Guerillera III

This came from one of my myspace bulletins, Jinks . A very worthy read. This is a recurring nightmare. This is one of history's most challenging lesson. First, the anihilation of Mayans and the Aztec nation (Aztec avarice became it's own demise). Native Americans in the north stripped of their lands, brutally left to crumble by disease. Africans, tossed from one country to another to serve as machinery, nothing more and still thought of as nothing more. Here, when Texas became a country, I believe the Rangers rid THEIR lands of MEZKINS:

Texas Rangers, U.S. History

Related Category: U.S. History


Texas Rangers, mounted fighting force organized (1835) during the Texas Revolution. During the republic they became established as the guardians of the Texas frontier, particularly against Native Americans. The Texas Rangers at first consisted of three companies of 25 men each. Said to "ride like Mexicans, shoot like Tennesseans, and fight like the very devil," the rangers were unique as a police force in that they never drilled, were not required to salute officers, and wore neither uniforms nor any standard gear except the six-shooter. In their first decade of operation, the rangers effectively quelled lawlessness in Texas on frequent occasions, and in the Mexican War (1846–48) they served as scouts and guerrilla fighters, gaining a wide reputation for valor and effectiveness.

In the late 1850s the rangers fought vicious battles with the Comanche, and in the Civil War, Terry's Texas Rangers gained renown. In the Reconstruction era the Texas Rangers were engaged to control outlaws, feuding groups, and Mexican marauders and were responsible for keeping law and order along the Rio Grande. In 1874 the Texas Rangers were organized for the first time on a permanent basis in two battalions; one was assigned to arbitrate range wars on the frontier, and the other was sent to control cattle rustling on the Texas-Mexico border. The heyday of the great cattle business, with its feuds and shootings, its outlaws and rustlers, was also the heyday of the Texas Rangers.


This reference was the first listing on a google search. That is in the texts books. They don't call the Texas Rangers a "vigilante violence" (artical makes an interesting statements about the sanction of minute men). They were created to protect their rightful borders by shooting any Mexican or Native American found.

I hope that this time, the endurance built by the sweat and blood of oppressed generations, will culminate to a full shift of power, a revolution that begins with the death of apathy and insular living, with offering more fine combed perspectives on the traditional glorified history to our students. Time to learn. Time to evolve:


US Deported Mexicans Before - American Dream my ass...
Body: US Deported Mexicans In Masses Before-It Was Bad Very bad
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www.usatoday.com/news/nat...over_x.htm

His father and oldest sister were farming sugar beets
in the fields of Hamilton, Mont., and his mother was
cooking tortillas when 6-year-old Ignacio Pina saw
plainclothes authorities burst into his home.

"They came in with guns and told us to get out,"
recalls Pina, 81, a retired railroad worker in
Bakersfield, Calif., of the 1931 raid. "They didn't let
us take anything," not even a trunk that held birth
certificates proving that he and his five siblings were
U.S.-born citizens.

The family was thrown into a jail for 10 days before
being sent by train to Mexico. Pina says he spent 16
years of "pure hell" there before acquiring papers of
his Utah birth and returning to the USA.

The deportation of Pina's family tells an
almost-forgotten story of a 1930s anti-immigrant
campaign. Tens of thousands, and possibly more than
400,000, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were pressured
-- through raids and job denials -- to leave the USA
during the Depression, according to a USA TODAY review
of documents and interviews with historians and
deportees. Many, mostly children, were U.S. citizens.

Related story: Some stories hard to get in history
books

If their tales seem incredible, a newspaper analysis of
the history textbooks used most in U.S. middle and high
schools may explain why: Little has been written about
the exodus, often called "the repatriation."

That may soon change. As the U.S. Senate prepares to
vote on bills that would either help illegal workers
become legal residents or boost enforcement of U.S.
immigration laws, an effort to address deportations
that happened 70 years ago has gained traction:

*On Thursday, Rep. Hilda Solis, D-Calif., plans to
introduce a bill in the U.S. House that calls for a
commission to study the "deportation and coerced
emigration" of U.S. citizens and legal residents. The
panel would also recommend remedies that could include
reparations. "An apology should be made," she says.

