbuilding of the new world” for creating “the foundation for present San Antonio and Texas.”187 In language that comes across as a pep talk in the wake of the stock market crash, a subsequent Light article proclaimed that the missions “still stand as monuments to the courage and zeal of the founders of the culture and progress Texas claims today.”188 No detail concerning the missions’ or the Spaniards’ contribution to the city and state was too small for inclusion on the news pages. One article in the Light mentioned that the “Pen Women,” a San Antonio women’s writing club, had read an article about the legend of Mission San José at their recent meeting.189 Another article noted that a “close-­up picture” of Mission San José was the new feature art on the dining car menus of the Southern Pacific Railroad.190 The discovery of a possible long-­lost mission

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in Floresville, Texas, ran on the local news section front. The mission was called “Mission de Cabras,” or “Mission of the Goats,” because of the plentiful goats that browsed there at the time. The event was big news, even though the photo showed nothing more than crumbling ruins.191 Advertisers were not to be left out. Waremoore Estates advertised its new development as having not only “gas, pure artesian water, electricity, wide, paved streets, [and] telephones,” but also an “alluring environment in the very shadow of historic Mission San Jose [sic].”192 At the onset of the Great Depression, San Antonians (mostly, though not exclusively, Anglos) fought a second battle of the Alamo as they sought to preserve remnants of a glorious Spanish colonial past. Historical preservation in San Antonio, and elsewhere in the nation, did not start with the Great Depression, but it became increasingly significant as fearful Americans sought inspiration from storied, successful pioneers.193 While the first Spanish-­speaking settlers were celebrated, the progeny of that past, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, faced a more uncertain fate. The Express and the Light reported on both topics, without appreciating how these issues, and the newspaper coverage, represented a “dichotomy” tantamount to “a schizophrenic mania,” as crusading journalist Carey McWilliams later put it.194 La Prensa, however, as a Spanish-­language newspaper, was a daily homage to both Mexican and Spanish heritage. A December 31, 1929, article that traced how Spanish colonists incorporated many words from the Aztec language and helped shape the Spanish spoken in Mexico exemplified this broader understanding of culture. La Prensa framed the complexities of Anglo, Spanish, and Mexican cultural heritage, recognizing Indian contributions as well.195 La Prensa, therefore, represented what French historian Pierre Nora would characterize as an important site of memory. Through its journalism, the newspaper constructed enduring public memories of languages and culture that codified what it meant to be Mexican.

Conclusion The three newspapers—the Express, La Prensa, and the Light—told stories about Mexicans, immigrants, and repatriates in 1929 in distinct, often dichotomous news frames that reflected each news organization’s priorities and editorial mind-­set. These stories were told against the long,

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complicated backdrop of the state’s Spanish colonial past and Mexican American history. Most telling, however, were those things absent from the frames. The two English-­language newspapers rarely dealt with the fate of Mexicans once they crossed the border. This might reflect a mandate to cover the United States. But it contradicts one of the tenets of the financial frame that stressed the interrelation between the Mexican and US economies, and that of Texas and Mexico in particular. Only in La Prensa were Mexicans visible figures who crossed borders and remained three-­ dimensional—though in some cases broken—people. Even on the US side of the border, Mexicans and Mexican Americans appeared multidimensional only in La Prensa. Through the good-­citizen frame Mexicans were not only workers, but also community builders with the wherewithal to help fellow immigrants in need. These activities, and equally importantly, the representation of these activities in the Mexican and Mexican American paper of record, La Prensa, helped create a positive image of possibility that undergirded the later efforts of Mexicans in the Long and Wide Civil Rights Movement. Frames less evident, such as the hierarchy of color frame, and the somos amigos/we are friends frame, were superseded by the sheer dominance of the financial frame, especially in the Express and the Light. The less extensive use of racial arguments found in the hierarchy of color frame might also stem from reticence to play up the racially charged dimension of immigration. For instance, in 1933, William Randolph Hearst issued a bulletin of Hearst editorial know-­how, which included many instructions he had sent in earlier years. Among these was this dictate: “Make a paper for the NICEST KIND OF PEOPLE—for the great middle class. Omit things that will offend nice people. Avoid coarseness and slang and low tone.”196 By that Hearst standard, the somos amigos/we are friends frame should have been more prevalent. That frame, however, was most evident in La Prensa and Express stories, revealing the newspapers’ jointly held, idealized image of Mexico and the United States, one of neighborliness and familiarity. The Express was most prolific in its coverage that framed Mexicans as an economic benefit to the United States. Frank G. Huntress’s editorial page unequivocally disputed as “baseless” and “unfair” arguments that suggested Mexicans posed an economic threat. In this stance the paper operated as a proponent of the financial interests that made the city and the region successful: banking, railroads, and agriculture. Its coverage

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helped construct a vision of Mexicans as the laboring lynchpin maintaining the region’s unskilled and semiskilled workforce. The Light’s use of the financial frame showed a similar skew. A prime example was a story about the Alien Registration Act of 1929 headlined “Texas Farmer to Benefit by Alien Law.”197 That the immigrants would benefit most under the law from no longer fearing deportation was omitted from the headline. Instead, the story framed the relief law as a boon to farmers anxious to secure a stable workforce. Even La Prensa’s opposing pariah and patriot frames blended with the financial frame. Mexicans’ heroic or outcast status hinged on whether they were depicted as returning with dollars and know-­how or as indigents lacking basic skills. The most significant omission was the absence of the amnesty frame in news coverage of the Alien Registry Act of 1929. The Express described the law as giving immigrants who entered the country illegally before June 3, 1921, “the opportunity to legalize their residence so as to have the right to apply for citizenship.”198 The paper quoted the local immigration service director as saying registration “is a privilege this country is extending.” Meanwhile, the Light reported the registration permit would put immigrants “on equal footing with those who entered legally.”199 The measure received no protest coverage in either the Light or the Express. While it fit the Oxford English Dictionary definition of amnesty as “a general overlooking or pardon of past offenses by the ruling authority,” that term was never used. While the frame seems inherently more benevolent, it nonetheless entwines the identity of the immigrant with an illegal act, albeit one that merits forgiveness.200 The term used most similar to amnesty, privilege, means “a right, advantage, or immunity granted to or enjoyed by an individual, corporation of individuals, etc., beyond the usual rights or advantages of others.” But the context of the use was key, and the tone of the articles sought to assure immigrants and their employers that this was a positive step, not a problematic one. In other words, the 1929 law that put immigrants on a path to legal residency and citizenship was not framed as a toxic, dangerous act for the country, as such measures have often been framed in the years since President Ronald Reagan offered “amnesty” under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). In any case, comparatively few Mexicans benefited from the 1929 law. Some 80 percent of the immigrants who registered their prior entry under the act during the Depression years were Canadian and European.201 Most news frames were characterized by political, economic, or social

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struggles. The Spanish nostalgia frame, however, evoked a proud public memory of eighteenth-­century Spanish-­speaking immigrants at a time when their descendants were viewed as illegal interlopers or, at best, merely the human machine tools of agriculture and industry. Although the immigrant and ethnic press is often singled out for its role in creating community solidarity, the Spanish nostalgia frame exemplifies one way the mainstream press fulfilled the same function for its imagined community of readers.202 Through their 1929 news coverage and editorials that framed reverence for San Antonio’s Spanish, Catholic, and Indian founding, the Express and the Light bolstered the city they served. That effort was challenged on Tuesday, October 29—Black Tuesday— the day the stock market took its deepest dive to that point. That same day the Express dedicated its new eight-­story art deco–­inspired building on the corner of Avenue E and 3rd Street. The newspaper’s special dedication edition ran more than two hundred pages and weighed three pounds.203 The Herbert S. Green–­designed building was loosely modeled on the Chicago Tribune Tower. At the time, the Express employed thirty-­six reporters, copyreaders, and editors, and had more than a hundred regular correspondents throughout Texas. The new facility gave each reporter “his individual steel desk . . . and his typewriter safeguarded with his own key.” The walls were painted a “clean-­looking, restful” buff and cream, while each reporter had his own “ample steel waste basket” to provide “remedy for the trash strewn floor of the editorial room of days gone by.”204 While the newspaper ran dozens of congratulatory ads for itself inside, the front-­page lead news story carried the headline “Bankers More Hopeful after Another Day of Violent Break in Prices on Stock Exchange.” The jump read, “Bankers seek prop to falling market.” The newspapers reflected the emotions and uncertainty that would come to characterize the Great Depression. And it was unclear whether the allure of a memory of the past, or the promise of a bright new newspaper building, would carry San Antonio through.

Chapter 2

1930

A Thousand Times Better Off with Mexican Labor

T

he temperature was eighty degrees by 10:​00 in the morning on April 7, which was warm for a southwestern Texas spring day. By afternoon, San Antonio’s heat wave would peak at ninety-­ three degrees. Weather, however, was no deterrent to a thousand jobless San Antonians who met at the Plaza de Zacate to begin a protest march through downtown.1 The political climate was heating up too. Attitudes toward Mexicans in the city that had been simmering on a back burner would boil over that day and make page 1 of the Light. The flashpoint was a communist-­led parade of the unemployed that marched through downtown, past the Mexican consulate (over the protest of the US State Department), and spilled onto the steps of City Hall, where the mayor addressed them. A group of about fifty women were in the lead, some clutching small children. “Business along Houston Street, Alamo Plaza, and Commerce Street was practically suspended as the parade marched through those streets and shop owners and clerks joined the huge gallery of sidewalk watchers,” the Light reported under a banner headline.2 Waving placards that had met Mayor C. M. Chambers’s prior approval, such as “We Cannot Be Fed on Hopes,” the messengers endured bystanders’ disparaging mutters. “I think they turned Mexico loose in San Antonio,” one watcher was reported to say. That notion was shared by many, according to the Light, which noted “much comment could be heard concerning the nationality of the marchers.” Embedded in these reactions was the racial coding of a Mexican appearance or coloring into something profiled as automatically non-­American. “ ‘Send ’em back to Mexico if they want jobs,’” the Light quoted another onlooker. The “othering” continued, with comments such as “ ‘Bet half of them are not American citizens.’” Another spectator went further: “ ‘Haven’t seen one American yet.’ ” The Light made it clear that these were not isolated observations. “Other similar ex-

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Figure 2.1. An estimated one thousand jobless, mostly Mexican men, march through downtown San Antonio from Plaza de Zacate to City Hall, on April 7, 1930, while onlookers mutter disparaging comments. San Antonio Light Photograph Collection, UTSA Special Collections–­ITC, No. L-­0049-­L. Used with permission, © San Antonio Express-­News/ZUMA.

pressions could be heard on every hand.”3 Suspicions about the marchers’ nationality weren’t limited to spectators. Immigration officials from various agencies mingled with the marchers, though no arrests were made, La Prensa reported.4 The lead paragraph of the Light maintained that “less than a dozen Americans” marched in the parade. In short, the framing of the Light story revealed how the pariah frame depicting Mexicans as “un-­American,” unwanted, and jobless had evolved since 1929. Despite their assertion of agency in this march, Mexicans were seen still as outcasts likely to drain American resources. The lack of organized labor’s support for the march underscored the Mexicans’ isolated status in the workforce. A spokesman for the building trades was quick to inform the Light that labor union members standing in the crowd outside City Hall were “merely spectators.” Likewise, religious figures were noted in news coverage only as on-

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lookers. The Express reported that priests on the steps of nearby San Fernando Cathedral peered through binoculars at the crowd as the church bells called believers to Lenten services. The only observer on record applauding the marchers was D. S. Sap, “an aged negro employee of City Hall.” He was too far from the action to make out what was said. He listened as rings of cigarette smoke began billowing over the crowd, adding haze to the heat enveloping the protesters. “Each time the crowd applauded a speaker,” reported the Light, Sap joined in the cheering. “I can’t hear him, but he must be making a point! He must be making a point!” The only reported expression of solidarity with the Mexican and Mexican American protestors was confined to another person of color. Was the inclusion of this voice in the Light news story mere happenstance, or did D. S. Sap’s presence in the story serve as a proxy for the idea that the marginalized along the color continuum shared common concerns? The newspapers failed to answer that question. The newspapers, however, did subsequently qualify some of the concerns raised in their coverage about communist involvement in the protest. In follow-­up reports on the jobless march, all three newspapers quoted Mexican consul Enrique Santibañez as saying he had no fear of communists. Moreover, Santibañez stressed that he had not asked for the march to be rerouted. Instead, he said he saw the march as about real economic need. Despite such commonalities in news coverage, there were also significant differences, some of them subtle. The Express, for instance, made a more nuanced assumption about the nationality of the marchers, describing the protestors as “nearly all of Mexican descent.” In describing ethnicity, not nationality, the Express did not so blatantly identify the marchers as non-­Americans. The Express further noted that “three negroes were in the parade,” suggesting slightly more fraternity between “othered” groups than previously reported. La Prensa, however— the only paper to outline the full parade route—tackled the nationality issue head-­on. La Prensa put the number of American participants at less than twenty, as had the Light. In sharp contrast with the Light’s pariah frame, La Prensa couched the protest in the good-­citizen frame, describing the marchers as orderly participants engaged in a civic exercise to fight a common problem. In fact, the San Antonio Mexicans were hardly alone in their struggle to find work. They were among 3.2 million people nationwide without jobs in 1930, double the number recorded before the October 24, 1929, “Black Thursday” stock market crash.5 Hoover sought answers, forming the

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President’s Emergency Committee for Employment, a group that looked for a private-­sector solution to the rampant joblessness.6 With quota restrictions in place for immigrants from other parts of the world, Congress reignited debate about the role of Mexican labor in the United States. Once again it considered legislation, including the Box bill, to impose a quota restriction on Western Hemisphere immigration. The Hoover administration continued its policy to restrict Mexicans administratively and to deport as many as possible. The impact of this policy played out on the pages of La Prensa in 1930, in articles such as “More Mexican Families Deported.”7 La Prensa made it personal. The newspaper listed the names of the “repatriates” returned to Mexico on October 25, 1930. Among them were Candelario Peña and Manuela R. de Peña and their children, Manuel, Maria Luisa, and José Lorenzo, who were seven, six, and three years of age, respectively. The children likely were US citizens, though they were listed as deportees.8 Mexicans may have been unwanted in the United States, but they were promised that was not the case back home. Through La Prensa, Mexican expatriates received a formal invitation from President-­elect Pascual Ortiz Rubio welcoming their return.9 Those lucky enough to remain employed and avoid deportation in San Antonio often worked on segregated work teams or separate shifts, largely apart from Anglos. Combined with their concentration in the city’s crowded, impoverished West Side, the segregated shifts helped socially isolate the Mexican and Mexican American community. This isolation included Mexican women, who were mainly employed in garment making, pecan shelling, and household service work. These segregated living and labor situations left Mexicans feeling even less American.10 Beyond that, these conditions also created a constituency ripe for social action and an audience for Spanish-­language media. For those literate in the mother tongue, this included La Prensa. The newspaper’s publisher, Ignacio Lozano, continued his campaign for the Mexican Clinic, combining this effort to uplift the community with his goal to promote Spanish-­language literature and arts. He staged a fundraiser at the Majestic Theater on October 25, 1930, with the film star Antonio Moreno, a romantic idol whose leading ladies included Greta Garbo and Clara Bow. Dr. Alfonso Tirado, a celebrated Mexican tenor, also arrived to perform for the event. La Prensa sold tickets for the show, which featured a screening of El hombre malo [The bad man], a Spanish-­ language production filmed by First National Pictures. Lozano brought

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Figure 2.2. La Prensa publisher Ignacio E. Lozano (center) and Hollywood actor Antonio Moreno (right) on the occasion of a performance to benefit the Mexican Clinic in San Antonio. The man at left is Dr. Alfonso Ortiz Tirado, a renowned Mexican tenor also performing at the benefit. San Antonio Light Photograph Collection, UTSA Special Collections–­ITC, No. L-­1245-­H. Used with permission, © San Antonio Express-­News/ZUMA.

the Los Angeles–­based movie critic of La Opinión and La Prensa, Gabriel Navarro, to San Antonio to serve as master of ceremonies. Navarro, a playwright, musician, and novelist, had also written a biography of Moreno.11 Perhaps more significantly, Navarro was a discerning critic of film representations of Latin Americans in Hollywood, another way Lozano’s press bolstered Spanish-­speaking people in the United States.12 The Mexican Clinic fund-raiser was page-­one news for La Prensa, and the subject of briefs inside the Light and the Express, in keeping with the newspapers’ conception of their imagined audiences. For instance, in a blurb on its society page, the Express reported that Moreno, a native of Madrid, Spain, was later fêted at the Spanish Governor’s Palace with red roses and yellow chrysanthemums, decor honoring the Spanish flag.13

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Nonetheless, news about Mexicans, immigrants, and immigration continued to make headlines in the English-­language press in 1930. The jobless Mexican marchers who had created such public drama and animosity on April 7 would continue to play a role, though an unwelcome one, as antagonists in unfolding, connected political crises. Many of the frames present in 1929 news coverage continued to appear, including the pariah frame, the patriot frame, the financial frame, the hierarchy of color frame, the somos amigos/we are friends frame, the prescriptive frame, and the Spanish nostalgia frame. A new frame—the quantification frame—emerged, marking the escalation of the return migration. This frame defined repatriation and deportation by numbers and statistics, tools popularized during the Progressive Era and prescribed by journalist Walter Lippmann to describe the dimensions of an issue.14 The Express, the Light, and La Prensa did not share all frames, though they shared many in some form. This chapter explores and illustrates each of these frames. Numbers were an important tool La Prensa used to underscore the significance of what happened to Mexicans, but not the only tool. The newspaper continued to write stories showing the deportee, the repatriate, and the immigrant as human beings with names, names like Manuel, Maria, Luisa, and José.

Patriot Frame: The Nucleus of a Repatriation Movement Despite the anti-­Mexican sentiment so evident in coverage of the jobless march, more positive representations of Mexicans continued to appear in the news. The year 1930 saw a continuation of the patriot frame in immigration news related to repatriates, particularly for agricultural workers returning to Mexico. As in 1929, words associated with this frame included “strength of character,” “know-­how,” “bravery,” and “heroism,” among others. These Mexicans were also sometimes seen as resilient and accomplished and were depicted returning with abundant possessions, including farm implements and home furnishings. In 1930, however, the patriot frame was formalized with a presidential seal of approval when President-­elect Pascual Ortiz Rubio’s invitation to repatriate made page 1 of La Prensa on January 14, 1930. Speaking to the Mexican community in Los Angeles, Ortiz Rubio exhorted expatriates to return to Mexico with their northern-­acquired skills to rebuild their country.15 Rubio’s comments translated into English were:

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I don’t need to remind you that at this time in Mexico’s reconstruction work and in the consolidation of the successes of the Mexican Revolution, we need the collaboration of all Mexicans and particularly those who, like you, have struggled in a more advanced society and have acquired ideas and strength of character that enable you to go and teach your Mexican brothers what you have absorbed through your daily work experience in state-­of-­the-­art industrial and agricultural sectors.16 Some Mexicans heeded the formal call. The migration was most visible at the border, where the returnees passed through government checkpoints. But it was socially constructed for San Antonio readers of the Express in articles such as a February 1, 1930, story headlined “Many Mexicans Are Returning.” The Express reported that “the nucleus of a repatriation movement” had become apparent with fifty families crossing the border from Laredo. Most had been tenant farmers in the United States, where they had lived for twenty-­five or more years and were now returning with their duty-­free farm vehicles and equipment to work on newly irrigated Mexican land.17 The phenomenon continued throughout 1930, with, for instance, La Prensa reporting from Laredo, Texas, on October 24, 1930, “The Exodus of Mexicans to the Homeland Continues.” Most of these repatriates were returning with their household goods, trucks, farm animals, and horses and were headed to government-­sponsored agricultural colonies, La Prensa’s article stated.18 This autonomous diaspora occurred amid continued acrimonious immigration policy debates and intensified deportation efforts. The momentum had begun in 1929, the same year Mexican Americans in Texas formed the League of United Latin American Citizens, known as LULAC, which still exists at this writing. The group, which was styled in the approach of W. E. B. Du Bois, the historian and black civil rights leader, and the NAACP, turned to the courts to fight poll taxes and school segregation throughout the Southwest.19 Ignacio Lozano, publisher of La Prensa, used his newspaper to champion those causes. Finding justice, jobs, and health care for Mexicans in Texas and Mexico was another urgent need La Prensa addressed in the 1930s. In its effort to find justice for Mexicans, La Prensa seized opportunities when they arose to celebrate Mexicans in the United States as true American heroes. A prime chance came in 1930, when the memory of a dead Mexican American war hero saved Carlos Gutierrez Sifuentes, a seven-­

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year-­old El Paso boy, from deportation. To win the boy’s right to remain in the United States, his adoptive mother, the widow of the World War I American army hero Private Marcos B. Armijo, testified before the immigration judge, and La Prensa covered the story. She recounted the tale of her husband’s bravery. In 1918, during a battle in France, a German shell blew off Private Armijo’s legs. Unable to walk, he calmly rolled cigarettes and smoked them while he exhorted the remaining American forces to keep fighting. Armijo’s widow testified that her US-­born adoptive son had a Mexican mother. The mother was forced to work long hours to support her children after her husband abandoned the family. Armijo’s widow, who was never identified by first name in the newspaper’s coverage, told the immigration judge that she was certain her adoptive son was born in the United States, because she had been present at his birth. With her ample government pension, she agreed to adopt and educate the child. La Prensa reported that once she identified herself as Armijo’s widow, she ensured the boy would not be deported. “The entire official world holds the deceased Armijo in high esteem, who is considered one of the best examples of the Hispano-­American race in the United States and is the most famous hero of the World War in this region. The highest circles of power in Washington had recognized Armijo’s valor,” the article concluded.20 In fact, the president of the United States posthumously awarded Private Armijo a Distinguished Service Cross.21 As explained by La Prensa, the bar to avert deportation was high, personified by the family of a patriot who paid in blood. La Prensa’s patriot frame continued in much the same way it had in 1929. The Mexican government needed its prodigals to return and do nothing less than transform a nation. These were more than workers. These were citizens, with strength of character and knowledge to share. This was entirely different from the vision of Mexicans in the United States, whose place in the American imagination typically existed at the margin. La Prensa’s coverage, in particular, suggested none were more marginalized in 1930 than deportees, many of whom were US citizens or residents of long standing unable to document their presence. Marcos B. Armijo’s widow was able to prevent one child from being unjustly deported, but few could claim a war hero’s wife as a sponsor. News and editorial coverage, particularly in the Express, however, framed Mexicans as having an intrinsic monetary value for several US business sectors in the Southwest.

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Financial Frame: Immigration Policy for the Southwest Economy The financial frame was elevated to a “storm center of thought” as Express editorial writers in 1930 “satisfied their instinct to spread ideas” about the immigration policies debated with increasing ferocity in Washington. News stories that began documenting the toll deportation, repatriation, and immigration restrictions had on agriculture and other industries were another spur to editorial writers. The Express pages were the place where the legislative wrangling of far-­off Washington solons, to use the vernacular for politicians at the time, collided with the reality of ranching and other work. In short, the Express reacted to rotting fruit falling on the ground. In fighting legislators to protect regional and local financial interests, the Express took on something much bigger. Since 1790 Congress had limited citizenship to “white persons.” Although the US Supreme Court in the 1920s had ruled Mexicans as “white” in the context of their citizenship applications, many seeking to restrict Mexican labor argued that their inferior stock should bar them from even setting foot in the country.22 The most contentious immigration-­related federal policy dispute in 1930 centered on Mexican quota restrictions, and the Box bill represented one Texan’s view. John C. Box, the East Texas congressional Democrat who had failed in his quest to set quotas on Mexican immigration in the 1920s, reintroduced the measure, the San Antonio Express reported in a page-­ one Associated Press story.23 Box, the ranking minority member on the House Immigration Committee, offered a competing bill to that of committee chairman Albert Johnson of Washington state. Box said his measure would treat all countries equitably, though provisions easing entry for “habitual English speakers” favored Canada.24 In January and February 1930, the Express published almost weekly editorials warning that the economic lifeblood of Texas and “almost any other area in the Southwest” would be drained by the flight of low-­wage Mexican labor that would ensue if the Box bill or other similar measures were passed.25 As might be expected, the frame represented the views of the Express’s imagined community of readers: larger growers, bankers, and big business. These were not the small farmers Box counted among his constituents.26 Box called on kindred solons to join him in the fight, including US representative Wright Patman, who had been elected a year earlier from the northeast border town of Texarkana, the Express re-

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ported. In a precursor to the Reagan era 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which took aim at those who employed immigrants who were not lawfully in the country, Patman introduced a bill in February 1930 to make it a felony to hire or contract such workers. Patman sought a maximum penalty of $20,000 in fines and ten years in jail.27 Ultimately, the 1986 bill imposed a civil penalty not to exceed $10,000 for each immigrant hired illegally.28 The Express editorial writers denounced Box’s position. The Express was explicit about the opportunities for Mexican labor in the United States: “plowing, sowing, and reaping; chopping and picking cotton, transplanting onions and lettuce, digging potatoes, gathering and packaging spinach, tomatoes, oranges, and so on.”29 In sum, Mexican labor was employed for labor that “machinery” could not perform and that “native white men generally will not do.”30 This included work in heavy industry and construction, the editorial continued, where Mexicans were “needed to lay pipes, dig ditches, put down pavement, grade rights-­of-­way, and build railroads.”31 Beyond framing the immigration debate, the Express marked unskilled labor as Mexican, far beyond what a white person would do. This is a prime example of an early twentieth-­century media social construction of race. This time, however, the language of the media found in the Express coverage defined white identity in opposition to brown, that is, Mexican and Mexican American identity. This is in contrast to the prevalent paradigm of the black–­white race binary, which the media has been instrumental in constructing and institutionalizing.32 In keeping with the way sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann conceived social reality, this Express news coverage helped construct a powerful symbolic racial representation of labor for southwest Texas society.33 Careful readers, however, might detect an implicit rebuke of whites. Though desperate and out of work, they would not consider taking such low-­wage, backbreaking jobs. Likewise, the Express editorial writers inscribed a place for Mexicans in society, which was essential, yet lesser. The Express covered the Mexican quota restriction hearings in Congress assiduously, framing the debate as a pivotal policy clash concerning the fate of the southwestern economy. In a February 1, 1930, Express article, “Hearing of Alien Bill in Uproar,” the paper reported that California state representative Arthur Free called Frances I. Jones, director of the US Employment Service, a “propagandist and a theorist” for arguing that Mexican labor was not needed in the United States.34 Anglo restric-

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tionists were not alone in their effort to stop Mexican immigration; some blacks also were opposed. The Express noted, for instance, that the “negro” congressman from Chicago’s South Side, Oscar Stanton De Priest, questioned F. Stuart Fitzpatrick, manager of the US Chamber of Commerce’s civic development department, about the number of jobless in the United States. When Fitzgerald was unable to supply the number, De Priest volunteered that “there were four million men out of work at present.”35 De Priest was not just the “negro” congressman from the South Side, he was also the first black elected to congress from the North, and the first elected in the twentieth century. More than that, he was the only black to serve in Congress during his three terms, making him a de facto leader for all blacks in the nation, not just those from Chicago’s South Side.36 The appearance of De Priest, who was not a member of the immigration committee, indicated that certain segments of the black community considered Mexican immigrants competition for jobs. During the hearing, De Priest argued that the Mexicans were from “outside the country” and brought in because “they were cheaper than American labor.” He argued for restricting Mexican immigration because “we ought to protect the Americans, not foreigners.”37 Just days before, in fact, the Light reported that De Priest had addressed the National Negro Labor Congress and “declared that immigration in this country should be stopped for a 10-­year period.”38 Sen. William Harris, Republican of Georgia, most likely did not have De Priest’s constituents in mind when he contended that Mexican workers took jobs from Americans and contributed to the poverty of native-­born American children. The Express strenuously disputed that “baseless and unfair” notion on the editorial page May 30, 1930.39 Senator Harris attempts to paint a distressing picture of native American children deprived of bread because a million Mexicans have taken potential jobs from their parents! The Georgia Senator points to the average influx of 58,000 from Mexico during the past five years, and asserts that “every Mexican who comes into this country takes earnings from an American laborer and his family.” That statement is as baseless and unfair as the figures used to sustain it.40 Moreover, the Express continued, most unemployed Americans are urban industrial workers “who would scorn to follow the plow, swing a pickaxe,

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or wield a spade under a burning sun.” 41 The Express’s editorial illustrated the dichotomous framing of Mexicans. They were strong and hardworking, but they were also lowly, and implicitly less suited to urban industrial work than whites. This backhanded compliment to Mexicans also cast whites in a less-­than-­favorable light, though many might have seen turning down dirty work as a badge of honor. The Express, through its editorial, once again defined the white and the Mexican in terms of what work they were willing to do. This media espousal of white rejection of stoop labor was a powerful construction of reality, appearing as it did in the desperate days of the Depression. The Express editorial voice was consistent in its denunciation of limiting Mexican immigration, and it employed classic editorialist tools: persuading, interpreting, and appraising.42 The newspaper’s audience included influential thought leaders. As George Fox Mott noted in his New Survey of Journalism, first published in 1937, “editorials appeal particularly to the leaders in the various social, economic, and political groups, and through these leaders find their way to all levels of the population.”43 Aware of bitter divisions on the issue of Mexican immigration, in the Texas delegation, as much as nationally, the Express used the power of its editorial page to urge action: defeat of legislation that posed economic peril to the region. In the Light, Arthur Brisbane used his national page-­one “Today” column to make an economic case for immigration. Avoiding Hearst’s inflammatory eugenics-­inspired language, Brisbane focused on the positive impact of immigrants on the country, especially their potential purchasing power. Without specifically referencing Mexicans, Brisbane argued: What the country really needs is POPULATION to consume the things that farmers and factories produce. If we had enough people there would be no problem about “too much wheat.” The people would eat it. Farmers who supported their congressmen in shutting out the kind of immigration that has built up this nation will realize eventually that what they need is more customers and consumers HERE IN AMERICA. And workmen, unemployed, will realize that merely shutting out foreigners does not guarantee jobs. Jobs depend on consumption of goods, and consumption of goods depends on people.44 As a bit item in a daily column, this financial framing of immigration was fleeting, however much it was to the point. For the anti-­restrictionists in Texas, the best-­case scenario would be the

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defeat of the quota bills. But even if Mexicans were not permitted to enter the country as permanent producers and consumers, fulfilling Brisbane’s hopes for an immigration economic engine, Mexicans at least needed to enter as producers, Texans argued. US representative John Nance Garner pushed for a clause in the quota bills that would permit seasonal labor to cross the border freely during a ninety-­day period when farmers needed their help most, the Express reported in a March 2, 1930, story.45 Earlier, in February, the Express showcased Garner’s congressional testimony in an editorial, quoting him as advising against “Porto Rican [sic] and Filipino laborers.” After all, explained Garner, “the Mexicans are not only acclimated, but feel at home in the Southwest.”46 Known as “Cactus Jack,” Garner was powerful political Texas muscle. He would serve as Speaker of the House in 1931 and as vice president of the United States during Franklin Roosevelt’s first two terms. La Prensa’s framing was more complex, capturing an upfront recognition that the welcome mat for Mexicans was woven with their own utilitarian labor. La Prensa editorialized that it was “evident that capitalists in the southern United States opposed establishment of a Mexican quota because cheap labor was a convenience to them.” The newspaper then noted the importance of expatriates to the Mexican economy: “Mexico received millions of dollars in remittances from the Mexican laborers in the United States.”47 Agribusiness in the 1920s successfully blocked restrictions against Mexican immigration. Now, in the 1930s, they feared profits would walk out the door with the Mexican labor force. And, noted La Prensa, Mexico had much to lose as well. La Prensa’s reports also reflected a financial counter-­frame, making economic arguments the Light did not. The Express’s and La Prensa’s coverage of a January 10, 1930, Rotary Club luncheon speech, attended by publisher Lozano typified this counter-­frame.48 William J. Knox, San Antonio’s public school assistant superintendent, addressed the business group, revealing results of his then-­recent economic study that showed Mexican cotton pickers earned $11 million a year. This multimillion-­dollar combined Mexican income flowed back to San Antonio’s local businesses, housing markets, and tax base. The proof was in the year-­round success of San Antonio businesses, a phenomenon unknown in Texas cities that were less welcoming to Mexicans, Knox said. This counter-­frame is significant in that it attested to a Mexican permanency; and whether they were citizens or not, if they paid taxes, owned homes, and sent their children to schools, Mexicans had

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more than a stake in the US system. They were here to stay and contribute, the counter-­frame showed. In its coverage of the Rotary Club speech, the Express said Knox “hung a ‘rainbow ‘round the shoulders’ of the Mexican” and “traced his economic wanderings from the class of peon to that of a man of wealth.” 49 This was in contrast to the Express’s more typical coverage, which framed Mexicans simply as convenient, cheap, and transient labor. La Prensa’s coverage of the speech offered a constructed reality of Mexican success in San Antonio that might inspire its readers to achieve their own goals north of the border. The Express coverage offered English-­ language readers a glimmer of a broader vision of the contributions Mexicans were making to San Antonio. The Hearst-­owned paper failed to cover the speech. As the three newspapers shaped their coverage of the news of the day, their respective frames became more sharply etched. All three papers gave front-­page treatment to Box’s losing bid for the congressional Democratic nomination in July 1930. “Box’s defeat will have an important effect, it is likely, on the fight in Congress in connection with Mexican immigration quotas,” the Express reported in its news story on July 28, 1930. If reelected, and the House Democrats had gained control, Box would have become committee chairman.50 The Express alone, however, showcased Box’s defeat on its editorial page, lamenting the possibility that Box might use his lame-­duck status to continue to push for cuts in Mexican immigration. “As diplomatic protests and adverse public sentiment generally have sufficed to prevent enactment thus far, it is to be hoped that no such coup will succeed,” the editorial stated.”51 The agribusiness-­driven financial frame evinced in the Express and La Prensa fits James Hertog and Douglas McLeod’s idea that the political economy—the interplay among law, politics, and economics—­produces public-­policy-­related frames.52 In this case, the political economy of southwest Texas helped frame the issue of restrictive Mexican immigration in a way that was evident in both newspapers. La Prensa editorials revealed a pragmatic understanding of the utilitarian role Mexican labor played in both the US and Mexican economies. Both La Prensa and the Express shared an aversion to quota restriction legislation, and to Box’s version of it in particular. However, it must be noted that Box’s arguments were not predicated solely on economic implications. Box’s effort to stem Mexican immigration was just as much based on his animus toward a people he deemed racially inferior.

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Hierarchy of Color Frame: Not “Inferior to Any Other Race in the World” The hierarchy of color frame pegged Mexicans in the social and economic order on the basis of skin color and ethnicity, in essence distinguishing Mexicans and whites as separate races, in part because of mixed Spanish and Indian blood. In earlier years Mexicans were often described as better workers than blacks. That distinction was lost on Box, who continued in 1930 to lace racial rhetoric through his arguments to impose quota restrictions on Mexicans seeking entry to the United States. Stories in this frame were often characterized by terms such as “inferior,” “menace,” and “threat,” and epithets such as “peon.” Express coverage of congressional hearings on Western Hemisphere Immigration touched on a number of these racial issues. A January 30, 1930, Associated Press article published in the Express highlighted testimony by “two American citizens of Mexican ancestry—J. T. (José Tomás) Canales and Alonso Perales.”53 The latter, the AP writer explained, served with General Pershing, who had sought to resolve the Tacna–­Arica dispute between Chile and Peru, the story noted. Omitted from the news frame was the significance of Canales and Perales as Mexican American civil rights leaders. Just the year before, the two attorneys had helped found the League of United Latin American Citizens and helped write its constitution.54 Before the committee, Perales, who was a diplomat as well as a lawyer, “made an eloquent defense of Mexicans as a race,” the AP story published by the Express stated. “I most emphatically deny that Mexicans are inferior to any other race in the world,” as those sponsoring the quota restriction bills argued, Perales said. Canales argued that the State Department and immigration officials “were unjustly deporting many Mexicans, who either were American citizens or had resided north of the Rio Grande for many years and had proven their ability as workers.”55 The AP article carried a Washington dateline, and though it put a favorable spotlight on the testimony of Perales and Canales, the failure to connect the two with LULAC and the notion of organized, mutual self-­help is an example of the way national media helped omit the emerging Mexican American civil rights movement from the news frame. With Asians excluded from immigration, agribusiness and industry saw few alternatives to Mexican labor. Success at severely restricting Chinese and Japanese immigrants had not blocked all Asian immigration.

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Filipinos, who began immigrating mostly as single men to work on the West Coast in the aftermath of the Spanish-­American War of 1898, met resistance and animosity.56 Arriving for the most part without families, Filipinos were viewed as oversexed and at the same time effeminate, and considered akin to the undesirable Chinese caste whose legal entry would be barred from the country until 1943.57 Still, the occasional apprehension of Chinese immigrants made news, particularly when it had a quirky twist, as in a Light report with a Los Angeles dateline. “Chagrined and suspicious when a quid of tobacco suddenly shot out from beneath a load of alfalfa and struck him in the eye, Frank Ellis, immigration inspector, prodded the alfalfa with a pitchfork . . . four Chinese emerged quickly from beneath the hay. Driver Paul L. Simpson was charged with smuggling Chinese into the country.”58 The unique method of detection, facilitated by the immigrants’ own sloppiness, was the feature of the story. The impact on the inspector and the driver, both more than likely white, was related. No word, however, was provided on the fate of the Chinese. Chinese were taboo; however, Filipinos were seen as “other,” even in comparison to the more family-­oriented Mexican and Japanese. Anti-­ Filipino violence on the West Coast erupted on the eve of the Great Depression, with nativists provoked by, among other things, Filipino men dating white women.59 Writing in his page-­one “Today” column in the Light, Arthur Brisbane explained that the United States had but one color, and it was white. “Regardless of opinions as to human rights, international brotherhood, etc., . . . white men, in a white country, will not allow their jobs or their women to be taken by Asiatics and common sense forbids Asiatic immigration of laborers, from our own Asiatic islands, or any other source.”60 Congressman Richard Welch, a Republican from California, pushed a bill to exclude all Filipino immigration, even while the Philippines remained a US colony. In a one-­paragraph story on April 13, 1930, the Light noted that Filipinos “attacked the bill as unjust and discriminatory.”61 Amid these anti-­Asian sentiments, Mexican Americans were somewhat better accepted, because, to adapt Edward Said’s rubric of “other,” they were more West than East, more Occident than Orient. In short, they were “other” in a way that was more familiar. Racial animus directed toward Filipinos accelerated a US move to promote Philippine independence, making the country a separate legal entity and blocking Filipinos from the US citizenship they might have expected under commonwealth status. Later in the Depression, Filipinos were also repatriated, though the two thousand shipped back were far fewer than

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the estimated half million Mexicans who returned to their home country.62 Perhaps more than anything, Filipino willingness to organize collectively and strike for higher wages dimmed their appeal to growers.63 Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler explained where Filipinos stood in his hierarchy of color in a January 25, 1930, Associated Press article that ran in the Express under the headline “Mexican Quota Plan Opposed.” The subhead filled out the news frame: “Much Better than Filipinos, Harry Chandler Tells Committee.” Chandler, president of the California-­Mexico Land & Cattle Co., and controlling owner of the Tejon Ranch in Los Angeles and Kern Counties, made his comments in testimony before the House Immigration Committee.64 In sum, he called Filipino workers “quarrelsome,” while in contrast the “Mexican peon creates no social problem because he is an innocent friendly individual.”65 In eschewing English-­ speaking Filipinos and favoring Mexicans, Chandler did not endorse the entire Spanish-­speaking labor pool. In words that were omitted from the Express news frame, Chandler said he would prefer not to hire “Porto Ricans [sic],” even though they were US citizens and were suffering economic strife on the island. “I should rather make a contribution [for their relief ] . . . and I should rather use the peon . . . than to bring in the Porto Ricans,” Chandler told the committee.66 Chandler’s comments were echoed later in the hearings by Ralph H. Taylor, executive secretary of the California agricultural committee. Taylor argued that curtailing Mexican labor would require growers “to bring in Filipinos and Porto Ricans [sic],” whom he described as a “social menace.”67 Box made it clear that whatever the views of Chandler and the other growers, Mexicans did not rate on his color gradient. “Practically all of the Mexicans that come to the US are peons, illiterate, ignorant; not good material for American citizenship” and not from “Mexico’s Caucasian ruling class,” Box said in a radio address La Prensa covered.68 Mexicans who came to the United States segregated themselves in “little Mexicos” and “lived in conditions of bad health and hygiene, spreading illness and epidemics,” he continued.69 Moreover, they were “more prone to crime than other immigrants who face restricted immigration,” Box said.70 For Box, then, color was a proxy for class. La Prensa columnist Rodolfo Uranga disputed the inferior-­race assertions Box propounded in his radio speech. “It is the immigrant class, the one who leaves his country in search of adventure, that in all cases is the more energetic, the more enterprising, the more audaciously intelligent and hardworking. The timid ones stay home.”71 What’s more, La

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Prensa said, “there is no such thing as a pure race, either in Mexico or Europe.”72 Box was more than wrong: he was also disingenuous, the columnist suggested, because Box had helped pass the Immigration Act of 1917 that barred sick, illiterate, and criminal Mexicans from the United States. Uranga’s passionate prose exemplified a prime distinction between the defense of Mexicans found in La Prensa and that found in the Express. Though both newspapers editorialized about the contribution of Mexican workers, La Prensa went further and characterized them as bright and intrepid, while dismissing that mixed blood was anything uniquely found south of the border. For Uranga, then, a Mexican mestizo had as much primacy in the hierarchy of color as Box’s “Caucasian Mexican.” Uranga saw bold immigrants trying to make something of themselves, not classes and colors. The color war extended to Mexican schoolchildren, a group that often missed classes during harvest seasons to join their parents in the fields. Their frequent absence was the rationale that some Texas school districts used to house Mexicans in separate facilities.73 That seemed about to change in 1930. La Prensa’s March 25, 1930, edition highlighted a significant Mexican civil rights victory, a court ruling that forced the Del Rio public schools to desegregate and admit Mexican students.74 LULAC, the Association of Latin American Parents and Teachers, and other groups had sued and won access to the schools, a decision at odds with pressures from farmers who discouraged school administrators, particularly in rural areas, from enforcing compulsory attendance laws.75 The ruling was one of ten major stories La Prensa ran on the topic of segregated schools during 1930, most published on page 1. The coverage brought literacy and academic achievement to the forefront of the community, mapping Mexicans and Mexican Americans as thinkers and potential citizens, not just material for manual labor. Moving up the hierarchy of color was a dream, but La Prensa suggested it might also become a reality. Mexicans did the work that whites would not do, as the Express had asserted. But La Prensa’s coverage underscored that Mexicans and Mexican Americans were capable of much more. The newspaper’s construction of Mexicans as thinkers was powerful at a time when Mexican youth were frequently treated as ignorant inferiors. They were often required to attend segregated schools, which were of poor quality. The aim was to keep Mexicans separate and subordinate to maintain a manual-­ laborer workforce, according to historian David Montejano. In his book Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986, he described

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a persistent pattern of segregation in southernmost Texas in the 1920s and 1930s.76 But La Prensa’s March 25, 1930, story documented that Mexican American parents had merely won the battle. The Del Rio public schools went on to win the war. The Texas Court of Appeals found that the separation in the Del Rio case was based on pedagogical, not racial, reasons. Nonetheless, the court ruled that arbitrarily separating Mexicans from “other whites” was illegal, a decision that recognized Mexicans as a distinct white “race.”77 The parents appealed, and with varying emphasis, the three newspapers followed the case all the way to the US Supreme Court. The decision of the federal court of appeals to permit the case to go to the Supreme Court was banner front-­page news in the Light on June 5, 1931.78 Ultimately, however, the nation’s highest court refused to hear the case, permitting segregation to remain a way of life for Mexican students in parts of Texas and the Southwest. La Prensa announced this development in a bold, all uppercased, banner teaser, or “refer” in newspaper jargon, published across the top of the newspaper on November 24, 1931: “The Segregation Case Is Definitely Lost.”79 The Express subsequently reported on a planned meeting of LULAC in San Antonio, during which the issue of Mexican school segregation would be a major topic.80 The San Antonio newspaper coverage of the Mexican American desegregation case, which came fourteen years before the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education, highlighted a prime way that Mexicans became lost in the constraints of the black–­white race binary. At best, Mexicans had a shifting place in the hierarchy of color as shown in English-­language news coverage that folded race and ethnicity with class. It was a caste system in which skin tone mattered, and there was little agreement on the place of Mexicans in it. Box put Mexicans at the bottom, with all races of color. The Light’s Arthur Brisbane articulated at least one group that fell below Mexicans—Filipinos, and all Asians for that matter. Chandler, the rancher and publisher, put Mexicans paternalistically below whites, and above other non-­white races. Mexican racial ambiguity may have played a role in these conflicting visions. “As a racially mixed group, Mexicans, like Indians and Asians, lived in a black-­and-­white world that regarded them neither as black nor white,” in the view of historian Neil Foley.81 La Prensa, and Mexican American civil rights leaders such as Canales and Perales, saw Mexicans as equal to other whites, a position they recognized many whites did not share. Although the positions were different, all parties used the hierarchy of color to sup-

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port their policy positions in news coverage. Whites exerted primacy, Mexicans petitioned for equality, and La Prensa covered the community’s effort to take its rightful seat in the schoolhouse, in keeping with the advocacy role of the ethnic press. However, news coverage in 1930 showed that not all whites subscribed to the hierarchy of color frame. Some Anglos also considered Mexicans neighbors and friends. Their ideas were manifested in a news frame in which the Golden Rule trumped perceived racial differences.

