 Hi, I'm Dr. Gene Pruice. In this video, we're going to look at the Great Depression of the 1930s and how it affected the Mexican-American community. What we're going to look at is the things that led to the Great Depression, how it affected the Mexican-American community, and what was done to improve the status of the Mexican-American community. The Great Depression was preceded by the Ballyhoo years, or sometimes called the Roaring 20s. This was a time of great economic increase in the United States, the great bull market of the 1920s, where the stock market was growing and growing and growing, and there was no end in sight. But there were economic problems beneath the prosperity. A lot of people were buying stocks on margin, Amazon credit. They would put a little bit down, 10% down, and then they would hope to pay off the rest of what they owed with the profits they would make from the stocks. There were a lot of income disparities. Farmers weren't making enough money. They had been making a lot of money in the 1920s because right after World War I, prices were high, but they never got that high again, and it started going down and farmers started asking for subsidies. And there was also limited purchasing power. Many people still did not have access to money, to capital, and so they were relying more and more on credit, and the economy wasn't very diverse, to be honest. Housing had stopped growing. People weren't constructing as much, and there were other areas of the economy that really weren't doing very well. More importantly, perhaps, was the ties that we had financially to European governments. During World War I, US investors had loaned money to allies, and what had happened after World War I was the allied nations, France, England, and Italy, had ordered Germany to pay reparations on the war debt. They assumed a war debt. But this was very hard on Germany, and so the allies were paying off their American loans with this reparation money. But in 1931, when the Great Depression affected Europe, because it affected Europe before it affected the United States, Germany stopped making payments and they never started up until after World War II was over. And so because Germany stopped making payments, the allies were unable to pay the United States loans, and so this affected the United States as well. So it was a circle of international credit debt that also led to the Great Depression. And so while the boom of the 1920s was going on, suddenly in May of 1928, from May through September, stock prices were still on the swing upward, but then they began spiraling downward by October. After a two-day recovery, they dropped again. A private financier, JP Morgan, tried to invest his own money into the stock market to keep it afloat, but it wasn't enough. There could not be enough money. And so on October 29th, Black Tuesday is sometimes called, the stock market crashed and the depression affected the stock market for about four years. Besides that, in the American Midwest, you had the dust bowl. This was a little over 10 years of drought. Drought and poor agricultural practices led to dust bowl conditions. This was newly farmed land. Remember, a lot of this Midwest had not even become organized states until the early 1900s. So farming was relatively new in the 1930s in this area on the map, Northern Texas, Kansas, Colorado. And they were not turning the land up very well. They were just turning over the topsoil, getting rid of the buffalo grass that had been there for thousands and thousands of years. It had deep roots and was holding that soil on. And so when you had years of drought and very powerful storms and winds coming through, it was blowing off a lot of the topsoil. Some 35 million acres of land were devastated as a result of the dust bowl and 124 million acres affected by wind erosion. And these dust storms, some of the worst, May 11th, 1934, the dust hit from the Midwest and it affected Washington, DC, New York and other places even into London. In April of 1935, a year later, so-called Black Sunday, this is where the term dust bowl came from because a newspaper article said there seems to be a dust bowl in the center of the United States. And we're talking about the winds blowing a lot of soil. During this Black Sunday blow, there was something like 3 million acres of dirt that was moved across the United States as a result of this. And so this led to a lot of farmers and farm workers being pushed off their lands. Farms just could not handle it in this area of the American bread basket. And so these are sometimes called oakes derogatorily, that they were coming out of Oklahoma. But it was also they were coming out of other places as well, Arkansas and Texas and other parts, who were moving from the area to California, which wasn't affected by the dust bowl and where there were jobs available. But those jobs were limited. And then with all of these other people moving over there, that crowded out the jobs in the California area too. For Mexican Americans, the widespread farm foreclosures pushed off a lot of tenant and farm workers off their lands. They were looking for homes. They were looking for work. So the New Deal, and we'll talk more about that in just a few minutes. Some of the New Deal programs established resettlement camps that allowed families to move in and have places to live. There was, as I mentioned earlier, a trek to California. But this only increased competition for people, California's who were already living there now had to compete with jobs for all these people moving in from the dust bowl area. There were Mexican Americans who moved into urban areas, certainly. But even in those areas, you did see unemployment and even underemployment because of cutbacks on production, because people weren't buying products. And so factories weren't having to produce as much. And this affected employment. