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.