They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representatives of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression by Melita M. Garza (review)

Inspired by a scene from the 1995 film, Mi Familia/My Family, which depicted the often ignored repatriation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 1930s and the experiences of her own family, Melita M. Garza has written a captivating study that examines the discourse on Mexican immigration and repatriation in the San Antonio English and Spanish-language press during the Great Depression. They Came to Toil is a comparative study that reveals how the city's leading newspapers—the San Antonio Express, the San Antonio Light, and the Spanish-language La Prensa—framed and influenced discussions of Mexican immigration. Fundamental to Garza's work is the recognition that the press shapes public views of ethnic cultures and that exclusion of coverage has a profound impact on historical memory and understanding of the experiences of ethnic communities.

Utilizing a chronological approach that organizes chapters by year (1929–1933), Garza examines news articles and editorials published in the three dailies not only to demonstrate the variation of rhetoric on Mexican immigration but also to show the increasing incidents of repatriation per year and how the press responded. During this period of economic crisis and rising nativism, the English-language press focused chiefly, if at all, on policy or the economic impact that immigration restriction or repatriation would have on industries. La Prensa, meanwhile, utilized article and editorial frameworks that related the personal experiences of the immigrant community and the repatriated. La Prensa used a prescriptive frame in which it not only sympathized with working-class Mexicans or the repatriated but also offered or supported solutions, among the most important being knowledge of policies. La Prensa also drew on the rhetoric of the Good Neighbor policy and stressed the economic benefit of Mexicans to the labor force and their contributions to the community ("somos amigos"—we are friends). The Express, like La Prensa, also employed the Good Neighbor approach but emphasized primarily the benefit of Mexican labor to the national economy and specific Texas-based industries. Both of these newspapers argued against restrictive immigration policy but for different reasons. On the other hand, the Light challenged the depiction of Mexicans as contributors to the economy and society and limited its coverage of Mexican immigration and repatriation. Garza concludes that unlike the locally owned Express or La Prensa, both of which were invested in the San Antonio and Texas communities, the William Randolph Hearst-owned Light lacked a local connection. With respect to repatriation, the Light and the Express chose to focus on policy with little to no coverage of the fate of those repatriated or the impact it had on the ethnic community. As a representative of a community often ignored by its English-language counterparts, La Prensa humanized immigrants and showed the results of the discriminatory policy that repatriated Mexican nationals and American citizens of Mexican heritage.

They Came to Toil painstakingly demonstrates the role of the press in creating depictions of communities and thus shaping public memory. One can begin with a simple question, "Why does the general public know little to nothing of the repatriation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans?" It is a question Garza answers beautifully: "The omissions of the story from the mainstream American newspapers, an important site of memory, may partially explain why this Depression-era dispersion of humanity was neither well noted nor long remembered" (172).