Latino Americans

by Ray Suarez

  The Villaseñor family made it from Texas to southern Arizona. “They had nothing. They slept on the street. You know that saying—‘the sun is the blanket of the poor.’” Young Juan Salvador, Villaseñor recalled, saw something that changed his life. “One day he saw a wrinkled old bag of bones begging in the street—sick-looking, dirty, whining, crying, clawing at people as they went by. Then he realized it was his own mother. The shame was so great that he cried, and he swore to himself that his mother would never beg again.” So in 1922 he went to work. He was twelve years old. There was plenty of work. Hard work. The Chinese immigrants heading east from the Pacific coast had done a lot of it in the mines and on the railroads, but American immigration law had shifted before the Mexican Revolution, with the Chinese Exclusion Act. There was work for the new guys, the Mexicans. Juan Salvador Villaseñor got a day-shift job at the Copper Queen Mining Company in Douglas, Arizona, then used an assumed name to get a job on the night shift.

  He was caught trying to smuggle a small bag of copper out of the mine, and sentenced to six years in prison. He escaped, but Villaseñor said his father’s time in prison had changed him: “His life became filled with jails, fights, brothels, gambling dens and pool halls. His world was the underworld.”

  By the mid-1920s, still a teenager, Juan Salvador was a bootlegger in San Diego’s barrio. “My father always said that coming into the barrio was like entering a different country. The houses were tiny, run-down. There were no sidewalks or paved streets, but there were chickens and pigs and goats running loose. It never failed to amaze him how different his people were from the Anglos. Los mejicanos never wasted anything. Instead of grass in front of their homes, they had vegetable gardens. And they didn’t fence in their livestock; instead, they fenced in their crops.”

  The immigrants’ hard work, in factories, on farms, and down mines helped make their new home states wealthy places that attracted investment from other parts of the country, and attracted new Anglo-American migrants from the Midwest and eastern seaboard. But these new neighbors looked down on the mejicanos even as their labor made Anglo-American fortunes. While references in newspapers and popular culture were full of stories of laziness and lack of ambition, the barrios of the Southwest were humming. Ernesto Galarza recalled Sacramento in his autobiographical novel, Barrio Boy: “Every morning a parade of men in oily work clothes and carrying lunch buckets went up Fourth Street, and every evening they walked back, grimy and silent. Within a few blocks of our house there were smithies, hand laundries, a macaroni factory, places where wagons were repaired, horses stabled, bicycles fixed, chickens dressed, clothes ironed, furniture repaired, wine grapes pressed, lumber sawed, suits tailored, vegetables sorted, railroad cars unloaded. The barrio was an open workshop.”

  Living in a neighborhood with other immigrants is a time-honored first step in finding your way in America. The barrio was, at the same time, a construction made out of necessity. The other neighborhoods of Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Dallas were not open to the newcomers. According to Antonio Rios-Bustamante, author of Mexican Los Angeles, there was “widespread racial prejudice—Anglo-Americans often refused to rent or sell to Mexican-Americans. In Los Angeles, a new community arose, with a migration within the city—from the old neighborhood in central L.A. to the east side, across the river. But whether it was old or new, the barrio was a comfort zone, a place where you could associate with people who understood you.”

  In tradition-bound immigrant families, the home was often the place where the rules of the home country, religion, and custom were most strenuously enforced. Coming to America changed the rules outside the house, where employers often treated women and men equally, said Vicki Ruiz. “Women of the barrio often worked at home, taking in boarders, doing laundry, or sewing. Some women labored in canneries or garment factories. Or they worked in the fields—often just sleeping on the ground in the fields, just as the men did.”

  So many people came, and joined families already making a life in America, that gradually a distinctly Mexican-American daily life evolved in places like Los Angeles and San Antonio. It was enriched by constant replenishment, with new people traveling north from Mexico. It also evolved, however, into its own way of life quite apart from Mexico . . . cross-pollinating the culture from home with American popular music, movies, and fashions.

  America’s transformative power changed the people who came here, while the new arrivals in turn changed the places they arrived. In the barrios of Los Angeles you knew you were not in Guanajuato, Mexico City, or San Luis Potosí. Yet you also knew you were not in other places in America not touched by the large-scale Mexican presence.

  While Mexicans were offered and were forced to accept lower wages for the same work as their Anglo neighbors, they also knew they were getting more—much more—money than they would make for that work back in Mexico. This economic reality would endure for decades to come, and in time would challenge people on both sides of the border, when farm owners would use the desperate poverty of Mexicans to undercut the wages of native-born and legally resident farmworkers.

  People who never would have met one another in Mexico found one another in the United States, people like Villaseñor’s parents. “One evening in San Diego Juan Salvador saw a woman standing outside a dance hall in the barrio in an orange dress, and he knew. This was Lupe, my mother, and this was love at first sight. She was an honest, hardworking girl, a barrio girl.

