Clash of Cultures & the Discovery of Gold      123456

The Great Depression

When the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, agricultural wages were cut at the same time that competition for farm jobs grew fierce. While some Mexican laborers staged strikes against the growers, others sought work in cities, migrating to Los Angeles and other urban hubs. Urban life presented new obstacles. With American unemployment at an all-time high, city and government employers were pressured to hire U.S. citizens exclusively. California passed a state law, the Alien Labor Act of 1931, that made it illegal for businesses in partnership with government agencies to employ those considered "foreign."

Deportation and Immigration of Mexicans and Mexican Americans to Mexico

In 1933, Los Angeles County hired over a dozen trains to deport more than 10,000 Mexicans who had been on county relief rolls. Soon after, in 1935, the California Relief Administration began denying public aid to Mexicans across the state. Between 1929 and 1935, the federal government played a direct role in deporting 82,000 Mexicans.

In response to well-publicized raids at work sites throughout California, many Mexican citizens and U.S. citizens of Mexican descent lived under constant threat of deportation. As a result, more than 400,000 of them voluntarily emigrated to Mexico. Many of them were people of Mexican heritage who had been born in the U.S. and never before seen Mexico. By the late 1930s the Mexican government helped route people across the Mexican border by providing low cost one-way train tickets. Remarkably, more than half of the nearly 500,000 people who moved to Mexico were actually U.S. citizens.