Abstract
Much is known about the repatriation and deportation of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans during the Great Depression. Historians have paid particular attention to the lives and struggles of Mexican migrants in the United States and the oppression they faced at the hands of public officials. Far less is known about what happened to these people once they returned to Mexico. This is the subject of Fernando Saúl Alanís Enciso’s Voces de la repatriación (Voices of the Repatriation), which explores the experiences of repatriates upon arriving, in addition to examining how everyone from ordinary residents and journalists to businessmen, bureaucrats, and politicians across the country reacted to them.
Alanís, a professor at El Colegio de San Luis, is a leading expert on how emigration and return migration have shaped Mexico, and vice versa. His earlier books include an exploration of the first Bracero program during World War I and a well-received 2007 monograph (translated into English and published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2017 as They Should Stay There) that detailed Mexicans’ repatriation from the United States during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940).
Voces de la repatriación, a prequel of sorts, situates the history of repatriation within the context of burgeoning Mexican nationalism in the early 1930s. Alanís pushes back against what he describes as the dominant narrative that Mexico welcomed migrants home with open arms. Instead, he argues, Mexican society responded with ambivalence. Some people offered support and solidarity and believed that the skills migrants acquired while in the north would help boost the national economy. Groups like the National Repatriation Committee raised money to provide aid to repatriates in northern border communities and help finance transportation to their home states. Even though a collective effort known as the “half-a-million campaign” raised only around 318,000 pesos (one-third of which was never accounted for as a result of corruption), Alanís asserts that such initiatives brought together people from diverse sectors of Mexican society.
But nationalism also led some Mexicans to denounce repatriates for having abandoned their country. In a time of rising xenophobia against the Chinese, Guatemalans, Jews, and Yankees, some Mexicans criticized repatriates for being unpatriotic and “agringados” and considered them to be a “dangerous…horde of unemployed people who would create difficulties for workers and cities across the country” (23). Alanís argues that these fears were exaggerated. One of the book’s important contributions is showing that repatriation did not have a negative effect on most local and regional labor markets or the national economy (though he notes that further state-level research is needed). According to him, this was in part because fewer people were repatriated or deported between 1929 and 1940 than some historians have claimed (around 500,000, rather than upwards of a million) and in part because fewer repatriates looked for work upon returning to Mexico than has been assumed. Alanís estimates that working-aged men represented only 40 to 50 percent of all repatriates in the early 1930s, with children making up another 40 percent and adult women comprising the remaining 10 to 20 percent. Moreover, rather than saturating labor markets, many people simply returned to their home communities and reintegrated into the local subsistence economy. Alanís concludes that if repatriation was in fact a “national problem,” it was one that existed only in the minds of some Mexicans.
This is an ambitious book, based on more than seven years of research and a decade of work. Most historians of repatriation have limited their Mexican archival work to the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores and Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City. Voces de la repatriación relies on these repositories as well, but what sets it apart are the impressive number of sources Alanís culled from at least 15 municipal and state archives along the northern border and throughout the Mexican interior. He also makes extensive use of dozens of Spanish-language newspapers from both Mexico and the United States, in addition to 26 original oral histories.
Such rich research enables Alanís to provide near comprehensive coverage of the subject at hand. At times, his encyclopedic treatment is overwhelming, but this level of detail is also what makes the book an invaluable resource, allowing him to compare and contrast repatriates’ diverse experiences and attempts to reintegrate into local communities and Mexican society in general. One can only hope that Voces de la repatriación, like his previous book, will be translated into English, as it would find a wide readership among migration scholars across the humanities and social sciences.