Description
Book SynopsisIn the first forty years of the twentieth century, over one million Mexican immigrants moved to the US, attracted by farm work in California. Camille Guerin-Gonzales tells the story of their migration, their years here, and of the 1930s repatriation program - one of the largest mass removal operations ever sanctioned by the US government.
Trade ReviewBased on exhaustive research in U.S. and Mexican archives, this study offers a richly textured history of Mexican immigrants in rural California. A work of exceptional breadth, especially with regard to repatriation, [it] is a pivotal contribution to Chicano historiography and immigration studies. -- Vicki L. Ruiz * Andrew W. Mellon All-Claremont Professor in the Humanities, The Claremont Gradua *
Guerin-Gonzales's special contribution is the link she explores between immigrant experience and the American dream. The towering irony her fine book reveals is how an ideology of promise for others was for the Mexican migrants the justification for their exploitation and, when the Great Drepression struck, for expelling many of them from the country. -- David Brody * University of California, Davis *
A valuable study of an essential part of American history . . . [and] a demonstration that commitment and compassion can coexist with solid scholarship. -- Patricia Nelson Limerick * University of Colorado, Boulder, and author of The Legacy of Conquest *
Enriches our understanding of the first four decades of the twentieth century. -- David Montgomery * Yale University *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE: WHITE AMERICAN DREAMS
1 Pastoral Dreams in California
2 Mexican "Birds of Passage"
PART TWO: RACIAL LIMITATIONS OF THE AMERICAN DREAM
3 Whiteness and Ethnic Identity
4 "Mexicans Go Home!"
PART THREE: DREAMING AMERICA
5 Los
