This book joins the small body of scholarship which examines Mexicans in the United States from 1900 to 1940. It briefly surveys migration from Mexico, and provides an excellent discussion of work and settlement patterns of Mexican laborers. There was exploitation and degradation of the immigrants, a “type of bondage” (p. 116).
Nativist attempts to place a quota on immigration are also examined. Even those who opposed the quota agreed their workers were inferior beings, but argued convincingly that economic necessity and Pan American goodwill should dictate the defeat of proposed legislation. Lack of jobs and American hostility toward the immigrants dining the Great Depression caused the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans.
This is an uneven book. Well written and based on extensive research in United States archives, it brings to light many new facts. The study, however, often lacks objectivity. Its previous title, Passing Through Our Egypt, a 1973 dissertation, more accurately reflects the polemical nature of many of the author’s conclusions. He states, for example, that during the recession of 1921-1922 the unemployed Mexican worker was deserted, rejected, and abandoned in his time of need. “All denied responsibility for him” (p. 71). This was not true: many former employers provided food, clothing, and transportation to Mexico, at times in close cooperation with Alvaro Obregón’s government; officials in Fort Worth, Texas, exhausted charitable resources to help the immigrants. Moreover, how can the Mexican experience be called a “type of bondage” given the continuous volume of transborder migration and the voluntary decision of hundreds of thousands of workers to settle here? The author has apparently ignored evidence which does not fit his preconceived notions.
Despite these reservations, this book may be read with profit by those interested in a scholarly approach to the history of Mexican immigrants and their descendants in the United States. But the author’s conclusions must be used with care if one wishes to understand fully the nuances of this important historical phenomenon.
