# The oppression of Mexican Americans

The long record of violence and exclusion against Mexican Americans: the border-era lynchings and the Bisbee Deportation, the 1930s Mexican Repatriation that expelled up to a million people, US citizens included, the Zoot Suit Riots, Operation Wetback, the sterilizations in Madrigal v. Quilligan, and the Chicano civil-rights response.

*This story parallel: Segregation: Jim Crow and its global cousins*
*This story part of: Health and medicine*
*The Texas Rangers: legend and dark history parallel this story*

## c. 1 January 1915 — Texas Rangers' La Matanza and Anti-Mexican Lynchings

Between roughly 1915 and 1919, Texas Rangers, local police, and vigilante mobs killed Mexicans and Mexican Americans in South Texas following the Plan de San Diego uprising, a period historians call La Matanza (the killing). Historians William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb documented hundreds of confirmed lynchings of people of Mexican origin in the US Southwest between 1848 and 1928, while historian Monica Muñoz Martinez estimates the death toll of La Matanza alone in the hundreds to low thousands, noting many killings went unrecorded. This period has its own dedicated timeline elsewhere; it is noted here briefly because it forms the backdrop for the Porvenir massacre and other violence covered in this dataset.

## 12 July 1917 — Bisbee Deportation

A sheriff-organized posse of about 2,000 armed men rounded up roughly 1,300 striking copper miners in Bisbee, Arizona, many of them Mexican, Mexican American, and other immigrant workers who had walked out demanding better pay and safety. The strikers were loaded onto cattle cars without food or water and dumped in the New Mexico desert near Tres Hermanas, more than 170 miles away. No one was ever convicted for the deportation, which was carried out with the cooperation of the mining company Phelps Dodge.

## 28 January 1918 — Porvenir massacre

Texas Rangers of Company B, along with local ranchers and with U.S. Army cavalry nearby, entered the village of Porvenir, separated fifteen unarmed Mexican and Mexican American men and boys, aged sixteen to seventy-two, from the rest of the community, and shot them on a hill outside town. Investigations by Mexican consular officials and the U.S. Army found no evidence the victims were involved in banditry, contradicting the Rangers' claim of a shootout. No Ranger was criminally convicted; Governor William P. Hobby dismissed five Rangers, reassigned others including the company captain, and Company B was disbanded. Historians, including those cited by the Texas State Historical Association, call it the single most notorious documented killing in Ranger history.

## c. 1 January 1929 — Mexican Repatriation

During the Great Depression, US federal, state, and local officials pressured or forcibly removed people of Mexican descent from the country through raids, deportation trains, and coerced 'voluntary' departures. Historians Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, in their study Decade of Betrayal, estimate that between 1 million and 1.8 million people were removed between 1929 and 1936, and that as many as 60 percent of them were US citizens, mostly children. Los Angeles County alone organized deportation trains that sent thousands south, and many families lost homes, jobs, and property with no due process.

## 17 February 1929 — League of United Latin American Citizens Founded

Three Mexican American civil rights groups in Texas merged to form the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which became the oldest continuously operating Latino civil rights organization in the United States. LULAC organized against school segregation, discrimination in public accommodations, and unequal treatment in the courts, and later filed or supported several of the landmark legal cases in this dataset.

## 4 March 1929 — Immigration Act of 1929 (Undesirable Aliens Act)

Congress made unauthorized reentry into the United States after a prior deportation a federal felony, punishable by up to two years in prison. Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has documented that the law was enforced disproportionately against Mexican nationals, and it became a legal tool used heavily during the mass deportation and repatriation campaigns of the following decade.

## 26 February 1931 — La Placita Raid

Immigration officials sealed off La Placita park near Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles and detained around 400 people, checking papers and arresting those unable to immediately prove legal status. Historian Francisco Balderrama identified the raid as one of the events that helped set off the broader wave of repatriation pressure in Los Angeles, which had the largest Mexican-origin population of any US city outside Mexico at the time.

## c. 4 October 1933 — San Joaquin Valley Cotton Strike

About 18,000 cotton pickers, most of them Mexican and Mexican American, walked off the fields across California's San Joaquin Valley demanding higher piece rates, organized by the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union. Growers and local vigilantes responded with armed attacks on strikers and their camps; at least three strikers were killed during the month-long strike before growers agreed to a partial wage increase.