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, there was a limited money supply. So few people had spending money. And oftentimes, it was hard on the Mexican American and Mexican community in the United States. One thing I do want to talk about is the agricultural harvest, sometimes known as the big swing. This was about nearly a million people were employed in this cotton harvest, big swing. This is in Texas, but it also trekked up to the American Midwest into Michigan, Montana, and Minnesota, picking beets. And a lot of this was done on a part-time basis. These weren't people doing it all the time. But they made up, Mexican and Mexican Americans made up about 75% of the cotton labor. And so this big swing started off in around June in South Texas and moved up along the coastal plains. And then it swung back towards Central Texas. Then after a few weeks in each of these areas, about six weeks, the majority of the harvesters either went towards the high plains. They maybe went towards Dallas, North Texas. And then some did move into East Texas. But there they faced competition with African-American farm laborers. And then by December, many of those who made the full swing were headed back down toward the border regions back towards home. And they followed the winter crops. And what this tells us is that there were crops that were grown year round in Texas. And these cotton harvesters and other, there were also harvesting other plants as well, were able to make this migration throughout the state in order to work. Now, this also included their children and their whole families, and so education was also affected by it. For Mexican-American communities moving into urban areas, there was an increased presence, not just in the traditional areas, we think, of Mexican-American communities along the border regions. They were moving into places, as I said earlier. They were going in Minnesota, in Iowa, in California, in Northern California, San Francisco. And so they were moving into areas not just along the borders. And some of these people were railroad workers and their families who were following the railroads. There was also mining going on in some areas. There were lumberjacks in East Texas and Mexican-American workers in the oil fields in Texas and Louisiana and in California as well. There was labor efforts to organize some of the workers. And let me go back into the late 19th century. In 1883, there was the Great Cowboys Strike in West Texas. They didn't last very long, where cowboys were demanding better pay. Their demands really weren't met. There were also the Callejeros de Labor in the 1880s. And this is similar to the American, the US, Knights of Labor. But a lot of labor organizations didn't like immigrant or minority workers. They were really organizing for white labor and for Northern European immigrant labor. Some of the Callejeros were affiliated with the Gorus Blancas in New Mexico. And you also had some violent strikes in the mines in New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona by the Western Federation of Miners, which did accept Mexican and Mexican-American laborers. In the early 1900s, the Los Angeles Times newspaper building was bombed because the newspaper was anti-union. There were rail strikes in 1910. And some 21 employees were killed in the Southwestern United States. In 1914, in Colorado, the infamous Ludlow Massacre. The United Mine Workers were on strike in Ludlow. And this is in southeastern New Mexico. And the state militia was sent in. And what they ended up doing was setting fire to the strikers' tents. And several people were killed during the Ludlow Massacre. So there was labor organizations, but it had a history of violence. There were, in the 1930s, other strikes as well during the Depression. One of the most famous ones was the sheep-shearers' strike. Mexican-Americans in West Texas were predominantly doing the sheep-shearing business. And they would travel around from farm to farm, from ranch to ranch, shearing the wool off of these sheeps. And there was some violence as they struck for better pay. But the results, because competition was so high, they really didn't succeed in their goals of striking. One of the other famous strikes was the San Antonio pecan-sheller strike. In 1934, some 5,000 workers went on strike. And here you see a picture of what their conditions were like at the bottom of your screen. They were usually crowded in rooms tightly packed, and they would shell pecans. Now, there were mechanized shelling machines that would shell them. But in San Antonio, they were still doing it by hand. Because they wanted to really keep employees, they felt some obligation, but they just could not pay what they wanted. In fact, look at the wages here, $0.15 an hour, and then it drops to $0.04 an hour. So this was pretty difficult to earn a living. And so Emma Tenayuka, who you see pictured at the top of your screen in 1938, she helped to organize a strike. The National Labor Relations Board, the NARA and whatnot did establish pay at $0.25 an hour. But in the end, what happens is that the pecan companies in San Antonio decide to go with mechanized, so many of these workers ended up losing their jobs anyway. In 1932, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been elected largely because of the Great Depression. The general belief that his predecessor, President Herbert Hoover, wasn't doing anything about it or didn't grasp the severity of the Depression. And so Hoover's was moved out of office in 1932, elected out of office. Franklin Delano Roosevelt came into office and his program was called The New Deal. And he really didn't have a plan, but he wanted to try something, and if it weren't keep doing it, if it didn't try something else, that was the motto for The New Deal. And so we get alphabet soup programs and