Debating American Identity: Southwestern Statehood and Mexican Immigration

7: “To Keep America American”: The Door Swings Outward

141 Born in Mexico circa 1907, Santiago Lopez grew up near Tucson, Arizona . At some point he returned to Mexico, but in 1925 he crossed the border again. Two years later the U.S. Border Patrol arrested Lopez, ordering him to leave the country. He did so, but within two hours walked back into the United States by entering a few miles west of Nogales, Arizona. Seven years later Lopez was working on a ranch owned by the Southern Arizona Bank and Trust Company when immigration authorities nabbed him again; this time they initiated formal deportation proceedings. Hearing of Lopez’s troubles, Hubert H. D’Autremont, then vice president of the Tucson Bank and formerly the director of the copper mining Calumet & Arizona Company, wrote to his congressional representative, Lewis W. Douglas, requesting his intercession in the case. D’Autremont vouched for his employee by recounting Lopez’s extensive history in the country and explaining that his presence would do “no harm to the United States.”1 By this time Lopez had lived continuously within the United States—except two hours—for nine years. Additionally, he had spent some period growing up in Arizona and was only about twenty-five years old. To which country did he belong? In the nineteenth century Lopez might have continued his transnational travels, hardly noticing his journey across invisible boundaries. If he had reached adulthood in the first decade of the century, he might have apprenticed himself much as Carlos Jácome (see chapter 1) had done in Tucson, rising economically to become a member of the middle class and accepted as an assimilated American or Spanish American. But by the chapter seven “To Keep America American” The Door Swings Outward 142 · Chapter 7 mid-1920s his initial encounter with border agents had convinced him to stay put, remaining in the United States rather than risking a trip outside the country.2 If asked, Lopez likely would have said his preferred home was in the United States; clearly his efforts to fight deportation suggest that he wanted to live there. By 1930, however, growers, the U.S. and Mexican governments, and some academics, journalists, and immigrants had succeeded in defining Mexicans’ presence in the United States as only temporary. Perceived as short-timers, these immigrants purportedly would not affect Americans in any way, except to benefit them through the sweat of their labor. The growing prevalence of this image of a temporary worker would upend the lives of people like Santiago Lopez who had committed to a life in Arizona . The immigration bureau, unimpressed by Representative Douglas’s intervention, ruled that Lopez had violated the 1924 immigration law for crossing without a visa, as well as the 1917 Immigration Act for entering the United States in violation of the literacy law. Having been granted permission to depart in 1927 on his own recognizance and in lieu of a formal hearing, Lopez had unlawfully returned to the United States within a few hours. Because he violated this agreement, Lopez could not then apply for admission despite his employer’s offer to cover his fees and teach him English. Despite his time in the United States, American bureaucrats quickly determined that he did not belong there. The conviction that Mexicans should remain in the country only temporarily surely facilitated the ease with which immigration officials deported Lopez.3 The Lopez case shows the success of the marginalization strategy in retaining relatively open borders as well as the perils for Mexican immigrants in the United States. Although the marginalization strategy, which Mexican immigrants had unwittingly contributed to as well, touted either their temporary status in the United States or their permanent secondclass standing by filling jobs that no Americans wanted. This rhetoric soon collided with the Great Depression and the realities that many Mexican immigrants had settled permanently, especially in the Southwest and Midwest, and that low-skill work was now something that Americans did want to do. The underside of this strategy was that if Mexican immigrants remained, or if the economy changed, they could be removed. This chapter shows how the growing image of the immigrants as temporary contributed to their voluntary and involuntary exodus during the Depression years, as well as why, initially, so many Americans and Mexicans thought this the appropriate resolution: they were never to have been there so long in the first place. “To Keep America American” · 143 Background...