  Lupe and Salvador Villaseñor’s wedding day.After fleeing north during the Mexican Revolution, Salvador Villaseñor worked as a miner and a bootlegger during Prohibition. He was handsome and tough, but at his young wife’s insistence he settled down to successful, legitimate businesses. CREDIT: VILLASEÑOR FAMILY

  “I always say that the angels of destiny brought this woman through my father’s barrio in a caravan of trucks. She was a migrant worker, following the harvest, and she was passing through, picking tomatoes. She had the most education of anyone in her family—she’d finished the sixth grade. Lupe was good, hard-working, and Salvador was, I have to admit, kind of a crook. But he convinced the priest that he wasn’t a sinner, because Jesus himself had turned water into wine—just like a bootlegger!”

  As Villaseñor remembers it, his mother, Lupe, somehow managed the opposite of Jesus’s miracle. She changed Juan Salvador’s wine into good clean water, and made an honest man out of him.

  The family owned a series of liquor stores and pool halls, worked hard, and as Villaseñor tells it, “lived out a version of the American Dream. They had lives full of violence and desperation yet never without hope, you know.

  “The U.S. was the place of good and wonderful possibilities. It didn’t matter if you were a bandido or a bootlegger or a migrant worker or a president. It was always a challenge, always a rain of gold with God giving you the breath of life, giving you hope for a better day. The path was crooked. Yet there was a path.”

  A Mexican Independence Day celebration in 1920s Los Angeles. So many of the photos from this era have a touching “foot in each world” quality, as a young community figures out what to retain from the old country and what to adopt from the new. Mexican and American symbols are side by side as the crowd gathers to re-enact the Grito (shout) that marked the proclamation of Mexico’s separation from Spain in 1821. CREDIT: LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY

  When the Great Depression hit the American Southwest, that path, for many, led right back to Mexico. Los Angeles itself was coming to a rough accommodation with its large Mexican population. Cultural appropriation was in full swing as Anglos traded intelligence on their “find,” the best Mexican restaurant in this or that part of the city, and Spanish- and Mexican-style homes, furniture, and housewares were all the rage. This city with the Spanish name that was full of Midwestern migrants suddenly “rediscovered” its mission roots in 1930 by turning the center of the original pueblo and mission of Nuestra Senora de Los Angeles de Porciuncula, Ou
r Lady of the Angels of Porciuncula, into the Olvera Street tourist attraction. The United States was preparing to solve its own employment problems by sending “foreigners” back to Mexico. The only problem? Many of those foreigners were as American as empanada de manzana, apple pie.

  Young Emilia Castañeda remembers wearing her favorite dress for the journey. “I wore it because it was my favorite, and this was an important occasion. Because we were going away, we were leaving everything behind.”

  Emilia was from Boyle Heights, a Los Angeles neighborhood that had become home to many Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, not far from present-day Dodger Stadium. “I remember my Japanese-American girlfriends, Midoriko and Natsuko. We were like the United Nations in Boyle Heights—all kinds of people.

  “I remember saying the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, standing up beside our desks, every morning at my school on Malabar Street.”

  The Great Depression was bankrupting countless people, destroying futures, and breaking up families. Many Americans believed low-paid immigrants were taking “American” jobs, and making Mexicans targets of particular resentment. As the job crisis got worse, unemployed Americans did not suggest that Italians or Germans should be put on ships and sent home.

  At a time when America was in a heightening panic over foreign agitators, fifth columnists, and “alien ideologies,” Vicki Ruiz suggests there is another reason it was considered desirable to send Mexicans home: “Growers initially felt that Mexican workers were attractive because they were ‘naturally’ docile. But their history proves that Latino Americans are very often willing to organize, and strike, when faced with intolerable conditions.

  “In the Depression, that’s exactly what they did—in garment factories, in canneries, in mines, in cigar factories. And in 1933 alone there were thirty-seven major agricultural strikes in California. Strikes were common enough that employers were ready to let workers go.”

  As in the heated debates in this century about how to handle immigration, families of mixed status were particularly vulnerable to the blunt instrument of the law. Emilia Castañeda and her brother Francisco were U.S. citizens, born after the family came to the country. “But my father, he was not. He had to go. The migras said my brother and I could stay if we declared that we were orphans. They would put us in an orphanage. But I wasn’t an orphan.

  “I had my father. I kept saying I had my father. So they sent us all away to Mexico. ‘Back’ to Mexico, they kept saying. But I had never been to Mexico.” The Castañedas were packed onto a train with hundreds of other Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, and sent rumbling across the desert on that long ride back to Mexico.

  Emilia Castañeda. U.S. born, raised in the Los Angeles barrio of Boyle Heights, Castañeda was one of the thousands of U.S. citizens sent “back” to Mexico during the Great Depression. “I never stopped thinking of myself as an American,” she said. “The other kids [back in Mexico] teased me because I couldn’t speak Spanish well, because we didn’t belong there.” CREDIT: CASTAÑEDA FAMILY

  Between 1931 and 1935, as American joblessness reached its Depression crescendo, some four hundred thousand Mexicans, more than half of whom were American citizens, were “repatriated” to a country that in many cases they had never seen. Carried on entirely without due process, the mass deportations were authorized by President Herbert Hoover, who gave the go-ahead to his secretary of labor, William Doak, to deport half a million foreigners. Gary Gerstle says the U.S. government and the country’s citizens lurched one way, then another, in their treatment of Latinos for a century. “The government was alternately welcoming and threatening, depending on the economy. In boom times, companies lured workers north; in hard ones, Latinos were harassed, attacked, and deported.

