My Family Was Almost “Repatriated” to Mexico in the 1930s. I See It Happening Again.

Esther Lopez was born a few months after the start of the Great Depression in March 1930, in the shadow of steel mills and factories. Some historians believe East Chicago’s Harbor was the most densely populated Mexican community in the United States at the time, with about 5,000 people living in a less than one-square-mile area. According to a 1976 history by Ciro Harolde Sepulveda, who later became a professor of Chicano and Boricua studies at Wayne State University, train conductors even called out ​“Mexico City” at the Harbor stop.

The neighborhood with its Mexican quarter, known back then as La Colonia del Harbor, shaped my grandma. She loved talking about Mr. Jablonski, whose son didn’t come back from the war; about her trademark tangerine lipstick; about the time she saw Mexican ranchera singer Pedro Infante outside his 1953 performance at the local American Legion (“He looked right at us!”). It’s where she met my grandpa, and where they had their seven kids.

It was only after her death that I found out my flag-waving, lifelong East Chicagoan grandmother had left out a major detail: Sometime before the end of the summer of 1932, her parents had almost boarded a train with their oldest children to ​“voluntarily repatriate,” or ​“self-deport” to Mexico. As I learned, the political moment that birthed the repatriation movement bears some frightening parallels to our own.

Her uncle Magdaleno would have been about 12. Like all of his siblings, he was born in the United States, making him a citizen by birthright. It’s not hard to imagine a teenager refusing to ​“go back” to a country he’d never seen. Reading the passage gave us both the chills: My grandparents met in the Harbor, and had Mag not run away, my mom — and by extension, my brother and I — may never have existed.

One of my aunts later confirmed that my grandma had told her the story. ​“A police officer must have let them off the train or something, looked the other way,” she said. She seemed shocked when I told her the repatriations had been voluntary, that the family wouldn’t have needed permission to stay.

Marcelino, his wife Maria Ramirez and their son Maggie moved from Caney, Kansas, to the Harbor after the strike ended in 1920. They walked the more than 660-mile route, according to my aunt’s essay, though Maria was pregnant. By 1922, Marcelino was officially employed at Inland Steel, where he worked for 35 years.

The Lopez Ramirez family weathered the harsh early days in the Harbor. Conditions were abysmal even before the Depression. According to Sepulveda, ​“unskilled laborers” worked more than 63 hours per week and suffered ​“one of the highest industrial accident rates” in the industrialized West, while ​“families slept with guns under their pillow for protection from rats at night.” He quotes a 1926 newspaper interview with a police chief about the conditions: 

We went into places where we could hardly get the door open. Sometimes there would be three beds in one little room and in one place we found 11 Mexicans sleeping. …Why, your dog or cat wouldn’t live under conditions that those people do.

Discrimination was rampant. ​“Mexicanos were sent to jail for insignificant acts,” Sepulveda writes. In one incident, police shot a Mexican in the back as he walked away from an officer, who ​“laughed as the body was thrown into a patrol wagon.”

Mexicans were also subject to some of the same de facto and unofficial segregation as Black Americans in the North. In East Chicago, Mexicans were banned from the public baths at Washington Park, as well as from many restaurants and barbershops. 

Still, Mexicans in the colonia found ways to support each other and celebrate their culture. They formed mutual aid societies, businesses and a community newspaper; they established the Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish and a tradition of annual festivities for Mexican Independence Day. According to an account unearthed by Sepulveda, one Mexican schoolboy snapped back at a teacher who harassed him, ​“I am more of an American than you are because all of my ancestors were born in North America and yours were all born in Europe.”

The ethnic tensions in the community were part of a nationwide anti-foreigner trend. ​“Nativism is an American institution, encouraged by the capitalist system. … Europeans were set off against Mexicanos and Blacks by industry,” writes Sepulveda. He cites a familiar-sounding quote from one 1926 article: ​“The high percentage of Mexicanos in the jails, asylums and hospitals of the southwest proves that we are getting too many of Mexico’s worst.”

Sepulveda estimates that ​“the most powerful man in [Indiana]” in the 1920s was David Curtis Stephenson, a Ku Klux Klan leader. The Klan made fewer inroads in the Harbor due to the large number of Slavs and Catholics, but it ​“met regularly in East Chicago churches.” (By the mid-30s, the Nazi Party-affiliated German-American Bund had local units in Illinois and Indiana; my grandma said some German kids would even come into class goose-stepping and doing a Nazi salute.)

By the time the Great Depression arrived, the anti-Mexican xenophobia that had been building for nearly a decade boiled over. Sepulveda quotes a 1930 opinion piece: ​“My contribution to the Mexicans at this Christmastime is the suggestion that we ship them all across the border where they belong.”

The organized repatriation campaign in the Harbor only lasted one summer, says Aguilar. Led by World War I veterans from the local American Legion, the campaign ran out of funds after the labor secretary refused to offer federal assistance, saying the neighborhood didn’t have enough Mexicans eligible for deportation — because many, like my grandma, were citizens.

