By Elaine Woo, Published: July 8
The Washington Post
he deportations began a decade before the World War II internment of 110,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Federal and local authorities rounded up Mexican immigrants and their families at dance halls, markets, hospitals, theaters and parks, loading them onto vans and trains that dumped them on Mexican soil.
One of the most notorious raids occurred in 1931 at La Placita, a popular gathering spot for immigrants outside Olvera Street in Los Angeles. A team of Immigration and Naturalization Service agents armed with guns and batons sealed off the small public park and herded 400 terrified men and women into waiting vans. The success of the raid galvanized authorities in other localities across the country.
By 1940, Mr. Rodriguez and Balderrama found, more than 1 million people of Mexican descent had been deported. Government officials used the term “repatriation” to describe their actions, but the researchers found that 60 percent of the expelled were U.S. citizens. “They might as well have sent us to Mars,” Mr. Rodriguez once said, recalling the words of one “repatriate.”