Somos Amigos/We Are Friends Frame: To Know Them Is to Love Them While Box and other politicians increasingly stirred vitriol, the Express and La Prensa intensified coverage in the somos amigos frame. In news stories and editorials that drew on personal and cultural ties between Mexicans and Anglos, as well as political and diplomatic ideals, such as Pan-­Americanism and the Monroe Doctrine, these newspapers told a different story. Longtime residents of the Southwest and West were a part of that dialogue. Knox, the San Antonio school sub-­superintendent, concluded his Rotary luncheon speech with the comment “Those that don’t appreciate Mexicans, don’t know them. When they get to know them [Mexicans] well and understand them, that changes, and they love them.”82 Knox’s sentiments were remarkably similar to those Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler expressed to Washington immigration policy makers the same month. The comments were not included in the Associated Press story the Express published, an omission that excised Chandler’s personal—not just pecuniary—connection to the Mexican community. “A good many of my friends were Mexicans and I worked with Mexicans . . . and have an appreciation of them,” Chandler stated.83 The City of the Angels was “about 60 percent Mexican” fifty years earlier when he had moved there, he noted.84 “Our traditions and background are mostly Mexican, and all of the old timers who . . . lived with the Mexicans . . . had a little different attitude toward them than the rest of the Americans,” the publisher and industrialist said.85 Chandler’s cultural frame of reference was shared by Knox, who reminisced about his San Antonio boyhood in the 1860s, when many Mexicans lived in the “best houses” and owned “hundreds of irrigated acres in the well-­watered valley.”86

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The Light published stories in the same frame; however, these were pegged to policy, not personal relationships. A prime example is the newspaper’s coverage of the Mexico City American Chamber of Commerce, and its effort to persuade Hoover to veto the Harris bill, which singled out Mexico for quota restrictions. In its cable to Hoover, the chamber said the bill should be vetoed “in the interest of the good relations now existing between the two countries.”87 Days later, Fred L. Johnson, president of the Confederación Mexicana de Obreros y Campesinos, asked Rep. John Nance Garner to oppose laws such as the Harris bill that “might be harmful to the people of Mexico.” Lawmakers should consider “the work that the Mexican laborer has done in helping the Untied States toward its present development, particularly in the clearing and cultivation of farmlands,” Johnson wrote.88 The Light published Garner’s subsequent reply to Johnson. “Aside from the economic damage that would result in agriculture in the Southeast,” Garner wrote, the quota restriction “would tend to eliminate to a great extent the very friendly relations now existing between the people of Mexico and the United States.”89 The difference between the two English-­language daily newspapers was not just that the Express made the issue personal, as it had done the year before, but also that the Express continued in 1930 to make its position on friendship with Mexico and its connection to immigration policy a major editorial-­page issue. When the Express took up the somos amigos/ we are friends frame Chandler and Knox invoked, the frame hinted at a cultural divide, driven by geography. “The Southwest’s objections” to Mexican immigration restrictions, the Express wrote, “are not entirely selfish.”90 That is because “[m]ore clearly than people who live at a distance, [southwest] residents perceive the bad effects which the restrictive legislation would have upon Mexican-­American relations.” Restrictive legislation would “gratuitously offend the New World peoples,” the Express added, reiterating a point in its earlier January 24, 1930, editorial.91 The Box bill carried a pretense of Western Hemisphere neutrality, which was betrayed by its preference for English-­speaking immigrants. Sen. William J. Harris, who authored Georgia’s bill—which the Express editorial page called the “Most Obnoxious of the Quota Bills”—didn’t pretend, making Canada and Newfoundland exempt from quota restrictions. Harris also proposed cutting Mexican immigration more than 96 percent, to about 1,500, from 40,000 in the prior fiscal year. This “patent attempt to play favorites” with Canada made the Harris Bill “more obnoxious” than three related House bills, the Express said.92

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If the Express saw a cultural divide driven by geography, it wasn’t exclusive to the Southwest borderlands. On February 25, 1930, the Express republished a St. Paul Pioneer Press editorial, which demonstrated that media views 460 miles from the Canadian border at Winnipeg were equally at odds with Washington policy makers. The Minnesota paper’s editorial “Fresh Immigration Blunders” objected to a Senate compromise to restrict all Western Hemisphere immigration except that from Canada, which earned an exemption from the Senate because of the “high quality of its immigrants.”93 Such favoritism “would spell the finish of the Monroe Doctrine,” the editorial said, and “if the policy is going to be one of rude exclusiveness, the way to keep neighborly resentment at a minimum is to be thoroughly and consistently rude.”94 The editorial concluded, “If Congress does not have the courage to treat Canada the same as Mexico, or the wisdom to treat all immigrants on the Canadian rule, it had best not tamper with Western Hemisphere relations at all.”95 The St. Paul paper refused to accept a notion of Mexican inferiority based on race, language, or any perceived hierarchy. The US State Department also weighed in, as La Prensa reported in a page-­one news story under the banner headline: “It Is Not Necessary to Impose a Quota on Mexican Immigration.” The March 16, 1930, story, datelined Washington, explained that the US State Department and the US Department of Labor disagreed on the need for a Mexican immigration quota. The State Department opposed it as superfluous, because Mexican immigration was already dwindling.96 Mexican immigration to the United States fell almost one quarter in 1929 compared to the number admitted a year earlier, La Prensa reported. Stricter requirements for entry meant that only one or two out of every ten who applied were admitted in 1929, for a total of 44,511.97 La Prensa’s coverage backed up the trend. By August 1930, La Prensa proclaimed that the “Exodus of Mexican Workers to the US Has Already Ceased.” The front-­page story reported that the US consulate in Laredo issued only fifteen visas to Mexicans in July.98 Meanwhile, as many as 1,596 Mexicans, migrating from California, Colorado, Illinois, and Texas, repatriated in July, leaving the United States at El Paso and crossing into Ciudad Juárez. Most left voluntarily, unable to find work in the failing US economy. But 226 were deported.99 Staying on good terms with a neighbor, especially one such as Mexico, with its long, storied relationship to the United States, meant recognizing that there was more at stake in the immigration debate than the US work-

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force. Diplomacy, friendly relations between countries, exemplified the somos amigos/we are friends frame. The editorial the Express reprinted from the St. Paul Pioneer Press advanced the Monroe Doctrine from President James Monroe’s original intent, which was to dissuade European powers from recolonizing the Americas. Without using the exact term— Pan-­Americanism—the Minnesota paper reflected a perception in line with that of former US ambassador to Argentina Charles Sherrill. The ambassador’s 1916 book Modernizing the Monroe Doctrine, suggested the newer understanding of the policy. “It matters little how much the republics concerned differ in racial traits,” Sherrill wrote. “Pan-­Americanism makes for a broader and deeper type of patriotism, because it adds a consideration for the viewpoint of other nations.”100 The Express transmitted this view to its readers on May 22, 1930, when it published an Associated Press story about the reaction of Mexico’s El Universal newspaper to the Box bill. El Universal invoked Pan-­Americanism in its editorial against the Box quota restrictions.101 “To return now to a policy of the closed door is to destroy the last fundamentals of Pan-­Americanism and the hope of a cordial understanding and good will between nations,” the Mexican newspaper editorialized.102 Two months later the Express covered a speech by Salvador Urbina, a Mexican Supreme Court justice, who called the Monroe Doctrine “an infantile theory used to foster imperialist polices in Latin America.” Urbina called the doctrine “dead” and suggested that discarding it would help improve relations with Mexico.103 The somos amigos/we are friends frame was predicated on multiple histories, the personal histories of civic figures with a breadth of experience in former Mexican territories, including Chandler, the publisher, and Knox, the educator. The frame also derived from American interpretations of fair play and foreign policy. The disparate treatment some policy makers accorded Canadian and Mexican immigrants on the basis of language was emblematic of an insensitivity the Express made clear it did not share toward Mexico. Despite the fond personal remembrances of a few influential Americans, and the economic interests of certain commercial and industrial sectors, many Mexicans lacked the means, ability, and legal standing to stay. The country abounded with the unemployed, and Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans were a visible, expendable “other.” Remaining in the United States was often a trial; leaving the United States was often a far greater tribulation.

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Pariah Frame: Confronting Inquisitors, Coyotes, and the Census Bureau Maintaining good relations with Mexico, much less Mexicans, was not a priority for immigration officials in El Paso, who rounded up some five hundred students from their classrooms and deported them when they couldn’t prove their citizenship. In a page-­one story March 27, 1930, La Prensa’s El Paso correspondent interviewed the deported children’s parents, many of them longtime residents who had settled in Texas prior to enactment of new immigration laws. Many said they were unaware or had forgotten that their child’s birth needed to be registered with US authorities.104 In this frame, the deportees and their parents were hapless victims of poorly conceived, or at least poorly implemented, US policy. The deportations quickly had an impact on El Paso classrooms, with La Prensa reporting 7 percent fewer students in the county public schools by March 30, 1930. Some in the Mexican community wondered whether educational authorities shared information from a school-­conducted census under a “secret agreement” with immigration officials. Or perhaps they were obeying a plan designed by “high circles in Washington, DC to intensify . . . their deportation campaign aimed at all foreigners, especially Mexicans,” La Prensa reported.105 In exposing this tragic practice, the newspaper reportage gave voice to Mexicans’ fears that longstanding, law-­ abiding years in the United States counted for nothing; Mexicans would always be targeted. Later that year, desperate Mexicans in Northern California turned the deportation process on its head. By October 22, 1930, the Express reported that Mexicans were asking to be deported “in such large numbers” that the immigration officers were swamped.106 Mexicans were pariahs who were now portrayed as operating with agency, engineering their own deportations before officials forced them to leave. But the numbers of Mexicans turning themselves in strained the government funds available to send them back, leading J. D. Nagle, the commissioner of immigration, to limit deportations. Only illegal immigrants who had committed a crime or fallen into poverty or illness and become public charges would be deported. “Self-­supporting law abiding aliens, even if in the United States illegally, are being put off when they apply for deportation,” the Express reported.107 The nation’s massive deportation policy had costs and consequences the Hoover administration had not considered.

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In border areas, however, Mexicans remained easy and unfortunate targets for deportation. La Prensa depicted deportees as “unfortunate countrymen” whose treatment by the US Border Patrol was “tantamount to that suffered during the Inquisition.” In an August 11, 1930, story the newspaper described how many were apprehended during the Border Patrol’s “daily sweeps through the most populous Mexican neighborhoods.” Once captured, “the deportees were detained in the basement of the immigration office” and kept “in a humid, dark, and uncomfortable” holding area. “There they were photographed, fingerprinted, subjected to thousands of requirements, questioned, and much more.”108 La Prensa also continued to follow the fate of repatriates as they left the United States, and in an August 25, 1930, story described a repatriation train of twenty-­four railcars carrying 1,600 people as “an immense mournful caravan of people down on their luck.” The travelers included repatriates and deportees, all of whom had been massing near the border, at Torreón in the Mexican state of Coahuila. They had no money to continue their journey home. The Mexican government paid their fares and sent them on their way. The local chamber of commerce, and the state and municipal governments, donated funds to purchase food for the caravan, including eight hundred sardine tins, one thousand pieces of bread; two sacks of sugar, six cartons of cookies, and forty kilograms of coffee.109 Adding to the financial woes facing repatriates was their continued victimization and exploitation by coyotes, criminals who helped illegal immigrants enter the country and often preyed upon them. Coyotes operating in the United States, La Prensa reported, had swindled repatriates traveling through the Midwest. The coyotes convinced repatriates they were required to exchange their US currency for Mexican money before leaving the United States. When they finally reached the Mexican border, they discovered they were penniless: The coyotes had exchanged their dollars for decommissioned Mexican money.110 La Prensa’s coverage provided more than news; it provided cautionary tales that increasingly portrayed returning to Mexico as a bleak exercise. In San Antonio, Mexicans continued to be targets. The dramatic Mexican jobless march had not been forgotten. The marchers themselves continued to be an object of scorn but also scapegoats in city politics. When Mayor C. M. Chambers pushed for a $4.98 million bond issue to create jobs and build infrastructure, A. D. Weakley, chairman of the Citizens League, which opposed the bond issue, argued that “ a survey shows there is little unemployment here, except among Mexicans who refuse to work,”

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the Light reported.111 In the Express, Walter W. McAllister, president of the San Antonio Building and Loan Association, called the bond issue “wasteful and unnecessary.” McAllister went on to attack the unemployment parade “as a thing in which the mayor and commissioners saw ‘a melodramatic chance to show the need of bonds for a bread line.’” In its news story, the Express stated flatly: “The recent unemployment parade . . . has provided ample grist for the anti-­bond speakers.”112 In advance of the upcoming vote on the bond issue, Weakley and the Citizens League had requested a federal grand jury investigation of Mexicans illegally voting in San Antonio with fraudulently issued poll tax receipts. The federal district attorney declined to pursue it, saying no federal crime had been committed. However, immigration authorities promised to investigate and “deport any alien violating any law of the state or the United States.”113 Less then a week before immigration officials in San Antonio announced their intent to deport the Mexicans, the Light published excerpts from a warning Mexican consul general Santibañez had distributed in Mexican neighborhoods in San Antonio. “It has come to our attention that American agitators have paid poll taxes of Mexican nationals with the object of using their votes,” Santibañez wrote in Spanish. The circular went on to warn that mixing “in political questions” in the United States would leave Mexican nationals at risk for deportation or jail. Santibañez also deplored that “Mexican citizens had been persuaded to participate in the unemployment parade.”114 Given the Light’s perception of its intended audience, publishing Santibañez’s statement seemed aimed at drawing Anglo attention to a possible voter fraud issue and the potential criminality of Mexican nationals, rather than aimed at warning Mexicans of the perils of participating in a US election. Whatever the intent of the Mexicans who agreed to march in the parade—or of those who voted illegally—making Mexicans more persona non grata than they already were was surely not their objective. And yet, under pressure from the opposition San Antonio Citizens League, Mayor Chambers assured a rally of about four hundred San Antonio suburbanites that if the bond issue passed, he would see to it that “American products and American labor were used in various construction projects.” Not only did Chambers promise “a living wage” would be paid, but he also said he “favored a law which would keep cheap foreign labor out of the United States.”115 No faction in city politics claimed Mexicans. The vote on the bond issue took place on May 7, 1930, with almost 35,000 voters participating, the most in any San Antonio city election to

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that point. The previous record of 26,000 votes had been set in the 1923 mayoral election. The ballots were kept under armed police guard at City Hall until they could be officially counted. The city claimed it won; the opponents claimed fraud, citing numerous irregularities, including an alleged “632 aliens” who voted.116 While the matter went to court, the ballots were stored in a City Hall vault after the lock combination was changed. It seemed that no matter what went wrong in San Antonio civic life in 1930, Mexicans were at the forefront of the problem. Later in the month, the census bureau announced new population figures for San Antonio, putting it at third place. Mayor Chambers blamed recent allegations of Mexicans’ voting illegally, and the subsequent threats of deportation against them, for the census bureau undercounting, the Light reported in a banner page-­one story. Chambers estimated that the census had missed twenty thousand Mexicans: I am not criticizing the census bureau’s work, for I believe that blame lies with recent talk of alien voters. The Mexicans have been scared to death by news reports and rumors and consequently when census workers approached them they were afraid to talk. Instead they would answer all questions with “Me no sabe” and would deny that there were any other members for the family except just the one who happened to answer the door. It would be the same way with us if we were in Mexico and there were rumors and threats being made against Americans. We would be secretive thereafter.117 In other words, Chambers argued that the newspapers reporting “recent talk of alien voters” had engendered fear in Mexicans of anything or anyone official, such that they wouldn’t respond to census workers. The pariah frame in 1930 continued to depict Mexicans, whether deportees or repatriates, as hostages to forces outside their control, whether government authorities or crooks, such as the human traffickers known as coyotes. Some of this treatment was heinous including a deportation sweep in a school and the dehumanizing treatment that some immigrants were subjected to during the deportation process. Once they crossed the border into Mexico, they frequently became charity cases, dependent on handouts of bread, sardines, and free transportation, notwithstanding the invitation Ortiz Rubio issued to its expatriates. To ease the onerous way, newspapers—La Prensa in particular—published articles with advice and suggestions for immigrants about various facets of the immigration and

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repatriation process. Meanwhile, the Light advised the US government about how to stop the immigration “menace.”

Prescriptive Frame: Perpetual Battles and Lands without Water In 1930 the Light trained its editorial megaphone for advice and instruction—the editorial page—on immigration. While Hearst and his competitor Joseph Pulitzer had made their mark—and their market— with yellow journalism, now long past its heyday, that sensational style had made “a valuable contribution to appreciation of the editor’s function as a moralist, a philosopher, an entertainer, an educator.”118 Arthur Brisbane, who was Hearst’s chief editorialist until his death in 1936, was a foremost practitioner of this “typographically sensational, easy-­to-­read” editorial. In Brisbane’s view, the function of the editorial was “to teach, to defend, to attack, to praise.”119 Better phrasing might have been: “to teach, to offend, to attack.” That better describes the Light’s August 2, 1930, immigration editorial, which led with the statement, “THE FARMER rids his barn of rats, his hen house of weasels.”120 In vivid language that compared humans to rodents and insects, the Light argued “the government of the United States should clean house and get rid of undesirable human vermin.” The Light then urged passage of new laws to make citizenship harder to obtain. “No man keeps in his own house those that are enemies of his family or for any other reason harmful. It is time for our government to protect itself against the vicious and criminal, the incompetent and the unfit.” How “fit” would be determined was unclear. The “vermin” editorial was a prelude to an expanded opinion-­page stance on immigration for the Light. The paper’s editorial platform, which was composed of ten position statements, suddenly increased to eleven on August 19, 1930. Using words that strongly echoed the eugenics movement of earlier decades—and language not found on the Express or La Prensa editorial pages—Hearst’s new editorial platform statement advocated “Selective immigration to admit only those suited for American citizenship.”121 For those found unfit, the Hearst press mandated “deportation of undesirable aliens.”122 Immigration was added as the penultimate point, wedged between a call for “the acquisition of the French and English West Indies as part payment for the debt to the United States” and another de-

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mand, this one for “complete publicity for income taxes.”123 While Hearst’s immigration stand was not progressive, his stand to have tax payment information open to public scrutiny was. Before the Revenue Act of 1926 mandated that the federal government keep the information private, a number of newspapers devoted pages to the tax information of wealthy celebrities, such as Babe Ruth.124 Progressive or not, none of the other ten Hearst position statements told the editorial-­page reader that the Light was a San Antonio newspaper. It was no surprise, then, that Hearst’s position on immigration failed to relate explicitly to Texas, the Southwest, or Mexico, as those of La Prensa and the Express did. The Light published editorials that urged “Uncle Sam” to limit “undesirable aliens” such as mobsters and bootleggers. It kept up the theme the next month, with a September 22, 1930, editorial endorsing the commissioner general of immigration Harry E. Hull, of Iowa, and his “urgent appeal to congress to adopt without delay a scientific system of selective immigration.”125 Hull estimated that more than half of immigrants admitted were taking jobs that should have gone to unemployed American citizens. “Under existing law the secretary of labor must admit a peanut vendor with a proper application while denying admission to some great industrial engineer whose entry would start the wheels of industry going,” the editorial lamented. “National preservation demands a scientific system of selective immigration under which only the best qualified and most needed immigrant can claim admission.”126 While the Light’s editorial page was occupied with educating Washington, DC, about how to check immigration, La Prensa was dispensing advice of a very different kind, directed at people the Hearst press sought to bar. The instructions La Prensa offered Mexicans were filled with caution, urging readers to either delay leaving for Mexico or not leave at all. Wait for the Mexican government to decide whether it will let Mexicans take all their possessions back duty-­free, rather than just a few, La Prensa suggested in a February 20, 1930, story.127 The newspaper told Mexicans to obtain authorization from the Mexican consulate before attempting entry into Mexico with weapons.128 Once across the border, La Prensa warned in a banner headline, “deportees must present themselves to Immigration,” referring to Mexican immigration. Repatriates who failed to do so would be required to pay customs duties on their goods.129 Finally, by the end of the year, La Prensa published an op-­ed that aimed to dissuade Mexicans in the United States from accepting a Mexican government offer to repatriate. Life in the homeland would not offer better living

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conditions, the op-­ed declared. “What are they going to give to the colonies of repatriating Mexicans?” the opinion writer, Miguel Ruelas, asked rhetorically. “Nothing but the threat of perpetual battles or the ownership of lands without water.”130 Practical as this advice seemed, staying in the United States without a job was also not an option. Not everyone wanted to help Mexicans leave the country. Agribusiness used the media to announce their own prescriptions, and often these were ways to help maintain the Mexican labor force in the United States. In a March 19, 1930, United Press story datelined Corpus Christi, La Prensa reported that the South Texas Chamber of Commerce, which lobbied on behalf of the Rio Grande Valley business community, advised its members the Mexican immigration quota was “inevitable.” Growers should “get the peons’ passports so that they would be in order when the quota was vigorously enforced.”131 News and commentary in the prescription frame aimed in myriad directions in 1930. Prescriptions shifted rapidly as policies changed, or threatened to change. Prescriptions were also sometimes contradictory. News coverage of Mexican president Ortiz Rubio’s call in 1930 for Mexicans to return and restore their homeland represented an ultimate prescription, as much as it framed repatriates as patriots. Yet it took little time for La Prensa to caution its readers about the perils of repatriating to Mexico. Farmers, businessmen, and repatriates struggled to discover the optimal way to negotiate a crisis precipitated by the one-­two punch of a decimated economy and draconian enforcement of immigration laws, both new and old. Despite occasionally conflicting prescriptions, Mexicans and Mexican Americans left the United States in a magnitude of much-­disputed dimensions.

Quantification Frame: A Male-­Dominated Exodus The hegira of humanity on the move during the Great Depression was not easy to tally. As more and more Mexicans—and La Prensa readers— departed for Mexico, the newspaper, far more than the two English-­ language dailies, used a data-­driven frame to make the massive demographic changes comprehensible to readers. The quantification frame helped establish an important news value, an event’s “magnitude, importance and prominence,” as Willard G. Bleyer wrote in the 1932 edition of Newspaper Writing and Editing, his classic textbook.132 The large num-

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bers established repatriation, deportation, and immigration as a major story. However, these articles sometimes conflated repatriates with deportees. In its common definition, a repatriate is anyone returning to his home country, whether deportee or not. In the Mexican government’s bureaucratic jargon, however, repatriates were those who had made their return to Mexico official by registering at a Mexican consulate in the United States. The failure of news organizations to clearly and consistently define immigration terms muddied the story. A prime example was the June 27, 1930, La Prensa article “Help for 5,000 Mexicans.” The story recounted Mexican government efforts to secure free rail passes to repatriate five thousand Mexicans found in “difficult circumstances” in Los Angeles and other parts of California. The article did not state whether these were officially registered repatriates or Mexicans who simply wished to return home.133 While the repatriates waited for government aid, deportees continued to cross the border. La Prensa reported that same day that eighty Mexicans from Kansas had returned to Mexico, a number of them ex-­ convicts just released from the federal penitentiary in Fort Leavenworth. The article noted that it had become the custom throughout the United States for prisoners to be deported once they had completed their terms.134 The newspapers’ use of imprecise terminology to classify categories of returnees contributes to a contested aspect of Depression era repatriation: the number of people who were officially repatriated through programs instigated by local US governments, relief agencies, and/or the Mexican government. While historian Abraham Hoffman provided what are generally regarded as the most reliable numbers—just under 500,000—based on statistics from the Mexican Migration Service, historians Francisco Balderrama and Ray Rodríguez extrapolated the number as high as two million. La Prensa reported government statistics, both from the Mexican government and the US government, and occasionally questioned their completeness and reliability. Numbers and categories such as repatriate, voluntary repatriate, deportee, and returnee without government or charitable assistance matter because they help explain the depth, dimension, and character of this mass migration. The boundaries between these groups were sometimes blurred, making the human-­interest news coverage particularly important in illustrating what it meant to be traveling to Mexico to begin a new life, or resume a former one, regardless of official immigration status. Some stories were more detailed numerically, providing a sense of the

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“average” repatriate. A prime example was the July 9, 1930, La Prensa article that ran under the banner headline “4,980 Mexicans Were Repatriated in Three Months.” The figure, calculated by the Mexican Migration Service, referred only to those repatriating through Nuevo Laredo during April, March, and June. Describing Nuevo Laredo as “a barometer for immigration and emigration” for the entire border, the article drew a demographic picture of repatriates during the second quarter of 1930. The repatriates were overwhelmingly male, numbering 3,411. Women numbered less than half that—1,569. Those without family constituted the bulk of the repatriated—4,368. Only 612 returned with a family. Children under fifteen years old accounted for 978 of those returning. By far the biggest age group, those between fifteen and fifty, numbered 3,805. Persons over fifty-­one years old were least represented among the repatriates, numbering only 202. During the same period, only 1,713 emigrated from Mexico into the United States.135 A clear demographic portrait emerged from the numbers in the news story: repatriates were more likely to be men under fifty traveling alone. News coverage, however, sometimes obscured other important characteristics of returnees, including the distinction between repatriates and deportees. A prime example is an August 16, 1930, article published with the banner, entirely uppercased headline “1,600 MEXICANS WILL BE REPATRIATED MONDAY.” US immigration officials “deported” the Mexicans, “who were jobless and afflicted” and were set to be transported in twenty-­five railcars into the Mexican interior, La Prensa reported.136 The numbers of repatriates and deportees continued in the thousands as the year wore on. These articles, which appeared mostly in La Prensa, provided a sense of proportion—one that increasingly suggested a biblical-­scale exodus. From January 1930 through the end of October 1930, some 18,140 repatriated and deported Mexicans passed through El Paso into Mexico. Repatriates represented four-­fifths of the total, La Prensa reported. On December 4, 1930, a La Prensa banner headline proclaimed, “4,782 Mexicans Returned through Nuevo Laredo.” Attempting to put this number in context, the article reported that the figure, which represented November departures, was five hundred more than had repatriated the prior month through the same port of entry.137 The movement was also increasingly one-­way, as La Prensa pointed out in a page-­one story, “Mexican Immigration Diminishing.” Only 2,400 Mexicans crossed the US border at Laredo in fiscal year 1929–1930, com-

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pared to 9,500 who entered in 1928–1929, La Prensa reported on November 13, 1930.138 La Prensa put the crisis in the Mexican community in context with the greater economic debacle pervading Depression era America: rampant homelessness, joblessness, and hunger. The newspaper published a three-­column photo across the top of the page that depicted more than a dozen men in fedoras, newsboy caps, and overcoats lined up on a New York City sidewalk to receive sandwiches, coffee, and money from Franciscan priests.139 Most of the men averted their faces from the camera. It seemed that everyone was looking for help in 1930. Prominent names make news, but magnitude is a news value, too. La Prensa showed the massive scale of Mexican repatriation and deportation in stories that framed the phenomenon quantitatively. The Express and the Light rarely ran such stories. La Prensa published stories from various ports of entry, detailing the Mexican exodus on a monthly, quarterly, and fiscal-­year basis using statistics primarily from the Mexican Migration Service and the US Immigration Service. Nonetheless, La Prensa’s point was clear: Mexicans were moving out of the United States in massive numbers, and few were entering. The coverage conveyed the harsh reality of the unwanted Mexican. Planters, harvesters, pipe layers, hod carriers, bricklayers, carpenters, autoworkers, tool grinders, steelworkers, cotton pickers, canners, pecan shellers, cigar makers, gardeners, and the unsung seamstress, laundress, cook, and maid, among others, seeded, weeded, forged, hauled, fed, built, mended, stitched, and cleaned the United States. For their service, they were expendable. This was not the reality for the first Spanish-­speaking immigrants to San Antonio, however. They were venerable.

Spanish Nostalgia Frame: Remember the Alamo The mania to remember the Spanish colonial past intensified in 1930, propelled by increasing recognition that San Antonio had its own novel national origin story that rivaled the tales of the Puritans. Most often, news written in the Spanish nostalgia frame dealt with efforts to retain the manifestations of the Spanish conquest in North America, including Spanish street names, and significant structures such as the Alamo, the Governor’s Palace, and the Franciscan Missions. The English-­language press celebrated these institutions in keeping with the press’s booster function. These mediated representations also played a role in concre-

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tizing what Renato Rosaldo describes as an imperialist nostalgia, which lets colonizers, in this case Anglos, define, mourn, and memorialize the conquered culture, the Spaniards. This is so even though—or perhaps because—the colonizers had a hand in permitting the decay of Spanish heritage sites.140 Four days after the new year of 1930, the Express and the Light covered the success of San Antonio preservationists in preventing the renaming of Zarzamora Street. The battle had begun in late 1929, when the preservationists argued that the city must keep the name Spanish colonial settlers had given the thoroughfare. Despite the Express’s story, which explicitly reported the city’s promise to maintain all of its Spanish street nomenclature, a group of businessmen petitioned to remove yet another Castilian street name. The businessmen sought to rechristen Losoya Street with a name better known in New York than in San Antonio—Broadway. The conservationists won again, noting that the name Losoya had a “musical cadence” and a historical significance: it honored Jesus Losoya, an early resident killed by Indians.141 Street names weren’t the only cultural markers the Express fought to preserve. Buildings remained one of Spain’s most potent legacies. The Express, whose main editorial imperative was “Keep San Antonio first always,” added a new objective in 1930: “Protect the Alamo from commercial encroachment and beautify its surroundings.”142 San Antonio had a slew of structures worthy of preservation—most notably its historic Spanish missions. The missions “are beyond appraisal—but they are worth even more as the embodiment of . . . the Franciscan Fathers’ devotion to the service of mankind.”143 In fact, the Franciscans’ handiwork was of unquantifiable value to a discouraged, Depression era city looking not only for tourist dollars, but also for memorable victories that might be relived. Then again, San Antonio was also heavily invested in at least one significant defeat. San Antonians continued to rally around San Antonio’s most renowned Franciscan-­built structure: the Alamo, the site of a battle that embodied the Texas Revolution. In January 1930, Mayor Chambers of San Antonio proposed a $30,000 electrified fountain be constructed and placed in Alamo Plaza in honor of “Bowie, Crockett, Travis, Houston, and other Texas heroes,” and the Express showcased the plan by publishing a photo of a mock-­up of the fountain.144 Of the four heroes named in the story, Sam Houston, the first US governor of Texas, was the only one associated with victory. A non-­Alamo combatant, he defeated the Mexicans at the Battle of San Jacinto, gaining independence from Mexico.

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La Prensa, perhaps more concerned with then-­present-­day Mexican immigrants, covered these stories less often. This editorial position may also have reflected the sentiments of the newspaper’s imagined community of readers, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, who were likely targets of an Anglo grudge over a decisive defeat. This was true even though persons of Mexican descent also perished alongside Anglos in pursuit of Texas independence. The economist Paul S. Taylor documented the extent to which Alamo history aroused Anglo antipathies toward Mexicans. In his 1934 book An American-­Mexican Frontier, he quoted a white cotton picker: “The study of the Alamo helps to make more hatred toward the Mexicans. It is human nature, if a man does you wrong—slaughters your kinsmen. In fact, I just ain’t got no use for a Mexican and I am in favor of not letting Mexicans come over and take the white man’s labor.”145 As Taylor noted, public memory and myth played against economic strains to exacerbate historical tensions among some in Texas. La Prensa might also have considered Alamo coverage less newsworthy because the city’s business leaders and socialites led the conservation and preservation efforts, largely excluding San Antonio’s Mexican American community.146 Other mission preservation news, however, such as the plans of the Mission Road Improvement League, remained a story that La Prensa followed. In anticipation of the two hundredth anniversary of the 1731 arrival of the Franciscans in San Antonio, La Prensa reported that the league intended to “honor the memory of the Franciscan friars who defied the hostility of the Indians to complete their work of civilization and concord, sowing the seeds of the Catholic faith, and constructing temples to provide protection.”147 The retelling of the Spanish legacy in San Antonio, including its conquest of Native Americans, was a proud past that La Prensa made a news priority for its imagined audience. The importance of the mission preservation story to La Prensa and its English-­language counterparts was exemplified in the newspapers’ coverage of the “mysterious disappearance” of an almost two-­hundred-­year-­old copper bell from Mission San José. The bell, presumably taken by a tourist, should be returned to the mission “so that it can be integrated with all the works the first Franciscan fathers have left to posterity to record for the world their stay in Texas, when the region was inhabited by savage Indians,” La Prensa stated.148 The Light reported that it was the second time that year the bell had been taken. The Express noted the mission caretaker’s chagrin that the bell had been lost twice in one year on his watch.

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Although the bell was just one small artifact, the news coverage of its loss reflects the diligence with which Spanish heritage was now guarded. Preservation coverage by the Express and the Light was far more comprehensive. In early January 1930, the Light reported that “prominent lumberman” Albert Steves Sr. had returned an iron bar he had taken from Mission San José’s “famous Rose Window” fifty years earlier. Steves had kept it on top of a wardrobe in his home. Steves described being on a hunting and fishing lark with other boys in 1880 when they “happened to be in the neighborhood of the mission.” At the time, he said, the mission was “a neglected old ruin,” and “cattle resided inside.” The story received major play on the Light’s local news section front and included a photo of Steves in front of the window, pointing to the bar he returned. And that, wrote the Light, solved the mystery of whether “the padres” had run out of iron to finish the window.149 The Light’s article offers a prime allegory of imperialist nostalgia: The theft of heritage committed by a “freckle-­faced boy”—Steves—was redeemed one half century later when he finally returned the iron bar to help complete the mission’s restoration. Brimming with its own Spanish fantasy and pioneer nostalgia, the Express strongly reiterated its support for efforts to recreate “the Old San Antonio Road.” Stretching from Nacogdoches through San Antonio to the Rio Grande, the route was well traveled by “early Spanish explorers, French traders, Franciscan Mission-­builders, colonists from the States, Indian Fighters, soldiers of fortune,” and “gray-­clad warriors,” the Express wrote in an editorial.150 But the Express did not stop there, and on May 21, 1930, it celebrated the Texas State Highway Commission’s decision to commemorate the Chisholm Trail. Famed University of Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie traced the path of the trail, which was in dispute, and proposed rebuilding two Chisholm Trails, with San Antonio included in both: “The two roads also will preserve the name of a man who was the cowmen’s friend—Jesse Chisholm, pioneer of the Western plains before the Civil War, Indian scout, guide interpreter and trader. He not only blazed a trail for Texas cattlemen, but won for them the Indians’ friendship, which made possible the 1,000-­mile drive from Texas to Kansas and Missouri markets.”151 The Express applauded this tribute to the Texas cowboy, though it failed to mention, Hollywood stereotypes notwithstanding, that the original cowboys, or vaqueros, were Mexican. Spanish nostalgia, however, became a staple of many San Antonio civic activities, including the city’s Battle of Flowers Parade. Top echelons

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of San Antonio society women began the parade tradition in 1891. The parade is a paradox of San Antonio’s entry into modernity, grounding its future in its past, according to historian Laura Hernández-­Ehrisman.152 The Battle of Flowers association organizing the event announced that floats for the 1930 annual parade must display “the ornamentation representative of that period of Spanish history when Ferdinand and Isabella reigned,” the Express reported on February 19, 1930.153 While the Battle of Flowers parade was a modern Anglo construct, the year 1930 ended with a wholly Spanish colonial theatrical presentation that was standing room only. The play, Los Pastores [The Shepherds], about the good shepherds combatting the devil to greet the Christ child in Bethlehem, was performed by a group of Mexican players at San Antonio’s International Institute a few days before Christmas 1930. “The interior of the building was jammed with interested people of both Mexican and Anglo-­Saxon races,” the Light reported. Some stood on tables in the hall and peered through a transom to watch. The play, which Franciscan missionaries first introduced to Indians in the territory, proved once again that a “distinctiveness, both unique and colorful in the life of America, is a possession of San Antonio,” wrote the Light.154 In this way San Antonio celebrated and claimed its Spanish-­speaking immigrant legacy, one that was both Spanish and Mexican, yet somehow still wholly owned by San Antonio. That celebration, however, was not simply about honoring the area’s past but about asserting ownership of it. As Stuart Hall and Edward Said have explained, dominant cultures shape their community by appropriating and defining an oppressed or vanquished other. Hall, in using the term “commodity racism,” often referred to products, such as biscuits and soap, which were stamped with racist colonial images.155 In promoting the sale of the city’s Spanish spirit, soul, and sacred structures through tourism, the press, along with the rest of the city power structure, engaged in this form of racism, albeit experientially. Whether or not city leaders were conscious of this aspect of their efforts, the city continued to make major investments in restoring and rebuilding these Spanish artifacts, planning a future built on its past, one street at a time.

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Conclusion San Antonio’s Iberian glorification stood in sharp contrast to the harsh reality of Mexican life in the Alamo City during the Great Depression. The Express celebrated and nurtured the city’s Spanish past, even as it advocated that the empire’s colonial descendants, Mexicans, remain in lower-­status jobs, doing the backbreaking work “whites would not do.” The newspaper continued to reflect Anglo society’s “absurd dichotomy between things Spanish and things Mexican,” as Carey McWilliams characterized such disparate views.156 The first full year of the Depression was riven with federal public policy debates about Mexican immigration. These debates were manifest in the financial frame, particularly in the Express, which illustrated the investment that growers, railroad owners, and bankers, in Texas and California, among other places, had in low-­cost, dependable, and mobile Mexican labor. Box and other opponents generally viewed such labor as an economic threat. However, the hierarchy of color frame illustrated that restrictionists such as Box also often cloaked their arguments in racial animus. The same was true for some proponents of an open border with Mexico, such as Harry Chandler, the Los Angeles Times publisher, who testified before Congress that the United States was “a thousand times better off with Mexican labor” than that of any other hue.157 Certainly Chandler believed that he and his enterprises were better off with Mexican laborers. While the Express focused on policy, La Prensa attempted to document the swell of Mexican humanity, as depicted in the quantification frame. Along with the prescriptive frame, this news coverage might be seen as an effort to bring order to a chaotic story, in which Mexicans and Mexican Americans were increasingly at risk of running afoul of government regulations and the Border Patrol. La Prensa’s focus on the pathos of the immigration and repatriation story, as exemplified in the pariah frame, among others, constructed a more complete image of Mexicans and Mexican Americans than did the Express: They were people, not mere policy widgets. And yet it was the Light that brought readers the vivid picture of the jobless Mexican marchers and captured and recorded the epithets directed at them from a largely Anglo crowd as they passed through downtown. It is true, as media historian Alfred M. Lee explained: “Hearst trained sensation-­mongers and jugglers of catchwords for big-­city dailies.”158 At least in this case, however, Hearst’s Light didn’t let a good story get in

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the way of the facts. For its part, the Express also worked some slice-­of-­ life detail into its coverage of the marchers, though the Light owned the story, perhaps because it broke in time for them to get it into that afternoon’s paper. While one thousand marchers through San Antonio’s main thoroughfare would have merited news coverage anyway, what might have shocked the crowd most was the Mexicans’ willingness to participate in a thoroughly American protest. In the hierarchy of color frame, Mexicans were favored as laborers for their forbearance and humility. Comparisons to Filipinos, blacks, and Puerto Ricans highlighted not only skin tone, but also these groups’ propensity to stand up for their rights. The march also made them a more visible flashpoint. Shortly afterward, Mexican nationals were targeted for allegedly voting illegally in San Antonio’s almost $5 million bond vote. Mayor Chambers blamed the backlash, and Mexicans’ growing fear of authorities, for leading to a massive census undercount in San Antonio. Once first among Texas cities, San Antonio ranked third in 1930, and the departure of Mexicans was partly to blame. Despite the negative media representations of Mexicans who participated in the march, the protest coverage demonstrated something positive—the Mexicans’ wherewithal to stand up for themselves. Their march through downtown San Antonio was an early step in a local civil rights movement, and one that justifiably gives them a foothold in the “Long and Wide Civil Rights Movement.” Other significant civil rights events were also marked in the 1930 news coverage. These included the heavily reported—at least in La Prensa—challenge to segregated Mexican schools in Del Rio. The important testimony of LULAC founding members Perales and Canales at Washington immigration hearings, which was found in the Express, showed Mexican American agency on a national stage. The failure of this Associated Press–­written story to note these two attorneys’ connection to LULAC, however, omitted from the frame the notion of an emerging organized Mexican American civil rights movement committed, at least in this instance, to defending Mexican immigrants. In some of its own locally generated coverage, however, the Express did highlight the role of LULAC in emerging civil rights issues, including in the Del Rio school desegregation case. The Express was the most adept at elaborating the somos amigos/we are friends frame in its coverage. All three newspapers recognized in their coverage that Mexico and the US were neighbors; however, it was mainly the Express that framed the countries as friends. This was also no doubt tied to self-­interest; it was easier to make money sharing free markets—

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and low-­cost labor markets—with friends. The Express coverage showed how conflicting ideas about the Monroe Doctrine, evinced in news coverage of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 1930s, belie its multiple meanings. Historian Jay Sexton, writing in his 2011 book The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-­Century America, explained that there were as many US applications of the doctrine as there were US foreign policies.159 President James Monroe originally conceived the doctrine in 1823 as a declaration against the intervention of European powers in the American continents.160 The Monroe Doctrine, then, was first and foremost about US national security, for which border security is a prime component. The idea that the Monroe Doctrine was moribund did not originate in the Depression with Mexican Supreme Court justice Urbina. President Woodrow Wilson, who was inaugurated in 1913, acknowledged to a group of Mexican newspaper editors that the doctrine was problematic, because it unilaterally transformed the United States into Mexico’s “big brother.”161 Wilson was unable to live up to such progressive rhetoric, much less maintain it.162 The Express, however, was relatively consistent. The newspaper reported on the relationship between the United States and Mexico from a vision of Texas—and San Antonio, similar to the way historian Neil Foley describes it—as a “border province between the South, the West, and Mexico.”163 Not only had Texas once been part of Mexico and colonial Spain, the newspaper editorialists understood that Texas and Mexico were interdependent neighbors, and there were rules for the treatment of neighbors. Despite differences in news coverage, the Express and La Prensa stood together against restrictive immigration policy making that roiled the nation’s capital. If there was a political economy divided by culture, it was a division between Texas and Washington, DC. When it came to understanding the importance of Mexico and Mexican labor, as mentioned earlier, the Express found citizens of the Southwest more discerning than Americans living far from the borderlands.”164 The Light’s editorial eye, however, challenged that notion, with its focus on “vermin” immigrants, whose fitness for citizenship was in serious question. Nonetheless, even San Antonians likely didn’t envision that 1931, the two hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the city’s first Spanish-­speaking immigrants and founders, would coincide with the largest annual Depression era outflow of Mexicans repatriating from the United States.

Chapter 3

1931

The Tragedy of the Repatriated

Remember, reader, that family that ventured through the desert of Sonora and left cadavers of loved ones along the lost path. Remember the one who committed suicide, feeling completely unloved when he returned to the doors of his home. Did you know that recently a repatriated couple had to say farewell to their son in Mexico City, after he froze to death on the way to their hometown? And finally, the press in the capital picked up the news that 25 small, repatriated children, and some women, and elderly, died from starvation during this time. How will this tragedy end?

D

La Prensa, November 25, 1931

awn had just begun to steal through the train station in the northern Mexican city of Guamúchil, Sinaloa, on June 12, 1931, when forty desperate California repatriates approached the stationmaster. They “demanded” a free ride on a waiting freight train headed south along the Pacific coast. “We are repatriates and the government offered to help us,” they told him.1 Then they forced their way onto the roof of the Southern Pacific of Mexico train. When a journalist who identified himself as a representative of the Lozano newspapers found them on their open-­air perch, they shouted: “Viva el señor Ignacio E. Lozano y La Opinión y La Prensa!” Their refrain underscored the reach of the Lozano press and its fame as an advocate for the Mexican community. The men, their few belongings slung over their shoulders, had walked from nearby towns where they had been looking for work for more than a week. “Most of them were in horrifically miserable condition,” the reporter wrote.2 Despite their destitution, they exuded fraternity. When three young brothers, who had left their parents behind in Bakersfield, California, told the reporter they had

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not had a “bite to eat” in two days, other repatriates instantly handed them tortillas. Not all were sympathetic to their plight. Some railroad employees complained that the repatriates boarded special free trains from the United States to Mexico but got off wherever they thought work existed. Then, when unable to find jobs, they demanded another free train ride. La Prensa correspondents captured the mix of reactions and experiences as Mexicans and Mexican Americans in desperate straits attempted to return to their homeland and carve out a life under inhospitable circumstances. By comparison to these compatriots, the journalists of La Prensa were relatively unscathed, although by 1931 the Depression started to strain the newsroom’s budget. In November 1931, the board of directors of Lozano Newspapers, Inc., voted to cut all wages and salaries at La Prensa by 5 percent. Moreover, the board reserved the option to make additional salary cuts at both La Prensa and its Los Angeles–­based sister publication, La Opinión. The board declared the measure necessary “during the present business conditions which demand a policy of strict economy.”3 The financial crisis was no longer just a story to report.

