Reviving German Propaganda
ECKARDT, W. V.
National Reports Atlanta: Joseph R. Fiszman. Boston: Courtney R. Sheldon. Chicago: Albert N. Votaw. Dallas: Bicknell Eubanks. Minneapolis: Sam Romer. New Orleans: Stephen Ryan. Richmond: Lawrence...
...The present city administration has consistently displayed neither the inclination nor the ability to take on a problem before it becomes too serious to handle effectively...
...As one extensive survey points out, "the thousands are merely the maximum numbers the understaffed Border Patrol can pick up and process in a single day...
...Richmond: Lawrence King...
...Mostly they come alone, but many bring their families with them wives, big children, little children, and babes in arms...
...Unable to destroy the project, the real object of their wrath, the mob amused itself by choking traffic along one of the city's main transportation arteries...
...Hundreds of thousands of these unfortunates will push their way across the Rio Grande during the 1954 farming season men and women whose ignorance, poverty, illegal status, and willingness to accept indescribable hardships place them at the mercy of unscrupulous employers...
...After all, Chicago has a long history of gang warfare between different ethnic groups, at times erupting into days-long battles in which the police have been powerless...
...Over one hundred arrests have been made, mostly on charges of disorderly conduct...
...By the time she and her husband moved into the all-white development, it was too late...
...About half were fined from $1 to $200...
...One is the National Citizens Protective Association, founded in St...
...In addition, both political organizations are too paralyzed by the fear of offending potential voters in this election year to support effective action...
...They are well aware that a Border Patrolman will notin fact, cannot use his pistol except in extreme emergencies...
...These groups also carry on "educational" work among whites...
...And of the thousands picked up and deported to Mexico, most are back across the Rio Grande in 24 hours...
...Disease and death rates in the areas of heaviest wetback concentration are an indication of the stupendous price we pay in that regard...
...Ideologies are beyond their comprehension...
...It certainly doesn't inculcate any respect in the legal Mexican immigrant into the United States for the laws of his adopted country...
...An open border is a constant invitation to subversives and spies...
...Flagrant violation of laws in itself is bad enough...
...There are sections of the border where, because of the terrain, wetbacks are not, and never will be, a major problem...
...Indeed, a group of cab drivers had already assembled in an all-night restaurant but was persuaded not to sally forth...
...Somewhat less than half those arrested are discharged...
...They have been lured north into gringo land by tales of high wages and good living...
...dollars sent to Mexico don't ring cash registers in the United States...
...There are just too many parts of the city where members of both races are waiting for a chance to get even for real or fancied griefs...
...The CHA learned even later than the neighborhood that the first Negro family had moved in...
...Carrying all their possessions on their backs, ready to bed down at night in whatever shelter comes to hand or without shelter, able to exist on a few beans and some flour for tortillas, they spend only the few cents such meager fare requires and save the rest for their return to Mexico...
...Just one such retaliatory incident could have set off a generalized riot that would not have been far from open racial civil war...
...At no time was there a white hand raised against black...
...This project contains within itself the potentialities for a genuine racial civil war...
...A little-used riot law, providing stiff penalties, has not been invoked...
...The most praiseworthy job has been done by the El Paso Cotton Growers Association, prime contractor for that area...
...They know the limitations of investigative personnel and facilities and that false papers are almost certain insurance against apprehension...
...One man was sentenced to a year in jail for attempted arson...
...What is the price in criminal activities...
...Its history has been marked by yearly battles on the racial front...
...The Border Patrol has less than 500 officers in the entire Texas border country, which extends 900 miles and covers an area several hundred miles into the interior...
...The survey, conducted by Texans alone, states in its...
...Louis by a former associate of Gerald L. K. Smith...
...Louis: William Wyant Jr...
...Racial violence is a favorite weapon of those who oppose public housing...
...Perhaps the most interested nongovernmental agency in the wetback situation is the Texas State Federation of Labor, whose survey provides a dramatic picture of the effects and dangers of an uncontrolled influx of mojadas...
...The mojadas stolidly accept good or bad treatment, starvation wages, sickness from contaminated drinking water and unsanitary living conditions...
...But they instinctively, or from actual or second-hand experience, know the limitations of enforcement against their illegal entry into the United States...
...Its president denies a desire to incite violence and blames what violence has occurred on "teenagers," but warns of serious trouble once the weather breaks...
...This summer, however, the situation promises to be more dangerous, and the location of the trouble seems to have been picked out in advance: the Trumbull Park public-housing project on the far South Side...
...The answer lies in strengthening the immigration laws and then enforcing them...
...The hungry Mexican citizen seeking work is not going to travel the many miles through the mountains along parts of the border in order to find the centers where work is available...
...If the good sense of the Negro community has so far helped avert bloodshed, the same cannot be said for certain of their white neighbors...
...But almost every summer since the end of World War II there has been a serious racial outbreak here generally on the issue of public housing...
...But it is the availability of farm employment which is the big attraction for most of the thousands who pour into Texas, coming all the way from Central Mexico, Southern Mexico, and even countries to the south of Mexico, such as Communist-dominated Guatemala...
...Both sides are organized although each is less organized than its opponents across the racial barricade admit and spoiling for a fight...
...Not a line was written locally on the riot, which had every policeman in the city on half-hour call, with 1,000 of their number ringing the trouble spot...
...For those who cannot be bullied, there is always arsonat least nine cases recognized by the police...
...San Francisco: Frank Mankiewicz...
...They do not think in terms of native labor displacement, lowering of economic standards and the socio-economic effects of their presence in the United States...
