Raymond Rodriguez, who drew attention to deportation of Mexicans in the 1930s, dies

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception 

Raymond Rodriguez was 10 years old in 1936 when his immigrant father walked out of the family’s farmhouse in Long Beach, Calif., and returned to Mexico, never to see his wife and children again.
The son would spend decades pondering the forces that had driven his father away, an effort that reached fruition in “Decade of Betrayal,” a social history of the 1930s focusing on an estimated 1 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans unjustly deported or scared into leaving their homes in the United States by federal and local officials seeking remedies for the Great Depression.

Raymond Rodriguez, left, and Francisco Balderrama co-authored a book about the raid at La Placita in 1931 that triggered the deportation of more than 1 million to Mexico, many U.S. citizens. (Photo by Wally Skalij/LA Times)

“Americans, reeling from the economic disorientation of the depression, sought a convenient scapegoat. They found it in the Mexican community,” Mr. Rodriguez and co-author Francisco Balderrama wrote in the 1995 book, which sparked legislative hearings and formal apologies from the state of California and Los Angeles County officials.
Mr. Rodriguez, 87, who believed “the greatest tragedy of all” was public ignorance of the deportations, died June 24 at his Long Beach home. The cause was believed to be a heart attack, said his daughter, C.J. Crockett.
“It is no exaggeration to say that without the scholarly work by Ray and Francisco, no one but a handful of individuals would ever know about the illegal deportations of Mexican Americans in the 1930s,” said former California state Sen. Joseph Dunn, who sponsored 2005 legislation that apologized for the state’s part in “fundamental violations” of the deportees’ constitutional rights.
Last year the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors apologized for the county’s role in the roundups.
The deportations began a decade before the World War II internment of 110,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Federal and local authorities rounded up Mexican immigrants and their families at dance halls, markets, hospitals, theaters and parks, loading them onto vans and trains that dumped them on Mexican soil.
One of the most notorious raids occurred in 1931 at La Placita, a popular gathering spot for immigrants outside Olvera Street in Los Angeles. A team of Immigration and Naturalization Service agents armed with guns and batons sealed off the small public park and herded 400 terrified men and women into waiting vans. The success of the raid galvanized authorities in other localities across the country.
By 1940, Mr. Rodriguez and Balderrama found, more than 1 million people of Mexican descent had been deported. Government officials used the term “repatriation” to describe their actions, but the researchers found that 60 percent of the expelled were U.S. citizens. “They might as well have sent us to Mars,” Mr. Rodriguez once said, recalling the words of one “repatriate.”
Most of the deportees were not welcomed in Mexico. They were criticized for their American ways, for not fighting to remain in the United States, and for being a burden on Mexico’s economy.