  “These reverses are a powerful continuing theme in the story of Latino Americans. The deportations in the thirties came so close to the time when the need for Mexican labor was insatiable—it was the direct result of market forces in America. To the Mexican workers it seemed like Please-come-and-stay . . . now-go-away.”

  For young people like Emilia, “home” was not Mexico; it was East Los Angeles. “I didn’t like the hard life in Mexico. Why did I have to carry laundry on my head and wash it by hand, walk miles for clean water? I was used to turning on a faucet in the kitchen, using a bathroom with a flush toilet. I never stopped thinking of myself as an American. The other kids teased me because I couldn’t speak Spanish well, because we didn’t belong there. We were outcasts, repatriados.”

  A family member found Castañeda’s birth certificate in a box of papers sitting in a closet. She and her family now faced a painful choice. “I proved I was a U.S. citizen, and I could come back home. So I did. But my brother Francisco wouldn’t come. He kept saying, ‘Why go to a country that rejected me, that took away my homeland?’ He wouldn’t come, and my father also refused. So I came back here alone. I took the same train, from El Paso to Los Angeles—back again on the same train where they packed us together and sent us away.”

  Mexicans and Mexican-Americans wait to be sent to Mexico in Los Angeles’ Union Pacific train station during the Great Depression. CREDIT: LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY

  Emilia Castañeda went back to night school to relearn English. The classes were held in her old elementary school. Looking back, she said the years in Mexico left her a stranger in her homeland, disoriented. “It was my world. But it didn’t feel like home this time. I lost my place here, and I still don’t know why they did this to us.

  “They broke my family apart, you know. I couldn’t go to my father’s bedside when he was dying. This is a feeling I will have until I die.”

  • • •

  ISABEL GONZÁLEZ, AMERICAN citizen, went on to live a long life. She married Juan Francisco Torres and moved to New Jersey. She continued to be an outspoken advocate for Puerto Rican rights back on the island and on the mainland. She sent a steady stream of tart, smart, and strongly argued letters to the editors of the New York Times, which published her views on Puerto Rico’s U.S.-appointed governor, tariffs on coffee, and the efforts to displace the Spanish language on the island through the educational system.

  José Martí became the rope in a tug-of-war between Cubans in postrevolutionary Cuba and Cubans who left the island to escape Communism. Poet, freedom fighter, martyr Martí’s serious face with its exuberant mustache looks down on Cubans playing dominoes and sipping coffee in a sleepy provincial town on the island, and in a park that bears his name on a busy Miami street.

  Victor Villaseñor’s parents bore up under the terrible challenges of Depression America, and emerged, dreams intact, if maybe a little dented. “My mother and father journeyed through hell. They never expected anything. But spirits, the beings of the spirit world, guided them on to hope.”

  Depression would soon give way to world war once again. Latinos would again be asked to prove they had a right to a place in the American whole.

  “The Fearless Mexican.” Sargeant Macario Garcia was presented the Medal of Honor, America’s highest military decoration, for bravery after suffering terrible wounds in a battle near the Belgian-German border. He was the first Mexican citizen ever given the Medal of Honor. Mexican citizens and Mexican-Americans have won a disproportionate number of the highest military honors in modern U.S. wars. CREDIT: NARA

  AT WAR: ABROAD . . .

  AND AT HOME

  LATINOS WERE given their rights as American citizens in law long before those rights were fully recognized by their fellow Americans. As it had been for African-Americans, it turned out that citizenship and full recognition of equality moved on separate tracks. One of the great catalysts in advancing the struggle for civil rights was the Second World War.

  Boys barely men, and men already familiar with hard days of work in fields and factories, were swept up by a war that was fought in every corner of the glo
be. They would meet farm boys and laborers from across the world in North Africa, Europe, and Asia . . . schoolteachers and salesmen, auto mechanics and bus drivers . . . and try to kill them to save their own lives.

  For many, the United States was their adopted country, a place they would now fight for after beginning their lives somewhere else. Others were from families that had been “American” for a century or more, but excluded from enjoying the same rights and aspirations many of their neighbors took for granted.

  Men and women who in many cases rarely traveled much beyond the county line had been halfway around the world, been part of the most powerful and successful armed forces ever assembled in the history of the world. Young people from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, cane plantations in Puerto Rico, and small county seats in California’s agricultural belt fought well and suffered much. Commendations, decorations, and awards marched in orderly lines above their left breast pockets, in recognition of outstanding valor and sacrifice, or for just doing their part. They had rubbed shoulders with and fought alongside people from everywhere and taken their measure. They came home knowing they were equal to their fellow Americans. The second-class citizenship many had been forced to live with before the war would no longer be good enough.

  The struggles of returning African-American servicemen, and how their fights for equal housing, schooling, and public accommodation spurred the civil rights era, have become a well-known part of our history. Perhaps less well-known is the fight for equality going on at the same time across the states bordering Mexico, on the West Coast, and in big cities like New York.