![]() ![]() The plot was uncovered by agents working for the U.S. Both had extensive coverage of the Gándara trial, which was quite dramatic - Gándara had plotted with an exiled Catholic bishop from Mexico, along with numerous other Mexican migrants, and he had enlisted the support of members of the local indigenous Yaqui community. In the Library of Congress Newspaper and Periodical collections, I found two Arizona newspapers that documented the case: the Tucson Citizen and the Arizona Daily Star. He was eventually caught in Tucson, where he was subsequently put on trial. While researching my book I kept coming across mentions of a man named José Gándara, a Mexican immigrant who tried to start a Catholic revolt from the U.S.-side of the U.S.-Mexico border in 1927. Could you tell us about it and why it’s significant to your research? You’ve found evidence of a court case in Arizona that sheds light on this period. They organized mass protests of the Mexican government from within their communities in the United States. While not all Mexican migrants supported the Catholic side of the conflict, thousands did. ![]() Second, it politicized Mexican migrants in the United States around the Cristero cause. The Cristero War had a twofold effect: first, it led to new waves of emigrants, exiles and refugees who fled the violence and economic disruption. Many Mexican Catholics were determined to go to war against their government until the laws were overturned. In a country that was 98 percent Catholic, this provoked a furious response. Finally, the perceptions of Mexicans as temporary migrants and docile laborers contributed to the fact that they were never included in the quotas.īetween 19, Catholic partisans took up arms against the Mexican federal government in protest against a series of laws that placed strong restrictions on the public role of the Catholic Church. In addition, migration from the Western Hemisphere made up less than one-third of the overall flow of migrants to the United States at the time. Southwest argued that without Mexican migrants, they would be unable to find the laborers needed to sow and harvest their crops. Mexico (and in fact, the entire Western hemisphere) was exempt from the quotas in part because of the agricultural lobby: farmers in the U.S. Perhaps more importantly, they were perceived as temporary migrants, who were far more likely to return to Mexico than to settle permanently in the United States.ĭoes this explain why Mexico was exempted from the quotas in the Immigration Act of 1924? They were thought to be docile, taciturn, physically strong, and able to put up with unhealthy and demanding working conditions. However, Mexicans were sometimes said to have certain positive qualities that made them “better” labor immigrants than the other groups. These beliefs tied in directly to concerns about immigration and immigration policy. The so-called science of eugenics helped drive this concern-the notion that ethnic groups had inherent qualities (of intelligence, physical fitness, or a propensity towards criminality) and that some ethnic groups had better qualities than others. public, as well as policymakers and the press, that “new” immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe as well as Asia were somehow different from previous generations of Western European immigrants to the United States-and whether their supposed differences posed a threat to U.S. ![]()
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