...But they have a sound knowledge of the limitations of immigration laws and of the Border Patrol...
...Where officials do not actually countenance anti-Negro violence, they tend to underestimate its seriousness...
...What is the price in human misery...
...The last major engagement was at another far South Side project, where individuals connected with local real-estate interests were actively agitating among the crowd...
...The other, more important, is a local property-owners' association of many years' standing in the community...
...One woman lost an eye...
...They are humble, amenable, easily dominated and controlled, and accept exploitation with the fatalism characteristic of the peon...
...One sees] part of the answer in this report on the lives and living conditions of the wetback and the people he displaces, the American citizens who are forced from their homes and their jobs by these illegal workers...
...Many are picked up by the United States Border Patrol before they have covered more than a few miles as they move aimlessly in their push into the interior of the United States...
...Bracero, incidentally, is the term applied to the legal entrant who works in the United States...
...In this case, with the fat in the fire, the agency stood firm and answered continued racist violence by allowing more Negro families to move in...
...Nor does it lie in maintaining a semblance of immigration-law enforcement which results in only partial control of the wetback tide...
...What is the price in disease and death...
...What is the price in danger to our national security...
...The answer must be found...
...Its members are urged to mill around and keep things stirred up...
...The Threat of Summer in Chicago By Albert N. Votaw Chicago In the summer, this city, with its 29 miles of publicly-owned lake fronts and hundreds of acres of parks in the hinterland, can be very pleasant...
...others were less seriously injured...
...And thousands of others make the same illegal trip across the riverto regular jobs in the border counties of Texas...
...CHA policy on projects situated in entirely white neighborhoods is to try to postpone interracial occupancy at least until the hard feelings engendered by the existence of the project itself have died down...
...But hundreds manage to make their way as far north even as Kansas...
...Summertime, when it gets too hot to sleep, will be danger time...
...The difference is that these ethnic gang fights were local, neighborhood affairs...
...But most of them fail to find the Gran Quivira of golden streets, just as their ancestors did with Coronado 400 years ago...
...Only repeated appeals by their more conservative leaders prevented some of the victims from driving their battered autos through the streets of their own neighborhoods a prelude to vengeance...
...Between major incidents, too, minor skirmishes continue in the form of shootings, bombings and fires of incendiary origin, as rundown white neighborhoods fight against being absorbed by the steadily expanding Black Belt...
...Immigration Service records in El Paso, for example, show that, during the fiscal year 1952-53, a total of 12,101 aliens were apprehended in agricultural work in the El Paso area, while 692 were apprehended in domestic work and 1,023 in industrial and other jobs...
...So the wetback becomes a major problem only in those areas where agricultural work is available near the border...
...At Trumbull Park, for the first time, organized racist groups have been operating openly...
...Up and down the river, thousands come looking for jobs in the towns and cities and in the fields...
...Donald Howard applied for an apartment in the Chicago Housing Authority's Trumbull Park project, no one thought to ask her race...
...That a practical program can be worked out and carried out amicably to permit thousands of Mexicans to cross the border legally and fill the available jobs during the peak of the farm season, both in planting and in harvesting, has been proved in actual practice...
...by self-policing its membership, the Association has been of immense help to the Immigration Service in keeping down the number of wetbacks in the area...
...Its members have cooperated wholeheartedly with the international "bracero" program...
...What is the price in lost business...
...Nor can illegal exploitation of illegal aliens help the standing of the United States in the eyes of exploited colonial areas of the world, where world Communism has chosen to challenge the ideas of the Western democracies...
...They may not know exactly how many or how few Border Patrolmen limited Congressional appropriations make possible for the vast border regions from Brownsville to El Paso...
...Negroes in the stalled streetcars and autos were stoned...
...Dollars not paid in wages don't go into trade channels...
...conclusions: "Truly the American people are entitled to ask, 'What price wetbacks?' What is the price in terms of depressed wages for citizens of the United States, who have a right to a wage on which they can live according to American standards of living...
...He is protected by agreed minimums for housing, feeding, medical care, wages, etc...
...These are the espaldas mojadas, the wetbacks, or the Guantanamo Joes, as they are called from the Mexican state which sends most of them north across the Rio Grande...
...Only then can the American people relax, secure in the knowledge that the threat of the wetback invasion has been halted...
...Along the Texas-Mexico border, the wetback problem ranges from "under fair control" in far West Texas around EI Paso to "completely out of control" in the lower Rio Grande Valley despite daily round-ups of thousands of mojadas...
...The 25-cent hourly wage of the wetback cannot support American citizens...
...It doesn't lie in opening the border still wider through the use of a crossing-card system which would be nothing but legalized wetbackism...
...Not that he sticks to agriculture...
...The Cicero riot, the most widely publicized of these major outbreaks, was atypical and, actually, the least dangerous...
...But it was never a real race riot...
...Racial feeling is city-wide, and racial warfare, if it comes, will range all over...
...It started when a Negro family rented an apartment in the all-white suburb and the building was wrecked by crowds, including many women and children, before they could move in...
...The CHA is often accused of favoring miscegenation, of disturbing the city's peace by attempting to cram interracial living down the throat of an unwilling populace...
...When light-colored Mrs...
...Crime is a natural result of the presence of thousands of people who already are living beyond the law...
...The vast majority of wetbacks are plain agricultural workers, including women and children, mostly from the peasant class in Mexico...
...Espaldas Mojadas' and the Texas Border By Bicknell Euhanks Dallas This is the time of the year when thousands of Mexicans begin slipping across the Rio Grande to find jobs in the Colossus to the north...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 20
