Corazón de Dixie

Front matter

CORAZON DE DIXIE

Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 JULIE M. WEISE

Corazón de Dixie

Contents

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER ONE Mexicans as Europeans: Mexican Nationalism and Assimilation in New Orleans, 1910-1939 14

CHAPTER TWO Different from That Which Is Intended for the Colored Race: Mexicans and Mexico in Jim Crow Mississippi, 1918-1939 51

CHAPTER ONE Mexicans as Europeans

Photographs of Hortensia Horcasitas (fig. 2) and Robert Canedo (fig. 3) seem typical of Mexican immigrant portraits from the U.S. Southwest in the first half of the twentieth century.’ The Horcasitas photograph recalls countless others of the “Mexican generation,” Mexican immigrants of the 1910s and 1920s. This generation fled revolution and economic hardship in Mexico; once in the United States, they adapted Mexican culture and nationalism to their new environment, using it to buffer themselves from a society that increasingly saw them as racially and culturally suspect.” Canedo, too, came to the United States from Mexico as a young child during the 1920s. His portrait evokes the “Mexican American generation,” for whom service in World War II was an integral component of a new political strategy and in some cases an identity shift, emphasizing U.S. citizenship. That generation embraced Americanism in the hope that white America would, in turn, embrace Mexican Americans.*

These photos, however, were not taken in Los Angeles or San Antonio but rather in New Orleans, where they told a different story. For Horcasitas and her family, embracing Mexican national culture was not a means of protection against white society but rather a way to join it. In the Crescent City, as New Orleans was known, middle-class Mexican immigrants of the 1920s successfully engaged Mexico and shaped the image of “Mexicans” in ways that secured their place among European-style white immigrants. They acquired a different racialization from their counterparts elsewhere in the United States, who had come to be seen as a group distinct from and inferior to white people. In the Southwest, the limited success of the Mexican American generation’s politics caused their children to adopt a more radical stance in the 1960s. In New Orleans, by contrast, the “Mexican generation” already lived as white people during the 1920s.

To see a selection of original historical sources from this chapter, go to http://corazondedixie .org/chapter-1 (http: //dx.doi.org/10.7264/N3FB517W).

(left) FIGURE 2 Hortensia

Horcasitas, New Orleans, Louisiana, ca. 1925. Courtesy of Carlos Zervigón and family.

(right) FIGURE 3 Robert Canedo, New Orleans, Louisiana, ca. 1945.

Courtesy of Hazel Canedo and family.

Canedo first acquired his U.S. citizenship during World War II but had enjoyed most ofits benefits for decades—benefits not enjoyed by those New Orleans citizens who were African American. Though his skin was dark and his mother was a poor widow raising a family on the proceeds of her sister's boardinghouse, in 1930 young Robert attended kindergarten with white children; meanwhile, his Mexican immigrant counterparts in the Southwest faced school segregation, deportation, and racial violence.* By the time he enlisted in the army, Canedo had already fallen in love with his future wife, a U.S.-born white woman named Hazel, to whom the photograph’s inscription was addressed.* The couple's children went on to live as white people in New Orleans, their Mexican heritage a curiosity rather than a determining factor of their life course.“ While the Southwest's Mexican Americans hoped military portraits like this one would mark a turning point in their experiences of race, Canedo's photograph simply projected the assured patriotism of any white soldier at war.

Between 1910 and World War II, nearly all of the roughly 2,000 Mexican immigrants who lived for a time in New Orleans—even those like Canedo, who hailed from working-class backgrounds and had darker skin—assimilated into white society.’ During those same years, pro-segregation white southern Democrats took hold of the city and imposed a binary racial system onto what had once been a multilayered social and racial landscape. The Supreme Court case named after New Orleans’s most famous Creole color line transgressor, Homer Plessy, ruled in 1896 that ancestry and biological race would determine who sat in which train car—who was black and who white. Since Plessy had just one black great-grandparent, the decision marked the “one-drop” rule’s continuance into the twentieth century. Faced with an increasingly rigid Jim Crow system, a variety of in-between groups, such as Italians and the mixed-race French-Spanish group known as Creoles, pursued distinct strategies toward social mobility and status.®

Yet racialization—the process of demarcating biological and quasi-biological categories of people, imbuing those categories with meaning, and assigning them to human beings—has never been the province of judges alone.’ Though biological, blood-based ideas of race were at their height in the United States in the interwar period, Horcasitas, Canedo, and thousands of other Mexican immigrants used culture to wedge their way into white New Orleans.'* They had learned this strategy in Mexico, where cultural ideas of race nearly always asserted themselves into biological ones. Though Horcasitas went on to marry a Cuban man and her descendants self-identified as Latin American throughout the twentieth century, this cultural identity was subsumed into a broad white racial category from the 1920s onward." The experiences of her family and countless others show that the South’s binary, blood-based racial system could not remain fully insulated from the more cultural forms of racial thought prevalent elsewhere in the world.” Mexican immigrants secured their white status in large part by ignoring the elements of Mexican nationalism that valorized their nation’s self-proclaimed identity of “mixed” biological inheritance. Thus, their stories also illuminate the powerful influence of U.S. white supremacy on other nations’ projects of self-definition, in this case Mexico’.

