These families have long pushed to remember the Mexican repatriation. It’s more urgent than ever, they say.

For the first nine years of her life, Christine Valenciana’s mother, Emilia Castañeda, born in 1926, lived in Boyle Heights. She attended Bridge Street Elementary School and lived with her parents and older brother. Her father was a bricklayer and stone mason. The family owned a home and lived a middle class life.

Then came the Great Depression, and the era of Mexican repatriation when over 1 million Mexicans and their descendants were forced out of their homes through mass deportations and threats under the guise of saving jobs for “real Americans.” It was impossible to find work, so the family lost their home. Feeling as if they had no choice, Castañeda and her family took a train to Gomez Palacio, Durango, Mexico so her father could look for jobs, and they lived in eidos, or communal grounds.

“It’s like right now, ‘Let’s give the jobs to the real Americans,’ so my grandfather, who was a well-established craftsman and had been here all those decades, couldn’t find work anymore,” said Valenciana, an associate professor emeritus at the Department of Elementary and Bilingual Education at Cal State Fullerton.

For over two decades now, Valenciana and the family members of others who were deported or forced to leave during the repatriation have been urging the country to pay attention to this little-known episode of history. They have petitioned the state for an apology, advocated for the history to be taught in schools, given talks to community groups and teachers and placed a plaque in Los Angeles, the site of many deportations during the repatriation.

Christine Valenciana holds a photo of her mother, Emilia Castañeda, whose family was forced to leave the U.S. during the Mexican repatriation.

(Alejandro R. Jimenez / For De Los)

Now, at a time when the president is promising mass deportations and has advanced harmful narratives about Mexicans and immigrants, advocates say they believe the work is more urgent than ever.

“It was a terrible injustice that was done, not just to my family, but to many, many other families, and the same rhetoric that I read about and that people told me about is almost identical to what’s happening now,” Valenciana said.

It wasn’t until Valenciana was an undergraduate in college and read a book that mentioned the Mexican repatriation that she learned that her family was part of this dark history. She and her mother, among other families impacted, became advocates for shedding light on the history.

Fransisco Balderrama’s family was also forced out of the U.S. into Mexico during the 1930s. The author of “A Decade of Betrayal,” which documents the repatriation, said that many of the people who were deported during this period were returning to a country they hadn’t been to in years or decades. Many children had limited Spanish and had never been to the countries before.

When the repatriation period ended and many Mexicans returned to the U.S., they contributed to the World War II military and economy, showing patriotism even following their expulsion, Balderrama said.

The emeritus professor of Chicano Studies/History at Cal State Los Angeles, who is married to Valenciana, said the current administration’s rhetoric on immigration echoes that from the 1930s.

During that time, there was “talking about America for Americans,” however, about 60% of people who were expelled to Mexico during that period were U.S. citizens — and many were children, Balderrama said.

“Even though this happened 100 years ago, there’s something in this American psyche with the political crisis that then takes out the immigrants and scapegoats them, beats them up in terms of saying, ‘Oh, you’re the problem. Let’s throw them out,’ which does not make any sense in terms of what this country is supposed to be about,” Balderrama said. “We’re not supposed to be a country that’s defined by race or religion. We’re defined by the constitution.”

Trump has said that migrants are taking away jobs, despite data that shows migrant labor contributes to economic growth. During his campaign, he claimed that migrants are taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs.”

“We will begin the largest deportation operation in the history of our country because we have no choice,” Trump said during a campaign rally in Wisconsin last September.

Since Trump took office on Jan. 20, there have been raids in major U.S. cities and officials have issued daily quotas in an effort to increase immigration arrests as part of the administration’s deportation campaign. He has also moved to end birthright citizenship and signed the Lanken Riley Act, which directs immigration officials to detain undocumented migrants who have been accused of certain crimes even before they are convicted.

When Guadalupe Espinoza’s mother, Ramona, was six years old in 1932, her mother took her to a medical center in East Los Angeles for vaccinations in order to attend Hammel Street School around the corner from where they lived. The trip to the medical center resulted in Ramona, her three younger siblings and her mother being targeted by immigration officials, who notified them that they had to leave the U.S. even though Ramona had been born there and her mother was in the U.S. legally. Not long after, Ramona, her siblings and her mother were put on a train and sent to Mexicali.

“They almost died in the desert on the way down,” Espinoza, a lecturer in elementary and bilingual education at Cal State Long Beach, said of her family. “But that’s part of what happens to people when they are suddenly sent away. It’s not their plan.”

“They almost died in the desert on the way down. But that’s part of what happens to people when they are suddenly sent away. It’s not their plan,” Guadalupe Espinoza said of her family’s experience during the Mexican repatriation.

(John McCoy / For The Times)

Espinoza said that her mother recalled immigration officials deporting people out of churches and picking people off the streets. She said it is important to speak up about the lost opportunities and trauma endured by her mother so that it does not happen to other families.

“What motivated me is that I’m very upset about what they did to my grandmother and to my mother,” Espinoza said. “In Spanish, we say, no se la van a acabar — they’re not going to hear the end of it – that they violated their human rights and their constitutional rights.”

Valenciana, Espinoza and Balderrama have traveled to the state capitol to testify about the experiences of their families, advocated for legislation that recognizes the repatriation, platformed survivor voices through recorded interviews, given lectures and conducted teacher training to try to raise awareness about the repatriation.

“The trauma and then the disappointment and the suffering that they inflicted on my grandmother and my mother is why I’m motivated to do this,” Espinoza said.

In 2005, they helped pass legislation that resulted in California apologizing for their role in the repatriation and a monument in downtown Los Angeles in 2012. In 2015, they also helped advance legislation that required schools to teach about the repatriation.

Last fall, Sens. Lena Gonzalez (D-Long Beach) and Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park) helped pass a piece of legislation that called for a Mexican Repatriation Memorial Project, which will place another plaque or monument in Los Angeles. Gonzalez’s great grandfather’s brother was deported during the repatriation period. Growing up, Gonzalez never learned about the Mexican repatriation, so she hopes the monument will help people learn about this history of mass deportations during the Great Depression.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do to just honor this past but also find ways to bring decency back to democracy and to let people know that undocumented residents, immigrants are not a threat,” Gonzalez said.

Valenciana said the work that needs to be done now isn’t just remembering the past but changing what is happening in the present.

“As my mother used to say, ‘I just wanted people to know what happened so it doesn’t happen again’ — and it’s happening again,” Valenciana said.

“The difference between then and now is there was very little [support] during the 1930s, but we’re going to stand up to this.”

Valenzuela is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles who writes about social justice issues and activism.