Focus/Summary:

This lesson focuses on the economic conditions confronting Mexicans during the Great Depression. Serious challenges confronted Mexican immigrants as millions of Americans were left homeless. Between 1929 and 1936 at least six hundred thousand Mexican nationalists and their children, many of whom were born in the U.S. returned to Mexico--this represented about one third of the U.S. Mexican population, the largest mass exodus in history of any one group from this country.

Vital Themes and Narratives:

Patterns of social and political interaction.

History's Habits of the Mind:

Understand how things happen and how things change, how human intentions matter, but also how their consequences are shaped by the means of carrying them out, in a tangible of purpose and process,

Understand the relationship between geography and history as a matrix of time and place, and as a context of events.

Objectives:

Students will understand how economic forces have contributed to conflict between Mexicans and white Americans during the Great Depression.

Students will analyze how events can influence the process of change over time.

Procedures:

Provide students with the stay or leave dilemma. Photographs of Mexican migrants can also be displayed. Instruct students to make a tentative decision on the issue and provide their reasoning. Identify reasons allowing the Mexicans to stay and for having them leave. Engage the class in a Socratic discussion of the issue(s) posed by the dilemma. Have each student indicate their position on the issue.

Source:

Chicano! -- The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement by F. Arturo Rosales--1997

Assessment of Student Learning:

Instruct students to develop a two hundred word essay justifying their position on the issue contained in the dilemma.

Make them leave or let them stay?

The year is 1933 and the United States is in the depths of the Great Depression.
You are a fruit producer located in southern California. You have hired hundreds of Mexicans to work for you and have befriended many of these individuals providing
you with excellent labor over the years. Your son has recently married the daughter
of a Mexican couple that have worked in your orchards for many years.

Nation wide unemployment is running at 25% with thousands of "Okies" migrating to the the "land of milk and honey"--California--looking for work. You are feeling the pressure from nativists and white workers to dismiss the Mexican workers who work for very reasonable wages. Threats to destroy your orchards and harm your family have been made against you by extremist groups. Thousands of Mexican nationals
and their children, many of whom were born in the United States, have been "persuaded" to return to Mexico.