Downplaying Deportations: How Textbooks Hide the Mass Expulsion of Mexican Americans During the Great Depression
▻https://www.zinnedproject.org/if-we-knew-our-history/downplaying-deportations
What happened is that men, women, and children — immigrant and U.S.-born, citizen and noncitizen, long-time residents and temporary workers — all became the targets of a massive campaign of forced relocation, based solely on their perceived status as “Mexican.” They were rounded up in parks, at work sites, and in hospitals, betrayed by local relief agencies who reported anyone with a “Mexican sounding” name to the Immigration Service, pressured (and often tricked) into “voluntary” deportation — sometimes called repatriation — by municipal and state officials, and forcibly deported in trains and buses, to a country some hadn’t lived in for decades and others never at all.