As the Great Depression engulfed the United States during the early 1930s, fear and anxiety spread that Mexicans were taking jobs and welfare benefits away from "real" Americans. Local, county, state, and national officials launched massive efforts to get rid of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. It is estimated that more than a million were deported to Mexico.
In this documentary the impact of forced relocation on both sides of the border is carefully appraised. Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and their children were repatriated indiscriminately because it was assumed they were a costly burden to taxpayers. However, as the documentarians painstakingly document, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans received few socio-economic benefits. Nonetheless, a horrific toll was extracted from individuals, families, and entire communities due to the anti-Mexican hysteria. In Mexico, the return of native sons and daughters and their American-born children sorely strained the social and agrarian reforms initiated by President Lazaro Cardenas (1934-1940) and his predecessors.
Prior to this filmic study, not a single documentary has ever been produced that addresses and questions the aspects of forced repatriation, relocation and deportation. By combining extensive interviews, archival footage, photos, archival research with oral history testimony, and by covering the Legislative hearings and litigations scheduled to begin in Sacramento, California on June 19, 2003 and conclude in June 2007, the filmmakers' goal is to produce a compelling narrative documentary that blends individual recollections with scholarly digital cinematic interpretation.
Our aim is to produce a documentary, the first to have ever been produced to address and question at length the aspects of repatriation by making BETRAYAL AND VIOLATIONS: MEXICAN REPATRIATION OF THE 1930'S, widely available to the general public, in particularly for educational purposes. We will consider this project a success when this largely unknown and long overlooked tragic episode in American U.S. History is covered extensively in the academic field.