Identifying sources to understand the lives of those who deliberately declined to identify as “Mexican” poses a challenge to historians. Nonetheless, Mexican sources, combined with a close analysis of original manuscript census pages and the family photographs and documents held by immigrants’

descendants, together begin to tell a story. They show how a group of middle-class Mexican immigrants like Horcasitas created a Europeanized version of Mexicanidad, perceptions of Mexicanness, that in turn allowed the Canedos and other poor Mexicans to quietly assimilate into white New Orleans geographically, culturally, economically, socially, and religiously. Like their counterparts in the Southwest, these working- and middle-class immigrants were considered “Mexican” But “Mexican” in New Orleans quickly acquired a very different meaning than it had elsewhere.*?

A sociologist wrote in 1949 that Latin American immigrants “are naturally associated with and identify themselves with the white rather than the colored element,” but there was nothing natural about Mexicans’ strategies for navigating New Orleans.'* Other immigrant and “in-between” groups made a variety of choices when confronted with the political dominance, and even the violence, of white supremacy during this period. That Mexican immigrants pursued assimilation into whiteness rather than antiracist politics, and achieved that assimilation by crafting a specific image of Mexican culture while remaining silent about biology, thus reveals as much about the history of Mexico as that of the U.S. color line.

Gulf Coast Routes

Though the first significant wave of Mexican migration to Jim Crow New Orleans began during the early twentieth century, the cultural, economic, and political history of the Gulf of Mexico gave this encounter deeper roots (see map 1). Like Latin America, Louisiana was first colonized by Spain and attracted a large population of Spanish emigrants from the eighteenth century forward.'> Even under French and later U.S. American rule in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Spanish-language culture thrived in New Orleans. In the nineteenth century, steamship connections through the Gulf of Mexico reinforced cultural and economic ties between Louisiana and Latin America, and New Orleans became a major center of Hispanophone journalism linking Spanish-speaking communities throughout the hemisphere.** Culture, too, crossed the Gulf, as many of the Mexican musicians who first arrived for the 1884 World’s Fair remained in New Orleans and influenced its music scene.'” The city periodically became embroiled in Latin American political struggles, as exiles including Mexican liberals Valentin Gómez Farías and Benito Juarez lived there for periods of time. Meanwhile, U.S. soldiers departed from New Orleans for their military incursions into Latin America, including the U.S.-Mexican War, as did small groups of U.S. American men

MAP 1 New Orleans and

UINITECSTATES New Orleans>8 Mexico's Gulf Coast, showing popular passenger steamship routes, 1920519308. Information from U.S. Department of Commerce, Commercial Travelers Guide to Latin America, 1926 and 1931.

Map by the author.

Progreso

Veracruz

MEXICO

N 0/20 | Pacific Ocean who set out for self-designed invasions of Latin America in expeditions that came to be known as filibusters.**

The Mexican Revolution of 1910-17 created political and economic instability that affected the United States through immigration and the spillover of revolutionary politics. The majority of the era’s U.S.-bound migrants hailed from north-central Mexico, a hotbed of revolutionary activity and within close reach of the Mexico-U.S. border. These poor, rural emigrants journeyed mostly to Texas during the 1910s—20s, and from there, many continued on to all parts of the United States, from Arizona to Alaska, Michigan to California. Meanwhile, some Mexican revolutionaries like the Flores Magón brothers took refuge in U.S. cities like Los Angeles and San Antonio.’

Linked to Mexico through the Gulf’s watery borderlands, New Orleans saw these same effects from the Mexican Revolution. Though larger numbers of Cubans and Hondurans later moved to New Orleans, in the 1910s—20s refugees from the Mexican Revolution constituted the city’s most numerically important group of Latin American immigrants, numbering at least 1,400 in

1920.”° Revolutionary conflict also straddled the Gulf of Mexico, as Yucatán's future socialist governor, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, retreated to New Orleans for a time.”' On the other side of the political spectrum, conservative leaders including Aureliano Urrutia and Francisco Carvajal plotted counterrevolution from New Orleans in 1914, arousing suspicion from U.S. authorities.?? The forces of reactionary Adolfo de la Huerta, while based in Veracruz, later used the Crescent City for refuge and supplies in 1923, spawning a migration of Mexican “soldiers of fortune, political plotters, and ammunition salesmen” to New Orleans.”

