March 13, 2005 :: No. 170

Christine Valenciana, assistant professor of elementary and bilingual education at Cal State Fullerton, was always aware that her mother, as a child, had been forced to journey to Mexico in 1935. What Valenciana didn’t realize was that her mother was just one of an estimated one to two million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who were forcibly deported during that era.

“I thought what happened to her and her family was an isolated incident,” she recalled. “I had no idea that this happened on a much larger scale.” Valenciana made the discovery in her student days while conducting research for a community history course.

The stories of her mother and other relatives who were among those forcibly deported to Mexico in the 1930s are now in the archives of the university’s Center for Oral and Public History.

Valenciana will deliver a lecture on “Expulsion of U.S. Citizens: Unconstitutional Deportation of Mexican Americans during the 1930s” at 7 p.m. Monday, April 18, in the university’s Titan Student Union.

The program, which is open to the public free of charge, will feature those who experienced the unconstitutional deportation; Francisco Balderrama, professor at Cal State Los Angeles and author of the book “Decade of Betrayal” and his co-author, Raymond Rodriquez; Sen. Joseph Dunn (D-Garden Grove); Attorney Sue Dunbar; and Steve Reyes of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Clips of the documentary “Betrayal and Violation” also will be shown.

The event is sponsored by the student group Hermanas Unidas de Cal State Fullerton and the faculty group Researchers And Critical Educators (R.A.C.E).

Researchers estimate that approximately 60 percent of those deported during the 1930s were children who were born in America and others who, while of Mexican descent, were legal citizens.

For example, Valenciana’s mother was 9 years old when she was unconstitutionally deported. She was a United States citizen who was born and raised in Los Angeles. Her dominant language was English, although she knew rudimentary Spanish. Suddenly, she was removed from the only home she’d known, taken out of her school, away from her friends and sent to a foreign country. She didn’t understand the customs. She was forced to live outdoors and was teased because she couldn’t speak Spanish very well.

It was difficult for adults, as well. Mexico was also in the midst of a depression at that time, and jobs were hard to find. Many of the deportees had jobs, homes and families in the United States. They hadn’t been in Mexico for decades, yet were expected to just pick up and start again.

This deportment literally broke up families. For instance, some who were deported had subsequent children who were born in Mexico. That meant that some children in the same family were American citizens while others were not. As these children grew older and married, many had children who were born in Mexico, so these children were not considered American citizens either.

Researchers have found the effects of the unconstitutional deportations to be far ranging and ones that continue today.

For more information on the lecture, contact Susana Flores, lecturer in elementary and bilingual education and president of R.A.C.E., at 657-278-7507 or sflores@fullerton.edu.

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