Mexicanos in Oregon: Their Stories, Their Lives

Chapter 2: Sojourners and Settlers: Tejanos and Mexicanos in Oregon in the Mid-Twentieth Century

52 Mexicanos in Oregon Chapter 2 Sojourners and Settlers: Tejanos and Mexicanos in Oregon in the Mid-Twentieth Century1 In the 1950s, the Bracero Program and its attendant albatross, illegal immigration, continued to come under severe scrutiny from various fronts. The press played an especially important role in shaping negative public opinion regarding the “invasion of illegal hordes streaming in from Mexico” (García 1980, 151). Mounting pressure regarding illegal immigration led Congress, in 1952, to pass Public Law 283, which made it a felony to import or harbor illegal aliens (Craig 1971). Employers, however, were exempt from the law! In her assessment of this period, Calavita (1992) notes that the detailed exposéWhat Price Wetbacks, published in 1953 by the American G.I. Forum of Texas (an association of Mexican-American World War II veterans)2 and Texas State Federation of Labor, and the vitriolic Cold War rhetoric of McCarthyism influenced significantly the national agenda regarding undocumented Undocumented Mexican immigrants being searched by U.S. Border Patrol, LA Times, May 2, 1950. University of California, UCLA Library. 53 THEIR STORIES, THEIR LIVES Tejanos and Mexicanos in Oregon in the Mid-Twentieth Century immigration. These pressures led to the drastic actions taken in 1954 when “the Border Patrol launched the greatest maximum peacetime offense against a highly exploited, unorganized and unstructured ‘invading force’ of Mexican migrants” (Samora 1971, 52). Under the leadership of General Joseph May Swing, Operation Wetback, as the campaign was called, was launched. This campaign pulled together federal, state, county, and municipal authorities, the FBI, and the Army and Navy, employing aircraft, watercraft, automobiles, radio units, and special task forces to round up and deport undocumented immigrants first in California and Arizona, then in Texas and the heartland (Samora 1971). Through its militarization of the border and deployment of massive round-ups and mop-ups, Operation Wetback was successful in reducing substantially the number of illegal workers, especially along the border (Calavita 1992) and the number of apprehensions dropped from 1,075,168 in 1954 to 30,196 in 1959. In the process, however, Operation Wetback strained the precarious relationship between Mexican Americans and their host society, and it allowed sectors of U.S. society to dehumanize undocumented workers by “shroud[ing] them with names and labels that reeked of derision, racism, and denigration” (García 1985, 231). While the Department of Labor took a strong stance against illegal immigration, it was not uncommon for the Immigration and Naturalization Service to raid a field, to take the arrested workers across the border, and deliver them to the Department of Labor, which, as the on-the-ground management arm of the bracero program, immediately processed them as now-legal braceros and sent them back to the very fields where they had originally been apprehended (Massey et al. 2002). This procedure meant that workers who had been queuing up to enter as legal workers were bumped in favor of workers who had transgressed the very policies shored up by immigration policy. While we have found scant evidence of the deployment of Operation Wetback strategies in Oregon, we do know that undocumented workers supplied a good portion of the workforce in agriculture in this state, as they did in the Southwest and Midwest; an article in the Oregonian points to this practice: “In addition to the Mexicans brought into this country legally, Oregon gets its share of the Illegal immigrants being deported, May 1953. Oregon Historical Society. 54 Mexicanos in Oregon Chapter 2: Sojourners and Settlers illegal hordes of wetbacks who sneak across the border to collect the American dollars U.S. farmers are glad to pay them” (May 17, 1953). This non-authorized migration from Mexico, which had run parallel to contractual labor migration during the 1940s, had by the 1950s begun to squeeze Mexican Americans in Texas, known amongst themselves as tejanos, out of farm labor in the Lower Rio Grande Valley (Fuller 1953). Furthermore, land consolidation, irrigation, and mechanization resulted in a significant reduction of jobs in that area (Wells 1976; Loprinzi 1991). The results were to have an enormous impact on Oregon, to which tejanos, unable to find work in Texas, gradually made their way. Not unlike braceros before them, this group of workers arrived to cultivate and harvest and they left when the season was over, creating few wrinkles in the social fabric of the state (though in due time they began to...