Mexican Repatriation: Citizens Pushed South

The Great Depression arrived in Tucson the way it arrived everywhere, as a sudden collapse of wages and work. What happened next in this city, and across southern Arizona, was not universal. It was specific to the families whose names sounded Mexican and whose faces were read as brown.

Beginning in nineteen twenty-nine and continuing through the mid-nineteen thirties, state and local governments organized repatriation programs to remove Mexican nationals from American soil. The programs were framed as voluntary. In practice, they were conducted through raids, through the withdrawal of public assistance, through the simple pressure of an authority showing up at your door and making clear that leaving was the expected outcome.

The borderlands of southern Arizona were among the most active zones of removal. Proximity to the border made the logistics straightforward. The physical distinctiveness of many Mexican-origin families and the concentration of Mexican American communities in neighborhoods like Barrio Libre made enforcement efficient.

The figure cited by historians is that roughly four hundred thousand people left the United States between nineteen twenty-nine and nineteen thirty-seven. Of those people, an estimated sixty percent were United States citizens by birth. They were American nationals, removed or coerced into leaving their country, some of them never to return.

The families they came from had in many cases been in this valley since before the Gadsden Purchase made Tucson American. They had been American before the United States arrived. None of that was relevant to the men at the door.

The state of California formally apologized for its repatriation programs in two thousand five. Arizona has not.