Though migrant political leaders sought refuge in New Orleans for the same reasons as their counterparts in Los Angeles or El Paso, Mexican migrants to New Orleans had generally experienced the turbulent 1910s differently. Would-be emigrants from north-central Mexico walked or rode railroads to the Texas border, while those who lived near Mexico's Gulf Coast ports boarded ships bound for U.S. Gulf Coast ports. Mexican consulate records suggest that Veracruz was by far the most common state of origin among New Orleans's Mexican immigrants, with others hailing from coastal states Yucatán, Campeche, and Tabasco.**

New Orleans—bound Gulf Coast migrants and their counterparts who journeyed from northern Mexico to the southwestern United States had overlapping yet different outlooks and reasons for migration, which in turn shaped the choices they made in the United States. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mexico's dictator Porfirio Díaz brought rapid capitalist development and social transformation to the country's heartland as well as its Gulf Coast. Still, the coast's tropical climates and proximity to shipping routes made the development of agriculture for export particularly dramatic there. Plantations in Veracruz grew coffee, tobacco, and sugar, while those in Yucatán produced the fibrous cactus known as henequen, which ultimately was used to fabricate rope. Economic expansion led to labor shortages, and some foreign-owned plantations notoriously used violence to keep workers on the job.” Simple unemployment, then, would not have motivated emigration from the Gulf Coast.

The revolution's trajectory in the Gulf fomented some but not all of the political and economic disruptions that motivated north-central Mexicans to emigrate.” Yucatán's poor and isolated plantation laborers did not seize the revolutionary moment to rebel themselves, nor did displaced rural dwellers in Veracruz.” Still, the towns and cities of Veracruz were centers of labor radicalism in the early years of the twentieth century. From coffee bean sorters to textile factory laborers, the state’s urban workers—many recent transplants from rural areas—initiated strikes and riots in 1906-7.22 When revolutionary leader Venustiano Carranza installed a sympathetic governor there in 1914, it was apparently with instructions to make major concessions to the working-class agenda.” The following year, a revolutionary governor arrived in Yucatán as well.* Though neither these leaders nor subsequent socialist governors succeeded in upending the Gulf Coast’s stratified economic order, their arrival initiated more than a decade of negotiation with peasant groups over land reform. In the case of Veracruz, continued labor unrest during and after the revolutionary years secured greater rights and protections for urban workers.** Thus, while north-central Mexicans undoubtedly experienced more and earlier violence and economic disruption during the revolution, the Gulf Coast's laboring classes also underwent rapid economic change in the early twentieth century—change with which many eventually voiced their dissatisfaction.

That Veracruz produced fewer out-migrants as compared with north-central Mexico thus attests to the critical role of railroad transportation and labor recruitment—beyond simply economic supply and demand—in jumpstarting more than a century of Mexican emigration. During World War I, US. labor recruiters focused their efforts at the Texas border. Governors, mayors, and local authorities in northern Mexico were instructed to spread the word about job opportunities, though many refused to do so, believing they needed the labor at home. Mexican workers who did hear about recruitment efforts during and after World War I walked days to reach the border or paid the train fare of around $13 to arrive there; then, enganchadores, recruiters, paid to transport them to work sites throughout the United States.*? State government officials in Veracruz also received requests for laborers, such as one in 1918 seeking men to work in the United States and outlining a specific procedure for contracting them.** Yet like their counterparts in northern Mexico, local officials in rapidly developing Veracruz were not eager to part with their workforce. “There is not anyone here that wants to abandon their land to go to a foreign country,’ wrote the mayor of Veracruz highlands village Xoxocotla in response to the 1918 request for laborers, “but if the situation does arise, care will be taken to follow your instructions?** Meanwhile, New Orleans—based Mexican import/export agent J. de la Torre saw that employers in the U.S. South, too, were hungry for Mexican labor and tried to start contracting them via ship from Veracruz to New Orleans. His requests that the Mexican government exempt him from the usual contract requirements and subsidize laborers’ train fare to the Mexican port city fell on unsympathetic ears, and the plan went nowhere.* In the end, then, the serious labor recruitment efforts that helped jump-start emigration in north-central Mexico in the interwar years did not reach the Gulf Coast.

