By Victoria Valenzuela

For the first nine years of her life, Christine Valenciana’s mother, Emilia Castañeda, born in 1926, lived in Boyle Heights. She attended Bridge Street Elementary School and lived with her parents and older brother. Her father was a bricklayer and stone mason. The family owned a home and lived a middle class life.

Then came the Great Depression, and the era of Mexican repatriation when over 1 million Mexicans and their descendants were forced out of their homes through mass deportations and threats under the guise of saving jobs for “real Americans.” It was impossible to find work, so the family lost their home. Feeling as if they had no choice, Castañeda and her family took a train to Gomez Palacio, Durango, Mexico so her father could look for jobs, and they lived in eidos, or communal grounds.

“It’s like right now, ‘Let’s give the jobs to the real Americans,’ so my grandfather, who was a well-established craftsman and had been here all those decades, couldn’t find work anymore,” said Valenciana, an associate professor emeritus at the Department of Elementary and Bilingual Education at Cal State Fullerton.

For over two decades now, Valenciana and the family members of others who were deported or forced to leave during the repatriation have been urging the country to pay attention to this little-known episode of history. They have petitioned the state for an apology, advocated for the history to be taught in schools, given talks to community groups and teachers and placed a plaque in Los Angeles, the site of many deportations during the repatriation.

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Last fall, Sens. Lena Gonzalez (D-Long Beach) and Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park) helped pass a piece of legislation that called for a Mexican Repatriation Memorial Project, which will place another plaque or monument in Los Angeles. Gonzalez’s great grandfather’s brother was deported during the repatriation period. Growing up, Gonzalez never learned about the Mexican repatriation, so she hopes the monument will help people learn about this history of mass deportations during the Great Depression.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do to just honor this past but also find ways to bring decency back to democracy and to let people know that undocumented residents, immigrants are not a threat,” Gonzalez said.

Valenciana said the work that needs to be done now isn’t just remembering the past but changing what is happening in the present.

“As my mother used to say, ‘I just wanted people to know what happened so it doesn’t happen again’ — and it’s happening again,” Valenciana said.

Read the full article at LA Times, here.