Financial Frame: Taking Jobs from Americans The comings and goings of Mexicans and Mexican Americans had financial implications for both the United States and Mexico. Not every American city was happy to see Mexicans go in 1931, and not every Mexican city was happy to see them arrive. Mexico was mired in its own economic crisis, which was “aggravated by the repatriation of thousands of Mexicans that had been deported from the United States because they were jobless,” La Prensa reported on January 20, 1931. Struggling to cope with the waves of repatriates, Mexico instituted a classification plan for the returnees, La Prensa’s article stated. In the first group were those who returned with money, farm tools, and the capability for work. The second group included those who wished to return to their home in Mexico, had family they could count on, and resources with which to live. The third were the indigent. Mexico’s plan was to provide the first groups with cultivable government-­owned land, with the hope that the better-­equipped repatriates would succeed and hire members of the last, or indigent, group.4 While Mexico attempted to put repatriates to work solving the unemployment problem, cities on both sides of the Texas–­Mexico border

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were reaping the financial consequences of a less-­than-­hospitable attitude toward Mexicans in the United States. The border city of El Paso was among the municipalities to feel the economic impact of anti-­Mexican sentiment. The Monterrey, Mexico, chamber of commerce and other business groups from nearby cities initiated a boycott against El Paso, “owing to the bad treatment toward Mexicans,” La Prensa reported. Replying with a letter “to our friends in Mexico,” the El Paso Chamber of Commerce assured Mexicans they were welcome. La Prensa described the businessmen’s statement as “very natural,” because “without Mexican consumers, local commerce would be ruined.”5 Despite the El Paso chamber’s declarations of “friendship and goodwill,” many Mexicans complained “of humiliations and discourtesies on the international bridges and in immigration offices,” the article continued. The correspondent wrote “that some North American immigration agents demonstrated brusqueness and arrogance toward Mexicans, especially those from humble and poor classes.” The reporter left the lingering idea that El Paso’s businesses would continue to decline. “The businessmen might not treat their Mexican clients badly, but they had no control over the US Department of Immigration, where many Mexicans had to suffer a thousand penalties, humiliations, stupid questions, etc.”6 This La Prensa discourse exemplifies the newspaper’s notion of its imagined audience as beyond mere elites. The paper also saw its role as a voice for the voiceless immigrant, who with little recourse and even less support was left to confront the demeaning attitudes and actions of US border authorities. In the Express, some stories in 1931 began to reflect on the overwrought immigration crackdown. O. W. Killam, president of the South Texas Chamber of Commerce in Laredo, argued that a 93 percent decline in Mexicans entering the country, along with decreases in European immigration, made “emergency legislation to relieve the unemployment situation” superfluous, the Express reported. As a member of a special committee reporting to the US Chamber of Commerce, Killam said the State Department’s administrative actions, along with existing law, had alleviated the problem of immigrants entering and competing for jobs.7 The threat that immigrants posed to the job market was palpable on the news pages. In San Antonio the Express publicized a YMCA public discussion on “Immigration and the Unemployment Problem.”8 Sentiment was intense, however, in border cities such as Del Rio where the American Legion surveyed highway workers between Del Rio and Eagle Pass, find-

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ing that only two out of twelve Mexicans on the job were US citizens, the Express reported. The publication of the survey results left “many Mexicans” thinking “that the Legion post is after their scalps.”9 The survey was spurred by the lingering unemployment of forty ex-­military men in Del Rio, according to Legion commander Art Kramer, who organized a “secret committee” to check up on the citizenship of workers. Kramer defended the tactic: non-­citizens “rob naturalized citizens of Mexican descent of their jobs as well as native-­born American citizens and there really isn’t much which can be done about it until the immigration laws are tightened to some extent.”10 The financial news frame that emerged in La Prensa in 1931 illustrated the complex role of Mexicans in the border economy and the uncertain role they might play as repatriates in Mexico. The financial frame as evinced in the Express in 1931 constructed a different reality, one in which American citizens—and veterans, no less—were allegedly cheated out of jobs by Mexicans illegally in the country. The Express narrated this story viscerally, describing the American Legion’s clandestine vigilante effort to police the legality of construction workers. Alluding to the figurative “scalping” of Mexicans highlighted how the financial impact of immigrants ignited the passions of Anglos desperate to sustain themselves in an unsustainable time.

Pariah Frame: Convoys of Misery Desperation mounted in 1931 along with the numbers of repatriates. The pariah frame was pervasive throughout that year’s news coverage of repatriates and deportees, a topic frequently found in La Prensa and rare in the Express and the Light. La Prensa chronicled their stories, including published reports from correspondents based in Mexico, who reported on the fates of repatriates and deportees from railroad stations, customs houses, hospitals, docks, and roadsides. La Prensa’s news coverage showed Mexicans returning aboard trains, boats, cars, and airplanes. Some returned on horse-­drawn carts; others returned on horseback. The litany of despair was long. One Mexican man arrived at the border town of Nuevo Laredo with a baby in his arms and other children in hand. He told immigration officials that his wife had “adapted to the foreign customs and refused to return.” The Mexican government provided the father and his children free rail passes to Monterrey, his hometown.11 More than

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broken homes, repatriation was a story of broken lives. Amador Lopez, a repatriate returning by train, shut himself in one of the bathrooms in the second-­class coach and “swallowed a strong poison.” According to La Prensa, “[w]hatever obliged the compatriot to kill himself remains unknown, although presumably he felt obligated to do so by the bad economic conditions that befell him.”12 Many returnees arrived at the Mexican border in wretched condition in 1931. Those who were fortunate enough to have amassed household goods, furniture, farm animals, and agricultural equipment often had to sell those at a steep discount at the border, because they lacked transportation to continue on their journey with these possessions.13 Some arrived with quilts, sheets, and other necessary linens, which Mexican immigrations officials sometimes confiscated and burned to halt the spread of infectious disease.14 “Misery, at its most touching level, had made them victims, in such a manner that in the city of Chihuahua they were received by the Red Cross, which gave them money and bread,” La Prensa reported.15 This article described a single train from California to Chihuahua, Mexico, in January 1931, that had 40 cars crammed with 1,500 agricultural workers, mainly from California, New Mexico, and Arizona. The article ambiguously described them as both repatriates and deportees. Once the train reached Aguascalientes, Mexico, the government handed them “abundant bread, prepared meats, and some amount of money.”16 As 1931 went on, La Prensa described an unremitting parade of human need descending on Mexico from every corner of the United States. This included nine jobless and “unfortunate paisanos” from Boston. The Mexican consul general in New York City provided free transportation aboard a ship bound for Tampico, Mexico, where the repatriates arrived in a “truly sad state” on January 27, 1931, La Prensa reported.17 The Mexican consulate later announced it would fund the return voyage of as many as five hundred Mexicans to Tampico, the Express reported on September 25, 1931.18 In some cases, private industry facilitated the Mexicans’ return. The Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railway Co. provided free train passage and food to eighty deportees, including women and children, traveling from Saginaw, Michigan, to the Laredo border.19 The border, an artificially constructed divider, was often the common connector for returnees. Many remained in the border area, “constituting a serious problem for the [Mexican] government.”20 Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso was filled with thousands of repatriates who were

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“without jobs and resources, suffering from hunger and miseries, with only the hope that the federal government would quickly allot them free rail passes,” La Prensa reported. The news story did not attempt to provide concrete numbers, though it mentioned that many of the Mexicans had “voluntarily” repatriated, using quotation marks around “voluntarily” to suggest the contrary: “that they had been obligated to leave because they did not have jobs.”21 The La Prensa journalist’s jibe at the governmental jargon—“voluntary repatriation”—highlighted the inadequacy, and perhaps the hypocrisy, of the official classification system for returnees. It all depended on one’s definition of “voluntary.” Historian Abraham Hoffman’s groundbreaking 1974 account of Mexican repatriation in the 1930s relied on administrative, legal, and bureaucratic classifications, which led him to characterize most repatriation as “voluntary.” Some faulted this as “history . . . written from the top down.”22 The La Prensa reporter, however, offered no documentation or empirical evidence to support his allusion to the involuntary nature of repatriation. Nonetheless, the La Prensa reporter was an eyewitness to unfolding events and from that vantage point challenged the neat government labels imposed on repatriates. Hoffman did note the paradoxical illogic of the Hoover administration’s stated strategy: repatriating and deporting unemployed Mexicans failed to create jobs for Americans, because Mexicans had no jobs.23 News coverage showed that repatriates were subjected to shabby treatment on both sides of the border, particularly if they were impoverished. One repatriate made it 150 kilometers south of Ciudad Juárez to the town of Villa Ahumada, only to be detained by a customs inspector because one of his documents lacked a proper signature. The repatriate was forced to return to Ciudad Juárez to correct the paperwork, La Prensa reported. According to “reliable sources,” customs inspectors were frequently peremptory with repatriates and deportees of little means. The reception was entirely different when well-­to-­do Mexicans presented themselves to officials. “These same zealous customs officers do not demonstrate much zeal, but no, to the contrary, they display much courtesy and attention when they deal with moneyed people or those of high official position.”24 La Prensa’s observations concerning the mistreatment of immigrants across the fault lines of class apprised the Mexican and Mexican American community of another injustice. In so doing, these Spanish-­language journalists gave their readers information essential to the development of a civil rights movement.

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Mexican customs officials also were accused of taking financial advantage of repatriates. Some, as in the case of the customs administrator in Nogales, Mexico, were under investigation by the Mexican government for charging customs duties on repatriates’ vehicles which were exempt from such, according to a March 17, 1931, La Prensa article. “Exploiters are taking advantage of this circumstance to acquire at cut-­rate price the possessions of repatriates who cannot afford to pay the duties.”25 The article didn’t speculate on whether the Nogales customs administrator was complicit in the effort to acquire the repatriates’ goods at low cost or was merely inept or otherwise corrupt. The Mexican Migration Service office in Ciudad Juárez was “constantly full of repatriates,” La Prensa reported on April 1, 1931. Within three weeks, Mexican immigration officials handed out 2,700 free rail passes. The local medical facility, Civil Liberty Hospital, was inundated with repatriates and deportees seeking food and medical care and attention. Cars and trucks of every class and size, loaded with returning families and their furniture, utensils, and other household goods, clogged the patio outside of the Mexican customs office awaiting approval “to continue their sad march into the interior of the country.”26 Some US government officials not only treated Mexican immigrants as pariahs but plainly characterized them as such. One “high North American government bureaucrat” declared, “There were ‘lunatics,’ demented people, and prostitutes among the 1,500 Mexicans deported the prior month through El Paso,” La Prensa reported on May 18, 1931. The negative depiction provided a veneer of justification to the deportations. Mexican consul general Renato Cantu Lara, however, sharply challenged the statement, protesting that only a minority of the deportees fit that description.27 One episode revealed some of the most striking differences among the papers’ coverage in the pariah frame: the two-­months-­long saga of some four thousand who were repatriated to Mexico from Karnes City, Texas. La Prensa reported on every facet of the project, starting with its planning stage in September 1931. The repatriates were casualties of the cotton market collapse. Most were jobless. The “few Mexican laborers who had obtained work earned a miserable 30 cents a day, which hardly kept a family from starving,” La Prensa explained in a September 27, 1931, page-­ one story. The result: eight hundred penniless families, amounting to four thousand people, faced the “painful” prospect of walking back to Mexico.28 These were pariahs of a different order. They were not the prostitutes and

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miscreants, as some were characterized. They were, however, the destitute excess labor that had served its purpose and now needed to be removed. La Prensa followed them over the 151-­mile journey to the repatriates’ arrival at the border in mid-­October 1931, and into Mexico.29 The Express coverage included an October 18, 1931, page-­one story, published the day the caravan was to pass through San Antonio and pick up three hundred more Mexican repatriates. The Express detailed the trip logistics, noting that San Antonio’s Mexican consul general, Eduardo Hernández Cházaro, had organized returnees in groups of 150 to 350 people, each with a designated leader and a departure time from Karnes City. The Express described their wait as a scene of frolicking children, clucking chickens, quiet women, and restless men.30 Hundreds of children run about and play among the heaps of personal belongings ranging from rolls of bedding to crates of poultry that mark the only worldly goods these people have to bring from their adopted home to their place of birth. The women sit stolidly by their belongings while the men pace the ground or gather in groups to discuss the trip. Some few who have prospered in the past are travelling homeward in dilapidated automobiles which they own. The largest percentage is traveling in trucks furnished by the Mexican government through its consulate in this city.31 The Light played the story inside, describing the repatriates as “almost cheery” at the prospect of the “work and food” that might greet them in Mexico. The travel conditions appeared nothing to cheer about, however. Most were “jammed,” standing, into fifty borrowed trucks. Meanwhile, “more prosperous Mexicans piled their families into old, dilapidated cars and followed the long caravan.”32 The odyssey had moments of triumph and tragedy, noted La Prensa. Five children were born on the 151-­mile journey to the Laredo border, and one man died. The man was a volunteer, not a repatriate. He had stopped to help a returnee repair his vehicle and was struck by an oncoming car as the repatriates’ convoy traveled between Karnes City and San Antonio, during the forty-­seven-­mile first leg of the trip.33 The Depression and the boll weevil had deposed King Cotton, and the Karnes City repatriates were the defeated subjects. The cotton market was among the most depressed in the agricultural sector. That was true even though only one-­third of the available cotton acreage in Texas had been

Figure 3.1. Matilde Elizondo (left) standing next to Salome Rodriguez in a caravan of about 1,600 Mexican repatriates passing through San Antonio on their way to Mexico from Karnes City, Texas, October 18, 1931. San Antonio Light Photograph Collection, UTSA Special Collections–­ITC, No. L-­1310-­A. Used with permission, © San Antonio Express-­News/ZUMA.

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planted in 1930, La Prensa reported. The Cotton Stabilization Corporation, a unit of the Federal Farm Board, was created in June 1930 and took the cotton cooperatives’ product off the market to bolster prices. For various reasons, including the relatively small number of farming cooperatives, the strategy failed. Farmers were left to plant the 1931 crop when it averaged 9 to 10 cents a pound, and to harvest it when prices had fallen to 5.3 cents a pound.34 On October 19, 1931, the patio and adjacent areas outside the customs office in Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas, swirled with almost two thousand of the Karnes City repatriates hauling their household goods in cars, trucks, and carts, transporting chickens, cows, and beasts of burden, La Prensa reported. The Express estimated a slightly lower number, 1,500, describing the “destitute hungry horde” as “refugees of economic disorder.”35 Mexican immigration officials worked late into the weekend processing their documents, La Prensa reported. The Express coverage cogently captured the repatriates’ predicament, describing them as flotsam and jetsam of an economic debacle. The article was almost comparable to many La Prensa stories, which provided a written portrait of the people that quantification stories would never measure. Although thousands of other repatriates had left Texas earlier, their sporadic, independent, and often solitary departure in individual vehicles garnered comparatively little news coverage in the Express and the Light. The extended roundup of Mexicans from every pocket of the country, from Los Angeles to Saginaw and New York and San Antonio, represented a massive dislocation of “unfortunates” who in many cases had worked a quarter century or more in the United States. Meanwhile, the Light framed the issue entirely differently, never mentioning Mexicans in its editorials and opinion pieces. An editorial featuring the “rigid enforcement” immigration views of Vice President Charles Curtis played prominently in four columns across the top of the April 28, 1931 edition. Such stringent measures were particularly called for in “these times of Depression and lack of employment,” Curtis stated. The editorial called for a new “intelligent system of selection” that would admit immigrants “for whom there is an economic need.”36 William N. Doak, Hoover’s labor secretary, expanded on these views in a June 21, 1931, opinion piece in which he stated: “The United States can no longer be regarded as a refuge for all oppressed peoples of the world.” Doak argued that by “encouraging a flow of immigration which cannot be absorbed,” the United States was exacerbating unemployment.37 In a late summer 1931 edito-

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rial that invoked the name of William Randolph Hearst, the Light called for “the prompt deportation of everyone who can’t prove his right to stay here.” In fact, all government should “rout out the undesirables who are a constant menace.”38 La Prensa followed the Karnes City story over the border, but the Express failed to venture outside the United States. In a rare look at the impact of US repatriation policy on Mexico, the Light on November 8 ran a story headlined: “Repatriated in Mexico Are Starving.” The story cited “an unprecedented situation [that] had been created by the return of enormous numbers of Mexicans in the United States.” The chief of immigration in Juárez, Mexico, called for the Mexican government to send “special trains” to transport the reverse migrants into Mexico’s interior. In the meantime, he called on El Pasoans to donate extra food and old clothing.39 Through La Prensa, members of the Mexican community followed more thoroughly the predicament of the repatriates and, as good citizens, often mobilized to help.

Good-Citizen Frame: Giving Two Thousand Loaves of Bread Repatriation was not merely a story of passive victimization or reliance on government authorities. The mass exodus of Mexicans and their concomitant suffering roused local Mexican American communities throughout Texas to launch fundraising drives and other forms of support. Women, who largely drove these efforts, were often the focus of these repatriation-­ related news stories in La Prensa. The Mexicans from Karnes might have had to walk if not for the intervention of Eduardo Hernández Cházaro, the San Antonio–­based Mexican consul general, and La Prensa. At the behest of the consul, and through exhortations published by La Prensa, members of the Mexican community throughout the state offered to lend not only cars, but also small buses and horses. As the caravan passed through San Antonio’s South Side, the streets were lined with well-­wishers from the Mexican community, waving on their compatriots.40 In what amounted to almost a footnote in its story, the Light reported that “various Mexican firms in and about San Antonio,” including dairies, creameries, and gasoline stations, donated supplies for the repatriates’ use during the trip.41 When the repatriates reached Laredo, Texas, they found themselves in one of the border cities in which Mexican Americans actively raised money for the repatriates. Among other activities, “the good society” conducted

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a special fundraising drive that netted goods and money amounting to $2,000 in value, or more than $31,000 in 2016 dollars, specifically for the repatriates who had left Karnes City, Texas, for lack of work.42 La Prensa photographed a jumbled mountain of brown-­bag lunches that volunteers in Laredo assembled for the repatriates, calling it only a “partial view” of the packets prepared for four thousand repatriates.43 The more-­than-­ ample lunch supply suggested that the Laredo aid workers were prepared to assist many other repatriates who did not travel in the extended caravan of two thousand. La Prensa’s November 1, 1931, article about Laredo’s efforts gave prominent mention to the women’s role, noting in a sub-­headline that the fundraising committee “was integrated” by women.44 La Prensa reporting crossed the social stratum, for example, when the paper noted that “all classes of Mexican society” donated time, if not money or goods, to ministering to or preparing the way for repatriates.45 Donors were listed by name, filling up three newspaper columns. In part, this was likely a strategy to increase donations through social pressure, since Laredo residents were able to see the amounts their neighbors had contributed. Laredo businesses, as well as other organizations and grassroots volunteers, also adopted a philanthropic stance toward the repatriates. The Cuauhtémoc Mutual Society of Bakers, which donated two thousand loaves of bread, was a leading example.46 Their work matched the efforts of women across the border in Nuevo Laredo, where women organized, raised funds, and solicited services, including free medical attention and hotel rooms for female repatriates who gave birth on the journey. They also collected clothes and groceries “to help improve, in part, the afflicted situation of their compatriots,” according to an October 28, 1931, La Prensa story.47 The men did their part too. The Rio Grande City, Texas, local baseball team “City Drug Store” challenged the Donna, Texas, “Cardinals” to play a benefit game for the repatriates. The Mexican Honorific Commission and the Rev. James Smith of Saint Joseph’s Church in Donna, raised almost $85, the equivalent of almost $1,350 in 2016 dollars, from their friends and the baseball competition. They traveled to San Antonio, meeting with La Prensa staff and Eduardo Hernández Cházaro.48 Across the border in Nuevo Laredo, Arnulfo de los Santos, the chief of Mexico’s Migration Office, organized a benefit bullfight for the repatriates, which was presided over by “distinguished señoritas from the society of both Laredos,” La Prensa reported.49 The El Paso Mexican community’s support for the San José Home, an

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institution run by nuns who were expelled by the Mexican government, ranked among its most important charitable work. The San José Home was built like a typical Mexican convent, with long lateral corridors, many rooms, and an ample, wide patio. The religious women cared for women and children who were subject to deportation, providing food, clothing, and medical care to “hundreds” of them each month. Previously, the repatriates had been forced to stay in the county jail, in “very bad conditions,” but numerous protests led US immigration authorities to enlist the help of the nuns. The US government paid the nuns a small amount to cover the costs of food for the women and children, who had to serve a short “technical” sentence in the institution before they were formally deported.50 The good-­citizen frame was most evident in La Prensa. In the Express, the frame was prominently referenced in the page-­one story the newspaper published about the Karnes City repatriates as they neared the Laredo border. The article reported that ubiquitous volunteers approached vehicles all along the caravan, providing food to adults and children, and milk for babies. The Express story also mentioned that the Mexican community from San Antonio and elsewhere lent many cars, trucks, and buses to the repatriates. The good-­citizen frame was also evident in Express news coverage of the longer-­term impact of repatriates on the Laredo, Texas–­Nuevo Laredo, Mexico border. A December 13, 1931, Express article stated that “the people of Nuevo Laredo have acted nobly during the great rush of Mexican repatriates, and especially the destitute ones, in caring for these itinerants” who had amassed at the border, lacking funds to move on.51 The frame was also evinced in a February 13, 1931, Express article that described efforts by the Mexican Blue Cross in Del Rio to raise funds for the needy, including repatriates.52 The Express also published a three-­paragraph story reporting on the Mexican community in Eagle Pass, Texas, partnering with neighboring Piedras Negras, Mexico, to hold a bullfight and a ball to raise money to help repatriates.53 The good-­citizen frame of Mexicans helping themselves and engaged in social action posed a challenge to the views of eugenicists such as Congressman Box—described in chapter 2—because good-­citizen news showed that the Mexican and Mexican American community was far from “uncivilized.” The good-­citizen frame was observable, though far from ubiquitous, in the Express. However, it was more fully constructed and elaborated in La Prensa. By showing the generosity and compassion of the community, La Prensa constructed the ingredients of good citizen-

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ship and defined Mexicans as more than good workers. Beyond its effort to mold good citizens, the newspaper performed a more straightforward public service, dispensing help and advice.

Prescriptive Frame: Take It? Or Leave It? The prescriptive frame was persistent throughout 1931, though there were fewer of these “how-­to” stories than a year earlier. A prime example was a January 7, 1931, editorial in which La Prensa counseled the Mexican government on the best method to rehabilitate the nation’s agricultural sector. Among other things, it must continue to help landowners hire and accommodate day laborers who “were exposed to so much misery and to the possibility of becoming public charity cases without government protection,” the newspaper stated.54 Advice targeted at repatriates had a distinct “news you can use” flavor. “Useful Recommendations for Repatriates to Avoid Difficulties,” was the headline on a prescriptive story La Prensa published April 25, 1931, on page 1. In an interview, Luis Mena, a customs official in Nogales, and a well-­known poet, warned repatriates that tariffs on clothing, cars, radios, and other items were excused only if the items were used. He recounted how a woman tried to return to Mexico with a bolt of silk cloth and was forced to pay duties on it. Some items could not be brought into the country at any price, Mena warned. Firearms, including hunting rifles, would be confiscated if the repatriate failed to apply for the proper permits.55 These prescriptive articles made it clear that repatriates’ every possession would be scrutinized and susceptible to customs duties upon entry to Mexico. Regulations, sometimes arbitrarily applied, made the wrenching act of repatriation all the more wearisome. In a June 12, 1931, La Prensa article, repatriates were warned not to mail their clothing home to Mexico and not to attempt to bring extra tires for their car beyond one spare, unless they wanted to pay duties on these items.56 These rules exacerbated the onerous journey for repatriates, because 1930s motorists traveling any distance had to contend with cheaply constructed tires that frequently failed on the nation’s poor roads. Likewise, repatriates traveling by train or car would have had little room to carry many possessions or articles of clothing. La Prensa continued in its role of tutoring Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the ways of navigating life in the United States, including efforts to smooth their exit out of the country. In so doing, La Prensa

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adopted one of the primary roles of the Mexican immigrant press, functioning as an instrument of social control by providing instruction about what the Mexican or US government expected of them. At the same time, La Prensa also acted as an instrument of social activism, because the newspaper equipped its readers with information that gave them some measure of agency. By spreading official government information, La Prensa acted as a guardian of its imagined community of readers, even if it meant facilitating their transformation to former readers and former subscribers.

Patriot Frame: Back to Mexico in a “Little Ford” Car In 1931 the patriot frame was largely absent in immigration news, in sharp contrast with a year earlier. This frame, which depicted returnees as saviors of a poor, war-­torn, and economically ravaged country, was eclipsed by stories that focused on the struggles of returnees. The strongest invocation of the patriot frame appeared in early January, when La Prensa editorialized that repatriates were mostly returning with “laurels of victory” and were not necessarily shamefully driven by the “humiliation of deportation.”57 The voluntary repatriate returned not as “a public charge,” but as “a possessor of a modest fortune, with agricultural tools, household goods, a little Ford car, and some savings.” For that reason, then, the newspaper argued, the voluntary repatriate’s “re-­integration in the homeland will have providential results for Mexico in the present moment in the search for national reconstruction through work.”58 Likewise, the Express in 1931 also characterized the “back-­to-­Mexico” movement in glowing terms, according to a special correspondent’s report from the Laredo border, published July 1, 1931. “Many of these Mexican repatriates responded to the call of Mexico for her native sons to return to develop the great agricultural resources of that country and engage in other pursuits,” the correspondent wrote, describing returnees who crossed the Laredo border between June 1930 and June 1931.59 The Express article acknowledged that “the business depression throughout the United States might have contributed to some extent to this heavy repatriation movement” but reported that “few” reached the Laredo border without funds during the year-­long period.60 “Most of the repatriates returned to their native country well supplied with worldly

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goods,” the Express article stated.61 Others “went on trucks loaded with household goods, radios and all that go to add to the comforts of home.” Citing data from the US Immigration Service, the article noted that 39,000 of the 40,000 Mexicans who crossed the Laredo border in this period were voluntary returnees, and only 1,000 were deportees. Despite these auspicious descriptions in La Prensa and the Express, 1931 news coverage concerning repatriates, which was mostly found in La Prensa, told a different story. The tale of a glorious return to Mexico undoubtedly held some truth, but it also may well have reflected successful Mexican government propaganda and the allure of a happily-­ever-­after narrative carried for newspapers. The return of successful Mexican immigrants, heroically helping rebuild the homeland, was inspiring at a time of severe economic distress on both sides of the border. Grim reality interceded in 1931, however, and the news coverage primarily framed Mexican repatriates and deportees as pariahs, that is, as needy, downtrodden cast-­offs returning to a financially beleaguered Mexico.

Quantification Frame: Mexican Immigrants by the Numbers The Mexican government did more than classify repatriates and immigrants in groups. It continued to count them, and even the US government considered the Mexican Migration Service the most accurate in its tallies. La Prensa covered the numbers from as many border cities as possible. Beyond that, relying on the Mexican Migration Service data offered La Prensa an important tool to illustrate the significance of repatriation and deportation stories in 1931. In contrast, the Express and the Light only infrequently published stories that numerically characterized Mexican repatriates and deportees. The movement of repatriates entering Mexico through Nuevo Laredo “grew notably” in the latter half of 1930, amounting to 21,000, La Prensa reported January 3, 1931. Four times more Mexicans repatriated in December 1930—4,000—than in July 1930, when 1,000 Mexicans returned through the Port of Laredo.62 Articles, including this one, often failed to define repatriates, an omission seen in the prior year’s coverage that continued to blur the impetus for the exodus. Were the repatriates returning voluntarily, eager to rebuild their homeland? Or were they pres-

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sured to evacuate in the prevailing anti-­Mexican climate? Or did they return for lack of resources? Or were they deported for a real or presumed violation of immigration law? A definitive answer to these questions would lend depth and dimension to the civil rights and race relations aspects of the repatriation and immigration story La Prensa reported to its readers during the 1930s. La Prensa sometimes made these distinctions explicit. Almost fourteen thousand Mexicans returned to Mexico through Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, during 1930, with most of them repatriating voluntarily, La Prensa reported on January 20, 1931. “Only 1,700 compatriots were deported,” the article stated. In other words, only a little more than 12 percent of the returnees were deportees. Repatriates moved continuously across the border at Ciudad Juárez, while deportees averaged twenty a day as US immigration authorities accelerated deportations of Mexicans unable to prove legal US residency. More than that, La Prensa stated, immigration officers had begun sweeping up Mexicans under their recently implemented “L.P.C. (Liable to become a public charge)” policy under which jobless Mexicans were increasingly vulnerable.63 Despite the incessant stream of deportees, La Prensa continued to show they represented only a fraction of repatriates departing from various border cities. Nuevo Laredo recorded the repatriation of 1,999 Mexicans during April 1931. A little more than 5 percent of that number, 110, were deported, according to La Prensa. Mexican emigrants to the United States that month numbered 255, underscoring the overwhelmingly one-­ way direction of Depression era migration between the two countries. The trend continued into the summer of 1931. US immigration authorities deported 292 Mexicans from El Paso during July. At the same time, far more Mexicans—2,167—repatriated voluntarily from the same border city, according to La Prensa. The area director for the Mexican Migration office in Ciudad Juárez was the source for the statistics, according to the story.64 Clarifying the different streams of Mexican returnees provided a sense of immigrant agency, at least in this case, because far more Mexicans elected to repatriate in July through El Paso than were forcibly deported. This precision in distinguishing the status of the migrant streams may have seemed a distinction without a difference to La Prensa readers. By now they had read many stories of an unrelenting and incalculable procession of Mexican people returning. “Hardly a day passes when special trains with more or less numerous groups of repatriates do not pass through this city, coming from diverse cities and regions of the

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United States. The largest numbers of repatriates come from the state of California.”65 In keeping with the perceived interests of their imagined community of readers, La Prensa’s was a consistent numerical frame, while the English-­language press opted for this angle when it was most dramatic. A prime example of this was the Express’s December 21, 1931, story headlined “Mexican Exodus Will Pass 50,000 Mark.” The story, contributed by a “special correspondent,” also used numbers from the Mexican Migration Service concerning those Mexicans crossing at the Laredo border. Most, roughly thirty thousand, had returned in the last half of 1931, and on average about 165 Mexicans per day made the return trip. The correspondent invoked the “hegira,” the flight of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina, and used the term “hordes,” a word commonly used to refer to animals and marauders, to describe the diaspora. The article stated, “Including the great hordes of Mexican nationals who have engaged recently in the hegira over the Mexico–­California border in the “back-­to-­Mexico” movement as a result of unemployment in the United States, it is estimated that 150,000 to 175,000 Mexicans will have left the United States during the year 1931.”66 The Express’s article was buried in the sports section on page 11, and despite its inherent pathos, the article shared many score-­keeping qualities with the baseball and basketball stories that ran above it on that page. Among these was the report that Charles Arthur (the Great) Shires of the then American Association’s Milwaukee Brewers had a .385 average with 157 games.67 The Light gave the phenomenon similar attention, publishing a two-­paragraph story deep inside the paper on December 7, datelined Mexico City. The lead of the story suggested its significance: “In the greatest immigration movement in recent Mexican history, 112,407 Mexican repatriates have returned to this country this year, most of them from the United States.”68 The Light’s story also ran on page 11 of its respective edition, below other short stories, some so whimsical as to be jokes. A prime example was the article “Dirt Not So Cheap in NY,” which explained that it would cost a dime to buy enough dirt to fill a small flowerpot in New York City.69 Numbers stories about repatriates, deportees, and other immigrants were an important editorial tool for La Prensa. Few such articles were published in the Express and the Light. The English-­language news frame’s near-­omission of thousands of returning Mexicans raises significant questions about how these journalistic outlets could justify ignor-

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ing the predicament of such a mass of humanity. Hints to the answer reside in discourse such as that found in the Hearst press, which routinely equated immigrants to riffraff, vermin, and criminality. More abide in the language of Congressman Box, and his rhetoric that defined Mexicans, particularly those of mixed blood, as diseased, inferior, and un-­American. Their “cheap” labor was of an expendable color. Despite the sense of scale numbers added to the Mexican diaspora story in La Prensa, quantifying the repatriation and deportation saga stripped the story of soul. And souls—and their suffering—were the story. The full repatriation tale could be told only through other news frames that looked at the people behind the numbers. The dichotomous patriot and pariah frames were a prime way the newspapers, particularly La Prensa, accomplished this. Meanwhile, as countless numbers of then-­present-­day Mexicans exited Texas and the United States, their Spanish-­speaking immigrant forebears were basking in a newfound acceptance on the pages of the English-­language San Antonio newspapers, the Light and Express.

Spanish Nostalgia Frame: Catholic, Castilian American Pioneers The path ahead seemed hazy in 1931, with dreams dissipating faster than bank accounts. The misty promise of the future, and the gritty reality of the present, merely made the heroic past more enticing. Moreover, for San Antonians, 1931, the city’s bicentennial, offered the optimal opportunity to reconsider civic roots. Spaniards from the Canary Islands and Franciscan missionaries founded San Antonio in 1731, more than two centuries after Juan Ponce de León made landfall on the Florida coast. Stories of the Spanish-­speaking pioneers’ resilience, fortitude, and exploits in the desolate Texas hinterland of the Spanish colonial empire offered a powerful survival saga for the despairing city of San Antonio. The city’s two hundredth anniversary represented banner news in both English and Spanish. The Express, the Light, and La Prensa extensively covered the six-­day extravaganza, which took place in early March 1931. The dedication of the newly restored Spanish Governor’s Palace was the kickoff for the bicentennial celebration, an event all three newspapers gave front-­page coverage. The Light added a front-­page promo for radio station KTSA, announcing that it would broadcast a celebration-­related

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high mass at San Fernando Cathedral, as well as ceremonies at Mission Concepción, one of San Antonio’s five Spanish colonial missions.70 A jarring juxtaposition of headlines in La Prensa illustrated the “absurd dichotomy” between things Spanish and things Mexican, in the terms of journalist Carey McWilliams. The Spanish-­language newspaper published its story with a headline that ran across seven out of eight columns of the first page: “Yesterday the Governor’s Palace was Inaugurated.”71 That day’s banner headline story, however, was reserved for present-­day Mexican immigrants: “Dining Rooms and Dormitories for the Repatriates.”72 The Express showcased a more glaring example of dichotomous thinking in a first-­person column that Harvey P. Smith, the architect overseeing restoration of the Governor’s Palace and missions, wrote for that paper. Smith described his extensive interviews with descendants of San Antonio’s original Spanish settlers, which he explained were part of his quest for detailed historical accuracy. However, he said, “[W]e decided that maybe we could find some information, which did not show on the surface . . . so I asked the mayor to let me have a couple of Mexicans, with picks and shovels, to do some excavation work underground.”73 The Spanish-­speaking immigrants of past and present were essential to the building and rebuilding of San Antonio but were worlds apart even in the same space and time. All three papers reported that Archbishop Patrick Cardinal Hayes of New York, accompanied by the archbishops of Santa Fe and San Antonio, and the bishop of Tulsa, blessed the newly renovated palace. Their “benediction consecrated the palace for all time, converting a sanctuary to worship the colonizers who gave us a country into something that perpetuates the Spanish inheritance the adventuresome and conquering [King] Carlos V left us,” La Prensa wrote.74 The newspaper coverage amplified pride in the Spanish heritage of Texas. At the same time, on the same page, La Prensa described the fate of descendants of that heritage, penniless repatriates and deportees who had voluntarily or forcibly fled the United States. At that moment that celebrations of Spanish colonial prowess were under way in San Antonio, 1,765 destitute Mexican returnees were congregating at the border with another caravan-­full of six hundred on the way from California. To stave off humanitarian disaster, Mexico set up emergency dining and lodging facilities in four border cities. Neither the Express nor the Light noted those developments. The Express interpreted the story of the Governor’s Palace inaugura-

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tion somewhat differently, relying on extensive quotes from Texas governor Ross S. Sterling. In his speech, Sterling emblematically tied Spanish colonial history to US history and his own Depression era political aims. Since the Anglo-­Saxon civilization in Texas is so young and we are accustomed for that reason to think of it as a young State, it seems [a] little strange to be celebrating the 200th anniversary of an epoch in Texas history. The people of Texas and the Southwest can point to the settlement of this section with as much pride as can those of the New England colonies, for it was nearly the same time each were [sic] beginning to develop. Sterling’s rousing call equating New Spain with New England was a segue to the modern-­day political point he wanted to make about Texas schools. Sterling turned the story of the Franciscan missionaries and their zeal to educate “the minds of the ignorant Indians” into a parable to push for greater spending on the Texas educational system. The “padres” worked indefatigably to teach “Indians those things which mean the difference between ‘men and brutes,’” the governor said. He then exhorted Texans to commit to the state’s education system with the drive and discipline of the founding Franciscans. Education in Texas is not nearly all that it should be. There is still room for improvement until we can assure every child, rural and urban, a fair chance for an education. The schooling of every Indian meant one more potential civilized being to develop this frontier land of early Texas. Similarly the education of every Texas child today and tomorrow, for ignorance is the breeding ground of crime.75 Sterling’s argument belied the reality of Texas education for many Mexicans and Mexican Americans. It came just a year after the Texas Court of Civic Appeals ruled that Mexican American children might legally attend segregated schools if they lacked proficiency in English or participated in seasonal migratory labor that would limit their school attendance. The court stated it would be illegal to exclude Mexicans from schools attended by other whites merely because they were Mexicans.76 In the view of legal scholar Juan Perea, whites “were interested in educating Mexican Americans only for the purpose of teaching them to believe in their own inferiority and to be satisfied with roles as manual laborers.”77Education was

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merely one of many ways that persons of Mexican descent in Texas were kept in the shadows of a celebration they should have starred in. La Prensa concluded its San Antonio bicentennial coverage with a March 10, 1931, page-­one story.78 Not for the first time, readers were presented the “schizophrenic” juxtaposition of the Mexican and the Spanish. Running above the fold, the two-­hundredth-­anniversary celebration article touted the “installation of an enormous boulder in the Main Plaza.” The rock was dedicated to the memory of the Canary Island emigrants who in 1731 founded the town of San Fernando, “now transformed in the beautiful and progressive city of San Antonio.”79 Below that final bicentennial article, La Prensa published the far more sobering banner headline: “1,600 Repatriates Will Arrive in Mexico Today.”80 Wanted or unwanted, Spanish-­speaking immigrants made news. In its last story reporting the two-­hundredth-­anniversary fête, La Prensa nonetheless rejected the dichotomy, suggesting that there should be no hierarchy of color separating the founding European Spaniards from present-­day Mexicans. The newspaper quoted Mayor C. M. Chambers and County Judge William W. Wurzbach, who both extolled the “Spanish race and its descendants” before a crowd of four thousand spectators. Chambers “sang the praises of the Spanish race and stated that the growth of San Antonio was owed in large part to the descendants of that race.” Wurzbach also lauded the Franciscan friars who accompanied the first settlers. He “declared that the Latin colony in San Antonio was the best in the United States owing to its ties of blood and tradition that united it with the intrepid and valiant Spaniards, to whom San Antonio’s existence is indebted.”81 These affirming media representations of persons of Spanish ancestry in San Antonio sharply contrasted with the continuing saga of the unwanted Mexicans leaving Texas and the rest of the United States, including a group expected to arrive that day in Mexico City aboard a federally sponsored train, according to La Prensa’s lead page-­one story.82 The 1,600 Mexicans were among the impoverished immigrants who had been detained and then deported from the United States. Many were stranded at the Mexican border for days, spurring the Mexican government to relocate them deep in the interior of the country.83 Although La Prensa failed to take note of these dichotomous page-­one stories, the visual juxtaposition of the San Antonio bicentennial and the Mexican repatriate articles illuminated the conflicting logic and sentiment they represented. The Express’s coverage differed markedly, not only in placement, but

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also in scope and content. Instead of giving it a page-­one treatment, the Express published its story on page 10, in a single column tracking the upper left side. Headlined “Stone Dedicated to City Founders,” the article ran alongside two photos of the final bicentennial ceremony. The article offered an overview of the day’s activities, which included, among other things, the San Antonio archbishop’s blessing of the boulder, an address by a descendant of the Canary Islanders, and an assembly of Our Lady of the Lake College students attired in Spanish pioneer costumes. The San Fernando Cathedral bells tolled at 11:​00 a.m. as factory whistles shrieked throughout the city. Planes from the Air Corps Training Center zoomed overhead in formation. The Express mentioned Wurzbach and Chambers, though it quoted only Mayor Chambers, using a distinctly different quote than the one La Prensa selected. According to the Express, Chambers stood near the boulder draped with the Spanish flag, and said, in part: It is fitting that the monument to the memory of the Canary Islanders should be placed within a few yards of the county and municipal buildings and San Fernando Cathedral, the very heart of our fair city. For years to come our children and our children’s children will stop here to do homage to these settlers. Now after many years, San Antonio, the birthplace of Texas liberty, pays tribute to our own heroes and I gratefully accept the boulder for the city in honor of those who did so much for San Antonio, Texas, Christianity and civilization. As long as God reigns may it stand as a perpetual memory to those brave settlers of church and State.84 In the socially constructed reality of the Express news story, the connection between the trailblazing Spaniards and their heirs, the Mexican people, never materialized. Instead, Chambers linked the Canary Island pioneers, patriotism, and state formation with his declaration that San Antonio was “the birthplace of Texas liberty.” Moreover, by highlighting the proximity of the boulder, the symbol of Spanish conquest, to key institutions of local government and religiosity, Chambers sought to imbue San Antonio’s present-­day civic and religious institutions with a patina of Spanish pioneer spirit. The boulder dedication story was front-­page news for the Light, which, as an afternoon paper, had the advantage of running its story on the day it happened. The Light also diverged from La Prensa and the Express in its narration of events. The Light recounted Wurzbach’s speech without

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using the term “Latin” as La Prensa had done. Instead, the story paraphrased Wurzbach as saying that “San Antonio’s cosmopolitan element ranked among the best in the United States, due directly to the blood of its founders on the city.”85 At a time when immigration issues were increasingly pegged to a hierarchy of color, the Light’s linkage of the Spaniard and the Mexican in the context of their value to the city of San Antonio was an important signifier of acceptance from local English-­language media. La Prensa’s editorial decision to focus on words from Wurzbach and Chambers that elevated the profile of San Antonio’s Mexican community exemplified the Spanish-­language newspaper’s fulfillment of two classic ethnic media functions. La Prensa not only preserved and transmitted Mexican American culture but also helped instill Mexican community pride.86 However, La Prensa did much more. Through its editorial judgment, that is, through its selection of which bits of reality to present, it showed, as historian John Bodnar put it, that it was “fully capable of creating a culture and, consequently, a memory separate from that which exists in dominant society.”87 The Express, the Light, and La Prensa chronicled San Antonio’s two hundredth anniversary in sometimes opposing social constructions of reality, drawn from a memory of the past, that added “perspective and authenticity” to their differing representations of the past and the present.88 The Express and the Light, as defenders of what Bodnar might call official interests, and La Prensa, as a defender of vernacular interests, both “selectively retrieved from the past” to reinforce their views of the present.89 The bicentennial commemoration offered a rare comparable exhibit of the newspapers’ representations of San Antonio history and the role Spaniards and Mexicans played in it. Mostly, however, the newspapers talked past each other to their respective imagined communities of readers. The comments of Wurzbach and Chambers vindicating Mexicans and Mexican Americans as vital members of modern San Antonio civic society were omitted from the Express. Instead, the Express excerpted and presented the idea that San Antonio’s legacy rivaled that of New England, which had long claimed title to the nation’s colonial past. The English-­language news coverage of a boulder commemorating the Spanish founders helped symbolically frame the wider Depression era effort to resurrect the Spanish legacy. Anglos had helped bury that legacy through architectural neglect and historical disparagement of Spaniards via the Black Legend that labeled them bloodthirsty brutes. Positioning the rock in close proximity to government offices—to a seat of modern Anglo power and au-

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thority—was another prime example of Renato Rosaldo’s imperialist nostalgia at work.90 Indulging in the Spanish fantasy helped redeem a social order that had abused the contribution of colonial Spain to Texas history. Now the dominant culture was eager to claim it, appropriate it, and profit from it. Writing in the Express, Harvey P. Smith, the architect leading San Antonio’s restoration work, made that unabashedly clear: “Did you ever stop to think how great a part this historical background of ours could play in the purely commercial progress of the city? Have you ever stopped to reflect on the shrewdness of the businessmen of California, for instance, in advertising their old missions” and “thus luring tourists by the thousands?”91 The bicentennial was not the only opportunity to recall Spanish colonial history; nor was the news story the sole editorial vehicle. On May 1, 1931, the Light published an editorial cartoon strip that dramatized how Alamo hero James Bowie got his foothold in Texas. The cartoon depicted a wedding scene: “James Bowie married the daughter of Juan Martin Verramendi [sic], lieutenant governor of Texas and Coahuila.” The thought bubble exchange between two wedding guests read: “This just about fixes Bowie with the government,” said one. “Yeah, he can get anything he wants,” responded the other.92 The final frame of the cartoon depicted Veramendi handing Bowie his Mexican citizenship papers. The cartoon not only framed Bowie; it also framed the close and complicated relationship Anglo Texans historically had with Mexico. For a newspaper known for carrying its chain’s nationally syndicated features, the history cartoon was tellingly local. Spanish nostalgia in architecture gave the Light another way to appeal to its Alamo City audience. In 1931 the paper celebrated its fiftieth year in business by moving into a new four-­story Spanish Renaissance–­style building at 420 Broadway St., on the corner of Broadway and 5th St. (later known as McCullough Ave). The Light’s new brick, steel, and concrete building had been constructed on what had once been an ancient seabed. Carved roof cornices, an intricate quasi-­Moorish-­style entrance one and a half stories tall, and arched rooftop towers gave the Light’s new home the “last word in beauty,” if the paper did say so itself.93 Touting water fountains, bathrooms, and showers on every floor, sixteen telephone trunk lines, elevators, and the most up-­to-­date heating and ventilation systems, the Light also claimed the last word in functionality. In a show of journalistic transparency, plate glass windows on the first floor offered a view of the newspaper’s two presses rolling out the latest editions. The editorial

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offices on the fourth level also housed the composing room, with fourteen typesetting machines set on solid maple floors. The Light newsroom, described as a “place where reporters hurried in, reported their news gleanings, and hurried out again,” was “filled with the steady clicking of the reporters’ typewriters” and “the hum of the Associated Press and International News Service machines.”94 In a front-­page congratulatory letter to William M. McIntosh, the Light’s publisher, his boss William Randolph Hearst applauded the new building’s modernity but stressed its symbolism. The building typified “the confidence you have in your community and also to a degree the confidence which the community has in you,” Hearst wrote.95 In 1931 San Antonio, like the country and the world, was looking for institutions to believe in. By wrapping its state-­of the-­art offices in the cloak of Spanish fantasy, the Light epitomized the need for progress to maintain historic integrity and “reflect the spirit of San Antonio.”96 More concretely, by leaving its second floor vacant and setting aside space to add as many as five more typesetting machines on the fourth level, the paper prophesied growth and profit at a time when many San Antonians failed to see past their own current loss.