Without the impetus and subsidy oforganized labor recruitment, Veracruzanos and other Gulf Coast residents who did board New Orleans—bound ships bore the entire cost of migration and readjustment themselves and thus were more likely to be middle and upper class. Still, they hailed from villages, towns, and cities and from a range ofeconomic positions. The Enseñat family, for example, ran a successful business in Yucatán's capital, Mérida. There, they manufactured and serviced machines that crushed and processed Yucatan’s most important crop, henequen.** Family lore recalls a bullet hitting a windmill in the Ensenats’ backyard in 1916, signifying the revolution’s threat to the family’s economic status and safety. Originally from Cuba, father Francisco Enseñat moved his family via ship to New Orleans that year, where he purchased a car for the family and enrolled his children in Catholic schools. Leaving his wife and children in New Orleans, he continued to commute between the Crescent City and the family home and business in Mérida.*” Like the Enseñats, many of these upper- and middle-class migrants feared rather than supported the revolution, making New Orleans a stronghold of conservative sentiment during the 1910s.**

Immigrants to New Orleans from the Gulf Coast’s rural areas had more to gain than lose from the revolution, yet many still left because of the upheavals it caused. Immigrant Peter Nieto was raised in a rural area near Jalapa, Veracruz, where he managed birth and death records for his town. The feeling of lawlessness in the aftermath of the revolution prompted him to take a banana boat to New Orleans in 1924. Within a year he had found work as a watchmaker and married Laura, a woman of Cajun descent from Cutoff, Louisiana.*? Another immigrant, a farmer’s son, recalled growing up in rural Veracruz. When his father died, the immigrant’s mother, like many other rural women in her time, moved the family to the port of Veracruz.*” But when the city’s labor market failed to yield economic stability, she and her children boarded a boat bound for New Orleans.** These rural emigrants, then, emerged from a milieu of political and economic flux.

Though Mexican consulate records suggest that the vast majority of New Orleans’s Mexican immigrants hailed from the Gulf Coast, census records show that a few families found their way to New Orleans through the more traditional route of passage, from northern Mexico to Texas. For example, the Mexican Hernandez, Flores, and Trentes families each had one child in Texas before moving on to New Orleans.’ Mary and Jesús Reséndez were Tejanos who brought their family to New Orleans, where Jesus found work driving a truck.* Francisco Cervantes hailed from Parras, in the border state of Coahuila. A trained machinist, Cervantes crossed the border to San Antonio in 1911 but could not find work in his profession. Indeed, Cervantes's arrival in Texas coincided with an upswing in anti-Mexican violence and Jim Crow practices that affected middle- and working-class Mexicans alike.** As Mexican agricultural laborers tried to escape Texas for California and the Midwest, Cervantes heard of an opportunity in New Orleans. Now on the white side of the color line, he did find work as a machinist there. He married Raquel Ramos, a Parras-born woman of upper-middle-class background who had been sent to New Orleans to attend Catholic school.* The family settled into a rental home near Clay Square, where their neighbors were almost all Louisiana-born white families whose heads of household practiced skilled trades.*°

Yet those who came through Texas were the exception, as most Mexicans of all social classes arrived in New Orleans on ship decks, in a context of international trade rather than violent racial threat. Some paid at least $50—a steep sum for poor Mexicans—to ride as proper passengers on a United Fruit Company or Mexican American Fruit Corporation steamship.* Men with less means who traveled without families could earn their passage by working menial jobs aboard ships, while others were skilled crew members who might disappear into the city as their vessels sailed on to the next port.

In addition to sailors from around the world, Mexican arrivals shared decks with agricultural goods and import/export businessmen; these businessmen aggressively promoted the idea that trade with Mexico and Latin America was key to their city’s future. Though few ships sailed under Mexico’s flag, in 1928 and 1929 more Honduran ships docked at New Orleans than did ships from any foreign country, and most of these, as well as several European and U.S. American lines, connected New Orleans to ports along Mexico's Gulf Coast.* New Orleans businessmen rejoiced as the United States normalized relations with Mexico's postrevolutionary regime, expecting to see a million dollars of monthly trade between Mexico and New Orleans;*? “Mexico's Trade Belongs to City” proclaimed a headline in the Times-Picayune.* In the following years, New Orleans accurately declared itself the “gateway to the Americas,” to the chagrin of globally ambitious coastal cities like Miami and Galveston who vied for the same title.** Recognizing the need to keep maritime traffic flowing through New Orleans rather than its competitor ports, Louisiana's governor hired a Mexican man to represent the state at trade-related events in Latin America in the late 1920s.°” With so much public discussion of Latin America’s importance to New Orleans's future, it is perhaps no surprise that the city's correspondent from San Antonio's La Prensa noted that even New Orleans's major newspaper, the Times-Picayune, “has always shown evenhandedness towards Mexico” at a time when papers elsewhere usually did not.** Although an economic courtship with Mexico was no guarantee of “evenhandedness” for actual Mexican people, the prominence of trade-related dialogue about the country created an international frame into which such immigrants could insert themselves from the moment of their shipboard arrival.

