They Should Stay There by Fernando Saúl Alanís Enciso & Russ Davidson & Mark Overmyer-Velázquez

Author:Fernando Saúl Alanís Enciso & Russ Davidson & Mark Overmyer-Velázquez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2017-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

Reactions in Mexico

Few people in Mexico were interested in the Cardenista repatriation plan. While it did have its critics and provoked some negative commentary, it failed to spark any widespread debate. Mexican society was focused on other concerns, such as the presidential succession and the country’s economic situation, and had little time for polemics over the return of compatriots from the United States.

Typical of the response was the position taken by an editorial writer for the Tampico newspaper El Mundo. In his opinion, the importance ascribed to repatriation “was decidedly exaggerated,” with respect to both the number of Mexican workers who found themselves in difficult straits and the alleged urgency of bringing them back. According to this editorialist’s assessment, which was supported by one of Beteta’s reports, fewer than 200 Mexican nationals, spread across different places in the United States, were in urgent need of assistance. In addition, many of those who had expressed the desire to return did not really want the government’s help, and since they formed such a small cohort, Mexico would derive little benefit from their return.40 A similar view was expressed by Alfonso Romero, a columnist for the Nogales, Sonora, newspaper Acción.41

Neither the Tampico editorial writer nor the Nogales columnist was impressed by the government’s pronouncements on behalf of its repatriation project. On the contrary, both criticized Cárdenas’s overhyped publicity for a plan whose objectives were highly selective and limited. They also reported the views of those in Mexico who spoke out against the return. The El Mundo columnist averred that the pool of possible returnees consisted of people who would return only because they were out of work and who subsequently would make their way back to the United States. Thus, in the event they repatriated, they would be tantamount to tourists, mere visitors as it were, who kept their residence across the border so as not to surrender their rights.42

Salvador Novo, a Mexican man of letters known for his heated criticisms of Cárdenas administration policies, as voiced in his column “La semana pasada,” was bitingly skeptical about the results of the repatriation program. He viewed it as an undertaking that would be carried out “provisionally, while later they would swim across the river they preferred to call the [Rio] Grande rather than the [Río] Bravo.” He also had little faith that “the repatriated pochos” [Americanized Mexicans living in the United States], who had shown themselves incapable of staying in Mexico, would readapt successfully to Mexican society. He wrote sarcastically that Beteta’s repatriation plan demanded of Mexican nationals who lived on U.S. soil a greater demonstration of their feelings for the homeland than those they displayed when jubilantly celebrating 16 September in a way that mimicked Fourth of July celebrations; or when they went into a California movie theater “even though” it showed Mexican films, “or when they admitted that in certain restaurants they called quesadillas ‘tacos’ and hot cakes with catchup ‘enchiladas’” (Novo 1964, 596–97).

Other writers, in Chihuahua and in Mexico City, sympathized with the assessments of both the Tampico editorialist and Novo.

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