Conclusion News coverage in 1931 continued to illuminate the trends of the first two years of the Depression. Immigration policies promulgated in distant Washington, DC, and Los Angeles County, among other places, had a profound effect on San Antonio and throughout Texas, wherever repatriates and deportees sojourned. In a way, this was a reverse pilgrimage from the land of milk and honey, or the land of Rockefeller and Ford, as the corrido referenced at the beginning of this book put it. Now many Mexicans found they had only a one-­way ticket back to a land fraught with fear and lack of opportunity. Though they were at the mercy of two countries that were fertile with little more than broken promises, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, at least to some degree, found they could count on their own community for basic support in extreme need. La Prensa provided an extensive account of this calculus of suffering and succor and persisted in giving dimension to the issue, including through a quantification frame that was rarely found in the Express and the Light. The framing included an effort to explain the circumstances for the departures, forced deporta-

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tions, voluntary departures, or official repatriations. Clarifying the different streams of Mexican returnees provided a sense of immigrant agency. The good-­citizen frame was also most prominent in La Prensa. This coverage is in keeping with sociologist Michael Schudson’s ideas that the media are central to the construction of civic fabric, including defining norms of communityhood.97 Even the Express, however, with its more limited repatriation and immigration coverage, noted the Mexican community’s philanthropy. The work of La Prensa journalists to document Mexican and Mexican American agency, and to report across class about the injustices and indignities immigrants suffered going and coming, highlights the newspaper’s important role in helping develop an awareness of civil rights. While La Prensa was not the only US-­based Spanish-­language newspaper to try to illuminate these issues, it was the most widely disseminated, both in the United States and in Mexico. It can be fairly said that these journalists, who faced their own personal and economic challenges during the Great Depression, functioned similarly to English-­language journalists who documented the black civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s—as “sympathetic referees.”98 In contrast, however, this early Mexican American civil rights episode remained largely a Spanish-­language story. The omission, therefore, of Spanish-­language news coverage from the record of American journalism history has contributed to making this and many other early Mexican American civil rights stories almost forgotten footnotes of public memory. Moreover, the blank pages in civil rights history books where the work of Spanish-­language journalists might have been recorded have contributed to a more limited view of the size, scope, and meaning of civil rights in the United States. This elision of history has helped obscure what should be understood today as a Long and Wide Civil Rights Movement that crosses many fault lines of race, ethnicity, geography, class, and gender—not to mention borders. Even as ethnic Mexicans were forced to depart, Texas cities venerated their Spanish heritage more than ever. Amid the calamity of a federal takeover of City-­Central Bank and Trust Co., the frustration over fewer jobs, and ever-­more-­frequent business failures, San Antonio staked its future to its past. San Antonio spent almost a week in 1931 consecrating itself to its Spanish colonial heritage. The city celebrated the lives of the first immigrants, the Spanish Canary Islanders and the Franciscan missionaries, while their transcendent blood, embodied in Mexicans, drained from

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Figure 3.2. Customers of City-­Central Bank and Trust Co. wait outside the financial institution in downtown San Antonio on October 1, 1931, for their first chance to gain access to their safety deposit boxes since the bank failed to open on September 28, 1931. This is an unpublished photo from the San Antonio Light Photograph Collection, UTSA Special Collections–­ITC, No. L-­1302-­H. Used with permission, © San Antonio Express-­News/ZUMA.

the country in the corpus of repatriates that crossed the border. Those remaining were often symbolically annihilated—trivialized, condemned, and omitted from news coverage—though they bore at least equally the brunt of Depression disasters.99 For instance, numerous businesses and individuals in the city’s Mexican community lost money in the City-­ Central Bank and Trust Co. collapse, which only La Prensa, among the three dailies, reported.100 As historian David Weber wrote, “In our historical imaginations, we have produced multiple interpretations of the Spanish frontier in North America—constructions that have contended with one another over time to transform our understanding.”101 La Prensa, the Express, and the Light presented contending representations of Mexicans in the United States in

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light of the Spanish colonial past of San Antonio. La Prensa, the Express, and the Light used the event to bolster, if not transform, readers’ perceptions of themselves. The year of the San Antonio bicentennial—1931—was nonetheless ironically the greatest year of Mexican repatriation. As 1932 approached, La Prensa’s question remained unanswered. “How will this tragedy end?”102

Chapter 4

1932–1933

A New Deal for American Pioneers

When the colonists of New England were building block houses, hanging and torturing witches, and pressing stubborn old Giles Cory [sic] to death, in San Antonio, the Franciscan monks were converting the Indians, while they watched in wonder and worship the glorious façade and exquisite rose window of [Mission] San José . . . under the inspired chisel of Pedro Huizar. Such Spanish structures and those who erected them have furnished the background of romance and culture for San Antonio.

I

Anna Ellis, San Antonio Express, February 12, 1933

n August 1932 a “South Texas alien drive” snared more than 350 Mexicans, sending them to Texas jails while they awaited deportation for violating immigration laws. Federal authorities, reported the Light, “had been going after the Mexicans,” rounding them up Texas-­ style.1 Such was the tone and tenor of immigration news just three months before Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the 1932 presidential election. Yet, in Roosevelt’s inaugural address in March 1933, he credited the American newcomer, proclaiming “the way to recovery” required “recognition of the old and permanently important manifestation of the spirit of the American pioneer.”2 Despite the “background of romance and culture” their pioneer ancestors brought to San Antonio, Mexican immigrants were an unwelcome embodiment of that spirit. Fewer were leaving for Mexico than had in the peak year of 1931, yet it remained an open question whether the New Deal would dawn for Mexicans still in the United States. Signaling a potentially positive answer was Frances Perkins, Roosevelt’s labor secretary and the first woman to hold a US cabinet seat.3 She declared that her knowledge of immigration was “meager”; however, she promised to pursue a “humanitarian” course,

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using as her “bible” the 1931 report of the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, known as the Wickersham report.4 The report, named for George Wickersham, the former US attorney general who headed it, found that the apprehensions of “supposed aliens are often characterized by methods unconstitutional, tyrannic, and oppressive.”5 In short, the report found that deportations were high-­handed and harsh, and needlessly divided families. Uproar over the deportation order of Roberto Gutiérrez, a Mexican Pullman porter, provided Perkins an early opportunity to delineate her course. Gutiérrez was serving as a waiter aboard the Missouri Pacific Railroad when customs officials found liquor in the dining car. Gutiérrez denied the alcohol was his yet refused to identify the passenger who brought the liquor aboard. US representative Richard Kleberg, the Catholic Church in Texas, C. N. Idar, general representative in the southern states for the American Federation of Labor, and commissioner of streets Paul E. Steffler were among those who protested Gutiérrez’s treatment to Perkins. Kleberg explained he “did not oppose the immigration laws as they stand” but “opposed the manner in which they have been administered.” After ordering a report on the incident, Perkins rescinded the deportation order.6 Gutiérrez’s story ran in all three newspapers, making page 1 in both the Light and La Prensa. Only La Prensa, however, followed up the next month with a wider assessment of Perkins’s policies. Mexicans who crossed the border to the American side daily to work or shop told the newspaper that immigration personnel had begun to treat them “much better.” Moreover, La Prensa reported, “the famous raids” carried out in highly populated, poor Mexican neighborhoods to apprehend and deport Mexicans “were things of the past.” Perkins was following very different procedures from “the radical ones” former labor secretary William N. Doak pursued under President Hoover. “I don’t want to say that the US government has eliminated all the restrictions against foreign immigration, but it does look as though the US has adopted a more benign approach,” La Prensa’s correspondent wrote.7 In fact, shortly after taking office Perkins fired 55 members of the “deportation squad” and furloughed 16 others.8 Meanwhile, the Express noted that Perkins revoked Doak’s February 1933 order to have immigrants fingerprinted.9 In short, within a month of taking office, Roosevelt and Perkins instituted a dramatic unwinding of many of the prior administration’s immigration policies. While government policy in Washington was evolving, a series of

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letters published in the San Antonio news pages showed that attitudes toward Mexicans and Mexican Americans were little changed from earlier Depression years. In fact, views seemed to have hardened, both pro and con. In some cases the perspectives showed more outright racism. The newspaper debate was largely confined to the “Open Forum” column in the Light, which was the only one of the three San Antonio daily newspapers to regularly publish letters to the editor during this period. Since Benjamin Franklin wrote his famous “Silence Dogood,” missives, letters to the editor have represented a storied practice central to newspapers’ democratic function. That practice persisted through the Depression and beyond.10 While a few letters on the subject of Mexicans had appeared during 1931, the back-­and-­forth on the topic was far more prolific and pernicious in the 1932–1933 period. As José de La Peña wrote in his letter defending the presence of Mexicans in breadlines: “Mexicans here are for some extraordinary reason looked down on and in many instances not considered as belonging to the white race at all.”11 However, many letter writers did not want Mexicans anywhere in San Antonio. Not in the bread lines, not on the job, and not on the radio. And most definitely they were not wanted in the public swimming pool. As “Resident” wrote: “It is a very good idea if the city had separate swimming pools for Mexicans as they have a different method of bathing.” The “Resident” reported seeing some Mexicans rubbing themselves with soap before jumping in the pool. He called for an “inspector” to “see that each takes a shower before going in.” If separate swimming pools weren’t possible, make it a paid pool, the letter writer urged.12 Miss H. Farias challenged the “Resident,” arguing that “if he is to judge a whole race just by a few of them, then what conception would he have of his own race if he were to see them as they behave on the Mexican border?”13 Farias’s letter openly challenged the notion that the Anglo norm represented a superior standard of behavior. Significantly, however, her letter gave tacit acceptance to the mediated notion that Mexicans and whites were of different races, even as she argued against the behavioral stereotype “Resident” furthered with his rhetoric. The letters published in the Light are not a scientific sampling of public opinion but hold value for their insight into what the Light editors perceived as representative of opinion based on the contents of the newspaper’s mailbag. The letter writers’ debate revolved in part around who might be considered American enough to merit a stake in the economy. Letter writer D. D. Doyle urged Texans to “Buy Texas” to create more jobs

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in the state. “And another thing, why do Americans give Mexicans jobs?” If the practice continues wrote Doyle, “why don’t they give the place back to Mexico?”14 Writers to the Light not only objected to Mexicans holding jobs in San Antonio but also protested the Spanish language and culture Mexicans infused in the city. “San Antonio Citizen” suggested that the city was already Mexico, or, perhaps better stated, still Mexico. The writer complained of Mexican boys who “refused to speak English. You can hear them speak at the schools on the playgrounds in Mexican.” They failed to follow the good example of the Germans, who “are always ready to speak English.”15 The comparison between the mestizo Mexican and the white European German played into the hierarchy of color frame, which in earlier Depression years was captured in the newspaper discourse of elites, such as Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler and Rep. John Box. The letters to the editor of the Light, however, revealed something beyond that. Readers expressed their thinking that some immigrants were preferred over others based on socially constructed images of race. Some immigrants were good; others were bad. For these readers, there was no ambiguity where Mexicans fit in the good/bad immigrant paradigm. The complaint about the Spanish language was shared by letter writer T. J. Remling, who disliked turning his radio dial and passing over Spanish-­language programming: “Here of late one has to be Mexican or at least must understand the Mexican language, or one is out of luck for the local stations.” Remling seemed ready to concede defeat. “After the fall of the Alamo, when Texas was taken from the Mexicans they said that they would get Texas back into their possession again and it seems that they are making great progress.”16 The letters from “San Antonio Citizen” and T. J. Remling represent the unease some Anglos felt about the historical and present identity of their city and state. In this view, Spanish or “Mexican” language could not signify Americanhood, that is, the kinship of American civic culture. The ideal “San Antonio citizen” was not Spanish-­speaking. Most worrisome, for the holders of this view, was that the defeated people speaking this defeated language would simply not give up and leave for good. Instead, they persisted; and they did so speaking a language that carried with it a culture and a history that predated the Anglos on the same land. The Spanish language rankled because it was a vestige of indomitable culture. As Sabine Ulibarrí stated: “We cannot even conceive of a people without a language or a language without a people.”17 The Light’s readers who took

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Figure 4.1. Domingo Cortinas, a worker at the Central Relief Committee Main Avenue Commissary, stands at the counter sorting groceries for impoverished Depression era San Antonians. The photo was published May 24, 1933, in the Light. San Antonio Light Photograph Collection, UTSA Special Collections–­ITC, No. L-­1453-­A. Used with permission, © San Antonio Express-­News/ZUMA.

umbrage at hearing Spanish spoken on the streets of San Antonio seemed intuitively to have grasped this. The Light, however, offered a unique journalistic space in San Antonio that also allowed Mexican voices to weigh in on these contentious issues in print and in a place where they were accessible to non-­Hispanic citizens. The irony of the Anglo letter writers’ arguments resonated with B. L. Davila, a San Antonio grocery store owner of Mexican descent. “I wish to call the attention of all Mexican labor critics to the fact that most Mexicans here were born and raised and living here before Americans knew Texas existed.” Davila, a US World War I army veteran, noted that many Mexicans had served alongside Anglos in the Great War. “All you critics of Mexicans go back to the year 1917,” Davila admonished. As for Mexicans getting aid from the Central Relief Committee, “Mexicans pay taxes too.”18 In this shared editorial space that evinced a broader community of readers

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than the Light’s journalists perhaps imagined for their work, Mexicans and Mexican Americans inscribed their rights. These public expressions of civil rights were keystrokes in the Mexican American role in what should now be understood as a Long and Wide Civil Rights Movement. Furthermore, N. Aguilar, editor of the Spanish newspaper Alma Latina, agreed with the “Buy Texas” slogan and publicized it on his news pages in Spanish. The criticism of Mexicans holding jobs in the United States, however, was another matter. “Doesn’t Mr. Doyle know that this is a cosmopolitan country that gives all nationalities the right to live?” Aguilar asked.19 C. G. Cantu seconded Aguilar’s view, asking why “other foreigners such as Englishmen, Germans, Irish, etc.” weren’t also barred from holding jobs in the United States. “If this should be done, we would find that only a few Indians in Oklahoma and New Mexico would be eligible for jobs, as they are the only 100 percent Americans,” Cantu wrote.20 Some defenses of Mexicans became part of the political sparring in the city’s Anglo power structure. The Citizens League, whose most famous member was Maury Maverick, then tax collector, put on a major political rally in 1932 using Spanish-­language interpreters for the various candidates’ speeches. Maverick reminded the crowd of two thousand Mexicans in Haymarket Plaza of the way D. A. McAskill, a former Citizens League candidate, slandered San Antonio’s largest Mexican community on the West Side, calling them “dope heads, robbers, and killers.” Noting that McAskill had since joined “the machine,” Maverick told the Mexicans that “what he [McAskill] says is what the machine thinks of you people.”21 The political rhetoric showed that the letters-­to-­the-­editor debate between those who assailed Mexicans and those who championed them was connected to the same competing attitudes found in wider San Antonio society. As this sampling of letters demonstrates, the role of Mexicans was questioned everywhere, from the schoolyard to the swimming pool. Despite the disparagement Mexicans and Mexican Americans faced from some in San Antonio, it was the only home many had ever known. Returning to Mexico appeared to be a dimming option. In general, during 1932 and 1933 the same themes that dominated representations of Mexicans in earlier Depression years continued, with a particular inflection caused by the rhetoric of the New Deal surfacing in some frames. Roosevelt’s mantra to rebuild, revive, and restore did not entirely vanquish the fears and economic distress that bred xenophobia, as represented in the Light’s published letters and commentary. Not even the concomitant effort to rebuild,

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revive, and restore the legacy of San Antonio’s Spanish-­speaking pioneers was powerful enough to eradicate the antipathy to “the foreigner”—the Mexican. Consequently, untold numbers of unwanted Mexicans were departing, some by choice, others by force. One newspaper in San Antonio, La Prensa, continued to frame the issue of repatriates and deportees by putting a number to the problem.

Quantification Frame: The Problem of Enumerating Counting Mexican returnees remained a persistent frame in 1932 and 1933, despite the comparatively fewer Mexican returnees. In 1932 the number of repatriates fell 44 percent from the peak year, 1931. They still figured in the thousands—77,453, to be exact. La Prensa remained persistent in questioning the legitimacy of the government numbers it used, in stark contrast to the English-­language press. In sum, the counting and the questioning went unabated in the face of continued demographic changes that altered the complexion of San Antonio and the country. The Light and the Express took tallies when they fit another news imperative: that local news commands interest and takes precedence.22 For instance, when Mexican consul general Eduardo Hernández Cházaro in San Antonio organized a truck caravan of repatriates to the Laredo border in 1932, the Express reported it.23 A one-­paragraph story published February 8, 1932, on page 14 ran with the headline: “Over 100 Mexicans Go to New Homes in South.”24 The numbers represented a minute data point among the thousands returning nationwide that year, but their story hit home. They were a hundred San Antonio souls that had given up hope of making it in the Alamo City. By 1933, a year later, interest in government-­instigated repatriations continued to wane. During this first full year of the Roosevelt administration, the number of returnees was only one-­fourth of what they had amounted to in the peak year of 1931. Few Mexicans responded to a joint San Antonio Central Relief Committee–­Mexican government plan to repatriate one thousand Mexican citizens to work on the Mexico–­Laredo Highway. The San Antonio Central Relief Committee agreed to pay their railroad fare to the Laredo border, and the Mexican government offered to cover their transportation inside Mexico, La Prensa and the Express reported. These newspapers also noted that the workers would not receive a salary but would be paid based on piecework.25

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The articles contained identical content, with the exception that one was in Spanish and the other in English. The other important difference was that the story in La Prensa was published on the front page, on February 6, 1933, while the Express published its version on the edition’s last page, a day later. M. Tomas Morlet, the Mexican vice consul in San Antonio, was the source for the articles, making it likely that he gave La Prensa the scoop. The Light’s story, three paragraphs long and on an inside page, mentioned that the city’s Central Relief Committee planned to send Mexicans back by truck in groups of fifty to one hundred. The Express followed up the day after their first story with a news article headlined: “Rush to Mexico for Jobs Fails.” The Mexican consulate had doubled its staff, anticipating Mexicans in San Antonio would line up to accept job offers. But the day after the announcement, only six had responded.26 When four days later that number increased to only forty Mexicans, Oscar Powell, the Central Relief Committee’s general chairman, provided the consulate with one worker to help promote the repatriation opportunity to unemployed Mexicans, the Express reported February 12, 1933.27 Powell perceived the tepid interest as a simple publicity problem. Just as likely, Mexicans may well have been leery of the piecework payment scheme, the temporary nature of the roadwork, and the predicament of repatriates in Mexico. A week later, eighty workers had registered to form the first contingent to return, both newspapers reported.28 The Light said only sixty-­two Mexicans would make the first return trip, and that they would travel on the Missouri Pacific Railroad line from San Antonio.29 The conflicting numbers found in the newspapers demonstrated the problem of accurately enumerating returnees even on a small scale. Whichever newspaper report of the numbers readers saw, one thing remained true, the joint effort of San Antonio’s Central Relief Committee and the Mexican consul general generated a marginal response from San Antonio’s Mexican community. If Mexico’s highway construction required a thousand workers, they came from somewhere other than San Antonio. Beyond the paltry reply to the road-­building call, the stories were significant because they showed how both newspapers diligently covered the local end of the massive, international repatriation phenomenon. The involvement of a major city entity, the Central Relief Committee, made this tale of repatriation a mainstream news event. Although the Express and the Light stories were relatively short, four paragraphs at most, and they played on interior pages, the coverage was incremental. By giving their

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readers the play-­by-­play on this city-­backed repatriation effort, the coverage emphasized the importance of the Mexicans’ departure to its community. The effort to count them demonstrated the importance of this local effort to return Mexicans. For its part, La Prensa clearly defined its imagined community as not only San Antonio and expatriate Mexico throughout the United States, but also Mexico. This was but one of many important repatriation stories La Prensa reported. Local news ruled in both the Express and La Prensa. However, La Prensa’s definition of local news was more expansive. Repatriates and deportees continued to exit various parts of the United States, La Prensa told its readers. Despite the declining numbers of Mexican returnees in 1932 and 1933, no group of departing Mexicans was too small to report, it seemed. One such article detailed the story of twenty deportees who had been living and working in Montana. They were sent to El Paso in the custody of US immigration officials, according to the October 29, 1932, La Prensa.30 The repatriated included 335 from Lake County, Indiana, who were en route to Laredo, Texas, on June 11, 1932. These repatriates followed thousands of other unemployed steelworkers who had already returned to Mexico ahead of them, the newspaper article stated. About the same time, a convoy of four hundred repatriates from Chicago was expected to arrive in Laredo, and a special train with one hundred more was scheduled to arrive after that, according to La Prensa.31 Midwestern steel and industrial workers were not the only ones returning in sizeable numbers. More than four thousand unemployed Mexican sugar beet workers in Colorado applied to the Mexican consulate in Denver to repatriate, La Prensa reported May 8, 1932.32 Denver, along with other Colorado cities and counties, established repatriation programs for indigent Mexicans. They relied on funds from the Community Chest, a social service agency precursor to the United Way, to transport the returning Mexicans to Ciudad Juárez.33 “Specially commissioned agents are even now rounding up the population and making lists of the beet workers who are found not to have work,” according to the La Prensa article, which bore the banner headline “Thousands of Beet Workers Abandon Colorado.”34 Between 1930 and 1935, Colorado cities and counties, with the help of the Mexican government and private charities, repatriated twenty thousand people to Mexico, including US-­born children of Mexican descent.35 During this period, according to historian Zaragosa Vargas, Americans of Mexican ancestry, both adults and children, who could not prove their citi-

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zenship, were deported. Despite the sweeps, the Great Western Sugar Co., abetted by a new, favorable sugar tariff, worked to maintain a steady Mexican workforce. Vargas described an insidious forced labor system, in which Mexican workers were granted relief to subsist through the winter, only to be excised from welfare rolls when the spring beet harvest demanded low-­wage workers.36 In San Antonio, despite the New Deal rhetoric of hope, deportations continued. Moreover, Mexican immigrants who remained jobless in San Antonio found that they were excluded from relief work opportunities. As the Light reported, this led to a rush on the federal building in San Antonio in 1933 as immigrants, mostly men, and mostly from Mexico, applied for citizenship.37 It was a new deal for American pioneers whose paperwork was in order. La Prensa, which circulated nationally and internationally, provided news from Mexican enclaves across the country. Beyond these local stories, the newspaper occasionally also provided readers with an accounting of departing Mexicans. A case in point was a La Prensa news report about Ciudad Juárez, a Mexican city across the border from El Paso. The report stated that 24,799 repatriates entered Mexico from the United States in the first ten months of 1932. The newspaper attributed the numbers to the Mexican Migration Service, though La Prensa cast doubt on their accuracy. According to “sources,” the true number of returnees was “much higher,” because not all repatriates registered with the Mexican consulate before returning, the La Prensa article stated.38 This was one of many instances in which La Prensa questioned official statistics, suggesting that the Mexican Migration Service data, which the US government considered the most authoritative, may well have fallen short of a true representation of the repatriation reality.39 In the first years of the Depression, quantification stories generally tallied repatriates and deportees. An August 10, 1932, page-­one story was rare in that it enumerated returnees who had found jobs in Mexico. Rohl, a construction company based in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, had hired more than 1,300 repatriates from the United States.40 By 1933 quantification frame stories documenting departing Mexicans were routine, sometimes mere one-­paragraph items. “A Train of Repatriates Is Awaited,” for instance, reported that El Paso expected six hundred repatriates from Los Angeles to pass through town via the railroad, headed to the Mexican interior.41 Rarer still were stories that documented Mexicans entering the

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United States. Without comment or making note of the irony, the Light ran an item on September 2, 1932, “10 and 20 Years Ago (From the Files of the San Antonio Light).” The reprint of news from September 2, 1912 noted that “the need for laborers is so great this time, especially in the cotton fields, that immigration from Mexico is not enough.”42 The quantification frame, with its numerical representation of Mexicans, tried to give scientific precision and definition to the ethnic diaspora. Inadvertently, it gave the story sterility. Immigration statistics might be perceived in the same light as stock market tables, sports scores, or gross domestic product reports. Numbers told part of the story, not all of it, and therefore, were not the true representations of reality Walter Lippmann argued for. As James Carey put it, Lippmann had indulged in “the classic fallacy of the Cartesian tradition,” which was “the belief that metaphors of vision, correspondence, mapping, picturing, and representation that apply to small routine assertions . . . will apply equally to large debatable ones.”43 People, however, not data points, drove much of La Prensa’s storytelling. Numbers, then, were but one way to picture the Mexican exodus. Aside from the issue of the accuracy of government statistics that La Prensa raised, merely quantifying the comings and goings did not convey how it felt to be starving at the border, did not explain immigration policy and its impact on families and individuals, and did not put the retreating Mexicans into the context of the political economy, workers’ rights, or civil rights. These articles, for the most part, represented de facto acceptance of the presumed inevitability of Mexicans as disposable labor.44 The omission of this frame from the Light and the Express highlights the ease with which brown bodies were dismissed from the news picture English-­ language dailies presented their community of readers. La Prensa’s effort to report on the numbers of repatriates and deportees from every corner of the United States, on the other hand, illustrated the breadth of its concept of community and its subscription base. In 1932 La Prensa had mail subscribers and dealers in all but seven states. Outside the West South Central region, which included Texas, the East North Central Region, which included Illinois and Michigan, represented its biggest subscriber base.45 In other words, as Table 4.1 and the circulation charts in the appendix illustrate, La Prensa was not just counting Mexicans leaving the United States; it counted readers leaving the United States. La Prensa did more than provide a dry statistical picture. The newspaper sent re-

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Table 4.1. La Prensa Circulation by Region 1929 Region New England Middle Atlantic South Atlantic East North Central East South Central West North Central West South Central Mountain Pacific Alaska & US Possessions Foreign Total

Daily 4 383 57 2,284 33 607 10,907 2,510 956 2 71 17,814

Sunday 4 401 57 2,264 38 564 19,937 2,761 1,086 2 79 27,183

1934 Daily 4 70 31 439 11 202 5,005 330 62 3 575 6,732

Sunday 5 129 45 1,199 22 498 11,407 872 118 5 2,603 16,903

Audit Bureau of Circulations, Chicago Note: Figures combine the number of mail subscribers and sales to dealers.

porters to the scene on both sides of the border, to record the texture that framed the human dimension of the story.

Pariah Frame: Starving, Sick, and Naked While debate raged in the English-­language Light over whether Mexicans remaining in San Antonio should swim in segregated pools, be barred from bread lines, and be forced to stop speaking Spanish, La Prensa focused on how Mexicans returning to Mexico were marginalized. During 1932 and 1933, the pariah frame in La Prensa more than ever illuminated the government’s role in helping and harming repatriates. Local business groups and private charities besieged the Mexican government with requests to help the starving, homeless repatriates who were amassed on the Mexican side of the border and dying of hunger. La Prensa reported in a page-­one banner headline story on February 10, 1932, that “30,000 repatriates were without a roof over their head or bread to eat. . . . In the streets you find hundreds of families, lacking the power to continue their journey for lack of resources, and lacking an idea of where to go because the

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situation is extremely difficult everywhere with such an immense number of jobless.”46 In short, immigrants in the pariah frame were found lacking. While the numbers of returnees were comparatively fewer than in 1931, the depth of their despair was deeper. Some repatriates committed suicide. Others committed homicide, including frustrated spouses and parents who murdered their families when they were unable to provide for them. Some were luckless accident victims. The latter included nine repatriates who were killed when a bus filled mostly with returnees from Texas skidded off the road in Mexico and into a ravine, a sad tale La Prensa reported in its March 26, 1933, front-­page account.47 The returnees were charity cases in a country that had little to give. An effort persisted, however inadequate, to make repatriates a national cause. The Mexican government announced in October 1932 that it would open three public restaurants in the border cities of Nogales, Ciudad Juárez, and Nuevo Laredo. Thousands of repatriates had passed through these cities, and many congregated in them, straining resources.48 Mexico designated Christmas Day 1932 National Donation Day for Repatriates, and a page-­one La Prensa article declared that everyone from the president of the republic down “to the most humble” were expected to give money to help the returnees who remained unemployed.49 In making the repatriates a civic cause, the Mexican government shifted some responsibility for returning Mexicans onto the shoulders of its citizenry. The newspaper didn’t account for all the proceeds, nor did it explain how or whether the funds were dispersed. However, on January 19, 1933, it reported that congressional legislators in Mexico City donated fifty pesos each.50 News coverage in the pariah frame provided a prime reason that Mexicans in San Antonio, or elsewhere, for that matter, failed to consider an all-­ expenses-­ paid offer to repatriate compelling. Citing “Mexico City dispatches,” the Express reported that the Mexican Repatriation Union deemed “further repatriation work would only aggravate the economic situation in Mexico.” The union provided anecdotal evidence: the story of a Mexican citizen who returned to Morelia, Michoacan, with his large family. Unable to find work, he sold his possessions to feed his household. “When he had sold his last piece of property he killed his wife and some of his children and himself.”51 Such news of hardship and misery likely deterred repatriates. This may also explain in part why, after three years of the Depression, more than one million Mexicans remained in the United States.52 Similarly horrific stories were more graphically portrayed in La Prensa.

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On April 26, 1932, the newspaper put a page-­one banner headline on a similar story: “A Repatriate Killed His Wife and His Child and Hanged Himself.” Juan Serrano lived in Corpus Christi and San Antonio before repatriating to San Luis, Potosí, Mexico, with his wife, Florentina Bolaños de Serrano, 25, and his two-­year-­old daughter, Maria Concepción. He left a note: “Don’t blame anyone, I did it.”53 Serrano had looked for work for months, to no avail, and was increasingly desperate, according to the article. He beat his wife and daughter to death. After they died, he hanged himself from a tree off the patio, but the cord broke and his body fell into some cactus plants, where his mother-­in-­ law discovered him. “The tragedy of the repatriates has caused deep consternation in the city,” La Prensa reported.54 In this way the pariah frame demonstrated that what happened to repatriates happened to the entire community. The repatriates’ tragedies and tribulations played out in the pages of La Prensa for friends, neighbors, and strangers to read and empathize over. The fates of the repatriates and the community were entwined. Mexicans who had repatriated had such confidence in La Prensa and its sister publication in Los Angeles, La Opinión, that they turned to the newspapers to reach their compatriots in the United States. For instance, on April 28, 1933, at the urging of the Mexican Repatriation Union, La Prensa published a photo of a group of gaunt repatriates, mostly men. The photo ran above a published letter from the union, which stated the returnees were starving and ate only one meal a day. The union sent the photographs and the letter to “let their brothers who live [in the United States] know the truth about things.” Despite much talk about being resettled in agricultural colonies, this never occurred. Their situation “was truly desperate,” the union wrote.55 La Prensa painted other portraits of misery. The Mexican government was not alone in promising repatriates a thriving livelihood in new agricultural colonies. Swindlers also enticed Mexicans living in the United States with bogus offers to relocate in a bucolic paradise in the home country, La Prensa reported January 4, 1932. Smooth business operators with “facile tongues” had persuaded forty Mexican families from Los Angeles to relinquish their homes in the United States and buy lots in an agricultural cooperative. The company undertook an “active campaign” in Los Angeles, distributing pamphlets that promised a “new paradise” in Baja California. There was no paradise, only poorly constructed huts with straw roofs, no irrigation, and no food. “Here and there, women and children, semi-­clothed, lined the doorways and looked at passersby with eyes that

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revealed the terrors of hunger,” La Prensa reported.56 These searing tales relating the fate of those who had once cooked, cleaned, built, planted, picked, and welded, among other tasks, in the United States went unrecorded in the English-­language Light and Express. Disposable Mexican labor remained a largely untold story. Most Mexican-­government-­sponsored colonies were also outright failures; incompetence, bureaucratic dithering, and neglect, though not necessarily fraud, were involved.57 An April 18, 1933, page-­one story reported that 275 starving, sick, and naked repatriated men, women, and children arrived in Mexico City after departing a presumably failed agricultural colony in northern Mexico. The repatriates were taken to a Red Cross sanitarium, where they awaited relocation to the primary agricultural colony for returnees in Menizo, Oaxaca.58 The Mexican government sent clothes and shoes to struggling repatriates in another colony, this one in the state of Guerrero, where the people “were in difficult conditions because they had invested all their resources in planting crops,” La Prensa reported July 18, 1933.59 The Mexican government’s own rhetoric of rebuilding with repatriates was in reality a bad deal for many returning Mexicans. The pariah frame was more evident in La Prensa because it covered repatriates and deportees on both sides of the border. For the San Antonio and Texas-­centric Express, once the Mexicans left the city, they were out of sight, out of mind, and out of the newspaper. The same was true for the more nationally focused Light, although it published a brief news story on July 13, 1933, suggestive of the pariah frame. “The repatriation of nationals is one of the chief Depression problems facing the Mexican government,” the Light wrote.60 The Light estimated that at least 300,000 had been “streaming back” from the United States since 1929. Still, in sharp contrast to La Prensa, the Light’s story glossed over the depth of the problem, saying most returnees had no need for government aid. When the alien “problem” didn’t remain on the other side of the border, it became a malady that required treatment, in the Light’s reportage. Federal judge R. J. McMillen had developed the antidote that was supposed to deter Mexicans from reentering once they had been deported. For instance, McMillen sentenced one three-­time deportee, who hadn’t been “cured . . . of his love for this country,” to twelve months in a federal detention farm at La Tuna, near El Paso, according to a March 10, 1933, Light story.61 The Light’s editorial page was inflected by the New Deal, shifting its attention largely toward supporting Roosevelt’s efforts to resuscitate the

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economy and showing less preoccupation with immigration. Readers sometimes connected these issues. Hearst pushed a “Buy American” program on his editorial pages that prompted a pointed letter to the editor from W. H. Wicke, a dissatisfied San Antonian. “Fifty percent of the employed labor right here in San Antonio is Mexican. A good many of these Mexicans and other foreigners have no right whatsoever being in this country . . . it is up to the people who do the hiring to hire Americans. Don’t ‘Buy American,’ but ‘Be American.’”62 For the letter writer, whatever American looked like, it did not look “Mexican.” The conflicting social constructions of immigrant and repatriate reality, ranging from near invisibility in the Express and the Light to torrid depiction in La Prensa, stemmed from the newspapers’ differing conceptions of their imagined community of readers. Though English-­language news of the returning Mexicans seemed to vanish over the border with them, some news from the other side still mattered to the English-­language press. Major highway roadwork in Mexico, a matter that had an impact on Texas industry, tourism, and commerce, made news. On May 3, 1933, the Express published a photo of six businessmen in suits and ties. The smiling group clutched fedoras and straw boaters and smiled for the snapshot, taken just before they left for a “goodwill trip to Mexico” to inspect the progress of Pan-­American Highway construction. The group included D. H. Martin, a state highway commissioner; Dick O. Terrell, president of the Chamber of Commerce; and Ray E. Lee, an Austin newspaperman.63 The state of the roads was a news matter, the state of the road workers, less so.

Patriot Frame: Repatriates to the Rescue Stories of deep despair did not stop La Prensa from occasionally reiterating its idealized perception of repatriates as heroic citizens. These stories had shrunk like the Texas cotton crop, but they had not vanished completely from the editorial landscape. This heroic frame overlapped with the financial frame in some instances. Heroes and patriots brought riches, or at least didn’t pose a financial burden on the rest of the country. The departure of 1,500 repatriates from Los Angeles in April 1932 led La Prensa to write that they returned with “knowledge unobtainable in Mexico,” including how to use agricultural machinery and how to plant crops more productively and efficiently.

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Meanwhile, Mexicans who remained in the United States, and there were many “according to the elevated statistics of the US immigration officials,” were model residents because they were self-­sustaining, La Prensa wrote. “We know that many of our people reside in California, Arizona, and Texas. But we are satisfied that they have never been a cost to society or to charitable organizations. It is not the norm for Mexicans to beg. In their major needs they ask for nothing; and they don’t expect a reward from anyone.”64 Some repatriates were unlikely heroes. These included Miguel Jimé­ nez, a native of Jalisco, Mexico, serving a life sentence in the Colorado State Prison at Cannon City. At the urging of the Mexican consul general in Denver, Ismael Vázquez, Colorado governor Edwin C. Johnson pardoned Jiménez, whose crime La Prensa omitted from the story. Jiménez had been imprisoned twelve years when Johnson pardoned him on the condition that Jiménez repatriate. “I return to my country full of hope and I resolve to reconstruct my life, dedicating myself to work,” said Jiménez, who had become a silversmith in prison. Jiménez then provided an endorsement for La Prensa, noting that incarcerated Mexicans in the Colorado State Prison read La Prensa and La Opinión, its Los Angeles-­based sister paper, to keep up with news about Mexico and the Mexican community in the United States.65 The uniting feature of the patriot frame could be seen in the early years of the Depression as perseverance. The prisoner, like the agricultural worker or the autoworker, might have fallen on hard times in the United States. He had, however, made the most of his opportunities and would return to Mexico and share his experiences with his compatriots. By 1932 and 1933, this paradigm in news coverage was difficult to discern. The myriad, traumatic trials awaiting repatriating Mexicans had been well publicized, making such a return seem a quixotic enterprise. Despite the fading patriot frame, the civic-­mindedness of Mexicans who remained in the United States persisted as a frame.

Good-­Citizen Frame: Constructing an Ethos of Charity and Self-­Reliance In an era of deprivation, when many had little, and even more had nothing, the Mexican community in 1932 and 1933 continued to help itself. The good-­citizen frame was inherently one of benevolence and a commu-

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nity’s ability to mobilize on behalf of the repatriates. Among the three newspapers, La Prensa’s prime role in constructing notions of good citizenship became more pronounced as this attribute of the community became harder to find in the English-­language press. Moreover, as an activist press, La Prensa was sometimes at the center of such activities, such as one described in the headline “The Pro-­Repatriados Committee of Laredo Reports on Its December Action.” The January 22, 1932, article was published with the subhead: “Through La Prensa thanks to all the mutual and fraternal associations that stood ready to help our compatriots.”66 In continuity with earlier Depression coverage, the newspaper listed an honor roll of donors. Sometimes both donors and recipients were listed by name. One donation of $2.25, for instance, went to “Mrs. Dolores, the widow of Morales, with six children, by order of the Mexican consul general.” The article also documented the extent to which local communities outside of Laredo rallied to support the deluge of repatriates that passed through the border city. Among others, the Society of the Sons of Hidalgo, from Robstown, Texas, donated $10; the Society of Hidalgo in Brownsville, donated $4; and the Society of Benito Juárez in San Benito, Texas, gave $4. Mexicans of all backgrounds and social profiles adopted the repatriates’ cause. Most notable was Diego Rivera, “the top mural artist, of worldwide fame,” who took a leading role in helping Mexicans in Detroit repatriate, La Prensa reported October 16, 1932.67 Commissioned by the Detroit Institute of Arts, Rivera spent eleven months, from April 1932 to March 1933, painting murals in what is now the museum’s Rivera Court. Rivera’s frescoes were a paean to Detroit industry and its workers circa the 1930s, and they celebrated manufacturing as indigenous city culture.68 Painting was not enough. Rivera commissioned himself to organize the League of Mexican Laborers and Farm Workers in Detroit and, working with the governments of Michigan and Mexico, helped indigent Mexicans repatriate. The officials involved included Michigan governor Wilber M. Brucker, Detroit mayor Frank Murphy, and Ignacio Batiza, Mexico’s consul general in Detroit. Some five thousand Mexicans planned to leave Detroit in early November, “with their families, their material possessions, if they had any, and their bitter experiences as expatriates,” La Prensa reported. Their departure would help Detroit save $3,500 a week, the estimated amount Detroit’s Public Welfare Department spent sustaining the 1,128 Mexican families registered to receive aid, the article stated. “With the absence of

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5,000 or 6,000 Mexican workers, American citizens would have a better chance to return to the automotive factories in early January 1933,” La Prensa reported. The Mexican government provided free rail transit to Laredo, Eagle Pass, or El Paso and Rivera helped supply food for their journey.69 Good citizens were not the only ones offering help to repatriates; the newspapers, and La Prensa in particular, also provided advice, suggestions, and warnings to compatriots who contemplated returning to Mexico.

Prescriptive Frame: Urging an End to Mexican Repatriation The prescriptive frame was sporadic during 1932 and 1933, reflecting the declining repatriation news cycle as fewer returnees made the pilgrimage to Mexico. Nonetheless, “how-­to” stories continued to provide advice and warning to the thousands of returning Mexicans, as well as to the Mexican government, which increasingly proved incapable of absorbing, much less accommodating, them. La Prensa maintained its role as a cautionary beacon, running page-­ one stories aimed at preventing returnees from making costly mistakes, such as one headlined, “Repatriates Should Not Return with Mexican Coins.” The January 5, 1932, article cited two official sources: the head of customs in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, Manuel Acuña, and the Mexican vice consul in Laredo, Texas, Professor Efrain Dominguez, who advised those returning from the United States to wait and exchange their US dollars after they had arrived in Mexico. That way, they could avoid entering the country with decommissioned, or worthless, money, the story said.70 By 1933 La Prensa no longer trifled with advice about small change. Its February 24, 1933, editorial strongly criticized the entire repatriation process and urged that the authorities, the press, and the Mexican consulates in the United States put an end to it—and their propaganda promoting it—quickly. Effectively, thousands of Mexicans returned to their country during this period, attracted by the promises the National Repatriation Committee threw to the four winds, with all our classic fanfare that favors the dramatic and sensational, without stopping to consider in the cold light of day how it would be possible to realize them. The committee promised to help those who returned, undertook an extensive

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propaganda campaign, and aroused their sentimental spirits with the possibility of a better life against the backdrop of incomparable Mexican landscapes. The propagandists devised well-­turned phrases, and tried to convince Mexicans, that there is nothing, after all, nothing like your own land in which to invest your energy. When the repatriates arrived in Mexico, it was logical that they would expect these promises fulfilled. The only thing they found was an enormous wall of total indifference.71 Nothing could be done about Mexicans who had already repatriated, but it would be “highly shameful to trick the Mexican, who, for better or worse, is earning a sure living outside the country, with a promise that knowingly cannot be fulfilled,” the editorial continued.72 La Prensa reiterated this admonition in a May 1, 1933, editorial, demanding the Mexican government establish the promised colonies, accommodate the repatriates already in the country, and then, only after these opportunities were distributed satisfactorily, consider repatriating more people.73 Later in 1933 La Prensa endorsed a Mexican government plan to build a new agricultural colony for repatriates on federal land in Baja California. Not only was this land fertile, but also such a colony would “Mexicanize” the region, which was now populated with Japanese, Russian, and Polish settlers, the October 16, 1933, editorial stated.74 La Prensa’s bold critique of the failed aspects of the Mexican government’s repatriation program was in keeping with its founding ethos, articulated on the front page of its February 13, 1913, edition. “Our (editorial) program could be fully expressed in three words: venimos a luchar.”75 The English translation requires four words: “we came to fight.” La Prensa went on to affirm that through its pages it would “honorably combat the [Mexican] government and at the same time signal the errors committed by our grandfathers under arms.”76 In other words, La Prensa was conceived as an instrument to question the policies and practices of the Mexican political system from the US side of the border, even while it abounded in Mexican pride. The dire situation repatriates encountered in Mexico in 1932 and 1933 did not deter all Mexicans in the United States, particularly those in equally or more desperate circumstances. The Mexican consul general in Kansas City, Missouri, warned Mexicans planning to repatriate that the government would not pay the freight costs to ship their household possessions, La Prensa reported in a May 4, 1933, article. The consulate also

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advised repatriates who had to abandon homes that they could give someone power of attorney to collect rents or sell their homes.77 Some prescriptions La Prensa published came straight from the government in Mexico City. Although La Prensa had previously warned repatriates numerous times to not bring firearms into the country without the proper permits, that did not stop the paper from running another advisory, this one from Mexico’s secretary of war, reminding returnees that they needed a special permit if they wanted to bring their guns.78 The treatment of Mexicans on both sides of the border led La Prensa to endorse building closer ties between “Mexico on the Outside,” or expatriate Mexico, and those who remained in Mexico. A July 19, 1933, editorial hailed “a permanent committee of Expatriate Mexico,” which was a creation of the Mexican Labor party. “Our opinion is that we must enthusiastically foment the solidification of these ties, which unite Mexicans living in the United States, Cuba, and other nearby countries, with those who still live on the ground that holds the ashes of our ancestors,” the La Prensa editorialist wrote. Those sympathetic ties might have inspired Mexico to support the many Mexican cotton pickers who had gone on strike in California, and who were now suffering in camps in that state. For instance, the National Committee of Repatriates had a fund of $300,000, some of which might have been used to help the strikers, the editorial stated.79 The editorialist’s views resonated with the words of Uranga, the Mexican La Prensa columnist, who argued in the first year of the Depression that Mexicans in the United States, along with thousands of North Americans of Mexican origin in the West and Southwest, would remain fraternally linked with Mexico as “members of our same race.”80 In the face of crisis, threat, and xenophobia, La Prensa promoted the view that Mexican expatriates and Mexicans in Mexico were united, despite their differing positions along the geographic fault line called the US–­Mexico border. La Prensa’s editorial was one of the few about immigration—in any frame—that were published in the three newspapers in 1933. The topic rated a brief mention on the editorial page of Hearst’s Light in October 1933. In a blend of the prescriptive and the pariah frame, the Light warned “the United States Senate that public sentiment in this country is against any . . . weakening of existing safeguards against alien immigration.” Calling the immigrant an “alien” that the country needed “safeguards” against reflected the consistent “othering” seen in the Light’s editorials from the beginning of the Depression.

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The prescriptive frame, however, was the province of La Prensa. The Express likely conceded that Mexicans did not turn to its news pages first for advice. The Express’s imagined community of readers included the business owners who employed Mexican labor, and the Anglo managers who oversaw them, as well as other members of the majority culture. La Prensa’s prescriptive-­frame coverage was in keeping with one of the functions of the ethnic press, to serve as a guardian, solidifier, and watchdog of its group. Importantly, as a Spanish-­language newspaper, La Prensa was itself a prescriptive frame. La Prensa emphasized preservation of the Spanish language and knowledge of Mexican culture in all its permutations, including the Castilian and the Indian. By prescribing Spanish, the paper represented the ultimate Spanish nostalgia frame. For Mexicans, of course, it was more than nostalgia; it was a noble, genuine commitment to linguistic heritage. For many Anglos in San Antonio, Spanish was merely a relic, or something that was necessary to do business, or something that was merely annoying. The Express and the Light took different routes.

