Echoes of 1930s Expulsions: A Warning for Today

Opinion for The Latino Newsletter

The Republican Party campaigned for power by threatening to rip the lives of 20 million people from the fabric of this country. As horrifying a premise as it is, this act of political depravity has happened before.

Beginning in the 1930s, an estimated 1 million people —Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals— were expelled from this country. Following the Great Depression, Mexicans were targeted and scapegoated for taking jobs from “real” Americans and exploiting social welfare resources. The Hoover administration, scrambling to stay in power, gave cities and states authority as to how they would rid themselves of these “undesirables.” The smears used against this demographic have embedded themselves into the historic and now daily discourse of immigration.

In Los Angeles and the state of California, individuals, including families with children, were raided and rounded up through door-to-door knocking, threats, intimidation, withdrawal of social welfare benefits, and collusion with the Mexican government. A conservative estimate suggests that 600,000 of those people were U.S. citizens. That is right, 600,000 people who had the legal right to live in this country were thrown out or “expatriated.”

The incoming Trump administration and its nativist allies clearly got their ideas from our little-known, forgotten history. There were few if any, concrete repercussions to Hoover’s action or that of the following FDR administration. There has been no federal acknowledgment and certainly no reparations. Only the devastation of families and communities.

To this very day, we as a nation remain troubled and confused by who is a “real” American. From the inception of our country, we’ve created and sustained outrageous “immigration policies.” Indigenous Native Americans were labeled “domestic foreigners” and didn’t have the right to vote until 100 years ago. In 1923, the Supreme Court ruled that “the intention of the Founding Fathers was to ‘confer the privilege of citizenship upon the class of persons they knew as white.’”

Citizenship and whiteness are still closely linked in the minds of many, which is precisely why there’s a fence on the southern border and not the northern border. Nobody tends to be worried about a “mass invasion” from the north.

This is all about skin color.

At California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), I teach this history, along with other hidden histories, to future elementary teachers. We reflect on how often K-12 education has omitted the United States-led crimes of the past. I teach these topics not because I am unpatriotic but precisely because I want to build a better country through the teaching of difficult truths.

The only way to plan for a better country in the future is to acknowledge our past, not the fairy tale creation myth, not the white-washed propaganda, but our actual history, with all its blood and sinew.

It is challenging to imagine the catastrophic damage to the lives of people who were removed and those who remained. How can we recognize what is not there? What does it take to notice the missing, the invisible, and the irretrievable?

And how dare we consider doing this again?

In 2018, after years of teaching about expatriation, I began writing Dispossessed, a novel about the 1930s mass expulsion of Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals.

Months after I started the book, the U.S. government began separating families at the border.

Our unvarnished history forces us to confront the present. Slander and scapegoating persist, fueled by white racial identity politics and nativism. Project 2025 threatens to denaturalize U.S. citizens.

My novel traces the life of one boy separated from his family during the 1930s expulsion. The Republican Party seeks to return us to an era where Brown U.S. citizens were abandoned by their own country.

The connection is chilling, real, and undeniable.

About the Author

Désirée Zamorano teaches linguistic and cultural diversity at CSULB.

What We’re Reading

Layoffs at TelevsisaUnivision: Variety published a Monday story about pending layoffs at the Spanish-language network. Just last week, we spoke with Jesus Lara, President of Local Media at TelevisionUnivision, about the network’s 2024 election coverage. According to the article, Lara will no longer be with the company.

The Latino Newsletter welcomes opinion pieces in English and/or Spanish from community voices. You can email our publisher, Julio Ricardo Varela. The views expressed by outside opinion contributors do not necessarily reflect the editorial views of this outlet.