you probably covered these in earlier history classes. So I just wanna talk about the three relief recovery and reform, the three strands of The New Deal to provide direct relief to people. Federal Employment Relations Act was to provide wages of what not the Civilian Conservation Corps actually hired people. The Works Progress Administration also hired people, put them to work, building infrastructure, government buildings and what not. Like the Houston City Council or the Houston, yeah, Town Hall is a WPA project. They also were recovery programs, Reconstruction Finance Corporation, pumped money into businesses. We've seen this in more recent times when we've had economic shortfalls, a society of too big to fail, putting money into the big businesses so they would not go under. The AAA, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, was aimed at providing opportunities for farmers, either buying land from them and asking them to not plow it, but to let it go fallow and return some erosion controls to the soil. And the NIRA, National Industrial Recovery Act, also provided funds for large corporations. And then there was the reform strand of the New Deal programs. And they're called alphabet soup programs because a lot of them are known by their initials. But there was the Banking Act of 1933 and this was just an act to not only shut down all banks to prevent run on the banks, but also to provide FDIC insurance protection to banks that they could participate so that you would have a guaranteed deposit in the bank in case of another economic catastrophe. The Fair Labor Standards Act worked on hours, working day hours, and also other types of industrial or business reforms to put people's trust back into those businesses. And then there was the FCC, the Federal Communications Corporation, which oversaw television later, but at this time was overseeing radio stations and their programming. So let's talk a little bit about what people consider the Mexican problem. As a result of the Mexican Revolution that happened in around 1910 to about 1920 and was still going on in the 30s, by the way, there were more Mexican and Mexican-Americans living in the United States. And you did have some people who consider them undesirable. And two examples of these are two U.S. congressmen from Texas, Martin dies from the Beaumont Port Arthur Orange area and U.S. Representative John Box from a little bit farther north in East Texas. And both of these people did feel that Mexican-Americans were undesirable and didn't really want them in Texas or in the United States and began passing legislation and supporting legislation to get rid of Mexican immigrants. And so you also saw segregation continues. Many of the work programs, the CCC, the WPA and some of these others were segregated, even for Mexican and Mexican-Americans, as well as for African-Americans and even sometimes for Asian-Americans as well. The agricultural and domestic workers were excluded from the new Social Security program. And so think of how many African-American and Mexican-American families who were involved in agriculture and domestic work whose wages were excluded from Social Security so they didn't have that protection later on. You also saw segregation in the schools and there were two cases in the 1930s of note. I mean, there were others but these are the two most important ones, the Dell Rio vs. Salvatiera case. And in this case was a Texas case along the border of Dell Rio where they allowed Mexican-Americans to be segregated. You also had the Lemon Grove incident the next year in California. Now, this actually also allowed for segregation of Mexican children. In 1929, you had the beginnings of the repatriation program and this went on throughout the Depression. Overall, some half million Mexican and many Mexican-Americans as well were included in the deportations were returned to Mexico or sent to Mexico. This was building upon the immigration restrictions of the 1920s. Many of them supported by John Box. For example, the Border Patrol was created in 1924 and you also had during the repatriation program reports of intimidation and police pressure on citizens urging them to move to Mexico or to return to Mexico. And partly out of this, you see the creation of an organization called the League of United Latin American Citizens. This was organized in 1929 in Corpus Christi, Texas but it had been formed out of other organizations that kind of came together to unite their power and their numbers and to present a stronger front against segregation and discrimination and the League of United Latin American Citizens or LULAC continues even until today. They're one of the oldest of the Mexican-American civil rights programs in the United States, organizations in the United States and we're gonna see their activities in future decades and future presentations. And so if we're looking at the story of the depression, the economic collapse began in Europe and then spread to the United States and increased. And a lot of this was due to problems within the economy itself. How did it affect the Mexican-American community? Well, the collapse affected the community because Mexican-Americans often held low paying jobs and those were significantly affected. Not only was there unemployment, but there was underemployment which means that they didn't have enough hours to offer the workers so there was a limited amount of money that they could get and so their economic influence was affected and there were things that were done to improve the status of Mexican-Americans. They were able to take advantage of New Deal programs and they did move into urban areas. They did join some unions and were able to get higher wages but remember, racism and segregation affected the community even to the point of deportations or repatriations as it was called. Thank you very much.