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The Mexican Repatriation in the United States

1929–1936 · Americas

Displacement

Displaced

1 million

Estimates of those who left the United States for Mexico between 1929 and 1936 range from about 400,000 to two million, with figures around one million commonly cited; researchers estimate that roughly 60 per cent were United States citizens by birth, most of them children. The wide range reflects the mixture of formal deportation, county-organised transport, and departures under pressure that were never recorded as removals; the evidence comes from Mexican and United States immigration statistics, county relief records and later scholarship cited in the California legislature's 2005 apology.

Share of the population affected

59%

of the Mexican-origin population of the United States at the 1930 census, 1930

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What happened

As unemployment rose after 1929, federal immigration raids, county welfare policies and public campaigns pressed people of Mexican descent to leave the United States. Los Angeles County organised trains to the border and other counties followed; relief was withheld from Mexican families, and highly publicised raids such as that in La Placita in Los Angeles in February 1931 spread fear well beyond those actually detained. A majority of those who went were United States citizens, chiefly the American-born children of Mexican immigrants, and many had no legal process at all. Estimates of the total run from 400,000 to two million. Labour demand in the Second World War reversed the flow, and the Bracero programme began recruiting Mexican workers in 1942. In 2005 the California legislature passed the Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program, formally apologising for the state's role in the unconstitutional removal of United States citizens and legal residents; no comparable federal apology has been issued.

Parties

United States federal, state and county authorities pressed or deported Mexicans and Mexican Americans, many of them US citizens, to Mexico during the Depression

Disputed

The total is uncertain by a factor of five because most departures were coerced rather than formally ordered and were not recorded as removals, and because Mexican and United States entry and exit statistics do not match.

The denominator

The 1930 US census, the only one to record 'Mexican' as a race, counted about 1,692,000 people of Mexican origin, falling to about 1,592,000 in 1940 despite natural increase. The number repatriated is disputed: Gratton and Merchant estimate about 355,000 movements to Mexico in the 1930s, Hoffman over 400,000 for 1929-37 and Rosales 600,000 for 1929-36, while a California legislative inquiry claimed up to 1.8 million; formal deportations numbered about 82,000.

The headline figure of one million sits at the high end of a 300,000-2,000,000 range whose central scholarly estimates are closer to 350,000-600,000, so the resulting share could be overstated by a factor of two or three.

Where the baseline comes from

Mexican Repatriation — Wikipediaopen-edited
1930 United States census — Wikipediaofficial

On the death toll

There was no significant death toll. The harm consisted in the loss of citizenship rights, homes, property and family separation, and in the destitution of families arriving in a Mexico unprepared to absorb them; deaths in transit were not systematically recorded and were not a defining feature of the episode.

Documented forms of violence

DenationalizationArbitrary Detention

The removal of United States citizens without due process and the use of immigration raids and detention to induce departure are documented in county and federal records and are recited in the findings of the California Apology Act of 2005.

Formal findings

Legislature of the State of California (2005) — Passed the Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program in 2005, apologising for the unconstitutional removal and coerced emigration of an estimated two million people, roughly 1.2 million of them United States citizens — source