Co-sponsor Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., says history
may repeat itself. He says a new House bill that makes
being an illegal immigrant a felony could prompt a
"massive deportation of U.S. citizens," many of them
U.S.-born children leaving with their parents.

"We have safeguards to ensure people aren't deported
who shouldn't be," says Jeff Lungren, GOP spokesman for
the House Judiciary Committee, adding the new House
bill retains those safeguards.

*In January, California became the first state to enact
a bill that apologizes to Latino families for the 1930s
civil rights violations. It declined to approve the
sort of reparations the U.S. Congress provided in 1988
for Japanese-Americans interned during World War II.

Democratic state Sen. Joe Dunn, a self-described "Irish
white guy from Minnesota" who sponsored the state bill,
is now pushing a measure to require students be taught
about the 1930s emigration. He says as many as 2
million people of Mexican ancestry were coerced into
leaving, 60% of them U.S. citizens.

*In October, a group of deportees and their relatives,
known as los repatriados, will host a conference in
Detroit on the topic. Organizer Helen Herrada, whose
father was deported, has conducted 100 oral histories
and produced a documentary. She says many sent to
Mexico felt "humiliated" and didn't want to talk about
it. "They just don't want it to happen again."

No precise figures exist on how many of those deported
in the 1930s were illegal immigrants. Since many of
those harassed left on their own, and their journeys
were not officially recorded, there are also no exact
figures on the total number who departed.

At least 345,839 people went to Mexico from 1930 to
1935, with 1931 as the peak year, says a 1936 dispatch
from the U.S. Consulate General in Mexico City.

"It was a racial removal program," says Mae Ngai, an
immigration history expert at the University of
Chicago, adding people of Mexican ancestry were
targeted.

However, Americans in the 1930s were "really hurting,"
says Otis Graham, history professor emeritus at the
University of California, Santa Barbara. One in four
workers were unemployed and many families hungry.
Deporting illegal residents was not an "outrageous
idea," Graham says. "Don't lose the context."

A pressure campaign

In the early 1900s, Mexicans poured into the USA,
welcomed by U.S. factory and farm owners who needed
their labor. Until entry rules tightened in 1924, they
simply paid a nickel to cross the border and get visas
for legal residency.

"The vast majority were here legally, because it was so
easy to enter legally," says Kevin Johnson, a law
professor at the University of California, Davis.

They spread out across the nation. They sharecropped in
California, Texas and Louisiana, harvested sugar beets
in Montana and Minnesota, laid railroad tracks in
Kansas, mined coal in Utah and Oklahoma, packed meat in
Chicago and assembled cars in Detroit.

By 1930, the U.S. Census counted 1.42 million people of
Mexican ancestry, and 805,535 of them were U.S. born,
up from 700,541 in 1920.

Change came in 1929, as the stock market and U.S.
economy crashed. That year, U.S. officials tightened
visa rules, reducing legal immigration from Mexico to a
trickle. They also discussed what to do with those
already in the USA.

"The government undertook a program that coerced people
to leave," says Layla Razavi, policy analyst for the
Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund
(MALDEF). "It was really a hostile environment." She
says federal officials in the Hoover administration,
like local-level officials, made no distinction between
people of Mexican ancestry who were in the USA legally
and those who weren't.

"The document trail is shocking," says Dunn, whose
staff spent two years researching the topic after he
read the 1995 book Decade of Betrayal: Mexican
Repatriation in the 1930s, by Francisco Balderrama and
Raymond Rodriguez.

USA TODAY reviewed hundreds of pages of documents, some
provided by Dunn and MALDEF and others found at the
National Archives. They cite officials saying the
deportations lawfully focused on illegal immigrants
while the exodus of legal residents was voluntary. Yet
they suggest people of Mexican ancestry faced varying
forms of harassment and intimidation:

*Raids. Officials staged well-publicized raids in
public places. On Feb. 26, 1931, immigration officials
suddenly closed off La Placita, a square in Los
Angeles, and questioned the roughly 400 people there
about their legal status.

The raids "created a climate of fear and anxiety" and
prompted many Mexicans to leave voluntarily, says
Balderrama, professor of Chicano studies and history at
California State University, Los Angeles.

In a June 1931 memo to superiors, Walter Carr, Los
Angeles district director of immigration, said
"thousands upon thousands of Mexican aliens" have been
"literally scared out of Southern California."

