The great depression was one of the toughest struggles in America, it started because of the stock market crash on October 29th 1929; also known as black Tuesday. The dust bowl that wiped out crops didn’t help either. All ethnicities, genders and ages were affected harshly by this, and didn’t start onto the path of recovery until 1933 when the New Age laws were passed and America slowly started the climb back onto their feet. On the 29th president Hoover was in office and everyone used him as a scapegoat; blaming it all on him- it wasn’t until Franklin Roosevelt was admitted into office that things started to get better.
Mexican Americans didn’t have the best lives even before The Great Depression. Many Anglos felt threatened by their presence and by their ability to work hard jobs and succeed in them so as many as “473 per 100,000 of population” were lynched with unfair or no trials at all. Many of the killings were carried out by the Texas Ranges who were supposed to uphold the law, but since racism was very common almost anyone who was not white was treated unfairly and was sometimes exempt from “normal” law and were tried to laws or rules that didn’t exist. Anti-Mexican mob violence and intimidation resulted in Mexicans being displaced from their lands, denied access to natural resources, and becoming politically disenfranchised.
Because of the Great-Depression the U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) adopted a policy of repatriation, reporting more than 250,000 Mexicans residing in the United States. Texas used Rangers to forcibly evict Mexicans who refused to accept voluntary repatriation, while Illinois, Indiana and Michigan paid for special trains to take Mexicans to the border. This happened because at that time these Latino families were accused of taking away all the job opportunities and government benefits from the so-called "real" Americans. Thus all these Mexican-Americans were repatriated or relocated even though more than half of these citizens were legal United States citizens. Herbert Hoover who was the President of United States at this time supported this acts.
The Mexican Americans during the Great Depression were having a hard time finding a steady job to support their families. This was due to the fact that most Mexican Americans were deported back to Mexico because they were the majority of unemployed workers in California, and also discrimination between Whites and Mexicans; where the White people would accuse Mexicans of stealing jobs that were originally for White people. So in order to survive they offered to work in horrible conditions that other ethnicities would not do, and work with little or no pay. Also, agriculture was not affected as much by the Dust Bowl in California where the majority of Mexicans were located, so they took advantage of farming and tried to profit from it. The majority of the Mexican Americans felt betrayed because of the massive deportation that they received, but of the Mexicans that remained in America they found whatever jobs they could find.
Well I think the governor should of took a bigger roll in the Great Depression In the 1930s it said that the Government deported more than 500,000 Mexican-Americans this was called the Mexican Repatriation I think instead of just sending them back for no reason just because they were Mexican he could of thought of something better like I think he should of open more opportunities meaning like jobs because that’s what people were struggling to find.
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