From: Melita M. Garza, They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. 264 pp. $29.95

In December 1929, Mexican deportee Carlos Espinosa recrossed the border into Laredo, Texas, and waited on the road for the US Border Patrol to apprehend him. He preferred prison in Webb County, USA for illegally reentering the country over unemployment, and presumably hunger, in Mexico, he told the border patrolmen who finally showed up.[1]

The way three competing newspapers dealt with this event highlights how disparate news coverage socially constructs the reality of immigration and Mexicans in distinctive ways. Espinosa was front-page fodder for San Antonio’s Spanish-language daily, La Prensa, predicting that: “The day a civilized government replaces Mexico’s tyrannical one. . . most Mexicans . . . will return promptly to their native soil. With the repatriation of Mexicans ‘living on the outside,’ competition with North American workers that has lowered salaries will cease.”[2]

The La Prensa columnist saw Espinosa as the prototypical Mexican, caught between political chaos in Mexico and the demand for cheap labor in the United States, law or no law. The Express editors considered Espinosa less newsworthy, reporting his apprehension on page 9, next to a story about a survey showing brunettes were more popular than blondes.[3]

The San Antonio Express didn’t consider the broader implications of Espinosa’s predicament, dwelling instead on the surprise of the border patrol. The incident went unrecorded in the competing William Randolph Hearst-owned San Antonio Light. In short, the Express’s placement suggested that he was just another Mexican drifter, while the Light found his story so banal as to not merit coverage.

Espinosa’s reported “capture” on the verge of the Great Depression poignantly encapsulated the dilemma of the Mexican, as persons of Mexicans descent were then called, whatever their nationality. The decade-long crisis blended with nativist sentiments to create a pivotal new chapter in US immigration history.[4]

New laws were debated, immigration became a flashpoint in the furor over the country’s economic troubles, and tens of thousands of immigrants, mainly from Mexico, were deported. Frustrated at congressional dithering, some counties and cities nationwide developed their own repatriation plans, leading to the return of almost one-half million Mexicans. Playing in the background were larger questions about who might be counted as American.

With San Antonio, Texas, as a backdrop, this book focuses on Mexicans, immigration, and repatriation, through an English- and Spanish-language media lens during the critical early 1930s period. News coverage of immigrants in Depression era San Antonio—a cornerstone of myth and memory—reveals profound differences in the way these three newspapers framed Mexicans and immigrants.

The setting for this book’s analysis is the aftermath of the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the deepest years of the Great Depression, 1929 to 1934. The Alamo City had a thriving independent Spanish-language daily newspaper, a locally owned English-language daily newspaper, and a chain-operated daily owned by William Randolph Hearst, then the nation’s grandest newspaper titan. The city was also located in a state that would ultimately report more repatriations than any other.[5]

Geographically situated about 150 miles from Mexico, San Antonio was nonetheless figuratively a powerful border city, one whose Mexican and Anglo culture remains enshrined in an artifact of Spanish architecture, the former Franciscan mission remembered for the Battle of the Alamo.

Moreover, during the Great Depression “San Antonio was at the crossroads of Texan, Mexican, and US myth, memory, and identity, as well as trade, commerce, and geography.[6] It was a time, as John Bodnar puts it, when recovering the past became increasingly important to Americans.

Destitute communities recovered and remade public memories of their pioneer heritage, finding comfort in memorializing past glories, conquests, and victories.[7] San Antonio was a prime example. The city became enthralled with the legacy of the early eighteenth-century Spanish-speaking immigrants who founded San Antonio. Paradoxically, Spanish-speaking immigrants of the Depression era often were on contested terrain and commonly met indifference, vitriol, or expulsion…

Mexicans accounted for more than 46 percent of all those deported between 1930 and 1939, though they represented only 1 percent of the US population…[8] The voluntary and forced returns to Mexico swept Mexicans from their homes in Anchorage, Detroit, Chicago, and other northern points, as well as from southern borderlands such as Laredo, San Diego, and El Paso…[9]

Because the media’s role in interpreting these events has also been little studied, the book analyzes the framing of these issues in three different newspapers in San Antonio to see how stories were cast to meet the perceived needs of different audiences. The representations illuminated on these pages do more than that, however.

They show the way independent, local journalistic voices in English and Spanish mapped the identity of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and immigrants in overlapping and sometimes contrary ways. They show the complicated role that English-language news played in supporting Mexican labor and at times demonizing it.

Reprinted with permission of the University of Texas Press

[1] “Un mexicano deportado volvio a Texas sabiendo que le esperaba la carcel,” La Prensa, December 8, 1930.

[2] Rodolfo Uranga, “Glosario del dia,” La Prensa, December 17, 1929. All translations from La Prensa are the author’s own.