Some of them came from hospitals and needed medical
care en route to Mexico, immigrant inspector Harry
Yeager wrote in a November 1932 letter.

The Wickersham Commission, an 11-member panel created
by President Hoover, said in a May 1931 report that
immigration inspectors made "checkups" of boarding
houses, restaurants and pool rooms without "warrants of
any kind." Labor Secretary William Doak responded that
the "checkups" occurred very rarely.

*Jobs withheld. Prodded by labor unions, states and
private companies barred non-citizens from some jobs,
Balderrama says.

"We need their jobs for needy citizens," C.P. Visel of
the Los Angeles Citizens Committee for Coordination of
Unemployment Relief wrote in a 1931 telegram. In a
March 1931 letter to Doak, Visel applauded U.S.
officials for the "exodus of aliens deportable and
otherwise who have been scared out of the community."

Emilia Castenada, 79, recalls coming home from school
in 1935 in Los Angeles and hearing her father say he
was being deported because "there was no work for
Mexicans." She says her father, a stonemason, was a
legal resident who owned property. A U.S. citizen who
spoke little Spanish, she left the USA with her brother
and father, who was never allowed back.

"The jobs were given to the white Americans, not the
Mexicans," says Carlos DeAnda Guerra, 77, a retired
furniture upholsterer in Carpinteria, Calif. He says
his parents entered the USA legally in 1917 but were
denied jobs. He, his mother and five U.S.-born siblings
were deported in 1931, while his father, who then went
into hiding, stayed to pick oranges.

"The slogan has gone out over the city (Los Angeles)
and is being adhered to -- 'Employ no Mexican while a
white man is unemployed,' " wrote George Clements,
manager of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce's
agriculture department, in a memo to his boss Arthur
Arnoll. He said the Mexicans' legal status was not a
factor: "It is a question of pigment, not a question of
citizenship or right."

*Public aid threatened. County welfare offices
threatened to withhold the public aid of many
Mexican-Americans, Ngai says. Memos show they also
offered to pay for trips to Mexico but sometimes failed
to provide adequate food. An immigration inspector
reported in a November 1932 memo that no provisions
were made for 78 children on a train. Their only
sustenance: a few ounces of milk daily.

Most of those leaving were told they could return to
the USA whenever they wanted, wrote Clements in an
August 1931 letter. "This is a grave mistake, because
it is not the truth." He reported each was given a card
that made their return impossible, because it showed
they were "county charities." Even those born in the
USA, he wrote, wouldn't be able to return unless they
had a birth certificate or similar proof.

*Forced departures. Some of the deportees who were
moved by train or car had guards to ensure they left
the USA and others were sent south on a "closed-body
school bus" or "Mexican gun boat," memos show.

"Those who tried to say 'no' ended up in the physical
deportation category," Dunn says, adding they were
taken in squad cars to train stations.

Mexican-Americans recall other pressure tactics. Arthur
Herrada, 81, a retired Ford engineer in Huron, Ohio,
says his father, who was a legal U.S. resident, was
threatened with deportation if he didn't join the U.S.
Army. His father enlisted.

'We weren't welcome'

"It was an injustice that shouldn't have happened,"
says Jose Lopez, 79, a retired Ford worker in Detroit.
He says his father came to the USA legally but couldn't
find his papers in 1931 and was deported. To keep the
family together, his mother took her six U.S.-born
children to Mexico, where they often survived on one
meal a day. Lopez welcomes a U.S. apology.

So does Guerra, the retired upholsterer, whose voice
still cracks with emotion when he talks about how
deportation tore his family apart. "I'm very resentful.
I don't trust the government at all," says Guerra, who
later served in the U.S. military.

Pina says his entire family got typhoid fever in Mexico
and his father, who had worked in Utah coal mines, died
of black lung disease in 1935. "My mother was left
destitute, with six of us, in a country we knew nothing
about," he says. They lived in the slums of Mexico
City, where his formal education ended in sixth grade.
"We were misfits there. We weren't welcome."

"The Depression was very bad here. You can imagine how
hard it was in Mexico," says Pina, who proudly notes
the advanced college degrees of each of his four
U.S.-raised sons. "You can't put 16 years of pure hell
out of your mind."