Immigrants: The Last Time America Sent Her Own Packing

Los Angeles later developed a highly efficient repatriation program under the direction of Rex Thomson, an engineer who had impressed members of the Board of Supervisors with his nuts-and-bolts know-how while advising them on the construction of the Los Angeles General Hospital. After the county welfare caseload nearly doubled from 25,913 cases during 1929-30 to 42,124 cases in 1930-31, the board asked the pragmatic Thomson to serve as assistant superintendent of charities. ‘It was one of the highest paying public jobs in California,’ Thomson recalled during an interview nearly 40 years later. Having lost a bundle in failed local banks, he continued, ‘I was interested in a job.’

Thomson proved to be a tough administrator who excised bureaucratic fat and made welfare money work for the county. Men dug channels in the Los Angeles River in exchange for room and board. He put the unemployed to work on several local projects: building walls along Elysian Park, grading the grounds around the California State Building. When Thomson visited Congress in Washington, D.C., to seek funding for his public works program, he challenged the feds to ’send out people to see if we aren’t worthy of this federal help.’ By the end of the week, he later reported: ‘I’ll be darned if they didn’t agree. The government got the idea, and started this Works Progress [Administration], but they didn’t always impose the discipline that was necessary.’

Along with putting the unemployed to work on government-sponsored projects, repatriation would become another of Thomson’s social remedies that would merit emulation. Thomson would later describe his program: ‘We had thousands of Mexican nationals who were out of work. I went to Mexico City and I told them that we would like to ship these people back — not to the border but to where they came from or where the Mexicans would send them if we agreed it was a proper place. We could ship them back by train and feed them well and decently, for $74 a family. So I employed social workers who were Americans of Mexican descent but fluent in the language, or Mexican nationals, and they would go out and — I want to emphasize offer repatriation to these people.’

A child in 1932, Rubén Jiménez remembers one such social worker, a Mr. Hispana, who convinced Jiménez’s father to exchange his two houses in East Los Angeles for 21 acres in Mexicali. ‘We were not a burden to the U.S. government or anybody,’ says Jiménez, whose father worked for the gas company and collected rental income on his property. Still, Hispana convinced the man that it was best for him to turn over his bungalow and frame house and depart with his family to Mexico, where their 21 acres awaited them. ‘We camped under a tree until Dad built a shack out of bamboo,’ Jiménez recalls. Since there was no electricity available, his parents traded their washing machine and other appliances for chickens, mules, pigs and other necessities for their new life.

In the clutches of the Depression’s hard times, families sold their homes at low prices. In some cases, the county placed liens on abandoned property. ‘While there is no direct authority for selling the effects and applying their proceeds,’ a county attorney informed Thomson, ‘we fail to see how the county can be damaged by so doing.’

‘They are going to a land where the unemployed take all-day siestas in the warm sun,’ wrote the Los Angeles Evening Express in August 1931, which described children ‘following their parents to a new land of promise, where they may play in green fields without watching out for automobiles.’ The reality proved to be far less idyllic. Emilia Castañeda first glimpsed Mexican poverty in the tattered shoes on the old train porter who carried her father’s trunk. ‘He was wearing huaraches,’ she recalled. ‘Huaraches are sandals worn by poor people. They are made out of old tires and scraps.’ Along with her father and brother, Castañeda moved to her aunt’s place in the state of Durango, where nine relatives were already sharing the one-room domicile. ‘There was no room for us,’ she said. ‘If it rained we couldn’t go indoors.’ She quickly learned that running water and electricity were luxuries left back in Los Angeles. She took baths in a galvanized tub and fetched water from wells. The toilet was a hole in the backyard. ‘We were living with people who didn’t want us there,’ Castañeda said. ‘We were imposing on them out of necessity.’ They left after her father found work. In time her brother would be working also and, to her great dismay, shuffling around in huaraches.