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Article Excerpt
In June 1930, the Arizona State Federation of Labor (ASFL) called for new restrictions on Mexican immigration in order to protect the status of "white citizen workers of Arizona and other Southwestern states." (1) Arizona's trade unions had repeatedly pressed for anti-immigration legislation over the previous two decades, and in so doing they often conflated national identity with race, using the terms white, American, and citizen interchangeably. The Great Depression amplified existing fears that Mexican workers were competing for jobs and degrading the economic, cultural, and racial status of the region's Anglo-American working class. Pressure from Arizona unions and politicians, and from other Southwestern states, soon compelled the U.S. Department of Labor to restrict immigration and initiate a nationwide "repatriation" campaign during which some half million Mexican immigrants, and thousands of Mexican Americans, were deported. (2)
Ironically, once Arizona agriculture began to rebound in 1933, the Anglos who had replaced deported Mexican workers faced questions about their own fitness for full citizenship. The ASFL theory that deportation would uphold or uplift the status of "white citizen workers" proved erroneous. As Anglo migrants from the Great Plains began working under the same substandard conditions as their Mexican and Indian antecedents, the boundaries of whiteness blurred. Incoming migrants were labeled with such derogatory terms as "Okie" and "white trash" and were shuttled into neighborhoods populated largely by nonwhites. Nevertheless, most of the newcomers refused to see ethnic Mexicans and Indians--or the growing number of black workers--as their equals. Many, if not most, viewed their own unfortunate circumstances as temporary, and they held on to their faith that they could work their way up the agricultural ladder, if not into new occupations altogether. (3)
For many, their expectations for upward mobility would prove well founded. Historian Marsha Weisiger has shown that, by the end of the Great Depression, the majority of the "Okies" found their way into better-paying, often unionized jobs, and, in many cases, into the middle class. Weisiger attributes this success to "gumption, hard work, perseverance, and a bit of luck," arguing that race had little to do with their experiences. (4) This essay, by contrast, contends that we cannot understand the concurrent success of the Anglo migrants and persistent subjugation of Mexican and Indian farmworkers without focusing squarely on race. While the Anglo workers certainly faced extremely difficult circumstances, ultimately, the boundaries of whiteness were not irrevocably damaged. Their successes in working their way out of poverty, when examined against the failure of most regional ethnic and Indian workers to do the same, can only be explained by understanding the central role that race played in defining the regional class structure in Arizona cotton country.
This essay contributes in two ways to current scholarship about race, labor, and citizenship in the twentieth-century Southwest and, more broadly, to recent debates over how the concept of whiteness has evolved over time in the history of the United States. First, while many scholars have focused on how various groups of European immigrants "became white" in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, the story of Okies in Arizona reveals how a population that had long been deemed white temporarily saw its privileged racial status threatened. (5) Second, however, I caution that this point should not be taken too far. Historian Neil Foley has argued that in Texas poor Anglos lost some of their whiteness in the 1930s, and that whiteness remained fractured even after the Great Depression due to the loss of status of yeomen farmers who had fallen off the agricultural ladder, becoming "semi-white" farmworkers. (6) This article draws some of the same conclusions, but with two important distinctions: In Arizona, there had never been a class of yeoman farmers comparable to what had existed in the south-central Plains states, and thus there was no comparable ladder from which to fall. Moreover, in Arizona the threat to the boundaries of white citizenship proved only temporary. Indeed, in the waning years of the Great Depression, the privileged status of "white citizen workers" would be reinforced as most Anglo migrant farmworkers found their way into higher-status jobs and as the Bracero Program reinforced the idea that migrant farmwork was nonwhite, noncitizen work. In short, the slip-page of many Anglos into a somewhat questionable racial status proved incomplete and temporary.
The deportations of Mexicans in the early years of the Great Depression were in large part responses to regional demands. In Arizona, much of the Anglo population, including labor union members and state officials, placed the blame for skyrocketing unemployment and low wages on "alien" Mexican workers. J. H. Francis, a member of the Arizona Legislature, expressed the feelings of many of his constituents in March 1930 when he complained about "the terrific drain imposed upon Arizona taxpayers through the admission of thousands of indigent Mexicans annually into this state." The Central Labor Council of the Globe-Miami mining district wrote to the president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) that the "industrial, social and educational standards of Americans" in Arizona's extractive industries had been dramatically undermined by the "Mexican influx." The ASFL and the national AFL agreed with this assessment and repeatedly called for a steep reduction in Mexican immigration in order to protect the status of "white citizen workers" in the Southwest. (7)
The rhetoric of deportation went beyond economic concerns to imply that Mexicans could not be assimilated and that nationality was determined not only by birthplace and political loyalty, but also by race and culture. In March 1930, the Arizona Labor Journal printed what it called a "splendid article" containing inflammatory rhetoric in support of restricting Mexican immigration. The article challenged the "alleged necessity for cheap labor" and suggested that Mexicans threatened to undermine "American standards of citizenship." It proposed further that white Americans in the Southwest were suffering due to "the permanent addition to our population of a great mass of the least intelligent and the least assimilable of all the alien groups which have settled among us," and it called for the curtailment of the "further Mexicanization of the Southwest." (8)
Arizona politicians who had previously supported temporary admittance of Mexican nationals had little choice but to respond to the growing cry for restrictions. Senator Carl Hayden initially replied by suggesting that Mexicans should be admitted into Arizona and the Southwest only temporarily for seasonal farmwork--an argument that he had been making since Mexican immigration dramatically increased in the late 1910s with the expansion of agriculture (particularly cotton) in the region. As the din against Mexican immigration became louder, however, his position changed, and his rhetoric became more emphatic and tinged with ethnocentrism, if not racism. "No large number of aliens," he suggested in April 1930, "should be permitted to become permanent residents of the United States, whose children will not look the same, act the same, and have the same ideals, as other Americans." In December, Hayden introduced a resolution in the U.S. Senate to appropriate funds for a full count of the illegal "aliens" who remained in the United States. He enthusiastically endorsed President Herbert Hoover's nomination of William Doak as Secretary of Labor, embracing Doak's promise to intensify restrictions against Mexican immigration and to initiate a concerted national repatriation campaign. (9)
Complaints in Arizona were part of a growing national groundswell for federal action. In the latter 1920s the U.S. State Department had begun to enforce more diligently the $8 head tax imposed under the 1917 Immigration Act, which, combined with the $9 visa fee introduced in the Immigration Act of 1924, made legal immigration prohibitively expensive for many Mexicans. After March 1930 the government stopped issuing visas altogether to "common laborers" from Mexico, and the U.S. Congress made illegal entry a misdemeanor punishable by jail time. Beyond the enforcement of immigration laws, the federal government began an active campaign to deport undocumented immigrants, while city and state officials took it upon themselves to encourage and intimidate even legal immigrants to return to Mexico. Under Secretary of Labor William Doak, immigration agents and local officials carried out raids in cities across the country, entering into communities and workplaces to arrest and deport those without proper documentation. (10)
In Arizona, thousands of Mexican immigrants were either forcefully deported or chose to leave "voluntarily," often as the result of active intimidation or discriminatory treatment by employers. The Depression, of course, affected all Arizona residents. Employers, however, often fired ethnic Mexicans first. In Tucson, in 1930, the Southern Pacific Railroad laid off more than one hundred workers, most of whom were Mexicans who worked in the blacksmith...
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