## 2 August 1942 — Sleepy Lagoon Case

After a young man named José Díaz was found dead near a reservoir called Sleepy Lagoon outside Los Angeles, police arrested dozens of Mexican American youths and put 17 of them on trial together for murder in a proceeding that denied them individual counsel and allowed prejudicial testimony about their clothing and background. Twelve were convicted in January 1943, feeding press coverage that stereotyped Mexican American youth as criminal 'zoot suiters.' A Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee formed to fight the convictions, and a California appellate court overturned them in October 1944, citing lack of evidence and judicial bias.

## 4 August 1942 — Bracero Program Begins

The United States and Mexico signed an agreement creating the Bracero Program, which brought Mexican contract laborers to work mainly in US agriculture during and after World War II. The program was supposed to guarantee minimum wages, decent housing, and the return of a mandatory savings deduction, but scholars including Mireya Loza and Deborah Cohen have documented widespread wage theft, unsafe pesticide exposure, overcrowded and unsanitary housing, and racial discrimination against braceros by employers.

## 3 June 1943 — Zoot Suit Riots

For roughly a week, groups of white US servicemen stationed in Los Angeles attacked Mexican American youths, many wearing zoot suits, stripping and beating them in the streets while local police largely stood by or arrested the victims rather than the attackers. The violence spread to other cities including San Diego and Chicago before military commanders declared Los Angeles off-limits to servicemen. Local press had spent weeks portraying Mexican American youth as violent gang members, coverage historians point to as helping incite the attacks.

## 18 February 1946 — Mendez v. Westminster

A federal district court ruled in favor of Mexican American parents, led by Gonzalo and Felicitas Méndez, who had sued four Orange County school districts for segregating their children into separate 'Mexican schools.' The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling in April 1947, and California Governor Earl Warren signed a state law that June repealing school segregation statutes. The case is widely cited as a legal precursor to Brown v. Board of Education.

## 26 March 1948 — American GI Forum Founded

Dr. Hector P. Garcia, a Mexican American physician and World War II veteran, founded the American GI Forum in Corpus Christi to fight discrimination against Mexican American veterans, including denial of medical care, education benefits, and burial services. The organization became a major national civil rights advocate and gained wide attention within a year through the Felix Longoria affair.

## c. 1 January 1949 — Felix Longoria Affair

A funeral home in Three Rivers, Texas refused to hold a wake for Felix Longoria, a Mexican American soldier killed in action in the Philippines during World War II, telling his widow that white residents of the town would object. The American GI Forum, newly founded by Hector P. Garcia, publicized the refusal, and then-Senator Lyndon B. Johnson intervened to arrange for Longoria's burial with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery on February 16, 1949. The affair became a rallying point that helped build national support for Mexican American civil rights organizing.

## 3 May 1954 — Hernandez v. Texas

The US Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Mexican Americans were entitled to equal protection under the 14th Amendment and that excluding them from jury service, as Jackson County, Texas had done for 25 years, was unconstitutional. It was the first case argued before the Supreme Court by Mexican American attorneys, and it was decided just two weeks before Brown v. Board of Education.

## c. 17 June 1954 — Operation Wetback

The Immigration and Naturalization Service, under Commissioner Joseph Swing, launched a mass deportation campaign targeting Mexican immigrants and, in practice, many Mexican Americans who were stopped and questioned based on appearance. The INS reported apprehending and deporting more than 1 million people that summer, though historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has argued the agency's own figures were inflated for publicity. Documented abuses included deportees being transported in overcrowded trucks and ships in extreme heat, and some deaths from heat exposure during transport were reported at the time.

## 30 September 1962 — National Farm Workers Association Founded

Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association in Fresno to organize farmworkers, most of them Mexican and Mexican American, who faced low wages, pesticide exposure, and unsafe field conditions with little legal protection. The organization merged with the Filipino-led Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee in 1966 to form the United Farm Workers.

## 31 December 1964 — Bracero Program Ends

The Bracero Program formally ended after Congress declined to renew it, following years of documented reports of wage theft, unsafe working conditions, and exploitation of contract laborers, alongside pressure from labor unions who argued the program undercut domestic farmworker wages. Over its 22-year run the program had brought an estimated 4.6 million contract labor placements of Mexican workers into the United States.

