October 31, the Washington Post began a series of emotionally crushing photographs, “Portrait of Child Laborers in the Great Depression.”
Luckily, my close friends and I (at the end of the 1930s) had kinder experiences than both the adults and children in that harsh “Portrait.” (But some city stranger did take a photo of me — age three — nakedly climbing a wood-pile looking for choice kindling.)
Later, a bit older, I was lucky to have had as a friend the only Mexican student enrolled in St. Patrick’s School, grades one to 12. That was in North Platte, Nebraska, a rail-head town, but one that didn’t fold when the line recommenced cutting the way west, aiming for the Pacific.
That school and the subsequent settlement of the majority of Mexicans living today in the middle of Nebraska’s Great Plains were descendants (parents and grandparents) of two “massive” waves of migrations occurring after 1900.
Amazingly, according to early studies, there were only 71 Mexicans living in Kansas in 1900, just 27 in Nebraska. In only ten years — by 1910 — the Mexican immigrant population increased to 9,429 in Kansas, 3,611 in Nebraska.
Yet the first wave immigration occurred from 1900 to 1920, the second from 1920 into the 1930s. One scholar estimated that between 1900 to 1920 the astonishing number of Mexicans immigrating to the United States is placed at one-tenth of the total population of Mexico at that time. This growth in population is due to a far-reaching, long-lasting brutal Mexican dictatorship, the 31 years of the megalomaniacal dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. That, of course, was in sharp contrast to the far lesser violence of U.S. rule. One country was “pushing” its citizens out, say historians, as the other country was engaged in “growth” changes that “pulled” them in.
Example: There were 834 hacendados (land owners) and approximately nine million landless citizens living under a miserable debt peonage during this time. Of the 834 hacendados, 15 owned more than 100,000 acres each; the hacienda of San Blas in the state of Coahuila, for example, contained almost a million acres. Despite higher prices of basic necessities, the income of a peon in 1910 was about the same as it was 100 years earlier.
The major attracting force that “pulled” Mexican immigrants to the north was the economic development in the southwestern part of the United States, and its corresponding need for cheap labor. This was the dramatic growth of agricultural enterprises and railroad construction in the Southwest. Demands of New England cotton mills, New York garment manufacturers, and the export market stimulated cotton growing in Texas.The Reclamation Act of 1902, the construction in 1904 of the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexican Railways encouraged ranchers to create huge irrigation projects to grow vegetable crops to be shipped to large metropolitan areas on the new railroads’ refrigerator cars.
In 1897 the U.S. Congress imposed a whopping 75-percent tax on the importation of foreign sugar. The result: By 1906, sugar beet acreage in the United States had more than tripled from the 135,000 acres in 1900 to a booming acreage of 872,000 in 1920. The Great Plains region (the North Platte Valley in western Nebraska and eastern Wyoming), producing 64 percent of the total crop grown in the United States. From 1923 to 1932 Nebraska ranked second in the United States — behind Colorado — in annual sugar beet acreage (74,000 acres) and first in the nation in yield per acre (12.7 tons). Thus Nebraska’s increased need for beet laborers, which was met by the government-sponsored recruiting of Mexican field workers. Plus many ambitious Mexicans who entered the United States legally and otherwise on their own sly initiative.
Many beet workers came originally to the North Platte Valley as railroad hands, then changed jobs as more and more field work became available. After 1920 many came unassisted as “betabeleros” (beet workers). Many more after 1916 were recruited to this work by the Great Western Sugar Company. In 1915 Great Western Sugar recruited and transported hundreds of workers into Nebraska. By 1920 this figure was more than 13,000. In 1926 Great Western provided transportation for 14,500 persons, employed 55 labor agents, and sent out ads: 1,000s of booklets, posters, hand bills, calendars – all in Spanish. And it ran advertisements in 15 newspapers.
For the immigrants from Mexico’s central plateau region (Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacan), the climate in the north was colder, but a sense of dislocation was eased by the presence of established Mexican communities. There, churches offered masses in Spanish, and betabeleros enjoyed Spanish-language newspapers, Mexican music, and food.
When racial discrimination became intense there existed the momentary refuge provided by the barrio. For many, racial prejudice against them became intolerable and they returned to Mexico, scarred and disillusioned. Some did as they had planned: they worked in the United States, saved their earnings, and returned to Mexico after the Revolution here quieted. But many toughed it out, remaining in the United States as permanent residents. Many others were forcefully deported back to Mexico after their labor was no longer needed during the depressions of 1921 and 1929. As a result of massive and indiscriminate raids conducted by U.S. authorities in Mexican communities, more than 400,000 persons were deported back to Mexico during the early 1930s; during 1931 alone, 138,519 Mexicans were forcefully repatriated.
Jose Flores, the high school friend of mine and of my buddy, Avrel Beatty, was legal like his parents and grandparents. And though he had papers proving this, Jose made sure he called little attention to himself. Yet when Nebraska’s Mexicans were hit with a steep wash of prejudice for “robbing” rural depression jobs from “real” Americans, he was prepared. Happily, the United States continued to have a pressing need for sugar cane. As the depression clenched more tightly, horse work shrank. Avrel and I looked toward Great Plains sugar beet crops, though even they were not as robust as they had been. Nonetheless, we went looking for Jose. He immediately, with some humor, plunged us into cultivating sugar beets.
Right off, we noticed that both adults and kids showed a lot of dirt on them. Jose said a day’s work could mean toting as much as ten pounds of soil at the end of the day. We began by topping beets. You do this by hooking the beet against one leg, then taking a long knife with a hook end and chopping the leaves from the top of the beet. Children helped pile up the beets once they were pulled. Later, by 1940, normal rainfall returned to the Great Plains, and federal programs helped boost farm prices and slowly improve the soil. But that was a long way off.