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CHAPTER 7 REPATRIATION IN THE RÍO BRAVO DELTA, 1935–1940 Beginning in the 1920s, U.S. intellectuals and social workers focused on the question of migration with new interest, and the social issues involving Mexican migrants were well represented in this literature.1 The politics of immigration restriction, emblemized in the passing of the immigration law of 1924 and in the repatriation movements of the 1930s, generated a good deal of research among social scientists.2 The Social Science Research Council was formed to study migration, and supported research by Manuel Gamio and Paul Taylor on Mexican migration and repatriation.3 Memories of forced and voluntary repatriation remained strong in the Mexican American community, and with the florescence of Chicano history in the 1970s the importance of this repatriation was stressed.4 In the 1980s and 1990s scholars investigated the way repatriation transpired in different regions, and how the events of the 1930s played a part in a longer story of migration and community formation in the southwestern United States.5 In their book, Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez enlarged the scope of research to include both the United States and Mexico, and included a chapter surveying Mexican programs to settle repatriados on land.6 With the consolidation of the cardenista cotton policy between 1936 and 1939, the Valle Bajo Río Bravo development project became central to the drive to greatly increase cotton exports, and when irrigation works were reaching completion in 1939, the government set about recruiting Mexican cotton farmers in Texas to colonize the lands of the Sauteña. While the politics of repatriation in the United States have received much attention, very little is known about the fate of the repatriados in Mexico, or the larger context of irrigated cotton development that influenced the Mexican government’s repatriation efforts. From Collective Ejidos to Repatriated Small Farmers In this chapter I examine the history of repatriation of Mexicans from Texas to the Valle Bajo Río Bravo (VBRB) project in 1939, and the formation of the Colonias Anáhuac, 18 de Marzo, and Magueyes. Two main arguments weave through the chapter. First, I show how the process of colonization exhibited the development 136 chapter 7 dialectic that characterized the construction and settlement of the VBRB project since 1935. That is, rather than being the result of a radically proactive state project, the repatriation of Mexicans and their settlement in the Matamoros region was an already-existing social process that the government sought to control and improve through the uneven enactment of a haphazardly assembled development plan. For this reason the history of repatriation and colonization found in these pages is much more detailed, much more complicated, and much messier than those usually told. This dialectic of development was negotiated in an idiom of historical progress and regional community shared by both state actors and repatriated colonists, a language of regional development that defined political culture in Matamoros throughout the cotton boom years (1940–1960), and is still strong today.7 The second argument I make is that the vision of agrarian northern Mexico guiding the reconstruction of regional society changed significantly from 1936 to 1939, as the cardenista state abandoned the model of the collective ejido in favor of the model of the colonia constituted by small property owners. Repatriation was a cornerstone of efforts by governments since Calles to establish progressive agricultural societies in northern Mexico, and although the shape of development blueprints changed, the repatriado continued to occupy a privileged position within them. The callista vision of development posited a rural society divided into a class of small and medium property owners, on the one hand, and a class of agricultural workers on the other. Manuel Gamio, who helped to formalize thinking about repatriation and the incorporation of repatriados in the irrigation projects of the CNI, argued that Mexicans who had worked in the United States were valuable for their advanced production techniques and their “high cultural level.” With the advent of cardenismo, the privileged position afforded the repatriated property-owning farmer in earlier visions of national agricultural development was occupied by a new social actor: the collectively organized ejidatario. The ejidatario on the industrial cotton farm was still considered a progressive, even middle-class social element, but because of his collective relations of production rather than his individual ownership of land. In the irrigation zones of the CNI, this transition in development blueprints was especially marked. During 1936 and 1937, Múgica...

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