Traditionally, Mexicans in the United States were for many years called a derogatory term that I will not repeat. It was w___back. American political leaders and the media used the insult routinely as though it was normal.
What follows are excerpts from my 1976 master’s thesis. “The Border Crisis” is a bit of a re-run. I have partially redacted the offensive term. Efforts to stem undocumented migrants henceforth were characterized as military campaigns.
In the summer of 1953, President Eisenhower appointed former comrade-in-arms General Joseph M. Swing as Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization.
After a tour of the Mexico-U.S. border to view first-hand “the w___k problem, U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell decided an anti-w___k” campaign would solve the problem. Thus, in typical military fashion, Swing set “Operation W___k” for June 17 at 9 a.m.
The Los Angeles Times trumpeted the upcoming operation in a June 10, 1954, splashy story:
“Government Maps War on W___s,” and the use of military jargon is clearly shown in the lead: “A major war on w___s, employing a reinforcement corps of 491 immigration officers recruited from all parts of the country, will be launched along the California-Mexico border next Thursday to send tens of thousands of illegally entered Mexican aliens back into Mexico.”
It was made clear that the drive was not to be aimed at “legal contract labor, but “at the increasing flow of line-jumping Mexicans — a flow that has increased at a fantastic rate during recent months until local border patrolmen have been swamped by the hordes that stream across the international boundary nightly.
Attorney General Brownell is also attributed as saying that he was concerned about “the possibility of large numbers of subversives who may be entering the country under the guise of farm laborers. “To leave no doubt about the undesirability of undocumented Mexican workers, Brownell reportedly said that they displaced domestic agricultural and industrial workers, were contributing to “the increasing crime rate11 and were spreading communicable diseases. Judging from the pre-” Operation W___k” coverage, the actual round-up could be expected to receive pretty extensive coverage. It did.
The Times announced on June 17, “The big federal round-up of Mexican nationals illegally in the United States is scheduled to begin at 9:00 a.m. today with a force of nearly 100 men forming a dragnet here to ferret out wetbacks who are living and working in the Los Angeles area.
In all, an estimated 1.3 million undocumented migrants were deported. Many millions more replaced them.
Ricardo Chavira Chicano 