Marks Reflective Essay

The Mexican Revolution and the series of Mexican civil wars that followed pushed many Mexicans to flee to the United States. Many U.S. farm owners recruited Mexicans and Mexican Americans because they believed that these desperate workers would tolerate living conditions that workers of other races would not. Mexican and Mexican Americans live in temporary seasonal work camps so they can move from farm to farm in search of work. Some camps had little tents and somewhere had shacks with the roofs and walls patched together with many different materials. Mexican American and Mexican farm workers lived in very poor conditions as they sought farm work in the United States earlier in the 1900’s. Mexican and Mexican American workers often earned more in the United States than they could in Mexico's civil war economy, although farmers paid Mexican and Mexican American workers significantly less than white American workers. By the 1920s, at least three quarters of California's 200,000 farm workers were Mexican or Mexican American.

As the rapid shift of Mexico’s working population started growing, the first labor agreement between Mexico and the United States formed that requires that all U.S. farm workers are being guaranteed the proper wages and work schedules. America in return asked that border of Mexico and the U.S. was enforced and that all immigrants had the proper work contracts.

Now in the one of the worst recessions in American history so far Mexican Americans are strong targets for discrimination and deportation. In California white government officials are claiming that Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans are the majority of their unemployment. White trade unions are also claiming that Mexican and Mexican Americans are taking jobs that belong to only white men. While this was going on wages were dropping due to the new white refugee labor, established Mexican and Mexican American farm workers had became a threat by banding together, often with other non-whites, and organizing strikes to protest lowered wages and worsening living conditions. Agriculture in the United States is being crippled due to the ongoing Dust Bowl. The farm owners have a chance to profit immensely from the supply of cheap labor, but not if these protests succeeded.

Local governments responded to white farm owner pressure and implemented "repatriation" plans to send Mexican immigrants back to Mexico in busloads. Many Mexican Americans were also sent out of the United States under these programs, there being no differentiation between Mexicans and Mexican American U.S. citizens. So far there has been an estimate of 500,000 legal Mexican’s that have been sent back into Mexico some just because they can not find they’re legal papers stating that they are U.S. citizens.

I think everything that is happening to these American citizens is an out rage. “Why are so many Mexican Americans being sent to Mexico?” This is a question that I feel the American government should ask them self’s but do they really even care?