My mother wanted to be a teacher. She loved school and learning, but in Mexico, her parents couldn’t afford to send her beyond the sixth grade.
She was a derived US citizen though.
Her mother, my grandmother, was born in San Antonio in 1912. My grandmother’s father, my great grandfather, Catarino Zúñiga Ordóñez, was born in Laredo, Texas in 1894.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which the United States of America took vast territories, including Texas, from Mexico to was signed in 1848, only 46 years before Catarino was born.
This means a whole generation of our family, caught in that transition, between time when Texas was still part of Mexico and when it became a part of the U.S.A. This is the story of many families where the border has crossed us while we have remained.
Catarino’s daughter, my grandmother, had married my grandfather, who was a Mexican citizen. When the mass Mexican deportations happened around the Great Depression my grandparents decided to go back to Mexico in fear of being taken off the street and dumped in Mexico never to find each other again.
That is how my grandmother, a second-generation Texan (at minimum) ended up having her children on Mexican soil and denying them the opportunities of a full American education.
History repeats itself, and as Mexicans we should never forget we are not immune to deportation, because at the end of the day U.S. citizenship is just a piece of paper the US government can choose to honor or not.
Back when my maternal grandparents returned to Mexico under threat of deportation, estimates say one third to half of the 2 million Mexicans that were “repatriated” were US citizens. Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas offered returning Mexicans ejidos -- communal land for agriculture. President Cardenas gave deported Mexicans land to work and build a home. This was what brought my maternal grandparents to Tamaulipas and where they established their family.
Eventually, my family cleared the land and built a small house while they worked on the land. My mother tells me her father hired migrant farmworkers coming from the southern states in Mexico to work the fields. Our family went from working in the fields to managing their own ranch. Still, this wasn’t a time of abundance, and they had to leave the ejido to move into the closest town where my Mom, like her 9 other siblings, had to go to school barefoot and hungry.
When they eventually returned to the United States, after filling out the administrative paperwork needed to assert citizenship for her and her siblings on account of my grandmother’s US citizenship, they worked in factories in South Texas and traveled to Michigan to work in the fields. My mother was about 20 years old when they moved back to the United States with the objective of working, so she lost out on the opportunity to access higher education.
All because of arbitrary and racist immigration laws. They were deporting US citizens back then which is why as a third generation Texan and US citizen I still don’t feel safe from deportation or incarceration due to my heritage.
There are so many untold stories of the extreme poverty, traumas, and struggle it took my mother, her siblings, and my grandparents to return to the United States when it didn’t have to be that way. When rhetoric about “legitimate” immigration steers the conversation around “doing things the right way” our family remembers the US government has done things the wrong way repeatedly for Mexicans.
We are holding immigrants to a higher standard than we hold the government of one of the most powerful nations in the history of the world. If anything, the US government has shown Mexicans how fickle and racist policies can be.
We cannot afford to forget, or be ignorant, of the history of our people in this country. It does not matter how many generations “in” you have been here we are still ethnically Mexican and historically the US government has used that against us.
Resistance does not end now, and we must dig in our heels in the knowledge our ancestors did not give up and have led us to this point where we are standing now. The choices are clear in this next chapter of history, and that is - are we going to acquiesce, comply, and ignore out of apathy or fear, or are we going to use everything we know to stand up against injustice, bigotry, tyranny and terror.
What we do next matters, because the next generation is counting on us, and they cannot continue to inherit the remains of a damaged Earth, past the point of recovery, and a government poised to strip them of their human dignity and basic civil rights.
Blog submitted by: Sylvia Zapata, SAF Executive Director