Recently I was researching Dorothy Lang's famous migrant mother photograph, and I learned something that was never covered in any of my U.

S.

History classes, which is that during the Great Depression, the United States deported at least 400,000 and possibly as many as two million Mexican Americans, most of whom were U S citizens.

This came to be known as the Mexican repatriation, although, as scholars have pointed out, since many of the people involved had never lived in or even been to Mexico, it was more of a de patri ation.

OK, a bit of historical context.

In the mid 19th century, the United States took a bunch of land from Mexico, including all of California and Arizona, as a result of the Mexican American War and the Gadsden Purchase.

And the people who lived in those communities who had been Mexican citizens became U S citizens.

Then, in the early 20th century, the violence and economic disruption of the Mexican Revolution led lots of people to seek refuge in the United States.

Also, the border between the U.

S.

And Mexico wasn't formerly regulated until 1917 right?

So it's 1930 The Great Depression is underway.

Unemployment is rising as his anti immigrant sentiment and the administration of President Herbert Hoover is promising real jobs for real Americans.

And Hoover's labor secretary believes that deportations will decrease unemployment, a line of thinking that has proven extraordinarily durable even though it isn't true, like national economies air, not some zero sum game where removing people from the workforce creates jobs.

In fact, a 2017 study about the Mexican repatriation found that the deportations either had no effect on unemployment or else made it slightly worse.

By the way, links to sources in the do we d'oh Also, I know contemporary conversations about US immigration are highly polarized.

But I think it's important to note that in the thirties, the push for deportations came from both.

What would today be considered the left and the right?

Like many labor unions called for deportations, for instance.

But so did the conservative Hoover administration.

A middle of this local municipalities began rounding up Mexicans or Americans of Mexican descent, or at times, anyone judge toe have brown skin.

Police officers or other officials would surround parks or neighborhoods.

Were Mexican Americans lived and then take people onto trucks and drive them to Mexico, or else drive them to train stations where chartered trains took them to Mexico.

Now these deportations took many forms.

Some were caused by a mix of coercion and discrimination like, for instance, many cities past Wallace saying that Mexican Americans couldn't work for city governments.

The federal government also encouraged large private companies to fire their Mexican American workers, which many companies did.

But there were also other strategies to force people out of the U.

S.

Like, for instance, some hospital patients were literally wheeled out of hospitals and put onto trucks and driven to Mexico.

There were sometimes legal proceedings, and if you could prove citizenship, which many people couldn't because such documentation was uncommon at the time you might be allowed to stay, but you also might not.

It vary dramatically from city to city, and it was extremely chaotic.

But in general those threatened with deportation had almost no legal recourse, and as a result, at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of U.

S citizens were deported to Mexico.

The U.

S government has never apologized for the repatriation, and it's not even mentioned in most U.

S.

History textbooks, and this isn't like ancient history.

There are lots of people alive today who lived through this.

One of them, for instance, was a five year old boy named Jose Lopez, who, despite being born in Detroit, was deported.

In fact, when he got to Mexico, he was teased because he didn't speak Spanish.

Jose Lopez.

His parents would go on to die and exile, as did one of his siblings.

But he returned to the United States in 1944 after trying to prove his citizenship.

For 14 years, he worked for his entire career at Ford Motor Company, became ah homeowner and a dedicated volunteer in his community.

All three of his kids went to college.

One is now an attorney, but there is also no getting back everything that Lope has lost as a result of his unjust and illegal deportation.

Lopez is American, and his story is an American story, and telling that story will never be unpatriotic.