Balderrama testified Tuesday that the deportation and coerced emigration campaign organized by Los Angeles city and county officials -- in partnership with the Chamber of Commerce -- "became a model for the rest of the United States."
In the Los Angeles effort, tens of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans were loaded aboard trains and transported to Mexico. The campaign, which reflected widespread racist attitudes toward Mexicans and Mexican Americans at the time, had the assistance of state and federal authorities along with Mexican consular officials, Balderrama and Rodriguez testified.
Castaneda, 77, and another victim of the campaign, Michigan resident Jose Lopez, also 77, recalled the struggles their families endured after being coerced into immigrating to Mexico in the 1930s. Castaneda and Lopez were both born in the United States and thus were U.S. citizens at the time their families went to Mexico under pressure, both testified.
Castaneda, whose father was a bricklayer who had entered the United States to find work in 1915, described the harsh living conditions her family encountered in Mexico. They had to move 18 times as her father searched for work, she said. Castaneda had to stop her education and help support the family. Her father always proudly told people his son and daughter were U.S. citizens, she said.
She eventually returned to the United States in 1944, at 17, after obtaining a copy of her birth certificate, which she showed to U.S. immigration authorities, she said.
"As an American, I didn't deserve to be deported," she said. "All Americans should know this is part of our history so we don't have to experience this again."
Lopez, whose father had found employment with Ford Motor Co. in the Detroit area in the 1920s, recalled his family's struggles with hunger and disease during their years in Mexico after they were put aboard a Michigan expulsion train in 1931.
"I was not able to go to school except for a couple of years," he said.
He returned to the United States in 1945, in time to receive a World War II draft summons, he said. He was disqualified from service because of his small size, which he attributed in part to the family's hunger and hardships in Mexico.
"I blame the entire U.S. government," he said. "It was a great injustice."
Kevin Johnson, an associate dean at the UC Davis School of Law, testified that the 1930s program violated both the constitutional and legal rights of Mexicans and Mexican Americans.
"It's a bedrock principle of U.S. immigration law that U.S. citizens cannot be removed" from the United States, he said. "This is why this episode is so troubling to me."
