Reform to Repatriation: Gendering an Americanization Movement in Early Twentieth-Century California

Abstract

This chapter adds new information about the regional diversity in Americanization movements by exploring how Americanization instruction was carried out on the Southern California landscape: what agents of reform thought of it and how their opinions and actions ultimately helped contribute to the deportation of nearly 500,000 Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants in what historians consider to be "one of the largest mass-removal operations ever sanctioned by the United States government" (Guerin-Gonzales 1994: 1). Using archaeological and archival research (Camp 2009) conducted on an Americanization program aimed at Mexican immigrants as a case study, this chapter demonstrates how a constellation of racialized and gendered discourses regarding the citizenship of the American nation shaped the types and intensity of training the "reformees" received. The Pacific Electric Railway Corporation, one of the chief Southern California employers and recruiters of male Mexican immigrants for railway maintenance labor, produced and circulated a sizeable amount of literature on the Americanization of their workforce. The charity and acculturation activities put on by the company or, rather, the reform work they claimed to perform served as a model for other Americanization campaigns in the region and made a lasting impact on race relations in California. Drawing upon a combination of oral histories from Southern California reformers, recently cataloged the Pacific Electric Railway Corporation documents held at The Huntington Library, newspaper articles, and reports composed by the California Commission of Immigration and Housing health and work camp inspectors who witnessed firsthand the Pacific Electric Railway Corporation's supposed reform work, this article demonstrates that Americanization efforts in Southern California predominantly benefited the corporations or institutions imparting such instruction. In what follows, this chapter highlights the discrepancies between what Americanizers in Southern California promised in public forums and the reform activities they actually undertook by comparing and contrasting archival and archaeological data associated with the Pacific Electric Railway's railway camps. To understand why these disjunctures exist, the Americanization movement must first be understood in its broader national and international context by exploring some of the factors that stimulated and provoked the production of Americanization discourses. Next, the case study of the Pacific Electric's railway camps is considered to critically assess what Americanization was actually composed of and if any of the company's promises were actually kept. This chapter concludes with a review and consideration of the factors that led to the disappearance of Americanization rhetoric in public venues and the simultaneous repatriation of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans back to Mexico. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)