Spanish Nostalgia Frame: Restoring a House in Ruins Remembering—and capitalizing on—San Antonio’s Spanish colonial heritage remained a pastime, a policy, and a passion that all three newspapers continued to cover in 1932 and 1933. San Antonio’s bicentennial was over, but there was still no better time for the past than these years, which represented the latter half of the Depression’s deepest recessionary period.81 By March 1933, the forty-­three-­month slump had officially run its course, but the Great Depression continued to take an immeasurable toll through the decade. For the Alamo City, restoring the ingenious infrastructure of the Spanish pioneers was one way to build faith in a social fabric that was showing more than recessionary wear; it was coming apart at the seams. Media representations of this reconfigured past were most visible in the pages of the Express and the Light. It was the Express, however, that had made it a matter of editorial policy by enshrining the idea in its “Platform for Greater San Antonio.” In 1930, the first full year of the Depression, it had added to the platform the pro-­Alamo editorial statement “To protect the Alamo from commercial encroachment and beautify its surroundings.”82 The Express followed the developments of the “Alamo park plan,” the city, state, and privately funded project to create a plaza around the

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Alamo.83 Through its continuing coverage, the Express certified how significant it was to revitalize the historic property and maintain it, not only as a cultural memory for San Antonio, but also as an iconic physical destination. In contrast, the Alamo, which anthropologist Richard R. Flores referred to as a “master symbol,” was little covered in La Prensa. Flores offered a possible explanation: “For Anglos, the Alamo serves as a sign of rebirth, the coming-­of-­age for a state, and eventually, a nation in its modern period. It is not quite the same for Mexicans. . . . For them . . . it serves as a reminder, a memorial to a stigmatized identity.”84 Even worse, this stigmatized identity that many Anglos and Mexicans accepted reflected a false binary of poorly written history, since the Alamo defenders included Tejanos—Mexican Texans—as well as soldiers of other nationalities. The early twentieth century was a turning point in the business of remembering the Alamo, catalyzed by the conservation efforts of Clara Driscoll, the daughter of a Corpus Christi railroad and ranching magnate, and the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. Driscoll helped fund the “purchase of land adjoining the Alamo shrine,” paving the way for the Alamo to be more fully embraced as sacred, rather than commercial space, which parts of the property had become. In the early 1930s the Alamo park project was evolving simultaneously with the development of a new $1.4 million federally financed post office building site nearby. When federal officials suggested trading some land with the adjacent Alamo project, Driscoll refused, saying only the state legislature could agree to that. “The Alamo and its environments belong to the people of Texas,” Driscoll stated in the Express.85 While her pronouncement sounded magnanimous, precisely who might be counted among “the people of Texas” remained open to question. If the Alamo rightfully belonged to “the people,” another Franciscan structure, the school at Mission Espada, rightfully belonged to the children, in the Express’s view. The newspaper lobbied for the restoration of “a new-­old schoolhouse at Mission Espada,” in a September 22, 1932, editorial. Named after St. Francis of Assisi, Misión San Francisco de la Espada had “retained much of the quaint atmosphere belonging to other days” because no major roads passed near it, the Express noted. Now, however, encroaching highway construction threatened the character of “the fourth mission,” as it was known, and “more than ever before, the spot will be visited by tourists,” the Express warned.86 Mission Espada’s proposed restoration, however, exemplified best practices in building modernity on the foundation of colonial architecture, the editorial suggested. The mission’s old stones would evoke an

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eighteenth-­century external appearance. New materials, however, would create a twentieth-­century classroom environment: light, airy, vented, and fireproof. For the editorial writer, the project recalled the story of St. Francis in the Chapel of St. Damian, when a voice called out: “Francis, seest thou not that my house is in ruins? Go and restore it for me.”87 Seemingly from the voice of God, this mandate echoed throughout San Antonio and, as historian John Bodnar noted, the entire nation during the 1930s.88 Restoring and rebuilding the architectural gifts of the past appeared possible and offered hope, jobs, and pride to a despairing population. Restoring and rebuilding the economy of the nation or, for that matter, the city seemed far more elusive. The excavation and restoration unearthed something more for San Antonio, however. The remnants of the past were not just found, they were reported on, and in this way Depression era journalists helped San Antonians rediscover a past that enabled them to better understand their present and future. Recovering the history and architecture of the missions was like solving a giant puzzle with many missing pieces, the Light’s reporting suggested. A Light quote from architect Harvey Smith is emblematic of this representation: “In all mission churches we have found except this one at Espada, the sanctuary of the church points east, toward Bethlehem, in fulfillment of a symbol,” Smith said. “At Espada, this buried sanctuary faces south.”89 The Express made the explicit connection between commerce, city, and colonial empire in a full-­page advertisement it published in conjunction with what it called a “Public Spirited Group of San Antonio Citizens.” Published on February 12, 1933, under the headline “The Army and the Missions have Helped to Build Your City,” the advertisement invoked the “cuirassed captains of Spain’s once mighty army” and the Franciscan missionaries whose “sword and cross” were “emblems of war and peace” that remained “inseparable from the history which has made San Antonio unique among cities of America.” With the soldiers walked sandaled friars bringing words of peace and promise to the savage Indians. First a fort, then a mission, more missions than at any other settlement in all New Spain, rose along the course of the winding river—de Valero, Concepcion, San José, San Juan, Espada, three-­quarters of the eighteenth century spent in building them.90

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The advertisement invoked other military-­related public memories in Texas, noting that Theodore Roosevelt had bivouacked with his Rough Riders in San Antonio before deploying to Cuba. The ad concluded with an exhortation to San Antonio residents, urging them to have faith in their city. After all, “[f ]aith in San Antonio has been justified for more than two centuries. From far-­off Spain the city’s future was visioned [sic] three-­quarters of a century before American independence was won.” During the Depression, yet another President Roosevelt played a role in remembrance, calling on the American pioneer spirit even while a strain of racist, history-­denying sentiments persisted in some New Deal newspaper rhetoric. The rhetoric of the Express’s advertisement, meanwhile, sought to energize downtrodden San Antonio citizens with an ideal of progress rooted in the city’s historical significance. The Express also sought to buoy the city by comparing San Antonio’s deeper, richer history to the New Englander’s exclusive claim on the nation’s founding story. Few Anglo settlers of Texas could trace a bloodline to original Spanish settlers, but San Antonio’s civic and cultural leaders eagerly assumed that legacy on behalf of the city’s current dwellers. This advertised display of imperialist nostalgia, notable in previous years, continued to serve its purpose of helping Anglo San Antonio absolve itself from the cardinal sin of neglecting and destroying the Spanish culture that had, after all, given the city its name. This appropriation of Spanish European immigrant culture also arguably represented commodity racism, with Anglo Texans valuing and profiting from the legacy of San Antonio’s founders, whom they perceived as higher on the hierarchy of color than their mestizo heirs, the Mexicans. Typically in commodity racism, the power elite market products or services through the exploitation of a stereotypical image of an “othered” group. In this case, the dominant Anglo culture appropriated the Spanish immigrant to market tourism. Spanish nostalgia, which had started to become fashionable in the late nineteenth century—and which was by no means unique to Texas—gained momentum in the early Depression years. The New Deal, however, added a new layer of patriotism and hope to San Antonio’s rebirth and renovation story. In 1933 the Great Depression and the San Antonio Conservation Society offered an opportunity for local relief workers to restore and rebuild the old granary, part of the Franciscan-­built Mission San José. The job of “preserving one of the city’s prized relics” gave ordinary San Antonians

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a stake in their city’s cultural heritage. It also offered to give “victims of the depression some work more interesting and appealing because of a permanent value, than digging ditches and cutting weeds,” the February 12, 1933, edition of the Express reported.91 The involvement of supervising architect Harvey P. Smith, a past chairman of the American Institute of Architects’ national committee for the preservation of historic monuments, underscored the project’s significance. Smith had researched Spanish missions in New Mexico and other parts of the Southwest and was a specialist in the period.92 The Light was also an avid chronicler of this work. No detail unearthed during the reconstruction was too small to report on, including the excavation of a hand-­welded brass spoon carrying the seventeenth-­century emblem of the Franciscans.93 The Light also diligently reported on the discovery of old European-­style flagstone sidewalks, sanctuary floors with intact red clay tiles, buried wells to supply water in case of Indian siege, original walls showcasing flying buttresses, and other “hidden secrets of the Franciscans of 200 years ago.”94 The restoration projects brought urgently needed economic uplift to the jobless lucky enough to be hired. More than that, the continued restoration of Mission San José inspired spiritual uplift in a city whose economic foundations were crumbling faster than the friars’ former habitat. As the Express explained, San Antonio’s five Spanish missions, of which Mission San José was the largest, allied San Antonio and the state with power, prestige, and a paragon of world order: Spain. The relics of the ancient Spanish colonization in Texas are monuments of a distinguished period in Texas history. To have even been a remote part of a nation so great that at the time her monarchs gave the law to Europe, when her great expeditions of discovery and war traversed and conquered two hemispheres, is surely no mean honor.95 Looking forward by looking back worked for San Antonio. When it came to preserving the Spanish past, the concept of “relief work” took on new meaning. The “absurd dichotomy” of worshipping a white European Spanish past while expelling its direct inheritors—the Mexicans—eluded the Express. The connection between the two immigrant groups was largely absent from the Spanish nostalgia frame in the Express. The Light, in contrast, made connections at times between Spanish-­speaking immi-

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grants separated by memory and era, even where the Express had failed to. Photos made these connections graphic. These included a section front photo of Henry Rivas of San Antonio, holding a handmade pottery jug “made in the Mexican quarter with a crude kiln.” Presented as a gift to the newly renovated Governor’s Palace, it was hung there by homespun maguey fiber.96 Another such photo showed a young San Antonio woman, Leonides Alcocer, holding a bowl of batter while looking expectantly at a depiction hanging on the wall of Saint Pascual Bailon, the patron saint of kitchens, as she implored him to ensure a successfully baked cake. The photo caption noted that images of the saint were once fixtures on local kitchen walls, adding that an “ancient Spanish print of the saint had been restored at the Spanish Governor’s Palace.”97 Yet another section front photo showed Señora Francisco De Vero, age seventy, who resided behind Santa Rosa Hospital. Draped in a mantilla and long skirts, she was seated on one of two historic mission benches recently brought to the Governor’s Palace. The photo captured De Vero weeping at the sight of the benches— “so vividly did they recall old colonial days” in San Antonio.98 Such examples from the Light may have seemed small; however, it was the quotidian nature of clay pottery, artistically rendered saints, and authentic, aged furniture that made them symbols of public memory, of Nora’s lieux de mémoire, for a Mexican and American readership in San Antonio. The chasm of centuries was not the biggest divide between the founders and the Depression era immigrants. Despite their similarities as Spanish-­speakers, infrastructure builders, planters, farmers, artisans, and Catholics, it was clear that socially constructed notions of race, often reinforced by media, kept them apart. Yet, for much of US history, the Spanish colonizers were also framed as pariahs and disparaged through the Black Legend that depicted them as bloodthirsty, cowardly brigands, rather than noble, intrepid explorers. Reflecting an American version of Said’s Orientalism, that demonizing view fulfilled its objective, justifying the Anglo imperative to expand westward and expel Spanish settlers, including many with legal land grants. History, however, had other aims in the 1930s, as John Bodnar has noted, and the Black Legend was whitewashed into an image of a proud, Spanish pioneer past. Both groups of Spanish-­speaking immigrants came to toil. However, in the 1930s media representations studied here, those who had arrived two centuries earlier were the revered.

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Conclusion Despite the more humanitarian approach labor secretary Perkins applied to immigration policy, xenophobia spurred by economic crisis and founded on historic enmity was evident in many news frames. Although the numbers of returnees dwindled, newspapers still made some effort to enumerate the thousands who left. This quantification frame was visible in the Express, the Light, and La Prensa during this period. Following the trend set in 1931, returning Mexicans were rarely framed as patriots, as they had been in the first two years of the Depression. The profile of the noble, adept, and patriotic Mexican worker returning to rescue a ravaged home country was supplanted with a downtrodden pariah image. Unlike in the rhetoric of the patriot frame analyzed in earlier chapters, repatriates and deportees were more consistently unfortunates, whose impoverished homecoming was a drain, not a boon, to an economically paralyzed Mexico. Yet the good-­citizen frame documented the Mexican community’s social responsibility to its desperate, returning countrymen, encompassing the generosity of local bakers and famous artists, such as Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. And fewer repatriates did not put an end to news coverage in the prescriptive frame. La Prensa, in particular, continued to offer advice to prospective repatriates and current immigrants, and occasionally the newspaper urged the government to pursue a specific course of action. During this period, it exhorted Mexico to cease and desist its disastrous effort to repatriate Mexicans living in the United States. The Spanish nostalgia frame also persisted in the aftermath of San Antonio’s 1931 bicentennial, and the San Antonio Express and the San Antonio Light were at the forefront of rebuilding a public memory of San Antonio under the aegis of conquistadors and Canary Islanders. San Antonio continued the absurd dichotomy of celebrating the Mexican workers’ heroic, Spanish colonial past. Through its news pages, the Express promoted the city’s nascent tourism industry, performing a classic newspaper booster role. The Express did this through editorial content and advertising that traced the city’s history to the “sword and cross” of Spanish conquistadors. Roosevelt’s New Deal pioneering spirit added a new twist to the story. San Antonio’s English-­language Express, in particular, was quick to capture an interpretation of San Antonio’s Spanish-­immigrant founding story that rivaled Yankee Puritan tales. The news frame cele-

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brating the first immigrants to San Antonio, the Spanish-­speaking colonists, friars, and soldiers, evinced the way Anglo society reinterpreted the American pioneer spirit Roosevelt urged Americans to summon. As historian John Bodnar noted, the veneration of pioneers was manifest throughout the 1930s, used as a tool to rebuild confidence in communities nationwide.99 Roosevelt blessed a movement already under way. Yet the Spanish nostalgia news frame was a sharp counterpoint to news frames of Depression era immigrants that dealt with their mass exodus. The years 1932 and 1933 were the beginning of the end for Mexican Depression era repatriation. Returning Mexicans, whether deportees or voluntary repatriates, tended to make news in the Express and the Light when the peg, or justification for the story, was local, particularly if a city agency, such as the Central Relief Committee, was involved. These news judgments were predicated on the newspaper’s definition of its community and its readership, and its limited understanding of how the Mexican diaspora was connected to the political economy of San Antonio and the Southwest. It was left to La Prensa, which circulated in all but eight states in 1933, to document the doings and goings on of Mexican enclaves from Detroit, Chicago, Denver, and locales in between and beyond the border. The teeming mass of Mexican workers left the United States in a story that remained largely untold to readers of the Express and the Light. In the defeat and powerlessness of the people of Spanish heritage, San Antonio tourism officials created their own Spanish public memory. The dynamic of the New Deal further enabled the city to sell that memory, continuing to engage in a form of commodity racism that disavowed and occasionally disparaged the inconvenient aspect of that legacy: the Mexican and Mexican American underclass that continued to build Texas. The Anglo power structure was not selling soap, or butter, or pancake mix, some of the goods more typically associated with racialized marketing. They were, however, selling something more enduring, a tourist experience based on a commoditized Hispanic culture: Spanish colonial armies, architecture, and missionaries. The Express published news stories about local Mexican Independence Day celebrations and editorialized about the famous “Grito de Dolores,” or “Call to Arms at Dolores,” which inspired the Mexican Revolution.100 But these stories rarely connected Mexico with San Antonio, or the legacy of Mexican Revolution with present-­day pride. Hearst’s Light was an occasional but notable exception, particularly when it published letters from

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Mexican Americans asserting their patriotism, civil rights, and a sense of Americanhood that was big enough to embrace both the Spanish and English languages. As might be expected, however, the task of inculcating pride and a place at the table remained primarily La Prensa’s. Lozano explained this vision in an editorial published nineteen years after La Prensa’s founding, and six years after La Opinión began operating in Los Angeles. “The work of the ‘Lozano Newspapers’ is not confined to the task of informing and educating. It has embraced the social functions of philanthropy, nationalism, organizing, and strengthening ties in the Mexican community.”101 Lozano’s broader concerns about media representations of Mexicans and other Latin Americans in the United States, however, went further than most readers of his newspapers likely realized. On January 2, 1932, La Prensa published a page-­one story about the successful premiere in Cuba of the movie Hollywood, ciudad de ensueño (Hollywood, City of Dreams). Featuring screen star, composer, writer, and tango singer José Bohr, the film dramatized some of the issues Spanish-­language immigrant actors faced in the Los Angeles studio world.102 Omitted from the article was Lozano’s behind-­the-­scenes role in the production: he had been a financier of the film, agreeing to invest as much as $10,000 in a partnership with Bohr and others to bring the movie to theaters.103 Pragmatically, the move represented Lozano’s recognition that as a newspaper publisher, he was also in the entertainment business. Later, in 1934, he proposed an expansion into color comics for the Sunday paper in order to lure more subscribers.104 More visibly, Lozano was particularly vigilant in attempting to discern whether a New Deal existed for Mexican immigrants. La Prensa also increasingly focused on connecting Mexicans in the United States with Mexicans in Mexico. In 1932 the columnist Nemesio García Naranjo, a noted journalist, biographer, educator, and poet, updated the newspaper’s mission from its founding mandate established in the crucible of the Mexican Revolution two decades earlier. La Prensa is a spiritual bridge that extends from Mexico to the souls of Mexicans who pilgrimage in foreign lands. It is a call that awakens the countrymen. It is a mountain whose heroic hollows repeat, like an echo, all the yearning of national life. Conscious of the glorious role it has come to represent, La Prensa tells its readers: “Never forget Mexico.”105

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Returning to Mexico might not be practical, or even desirable. But recalling the homeland was possible and La Prensa sought to build and preserve such memories for its imagined community of readers who might become permanent expatriates—for those who might become Mexican Americans. As the Depression wore on, and repatriations and deportations continued, La Prensa subscribers found it impossible to forget Mexico. On the contrary, Lozano’s readers found they were “Mexicans on the outside” of any national imagination. Mexico had seemingly forgotten them, while the United States had yet to truly see them.

Chapter 5

Conclusion and Epilogue

The newspaper which is complete in its every edition . . . all news and advertising included . . . and carefully censors all copy, is the medium that enjoys the confidence of the reader public. San Antonio Express, September 16, 1932

I believe that our paper is the leading paper in San Antonio . . . we have been able to present all the facts about all the important news stories. By doing this . . . we have built up a reader confidence. San Antonio Light publisher William McIntosh, February 14 , 1930

La Prensa is the only long-­published Mexican paper abroad, which underscores its importance and influence in public opinion. La Prensa, February 13, 1933

The False Equivalence of Differently Framed News The disparate renderings of Depression era repatriation on the part of English- and Spanish-­language newspapers examined throughout this book may be seen as merely in keeping with the conventions of reporting and the definitions of community as imagined by their respective news organizations. Yet to accept that these reporting differences merely flow naturally from reporting conventions and community definitions requires acceptance of a false equivalence. These three newspapers—the Express, the Light, and La Prensa—made different news judgments about Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and immigrants in San Antonio and the nation.

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Figure 5.1. Rafael Romero, a San Antonio Light newsboy, sells newspapers barefoot. Published in the Light, June 16, 1925. San Antonio Light Photograph Collection, UTSA Special Collections–­ITC, No. L-­0170-­C. Used with permission, © San Antonio Express-­News/ZUMA.

Accepting them all as accurate would suggest they were all equally valid. For example: Mexican repatriation was a story; and Mexican repatriation was not a story. To accept that repatriation was a non-­story, though, requires a naïve embrace of a myopic news judgment. It means that the forced and voluntary removal of hundreds of thousands of people of Mexican descent—many of them US citizens—from all corners of the country was not objectively notable. It was a story only for some people living in the same space and time; for others, it was a non-­event. This story was framed in articles that were set in type in English and Spanish, and published in newspapers that each claimed their own completeness and importance as media outlets. The failure, however, to report the larger story of this exodus in the English-­language press was patently an error in news judgment. Putting forward an incomplete story amounted to an act of symbolic annihilation that left a gap not only in Mexican American civil rights history, but also in American history. The incomplete story made

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these newspapers not only sites of memory but also sites of what might be forgotten. As noted previously, the phenomenon of Mexican repatriation from the Lone Star State had occurred periodically since the founding of the Republic of Texas. Depression era Mexican repatriation and deportation, however, was on a scale without equal. Coupled with its occurrence at a pivotal period in the economic and political history of the United States, the 1930s Mexican exodus stood as a class apart from prior episodes. In sum, the failure to report on immigration, without reporting on deportation and repatriation, and its impact on people and communities, was a failure of American journalism. Clearly, this was largely a segregated news story, more completely available to the Spanish-­speaking readers of La Prensa, the most widely circulated source for people of Mexican origin in the United States at that time. It was also the one paper whose narrative portrayed fully realized human dimensions. The news coverage in the Express followed the paradigm enunciated by historian George Lipsitz, who described ethnic communities as “surrounded by images that exclude them” and “included in images that have no real social power.”1 This was explicit in the Express, which clearly delineated the role of the Mexican in Southwestern society: “plowing, sowing and reaping; chopping and picking cotton, transplanting onions and lettuce, digging potatoes, gathering and packaging spinach, tomatoes, oranges, and so on.”2 Neither the machine nor “native white men” could replace the Mexican worker, who was also indispensable “to lay pipes, dig ditches, put down pavement, grade rights-­of-­way and build railroads,” the editorial argued.3 These were not people of power. These were people who did the bidding of the powerful. As the epigraph that opened this book stated, they came to San Antonio to work—and they did. There were, nonetheless, similarities among the three papers in coverage: in particular, policies about immigration, repatriation, and deportation were undeniably news. Most significantly, the Express and La Prensa shared a financial frame that recognized the primacy of the Mexican worker in the Southwest and US economy. In keeping with that, both newspapers adamantly opposed legislation to restrict Mexican immigration, such as the Box bill. This shared newspaper frame revealed a constructed reality divided by cultural geography, a gulf between the culture of the Southwest and that of Washington policy makers either less cognizant or more wary, or both, of the nation’s dependence on Mexican labor. The Light, however, existed in the same space and time. And though it

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occasionally covered local Mexicans in relation to the San Antonio economy, such as in the case of the Mexican jobless march in 1930, the significance of the Mexican workforce was largely ignored in the Light. But there were more telling differences in coverage. News frames from 1929 to 1934 stemmed from these newspapers’ disparate conceptions of their readership and imagined community—in other words, from their selective understanding of news that served their market. These conceptions and definitions, as Herbert Gans noted, are drawn from constructed notions of nation, government, society, and social institutions that are integral to the journalists’ mind-­set.4 These ideas in part also govern how reporting was done. This is apparent in the nuances of the financial frame: the Express focused on policy, while La Prensa focused on people—and the tangible effects of policy on people. By definition, then, neither newspaper, nor any newspaper, can be “complete,” as the Express proudly advertised itself to readers and advertisers. As this book shows, the Express provided more coverage of repatriation as the years wore on, particularly when the story had a direct bearing on the city or involved a municipal agency. Yet a reader who relied exclusively on the Express—or the Light, for that matter—would have failed to grasp the complex reality of the Mexican exodus from the United States. Missing were the stories La Prensa published across both countries, sometimes via wire service but often contributed by special correspondents from places such as Illinois, Colorado, Arizona, and Mexico that documented the widespread impact of Depression era immigration policies on Mexicans and Mexican Americans. The absence of the broader international story meant that this episode of mass repatriation and deportation, which involved Texas more than any other state, was a virtual non-­event for the typical reader of either the Light or the Express. Operating with an international conception of its community of readers, La Prensa tapped a wide network of mostly unidentified correspondents who supplied news from various parts of Mexico and cities in the United States with a sizeable Mexican presence. All three newspapers utilized wire services; and, at least for a time, La Prensa had a special correspondent in Washington, DC. Official government sources have long been the primary source for journalists, and the same could be said for La Prensa, the Express, and the Light, though the government officials the newspapers relied on were not always the same. La Prensa mainly looked to Mexican government officials, while the Express and the Light mainly looked to US government officials.

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News Frames and the “Historic Reality” of Depression Era Mexican Immigration Ideas and attitudes about the role of Mexicans and Mexican Americans had been forming for years in Texas, and elsewhere in the country, but in the span of the early Depression years, they were hardened amid the political debates about Mexican immigration quotas and the best ways to create more jobs for Americans. The newspaper articles highlighted in the preceding chapters offer what James Carey described as a “historic reality,” illuminating “a form of culture invented” in a particular time and place, in this case, Depression era San Antonio, Texas: the cornerstone of Texan and Spanish-­colonial myth and memory.5 This study of what newspapers said happened, then, reveals an understanding of the consciousness of the time—of what people thought about events and issues. As I have argued, news frames, beginning in 1929 on the cusp of the Great Depression, reveal distinct differences. For example, the repatriation of Mexicans was a virtual non-­topic in the Express and the Light. Moreover, La Prensa provided a dichotomous framing of Mexicans, as patriots who would save the homeland and, alternatively, as pariahs who were a drag on society, no matter which side of the border they populated. Some were pitied, though often viewed as no less a problem. These frames were evinced to some extent in Express news coverage as well; but the Express was far more preoccupied with Mexican immigration policy than with the lives of Mexican people. The Light was the only one of the three newspapers to employ a eugenics argument in discussing immigration. The Light’s largely chain-­generated editorials hardly acknowledged Mexican immigrants, instead arguing for a blanket screening of all newcomers to ensure they were “fit” to live in the United States. Hearst’s advocacy to admit only “the fit” was never discussed in the context of Mexican immigrants, a group outside the frame of the Light’s editorial page. Without question, all three newspapers played a prominent role in Texas. The Light extolled its higher circulation figures, often advertising them at the top of the front page. In a 1930 letter to “My dear Mr. Hearst,” Light publisher William McIntosh detailed his own newspaper’s completeness against “any other San Antonio newspaper,” including besting the competition with “more local stories . . . more complete club and society news . . . more local pictures . . . and more school news.” In a sign of the times, McIntosh also stressed that “our paper alone published all of the local markets.”6 The Express likewise publicly championed its role

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as the “complete” voice of the greater San Antonio region, a claim that no newspaper, much less the Express could fulfill. The Express touted itself as the only morning home-­delivery newspaper in San Antonio, starting in 1865.7 La Prensa, however, was also a morning newspaper and was the foremost voice of persons of Mexican ancestry in San Antonio and the nation.8 During the massive deportation and repatriation of Mexicans from the United States, the Express, the Light, and La Prensa were crucial and influential sources of information for the public and policy makers. Overall, a prime difference was that La Prensa spoke more often to Mexicans, whereas the Express and the Light spoke about Mexicans or ignored them altogether. Reading between the lines of the Express, Mexicans might see affirmation of their well-­ordered, subordinate role as a laboring class despite their connection to the founding Spanish colonial past of San Antonio. Perusing the Light’s “Open Forum,” particularly in 1933, mainstream readers of whatever background or ethnicity could see, in contrast, a robust debate about the role of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in San Antonio civic society—and one in which persons of Mexican descent were equal participants. In short, through the letters to the editor of the Light, Mexicans typeset their own civil rights frame, asserting their patriotism, dedication, and contributions to San Antonio. In English, in a widely read public space, Mexican Americans gave early voice to a movement that would later gain national attention but has yet to be properly and fully understood as part of a Long and Wide Civil Rights Movement. They gave voice to their Americanhood. La Prensa’s initial euphoria over the promise of a newly stable Mexican government was evidenced in the newspaper’s framing of repatriation as a patriotic act. Responding to the Mexican government’s call to help restore the homeland, the re-­patriot returned to Mexico in “a little Ford car,” with northern agricultural know-­how, a tractor, and $100 in savings, or more, as news coverage in La Prensa, and to a lesser degree, the Express, showed.9 La Prensa columnist Rodolfo Uranga argued that these repatriates would return “with riches more valuable than dollars,” most importantly “their zeal to be independent” and “their hatred for caciques, caudillos, and thugs.” In this way, La Prensa remained a critic of the Mexican government even as it, at least for a time, promoted its repatriation policies. However, La Prensa’s framing of repatriates as pariahs became more pronounced as the Depression years unfolded and the stories of starving, barely clothed, and ill returnees increased.

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Over the course of the Depression, the patriot frame all but evaporated in all three newspapers, along with confidence in the Mexican government’s ability to absorb returnees. La Prensa brought the story of the returnee to readers with human-­interest narratives, including a tale about a desperate repatriate who swallowed poison on a train, another about a man who hanged himself from a tree, and others about hordes left destitute at the border. These privations occurred for the most part in Mexico, beyond the news priorities of the Express and the Light. For the two English-­language dailies during this early Depression period, the repatriated were mostly out of sight, over the border, and out of the news frame. All three newspapers acted as advisors, and occasionally harsh critics of government. However, news coverage had its own borders, and it followed that the Express would offer few stories in the prescriptive frame directed toward Mexican immigrants. Instead, the Express wrote prescriptions for politicians, including editorials that railed against congressional legislation designed to stem the flow of Mexican labor into the United States. The Express argued for the low-­cost workforce that served the interests of ranchers, builders, and manufacturers—a policy that it also perceived was in the best interests of United States–­Mexico relations. In contrast, the editorial page of La Prensa directed most of its political prescriptions southward, criticizing, among other things, the failure of the Mexican government to properly accommodate repatriates. Ultimately, La Prensa advised repatriates to remain in the United States, if at all possible. At the same time, La Prensa offered prescriptions to readers contemplating a return to Mexico, passing along official Mexican government advice on what to take, and what to leave behind, whether the item was a spare tire, a gun, or a bolt of silk. This was La Prensa’s literal, pragmatic guidance for Mexicans and Mexican Americans. La Prensa, however, as a Spanish-­language newspaper in the United States, was in one sense the embodiment of a prescription. In its every word, it exhorted its readers to retain the Spanish language and culture, even as they navigated a society that could be indifferent or hostile to their background. As the newspaper stated in its 1933 editorial celebrating its twentieth year of operation: “In a foreign country, where so easily the language is corrupted and spoiled, contaminated with improper or frankly broken words, La Prensa has sought to maintain a pure Castilian language, which is that of Mexico, because we are convinced that language is one of the more solid bulwarks of national culture, and for that matter, nationality.”10 In this way, La Prensa

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was an important element in the Spanish-­speaking community’s circuit of culture, predicated on the “shared meanings” of language.11 Or, as Sabine Ulibarrí put it so profoundly: “Language is people.”12 On a nation-­state level, the Express was far from indifferent to notions of amity, diplomacy, and neighborliness between Mexico and the United States. These civic values, manifest in the newspaper’s somos amigos/we are friends frame, are illustrative of the media’s prime role in the cultural construction of “hood”: nationhood, communityhood, and cityhood, as Michael Schudson characterizes it.13 The imperative to maintain goodwill with the state’s neighbor to the south was among the reasons the Express editorialized against the Box bill and other legislation aimed at imposing quota restrictions on Mexico. This frame, which the Express shared with La Prensa, faded after the defeat of the Box bill and other similar legislation. The nature of friendship between members of a majority culture and descendants of conquered people is necessarily complicated by its inherently uneven playing field. Those who had a public memory of a more egalitarian time in social relations between Mexicans and Anglos were rapidly becoming artifacts. Unlike the missions, however, preserving their remembrances was not a priority of the San Antonio Conservation Society. La Prensa, in its daily news coverage, sometimes illuminated its own sense of history. In quoting school sub-­superintendent William Knox speaking before a Rotary Club meeting, La Prensa highlighted how San Antonio’s highly segregated 1930s society hindered greater understanding between Anglos, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans. As Knox put it: “Those that don’t appreciate Mexicans, don’t know them. When they get to know them [Mexicans] well and understand them, that changes, and they love them.”14 Many Mexicans chose not to wait for such an embrace. Their diaspora was numerically pictured in the quantification frame, a staple of La Prensa’s ongoing news coverage of repatriation, deportation, and immigration during this period. Articles enumerating the exodus of Mexicans from various Texas border cities were less common in the Express and the Light, and the relative absence of these stories was another way that 1930s repatriation was rendered invisible to readers of the English-­language newspaper. How were readers to grasp the scale and impact of this mass movement if the English-­language daily newspapers failed to convey the fuller story?

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Symbolic Annihilation: Journalism’s Role in Mediating Reality The omissions of the story from the mainstream American newspapers, an important site of memory, may partially explain why this Depression era dispersion of humanity was neither well noted nor long remembered. As Michael Schudson stated, “the news constructs a symbolic world that has a kind of priority, a certificate of legitimate importance.”15 Outside of public policy debates driven by agribusiness, railroad, and banking interests as reflected in the financial frame, the human-­interest dimensions of Mexican immigration, repatriation, and deportation remained largely “un-­certified,” and “illegitimate” issues in the Express. To acknowledge that such editorial decisions were in keeping with the thinking of the times does not obviate, and in fact may validate, the idea that Mexicans in the United States were nothing more than disposable labor, as Zaragosa Vargas and others have argued.16 Furthermore, journalism may help preserve and instill a memory of the past through the reporter’s role in mediating reality.17 By implication, then, journalism seeds the clouds of historical amnesia through the reporter’s role in omitting reality, in this case erasing, or at least substantially minimizing, the wider human saga of the Mexican Depression era diaspora. The result, evident over time, was symbolic annihilation. As chapter 3 explains, symbolic annihilation refers to the trivialization, condemnation, or absence of a social group from media coverage.18 To weigh the justice of an issue, a policy, or an action, a democratic society must first be apprised of it. Immigration, deportation, and repatriation news in the Express and the Light, with their policy-­oriented bent, reflected, as sociologist Herbert Gans might say, “the empirically graspable external reality” available to Express journalists through their “socio-­cultural-­political milieu” and that of their editors.19 Simply put, their decisions about what was news were hewn from their own understanding of the world and the reference points of their own backgrounds and experience. It could not be otherwise. The open question is whether that experience included the Spanish language. A language barrier between the editorial staffs of the Express and the Light and the city’s largest minority group suggests that mainstream journalists’ understanding of Spanish-­speaking immigrants was divided by culture as well as experience. Despite their respective claims to completeness of news coverage and their profession’s recent embrace of objectivity,

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the reporters and editors studied in this book nonetheless wrote in the context of their own values and in concordance with the reality judgments of their own newspapers. Their narrative choices, as Hayden White might say, gave those news judgments of commission and omission authority.20 The media record, admittedly, is only one narrow filter through which reality is constructed, but its mass reach makes it significant. However, as scholars argue, our social world expands when minorities collect and disseminate the news.21 So too does our historical world expand when minority news coverage, in this case in Spanish, is examined, rather than overlooked, as a primary resource of constructed American reality. La Prensa publisher and Mexican expatriate Ignacio Lozano founded his newspaper in 1913 with the goal of challenging the Mexican government’s stewardship of his troubled, beloved country. By 1932, at the height of the Depression, he publicly positioned his newspaper as something more, a cultural bridge between two countries, the United States and Mexico. Lozano was an intellectual, and as a businessman he was conservative. But to serve a language-­minority readership, and a Spanish-­language one at that, in the state of Texas, was inherently empowering to a community of people seeking acceptance. Through the pages of La Prensa, the Mexican community in San Antonio—and around the country—saw representations of themselves as leaders, donors, educators, and professionals. Lozano may have set out to develop a publication that looked south toward Mexico; however, San Antonio readers saw something else on the news pages: representations of their struggles, successes, and solidarity in the land of the North. Through words and pictures La Prensa helped delineate the beginnings of a Mexican American civil rights narrative. La Prensa’s unique role was not lost on other publishers. Later in the Depression, La Prensa’s English-­language morning competition, the Express, saluted the newspaper and Lozano for marking a quarter century of publishing. In a February 17, 1938, editorial, “Honoring La Prensa,” the Express explained that La Prensa “met both a present and growing civic need.”22 Describing itself as “the seventy-­three-­year-­old San Antonio Express,” the newspaper congratulated its “bright, newsy, young neighbor, La Prensa,” on its twenty-­fifth anniversary.23 In a magnanimous somos amigos gesture, the Express explained: “La Prensa quickly made for itself a place in the community life, and it has filled that place so creditably as to have become indispensable.” While the Express might have willingly ceded news coverage of the Spanish-­speaking community to La Prensa,

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the English-­language daily recognized and publicly applauded Lozano’s relatively young newspaper for “giving the people the facts they needed for a proper understanding of what was going on.” The Express also asserted that La Prensa “fostered a better spirit between Spanish-­speaking and English-­speaking peoples—in the community, the state, nationally, and internationally.”24 In sum, Lozano’s newspaper gave a voice to the voiceless and supported images of Mexicans as thinkers and professionals that were not frequently seen in the mainstream media. By recognizing Mexicans and Mexican Americans, La Prensa empowered them even as it created representations of them not found in the English-­language newspaper.

Dichotomous News Frames of Spanish-­Speaking Immigrants In only one respect were Spanish-­speaking immigrants celebrated, revered, and widely covered in the English-­language Express and the Light, and that was in the context of the Spanish nostalgia frame. The Spanish colonial conquest, once vilified as the Black Legend of bloodthirsty barbarism, was remade in the 1930s public memory as an authentic parable of pioneer pride.25 The Spanish nostalgia frame typified Michael Kammen’s conception of public memory, illuminating how it was allied with patriotism and national identity.26 Although conservation and preservation efforts were afoot before the stock market crash of 1929, San Antonio’s historic preservation projects flourished anew in a despairing city hungering for at least a past to be proud of. Through editorials, advertisements, and articles, the Express and the Light also demonstrated the civic role the Spanish pioneers played in refashioning San Antonio as a tourism destination. Therefore, the past did not merely represent pride; it offered profit. Spanish nostalgia was not to be confused with a Mexican vogue. As historian Laura Hernández-­Ehrisman put it, the city’s leading preservation group, the San Antonio Conservation Society, was at the time “more interested in Spanish buildings of the past,” and it “neglected Mexicano residents in the present.”27 This Spanish nostalgia, then, was also an imperialist nostalgia that granted San Antonians reprieve from presiding over the decay of Spanish heritage sites by participating in their rebuilding. Significantly, this Depression era conservation movement occurred as a renewed

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effort was under way to codify Mexicans—through immigration policy— as a separate, un-­American, and inferior race. San Antonio may have been the site where the Union army surrendered its forts and arsenals to the Confederacy in Texas, but it was far from a “Lost Cause.”28 The city’s history loomed larger than the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, or even the Mayflower. Resurrecting and restoring this heroic Spanish past emphasized that San Antonio could stake a claim to a founding world empire that rivaled New England’s, as Anna Ellis asserted in the Express. This view of history dwelt little on the events of 1822, “when Mexico threw off the yoke of Spain,” or of the Mexican people who persisted on the land after the Spanish Empire retreated.29 The selective return to a pioneer history, which John Bodnar noted was prevalent throughout the United States during the Great Depression, infused downtrodden Americans with a reassuring can-­do spirit.30 The manifestation of the American pioneer spirit that Roosevelt intuitively prescribed to spur national recovery was reinterpreted in Express and Light news coverage as Catholic, Castilian, and conquistador. The Express touted this history as an example of the power of faith, asking financially devastated and spiritually weary San Antonians to trace the path of Spanish soldiers and friars, who had forged a settlement in a desolate, dangerous land with little more than belief. The Express editorialists might have bolstered their case had their coverage emphasized, or even noted, that the progeny of the Spaniards, the Mexican people, were modern pilgrims continuing the Iberian legacy as builders, planters, and harvesters in a new, often hostile land. In the hierarchy of color, however, Spaniards were white Europeans, with an empire that once rivaled England’s; Mexicans, on the other hand, were racially ambiguous, but most likely mestizo, with only Mexico’s “ruling class” considered white, that is, acceptable, by eugenicists like Congressman Box. La Prensa’s Spanish nostalgia news frame was in sharp contrast to that of the Express and the Light. This was graphically evident in the newspapers’ coverage of the city’s bicentennial celebration. La Prensa made the connection between the founders and then-­present-­day immigrants that the English-­language papers failed to show. La Prensa did so by including powerful quotations from civic leaders: Mayor C. M. Chambers and county judge William W. Wurzbach. Chambers “sang the praises of the Spanish race and stated that the growth of San Antonio was owed in large part to the descendants of that race.” Wurzbach asserted “the Latin colony in San Antonio was the best in the United States owing to its ties of blood

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and tradition that united it with the intrepid and valiant Spaniards, to whom San Antonio’s existence is indebted.”31 Such comments made Mexicans visible—and vital—members of Depression era San Antonio. The Mexican community’s connection to the city’s founders and first citizens legitimized their status, if only in the constructed reality of La Prensa. Whereas media scholars Betty Houchin Winfield and Janice Hume found ideas and memories about American public and cultural places emerged, were legitimized, and settled through nineteenth-­century newspaper accounts, this study of twentieth-­century English- and Spanish-­language newspaper accounts found something more.32 In La Prensa’s Spanish nostalgia frame, the city’s Spanish colonial founding tied its readers— mostly Mexicans and Mexican Americans—directly to glory, power, and a proud heritage. In the Express framing, the Mexican community had seemingly no connection to the city’s roots and therefore had no inherent stake, or place, in San Antonio civic life, past or present. Meaning and public memory emerged in the twentieth-­century San Antonio press, but nothing was settled.

Constructing the Mexican Good Citizen through News Frames These omissions in the Express’s rendering of the Spanish nostalgia frame, along with the relative absence in the Express of the pariah frame— of news of the travails of Mexican repatriates and deportees—were not the only examples of missing news coverage. Another was the good-­citizen frame, which the Express briefly commented upon, and La Prensa documented with numerous news reports from various Texas communities. This frame highlighted Mexican American and Mexican agency. Reynolds McKay, in his dissertation concerning Mexican repatriation from Texas, suggested that this degree of social organization was uncommon in Mexican communities elsewhere. In addition to self-­help groups, Texas Mexicans had social clubs, patriotic organizations, and committees set up specifically to help repatriates.33 La Prensa, however, described this spirit as endemic to Mexicans throughout the country: “One of the immutable characteristics of the Mexican colony in the United States is, without a doubt, its pure philanthropy.”34 La Prensa helped set Mexican Americans on a civil rights path with portrayals like these that offered representations of community wherewithal.

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These ideals were sometimes constructed in pictures as well as words. A prime example of such pictorial discourse was La Prensa’s publication of a photo of thousands of lunch sacks filled with food.35 This portrait of bounty and beneficence in a time of need demonstrated the power of Mexican community volunteers who prepared the meals for repatriates crossing the border. While scholars have posited that news photographs uphold the social structure, this photo in the Spanish-­language newspaper manifested La Prensa’s effort to help build one.36 In other words, the photo illuminated the cohesiveness, organization, and fraternal nature of a community in opposition to the less powerful images of the Mexican community constructed in the English-­language newspaper. The good-­citizen frame of La Prensa coverage is an example of that newspaper’s richer, more complete depiction of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in comparison to coverage in the Express and the Light. Whether reflective of a Texan or a national attribute, the frame illustrates the community’s dedication, compassion, and cohesion. Moreover, this frame counters the notion implicit in other coverage of the period that persons of Mexican ancestry lack the capacity for citizenship. In short, the good-­citizen frame also presented an image of agency, solidarity, and power, one largely absent in the English-­language Express and the Light— and one that ultimately contributed to the development of a Mexican American civil rights movement. La Prensa embodied this civic image, promoting community fundraisers and exhorting readers to donate to various causes. By naming names, documenting donations, and otherwise publicizing philanthropy, the community took shape through the news pages. Among other things, the newspaper initiated and sponsored the construction of the Mexican Clinic in San Antonio, and touted “donations from all parts of the country.”37 The clinic brought affordable health services to poor Mexicans and Mexican Americans. La Prensa’s sponsorship of a project that aimed to produce better health outcomes also helped prepare Mexicans for US citizenship. A healthy Mexican population would challenge Congressman Box and other eugenicists who argued that Mexicans were not fit for citizenship because, among other reasons, they were dirty, disease-­ridden, and a “menace” who were “injuring public health.”38

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Invisible Civil Rights History and the Hierarchy of Color Frame The eugenicists’ image of the Mexican is an extreme variant of “the other.” This view was most graphically represented by Box, and most decisively dismissed by the Express and La Prensa in their respective editorials and commentary. The Light’s application of eugenics covered all immigrants as a blanket out-­group without singling out Mexicans. The subtext of “the other,” in a more nuanced way, played a role in how Mexicans were covered and/or not covered in the news. The case of Mexicans and Mexican Americans relates to their degrees of “otherness,” which has long put them in an “ambiguous position . . . within the imaginary of the United States,” as Latino cultural studies scholar Randy Ontiveros described it.39 Ontiveros made his observations in the context of media coverage of the Mexican American post–­World War II experience. For instance, Ontiveros pointed to Walter Cronkite’s struggle to keep a straight face during a 1972 evening news report on the takeover of Catalina Island by the Brown Berets, a Chicana/o protest group. This light approach, trivializing issues related to Mexican Americans, was also manifest in some Depression era news coverage discussed here. In the Light and the Express, Mexicans were sometimes described in a cruelly comic way. In some representations, they were dressed like rubes, clueless about how to wear basic articles of clothing, such as a man’s tie, or were unable to communicate beyond a simple head nod. Despite their inclusion in the news frame, this trivializing coverage represented symbolic annihilation. However, the “uncertain, third space” somewhere between “native” and “alien” that Mexicans occupied was manifest long before the television news Ontiveros studied. It was found much earlier, in the arguments of Box and in the congressional testimony of Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler discussed in this book. It is most visible in the hierarchy of color frame, with Chandler arguing for unrestricted immigration because “innocent, friendly” Mexican peons were much preferred to “quarrelsome” Asian Filipino workers. In the view of Chandler, Mexicans ranked higher than “Porto Rican [sic] negroes,” a group that as American citizens, demanded equality with whites.40 In other words, in this view, Mexicans were much less likely to stand up for their civil rights. And yet, when they did, as in the jobless protest through San Antonio on April 7, 1930, which was covered vividly by the Light, spectators “othered” them as un-­American.41

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Traditionally, Mexicans have been outside the black–­white race binary, the paradigm that traditionally has limited the way government officials, academics, and journalists, among others, pursue fact-­finding, analysis, and narratives about civil rights. This is evident in the Depression era Mexican diaspora, whose breadth was unfathomed in the English-­ language Express and Light. It was also evident in the struggles of Mexicans and Mexican Americans who remained, such as those who pressed to desegregate schools for Mexican Americans in 1930. The depth of community support for the case was manifest in the pages of La Prensa and in the newspaper’s role in raising funds to pay for the case. As La Prensa stated in an editorial on its twentieth anniversary in 1933, “A collection of La Prensa is an invaluable document to understand the history of our country.”42 While Lozano may well have been referring to Mexico, his editorial, like his newspaper, bridged the border. As he put it in his preceding paragraph: “Somos hispano-­americanos.” With this statement, “We are Hispano-­Americans,” Lozano recognized that though his newspaper’s founding goal was to show Mexicans in the United States how to be Mexican, his journalism inevitably showed Mexicans in the United States how to be Americans—Mexican Americans. This book has demonstrated that journalists working in any language are integral to the newspapers’ construction of social reality, reporting news stories that “impart a public character” to daily happenings.43 Moving beyond the black–­white race binary to a more expansive civil rights narrative requires examining sources and resources that “impart a public character” to events and people not well or widely covered in the English-­ language media. In this case, that requires examining or reexamining Spanish-­language media, among other sources. The mandate for doing so might be better understood if, as historian Maria Cristina Garcia suggested, “we begin the national narrative in sixteenth-­century New Mexico rather than the seventeenth-­century Virginia.”44 Likewise, the imperative might be acted on if we understood, as historian Felipe Fernández-­ Armesto put it, that the “making of this country has been a collective effort—sometimes collaborative, sometimes conflictive—of all the ethnic and religious minorities who inhabit it.”45 This calls for re-­periodizing race relations and civil rights history in the United States. In other words, the Long and Wide Civil Rights Movement must move beyond the borders of the black-­white race binary, must move beyond the borders of the 1960s, and must move beyond the borders of English-­language media, and even the borders set by the media itself.

