Mediocre by Ijeoma Oluo

Author:Ijeoma Oluo [Oluo, Ijeoma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2020-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

Women were not the only scapegoats during the Great Depression. Although Black unemployment overall during the Great Depression didn’t rise nearly as much as it did for white workers (due to the fact that Black workers in the South had long been kept out of the industries hardest hit), Black factory and service workers in the North faced immediate and widespread layoffs as their jobs were taken from them and given to white workers. In the western United States, economic anxieties gave xenophobic politicians and locals the fodder they needed to push out Mexican American workers. As was the case with Black and women workers, the few jobs that were open to Mexican Americans in states like California were not regularly sought after by white workers, even during the Great Depression. Still, there was a rising fear that Mexican American workers were taking “American” jobs, and that an “indigent” Mexican American population would suck up the few resources available to white Americans during hard economic times. Government officials, including Labor Secretary James Doak, pushed the idea that deporting Mexican Americans would solve job woes in the West. In his hunt for undocumented Mexican American immigrants, Doak authorized raids of private homes, businesses, and churches, and the deportation of thousands of people without proper hearings.15

Even more devastating than Doak’s deportation efforts was the massive “repatriation” of Mexican Americans to Mexico. Between 1931 and 1934, over three hundred thousand Mexican Americans were coerced, threatened, or forced to leave the United States for Mexico—an estimated one-third of the national Mexican American population. Let’s pause to let that sink in: one-third of Mexican Americans were driven from the country against their will because white men, unable to fix the mess they had made of the economy, decided to take their frustration out on brown workers in a fit of xenophobia. Sixty percent of those repatriated were American-born.16 Entire Mexican American communities were decimated by this widespread and often violent discrimination and removal and did not recover in numbers for decades.

Jose Lopez, a US citizen who was forcibly removed to Mexico with his family as a child, later testified at a hearing before the California legislature about the devastation the deportation brought to his family and community. “I was five years old when we were forced to relocate,” he said. “I… bec[a]me very sick with whooping cough, and suffered very much, and it was difficult to breathe.… Living conditions in Mexico were horrible, we lived in utter poverty. My family ate only tortillas and beans for a long time. Sometimes only one meal a day.” Both of Lopez’s parents and one of his brothers died in Mexico before he and his surviving siblings were able to make their way back to the United States in 1945.17

The mistreatment of women workers and workers of color did not end when the Great Depression ended. Women and people of color were excluded from the bulk of job-creation efforts during the New Deal. Black sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic

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