[3] (Special Correspondent), “Man Prefers County Jail to Mexico: Deported Alien Pleads to Be Taken Back to Laredo,” San Antonio Express, December 7, 1929. The Express referred to him as Espinoza, while La Prensa referred to him as Espinosa. “Brunettes Are More Popular than Blondes,” San Antonio Express, December 7, 1929.

[4] National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Business Cycle Dates, accessed December 26, 2011, http://www.nber.org/cycles.html

[5] Abraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexicans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929-1939 (1974; repr. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1979), 118. All citations are to the 1979 edition.

[6] Richard A. Garcia, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class, San Antonio, 1929-1941 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991), 3.

[7] John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (1929: repr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 127, 173. All citations are to the 1994 printing.

[8] Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, rev. ed. (1995; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 67. All citations are to the revised edition.

[9] Hoffman, 399.

Dale L. Cressman, associate professor of communication at Brigham Young University, has won the first annual Michael S. Sweeney Award for his scholarly article in Journalism History, “News in Light: The Times Square Zipper and Newspaper Signs in an Age of Technological Enthusiasm.”

The award, which honors the best article published in the quarterly journal over the past year, was created by the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) to honor the outgoing editor.

Mike Sweeney, since 2012 editor of the independent peer-reviewed journal at Ohio University, announced two years ago that he wanted to turn over Journalism History to the Division and to a new editor. The reason was two-fold, he told the division with frankness: he was being treated for a Stage IV cancer and the journal’s self-publication was no longer financially sustainable.

Sweeney, who was also the incoming head of the History Division at the time, appointed an ad hoc task force to examine having the Division take over the journal. The mission that Sweeney initiated has now cleared the way for the Division to publish the journal for its nearly 300 members and institutional subscribers. The Division has also named the next editor, Gregory A. Borchard of the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

In appreciation of Sweeney’s tenure as editor and his actions to ensure the journal’s future, the Division created the Michael S. Sweeney Award. The editor, in this case Sweeney himself, nominates four or five top articles from four issues over a recent 12-month period. The winner is selected from among the nominated articles by the Division’s three officers and is honored with a plaque at the AEJMC conference in August.

The other nominees for this first award were Juanita Darling, for “Jewish Values in the Journalism of Alberto Gerchunoff”; Michael Fuhlhage, for “To Limit the Spread of Slavery: A Boston Journal Correspondent’s Multiple Roles in the Kansas Free State Movement”; and Debra Reddin Van Tuyll, for “Protecting Press Freedom and Access to Government Information in Antebellum South Carolina.”

Cressman’s winning article, “News in Light,” traces the evolution of signs posted outside newspaper buildings, notably in New York City, feeding a public appetite for major news events. Electricity and technological advances, under competitive pressure among newspapers, led in 1928 to the “moving letter” sign around the New York Times building known as “The Zipper.” Cressman uses archives from the New York Times to document fights over the patent, but also theorizes that this history prefigured TV news consumption in the way it transformed readers into a collective audience.

The Division officers, Doug Cumming, Erika Pribanic-Smith and Teri Finneman, were impressed by the article’s insight, scholarship and readability.

Cressman, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Utah, was formerly a television news editor and producer in Salt Lake City, Green Bay, Wis., and Waco, Texas, and an editor at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Christopher Frear is a doctoral candidate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of South Carolina.

What a time to take up trail running. As I’ve studied for comprehensive exams and writing a dissertation, trail running—taking off in the woods to climb hills, splash through streams, and pick my way around roots and rocks for an hour or more—has become a fixture in my daily life. No, I’m not recommending it, but trail running has taught me useful habits.

Work the hills. Uphill is harder but more rewarding. On trails most people won’t take, and going when they won’t, that’s when I find the surprising, interesting things. A journalism history dissertation feels a lot harder than other methods in the social sciences I’ve used, but it has made me a more thorough researcher.

Be easy when it’s hard. On the days when it feels hard, I’ve learned to be easiest on myself. I tell myself to just show up and do what I can. It works for running and research.

Watch when I get tired. In thousands of miles on the trails, I’ve fallen three times, all more than an hour into a run when I failed to lift my toe past a small root or rock embedded in the trail. The first one gashed up my knee and ended my run. The latest one was an uphill chest plant on a soft, muddy trail, and I bounced up and kept running. In research, late in the day or when my attention is low, I remind myself to switch tasks rather than sit and stare at a blinking cursor or rush through a vintage newspaper to finish a pile.

Appreciate the isolation. In running and in research, most of the work is alone. When I’m way out on a trail or deep in a legal file, and I have a long way to go, I repeat to myself, “Relax into it,” to keep moving at a steady pace and not overlook the details. Just last week, a case file in the Fourth Circuit Court archives yielded several deep in files as I paid attention to details.