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Epilogue The stories from the 1930s recounted in this book might well sound familiar to readers who followed the news during the Great Recession of 2007–2009 and beyond. During President Barack Obama’s tenure as president, beginning in 2009, annual deportations were higher than during any other president’s term.46 State immigration statutes that roiled the states did not wholly withstand US Supreme Court scrutiny, yet immigration reform eluded Congress and the president. Meanwhile, San Antonio, one of the two largest majority-­Latino cities in the United States, persisted in the veneration of its Spanish colonial history.47 In 2015 San Antonio’s five Spanish missions were “elevated to the stature of Machu Picchu, Stonehenge, and the Taj Mahal” when the World Heritage Committee of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) gave them World Heritage Status. At the time, winning the designation was projected to add $44 million to $100 million in economic activity, one thousand more jobs, and $2 million more in hotel tax revenue through 2025.48 Once again, Spanish-­speaking immigrants represented profit and pride, this time in a new era of privation. On a grand scale, then, San Antonio continued to celebrate its Spanish pioneer past. Meanwhile, in 2016, Texas’s Canadian-­born, half-­Cuban US senator, Ted Cruz, ran for the Republican presidential nomination promising a harsher crackdown on immigration, winning Texas’s Republican presidential primary election handily. Cruz’s rhetoric was relatively mild compared to that of his GOP competitor Donald Trump. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump declared during his June 16, 2015, speech announcing his candidacy. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists . . .”49 Trump’s words were an echo of San Antonio politician D. A. McAskill, who in 1932 referred to the city’s Mexican residents as “dope heads, robbers, and killers.”50 They also sounded much like Box, who, in 1930, flatly described Mexicans who came to the US as “peons, illiterate, ignorant, and not good material for American citizenship.”51 Trump’s accusation that Mexico was “not sending their best” also echoed Hearst’s eugenics-­inspired “fittest”-­only immigration editorials of the early 1930s. The turmoil felt in many immigrant communities in the 1930s likewise persisted during the Great Recession and through the 2016 presidential election. At this writing in late 2016, with uncertainty swirling around so

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many of President-­elect Trump’s policies, English- and Spanish-­language news organizations in the United States have reported on the anxiety and fear of many immigrants, especially the approximately 700,000 “Dreamers,” immigrants who were brought to the United States as children and who do not have legal permission to reside in the country. Despite his hardline immigration campaign rhetoric, as this book goes to press, Trump recently suggested that he might soften his stance toward members of this group, who were temporarily granted the right to work and avoid deportation through an executive order of President Obama.52 Though these more recent media messages may sound eerily similar to those reported in the 1930s newspapers, the media landscape in San Antonio has much changed since the Great Depression. In 1992, after a sixty-­eight-­year newspaper war, Hearst bought the combined morning and evening San Antonio Express-­News from then-­owner Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for $185 million. Responding to antitrust requirements, and citing inability to find a buyer, Hearst extinguished the Light in 1993, putting 650 employees out of work.53 As for La Prensa, it continued to operate after Lozano’s death in 1953 managed by Lozano’s widow and the newspaper’s longtime business manager, Leonides González. The paper was sold in 1957, when González, the father of US representative Henry B. González, retired. La Prensa, by then a tabloid, published its last issue in 1963.54 Starting in 1989, Tino Duran founded a new bilingual, semiweekly newspaper operating under the name La Prensa de San Antonio, with a mandate to cover “positive news” in the city.55 As for the Lozano news empire, La Opinión, the sister paper to the original La Prensa, which also battled with banner headlines to defend Mexicans in the United States during the Great Depression, still publishes in Los Angeles at this writing. Just three years before the Lozano family relinquished control of its San Antonio–­based Spanish-­language newspaper, however, a new powerhouse in Spanish-­language media was born in San Antonio in 1955, when the company now known as Univision was established. Housed in a mid-­ century modern building, Univision started with the nation’s first full-­ time Spanish-­language television station and the first station to be owned by a Mexican American.56 Univision is now headquartered in New York, and its San Antonio building was demolished over community and preservationists’ objections in 2013. The network’s reach is international, and its journalists, most prominently its trailblazing anchors Jorge Ramos and María Elena Salinas, act in the spirit, if not the style of La Prensa’s

182 They Came to Toil

Lozano. They are a voice for the voiceless immigrant and the US-­born alike, bridging the worlds of English-­language, Spanish-­language, and multilingual Americans. It’s hard to know what my Mexican immigrant grandparents, whom I recalled in the preface, would make of this brave new media world. Fleeing the fusillades of the Mexican Revolution, they were Lozano’s contemporaries and readers. My maternal great-­grandfather would return from his custodial job at San Antonio’s Gunter Hotel and sit at the tiny kitchen table, holding his copy of La Prensa behind the glow of an oil lamp while he read the news. Undoubtedly, much of the news hit home, including stories about the revival of Mission San José, where my great Uncle José Caballero later worked as a living embodiment of Spanish Nostalgia, playing the guitar and singing songs in Spanish for tourists. I imagine my great-­grandfather sharing the latest news with my great-­grandmother as she embroidered pink and blue trim on delicate white baby clothes, the stay-­at-­home piecework labor of many San Antonio women in that era. Often they would take their discussion to the porch of their pecan-­ tree shaded, 800-­ square-­ foot wooden frame home, which sat within cannonball-­striking distance of the Alamo. Their home, where one of my aunts lived for eighty-­five years, was sold and fully renovated in 2010, becoming part of the fashionable “new” San Antonio. A few blocks away my paternal grandfather, a blacksmith, repaired and maintained the railcars that carried so many Mexicans on their sad journey “home” during the Great Depression. Often, my grandmother accompanied him, bringing her hot, fresh, homemade tacos to sell at the railyard. None of them made much money. They were rich in the things that mattered, and their reward was seeing their children and grandchildren become pilots, military officers, navigators, US Marshals, elected officials, restaurateurs, teachers, lawyers, judges, policemen, engineers, managers, musicians, animators, filmmakers, composers, journalists, and professors. My grandparents’ story, and the story of countless thousands of new Americans like them, before and since, has been too little told. Books like this are one step in bringing this story to light. Future research will round out and enhance this work, continuing to illuminate our understanding of American journalism, and our notion of what it means to be an American.

Appendix

By the Numbers

La Prensa, the Express, and the Light Circulation, 1929–1934

La Prensa In 1929 nearly one-­third of La Prensa’s circulation was by mail to states outside the paper’s San Antonio home, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations Inc. Circulation totaled 22,177 daily and 31,934 Sunday at the end of the second-­quarter reporting period. By the spring of 1930, the Hoover administration’s repatriation/deportation drive, and the diminished discretionary income of La Prensa readers, had begun to impinge on the paper’s circulation. By the end of the second quarter in 1930, circulation had already fallen by 25 percent daily, to 16,508, and by nearly 18 percent Sunday, to 26,209. Daily circulation slid again between the second half of 1930 and the second quarter of 1931 when the newspaper reported it had fallen another 19 percent, to 13,282. Sunday circulation appeared to stabilize somewhat, falling 3.7 percent to 25,232 copies. However, by the end of the second quarter of 1932, and in line with the declining Mexican population in the United States, the paper’s daily circulation totaled only 10,784, less than half the number of daily papers that had been reported sold only three years before. Sunday circulation at the end of the second quarter totaled 21,889, down nearly one-­third from the figure reported in 1929. Circulation continued to tumble in 1933. By the end of the second quarter of 1934, just outside the scope of this book, the daily circulation of La Prensa had dwindled to 6,707 papers, down nearly 70 percent from five years earlier, in 1929. Sunday circulation totaled 16,237, down nearly 50 percent from five years earlier. La Prensa’s national circulation, which totaled nearly 8,000 papers in 1929, was decimated. More than three-­fourths of the paper’s national subscribers had cancelled their subscriptions. Mail subscriptions the paper reported at the end of the second quarter of 1934 totaled only 1,792 for daily papers and

184 Appendix

Figure A.1. San Antonio Daily Newspaper Circulation

2,657 for Sunday’s. These were dire numbers compared to what La Prensa had reported at the second quarter in 1929, just prior to the start of the Depression. At that time, La Prensa’s national circulation figures were 7,959 daily and 7,935 Sunday.

San Antonio Express and Evening News During the reporting period studied in this book, the Express and its sister paper, the Evening News, were the dominant daily English-­language papers circulating in the city. On Sunday, the Express Publishing Co. battled the San Antonio Light for readers. Unlike La Prensa, only about 10 percent of the Express/Evening News circulation was sent to mail subscribers. As with La Prensa, however, the Depression hit the Express/Evening News hard. Just prior to the official start of the Depression, the audit report for the second quarter of 1929 put the combined daily circulation of the Express newspapers at 79,528. Sunday circulation was a robust 63,756. However, four years later at the end of the second quarter of 1933, the newspapers reported that combined daily circulation had fallen to 69,844, a decrease of more than 12 percent. Sunday circulation experienced a sharper decline, falling nearly 20 percent to 51,573. A year later, however,

Appendix  185

Figure A.2. San Antonio Sunday Newspaper Circulation

a little more than twelve months after the Depression officially came to a close, circulation had recovered a bit, climbing to 72,052 daily and 53,050 Sunday. Undoubtedly, the Depression was only partly to blame for the Express’s loss of readers. A significant part of the Express’s loss appears to have been the gain of the San Antonio Light and its deep-­pocketed owner, William Randolph Hearst.

San Antonio Light At the end of June 1929, the San Antonio Light daily circulation totaled 40,506, while its Sunday circulation was slightly higher at 75,076 than that of the Express. Unlike the Express and La Prensa, the Light’s circulation grew through most of the Depression. By the end of the second quarter of 1934 the paper’s daily circulation rose almost 20 percent, to 48,212. Meanwhile, on Sundays, the most valuable day for advertising revenue, the Light’s circulation rose 6 percent, to 79,381.

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Notes

Introduction Epigraph: Dúo Latino, “La crisis/The Crisis,” F. Miranda/Public domain, recorded March 31, 1932, New York. 1. “Un mexicano deportado volvio a Texas sabiendo que le esperaba la carcel,” La Prensa, December 8, 1930. 2. Rodolfo Uranga, “Glosario del dia,” La Prensa, December 17, 1929. All translations from La Prensa are the author’s own. 3. (Special Correspondent), “Man Prefers County Jail to Mexico: Deported Alien Pleads to Be Taken Back to Laredo,” San Antonio Express, December 7, 1929. The Express referred to him as Espinoza, while La Prensa wrote his last name as Espinosa. “Brunettes Are More Popular than Blondes,” San Antonio Express, December 7, 1929. 4. National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Business Cycle Dates, accessed December 26, 2011, http://www.nber.org/cycles/cyclesmain.html. By December 1929, the United States was in the fourth month of a forty-­three-­month economic contraction, according to the NBER, an independent economics agency that is the official arbiter of recessionary periods. Though the business cycle contraction ended in March 1933, many scholars define the recession era as from 1929 through 1939 or through 1941. See, for example, Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America 1929–1941, rev. ed. (1984; repr., New York: Crown, 2009). All citations are to the 2009 edition. 5. Hoffman, Unwanted Mexicans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929– 1939 (1974; repr., Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1979), 118. All citations are to the 1979 edition. 6. Richard A. Garcia, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class, San Antonio, 1929– 1941 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991), 3. 7. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (1992; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 127, 173. All citations are to the 1994 printing. 8. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 60. All citations are to the 2005 reprint. 9. Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, rev. ed. (1995; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 67. All citations are to the revised edition.

188 Notes to Pages 3–4 10. Chris Strachwitz, “Corridos y tragedias de la frontera: An Introduction,” in Mexican-­ American Border Music, vols. 6 and 7, Corridos & tragedias de la frontera (El Cerrito, CA: Arhoolie Productions, 1994), 3–12, 76–82. 11. Martha I. Chew Sánchez, Corridos in Migrant Memory (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 8. 12. Ibid., 10. 13. Repatriation refers to immigrants (and sometimes US citizens) leaving the country either voluntarily or formally through a federal government action to remove impoverished immigrants. Repatriation may also have been organized by local private and public welfare agencies. The Mexican consulate and/or the local Mexican community may have organized repatriations. Finally, Mexicans and US citizens of Mexican descent living in the United States may have been forcibly repatriated. Deportation refers to a federal government action to remove an immigrant under warrant proceedings or for the immigrant to leave voluntarily without the warrant proceeding. For more on the definition of repatriation, see Hoffman, Unwanted Mexicans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929–1939 (1974; 166). 14. Hoffman, Unwanted Mexicans in the Great Depression, 83. Also see, for example, “300 Mexicans Leave Ohio,” New York Times, March 20, 1934. The voluntary return of three hundred Mexican men from Lucas County, Ohio, was facilitated by the state of Ohio, which covered each man’s fare of roughly $15 per person so they could board “a special train bound for the Mexican border.” 15. Abraham Hoffman, “Mexican Repatriation Statistics: Some Suggested Alternatives to Carey McWilliams,” Western Historical Quarterly 3, no. 4 (October 1972), 399. Hoffman’s 1972 article finds fault with scholars such as McWilliams who have failed to provide evidence to support repatriation statistics. See Table 1 on page 399 of Hoffman’s article, in which Hoffman provided Mexican government statistics that the US government relied on as more reliable and accurate than those the United States collected. The month-­by-­month statistics extend from 1929 through 1937, documenting 458,023 repatriated persons. Hoffman notes that there were myriad reasons Mexicans returned, including the conclusion of the Cristero Rebellion in Mexico. The high-­end estimate of one million repatriated Mexicans comes from Balderrama and Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal, 151. See also David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 72, in which the author discusses the reliability of statistics concerning Mexicans during the period and suggests that as many as eighty thousand Mexicans and US-­born children may have been repatriated annually between 1929 and 1937. See also Matt S. Meier and Feliciano Ribera, in Mexican Americans/ American Mexicans: From Conquistadors to Chicanos (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 154–155, in which the authors cite Mexican government statistics that show 458,000 Mexicans returned between 1929 and 1937. Meier and Ribera say that Texas had the most returnees, 132,000. See also Natalia Molina, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). Also see Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 16. Zaragosa Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-­Century America (2005; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 16–61. All citations refer to the 2008 printing. For an examination of the Mexican labor issues in the late 1800s and early 1900s, see Emilio Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993).

Notes to Pages 4– 6  189 17. Kevin R. Johnson, “The Forgotten ‘Repatriation’ of Persons of Mexican Ancestry and Lessons from the ‘War on Terror,’ ” Pace Law Review, 2005, Paper 39, 1–2, 4, accessed April 24, 2011, http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/lawrev/39/. For a complete text of the 2005 California apology, see http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/0506/bill/sen/sb_06510700/sb_670_bill _20051007_chaptered.html. 18. Johnson, “Forgotten ‘Repatriation,’ ” 1–2. 19. R. Reynolds McKay, “The Impact of The Great Depression on Immigrant Mexican Labor: Repatriation of the Bridgeport, Texas Coal Miners,” Social Science Quarterly 65, no. 4 (June 1984): 354. See also R. Reynolds McKay, “Texas Mexican Repatriation during the Great Depression” (PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, Norman, 1982). See also Rodolfo F. Acuña and Guadalupe Compeán, Voices of the US Latino Experience, Vol. II, 586: “The study of repatriation remains a neglected area of investigation. Indications are that there was a substantial Mexican repatriation from Texas—probably more Mexicans were returned to Mexico from this state than from any other state.” 20. National Bureau of Economic Research, Business Cycle Dates, accessed January 29, 2012, http://www.nber.org/cycles/cyclesmain.html. 21. Greg Stohr, “Arizona Illegal-­Immigration Legislation Given US Supreme Court Review,” Bloomberg, December 12, 2011, accessed January 4, 2012, http://www.bloomberg.com /news/2011-­12-­12/supreme-­court-­to-­hear-­arizona-­s-­appeal-­of-­ruling-­against-­immigration -­law.html. 22. Andrew Harris, “Alabama Immigration Law Improperly Encroaches on Federal Power, US Says,” Bloomberg, August 1, 2011, accessed June 20, 2012, http://www.bloom berg.com/news/2011-­08-­01/alabama-­immigration-­law-­imporperly- ­encroaches- ­on-­federal -­power-­u-­s-­says.html. 23. Greg Stohr, “Arizona Immigration Law Partially Struck by High Court,” Bloomberg, June 25, 2012, accessed June 30, 2012, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-­06-­25 /arizona-­illegal-­immigration-­law-­gets-­mixed-­top-­court-­decision.html. 24. Charles M. Payne paraphrases Julian Bond’s version of the master narrative. See Charles M. Payne, “The View from the Trenches,” in Steven F. Lawson and Charles M. Payne, Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945–1968 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 124–125. Also see Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement,” in Down the Line: The Collected Writing of Bayard Rustin (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971), 111–122. 25. Lawson and Payne, 1998. 26. Payne, “View from the Trenches,” in Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 110. 27. Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007; originally published 1995), 413. All citations are to the second edition. 28. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movements and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–1263. 29. Ibid., 1235, 1236. 30. Ibid., 1234. 31. Ibid., 1236. 32. Ibid., 1234. 33. Emilye Crosby, “The Politics of Writing and Teaching Movement History,” in Civil Rights History from the Ground Up: Local Struggles, a National Movement, ed. Emilye Crosby (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 9. Crosby notes that scholars contest,

190 Notes to Pages 7–9 among other things, Hall’s position that the civil rights movement emerged primarily from the black church’s prophetic tradition. 34. Ibid., 5. 35. Mark Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 14. 36. Sally Lehrman, “How to Cross Your ‘Faultlines,’” Society of Professional Journalists, http://www.spj.org/dtb2.asp. 37. Juan F. Perea, “The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race,” in The Latino/a Condition: A Critical Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 335–336. 38. Ibid. 39. Raúl Ramos, Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821– 1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 7. Also, Ruben Flores noted that Mexican mestizaje was not only a matter of racial amalgamation, but in early twentieth century Mexico it also represented a policy goal of cultural fusion. Ruben Flores, Backroads Pragmatists: Mexico’s Melting Pot and Civil Rights in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 35–50. 40. Pablo Mitchell, Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modern New Mexico, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005), 22–23. 41. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 58. 42. Martha Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). 43. Neil Foley, “Partly Colored or Other White: Mexican Americans and Their Problem With the Color Line,” in Beyond Black White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the US South and Southwest, ed. Stephanie Cole and Alison M. Parker (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 125. 44. Ariela J. Gross, “ ‘The Caucasian Cloak’: Mexican Americans and the Politics of Whiteness in the Twentieth Century Southwest,” Georgetown Law Journal 95 (2007): 337– 392; Ariela J. Gross, “Comment: Texas Mexicans and the Politics of Whiteness,” Law and History Review 21, no. 1 (2003): 195–205. 45. Max Krochmal, “Chicano Labor and Multiracial Politics in Post-­World War II Texas,” in Life and Labor in the New South, ed. Robert H. Zieger (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 138. See also, Max Krochmal, Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 46. Nancy A. Hewitt, in Beyond Black White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the US South and Southwest, ed. Stephanie Cole and Alison M. Parker (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), xi. 47. Carson Clayborne, David Garrow, Bill Kovach, and Carol Polsgrove, compilers, Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism Part Two 1963–1973 (New York: Library of America, 2003), 885, 907. 48. Peter Jan Honigsberg, review of Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1941– 1973, Santa Clara Law Review 44, no. 1 (January 2003), 335, 338. 49. Ibid., 335–336. 50. Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 6. All references are to the 2003 edition.

Notes to Pages 9–14  191 51. For more, see: Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974; repr., Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986); Robert M. Entman, “Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm,” Journal of Communication 43, no. 4 (1993): 51. See also Robert M. Entman, Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion and US Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Choices, Values and Frames,” American Psychologist 39, no. 4 (1984): 341–350. 52. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 3. 53. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 134. Reprinted 2006. All citations are to the 2006 printing. 54. Ibid. 55. Molina, Racial Scripts, 22–23. 56. James W. Carey, “The Problem of Journalism History,” Journalism History 1, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 5. 57. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (1983; London: Verso, 2006), 62. All citations are to the 2006 edition. 58. Zaragosa Vargas, Crucible of Struggle: A History of Mexican Americans from Colonial Times to the Present Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 177. 59. Betty Houchin Winfield and Janice Hume, “The Continuous Past: Historical Referents in Nineteenth-­Century American Journalism,” Journalism Communication Monographs 9, no. 3 (August 2007): 122. 60. Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang, “Collective Memory and the News,” Communication 11, no. 2 (1989): 125. 61. Edward Said, Orientalism, 3. 62. Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Representations no. 26, special issue: Memory and Counter-­Memory (Spring 1989): 108–109. 63. National Bureau of Economic Research, Business Cycle Dates, accessed June 20, 2012, http://www.nber.org/cycles/cyclesmain.html. 64. Hoffman, Unwanted Mexicans in the Great Depression, 174. 65. Balderrama and Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal, 147. 66. Lipsitz, Time Passages, 135. 67. Patrick Cox, The First Texas News Barons (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 23. 68. Félix Gutiérrez, “Spanish-­Language Media in America: Background, Resources, History,” Journalism History 4, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 37. 69. Carlos E. Cortés, “The Mexican-­American Press,” in Sally M. Miller, ed., The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical Analysis and Handbook (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 254. 70. Roberto R. Treviño, “Prensa y Patria: The Spanish-­language Press and the Biculturation of the Tejano Middle Class, 1920–1940,” Western Historical Quarterly 22, no. 4 (November 1991): 452–453. 71. Nora Rios-­McMillan, “A Biography of a Man and His Newspaper,” The Americas Review 17, nos. 3–4 (Fall-­Winter 1989). 72. Garcia, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class, 246. 73. Ibid., 247. 74. Maggie Rivas-­Rodriguez, “Ignacio E. Lozano: The Mexican Exile Publisher Who Conquered San Antonio and Los Angeles,” American Journalism 21, no. 1 (2004): 75–89.

192 Notes to Pages 14–16 75. Vicki Mayer, “From Segmented to Fragmented: Latino Media in San Antonio, Texas,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 78, no. 2 (2001): 293. 76. “Gaceta de Tejas,” Handbook of Texas Online, published by the Texas State Historical Association, accessed November 26, 2011, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online /articles/eeg01. See also Félix Gutiérrez, “Spanish-­Language Media in America,” 34–41, 65. 77. Conchita Hassell Winn, “Spanish-­Language Newspapers,” Handbook of Texas Online, published by the Texas State Historical Association, accessed June 20, 2012, http:// www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/ees18. 78. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 39 (originally published 1966). All citations are to the 1967 edition. 79. Armando B. Rendon, Chicano Manifesto (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 29. 80. Sabine Ulibarrí, “Language and Culture,” in Sabine R. Ulibarrí: Critical Essays, ed. María I. Duke dos Santos and Patricia de la Fuente (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 243. 81. David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987, 1992), 82–85, 161. All citations are to the 1992 printing. 82. Ramos, Beyond the Alamo, 12–13. 83. Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven: Yale, 2003), 11. 84. Ibid. 85. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 13, 40. 86. Ibid., 17, 18. 87. Ibid., 13. 88. Vargas, Crucible of Struggle, 106. 89. Garcia, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class, 16. 90. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 39. 91. Ibid., 41. 92. Ibid., 43. For a fuller discussion of the forces militating against Asian immigrants, see, for example, Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 21–55. Also see Erika Lee’s At America’s Gates, Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). For more on restrictions against Japanese immigration, see Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 44–52. 93. “Statement of Harry Chandler, President Los Angeles Times Co,” Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Western Hemisphere Immigration, 71st Congress, 2nd Session, 1930, 61, 63–75. See, for instance, page 61: “So you have to consider fundamentally that these Mexican men are practically Indians, they are of Indian blood, these peons who come in; and there is no more problem with them than with our original Indians. And we Americans who look back to the time we were among the Indians know there were fewer problems then. But they were not Americans, and they were not our race. They did not make the problem that the negro has made or that the Filipino would make if we brought him in.” 94. James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-­first Century (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005), 204–205. 95. Ibid. 96. Adam S. Cohen, “Harvard’s Eugenics Era: When Academics Embraced Scientific

Notes to Pages 16 –19  193 Racism, Immigration Restrictions, and the Suppression of ‘the Unfit,’ ” Harvard Magazine, March–­April 2016, http://harvardmagazine.com/2016/03/harvards-­eugenics-­era. 97. McKay, Texas Mexican Repatriation during the Great Depression, 16–20. See also, for instance: “Mexico Discontinues Wholesale Repatriation,” San Antonio Express, June 24, 1921; “Mexican Labor in US Prospers This Year,” San Antonio Express, December 17, 1924; “Quieren tierras los repatriados de E. Unidos,” La Prensa, March 7, 1922. 98. Ibid. 99. Frank McLynn, Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2000), 220–221. 100. Friedrich Katz, “Pancho Villa and the Attack on Columbus, New Mexico,” American Historical Review 83, no. 1 (February 1978), 101. 101. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 123. 102. McLynn, Villa and Zapata, 332. 103. Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, accessed June 20, 2012, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=B000710. For Jacksonville background, see: Ann Hudson, “Jacksonville, TX (Cherokee County),” Handbook of Texas Online, published by the Texas State Historical Association, accessed April 3, 2011, http://www .tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hej01. 104. Balderrama and Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal, 21. 105. “The Mexican Conquest,” Saturday Evening Post, June 22, 1929, 26. Cited in Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 55–56. For Saturday Evening Post circulation and history, see, for example, Douglas B. Ward, “The Geography of an American Icon: An Analysis of the Circulation of the Saturday Evening Post, 1911–1944,” American Journalism 27, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 59–89. For circulation figures, see Saturday Evening Post website, accessed December 26, 2011, http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/about. 106. “Mexican Conquest,” 26. 107. Michael Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 8. 108. Ibid., 37. 109. T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 49, 54. See also David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 192–193. 110. Garcia, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class, 1. 111. “Think,” San Antonio Express, September 1, 1923. 112. Garcia, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class, 16. 113. US Census, 1940. Characteristics of the Population, 1054, 1056. The 1940 Census contains comparative numbers for 1930. 114. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 60. 115. “Says 400,000 Aliens Are Here Illegally, Doak Tells the Senate That 100,000 Are Deportable, and Urges Stricter Law,” New York Times, January 6, 1931. 116. Ibid. 117. Annual report of the Commissioner General of Immigration to the Secretary of Labor, fiscal year ended June 30, 1931, 71. 118. Frances Donecker, “San Antonio Express-­News,” Handbook of Texas Online, published by the Texas State Historical Association, accessed November 26, 2011, http://www .tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/ees03.

194 Notes to Pages 19–25 119. “A History of the San Antonio Express-­News,” the San Antonio Express-­News, accessed November 7, 2010, http://www.mysanantonio.com/about_us/express-­news/A_history _of_the_San_Antonio_Express-­News.html. See also William Walker Nesbitt, “History of the San Antonio Express, 1865–1965” (master’s thesis, University of Texas, Austin, 1965), 2. See Rios-­McMillan, “Biography of a Man.” 120. The Express started the Evening News in 1918 to offer readers and advertisers an afternoon alternative to the San Antonio Light. See Nesbitt, “History of the San Antonio Express, 1865–1965.” The Light was founded in 1880 and bought by William Randolph Hearst in 1924. From “A History of the San Antonio Express-­News.” 121. Donecker, “San Antonio Express-­News,” Handbook of Texas Online. 122. Nesbitt, “History of the San Antonio Express,” 139. 123. Ibid., 111–112, 120. For information on the Union capitulation in San Antonio, see Fehrenbach, Lone Star, 352. 124. Frances Donecker, “San Antonio Light,” Handbook of Texas Online, published by the Texas State Historical Association, accessed May 14, 2013, http://www.tshaonline.org/ handbook/online/articles/ees05. 125. Ibid. 126. Alfred M. Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social Instrument (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 218. 127. “Light Publisher Dies in Canada,” San Antonio Express, July 30, 1946. “W. M. McIntosh, Publisher, Dies,” San Antonio Light, July 29, 1946. See also “Scripps Start Paper in Forth Worth,” Editor & Publisher 54, no. 16 (September 17, 1921): 30. 128. Letter from San Antonio Light publisher William McIntosh to William Randolph Hearst, September 26, 1927, William Randolph Hearst Papers, BANC MSS 77/121 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley Carton 19, Folder 50. 129. “A Century of Texas Newspapering Will Be Observed By . . . ” UPI, January 19, 1981. 130. Garcia, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class, 4. 131. “History of the San Antonio Express-­News.” Rios-­McMillan, “Biography of a Man,” 137. See also Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 40. In 1923, ten years after founding La Prensa, Ignacio Lozano founded La Opinión in Los Angeles, which still publishes today. 132. Richard Griswold del Castillo, “The Mexican Revolution and the Spanish-­Language Press in the Borderlands,” Journalism History 4, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 47. 133. Documents in The Lozano Papers collection at the Huntington Library show that Ignacio Lozano corresponded and conducted business with various Hollywood figures, including José Bohr, grandfather of Pedro Armendariz Jr. 134. Ana Gonzalez-­Barrera and Jens Manuel Krogstad, “US Immigrant Deportations Declined in 2014, but Remain near Record High, PEW Research Center, August 31, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-­tank/2016/08/31/u-­s-­immigrant- ­deportations- ­declined -­in-­2014-­but-­remain-­near-­record-­high/. 135. Barack Obama, “Letter from the President—Efforts to Address the Humanitarian Situation in the Rio Grande Valley Areas of Our Nation’s Southwest Border,” The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, June 30, 2014, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-­press-­ office/2014/06/30/letter-­president-­efforts-­address-­humanitarian-­situation-­rio-­grande-­valle. 136. Time Staff, “Here’s Donald Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech,” Time, June 16, 2016, http://time.com/3923128/donald-­trump-­announcement-­speech/. 137. Alan Rappeport, “First Draft: Donald Trump’s First TV Ad Focuses on Immigration,”

Notes to Pages 25–31  195 New York Times, January 4, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-­draft/2016/01/04 /first-­donald-­trump-­tv-­ad-­focuses-­on-­immigrant-­threat/. 138. “Dictionary.com’s 2016 Word of the Year: Xenophobia,” November 28, 2016, Dictionary.com, http://blog.dictionary.com/xenophobia/.

Chapter 1 1. Jay Kinsbruner and Erick D. Langer, eds., “Cristero Rebellion,” Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture 2, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Scribner’s 2008), 657–658. 2. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 60. All citations are to the 2005 reprint. 3. Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, vol. 3, The Great Depression: 1929– 1941 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 47, 48. 4. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 54–55. 5. See, for instance, “Mexico Protests Illegal Search,” San Antonio Express, November 14, 1929. 6. The author conducted a keyword search for repatriation and repatriate in English and repatriación and repatriado in Spanish in the digital editions of the respective newspapers. After eliminating duplicate stories and stories that were irrelevant or tangential to the repatriation of Mexican workers, forty-­two remained in La Prensa. 7. Associated Press, “Repatriation of Texas Mexicans Is Planned,” San Antonio Express, July 18, 1929. 8. “2,000 Mexican Families Return,” San Antonio Express, August 21, 1929. 9. “Paraguay Will Repatriate 35,” San Antonio Light, March 25, 1929; “Repatriation of Prisoners Starts,” San Antonio Light, July 1, 1929. 10. “Canales Visit Pleasure Trip,” San Antonio Express, October 20, 1929. 11. “Deportation Faces Many Mexicans: New Labor Alien Law Will Affect Thousands of Valley Workers,” San Antonio Light, June 17, 1929. 12. “Creese que los mexicanos que regresan al pais aportaron cien millones de pesos,” La Prensa, July 21, 1929. 13. Rodolfo Uranga, “Glosario del dia,” La Prensa, July 25, 1929. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. “Condiciones en que estan en los E. Unidos algunos agricultores mexicanos,” La Prensa, April 10, 1929. 18. “Repatriación de mexicanos para labores de campo,” La Prensa, April 1, 1929. 19. “Gran junta de agricultores mexicanos en Harlingen,” La Prensa, June 16, 1929. 20. Ibid. An hacendado is a landowning cattle rancher or planter. 21. Michael Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 92. 22. Ibid. 23. Nora Rios-­McMillan, “A Biography of a Man and His Newspaper,” The Americas Review 17, nos. 3–4 (Fall–­Winter 1989): 139.

196 Notes to Pages 31–35 24. Robert Ezra Park, The Immigrant Press and Its Control (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1922), 55, accessed May 17, 2012 on Openlibrary.org, http://openlibrary.org/books /OL6641224M/The_immigrant_press_and_its_control. 25. Ibid. 26. Michael C. Meyer, William L. Sherman, and Susan M. Deeds, The Course of Mexican History, 8th ed. (1979; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 517, 522. All citations refer to the 2007 edition. 27. Gilbert G. González, Mexican Consuls and Labor Organizing: Imperial Politics in the American Southwest (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 31. 28. Ramón Eduardo Ruiz, Triumphs and Tragedy: A History of the Mexican People (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 386. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 386, 387. 32. “Protección a los obreros repatriados,” La Prensa, September 26, 1929. 33. Ibid. 34. “Los mexicanos deportados regresan a sus hogares hambrientos y tristes,” La Prensa, November 2, 1929. 35. Ibid. See also “Nueva ley sobre registros de nacimientos,” La Prensa, July 20, 1929. This was particularly true for births, which state residents (Mexicans prominently among them) had not always diligently registered. In 1929 the Texas legislature strengthened birth registration laws, requiring the documents to be filed in municipal offices, not in health departments. San Antonio’s municipal secretary, Fred Fries, said Mexicans were the least likely to register their children’s births. “There are many people who are thirty or forty years old who allege they are San Antonio natives, but they can’t prove that easily because the corresponding registration does not exist” (“Nueva ley sobre registros”). 36. “Nueva ley sobre registros.” 37. “Numerosas compatriotas trabajadores pasan para México,” La Prensa, November 9, 1929. 38. “Perjuicios a braceros mexicanos,” La Prensa, July 6, 1929. 39. David P. Green, Place Names of San Antonio: Plus Bexar and Surrounding Counties, 2nd ed. (San Antonio: Maverick, 2007), 15. 40. “Perjuicios a braceros mexicanos.” 41. Ibid. 42. “Alien Deportation under New Law Denied,” San Antonio Express, June 20, 1929. 43. Ibid. 44. “ ‘New Aliens’ Law Puzzles,” San Antonio Light, June 6, 1929. “Aliens Exploited US Agent Says,” San Antonio Express, June 8, 1920. 45. For more background on early twentieth-­century immigration debates, see also Daniel J. Tichenor, “Strange Bedfellows: The Politics and Pathologies of Immigration Reform,” Labor: Studies in Working-­Class History of the Americas 5, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 39–60. 46. “Mexican Exodus Held Groundless by Quota Backer,” San Antonio Express, July 2, 1929. 47. “Box Says Naturalization Bill Would Let Thousands Become US Citizens,” San Antonio Express, February 11, 1929. 48. “Mexican Exodus Held Groundless,” San Antonio Express, July 2, 1929.

Notes to Pages 35–40  197 49. Ibid. The San Antonio Express quoted the following State Department figures illustrating the decrease in numbers of Mexicans granted legal US entry: in January 1929, there were 2,700 entries compared to 3,500 in 1928; February 1929, 2,800 versus 4,100 for 1928; March 1929, 1,800 versus 6,000 in 1928; April 1929, 2,500 versus 6,300 in 1928. See also Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 61. Daniels describes the stringent application of the “LPC clause,” or “likely to become a public charge” clause. Applicants would be denied a visa or passport if they stated they had no job lined up in the United States. They would also be denied if they did, under a rule that prohibited “contract labor.” Daniels described this as an “administrative hinge,” which was first used against Mexicans beginning in 1928, and then picked up by Hoover and extended to other nationalities as the Depression progressed. 50. Ibid. 51. “Federal Judge Urges Mexicans Sentenced for Illegal Entry to Tell Homeland about Law,” San Antonio Express, July 18, 1929. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. “ ‘Wet’ Immigrants Get Mail Course from Relatives Here on How to Duck Law after Arrival,” San Antonio Express, September 18, 1929. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. “39 Taking Exams for US Service on Texas Border,” San Antonio Light, June 6, 1929. 60. González, Mexican Consuls, 33. 61. Ibid., 31–32. 62. Ibid., 32. 63. Ibid., 31. 64. “Tres sociedades repatrian a cien deportados,” La Prensa, May 14, 1929. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. “La clinica debe ser construida muy en breve,” La Prensa, March 17, 1929. 68. “Tax Exemptions Asked for Clinic on South San Saba,” San Antonio Light, August 5, 1929. 69. Nicolás Kanellos, “A Socio-­Historic Study of Hispanic Newspapers in the United States,” in Félix Padilla, ed., Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Sociology (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1994), 228. 70. Leara D. Rhodes, The Ethnic Press: Shaping the American Dream (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 41. 71. Museum Planet, Battery Park New York City, New York, Giovanni da Verrazzano Memorial, accessed March 6, 2012, http://www.museumplanet.com/tour.php/nyc/bp/16. Also see ItalianHistorical.org, The Verrazzano Monument, which credits Il Progresso’s publisher for helping construct the monument, accessed March 6, 2012, http://www.italian historical.org/page50a.html. 72. Garcia, Rise of the Mexican-­American Middle Class, San Antonio, 1929–1941 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991), 38, 39. 73. John Mckiernan-­González, Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas–­ Mexico Border, 1848–1942 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 2, 15.

198 Notes to Pages 40–45 74. Natalia Molina, Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 2. 75. Rodolfo Uranga, “Glosario del dia,” La Prensa, February 16, 1929. 76. Ibid. 77. “Facilidades para la repatriación,” La Prensa, February 27, 1929. 78. Ibid. 79. “Los mexicanos que deseen repatriarse deben obtener certificado de residencia,” La Prensa, March 17, 1929. 80. Ibid. 81. “Las CIAS. Ferrocarrileras dan facilidades a todos los repatriados pobres,” La Prensa, November 6, 1929. 82. “Un plan vasconcelista a favor de los mexicanos que residen en este pais,” La Prensa, April 12, 1929. 83. Ibid. 84. M. R. Vidal Jr., “Repatriación del campesino mexicano,” La Prensa, January 27, 1929. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid. 88. “P. Ortiz Rubio ofrece seguir la politica de Calles y Obregón,” La Prensa, March 6, 1929. 89. “Sheep, Goat Men Rap US Officers,” San Antonio Express, May 11, 1929. 90. Ibid. 91. “Valley Takes Up Labor on Border,” San Antonio Express, May 11, 1929. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid. 94. “25,000 Mexicans May Be Deported,” San Antonio Express, July 20, 1929. 95. “New Aliens’ Law Puzzles,” San Antonio Light, June 6, 1929. 96. “Tower Building, Including Site, Cost $3,000,000,” San Antonio Express, March 5, 1929. “Immigration Men in Tower Building,” San Antonio Light, June 25, 1929. 97. “Muchos mexicanos son capturados en el valle por no tener pasaporte,” La Prensa, April 19, 1929. 98. “Mexico Protests Illegal Search,” San Antonio Express, November 14, 1929. 99. Ibid. 100. “Mexican Youth Freed by Court,” San Antonio Express, November 6, 1929. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid. 103. National Bureau of Economic Research, Business Cycle Dates, accessed May 18, 2012, http://www.nber.org/cycles/cyclesmain.html. 104. Carlos E. Cortés, “The Mexican American Press,” in The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical Analysis and Handbook, ed. Sallie M. Miller (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987), 254. 105. Associated Press, “Repatriation of Texas Mexicans Is Planned,” San Antonio Express, July 18, 1929. 106. “Repatriación de mexicanos se llevará a cabo si se obtienen facilidades y ayuda de portes,” La Prensa, July 18, 1929. 107. “El bracero mexicano es insubstituible,” La Prensa, October 11, 1929.

Notes to Pages 45–50  199 108. Ibid. 109. Leon Nelson Flint, The Editorial: A Study in the Effectiveness of Writing (New York: D. Appleton, 1920), 24. 110. “Virtual Exclusion Is Not Sensible ‘Restriction,’ ” San Antonio Express, February 1, 1929. 111. Ibid. 112. “Intelligent Selection of Immigrants,” San Antonio Light, July 6, 1929. 113. “Disminuye la inmigración mexicana a Estados Unidos,” La Prensa, January 26, 1929. 114. Ibid. 115. “30,000 Ask Quota for Mexican Immigrants,” San Antonio Express, January 19, 1929. 116. Ibid. 117. Ibid. 118. “30,000 personas piden que se establezca la cuota para mexicanos,” La Prensa, January 20, 1929. 119. “El subsrio. de trabajo dice que no quieren obreros baratos,” La Prensa, May 25, 1929. 120. “De nuevo presentara Box la iniciativa a contra la inmigración de mexicanos,” La Prensa, January 30, 1929. 121. “Cattle Raisers Plan for Loans,” San Antonio Express, December 17, 1929. 122. “Box and His Bill Scored at Del Rio,” San Antonio Express, August 1, 1929. 123. Ibid. 124. Ibid. 125. “Mexican Official Discusses US Immigration Problem,” San Antonio Express, October 22, 1929. 126. “Immigration Quota Quiz Shifts to Brownsville,” San Antonio Express, October 23, 1929. 127. Ibid. 128. “Mexican Labor ‘Coming into Own,’ ” San Antonio Light, August 7, 1929. 129. “Virtual Exclusion Is Not Sensible ‘Restriction.’ ” 130. “Preferable to Quota Basis for New World Immigration,” San Antonio Express, January 19, 1929. 131. Harry Williams, “Texas Trails,” San Antonio Light, July 5, 1929. 132. “Birth Registration,” San Antonio Light, February 7, 1929. 133. “Opposition to Box Bill Grows,” San Antonio Express, August 24, 1929. 134. Ibid. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid. 137. “Mexican Immigration Heavily Diminished,” San Antonio Express, October 28, 1929. 138. “Habra una conferencia de consules americanos,” La Prensa, January 19, 1929. 139. “Reed Opposes Quotas for Mexico,” San Antonio Light, July 3, 1929. 140. “Added Reasons for Turning Down the Box Bill,” San Antonio Express, August 25, 1929. 141. Ibid.

200 Notes to Pages 50–56 142. Ibid. 143. “Immigration Law Begins to Pinch Southwest Farms,” San Antonio Express, October 27, 1929. 144. “En defensa del bracero mexicano,” La Prensa, September 17, 1929. The San Benito legionnaires’ defense of the Mexican community was predicated, at least in part, on the Mexicans’ participation in military service, which historically has been linked with notions of citizenship. See, for instance, James Burk, “Citizenship Status and Military Service: The Quest for Inclusion by Minorities and Conscientious Objectors,” Armed Forces & Society 21, no. 4 (June 1995): 503–529. Burk argues that the link between military service and citizenship was strongest in the United States prior to World War II. 145. “En defensa del bracero mexicano.” 146. Ibid. 147. Ibid. 148. John Higham, “The Evolution of Thought on Race and the Development of Scientific Racism,” in Major Problems in American Immigration and Ethnic History, ed. Jon Gjerde (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 291–299. 149. David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (1987; repr., Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 181. All citations refer to the 1992 printing. 150. “Box Will Revise Immigrant Bill,” San Antonio Express, December 4, 1929. 151. Ibid. 152. Ibid. 153. “Growers Flay Plan to Bring in Negroes,” San Antonio Light, November 3, 1929. 154. Ibid. 155. “Glosario del dia,” La Prensa, June 24, 1929. 156. Ibid. 157. Ibid. 158. For more on Box and his views about the Mexican place in the hierarchy of color, see Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (1997; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), esp. 40–63. 159. Cortés, “Mexican American Press,” 254. All citations are to the 1999 printing. 160. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (1992; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 127. All citations are to the 1994 printing. 161. Erik Davis and Michael Rauner, The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006), 22. Also see Pacific Coast Architectural Database (PCAD), “World’s Columbian Exposition, California Pavilion, Chicago, IL,” http://pcad.lib.washington.edu/building/11082/. 162. David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 343. 163. Bodnar, Remaking America, 15. 164. Elias M’Quaid, “Dear Old Bawston Gets Low-­Down on San Antonio, Texas,” San Antonio Light, March 31, 1929. 165. Weber, Spanish Frontier in North America, 343. 166. Ibid., 353. 167. Ibid. 168. “Abstract of Title Shows Old Spanish Governor’s Palace in Private Hands since 1804,” San Antonio Express, January 2, 1929.

