Mexican Repatriation

The Mexican Repatriation Acts were repatriations, deportations and removals of Mexicans or Mexican-Americans from the United States. The estimates of how many were repatriated, deported or removed go from between 300,000 to more than two million people. Between forty and sixty percent of them (perhaps more) were United States citizens.^[1] The Mexican Repatriation took place during the two final years of the 1920s and the entire 1930s.^[2]^[3] These were times during which the Great Depression was happening.

The Mexican people remaining inside the United States were classified U.S. citizens and counted as White people or Caucasians before 1930. In that year a growing number of immigrants which was mixed with local racism led to new racial or ethnic categories being created in that year.^[4]

Mexican Repatriation Media

People waving goodbye to a train carrying 1,500 Mexicans from Los Angeles on August 20, 1931
Former Mexican territories within the United States. The Mexican Cession and former Republic of Texas are both shown in white, while the Gadsden Purchase is shown in brown.
California mother describes voluntary repatriation: "Sometimes I tell my children that I would like to go to Mexico, but they tell me, 'We don't want to go, we belong here.'" (1935 photograph by Dorothea Lange).
Rep. Martin Dies, Jr., American Congressman from Texas.
William Doak, Secretary of Labor
Pascual Ortiz Rubio, president of Mexico at the peak of the repatriation (1931)
Engraving at Los Angeles' LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, which discusses the repatriation.