Ricardo Chavira Chicano

I

In Donald Trump’s America, my great-grandfather, Jesús Chavira, would be treated as a societal menace.

But Jesús Chavira was fortunate to have crossed the border 153 years ago. The Mexican 14-year-old orphan faced no immigration or work barriers in 1871. Jesus, my great-grandfather, and his many descendants became productive citizens of the United States.

Orphaned in Ciudad Camargo, Chihuahua, Jesús found a new home with his grandfather Gregorio, who lived alone at his ranch. Jesús provided company and much-needed help on his ranch just outside Satevó, a 300-year-old village,

Gregorio told his grandson that as soon as he died, Jesús should leave immediately. Criminals would seize the land and likely kill him. The older man suggested to Jesus that he ought to settle in West Texas, where he had a good chance of finding work.

Sometime in 1871, Gregorio died. There was no time to mourn. Jesús, astride a white mare, headed north, traveling 228 miles through the desert where bandits roamed. The rangy youth made it to Fort Davis, home of the Ninth U.S. Calvary, where he was hired as a stable hand.

The army was at war with the Apache and Comanche, and Jesús would later recount how he sometimes accompanied the soldiers on their mounted patrols. He showed tracking skills and was given the added duties of scouting for indigenous people on the move.

Over time, my great-grandfather settled in the barren West Texas desert and married Estefana Molina, who had been orphaned early. By 1906, they had eight children, the eldest of whom was my grandfather, José.

In long chats with me, my grandfather recalled how the family struggled to make a living growing crops and raising livestock in a hard land made all the harder by virulent racism. The anti-Mexican sentiment was so intense, said my grandfather, that European American drifters would shoot at them from a distance.

“My father decided to move away to a safer place,” José recounted. “He couldn’t fight back because we were just kids, and he did not even own a gun. Even if he did defend himself, the [Texas] Rangers would have killed him. The gringos made our lives very difficult.”

The Chavira story represents what Mexicans had to endure in turn-of-the-century Texas. If Jesús did not have to bother with the Border Patrol —not created until 1924—he and his family were often greeted with racist hostility.

But the history of the Chaviras highlights something else.

Like many others who came to the North, they worked hard for little money. Future Chaviras would serve the United States in three wars and hope for a certain degree of respect and fair play.

In 1918, José, illiterate because there were no schools where he grew up, married my grandmother María Ramírez in Guadalupe, Chihuahua. For ten years, they worked as migrant cotton pickers, ranging through Texas and into Oklahoma.

Whenever work became scarce, the Chaviras, who included my father, David, and his sister, Elena, would return to their home in Sierra Blanca, Texas.

My father and aunt attended the school for Mexicans. David told me the school “was a joke.” “The teacher just had us sing songs or left us alone to spend time with her boyfriend.” My grandfather visited the school and saw the same thing. He and my grandmother would not allow them to be denied an education.

To ensure their children’s education, José and María moved to El Paso, where their children could attend legitimate school full-time. The school was set aside for Mexicans.

“I was eight when I started the first grade,” my father told me. “I couldn’t read any letters and didn’t speak English.”

My grandfather had to find work in a border town with high unemployment. The Chaviras moved in 1928. The times became increasingly difficult with the onset of the Great Depression the following year.

José turned to a street corner where day laborers were hired for day labor.

“I remember my first day on that corner,” said José. “A gringo in a truck drove up, looked us over, and picked a few men, me included. We were put to work at a construction site, and I did what I could to show him that I was strong because if you seemed weak or slow, the gringo told you that you do not come back; he told me that I could return.”

As a teenager, my father hopped freight trains to California, where he picked crops during the summer. My grandfather rode the train with my dad one summer.

My father also took a long break from high school to work for the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s work programs.

“My dad was pretty sad when I did that,” my father recalled. “He was sure I would never graduate from high school.”

However, at the age of 21, David graduated from El Paso’s Bowie High School and entered the United States Army directly. His tour began a few months before Pearl Harbor attack and continued until the end of World War II.

“When I left the Army, I really thought that as someone who graduated high school, which was rare in those years, and with the time I spent in the Army, I would get a good job,” my father told me. “I discovered that El Paso had not changed and that, above all, I was Mexican. And for Mexicans, decent jobs hardly existed.”

My father and mother, Helena, headed to Los Angeles, where my two brothers and I were born.

José and María also migrated to L.A. and continued to work at the grueling and poorly paid jobs set aside for Mexicans. Though José (a native of Shafter, Texas) was a U.S. citizen, he was unable to achieve anything above manual labor. María, a legal resident, cleaned buses, streetcars, and hospital rooms for years in her last years. The current wave of xenophobia, highlighted by anti-immigrant fables and demands for mass deportations, is not new to the U.S. Growing up in the 1950s and 60s Los Angeles, my family and I heard such sentiments openly expressed. European Americans, at one time or another, called us greasers or yelled at us, “Go back to Mexico!”

Just a few months ago in Tucson, a woman consumed with road rage got in my face and bellowed that repugnant demand. It was upsetting and a crude reminder that hardcore racism still lives.

We Mexicans have endured all manner of racism and marginalization. We have lived through mass deportations during the Great Depression and Operation Wetback in 1952.

What I say to those who mischaracterize us as aliens is that we have always been in the Southwest.

Who else but Mexicans under Spanish colonial rule founded and named San Antonio, El Paso, Albuquerque, San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Francisco? Our ancestors were on hand to greet the first European Americans to arrive in those settlements.

Trump and the Trumpistas can do everything in their power to sweep us out of the U.S. In the end, they will fail.

Aquí estamos y no nos vamos—We are here and not leaving.