Note: A good time to retell and past story.
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| My mother (left) with her friend, Connie Saenz, a child of Oaxacan immigrants |
There were no strict immigration laws between Mexico and the U.S. in the 1900s. People crossed both ways to visit relatives, shop, work, conduct business, and return home. The 1929 U.S. Immigration Act imposed a one-dollar entry fee on immigrants entering the U.S. which was later raised to eight-dollars, along with literacy and health tests, mainly aimed at limiting European and Asian immigrants whose hard work and knowledge of agriculture threatened American farmers.
At the El Paso border, American labor welcomed Mexican workers, who could avoid paying immigration fees by wading across the river and entering the other side, no big deal. There was no organized immigration enforcement service, but later, as Congress tightened immigration laws, crossing the border became more humiliating when immigrants, especially women, had to disrobe, so agents could spray them with kerosene to satisfy the health requirements. Still, American business interests urged them south.
Up to the 1970s, it was still fairly easy to cross the border, either way. Agents watched to make sure no one was carrying anything obviously illegal or dangerous. I remember in high school kids returning from a weekend in Baja with their parents smuggling in firecrackers. If you brought back a cherry bomb or an M-80, you were king. The agents turned a blind eye.
It was like that until Nixon’s trumped-up “War on Drugs,” tightening up immigration laws. U.S. agents asked to see personal identification, like driver’s licenses, green cards, MICA's, and temporary visitors' passes. Neither government wanted to really shut down the border, completely, since businesses on both sides raked in millions of dollars a month.
Immigration did get tight in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, when politicians had no answers for Americans who questioned why the U.S. economy had tanked and there were no jobs. That's when American racism raised its ugly head and politicians figured it would be a good idea to blame foreigners for the financial crisis, even though economists said a country’s financial stability had little to do with immigration but more to do with reckless business decisions made by government officials and corporate heads.
To show they were addressing the problem, the American government deported hundreds of thousands of Mexicans workers, many who had made lives here and others who were U.S. citizens. It wasn't unusual to pack Mexicans into cattle cars, haul them by train into the desert, and dump them there. It's all well-documented in the book Decade of Betrayal, by Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez, and in the song "Deportees" by Woody Guthrie, who sang about a plane loaded with Mexican farmworkers crashing and burning in Coalinga, CA., on their way to a deportation center in El Centro, California. Even though the media identified the pilots, they didn’t identify the passengers on board, hoping to hide the tragedy from the public. Some government official got the bright idea to bury the Mexican deportees in a mass grave some place in Fresno.
Families, like my mother’s, pretty much stayed in their barrio shanties, going out only to work in the brickyards, beanfields, and packing sheds, low-paying jobs Americans didn’t want, always fearful of getting caught up in immigration raids.
When I once asked my mother if her family ever talked about returning to Mexico, she said her father talked about it, but nobody else did. She said she never had the desire to visit. Her father still owned a portion of the family ranch in Jalisco, where her relatives still farmed the land near the town of San Gaspar de Los Reyes, in the village of Mitic.
My mother told me she recalled when she was about sixteen, and she had just been released from spending three years at Olive View Hospital, recuperating from tuberculosis, which she later learned had been misdiagnosed, her brother Chuy talked about visiting the family in Mexico. My mom said once home from the sanitorium, she made up for lost time, finishing high school, working at Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills, attending dances, and enjoying the movies in downtown Santa Monica. Her family in Mexico was the furthest thing from her mind.
Her older brother, “Chuy,” was relentless, begging her then insisting. Chuy had lived on the family ranch in Mexico as a teenager but returned home after a couple of years. She respected her older brother. As she remembered, “We all worked, but my brother Chuy would leave home, go to other states, work, and send my mother his check, every week, to support the family.”