Find occasional community. No one wants to hear the details of a run, or my training for a race—except another dedicated runner. My daughter-in-law is my fellow run junkie. We trained in separate states for a 12-mile trail race this spring and texted plans, runs, worries, and encouragement in the months before. While we all get comfortable giving a polished one-sentence capsule of our research, we still need to someone with whom to share the details, the finds, the worries about theory. Advisors play this role, and so do fellow researchers in our History Division, and in other associations and conferences.

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AEJMC social: Swap stories and find a new colleague at our History Division graduate student social at the Capitol City Brewing Company, August 7, 8:30–10:30 p.m. (after History and GSIG meetings). It’s a short walk from the hotel and will include a buffet with meat and vegetarian options.

By Bill Huntzicker

Professor Hazel Dicken-Garcia, 79, who was among the first to explore the evolution of ethics in journalism and whose students populate newsrooms and universities around the nation, died May 30 at Our Lady of Peace hospice in St. Paul, Minn., two miles from the home in which she lived since the 1980s.

Dr. Dicken-Garcia taught in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis for 30 years.

Her second and best-known book, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America, won the Frank Luther Mott Kappa Tau Alpha research award in 1989. She received the American Journalism Historians Association’s Kobre Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2006.

Born in a log house in rural Clinton County, Kentucky, near the town of Albany on March 4, 1939, she recalled hitching a mule to a harrow plow to break up clods on the family farm. As a child, she walked more than two miles to a one-room school that had no library. An avid reader, she said she had read all the books in the school before she reached the eighth grade.

To attend Clinton County High School, she had to move to town, because there was no road suitable for a bus to reach her rural home. After graduation in 1957, she attended Berea College, founded in 1855 (before the abolition of slavery) to provide an integrated education for poor black and white students. The college required work in lieu of tuition, so she worked her way through school.

After graduating in 1961, she worked for two years with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in India. Returning to the United States, she worked with AFSC for three years as a youth program director in four states, organizing programs and conferences on social issues, including poverty, racism, and mental illness.

She worked at part-time jobs and as a reporter in Ann Arbor while she earned her master’s degree from the University of Michigan, completing it in 1969. Three years later, she moved to Madison to work on her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, where she studied mass communication history, finishing the degree in 1977.

She taught at the University of Wisconsin, Waukesha County; the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the University of Iowa, Iowa City; the University of Maryland, College Park; American University in D.C.; the University of Michigan;and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.  She settled at the University of Minnesota, where she designed a variety of mass media history, law, theory, and ethics courses.

In addition to Journalistic Standards, Dr. Dicken-Garcia wrote To Western Woods: The Breckinridge Family Moves to Kentucky in 1793 (2008), which is about early communication on the frontier. Earlier, she coauthored Communication History (1980) and Hated Ideas and the American Civil War Press (2007). She wrote many academic articles on media history.

She also wrote an autobiographical introduction to Beyond the Ivory Tower: A Symposium Honoring Mass Media Historian Hazel Dicken-Garcia, which was published by Minnesota’s journalism school in 2010.

Dr. Dicken-Garcia was deeply involved in the annual Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, where she served as president of the steering committee for more than a decade. The symposium honors a journalism historian each year with the Hazel Dicken-Garcia Award for Distinguished Scholarship. (Dr. Dicken-Garcia was the first winner of the award, which subsequently was named in her honor.) She and her students have presented numerous papers that have become chapters in the books published from the symposium.

Friends and colleagues of Dr. Hazel Dicken-Garcia will gather for a memorial at 2 p.m. on June 22 at Unity Church-Unitarian, 733 Portland Ave., St. Paul, Minn. 55104

The Rev. Janne Eller-Isaacs has asked friends to send her stories or anecdotes to be read at the ceremony. She will pass the unabridged versions of notes on to the family. She can be reached at janne@unityunitarian.org and 651-228-1456 x106.

Memorials in lieu of flowers can be sent to her favorite causes, including the Symposium. Send contributions to: the Hazel Dicken-Garcia Fund for the Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression, c/o David B. Sachsman, 212 Frist Hall, Dept. 3003, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, 615 McCallie Ave., Chattanooga, TN 37403.

Questions can be directed to David-Sachsman@utc.edu.

Another fund in her honor is the Hazel Dicken-Garcia Graduate Fellowship, which supports graduate students in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Minnesota. Contributions can be sent to University of Minnesota Foundation; P.O. Box 860266; Minneapolis, MN 55486-0266; The link: https://makingagift.umn.edu/give/fund.html?id=5003

She also supported Berea College, CPO 2216, Berea, KY 40404. Questions answered at edwardse@berea.edu. Another of her favorite causes is her church at the address above.

Her remains will be buried near her parents at the Cedar Hill Cemetery in Clinton County, Ky.