The Weight of Shadows Read Online Free PDF Page A

less than a century before, and Mexican labor had been a boon to the economy there. State and local law enforcement officials also turned a blind eye to systemic racist violence aimed at purging foreigners. Most Mexicans’ departures were officially categorized as voluntary, but in reality they left under threat of violence. Methods of coercion existed on a spectrum ranging from formal (increased official deportation by the INS during the 1930s) to informal (Mexican laborers dragged from fields by angry mobs, tortured, and killed). V. Wayne Kenaston Jr., a San Diegan whose parents were members of their local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan during this period, remembered that “years ago east of 55th Street and El Cajon Boulevard, past College Avenue, there were lemon orchards.” The bodies of murdered Mexicans would occasionally be discovered among the trees, “sometimes disfigured by torture.”
    The context in which the Mexican Repatriation happened was already one steeped in racist terror. As historians William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb point out in their research on lynching,
    Statistics alone can never explain lynching in the United States. More than other Americans, blacks and Mexicans lived with the threat of lynching throughout the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. The story of Mexican lynching is not a footnote in history but rather a critical chapter in the history of Anglo western expansion and conquest.
    In their research, Carrigan and Webb note that numbers for Mexican victims of lynching are extremely difficult to collect because most were never recorded, and the victims that were recorded were often racially misclassified. The definition of lynching itself has shifted over time, and in their count Carrigan and Webb call lynching “a retributive act of murder for which those responsible claim to be serving the interests of justice, tradition, or community good.” According to Carrigan and Webb, the rate of black Americans lynched from 1880 to 1930 was 37.1 per 100,000. The rate of Mexican lynching during the same period was 27.4 per 100,000.
    Mexico’s history has always been inextricably linked to that of the United States. Yoli says that growing up she often heard her father repeat a saying: “¡Pobre México! Tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos.” The quote is popularly attributed to Porfirio Díaz, which is dubious but possible since Díaz would have been eighteen years old in 1848 at the conclusion of the US invasion of Mexico, which ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which the United States took about half of Mexico’s landmass, including all of California. With the signing of the treaty, Mexicans living on the wrong side of the newly established boundarylost property rights along with any semblance of civic power; they were segregated, and their culture deemed worthless and deviant.
    The saying coming from Díaz makes less sense if you consider that the United States supported his dictatorship because it was in their economic and political interest to do so. Some historians argue that “by the dawn of the twentieth century the United States controlled the Mexican economy.” Because of mounting popular pressure, Díaz announced that Mexico was ready for democracy and agreed to hold free elections in 1909, during which he would run for his eighth term. William Howard Taft, the twenty-seventh president of the United States, met with Díaz at the El Paso–Juarez border in a historic show of solidarity for the “identical aims and ideals” of both nations. This wasn’t surprising because “according to US Consular General Andrew D. Barlow, 1,117 US-based companies and individuals had invested $500 million in Mexico,” and dictatorial rule had been good for this kind of American involvement. To Taft and US investors, the plethora of horrors created by the