Notes to Pages 56 – 60  201 169. “Old Spanish Palace Board Divides Work,” San Antonio Express, February 12, 1929. 170. “Abstract of Title Shows Old Spanish Governor’s Palace in Private Hands since 1804.” 171. Ibid. 172. “Society Denied Exclusive Custody of Spanish Palace,” San Antonio Express, February 6, 1929. 173. “Old Painting Depicts Dance in Spanish Palace,” San Antonio Express, February 4, 1929. 174. “1803 Will Gives Old Palace Data,” San Antonio Express, November 19, 1929. 175. “For a Memorial Park around the Alamo,” San Antonio Express, January 18, 1929. The newspaper covered all permutations of the Alamo legislative debate. For example, see also “San Antonio’s Counsel Okehs [sic] Alamo Bill,” San Antonio Express, January 31, 1929; “Alamo Park Purchase Bears Signatures of House Senate Bill to be Offered Thursday,” San Antonio Express, January 17, 1929; “Alamo Park Land Purchase Bill Appropriating $1,000,000 Passed by Senate with but One Vote of Nay,” San Antonio Express, January 30, 1929. 176. “Alamo Memorial Park Bill at the Special Session,” San Antonio Express, April 18, 1929. 177. “The Alamo—Texas’s Shrine and All the State’s Concern,” San Antonio Express, July 10, 1929. See also “Alamo Bill Veto Shocks Mayor,” San Antonio Express, July 10, 1929. 178. “Think,” San Antonio Express, December 12, 1929. See also “Mission Drive Improvement Plan Advanced,” San Antonio Express, December 13, 1929. 179. Ibid. 180. “Granary Built About 1702 to Be Made into Curio Shop,” San Antonio Express, December 8, 1929. 181. “The Old San Antonio Road,” San Antonio Express, February 23, 1929. 182. “Zarzamora St. Name Change Is Protested,” San Antonio Express, December 22, 1929. 183. “Society Asks Street Name Be Unchanged,” San Antonio Express, December 25, 1929. 184. “Proposed Change of Street Name Causes Protest,” San Antonio Light, December 26, 1929. 185. “Protesta de una Sociedad Sanantoniana,” La Prensa, December 27, 1929. 186. “City Thanked for Refusing to Change the Name of Zarzamora,” San Antonio Express, January 4, 1930. 187. “Mission Main S.A. Tourist Attraction,” San Antonio Light, November 26, 1929. 188. “Motorists ‘Discover’ Historic Missions,” San Antonio Light, December 15, 1929. 189. “Pen Women Guests at Luncheon,” San Antonio Light, March 17, 1929. 190. “Mission Door Seen on Card,” San Antonio Light, November 13, 1929. 191. “Old Mission Is Re-­found,” San Antonio Light, February 24, 1930. 192. “Waremoore Estates: Suburban Home Sites of Acres and Half Acres” (advertisement), San Antonio Light, April 14, 1929. 193. Bodnar, Remaking America, 136. 194. Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-­Speaking People of the United States, new ed. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1948; New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 44. 195. “De cómo han influído entre si el Castellano y el Nahuatl y en la lengua que se habla en México,” La Prensa, December 31, 1929.

202 Notes to Pages 61–70 196. William Randolph Hearst, A Handbook of Journalism (The Hearst Corporation, 1983), 6. 197. “Texas Farmer to Benefit by Alien Law,” San Antonio Light, May 20, 1929. 198. “Alien Deportation under New Law Denied.” The Express reported that the law applied to immigrants who entered the United States before June 3, 1921. Homeland Security’s US Citizenship and Immigration Services reports that it initially applied to persons arriving in the country before July 1, 1921. https://www.uscis.gov/history-­and-­genealogy/genealogy /registry-­files-­march-­2-­1929-­march-­31-­1944. 199. “Texas Farmers to Benefit by Alien Law.” 200. George Lakoff and Sam Ferguson, “The Framing of Immigration,” n.p.: The Rockridge Institute, 2006. 201. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 82. 202. See also Melita M. Garza, “Sword and Cross in San Antonio: Reviving the Spanish Conquest in Depression-­Era News Coverage,” Journalism History 39, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 198–207. In this article I discuss some of these issues, though the analysis is limited to the Express and La Prensa. 203. “Order Special Edition Number Monday, Please,” San Antonio Express, October 28, 1929. 204. “Copy for Editorial Pages Is Prepared on Sixth Floor,” San Antonio Express, October 19, 1929.

Chapter 2 1. “La protesta de los sin trabajo,” La Prensa, April 7, 1930. 2. “1,000 Jobless Demand Work from City,” San Antonio Light, April 7, 1930. 3. Ibid. 4. “El consul no temia a los comunistas,” La Prensa, April 8, 1930. 5. “Timeline of the Great Depression,” The American Experience, PBS, accessed March 1, 2012, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/timeline/rails-­timeline/. 6. Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America 1929–1941, rev. ed. (1984; New York: Crown, 2009), 78. 7. “Se deporta a más familias de mexicanos,” La Prensa, October 26, 1930. 8. Ibid. 9. “Ortiz Rubio invita a regresar a la patria a todos los mexicanos residentes en los Estados Unidos,” La Prensa, January 14, 1930. 10. Richard A. Garcia, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class, San Antonio, 1929– 1941 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991), 39. 11. “Otra gran pelicula, hecha exclusivamente por mexicanos, en la función del Majestic,” La Prensa, October 19, 1930. 12. Colin Gunckel, “The War of the Accents: Spanish Language Hollywood Films in Mexican Los Angeles,” Film History: An International Journal 20, no. 3 (2008): 338. 13. “Antonio Moreno Honored at Luncheon,” San Antonio Express, October 24, 1930. 14. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, rev. ed. (1922; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 216–217. All citations refer to the 1997 edition. 15. “Ortiz Rubio invita a regresar a la patria.” 16. Ibid. English translation by the author.

Notes to Pages 70– 74  203 17. “Many Mexicans Are Returning,” San Antonio Express, February 1, 1930. 18. “Sigue el exodo de mexicanos a la patria,” La Prensa, October 24, 1930. 19. David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 77. 20. “Las hazañas de un héroe mexicano en Francia,” La Prensa, January 13, 1930. 21. “Hall of Valor, Marcos B. Armijo,” Military Times, accessed March 6, 2012, http:// valor.militarytimes.com/recipient.php?recipientid=10469. 22. Ian Haney-­López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 2, accessed December 4, 2016, eBook Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost. 23. “Box Proposes New Alien Limit,” San Antonio Express, January 14, 1930. 24. Ibid. 25. “No Call for New World Immigration Quota,” San Antonio Express, January 15, 1930; “Sound Objections to the Box and Johnson Bills,” San Antonio Express, January 24, 1930; “Widespread Opposition to the Box Bill,” San Antonio Express, January 29, 1930; “Faulty Immigration Measures,” San Antonio Express, January 31, 1930; “Hardship to Farmers in the Southwest,” San Antonio Express, February 5, 1930; “Immigration Figures and the Box Bill,” San Antonio Express, February 14, 1930; “Most Obnoxious of the Quota Bills,” San Antonio Express, February 19, 1930; “Fresh Immigration Blunders,” San Antonio Express, February 25, 1930; “From Bad to Worse in Immigration Bills,” San Antonio Express, February 28, 1930. 26. David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (1987; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 182, 186. All citations refer to the 1992 printing. 27. “Bill Bars Employing of Aliens Illegally in United States,” San Antonio Express, February 4, 1930. 28. Robert Pear, “President Signs Landmark Bill on Immigration,” New York Times, November 7, 1986. 29. “Widespread Opposition to the Box Bill.” 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Teresa J. Guess, “The Social Construction of Whiteness: Racism by Intent, Racism by Consequence,” Critical Sociology 32, no. 4 (2006): 22. 33. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 40. All citations refer to the 1967 edition. 34. “Hearing on Alien Bill in Uproar,” San Antonio Express, February 1, 1930. 35. “Mexican Quota Fight Continues,” San Antonio Express, February 4, 1930. The article gave an incorrect name and title for F. Stuart Fitzpatrick. See “Statement of F. Stuart Fitzpatrick, Manager of the Civic Development Department of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, Washington, DC,” Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Western Hemisphere Immigration, 71st Congress, 2nd Session, 1930, 304, 314. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951d00857932t;view=1up;seq=3. 36. “De Priest, Oscar Stanton,” History, Art & Archives: United States House of Representatives, http://history.house.gov/People/Detail?id=12155. 37. “Statement of F. Stuart Fitzpatrick,” 114–115. 38. “Negro Would Halt All Immigration,” San Antonio Light, Jan. 27, 1930. 39. “As to ‘Depriving Americans of Employment,’” San Antonio Express, May 30, 1930. 40. Ibid.

204 Notes to Pages 75–80 41. Ibid. 42. George Fox Mott ed., New Survey of Journalism, 3rd ed. (1950; rev. 1953 New York: Barnes & Noble), 260–264. All citations refer to the 1953 edition. First published in 1937 as An Outline Survey of Journalism. 43. Ibid., 266. 44. Arthur Brisbane, “Today,” San Antonio Light, August 3, 1930. 45. “Garner to Carry on in Immigration Fight,” San Antonio Express, March 2, 1930. 46. “Hardship to Farmers in the Southwest,” San Antonio Express, February 5, 1930. 47. Marco Polo, “Aspectos del Mejico emigrado,” La Prensa, May 1, 1930. 48. “Los mexicanos constituyen uno de los valores economicos más importantes con que cuenta San Antonio,” La Prensa, January 12, 1930. 49. “Mexican Residents Praised as One of San Antonio’s Greatest Assets by Assistant School Superintendent,” San Antonio Express, January 10, 1930. 50. “Box Bill Author Loses His Race in 2nd District,” San Antonio Express, July 28, 1930. “El Congresista Box pierde su reelección,” La Prensa, July 29, 1930. 51. “With the Primary Defeat of Representative Box,” San Antonio Express, July 29, 1930. 52. James K. Hertog and Douglas McLeod, “A Multiperspectival Approach to Framing Analysis: A Field Guide,” in Framing Public Life: Perspectives on Media and Our Understanding of the Social World, ed. Stephen D. Reese, Oscar H. Gandy Jr., and August E. Grant (2001; repr., Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003), 144. 53. “$100,000 Refused for Immigration,” San Antonio Express, January 30, 1930. 54. Cynthia E. Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 151–180. 55. “$100,000 Refused for Immigration.” 56. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 97. All citations are to the 2005 edition. 57. Ibid., 105, 110. 58. “Tobacco Quid Undoing of Chinamen,” San Antonio Light, August 16, 1930. 59. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 113. 60. Arthur Brisbane, “Today,” San Antonio Light, January 26, 1930. 61. “Filipinos Protest Immigration Bill,” San Antonio Light, April 13, 1930. 62. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 122. 63. Ibid., 107. For instance, in 1928 asparagus workers in Stockton, California, organized to press wage demands. In 1930 Filipino lettuce workers in Salinas, California, struck for higher wages. 64. “Statement of Harry Chandler, President Los Angeles Times Co.,” Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Western Hemisphere Immigration, 71st Congress, 2nd Session, 1930, 63–79. 65. “Mexican Quota Plan Opposed,” San Antonio Express, January 25, 1930. 66. “Statement of Harry Chandler,” 72. 67. “Mexican Labor Survey Sought,” San Antonio Express, January 31, 1930. 68. Rodolfo Uranga, “Glosario del dia,” La Prensa, May 6, 1930. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 81–87  205 72. Ibid. 73. Neil Foley, “Over the Rainbow,” in The Latino/a Condition: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, 2nd ed. (1998; New York: New York University Press, 2011), 448–449. All citations refer to the 2011 edition. 74. “Se suspendió la separación de los escolares mexicanos, un triunfo de la raza en Del Rio, Tex.,” La Prensa, March 25, 1930. 75. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 191–196. 76. Ibid. 77. Foley, “Over the Rainbow,” 449. 78. “US Court to Settle Mexican School Row,” San Antonio Light, June 5, 1931. 79. “Se perdió en definitiva el asunto de la segregación,” La Prensa, November 24, 1930. 80. “Latin American League to Meet,” San Antonio Express, November 8, 1931. “Group to Fight Policy of Schools,” San Antonio Express, November 28, 1931. 81. Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (1997; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 5. All citations are to the 1999 edition. 82. “Los mexicanos constituyen uno de los valores economicos.” 83. “Statement of Harry Chandler.” 84. Ibid., 64. 85. Ibid. 86. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 92. 87. “Chamber in Mexico Asks Veto on Ban,” San Antonio Light, May 26, 1930. 88. “Anti-­Mexico Bill Opposed,” San Antonio Light, June 1, 1930. 89. “Garner Fights Mexican Ban,” San Antonio Light, June 8, 1930. 90. “Widespread Opposition to the Box Bill.” 91. Ibid. 92. “Most Obnoxious of the Quota Bills.” 93. “Fresh Immigration Blunders.” 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid. 96. “No es necesario imponer cuota a la inmigración de mexicanos,” La Prensa, March 16, 1930. 97. “Son los que pasaron en 1929, por 58,883 que entraron en el año de 1928,” La Prensa, January 13, 1930. 98. “Cesó ya el éxodo de braceros a los EE. UU.,” La Prensa, August 11, 1930. 99. “1,596 repatriados entran por Juarez,” La Prensa, August 11, 1930. 100. Charles H. Sherrill, Modernizing the Monroe Doctrine (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), vii. 101. “Mexican Paper Scores Box Bill,” San Antonio Express, May 22, 1930. 102. Ibid. 103. “Mexican Flays Monroe Doctrine,” San Antonio Express, July 27, 1930. 104. “500 escolares mexicanos deportados,” La Prensa, March 27, 1930. 105. “Ha disminuido la población escolar de El Paso, a causa de las deportaciónes,” La Prensa, March 30, 1930. 106. “Aliens Seeking to Be Deported Swamp Immigration Men,” San Antonio Express, October 22, 1930. 107. Ibid.

206 Notes to Pages 88–97 108. “Deportan a 20 cada dia por termino medio,” La Prensa, August 11, 1930. 109. “Un convoy con cerca de 1,600 repatriados,” La Prensa, August 25, 1930. 110. “Los repatriados son explotados por ‘coyotes,’ ” La Prensa, October 26, 1930. 111. “Weakley Wires Cabinet Officer regarding Use of Telegram,” San Antonio Light, May 1, 1930. 112. “McAllister Flays Bond Issue on Air,” San Antonio Express, April 20, 1930. 113. “Deportation Faces Alien Voters,” San Antonio Light, April 20, 1930. 114. “Mexicans Get Vote Warning,” San Antonio Light, April 25, 1930. 115. “San Antonio Suburbs Hear Mayor’s Bond Address,” San Antonio Light, April 20, 1930. 116. “Bond Election Contest Charges Illegal Voting,” San Antonio Express, May 10, 1930. 117. “Alien Scare Cuts Census,” San Antonio Light, May 22, 1930. 118. Leon Nelson Flint, The Editorial: A Study in the Effectiveness of Writing (New York: D. Appleton, 1920), 11. 119. A. Gayle Waldrop, Editor and Editorial Writer (New York: Rinehart), 55. 120. “United States Should Clean House,” San Antonio Light, August 2, 1930. 121. “The Hearst Papers Advocate,” San Antonio Light, August 19, 1930. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid. 124. Mark J. Leff, The Limits of Symbolic Reform: The New Deal and Taxation, 1933– 1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 67. 125. “Selective Amendment to Immigration Act,” San Antonio Light, September 22, 1930. 126. Ibid. 127. “Varios diputados piden que se den facilidades a los mexicanos que se repatrien,” La Prensa, February 20, 1930. 128. “Importante indicación a los compatriotas que regresan al pais,” La Prensa, November 22, 1930. 129. “Los deportados deben presentarse a inmigración,” La Prensa, July 7, 1930. 130. “¿Que se les va a dar?,” La Prensa, December 6, 1930. 131. “Se cree inevitable la cuota, los agricultores deben preparse para hacer frente a la situación,” La Prensa, March 19, 1930. 132. Willard G. Bleyer, Newspaper Writing and Editing, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), 49. 133. “Ayuda a cinco mil mexicanos,” La Prensa, June 27, 1930. 134. “Llegan más deportados,” La Prensa, June 27, 1930. 135. “4980 mexicanos se repatriaron en tres meses,” La Prensa, July 9, 1930. 136. “1600 mexicanos seran repatriados el lunes,” La Prensa, August 16, 1930. 137. “4,782 mexicanos regresaron por N. Laredo,” La Prensa, December 4, 1930. 138. “Disminuye la inmigración de mexicanos,” La Prensa, November 13, 1930. The numbers were reported on a fiscal-­year basis. 139. “Padres Franciscanos alimentan a los desocupados,” La Prensa, November 13, 1930. 140. Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Representations, no. 26, special issue: Memory and Counter-­Memory (Spring 1989), 108–109. 141. “Steffler Opposes Losoya Street Change,” San Antonio Express, January 25, 1930; “Losoya to Remain as Street Name,” San Antonio Express, January 26, 1930.

Notes to Pages 97–103  207 142. “Platform for Greater San Antonio,” San Antonio Express, January 2, 1930. 143. “Provide a Worthy Setting for Priceless Possessions,” San Antonio Express, January 9, 1930. 144. “Memorial for Texas Heroes,” San Antonio Express, January 30, 1930. 145. Paul S. Taylor, An American-­Mexican Frontier, Nueces County, Texas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934), 274. 146. Laura Hernández-­Ehrisman, Inventing the Fiesta City: Heritage and Carnival in San Antonio (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 96. Hernández-­ Ehrisman writes, for instance, that the Anglo women organizers of San Antonio’s bicentennial celebration planned to play the part of the first immigrants, the Spanish-­speaking Canary Islanders, and expressed surprise when the Canary Islanders’ descendants wanted to play the part of their own ancestors. See also page 84, where Hernández-­Ehrisman writes that the Anglo-­dominated San Antonio Conservation Society, known as SACS, “operated within a space between the Spanish fantasy and the Mexican reality. To some extent they embraced Mexicano culture and Mexicanos’ presence but wanted to supervise their role in the city’s public culture.” 147. “Centenario de las misiones catolicas,” La Prensa, July 30, 1930. 148. “Una reliquía histórica ha sido tomada de la Misión de San José,” La Prensa, October 15, 1930. “Copper Bell Again Taken from Mission,” San Antonio Express, October 15, 1930. “San Jose Bell Is Stolen from S.A. Shrine,” San Antonio Light, October 14, 1930. 149. “Mystery of San Antonio Mission Solved,” San Antonio Light, January 12,1930. 150. “Recreating the Old San Antonio Road,” San Antonio Express, January 27, 1930. The Express editorial writer expressed a clear sense of the significance of San Antonio’s Spanish colonial past, writing: “The reconstruction task follows ancient precedent. Don Antonio Cordero, Spanish Governor of San Antonio, ordered the road—then called El Camino Real— or King’s Highway—repaired in 1805. The Congress of the Republic of Texas passed a bill directing its improvement in 1839. The restoration work of 1930 should be done so thoroughly as to last forever.” 151. “Marking the Chisholm Trail,” San Antonio Express, May 21, 1930. 152. Hernández-­Ehrisman, Inventing the Fiesta City, 43. 153. “Floats to Carry Spanish Theme,” San Antonio Express, February 19, 1930. 154. “Los Pastores Witnessed by 400,” San Antonio Light, December 23, 1930. 155. Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997; repr., London: Sage, 2010), 239–242. All citations are to the 2010 printing. 156. Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-­Speaking People of the United States, new ed. (1948; New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 50. All citations refer to the new edition. 157. “Mexican Quota Plan Opposed, Much Better than Filipinos, Harry Chandler Tells Committee,” San Antonio Express, January 25, 1930. 158. Alfred M. Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social Instrument (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 636. 159. Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011), 4. 160. Ibid., 3. 161. Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 84.

208 Notes to Pages 103–110 162. Sexton, Monroe Doctrine, 242. 163. Foley, White Scourge, 3. 164. “Widespread Opposition to the Box Bill.”

Chapter 3 Epigraph: “La tragedia del los repatriados,” La Prensa, November 25, 1931. 1. “Repatriados que van en el techo de los trenes,” La Prensa, June 16, 1931. 2. Ibid. 3. Box 24, Folder 3, Record of Minutes, Lozano Newspapers, Inc., November 12, 1931, Lozano Family/La Opinión Collection, 1875–2006, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 4. “Clasifican en 3 grupos a los repatriados,” La Prensa, January 20, 1931. 5. “Un mensaje de amistad del comercio de El Paso, Texas,” La Prensa, March 22, 1931. 6. Ibid. 7. “Alien Laws OK Killam Reports,” San Antonio Express, February 2, 1931. 8. “Discussion Group Will Hold Meeting,” San Antonio Express, February 5, 1931. 9. San Antonio Express, February 8, 1931. The article appeared without a headline. 10. Ibid. 11. “600 repatriados obtuvieron pases en el tren,” La Prensa, October 23, 1931. 12. “Un repatriado se dio muerte en el tren,” La Prensa, September 27, 1931. 13. “600 repatriados obtuvieron pases en el tren.” 14. “Queman los colchones de los repatriados,” La Prensa, October 7, 1931. 15. “1,500 deportados arribaron a Aguascalientes,” La Prensa, January 22, 1931. 16. Ibid. 17. “9 mexicanos arribaron a Tampico, en estado verdaderamente triste,” La Prensa, February 1, 1931. 18. “Repatriation Planned of Jobless Mexicans,” San Antonio Express, September 25, 1931. 19. “El Missouri, Kansas, Texas facilito los transportes a unos deportados,” La Prensa, September 29, 1931. 20. “Llegaron más repatriados a Juárez,” La Prensa, March 17, 1931. 21. Ibid. 22. Lori Helmbold, review of Unwanted Mexicans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929–1939, by Abraham Hoffman, Aztlán 6, no. 3 (Fall 1975): 468. 23. Hoffman, Unwanted Mexicans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929–1939 (1974; repr., Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1979), 40–41. All citations are from the 1979 edition. 24. “Llegaron mas repatriados a Juárez.” 25. “En Nogales se obliga a los repatriados a pagar derechos de importación por sus autos,” La Prensa, March 17, 1931. 26. “2,700 pases libres, dados en tres semanas a mexicanos repatriados en C. Juárez,” La Prensa, April 4, 1931. 27. “Protesta el consul,” La Prensa, May 18, 1931. 28. “800 familias mexicanas se disponen a emprender a pie a su viaje a la patria,” La Prensa, September 27, 1931.

Notes to Pages 111–119  209 29. “Salida de los repatriados de Karnes City,” La Prensa, September 29, 1931. 30. “250 Mexican Families Start Trip to Homeland in Trucks and Autos from Karnes County via This City,” San Antonio Express, October 18, 1931. 31. Ibid. 32. “1600 Mexicans on the Way Back,” San Antonio Light, October 18, 1931. 33. “Hubo 5 nacimientos en la caravana,” La Prensa, October 20, 1931; “En Hebbronville sera inhumado el mexicano que pereció en la caravana de repatriados,” La Prensa, June 16, 1931. 34. Robert A. Calvert, Arnoldo De León, and Gregg Cantrell, The History of Texas, 4th ed. (1990; Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2007), 322–323. All citations are to the 2007 edition. 35. “1,500 Mexicans Cross Rio Grande,” San Antonio Express, October 19, 1931. 36. “National Welfare Demands Stricter Immigration Laws,” San Antonio Light, April 28, 1931. 37. W. N. Doak, “United States Gradually Closing Gates against Immigration,” San Antonio Light, June 21, 1931. 38. “Why Not a Round-­up of Undesirable Aliens?” San Antonio Light, August 7, 1931. 39. “Repatriates in Mexico Are Starving,” San Antonio Light, November 11, 1931. 40. “800 familias mexicanas se disponen a emprender a pie a su viaje a la patria.” 41. “1600 Mexicans on the Way Back.” 42. “La gran ayuda de Laredo a los repatriados de Karnes,” La Prensa, November 1, 1931. 43. “Nuevo Laredo ayudó también a los repatriados,” La Prensa, October 21, 1931. 44. Ibid. 45. “Quedó cerrado ya el Comite de Auxilios,” La Prensa, October 21, 1931. 46. “La cooperación del comercio fue también muy valiosa, espontanea y oportuna,” La Prensa, November 1, 1931. 47. “La ayuda de Nuevo Laredo a los repatriados fue también de una gran importancia,” La Prensa, October 28, 1931. 48. “Viajeros de Donna, Tex.,” La Prensa, October 28, 1931. 49. “Hoy es la corrida a beneficio de los repatriados,” La Prensa, May 3, 1931. 50. “Unas religiosas dan asilo a las mujeres y niños mexicanos que van a ser deportados,” La Prensa, August 12, 1931. 51. “Help for Repatriates by Mexico Exhausted,” San Antonio Express, December 13, 1931. 52. “Blue Cross in Drive,” San Antonio Express, February 13, 1931. 53. “Amateur Bull Fight and Fiesta Planned,” San Antonio Express, March 6, 1931. 54. “El regreso a la patria,” La Prensa, January 7, 1931. 55. “Utiles recomendaciones a los repatriados pare que se eviten dificultades,” La Prensa, April 25, 1931. 56. “Un importante consejo a los repatriados,” La Prensa, June 12, 1931. 57. “El regreso a la patria.” 58. Ibid. 59. “40,000 Mexicans Return to Homeland,” San Antonio Express, July 1, 1931. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. “21,000 mexicanos repatriados durante los ultimos meses, por Nuevo Laredo,” La Prensa, January 3, 1931.

210 Notes to Pages 120–129 63. “14,000 mexicanos repatriados por Ciudad Juárez,” La Prensa, March 20, 1931. 64. “292 mexicanos deportados el mes de julio,” La Prensa, August 12, 1931. 65. Ibid. 66. “Mexican Exodus Will Pass 50,000 Mark,” San Antonio Express, December 21, 1931. 67. “Shires Greatest Batter in League,” San Antonio Express, December 21, 1931. 68. “1931 Repatriates to Mexico May Exceed 150,000,” San Antonio Light, December 7, 1931. 69. “Dirt Not So Cheap in NY,” San Antonio Light, December 7, 1931. 70. “Officials Here to Aid in Fête,” San Antonio Light, March 4, 1931. 71. “Ayer fue inaugurado el Palacio del Gobernador,” La Prensa, March 5, 1931. 72. “Comedores y dormitorios para los repatriados,” La Prensa, March 5, 1931. 73. Harvey P. Smith, “Architect Who Restored Palace Appeals to San Antonio to Keep Individuality All Its Own,” San Antonio Express, March 1, 1931. 74. “Ayer fue inaugurado el Palacio del Gobernador.” 75. “Spanish Palace Dedicated amid Setting of 1731,” San Antonio Express, March 5, 1931. 76. Neil Foley, “Over the Rainbow,” in The Latino/a Condition: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, 2nd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 449. First edition published 1998. All citations are to the 2011 edition. 77. Juan F. Perea, “Buscando America: Why Integration and Equal Protection Fail to Protect Latinos,” in The Latino/a Condition, 604. 78. “Terminan las fiestas en San Antonio,” La Prensa, March 10, 1931. 79. Ibid. 80. “1,600 repatriados llegaran hoy a Mexico,” La Prensa, March 10, 1931. 81. Ibid. 82. “1,600 repatriados llegaran hoy a Mexico.” 83. Ibid. 84. “Stone Dedicated to City Founders,” San Antonio Express, March 10, 1931. 85. “Chimes Ring in San Antonio’s Birthday,” San Antonio Light, March 9, 1931. 86. Carlos E. Cortés, “The Mexican American Press,” in The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical Analysis and Handbook, ed. Sallie M. Miller (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987), 254. 87. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (1992; repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 42. All citations are to the 1994 printing. 88. Ibid., 15. 89. Ibid. 90. Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Representations no. 26, special issue: Memory and Counter-­Memory (Spring 1989): 108–109. 91. Smith, “Architect Who Restored Palace Appeals to San Antonio to Keep Individuality All Its Own.” 92. “Texas History Movies: Bowie Is Said to Have Dealings with the Pirate Lafitte,” San Antonio Light, May 1, 1931. 93. “Light Moves into New Home,” San Antonio Light, February 23, 1931. 94. Jesse Villerreal, “Boy Describes Day at Paper,” San Antonio Light, May 1, 1930. 95. “New Building Typifies Confidence in Community Declares W. R. Hearst,” San Antonio Light, May 26, 1931.

Notes to Pages 129–135  211 96. “Light Moves into New Home.” 97. Michael Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 42. 98. David Treadwell, “Journalists Discuss Coverage of Movement: Media Role in Civil Rights Era Reviewed,” Los Angeles Times, April 5, 1987. Lewis was referring to journalists covering the civil rights movement of the South in the 1950s and 1960s. 99. Gaye Tuchman, “The Symbolic Annihilation of Women by the Mass Media,” in Culture and Politics: A Reader, ed. Lane Crothers and Charles Lockhart (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 154. 100. “El Banco ‘City National’ de San Antonio, estara cerrado durante algunos días,” La Prensa, September 29, 1931. 101. David J. Weber, “The Spanish Legacy in North America and the Historical Imagination,” Western Historical Quarterly 23, no. 1 (February 1992): 6. 102. “La tragedia de los repatriados.”

Chapter 4 Epigraph: Anna Ellis, “Unemployed in New Field—Restoring Granary at Mission San José,” San Antonio Express, February 12, 1933. For information on Giles Corey and witchcraft in New England, see, for instance, Winfield S. Nevins, The Witches of Salem (1692; repr., Stamford, CT: Longmeadow Press, 1994), chapter 5, Martha and Giles Corey, 97–110. 1. “South Texas Alien Drive Is Started,” San Antonio Light, August 8, 1932. 2. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address of the President,” March 4, 1933, National Archives, accessed December 29, 2015, http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons /fdr-­inaugural/#documents. “Roosevelt’s Address” ran in its entirety on page 1 of the San Antonio Express, March 5, 1933. 3. Ruby A. Black, “Frances Perkins ‘Unwinds’ Labor Department; Ruthless in Fighting Efficiency,” Amarillo Globe, April 12, 1933. 4. “Labor Secretary Asks A.F.L. Advice,” San Antonio Express, March 3, 1933. “Miss Perkins’ Labor Plan Outlined,” San Antonio Light, March 3, 1933. 5. National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, Report on the Enforcement of the Deportation Laws of the United States (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1931), 177. 6. “Immigration Quiz Threatened Here,” San Antonio Express, April 11, 1933. 7. “Procedimientos más benignos en el servicio de migracíon en la zona de El Paso, Texas,” La Prensa, May 2, 1933. 8. Black, “Frances Perkins ‘Unwinds’ Labor Department.” 9. Associated Press, “Miss Perkins Cancels Fingerprint Orders,” San Antonio Express, April 15, 1933. 10. Ernest C. Hynds, “Editorial Page Editors Discuss Use of Letters,” Newspaper Research Journal 13, no. 1/2 (Fall 1991): 124. 11. José de La Peña, “Mexicans in Bread Line Defended,” San Antonio Light, May 22, 1932. 12. Resident, Letter to the Editor, San Antonio Light, May 16, 1933. 13. (Miss) H. Farias, “Cites Border Antics in Race Defense,” San Antonio Light, May 19. 1933.

212 Notes to Pages 136–143 14. D. D. Doyle, “ ‘Buy Texas,’ Urges Reader,” San Antonio Light, January 17, 1933. 15. “San Antonio Citizen, Suggests Mexicans Speak English,” San Antonio Light, January 28, 1933. 16. T. J. Remling, “Calls for English on S.A. Stations,” San Antonio Light, April 21, 1933. 17. Sabine Ulibarrí, “Language and Culture,” in Sabine R. Ulibarrí: Critical Essays, ed. María I. Duke dos Santos and Patricia de la Fuente (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 243. 18. B. L. Davila, “Defends Mexicans’ War Records,” San Antonio Light, January 28, 1933. 19. N. Aguilar, “Mexican Editor Boosts Idea,” San Antonio Light, January 25, 1933. 20. C. G. Cantu, “Mexican Labor in US Is Upheld,” San Antonio Light, January 29, 1933. 21. “League Gets Big Welcome from Mexicans at Rally,” San Antonio Light, July 15, 1932. 22. Willard G. Bleyer, Newspaper Writing and Editing, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), 48–49. 23. “Over 100 Mexicans Go to New Homes in South,” San Antonio Express, February 8, 1932. Also see “125 Mexicans to Quit San Antonio Sunday,” San Antonio Express, February 7, 1932. 24. Ibid. 25. “Repatriara el gobierno mil mexicanos,” La Prensa, February 6, 1933; “1,000 Mexicans to Be Sent Home,” San Antonio Express, February 7, 1933. 26. “Rush to Mexico for Jobs Fails,” San Antonio Express, February 8, 1933. 27. “Few Mexicans Returning Home,” San Antonio Express, February 12, 1933. 28. “El primer grupo de repatriados saldrá el lunes proximo,” La Prensa, February 19, 1933; “Mexican Group Leaves Monday,” San Antonio Express, February 19, 1933; “Mexico Gives S.A. Men Work,” San Antonio Light, February 19, 1933. 29. “Mexico Gives S.A. Men Work.” 30. “Veinte mexicanos deportados de Montana,” La Prensa, October 29, 1932. 31. “335 Mexicanos de Indiana vuelven a la patria,” La Prensa, June 11, 1932. 32. “Millares de betabeleros abandonaran Colorado,” La Prensa, May 8, 1932. 33. “United Way Worldwide History,” United Way, accessed April 13, 2012, http://www .unitedway.org/pages/history/. 34. “Millares de betabeleros abandonaron Colorado.” 35. Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-­ Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 165. 36. Zaragosa Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-­Century America (2005; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 54. All citations are to the 2008 printing. 37. “Aliens Rush to Become Citizens,” San Antonio Light, November 29, 1933. 38. “24,799 Mexicanos repatriados en diez meses,” La Prensa, October 31, 1932. 39. Abraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexicans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929–1939 (1974; Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1979), 126. All citations are to the 1979 edition. 40. “1,300 repatriados encontraron ya ocupación,” La Prensa, August 10, 1932. 41. “Se espera un tren de repatriados,” La Prensa, December 12, 1933. 42. “10 and 20 Years Ago (From the Files of the San Antonio Light),” San Antonio Light, 1922. 43. James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, rev. ed.

Notes to Pages 143–151  213 (New York: Routledge, 2009), 58–59 (originally published Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). All citations are to the 2009 edition. 44. See Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights, chap. 1, and particularly 39, 60–61. Vargas states that US business interests deliberately overhired Mexican workers, a system that during the Great Depression resulted in an excessive labor supply. Vargas agrees with Ernesto Galarza that “repatriation was nothing more than the wholesale disposal of human labor below the border.” 45. Audit Bureau of Circulations, Chicago, “Audit Report, La Prensa, for twelve months ending June 30, 1932.” 46. “30,000 repatriados sin techo y sin pan,” La Prensa, February 2, 1932. 47. “9 fueron los repatriados muertos,” La Prensa, March 26, 1933. 48. “3 comedores gratis para repatriados,” La Prensa, October 25, 1932. 49. “El día 25 sera la Colecta Nacional Pro-­Repatriados,” La Prensa, December 4, 1932. 50. “Los diputados ayudaran con cincuenta pesos a los repatriados,” La Prensa, January 19, 1933. 51. “Few Mexicans Returning Home.” 52. “Queda más de un millon de mexicanos en EE. UU.,” La Prensa, June 19, 1933. 53. “Un repatriado mata a su esposa y a su hija y se ahorca,” La Prensa, April 26, 1932. 54. Ibid. 55. “Venimos a morir de hambre y a causar lastimas,” La Prensa, April 28, 1933. 56. “Angustiosa situación de unos colonos que fueron engañados en California,” La Prensa, January 4, 1932. 57. Hoffman, Unwanted Mexicans, 139–144. 58. “275 repatriados llegan hambrientos, enfermos y desnudos, a la Metropoli,” La Prensa, April 18, 1933. 59. “Auxilios a los repatriados,” La Prensa, July 18, 1933. 60. “US Neighbors Trying Many Recovery Methods,” San Antonio Light, July 13, 1933. 61. “Federal Court has ‘Cure’ for Aliens,” San Antonio Light, March 10, 1933. 62. “Urges Slogans, ‘Hire American,’ ” W. H. Wicke, San Antonio Light, January 12, 1933. 63. “Goodwill to Mexico,” San Antonio Express, May 3, 1933. 64. “Cuestiones sobre la repatriación,” La Prensa, April 29, 1932. 65. “Otro mexicano logro la libertad y se repatria,” La Prensa, April 2, 1932. 66. “El comite pro-­repatriados de Laredo informa de su gestión en diciembre,” La Prensa, January 22, 1932. 67. “Diego Rivera ha realizado una eficaz labor en favor de la repatriación de mexicanos,” La Prensa, October 16, 1932. 68. “Visit Rivera Court: Industry and Technology as the Indigenous Culture of Detroit,” Detroit Institute of Arts, accessed April 16, 2012, http://www.dia.org/art/rivera-­court.aspx. Now considered possibly his finest work, Rivera’s murals were not universally applauded at the time. Although Rivera’s role in repatriating Mexicans from Detroit was not evident in the Express coverage analyzed in this study, the Express did publish a page-­one story, “Machine Slavery in Rivera Paintings Leads to Protest,” on March 26, 1933. Detroit’s Rev. H. Ralph Higgins, the head of a citizens’ committee, protested that Rivera’s murals were “grossly one-­ sided, materialistic, and an unfair interpretation of Detroit life.” 69. “Diego Rivera ha realizado una eficaz labor.” 70. “Los repatriados no deben llevar dinero mexicano en plata,” La Prensa, January 5, 1932.

214 Notes to Pages 152–162 71. “El fracaso de la repatriación,” La Prensa, February 24, 1931. 72. Ibid. 73. “La repatriación engañosa,” La Prensa, May 1, 1933. 74. “La colonización acertada,” La Prensa, October 16, 1933. 75. “A la Prensa, a nuestros amigos y al publico,” La Prensa, February 13, 1913. 76. Ibid. 77. “Recomendación del consulado en Kansas City,” La Prensa, May 4, 1933. 78. “Guerra prohibe a los repatriados llevar armas,” La Prensa, October 28, 1933. 79. “La unión de los dos Méxicos,” La Prensa, July 19, 1933. The editorial noted that the Labor Party was trying to control 200,000 votes in the next presidential election. 80. Rodolfo Uranga, “Glosario del dia,” La Prensa, February 16, 1929. 81. National Bureau of Economic Research, Business Cycle Dates, accessed June 3, 2012, http://www.nber.org/cycles/cyclesmain.html. 82. “Platform for a Greater San Antonio,” San Antonio Express, January 3, 1930. 83. See, for example, “City Holding Up Alamo Park Plan,” San Antonio Express, September 4, 1932; “Merchants Kick at Alamo Plans,” San Antonio Express, February 7, 1933; “Crowding Alamo Plan Protested,” San Antonio Express, February 15, 1933. 84. Richard R. Flores, Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 11. 85. “Crowding Alamo Plan Protested.” 86. “A New-­Old Schoolhouse at Mission Espada,” San Antonio Express, September 22, 1932. See also “Mission School to Be Remodeled,” San Antonio Express, September 21, 1932. 87. “A New-­Old Schoolhouse at Mission Espada.” 88. Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (1992; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 127. All citations are to the 1994 edition. 89. “Rare Finds Are Made at SA Missions,” San Antonio Light, December 17, 1933. 90. “The Army and the Mission Have Helped to Build Your City,” advertisement, San Antonio Express, February 12, 1933. 91. “Unemployed in New Field—Restoring Granary at Mission San José.” 92. Ibid. 93. “Relic of Padres,” San Antonio Light, May 3, 1933. 94. “Rare Finds Are Made at SA Missions.” 95. Ibid. 96. “Revive Old Process,” San Antonio Light, August 7, 1933. 97. “Saint of Kitchen,” San Antonio Light, July 6, 1933. 98. “Old Benches Find New Home,” San Antonio Light, February 4, 1933. 99. Bodnar, Remaking America, 127. 100. “The Call to Arms at Dolores,” San Antonio Express, September 16, 1932. See also “Mexicans Plan Annual Festival,” San Antonio Express, September 6, 1932; “2 Mexican Fetes Planned Tonight,” San Antonio Express, September 15, 1932; “Sons of America in 5-­Day Program,” San Antonio Express, September 11, 1932. 101. “Apreciaciones sobre los ‘Periodicos Lozano,’ ” La Prensa, January 2, 1932. 102. Lisa Jarvinen, The Rise of Spanish-­Language Filmmaking: Out from Hollywood’s Shadow, 1929–1939 (Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 17–20.

Notes to Pages 162–17 1  215 103. Box 25, Folder 3, Minute Books: Record of Minute Book #1 (1928–1929) Lozano Family / La Opinión Collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 104. Box 24, Folder 3 Agreements: Calderon, Mauricio, et al (1931) Lozano Family / La Opinión Collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 105. Nemesio Garcia Naranjo, “Los 19 años de La Prensa,” La Prensa, February 13, 1932.

Chapter 5 Epigraph 1: San Antonio Express, “The Complete Newspaper’s Influence,” (advertisement) September 16, 1932. Epigraph 2: Letter from William McIntosh to William Randolph Hearst, February 14, 1930. The William Randolph Hearst Papers, 1874–1951. The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. BANC MSS 77/121 c 19.43-­2. Epigraph 3: “Viente años de vida,” La Prensa, February 13, 1933. 1. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (1990; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 134. All citations refer to the 2006 printing. 2. “Widespread Opposition to the Box Bill,” San Antonio Express, January 29, 1930. 3. Ibid. 4. Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time (1979; repr., New York: Random House, 1980), 201. All citations are to the 1980 printing. 5. James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 17 (originally published Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). All citations refer to the 2009 edition. 6. Letter from McIntosh to Hearst, February 14, 1930, The William Randolph Hearst Papers. 7. “A Year of Bigger Business for This City and This Region,” San Antonio Express, January 1, 1931. 8. Rubén Munguía, “La Prensa: Memories of a Boy . . . Sixty Years Later,” The Americas Review 17, nos. 3–4 (Fall–­Winter 1989): 131. 9. “Creese que los mexicanos que regresan al pais aportaron cien millones de pesos,” La Prensa, July 21, 1929. “Many Mexicans Are Returning,” San Antonio Express, February 1, 1930. Sigue el éxodo de mexicanos a la patria, La Prensa, October 24, 1930. Rodolfo Uranga, “Glosario del dia,” La Prensa, July 25, 1929. “El regreso a la patria, La Prensa, January 7, 1931. “40,000 Mexicans Return to Homeland,” San Antonio Express, July 1, 1931. 10. “Veinte años de vida.” 11. Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997; repr., London: Sage, 2010) , 1–3. All citations are to the 2010 printing. 12. Sabine Ulibarrí, “Language and Culture,” in Sabine R. Ulibarrí: Critical Essays, ed. María I. Duke dos Santos and Patricia de la Fuente (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 243. 13. Michael Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 42. 14. “Los mexicanos constituyen uno de los valores economicos mas importantes con que cuenta San Antonio,” La Prensa, January 12, 1930.

216 Notes to Pages 172–177 15. Schudson, Power of News, 33. 16. Zaragosa Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-­Century America (2005; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 16–61. All citations refer to the 2008 printing. 17. Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang, “Collective Memory and the News,” Communication 11, no. 2 (1989): 125. 18. Gaye Tuchman, “The Symbolic Annihilation of Women by the Mass Media,” in Culture and Politics: A Reader, ed. Lane Crothers and Charles Lockhart (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 154. 19. Gans, Deciding What’s News, 79–80, 201. 20. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 1. 21. Schudson, Power of News, 37. 22. “Honoring La Prensa,” San Antonio Express, February 17, 1938. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 343. 26. Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991; repr., New York: Vintage, 1993), 13. 27. Laura Hernández-­Ehrisman, Inventing the Fiesta City: Heritage and Carnival in San Antonio (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 84. 28. Historian Gary W. Gallagher described the concept of the South’s “Lost Cause” as “a public memory of the Confederacy that placed their wartime sacrifice and shattering defeat in the best possible light.” For more on this topic, see Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, eds., The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (2000; repr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). For the quote referenced in this footnote, see page 1 of the introduction. All citations refer to the 2010 edition. For information on the Union capitulation in San Antonio, see T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and Texans (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 352. 29. Ernest Peixotto, Our Hispanic Southwest (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 41. 30. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (1992; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 127. All citations are from the 1994 printing. 31. “Terminan las fiestas en San Antonio,” La Prensa, March 10, 1931. 32. Betty Houchin Winfield and Janice Hume, “The Continuous Past: Historical Referents in Nineteenth-­Century American Journalism,” Journalism Communication Monographs 9, no. 3 (August 2007): 123. 33. Reynolds R. McKay, “Texas Mexican Repatriation during the Great Depression” (PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, Norman, 1982), 573. 34. “La colonia ha respondido al llamado hecho por la beneficiencia mexicana,” La Prensa, February 15, 1931. 35. “Nuevo Laredo ayudó también a los repatriados,” La Prensa, October 21, 1931. 36. Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt, eds., Picturing the Past: Media, History, and Photography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 7.

Notes to Pages 177–181  217 37. “La colonia ha respondido al llamado hecho por la beneficiencia mexicana,” La Prensa, February 15, 1931. 38. “Box Will Revise Immigrant Bill,” San Antonio Express, December 4, 1929. 39. Randy Ontiveros, “No Golden Age: Television News and the Chicano Civil Rights Movement,” American Quarterly 62, no. 4 (December 2010): 897. 40. “Growers Flay Plan to Bring in Negroes,” San Antonio Light, November 3, 1929. 41. “1,000 Jobless Demand Work from City,” San Antonio Light, April 7, 1930. 42. “Veinte años de vida.” 43. Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 4. 44. “Latino History: An Interchange of Present Realities and Future Prospects,” Journal of American History 97, no. 2 (September 2010): 426. 45. Felipe Fernández-­Armesto, Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2014), 5. 46. Mike Corones, “Tracking Obama’s Deportation Numbers,” Reuters, February 25, 2015. 47. Anna Brown and Mark Hugo Lopez, “Mapping the Latino Population, by State, County and City,” PEW, August 29, 2013, http://www.pewhispanic.org/2013/08/29/iv -­ranking-­latino-­populations-­in-­the-­nations-­metropolitan-­areas/. 48. Tracy L. Barnett, “San Antonio’s Missions Declared a World Heritage Site,” USA Today, July 6, 2015. 49. “Trump Stands by Statements on Mexican Illegal Immigrants, Surprised by Backlash,” Fox News Politics, Foxnews.com, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/07/04/trump -­stands-­by-­views-­dangerous-­mexican-­illegal-­immigrants-­admits-­surprised-­by.html, July 4, 2015. 50. “League Gets Big Welcome from Mexicans at Rally,” San Antonio Light, July 15, 1932. 51. Rodolfo Uranga, “Glosario del dia,” La Prensa, May 6, 1930. 52. Lisa Mascaro, “Trump Once Welcomed a Visit from Immigrant ‘Dreamers.’ Now, They Anxiously Await His Next Move,” Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2016, http://www .latimes.com/nation/la-­na-­pol-­trump-­dreamers-­20161215-­story.html. 53. Michael Barajas, “Current 25: News War Ends with Hearst Closing the ‘Light,’ ” San Antonio Current, May 31, 2011, accessed March 12, 2016, http://bit.ly/1UoyMQ0. 54. Handbook of Texas Online, Nora E. Ríos McMillan, “La Prensa,” accessed March 12, 2016, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/eel03. 55. Camille Garcia, “La Prensa Founder, Publisher Tino Duran Retires,” Rivard Report, March 23, 2016, https://therivardreport.com/la-­prensa-­founder-­publisher-­retires/. 56. Lauren Walser, “Lost: Univision Building Demolished in San Antonio,” National Trust for Historic Preservation, November 20, 2013, https://savingplaces.org/stories/lost -­univision-­building-­demolished-­in-­san-­antonio/#.WGh226IrI_U.