## 8 September 1965 — Delano Grape Strike Begins

Filipino American grape pickers with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee walked out in Delano, California, and were joined a week later by Cesar Chavez's National Farm Workers Association, beginning a strike and consumer boycott that lasted five years. The combined effort, which became the United Farm Workers, eventually won the first collective bargaining contracts for farmworkers in US history in 1970.

## c. 1 January 1968 — Coerced Sterilizations at LA County-USC Medical Center

Between the late 1960s and mid-1970s, doctors at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center sterilized Mexican-origin women, often during labor, without adequate informed consent, sometimes pressuring patients while they were in pain or under sedation to sign consent forms in English that they could not read. Researchers Elena Gutiérrez and Virginia Espino, drawing on hospital records and interviews with the women involved, documented the pattern as part of a broader push toward population control aimed at poor and immigrant women.

## 1 March 1968 — East LA Walkouts (Chicano Blowouts)

Over a period of about a week, an estimated 15,000 to 22,000 Mexican American students walked out of several East Los Angeles high schools to protest overcrowded classrooms, corporal punishment, a curriculum that ignored Mexican American history, and low college-attendance rates. The walkouts, organized with teacher Sal Castro and student activists, are widely regarded as a founding event of the Chicano Movement and led to some of the organizers, including Castro, facing conspiracy charges that were later dropped.

## 17 January 1970 — La Raza Unida Party Founded

José Ángel Gutiérrez and other Chicano Movement activists founded La Raza Unida Party in Crystal City, Texas, as an independent political party to run Mexican American candidates for local and state office. The party won control of the local school board and city council in Crystal City that year and expanded into other states before declining in the later 1970s.

## 29 August 1970 — Killing of Ruben Salazar

Rubén Salazar, a prominent Mexican American journalist and news director who had reported critically on police treatment of Chicano communities, was killed when a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy fired a tear gas projectile into the Silver Dollar Café during the unrest following the National Chicano Moratorium march. A coroner's inquest found the death was caused by the deputy but declined to recommend criminal charges, and the case remains a lasting symbol of law enforcement violence against the Chicano Movement.

## 29 August 1970 — National Chicano Moratorium

An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 people marched through East Los Angeles to protest the disproportionate number of Mexican American casualties in the Vietnam War, making it the largest antiwar demonstration organized by an ethnic minority group in US history to that point. Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies moved into the crowd with tear gas after a reported disturbance at a nearby liquor store, and the ensuing chaos left three people dead, including journalist Rubén Salazar.

## c. 1 June 1975 — Madrigal v. Quilligan Filed

Ten Mexican-origin women who had been sterilized at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center filed a federal class-action lawsuit, Madrigal v. Quilligan, arguing they had been coerced or misled into consenting to the procedures. Attorney Antonia Hernández represented the women; Judge Jesse Curtis ruled against the plaintiffs in June 1978, finding no intentional wrongdoing by individual doctors, but the case drove California to require bilingual consent forms and a 72-hour waiting period before sterilization, reforms that were later adopted more broadly.

## 6 August 1975 — Voting Rights Act Bilingual Amendments

President Gerald Ford signed amendments to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 extending its protections to language minorities, requiring jurisdictions with significant Spanish-speaking populations, among others, to provide bilingual ballots and voting materials. The amendments responded to documented history of Mexican Americans in Texas and the Southwest being discouraged or barred from voting through English-only requirements and other tactics.

## c. 1 April 2005 — Bracero Wage Restitution Fund

After years of advocacy and lawsuits, including the US class action Cruz v. United States filed in 2001, the Mexican Congress created a fund to compensate surviving braceros or their heirs for a mandatory 10 percent wage deduction that was supposed to be held as savings during the Bracero Program but that many workers never received. Payments of roughly 38,000 pesos, later supplemented by additional US dollar payments, began reaching some former braceros and families in the following years, though many braceros had already died and advocacy groups criticized the application process as slow and difficult to navigate.

## c. 1 October 2005 — California Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program, formally acknowledging that the state had violated the constitutional rights of an estimated 400,000 Mexican-origin residents of California, many of them US citizens, who were forced or pressured to leave the country during the Great Depression. It was the first formal government apology in the United States for the Mexican Repatriation.