EchoBlog

Sept. 16 marks the celebration of Mexico winning independence from the clutches of imperial Spain in the early 19th century. Over the years, its significance for the Mexican diaspora in the United States has increased, with celebrations now symbolizing ethnic pride in the U.S. cities and towns where people of Mexican descent have carved out spaces of dignity in the face of unwelcoming social forces.

From borderlands to barrios, Mexican communities become lively, loud and boisterous as the eve of Independence Day approaches. People join in the celebratory cry known as “El Grito de Dolores,” echoing the insurrectionist call made by Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla in the town of Dolores Hidalgo on Sept. 16, 1810. The cry has become an enduring feature of celebrations in communities with a significant Mexican population.

At times, the festive atmosphere of the Mexican diaspora gathering to celebrate Independence and other homeland holidays has been dampened by the threat of anti-Latino and anti-immigrant violence. For example, in 2017, PhiladelphiaMayor Jim Kenney lamented the cancellation of a public Cinco de Mayo celebration that would have attracted thousands, for fear that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would send agents. Days before, the Trump administration had announced it was gearing up for a multi-city, large-scale raid of “sanctuary cities” in what ICE called “Operation Safe City.” The threat was chilling, forcing Mexican communities to weigh the joy and connection of celebrating communal heritage against the threat of dissolution and terror in the community.

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This was not the first time that U.S. government officials used the occasion of Mexican patriotic holiday celebrations to apprehend immigrants. One of the most significant episodes in which a homeland celebration was turned into a mass deportation took place on the eve of Mexican Independence Day in Chicago in 1954. On that day, as the city’s Mexican community prepared for celebration and a parade down a major thoroughfare, agents from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) prepared to deport Mexican nationals in parts of the city where they resided. On Sept. 16, the roundups in Chicago began, as part of a months-long federal mass deportation campaign called Operation Wetback.

Earlier that year, Operation Wetback had deployed a similar military-style drive and campaign of fear to deport tens of thousands of immigrants from the country in cities such as Los Angeles and in communities across most of the Southwest. In the first three months of the operation, 93,913 Mexican nationals were arrested and presumably deported to Mexico.

It is unsurprising that Operation Wetback began in the Southwest. Large parts of the U.S. Southwest had been home to Mexican-descended peoples long before the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-1848. The U.S. conquest and annexation of northern Mexico did not always confer equal treatment to Mexicans under U.S. law, and they quickly became foreigners in their own land.

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But Mexican-descended peoples settled elsewhere as well. In the first half of the 20th century, industrial capitalism, a revolution in the borderlands, two world wars, restrictions of other immigrants and a binational guest worker agreement known as the Bracero Program (1942-1964) all played a role in bringing new generations of Mexican immigrants into the United States for work and survival. In the process, these migrations created multigenerational, mixed-status Mexican communities composed of Mexican American U.S. citizens, alongside immigrants of both legal and unauthorized status — all building lives together from the West Coast to the Great Lakes region, and from the Rio Grande Valley to the Lehigh Valley.

By 1954, Attorney General Herbert Brownell was committed to stamping out what he believed to be an “immigration crisis.” Because of national security concerns during the Cold War, leaders like Brownell feared that enemies would perceive the United States as vulnerable if the country could not control its borders and prevent what he called “an influx of illegal aliens.” By this, he meant Mexican immigrants, even citizens and those in the United States legally.

After the Southwest campaign concluded, Brownell announced Chicago as his next target. He aimed to deport 25,000 to 40,000 undocumented Mexicans from the city. Mexicans began to make Chicago their home after 1910, fleeing the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution. Soon after, more Mexican immigrants headed to the Windy City to find work in the steel mills, meatpacking, railroad and manufacturing industries. By the 1940s, Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans had transformed an old port-of-entry neighborhood known as the Near West Side into the largest concentration of Mexicans in the Midwest, numbering in the tens of thousands. They used grand ballrooms, theaters and thoroughfares to celebrate Mexican patriotic holidays.

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Chicago’s version of Operation Wetback was particularly ruthless for a few reasons, including the INS’s strategic decision to begin the campaign on a holiday. Sept. 16 was a day when the community would be out in public, not only to celebrate their homeland’s independence but to create community and pride in Chicago as Mexican Chicagoans. In addition, by targeting the street where the Mexican Independence Day parade took place, the INS dispossessed Mexican immigrant business owners of their storefronts and livelihoods.

INS Commissioner Joseph Swing warned that the great danger of the “alien influx” was not near the U.S.-Mexico border but instead in Chicago. That belief led the Department of Justice and the INS to direct an enormous amount of personnel and resources to the Windy City’s mass expulsion raids. The INS even planned for what to do if it ran out of space to detain Mexicans in the Cook County Jail. They contracted an old Studebaker car-manufacturing warehouse to temporarily incarcerate Mexican nationals, located conveniently close to Midway Airport, so they could more quickly deport Mexicans by plane.

Those who lived through this episode recalled tenement doors being kicked in by federal agents, movie theaters being raided and INS agents placing churches under siege.

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One of the signature features of the federal operation was utilizing “a military mind,” as Swing called it, swiftly deporting immigrants through the use of military planes, boats and trains. Doing so allowed for deportations before any due process could take place in a court. Swing, a retired Army general, was committed to bolstering the image of the INS as “an aggressive, highly militarized law enforcement organization.” That included exploiting immigrant patriotic celebrations as a tactical strategy in the war against immigrants.

In 1955, the INS reported that from September 1954 to June 1955, the agency had deported “11,459 aliens” through airlift, but that did not include those who had been deported by rail or bus. And while it seemed that the INS had not met its stated goal of deporting 25,000 to 40,000 undocumented immigrants from Chicago, the agency nevertheless claimed that “the border [had] been secured,” which in the agency’s view included the roundups of migrants in urban centers.

Civil liberties groups such as the Midwest Committee for Protection of Foreign Born (MCPFB) and the American Civil Liberties Union attempted to mount a legal response to the mass deportations but felt paralyzed by the sheer number of arrests and the swiftness of the proceedings. Nathan Caldwell Jr., executive director of the MCPFB, admitted to a colleague in Los Angeles that “the attorneys here have had no previous experience before the Service [INS] or in the Courts around a drive of such mass character.” Chicago’s Mexican community was left devastated by the months-long raids of homes, businesses and workplaces, and it left a lasting feeling that their communities would continue to be persecuted by immigration authorities whenever the politicians found it to be convenient.

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Today, the memories of what took place on Mexican Independence Day in Chicago in 1954 have faded. And celebrations of Mexican holidays remain important features of Latino life in communities throughout the country. Public displays of ethnic pride and cultural celebration are important to people, even as they also prompt heightened alertness about anti-immigrant sentiment and policies that target and criminalize immigrants. In the face of policies that have abused and terrorized immigrant communities, such patriotic festivities remain a space for mutual aid and visibility — and an opportunity to challenge exclusion in the United States.

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