Aunt Lucy’s Trip to Mexico
Ricardo Chavira     [Photo]

My 79-year-old aunt, Lucy Parra was a 12-year-old who had just lived every child’s nightmare. It was 1938, and within a few months both her parents had tragically died. She had no relatives in her native Los Angeles and only sketchy information about aunts and uncles in El Paso, some 800 miles away.

So county officials turned her over to Catholic nuns who operated an orphanage.

“Imagine how torn up I was, losing both my parents. They got real sick from I don’t know what, and I was alone,” Lucy recalls. “When the nuns took me, I felt lots better. They would make sure I had good life, I believed.”

What she didn’t know was that another tragedy was in the offing. Her experience as an orphan and, later, as an unwanted Mexican so scarred her she still weeps at the memories.

Lucy was to become one of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans expelled from this country during the Great Depression. As was true of many others, it made no difference that Lucy was born in the United States and it was the only home she knew. The West was in the grips of an anti-Mexican hysteria, fueled by the depression. That ugly chapter in U.S. history resonates today, with xenophobes calling for an anti-Mexican ethnic cleansing.

County welfare authorities, it turned out, had a new home in mind for her. Lucy’s maternal grandparents lived in La Brecha, Sinaloa, a speck of a village on Mexico’s northern Pacific coast. Lucy was horrified at the prospect. She spoke no Spanish and feared the worst in moving to the Mexican wilderness.

“I got down on my knees in front of the nuns, “a tearful Lucy recalls, “and begged them to help me find my relatives in El Paso. I told them I was very afraid. This was my country, not Mexico.”

The nuns were sympathetic, but insisted that the matter was out of their hands. And so Lucy was put aboard a Mexico-bound train.

”Oh, my gosh, how I cried when we got off the American train at Nogales and got on the Mexican car,” she says. “I promised myself I would come back home somehow.”

When Lucy arrived in Guasave, the town nearest La Brecha, her grandparents met her. “They were nice, and told me we were going to ride home in a car,” she says, now with a loud laugh. “I didn’t know they meant a cart with mules pulling it.”

Her grandparents were destitute. Lucy quickly figured out she would have to work. She became an expert tortilla-maker, selling her wares around the village. “I had a real rough time adjusting. I had to learn Spanish and how to survive in this tiny place, far from everything. There wasn’t a school, so my formal learning ended there. I did my best to enjoy life, but I knew my home was Los Angeles.”

In time, word of Lucy’s fate filtered to other relatives, and they forwarded money to buy her a ticket north. “As soon as I could get off the train in the United States, I got down and kissed the ground," she remembers.

My aunt recalls some good times in La Brecha, the outdoor dances and her grandfather’s sometimes-bountiful fishing outings. But mostly, she feels badly cheated.

“I thought my country was good and not capable of being that cruel,” she says. “Those officials took that away from me. They also took away from me my education. By the time I got back, I was so far behind in my schooling that I was too embarrassed to enroll again. That hurt me the rest of my life.”

Lucy’s exile wasn’t the result of some misunderstanding. Rather, it was part of an intentional government effort to rid the United States of what officials considered an undesirable ethnic group. Never mind that Mexicans had contributed mightily to the building of the West. With jobs scarce, they were a deemed a burden.

As the United States struggles through another protracted economic downturn, it’s at a minimum prudent to recall what can happen when base, xenophobic impulses drive policy.

(Former news executive Ricardo Chavira is a journalism professor at California State University at Fullerton and the University of California at Irvine. He may be reached by e-mail at ricardochavira50@yahoo.com)

© 2005, Hispanic Link News Service
10/30/05
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