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Primary Sources Newspapers Birmingham News (March 14, 1888, to June 26, 2012) La Prensa (February 13, 1913, to May 28, 1959) New York Times (September 18, 1851, to June 26, 2012) San Antonio Express (September 27, 1865, to September 7, 1984) San Antonio Express-­News (September 8, 1984, to August 26, 2012) San Antonio Light (April 3, 1883, to November 28, 1977)

Archives William Randolph Hearst Papers, BANC MSS 77/121 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Huntington Library’s Lozano family/La Opinión collection, 1875–2006, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. San Antonio Light Photograph Collection, University of Texas San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.

Lyrics Dúo Latino, “La crisis/The Crisis,” F. Miranda. Circa 1932. Public domain.

Government Documents Annual report of the Commissioner General of Immigration to the Secretary of Labor, fiscal year ended June 30, 1931. Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. “Inaugural Address of the President.” March 4, 1933. National Archives. http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/fdr-­inaugural/#documents. US Census. Characteristics of the Population, 1910, 1920, 1940. US Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics. 2010 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. Washington, DC: US Department of Homeland Security, August 2011.

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Index

Page numbers followed by f indicate figures; those followed by t indicate tables. Acuña, Manuel, 151 African Americans, 7, 102 agribusiness, 47–48, 77, 78, 93 Aguascalientes, Mexico, 108 Aguilar, N., 138 Alamo: Battle of, 2, 18; Express promotion of, 57, 154–155, 201n175; Light cartoon on, 128; and Spanish nostalgia, 55, 60, 96–98 Alcocer, Leonides, 159 Alien Registry Act (1929), 27, 34, 48–49, 62 Alma Latina, 138 American Federation of Labor, 47, 134 Americanhood, 161–162, 169 American Institute of Architects, 158 American journalism history, 130 American Legion, 106–107 American-Mexican Frontier (Taylor 1934), 98 amnesty frame, 62 Anderson, Benedict, 10 Anglos: and the Alamo, 155; and Black Legend, 127–128; and imperialist nostalgia, 97; and Mexican immigrants, 28; and Mexicans, 18; and Spanish nostalgia, 55, 157; and Tejanos, 15 Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Montejano 1987), 52, 81–82 architectural restoration, 156 Arizona: and La Prensa special correspondents, 167; and Mexican community,

40; and Mexican immigrants, 16; and Puerto Rican laborers, 53; and repatriates, 108; and Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 15; and twenty-first century immigration laws, 5 Armendariz, Pedro Jr., 194n133 Armijo, Marcos B., 71 Asian Americans, 9 Asian immigrants: and hierarchy of color frame, 78–80, 82; and labor organization, 178; restrictions on, 16, 192n92 Associated Press: and financial frame, 72; and hierarchy of color frame, 78, 80; and Mexican American civil rights movement, 102; and somos amigos/we are friends frame, 83, 86 Association of Latin American Parents and Teachers, 81 Aztec language, 60 Balderrama, Francisco E., 4, 10, 12, 94 Bancroft Library, 12 Barsotti, Carlo, 39 Batiza, Ignacio, 150 Battle of Flowers Parade, 99–100 Battle of San Jacinto, 97 Beach, Harrison L., 21 Belcher, C. C., 42 Bell, J. E., 43, 53 Beneficencia Mexicana, 38 Berger, Peter, 14, 73 birth registration, 196n35

230 Index black community, 74 Black Freedom Struggle, 6 Black Legend, 127–128, 159, 174 Black Tuesday, 63 black–white race binary: and civil rights history, 7–8, 52; and Express coverage, 73; and Mexicans and Mexican Americans, 25, 179; and public school desegregation battle, 82; and Texas, 51 Bleyer, Willard G., 93 Bodnar, John, 3, 55, 56, 127, 156, 159, 161, 175 Bohr, José, 162, 194n133 Bolaños de Serrano, Florentina, 146 Bond, Julian, 6 Border Patrol, 1, 37, 43–44, 88, 101 Bowie, James, 57, 128 Box, John C.: electoral defeat of, 77; and eugenics, 54, 116, 175, 177, 178; and hierarchy of color, 52–53, 82, 101, 136, 200n158; and quota debate, 17, 34–35, 47, 50, 72–73; racial rhetoric of, 78, 80, 122, 180; Rodolfo Uranga’s rebuttal of, 80–81. See also Box bill Box bill (immigration quotas): Judge C. C. Belcher’s opposition to, 42; El Universal editorial against, 86; and financial frame, 45, 46–47, 72; and Mexican labor, 67; opposition to by Express and La Prensa, 166, 171; and somos amigos/ we are friends frame, 48, 49, 50, 84. See also Box, John C. Boynton, Charles A., 35 Brackenridge, George W., 21 Bradley, Tom, 8 Brilliant, Mark, 7 Brisbane, Arthur, 75–76, 79, 82, 91 Brown Berets, 178 Brown v. Board of Education (1954), 6, 8, 82 Brucker, Wilber M., 150 business interests: Box attitude toward, 52–53; and Express framing, 44; and Mexican labor, 24, 35, 42–43, 47–48, 213n44; and quota debate, 46 Caballero, José, 182 California: and civil rights history, 7; and

Depression-era civil rights violations, 4; and Mexican labor, 101; as source of repatriates, 121; and Spanish nostalgia, 54, 55, 128 Canada, 50, 72, 84–85 Canales, Felipe, 28, 47 Canales, José Tomás, 78, 82, 102. See also LULAC Canary Islanders (San Antonio founders), 54, 126, 130, 160, 207n146 Cantú, C. G., 138 Cantú Lara, Renato, 110 Carey, James, 10, 143, 168 Carrillo, Alejandro P., 22f census, 90, 102 Central Relief Committee Main Avenue Commissary, 137f Chabot, Frederick, 57 Chamber of Commerce, 148 Chambers, C. M.: and Alamo Plaza plan, 97; on census, 90, 102; and Governor’s Palace restoration, 57; and jobs bond issue, 88, 89; and Mexican march for jobs (1930), 64; and San Antonio bicentennial, 125, 126, 127; on Spanish and Mexicans, 175–176 Chandler, Harry: and financial frame, 101; and hierarchy of color, 16, 80, 82, 136, 178; racial rhetoric of, 192n93; and somos amigos/we are friends frame, 83, 84, 86 charitable work, 37, 38 Chicago, 141 Chicago Rock Island and Pacific Railway Co., 41 Chicago World’s Fair (1893), 54, 55 Chicano studies, 4 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 16. See also Chinese immigrants Chinese immigrants, 78. See also Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) Chisholm, Jesse, 99 Chisholm Trail, 99 Cincinnati Post, 21 circulation: of La Prensa, 183–184; of San Antonio Express and Evening News, 184–185; of San Antonio Light, 185

Index  231 citizenship: of deportees, 165; and Express framing, 49–50; and financial frame, 107; and military service, 200n144; and Philippine independence, 79; and public health, 177; and Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 16; and whiteness, 72. See also nationality City-Central Bank and Trust Co., 130, 131f Ciudad Juárez, Mexico: and Mexican government aid to returnees, 145; and Mexican Migration office, 110; and repatriate numbers, 142; and returnees, 108–109; and voluntary returnees, 85, 120, 141 civil rights: and black–white race binary, 179; and hierarchy of color frame, 178; and journalistic challenges, 130; and La Prensa’s quantification frame, 120; and letters to the editor, 138; media narrative of, 6–11; and Mexican immigrants, 102; and repatriation, 4, 5 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 6 civil rights movement: emergence of, 189– 190n33; and journalists, 211n98; and La Prensa journalists, 130; and Mexican Americans, 8, 78, 102, 177; periodization of, 6–7; and Spanish-language news, 109. See also Long and Wide Civil Rights Movement Civil Works Administration (CWA), 58f class, 80–81, 82–83, 109 Cleveland Press, 21 Colorado, 141–142, 149 Columbian Exposition (1893). See Chicago World’s Fair (1893) Columbus, Christopher, 39 commodity racism, 9, 100, 157, 161. See also racism communists, 24, 64, 66 Community Chest, 141 Confederación Mexicana de Obreros y Campesinos, 84 Congress: Chandler testimony before, 101, 192n93; and citizenship for “white persons,” 72; and DACA, 25; and Filipino immigrants, 79; and immigration reform, 180; and Mexican labor, 27–28;

and quota debate, 3, 17, 49, 67, 73–74, 77; St. Paul Pioneer Press on, 85 consumer culture, 38 Coolidge, Calvin, 28, 35 Cordero, Manuel Antonio, 56 Correa, Heriberto, 38 corridos, 3–4 Cortés, Carlos, 13 Cortinas, Domingo, 137f cotton market collapse, 110–112, 113 Cotton Stabilization Corporation, 113 Cox, Patrick, 13 coyotes, 41, 88 Cristero Rebellion, 27, 31 Crockett, Davy, 57 Cronkite, Walter, 178 Crosby, Emilye, 6–7 Cruz, Ted, 180 Curtis, Charles, 113 Daughters and Sons of the Heroes of Texas, 56–57 Daughters of the American Revolution, 59 Daughters of the Republic of Texas, 155 Davila, B. L., 137 Davis, James J., 54 debt peonage, 33–34 Decade of Betrayal (Balderrama and Rodríguez 1994), 4, 12 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), 25 Del Rio, Texas: and fundraising for repatriates, 116; and public school desegregation battle, 81–82, 102; and unemployment, 106–107 deportation: of anyone without proof of citizenship, 141–142; defined, 188n13; of French Canadians by English, 51; harshness of, 134; Light advocacy of, 24; Mexican immigrant requests for, 87; of Mexicans, 3; under Obama administration, 180; and quantification frame, 69; versus repatriation, 95; and San Antonio INS District, 19; and unaccompanied minors, 25; unprecedented scale of during Depression, 166 deportees: and news frames, 29; and pariah

232 Index frame, 108; and quantification frame, 142; quantification of, 120; versus repatriates, 94; versus voluntary returnees, 119 De Priest, Oscar Stanton, 74 Detroit Institute of Arts, 150 Diehl, Charles S., 21 diplomacy, 48, 50, 56, 86 Doak, William N., 18–19, 113, 134 Dobie, J. Frank, 99 Domínguez, Efraín, 151 Doyle, D. D., 135–136 Dreamers, 181 Driscoll, Clara, 155 Du Bois, W. E. B., 70 Duran, Tino, 181 Eagle Pass, Texas, 35, 116, 151 economic recession of 1920–1921, 10 editorials, 29, 45. See also specific frames; specific newspapers education, 124–125 El Bejareño, 14 El Camino Real, 3, 55, 58–59, 207n150. See also Old San Antonio Road El hombre malo [The bad man], 67 Elizondo, Matilde, 112f Ellis, Anna, 175 El Paso: and anti-Mexican sentiment, 106; and deportation of schoolchildren, 87; and Mexican community’s charitable work, 115–116; and repatriation, 120 El Paso Chamber of Commerce, 106 El Universal, 86 English-language media, 127, 179 English-language newspapers: and American consciousness, 17; and border coverage, 61; and buried quantification stories, 121, 171; and coverage of repatriation, 3–4; and good-citizen frame, 177; and historical amnesia, 172–174; and majority culture, 10–11; and media frames, 69; and Mexican American identity, 9; and repatriation coverage, 164; as sites of memory, 25. See also specific newspapers Espinosa, Carlos, 1–2, 27

ethnic communities, 166 ethnicity: and hierarchy of color frame, 78, 82; and letters to the editor, 169; and Long and Wide Civil Rights Movement, 130; and media frames, 12; versus nationality, 66 ethnic media, 127 eugenicists, 116, 177, 178 eugenics: and hierarchy of color frame, 54; and immigration restrictions, 16; and Light editorial platform, 45, 91–92, 168, 178; and restrictionists, 52 Farias, H., 135 fault lines framework, 7 Federal Farm Board, 113 Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, 179 Filipino immigrants: Harry Chandler on, 192n93; John Nance Garner on, 76; and hierarchy of color frame, 78–80, 82, 102, 178; and labor organization, 204n63 financial crises: and reporters, 105; and xenophobia, 5 financial frame: in 1929 news coverage, 44–48; in 1930 news coverage, 69, 72–77, 101; in 1931 news coverage, 105– 107; in 1932–1933 news coverage, 148– 149; defined, 29; dominance of, 61–62; and Express coverage, 24; and Mexican labor, 166; and policy’s effect on people, 167; and prescriptive frame, 42; and somos amigos/we are friends frame, 50; and Spanish nostalgia frame, 56; and symbolic annihilation, 172 First Texas News Barons, The (Cox 2005), 13 Fitzpatrick, F. Stuart, 44, 47–48, 74, 203n35 Flores, Richard R., 155 Floresville, Texas, 59–60 Foley, Neil, 8, 82, 103 Fort Worth Press, 21 Fort Worth Record, 21 Franciscan Missions, 57–58, 96, 155–157, 180 Franklin, Benjamin, 135 Free, Arthur, 73

Index  233 Freedom Rides, 6 Fries, Fred, 196n35 Gaceta de Tejas, 14 Galarza, Ernesto, 213n44 Gallagher, Gary W., 216n28 Gans, Herbert, 167, 172 Garcia, Maria Cristina, 179 García Naranjo, Nemesio, 14, 162 Garner, John Nance, 76, 84 Gentlemen’s Agreement (1908), 16 Gitlin, Todd, 9 González, Gilbert, 32, 37 González, Henry B., 181 González, Leonides, 181 Gonzalez, Ventura, 31 good-citizen frame: and 1929 coverage, 37–39; and 1930 jobs march, 66; and 1931 coverage, 114–117; and 1932–1933 coverage, 149–151; defined, 29; and La Prensa’s construction of civic fabric, 130, 176–177; and Long and Wide Civil Rights Movement, 61; and Mexican community’s generosity, 160 Governor’s Palace, 56–57, 96, 122, 159 Grant, Madison, 52 Great Depression: and architectural restoration, 156; beginnings of, 187n4; and eugenics, 45; and journalistic challenges, 130; and majority culture, 10–11; and Mexican economy, 32; and Mexican immigration debates, 101; and Mexicans’ dilemma, 2; and news coverage, 27; and news frames, 168; parameters of, 12; and pioneering spirit, 175; and social fabric, 154; and Spanish nostalgia, 60 Great Recession, 5, 25, 180–181 Green, Herbert S., 63 Grito de Dolores, 161 Guglielmo, Thomas, 8 Gutiérrez, Félix, 13 Gutiérrez, Roberto, 134 Gutierrez Sifuentes, Carlos, 70–71 Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, 6 Hall, Stuart, 11, 14, 100

Handman, Max, 52 Harlingen Chamber of Commerce, 42–43 Harris, William J., 17, 74, 84 Hayes, Patrick Cardinal, 123 Hearst, William Randolph: and “Buy American,” 148; editorial policies of, 61; and eugenics, 75, 180; on immigration, 168; and Light editorial for deportation, 114; and Light editorial platform, 92; on new (1931) Light building, 129; and New Deal, 24; and newspaper chain ownership, 2, 21–22; and racist discourse, 122; and San Antonio newspapers, 181; and yellow journalism, 91 Hernández Cházaro, Eduardo, 111, 114, 115, 139 Hernández-Ehrisman, Laura, 100, 174 Hertog, James, 77 Hewitt, Nancy, 8 hierarchy of color frame: in 1929 news coverage, 52–54; in 1930 news coverage, 69, 78–83, 102; and civil rights history, 178–179; in letters to the editor, 136; Light avoidance of, 61; and Light coverage of 1930 jobs march, 66; and Light coverage of San Antonio bicentennial, 126–127; and Mexican immigration debates, 101 Higgins, H. Ralph, 213n68 Hispanophobia, 55 historiography, 13 Hoefgen, W. L., 47 Hoffman, Abraham, 4, 10, 94, 109, 188n15 Hollywood, ciudad de ensueño (Hollywood, City of Dreams, 1932), 162 Hoover, Herbert: and deportation procedures, 134; and William Doak, 18, 113; on immigration, 27–28; and immigration policy, 197n49; and somos amigos/ we are friends frame, 48, 50, 84; and unemployment, 66–67 Hoover administration: and deportation policy, 87, 183; and immigration crackdowns, 3, 67; and unemployment, 109 House Committee on Immigration, 45 Houston, Sam, 97 Hudspeth, Claude, 47

234 Index Hull, Harry E., 92 human-interest news, 94, 170, 172 Hume, Janice, 176 Huntington Library, 12 Huntress, Frank Granger, 19, 20f, 61–62 Idar, C. N., 134 Il Progresso Italo Americano, 39 immigrant news, 10 immigrants: anxiety of, 181; and deportation legislation, 202n198; deportation of, 2; in English- and Spanish-language press, 24–25; and health tests, 52; and job market, 106–107; and self-help, 29 immigration: American consciousness of, 17; and election rhetoric, 180; Light coverage of, 24; and Light editorial platform, 91–92; and unemployment, 113 Immigration Act (1882), 28 Immigration Act (1917), 52, 81 Immigration Act (1924), 16, 50, 52 immigration laws, 29, 52, 87, 93, 107, 133, 134 immigration legislation, 8, 10 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA, 1986), 62, 73 Immigration Service, 49 imperialist nostalgia, 97, 128, 157, 174 Indiana, 141 irrigation, 16 Japanese immigrants, 78, 192n92 Jiménez, Miguel, 149 jobless, the: and communists, 66; and deportation, 120; and immigration sweeps, 120; La Prensa coverage of, 69; and march for jobs, 64, 65f, 101, 167, 178; in Mexico, 32, 41, 105; and New Deal, 142; and pariah frame, 65, 108, 110–111, 144–145; and quantification frame, 95; and restoration projects, 158; scapegoating of, 88–89; and shady recruiters, 34; statistics for, 74. See also unemployment jobs: and immigrants, 138; in letters to the editor, 136; and quantification frame, 142–143; and repatriation, 109

jobs bond issue, 88–90 Johnson, Albert, 72 Johnson, Edwin C., 149 Johnson, Fred L., 84 Jones, Frances I., 73 journalism: American, and what it means to be, 182; as consciousness of the past, 10; and failure to cover immigration, 166; and mediation of reality, 172–174; and social reality, 179 journalistic interviewing, 31 Kammen, Michael, 174 Kanellos, Nicolás, 38 Karnes City repatriates, 24, 110–111, 112f, 113–115, 116 Kellogg, Frank B., 45, 48 Killam, O. W., 46–47, 106 King, Martin Luther Jr., 6 Kiwanis Club, 43 Kleberg, Richard, 134 Knox, William J., 76–77, 83, 86 Kramer, Art, 107 Krochmal, Max, 8 KTSA radio station, 122–123 Ku Klux Klan, 13 labor organizing, 65, 80, 204n63 Landa y Piña, Andrés, 45 Lang, Gladys Engel, 11 Lang, Kurt, 11 La Opinión (Los Angeles): as activist press, 162; founding of, 23; and incarcerated Mexicans, 149; and Mexican Clinic benefit, 67–68; ongoing publication of, 181, 194n131; and repatriates, 104, 146; salary cuts at, 105 La Peña, José de, 135 La Prensa (San Antonio): as activist press, 150, 162; advice on repatriation from, 90–91; circulation of, 143–144, 144t; on civic consciousness toward returnees, 24; closing of, 181; coverage of bank failure by, 131; and coverage of repatriation, 161; coverage of San Antonio’s bicentennial by, 125; and cross-border coverage, 61; defense of Mexicans in, 80–81; and

Index  235 definition of local news, 141; on deportation, 67; on dwindling Mexican immigration, 85; on El Paso boycott, 106; on El Paso schoolchildren’s deportation, 87; on Espinosa capture, 1–2; and financial frame, 45–47, 76, 77, 107; focus on people by, 167; founding of, 19; and framing of Mexican humanity, 101, 122, 129–130, 166; framing of repatriation by, 30–31, 32–34; and function of ethnic media, 127; and goodcitizen frame, 37–39, 116–117, 176–177; and hierarchy of color frame, 53–54, 82–83; and immigration policy coverage, 103; and incarcerated Mexicans, 149; on joint repatriation plan, 139; and Karnes City repatriates, 110–111, 113, 114–115; and Mexican American identity, 13–14; and Mexican Clinic, 67–68; and Mexican march for jobs (1930), 65, 66; on Mission San José bell, 98; and naming of human beings, 69; and news frames, 169; ownership of, 22–23; and pariah frame, 88, 107–111; and patriot frame, 70–71, 118, 148–149; on Perkins’s policies, 133–134; popularity of with repatriates, 104; and prescriptive frame, 39–42, 43, 44, 92–93, 117–118, 151–154, 160, 170–171; as primary source, 11–12; on public school desegregation battle, 81, 82; and quantification frame, 93–96, 119–121, 140, 171; and quota debate, 45–47; on repatriate numbers, 142; on repatriates’ misery, 144–147; on repatriation, 28; and representation, 174; salary cuts at, 105; as site of memory, 60; and somos amigos/we are friends frame, 48, 50–51; and Spanish-Mexican dichotomy, 123; and Spanish nostalgia frame, 98, 175–176; on Spanish streetname debate, 59; on women’s charity work, 115 La Prensa de San Antonio, 181 Laredo, Texas: and deportees, 108; and diminishing immigration, 85, 95–96, 106; and financial frame, 33; and Karnes City repatriates, 111, 113, 114–115, 116;

and Mexican community’s charitable work, 150; and patriot frame, 118–119; and prescriptive frame, 151; and quantification frame, 119–121, 139, 141; and repatriates, 70 Laredo Chamber of Commerce, 42 Latinos, 9 League of Mexican Laborers and Farm Workers, 150 Lee, Alfred M., 101 Lee, Ray E., 148 letters to the editor, 135 Lincoln, Abraham, 21 Lippmann, Walter, 69, 143 Lipsitz, George, 9, 12–13, 166 literacy tests, 3, 45, 52 Lloyd, Demarest, 46, 48 local studies, 6–7 Long and Wide Civil Rights Movement, 26, 61, 102, 130, 138, 169, 179. See also civil rights movement Long Black Power Movement, 6 Long Civil Rights Movement, 6, 9 López, Amador, 108 Los Angeles Times: and hierarchy of color frame, 16, 80, 101, 136, 178; on repatriation, 4; and somos amigos/we are friends frame, 83 Losoya, Jesus, 97 Los Pastores [The Shepherds], 100 Los Santos, Arnulfo de, 115 Lower Rio Grande Valley, 43–44, 53 Lozano, Ignacio, 68f; as elite opinion leader, 13–14; and Hollywood figures, 194n133; on La Prensa’s activist role, 162; and LULAC, 70; and Mexican Americans, 179; and Mexican Clinic, 67–68; and Mexican community, 173– 174; and newspaper chain ownership, 23; as owner of La Prensa, 12; popularity of with repatriates, 104; and self-help culture, 38–39 Lozano Newspapers, Inc., 105 Luckmann, Thomas, 14, 73 LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens): founding of, 70; and Mexican American civil rights struggle, 78, 102;

236 Index and public school desegregation battle, 81, 82. See also Canales, José Tomás Martin, D. H., 148 Martinez, Emilio, 44 Maverick, Maury, 138 Maynard, Robert, 7 McAllister, Walter W., 89 McAskill, D. A., 138, 180 McIntosh, William McKay, 21–22, 22f, 129, 168 McKay, Reynolds, 176 Mckiernan-González, John, 39–40 McLeod, Douglas, 77 McMillen, R. J., 147 McWilliams, Carey, 60 media framing theory, 9. See also news frames memory studies, 9 Mena, Luis, 117 Menchaca, Luis, 57 Menchaca, Martha, 8 mestizaje, 190n39 Mexican agriculture, 41–42 Mexican American civil rights history, 165 Mexican American civil rights movement: and good-citizen frame, 177; and hierarchy of color frame, 82; and intersectionality, 7; and La Prensa, 173; and Lozano’s newspapers, 39; mainstream news coverage’s omission of, 78, 102, 130, 165; and whiteness, 8 Mexican American community: and class injustice, 109; and fundraising for repatriates, 114–117; and good-citizen frame, 38; and segregation, 67; and Spanish nostalgia frame, 98 Mexican American identity, 3, 13–14, 73 Mexican Americans: American consciousness of, 17; and Americanhood, 161–162; attitudes toward, 135; and black–white race binary, 9; and civil rights, 176; and community support, 129; and language, 14–15; and La Prensa, 163; and letters to the editor, 169; and San Antonio bicentennial, 127 Mexican Blue Cross, 37, 116

Mexican civic associations, 37 Mexican Clinic: and good-citizen frame, 38; and La Prensa, 177; and Ignacio Lozano, 67–68; and prescriptive frame, 39–40, 44 Mexican community: and charitable work, 38, 149–150, 176–177; and joint repatriation plan, 140 Mexican Consuls and Labor Organizing (González 1999), 37 Mexican expatriates, 153, 163 Mexican government: and La Prensa coverage, 167; La Prensa’s critique of, 151–152, 169, 170; and National Donation Day, 145; and patriot frame, 119; and rail transit for repatriates, 151; and repatriates, 110; and repatriates’ misery, 147; and repatriation, 37, 41, 139; and statistics, 188n15 Mexican immigrants: dwindling number of, 95–96; and hygiene, 3; and quotas, 34–35; and race hierarchy, 29; roundups of, 133; Trump rhetoric on, 25 Mexican Independence Day, 161 Mexican Interior Ministry, 28 Mexican labor, 33f; and auto factories, 151; and black community, 74; and business interests, 42–43; and Coolidge administration, 35; and cotton market collapse, 110–111; disposability of, 147; divergent framing of, 103, 166–167; as economic threat, 17; and English-­language news, 4, 143; Express coverage of, 23–24, 154; and financial frame, 44–46, 72–73, 76–77, 101; and hierarchy of color frame, 53–54, 78, 80; and Hoover administration, 27–28; and letters to the editor, 137; and march for jobs, 88; and prescriptive frame, 170; and quota debate, 47–48, 67, 93; and San Antonio, 18; and Spanish Governor’s Palace restoration, 123; and strikes, 153; and sugar industry, 141–142 Mexican march for jobs (1930), 64–66, 65f, 88, 89, 178 Mexican Migration Department, 45 Mexican Migration Service: and financial

Index  237 frame, 45; and quantification frame, 119–121; and repatriates, 110; as source of statistics, 12, 94, 95, 96, 142 Mexican National Railroad Commission, 37 Mexican quota laws, 3 Mexican Repatriation Union, 145, 146 Mexican Revolution (1910), 16, 161 Mexicans: and the Alamo, 155; American consciousness of, 17; attitudes toward, 135; and birth registration, 196n35; and black–white race binary, 7–8, 179; Box attitude toward, 52; and census undercount, 90; and community support, 129, 176–177; and corridos, 3; deportation of, 2; in English- and Spanish-language press, 24–25; and good-citizen frame, 61; and legal US entry, 197n49; and letters to the editor, 138; and military service, 200n144; and news frames, 29; as productive citizens, 137; and race hierarchy, 16; racialized image of, 10; in San Antonio, 18; and San Antonio bicentennial, 127; and Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 15–16; trivialization of, 178 Mexican schoolchildren, 81 Mexican Supreme Court, 86 Mexico: and classification of repatriates, 105; and emergency aid for repatriates, 123; and English-language news, 170; and Great Depression, 119; and mestizaje, 190n39 Mexico City American Chamber of Commerce, 84 Mexico–Laredo Highway, 139 Mexico’s Migration Office, 115 Milam, Ben, 34 minority news, 10 Mission Concepción, 122–123 Mission Espada, 155–156 Mission Revival architecture, 54, 55 Mission Road Improvement League, 98 Mission San José, 58f, 59, 60, 98, 157–158, 182 modernization, 13 Modernizing the Monroe Doctrine (Sherrill 1916), 86 Molina, Natalia, 10, 40

Monroe Doctrine, 83, 85, 86, 103 Monroe Doctrine, The (Sexton 2011), 103 Montana, 141 Montejano, David, 15, 52, 81–82 Monterrey, Mexico, 37, 106 Montgomery Bus Boycott, 6 Moody, Dan, 57 Moreno, Antonio, 67, 68, 68f Morlet, M. Tomás, 140 Mott, George Fox, 75 Murdoch, Rupert, 181 Murphy, Frank, 150 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 6, 70 Nacogdoches (Texas) Mexican Advocate, 14 Nagle, J. D., 87 National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, 134 National Committee of Repatriates, 153 national identity, 174 nationality: versus ethnicity, 66; and language, 170; and Mexican march for jobs (1930), 64–65, 66; and “Mexicans,” 2. See also citizenship National Negro Labor Congress, 74 National Origins Law (1924), 34 National Repatriation Committee, 151–152 Native Americans, 8, 9, 98 Navarro, Gabriel, 68 Negrete, Sebastián, 38 Negri, Ramón de, 32 New Deal: and civil rights history, 8; and exclusion of Mexican jobless, 142; and Mexican immigrants, 133; and news frames, 24; and pioneering spirit, 160– 161; and public nostalgia, 157; and xenophobia, 138–139 New Mexico: John C. Box’s fact-finding tour of, 52; and corridos, 3; and Mexican community, 40; and national narrative, 179; and Native Americans, 138; as source of repatriates, 108; and Spanish missions, 158; and Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 15; and Pancho Villa, 17; and whiteness, 8 news frames: and “historic reality,” 168–171;

238 Index and New Deal, 24; of repatriates as patriots, 29–31; and representation, 29. See also media framing theory; specific frames newspapers, 9, 11–15, 12–13, 172. See also specific newspapers Newspaper Writing and Editing (Bleyer 1932), 93 New Survey of Journalism (Mott 1937), 75 Ngai, Mae, 8 Nogales, Mexico, 110 Nora, Pierre, 11, 60, 159 nostalgia. See Spanish nostalgia frame NPR (National Public Radio), 4 Nuevo Laredo, Mexico: and charitable work, 115; and good-citizen frame, 116; and Karnes City repatriates, 113; and Mexican government aid to returnees, 145; and quantification frame, 119; and repatriation statistics, 95; and voluntary returnees, 120 Oakland Tribune, 7 Obama, Barack, 25, 180, 181 Obregón, Alvaro, 31 Oklahoma, 8, 15, 52, 138 Old San Antonio Road, 3, 59, 99, 207n150. See also El Camino Real Ontiveros, Randy, 178 Order of the Alamo, 22 Orientalism, 9, 11, 159 Ortiz Rubio, Pascual, 42, 67, 69–70, 90, 93 Ortiz Tirado, Alfonso, 67, 68f “othering,” 9, 153, 178 Pan-Americanism, 83, 86 Panhandle and Santa Fe Railway Co., 41 pariah frame: in 1929 news coverage, 32–37; in 1930 news coverage, 69, 87–91; in 1931 news coverage, 107–111; in 1932–1933 news coverage, 144–148, 160; Express’s omission of, 176; and financial frame, 62; and La Prensa’s humanization focus, 101, 122, 169; and Light coverage, 66, 153 Park, Robert, 31

Passing of the Great Race, The (Grant 1916), 52 Patman, Wright, 72–73 patriot frame: in 1929 news coverage, 29–31; in 1930 news coverage, 69–71; in 1931 news coverage, 118–119; in 1932–1933 news coverage, 148–149, 160; evaporation of, 170; and financial frame, 62; and La Prensa’s humanization focus, 169 Payne, Charles, 6 Peña, Candelario, 67 Peña, Manuela R. de, 67 Perales, Alonso, 78, 82, 102 Perea, Juan, 124 Perkins, Frances, 133–134, 160 Pershing, John J., 17 Piedras Negras, Mexico, 116 Pierce, Frank, 51 Pike, Zebulon, 56 police harassment of jobless, 33 political economy, 77 poll tax, 89 Ponce de León, Juan, 122 Portes Gil, Emilio, 30, 32, 45 Powell, Oscar, 140 prescriptive frame: in 1929 news coverage, 39–44; in 1930 news coverage, 69, 91–93, 101; in 1931 news coverage, 117–118; and 1932–1933 coverage, 160; in 1932–1933 news coverage, 151–154; defined, 29; and readerships, 170 preservationists, 97, 99, 181 Progressive Era, 52, 69 public health, 39–40, 52, 177 public memory, 174, 176, 216n28 public schools, 81, 102, 124–125, 179 Puerto Ricans, 53, 76, 80, 102, 178 Pulitzer, Joseph, 91 Punitive Expedition (1916), 17 quantification frame: in 1930 news coverage, 93–96; in 1931 news coverage, 119–122; in 1932–1933 news coverage, 139–144, 160; emergence of, 69; and La Prensa’s humanization focus, 101, 129;

Index  239 mainstream news coverage’s omission of, 171 quotas: and anti-Mexican sentiment, 168; disputes over, 45–48, 50, 75–76; Express editorials on, 73–74; and Harris versus Box bills, 84; and Immigration Act (1924), 52; and Mexican immigrants, 34–35 race relations, 120, 179 racial hierarchy. See hierarchy of color frame racialized scripts, 10 racial profiling, 5 racism, 52, 135. See also commodity racism railroads: and Express framing, 49; and Mexican immigration, 16; and Mexican labor, 44, 52–53, 61–62, 73, 166; and repatriates, 104–105 Ramos, Jorge, 181–182 Ramos, Raúl, 7–8, 15 Randolph, A. Philip, 8 readerships, 167, 176 Reagan, Ronald, 62 Reed, David A., 50 Registration Act (1929), 27, 34, 48–49 Remling, T. J., 136 repatriates: and customs duties, 117; versus deportees, 94; desperate situation of, 125; exploitation of, 110; framed as pariahs, 88; framed as patriots, 29–31, 69–71; framed as unfortunates, 160; from Karnes City, 110–111, 112f, 113– 114; La Prensa’s advice to, 151–153; La Prensa’s coverage of, 141; as local news, 139; and pariah frame, 108; and patriot frame, 118–119; and quantification frame, 142; and Diego Rivera, 150–151; tragedies involving, 144–147; voluntary and not, 120 repatriation: coverage of, 28, 195n6; defined, 188n13; versus deportation, 95; disparate coverage of, 164–167; as disposal of human labor, 213n44; of Filipinos, 79–80; La Prensa coverage of, 92–93, 129–130; La Prensa’s critique

of, 151–152, 170; as local news, 161; and Mexican Clinic, 40; after Mexican War, 16–17; news coverage of, 23–24; peak period of, 12, 132; and quantification frame, 69, 94–96; from Texas, 2, 189n19; and unemployment, 85; unprecedented scale of during Depression, 166; of US citizens, 3–4; of voluntary returnees, 188n14 Reporting Civil Rights (Library of America 2003), 8 representation, 24–25, 29, 38–39 Republic of Texas, 166 restrictionists, 46–48, 101 Revenue Act (1926), 92 Rivas, Henry, 159 Rivas-Rodriguez, Maggie, 14 Rivera, Diego, 150–151, 160, 213n68 Robertson, Samuel A., 44, 53–54 Rodríguez, Raymond, 4, 12, 94 Rodriguez, Salome, 112f Rogers, Will “the Cherokee Kid,” 22 Romero, Rafael, 165f Roosevelt, Franklin Delano: and John Nance Garner, 76; immigration policies of, 133–134; and New Deal, 24, 138, 147–148; and pioneer spirit, 133, 157, 160–161, 175 Roosevelt, Theodore, 157 Rosaldo, Renato, 55, 97, 128 Rose Window, 99 Rueda, Fernando, 30 Ruelas, Miguel, 93 Ruiz, Ramón Eduardo, 32 Rustin, Bayard, 6 Ruth, Babe, 92 Said, Edward, 11, 79, 100, 159 Salinas, María Elena, 181–182 Sam Jackson American Legion post, 50–51 San Antonio: bicentennial of, 24, 122–123, 130–132; as bicultural and bilingual, 18–19; and census undercount, 90, 102; and Civil War, 21; as crossroads, 2–3; and financial frame, 76–77; and Mexican march for jobs (1930), 9, 64–66;

240 Index “othering” of, 11; and public nostalgia, 157; and Spanish architecture, 56; Spanishness of, 16; and Spanish nostalgia, 180; view of Mexicans and immigration in, 17 San Antonio Building and Loan Association, 89 San Antonio Central Relief Committee, 137f, 139, 140–141, 161 San Antonio Citizens League, 88–89, 138 San Antonio Conservation Society, 58, 59, 157–158, 174, 207n146 San Antonio Evening News, 19 San Antonio Express: and Black Tuesday, 63; coverage of repatriation by, 147; coverage of San Antonio’s bicentennial by, 126; defense of Mexicans in, 81; on Espinosa capture, 2; and financial frame, 45, 47, 61–62, 72–75, 76–77, 106–107; focus on policy by, 167; founding of, 19; and framing of Mexicans as workers, 166; framing of repatriation by, 34–36; and good-citizen frame, 116, 177; and hierarchy of color frame, 78, 80; and immigration policy coverage, 103; on joint repatriation plan, 139, 140–141; and lack of coverage on repatriation, 28; and lack of good-citizen frame, 38; on La Prensa, 173–174; and Light, 23–24; on Mexican goodwill toward San Antonio, 18; on Mexican labor, 170; and Mexican march for jobs (1930), 66, 102; minority coverage in, 13; on Mission San José bell, 98; ownership of, 21; on Pan-American Highway construction, 148; and pariah frame, 89, 108, 111, 113; and patriot frame, 70, 118–119; on Perkins’s policies, 134; and prescriptive frame, 42–44; as primary source, 11–12; and quantification frame, 121; and quota debate, 45–46; readers of, 154; on repatriates’ misery, 145; scarcity of repatriation coverage by, 168; selfaggrandizement of, 168–169; on selfdeportation, 87; and somos amigos/we are friends frame, 48, 49–51, 83, 84–85, 86, 102–103, 171; and Spanish-Mexican

dichotomy, 101, 123; and Spanish nostalgia frame, 56–59, 60, 97, 99, 154–157, 158, 160–161 San Antonio Express-News, 181 San Antonio Light: on citizenship application rush, 142; closing of, 181; coverage of repatriation by, 147; coverage of San Antonio’s bicentennial by, 126–127; and Espinosa capture, 2; and Express, 23–24; and financial frame, 45, 62, 75–76; framing of repatriation by, 30, 43; and good-citizen frame, 177; on Gutiérrez deportation order, 134; and hierarchy of color frame, 53, 66, 79; on immigration, 153; immigration coverage by, 168; on joint repatriation plan, 140–141; and Karnes City repatriates, 114; and lack of coverage on repatriation, 28, 36; on La Prensa’s activist role, 38; and letters to the editor, 161–162, 169; letters to the editor in, 135–139; on Los Pastores play, 100; and Mexican march for jobs (1930), 64–66; on Mission Espada restoration, 156; on Mission San José bell, 98; on New Deal, 147–148; ownership of, 19, 21–22; and pariah frame, 88–89, 90, 103, 111, 113– 114, 144; and paucity of Mexican labor coverage, 166–167; and prescriptive frame, 91–92; as primary source, 11–12; and quantification frame, 121, 143; and quota debate, 47–48; and sensationalist reporting, 101–102; and somos amigos/ we are friends frame, 48–49, 50, 84; and southwestern inferiority complex, 55; and Spanish-Mexican dichotomy, 158– 159; and Spanish nostalgia frame, 59, 60, 97, 99, 128–129, 175 San Antonio National Bank, 21 San Antonio’s West Side, 39, 67, 138 San Benito American Legion, 200n144 San Benito Chamber of Commerce, 43, 53 San Fernando Cathedral, 122–123, 126 San José Home, 115–116 Santa Rosa Hospital, 159 Santibañez, Enrique, 43–44, 66, 89 Sap, D. S., 66

Index  241 Saturday Evening Post, 17 Schudson, Michael, 17, 31, 172 scientific racism, 52 Scripps newspaper chain, 21 seasonal labor, 76 segregation, 38, 81–82, 166, 179 self-help frame. See good-citizen frame self-help groups, 176 Serrano, Juan, 146 Sexton, Jay, 103 Sheep and Goat Raisers’ Association of Texas, 47 Sherrill, Charles, 86 sites of memory, 11, 25, 60, 166, 172 Smith, Harvey P., 123, 128, 156, 158 social activism, 118 social control, 13, 117, 118 social reality, 179 Society of Benito Juárez, 150 Society of Hidalgo, 150 Society of the Sons of Hidalgo, 150 solidarity: and color continuum, 66; and good-citizen frame, 38, 177; and La Prensa’s interviews, 31; and Mexican American civil rights movement, 39, 173; and somos amigos/we are friends frame, 50; and Spanish nostalgia frame, 63 somos amigos/we are friends frame, 48–51, 61, 69, 83–86, 171 Southern Pacific Lines, 41 South Texas Chamber of Commerce, 46–47, 93, 106 Spanish-American War (1898), 79–80 Spanish Empire, 54–55 Spanish language, 60, 136 Spanish-language journalists, 130 Spanish-language media, 13, 17, 67, 109, 179 Spanish-language newspapers: as activist institutions, 13; and media frames, 10–11; and repatriation coverage, 12, 164; and representation, 173–174; as sites of memory, 24–25; and Texas, 14. See also specific newspapers Spanish-language television, 181–182 Spanish-Mexican dichotomy, 101, 123, 125, 130–131, 174–176

Spanish missions. See Franciscan Missions Spanish nostalgia frame, 54–60, 63, 69, 96–100, 122–129, 154–159, 160–161, 174– 176; and Mission San José, 182; and San Antonio bicentennial, 207n146 Spanish-speaking immigrants, 3 special correspondents, 167 statistics: accuracy of, 142; and immigrant agency, 120; for legal US entry of Mexicans, 197n49; and quantification frame, 95–96; on repatriation, 188n15; reporting on, 94 Steffler, Paul E., 59, 134 Sterling, Ross S., 124–125 Steves, Albert, 99 Stock Market Crash of 1929, 2 St. Paul Pioneer Press, 85, 86 swindlers, 146–147 symbolic annihilation, 172–174, 178 tariffs, 117 Taylor, Paul S., 98 Taylor, Ralph H., 80 Tejanos, 15, 155 Terrell, Dick O., 148 Texas: and birth registration, 196n35; and black–white race binary, 8; constructed historic reality of, 168; and cotton, 17; and cotton market collapse, 111, 113; and deported children, 87; and Englishlanguage newspapers, 13; and Express focus, 147, 148; and financial frame, 46–48, 62, 72–77, 101, 105–106; and good-citizen frame, 114–117, 176; and hierarchy of color frame, 52–53; and historical context, 15–16, 18–19, 21; and house-to-house searches, 43; and La Prensa circulation, 143; and LULAC, 70; and medical border, 39–40; and Mexican labor, 101; and New Deal, 161; versus New England, 157, 175; and Old San Antonio Road, 207n150; and patriot frame, 30–31; and public memory, 98; and public nostalgia, 99; and public school desegregation battle, 81–82; and repatriation, 166, 167, 188n15, 189n19; repatriations from, 4; and somos

242 Index amigos/we are friends frame, 49–51, 103; and Spanish-language newspapers, 14; and Spanish-Mexican dichotomy, 122, 155; and Spanish nostalgia frame, 54–57, 59, 97, 123–129, 130, 158; and twenty-first century politics, 180. See also specific cities Texas Historical and Landmark Association, 56–57 Texas Newspaper Publisher’s Association, 22 Texas newspapers, 13 Texas Rangers, 15 Tobin, John W., 22f tourism: and cultural appropriation, 157; and Spanish-Mexican dichotomy, 161; and Spanish nostalgia, 56, 180, 182 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), 15–16 Treviño, Roberto, 13 Trump, Donald, 25, 180, 181 Ulibarrí, Sabine, 14, 136, 171 unemployment, 66–67, 86, 113. See also jobless United Way, 141 Univision, 181–182 Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression (Hoffman 1974), 4 Uranga, Rodolfo, 14, 30, 40, 80–81, 153, 169 Urbina, Salvador, 86, 103 USA Today, 4 US Border Patrol. See Border Patrol US Chamber of Commerce, 44, 47–48, 53, 74, 106 US Department of Labor, 18–19 US Department of Labor and Immigration, 53 US government, 110, 167 US Immigration Service, 119 US State Department, 45–46, 50, 85, 106 US Supreme Court, 5, 72, 82, 180 Valley Chamber of Commerce, 42 vaqueros, 99

Vargas, Zaragosa, 4, 141–142, 172, 213n44 Vasconcelos, José, 41 Vázquez, Ismael, 149 Veramendi, Juan Martin, 128 Vero, Señora Francisco de, 159 Verrazano, Giovanni da, 39 Vidal, M. R., Jr., 41–42 Vietnam War, 8 Villa, Pancho, 17 voluntary returnees: in corridos, 3–4; definition of, 109; during economic recession of 1920–1921, 10; and local news peg, 161; mainstream news coverage’s omission of, 165; from Ohio, 188n14; and patriot frame, 118–119; and quantification frame, 94, 129–130 voting fraud, 89, 102 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 6 Weakley, A. D., 88–89 Weber, David, 18, 55, 131 Weekly Dispatch (San Antonio’s union newspaper), 47 Welch, Richard, 79 West Side (San Antonio), 39, 67, 138 Whalen, William A., 34, 36, 43, 44 White, Hayden, 173 White, Robe C., 46 whiteness, 8, 54, 72 Wicke, W. H., 148 Wickersham, George, 134 Williams, Harry, 48–49 Wilson, Woodrow, 17, 103 Winfield, Betty Houchin, 176 wire services, 167 women’s clubs, 47 World Heritage Status, 180 World War I, 16, 51 Wurzbach, William W., 125, 126–127, 175–176 xenophobia, 5, 25, 138–139, 160 Zuniga, Manuel, 36