In the early 1930s, the American Legion headquarters had called on local posts to conduct a survey to assess aid need. But as that need skyrocketed, East Chicago’s main relief agency sought ways to cut costs. Local American Legion Commander Paul E. Kelly, a veteran and Inland Steel employee, and others decided the best solution was ​“to rid this community of Mexicans,” whom Kelly blamed for unemployment, as well as syphilis. When the federal government declined to carry out deportations in the Harbor, Kelly and his allies undertook a ​“census” of the Mexican and Mexican-American community in the colonia. They used the aid survey as a map to remove their Mexican neighbors from the relief rolls and pressure them into leaving the country. That survey is likely the ​“the list to leave” in my aunt’s essay — the list that led my family to board the train.

Aguilar tells In These Times that some lists of Harbor Mexican families from the era can still be found at the East Chicago library. ​“They’re really haunting,” Aguilar says. “[The lists] show how not voluntary this was.” The lists include Spanish-surname families who were not on the community welfare because the town was ​“not going to provide it to Spanish surname folks,” he says. ​“It’s not ​‘self-deportation’ when you’re giving these communities and families no other tangible choice.”

Asylum seekers are scapegoated for ​“wasting” tax dollars and labeled ​“illegals” — though asylum is an international right. Hate crimes against Latinx and other migrants are trending upwards; migrants have been the victims of intimidation and even shootings. Neo-Nazis are on the move. And as in the 1930s, nativism and xenophobia are growing to unnerving proportions internationally, from the growing power of the far-right AfD Party in Germany to pogroms against Syrian refugees in Turkey.

Echoing the repatriation movement, anti-migrant, anti-asylum seeker policies and threats of deportation are leaving many people feeling like they have no choice but to flee. In February, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced a nationwide ad campaign, telling undocumented migrants: ​“if you leave now, you may have an opportunity to return,” or else ​“we will find you and deport you.” The White House then froze funding for refugee resettlement agencies, putting refugees’ ability to access food and housing at risk. 

The White House has also announced an effort to create a register for all undocumented migrants – which conjures images of the 1930s relief rolls, as well as certain other lists used to track ​“undesirables” in Europe. The Trump administration is also attempting to repeal birthright citizenship, the very thing that protected my grandma and the Mexican families in the Harbor from official deportation. DACA recipient Quebec Vasquez, who has three U.S. citizen children, told The Independent she is so frightened, that she and her husband plan to ​“self-deport” to Mexico; both arrived in the US at age 7.

While there is not much of an organized citizen effort to pressure migrant neighbors to leave, TikTok and other social platforms are full of calls for self-deportations. Offline, after the election, an affiliate of the Ku Klux Klan targeted Northwest Indiana and other locations with flyers urging migrants to get out.

“I anticipate an increase in people making the heartbreaking decision to ​‘self-deport,’” says Bindhu Vijayan, the executive director of Beyond Legal Aid, a Chicago nonprofit that uses a community activism lawyering model. ​“Some individuals have already sought legal counseling about this possibility, and others may have left before the administration even took office.” Vijayan says that new restrictions may deter some migrants from seeking legal counsel, to avoid exposing thems elves to ​“an increasingly volatile immigration system.”

Carlos (a pseudonym), a migrant who has lived in Chicago for 10 years, says people are more afraid now than they were under Presidents Obama and Biden — even though both deported more people than Trump did in his first term — because Trump ​“doesn’t mince his words [or] care what people say about him.” Carlos, who wasn’t comfortable sharing his immigration status or having any identifying information published, is most worried about the facilities the administration will build to house migrants, which he compared to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. In January, Trump issued an order to expand migrant detention facilities at military prison Guantanamo Bay to hold up to 30,000 people. The first group of migrants sent to the island, many of whom have no criminal record, have reported abuse so severe, one man said he tried to kill himself as a result.

Chicago was one of ICE’s first targets under Trump, but the city’s sanctuary law grants migrants a measure of protection by preventing city agencies from asking about immigration status or sharing that information with ICE. The city is also home to a robust network of migrant support organizations, to the point that immigration authorities complained many migrants were too educated to be caught up in the raids.

In East Chicago, which is still home to a Mexican community as well as more recent arrivals from Central America and Venezuela, migrants do not have the same protections. Pressure from the Republican-run state government last year drove East Chicago to repeal its own sanctuary city rule. 

But the ​“bottom line,” Aguilar says, is that grassroots groups across the Midwest are offering ​“an easy way for folks to get involved and help.” Groups such as Cosecha Indiana and Indiana Undocumented Youth Alliance offer education and opportunities for action. And activists in the region have long protested deportation flights at the Gary Airport, where authorities have involuntarily transported thousands of migrants since 2013. Police arrested three activists there just days before Trump’s inauguration.

“[The migrant community] doesn’t need national groups to come in and save them,” Aguilar says, ​“They need a community that’s backing them block-by-block in the neighborhoods, showing that public display of support at this what-comes-next moment.”