Her father, Nicolas Gonzalez, was in his forties when he contracted emphysema after working for years in Santa Monica’s brickyards and died. In those days, the old-timers didn’t wear masks or any type of protection. They worked in clouds of red dust all day with just cloths over their noses and mouths. They didn’t know they were breathing in tiny particles of brick. Over time, their lungs just disintegrated. They ended up choking to death, at least, that's the way my father told it.
My mother told me, chuckling, "Chuy, my brother, had lived in Mitic for a couple of years. He had a girlfriend there. I didn't know, then, but he didn't want my mom to know, and he was taking my mom with him to visit her relatives. I guess Chuy figured I could keep my mother distracted while he went to see his girlfriend. I think he had a baby, too. He might have even been married but nobody really knew. My brother was private."
Mitic was once a thriving community, until revolutions, revolts, and draughts devastated most of it, sending the people fleeing to San Juan, Aguascalientes, and the United States. Showing respect to her oldest brother, my mother finally agreed to accompany him and her mother to Mexico. She was fully Americanized and not a hint of Mexican ranch life in her. She wore slacks and blouses, Rita Haworth-style, at a time when ranch women in Mexico wore long, dark dresses down to their ankles.
She recalled when she first saw the ranch and met her relatives, "They were so poor. All they had to offer us were cooked beans and a little soup."
My mother spoke as if she had been transported back to 1941, a teenager again. She said her mother decided to stay with her sister in San Juan de Los Lagos, while she chose to “rough it” and stay on the ranch with her father’s family. She met a young cousin, Patricia. The two quickly became friends.
The town of Mitic was nearly deserted, the dirt streets empty, and many of the adobe homes decaying. The ancient Indian village, historians trace back to before the conquest, had fallen onto difficult times, most of the men gone, looking for work in the States. She said, "I had to sleep on…not even a bed. It was like a cot, and it nearly rested on the dirt floor."
The house was made of adobe and in poor condition. At night when she tried to sleep, she could hear scampering in the house followed by banging noises. Sometime in the early morning, she opened her eyes and saw the face of a large rat staring back at her. The rats were everywhere. After one night, she told her mother, she could not stay in the house another night. "I felt so bad because I had planned on staying a few nights, but the next day I packed up and left."
It was a difficult departure. She and her cousin, Patricia, had gotten close in a short time. She said, "Patricia was about fifteen and very pretty…a beautiful girl."
Patricia asked if my mother could stay for her confirmation and confided in her, saying she had nothing nice to wear for the ceremony. "It was hard," my mother told me. "I almost cried when I had to leave."
She said the ranch was a big difference from her mother’s family, the Villalobos, who lived in San Juan de Los Lagos, middle-class, teachers, with modest homes in the city, whose kids played musical instruments and, at least, had enough to eat. “They were all very friendly but didn’t have much, either.” On the way back home, they visited her mother’s other sister in Aguascalientes. "Those relatives who lived in Aguascalientes were very, very wealthy."
My mother described how my grandmother's sister had married a banker. The family owned a house with many rooms, the floors covered in Saltillo stone, a courtyard and fountain, and maids to care for the children. They were polite and friendly but a bit reserved, and they were wealthier and more refined than any of the relatives who had migrated to the U.S. Wealthy Mexicans had no need to migrate to the U.S.
Once she arrived home, my mother excitedly told her mother she wanted to send Patricia a confirmation dress. From her closet, she picked the prettiest one she could find. She hoped the dress would fit. She and her cousin were about the same size. She wrapped the dress, placed it in a box, took it to the post office, and mailed it to Patricia, hoping to surprise her.
A few months passed. My mother heard nothing from Patricia or her parents. Then, after what seemed a long time, my mother received a letter from Patricia's parents. They wrote, telling my mother how much Patricia had loved the dress, but Patricia had taken ill not long after my mother’s departure. She grew worse, and she died. They thanked my mother for the dress and told her their daughter looked beautiful wearing the dress in her casket.
As she told me this, my mother’s eyes glazed over, her voice cracked when she said, "It was so sad."
