Though the government welcomed repatriates, the general citizenry often did not. ‘Most of us here in Mexico do not look on these repatriates very favorably,’ remarked one Mexico City landlady. ‘They abandoned the country during the revolution, and after getting expelled from the north, they expected their old compatriots…to greet them with celebrations of fireworks and brass bands.’ Castañeda remembers children taunting her as a ‘repatriada.’ ‘The word was very offensive to me,’ she recalled. ‘It was an insult, as is calling someone a gringo or a wetback.’ As one Mexican ranch worker asked a repatriate in Torreón in the northeastern state of Coahuila: ‘What you doing here for? To eat the little bread we have?’

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As news about the harsh conditions in Mexico traveled north, it became more difficult to convince people to leave the United States. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal provided work for some Mexicans, such as veterans of the U.S. military, and welfare was allotted to those who were barred from the work projects. But, back in Los Angeles, Thomson remained resolute in his efforts to repatriate Mexicans, eventually turning his attention to nursing homes and asylums in his desire to purge what he considered welfare leeches. In some cases, the bedridden were sent out on the back of a truck.

Many American children of repatriates never lost their desire for a true repatriation of their own. Emilia Castañeda, who had relocated 17 times while living in Mexico, decided to return to Los Angeles as her 18th birthday approached, some nine years after that dark morning in 1935. Her godmother in Boyle Heights forwarded Castañeda’s birth certificate, along with money for the train ride. Ironically, this American citizen was again subjected to humiliation. At the border crossing, immigration officials asked to see her tourist card. ‘I had to pay for a tourist card because, according to them, I was a tourist. Can you imagine? Me, a tourist, for nine years.’ It was 1944, and the train was crowded with soldiers. ‘I sat on my suitcase in the aisle. The seats were reserved for servicemen, but some were kind and they offered me their seats. I spoke very little English by then. Here was this American girl coming back to the United States.’

Castañeda relearned English in the same school she had attended as a child. As she would later admit, her forced relocation ‘prevented me from completing my education and advancing for better employment.’ Rubén Jiménez had attended school in Mexico, walking 12 miles a day to a one-room structure where six grades shared one teacher. When he returned to the States, the transition back into Los Angeles schools was difficult. A high school sophomore at age 17, Jiménez dropped out and joined the Army, serving as a radar operator during World War II. After several years, he completed college and eventually retired as a parole investigator.

While many American citizens who were caught up in the repatriation movement returned and struggled to readjust to their native country, thousands who had left without documentation had no legitimate proof of citizenship and were denied reentry. ‘We talked to one lady, part of her family came back, and part of it, unable to prove their residency, settled along the border so they could get together sometimes,’ recalls Rodríguez. ‘But the whole family was not able to make it back. And that was not an unusual circumstance.’

In 1972 Hoffman noted that the history of Mexicans in the United States was largely ignored. ‘A case in point is that of the repatriation phenomenon,’ he said. ‘When I started working on it as a dissertation there was really nothing. Historians had neglected it as a topic, as they did essentially everything that today we call ethnic studies. I was interested in the topic because I was born in East L.A., and although I am not a Mexican American, I did have some concerns about what had been going on in an area where I had grown up.’

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