Attempts to encourage trade with Latin America meant Mexicans' arrival experiences in New Orleans bore little resemblance to those of their counterparts who left Mexico via its northern borderlands. Historians have observed that the U.S.-Mexico land border, and movement across it, was ill policed and even ill demarcated when the Mexican Revolution began. By the early 1920s, the experience of crossing the border became an increasingly humiliating one for Mexicans and indeed a foundational moment for their racialization as a distinct and undesirable group.** In El Paso, for example, public health inspectors forced border-crossing Mexicans to strip naked, then searched their scalps for lice and sprayed them with a mixture of soap, kerosene, and water—all because they believed Mexicans were genetically predisposed to carrying disease.°°

In contrast, New Orleans elites’ emphasis on promoting Latin American trade gave Mexicans a more welcoming arrival there in the 1910s—20s. As their steamships neared the port, migrants could see the city’s low-profile skyline across the waterfront. They first docked near the new three-building immigration station in Algiers, across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, for immigration and public health inspectors to come on board. Health inspections took place in crowded conditions on deck and, unlike examinations at the southwestern border, were cursory at best. When public health officials tried to implement more thorough screenings in 1910, New Orleans's immigration commissioner discouraged them, saying, “Commerce and trade relations between the port of New Orleans and Central and South America needs stimulating and encouraging”** The city’s elites wanted the port to welcome, not deter, newcomers, and they successfully pressured federal agencies to fall in line.” As boats carrying Mexican migrants continued into the maze of wharves, warehouses, and train tracks that comprised the city’s vast international port, inspectors checked passports and distributed six-month visitor permits to those who declared their intention to stay temporarily. Fewer than one in a hundred were barred entry.°*

Once the ships reached their docks, Mexican crew members may have unloaded bananas or performed final shipboard duties while migrants who could afford passenger fare disembarked into the city’s downtown. To the right down Chartres Street, the Cabildo building reigned over Jackson Square, evoking for Mexicans the Spanish colonial architecture in the zócalos, town squares, of their home country’s state capitals. Italians, Filipinos, and African Americans mingled among Creoles on the French Quarter streets and narrow alleys of their shared neighborhood. Walking onward or boarding a streetcar through New Orleans’s dense neighborhoods, Mexicans encountered Irish, German, and Chinese immigrants scattered among white and black residents, their homes often boasting the distinctive Creole iron balustrades that evoked Caribbean architecture.’ This was hardly a dusty border station like the ones that admitted or excluded Mexicans at El Paso’s Santa Fe or Stanton Street bridges, nor was it Los Angeles’s railroad depot, which delivered newcomers to a decaying downtown plaza peopled almost exclusively by recently arrived Mexican, Italian, and Eastern European low-wage laborers.©°

The revolution’s final years and ultimate triumph brought Mexicans to New Orleans at a quickened pace. The majority of those present in 1920 had arrived since 1917, suggesting that many considered themselves refugees from the new regime.** Their numbers were small but not insignificant: by 1920, the federal census listed 1,242 Mexican-born whites living in New Orleans, slightly more than were living in Chicago that year.” It is likely that an additional 10 percent lived there as well, classified by census workers as Negro or mulatto. As these new arrivals adjusted to New Orleans, they would quickly learn to navigate a geography not just physical but, increasingly over the 1910s—20s, racial as well.

Crossing into White New Orleans

Beginning with their maritime border crossings, Mexicans’ trajectories in New Orleans were different from their counterparts elsewhere in the United States. In the early years following the revolution, most of the New Orleans Mexican immigrants entered middle-class professions; this reflected their more educated and financially secure origins as well as the relative fluidity of their racial position in the city. The highest number of Mexican immigrant men who arrived by 1920 performed white-collar jobs: they were import/ export managers, doctors, teachers, clerks, artists, and musicians, or they worked as ship captains and in other maritime occupations (see table 1). Many of these professionals considered themselves temporary refugees from the revolution, “without power, waiting to return on a moment's notice to our

TABLE 1 Occupations of Mexicano men age sixteen and over (as percentage of all Mexicano men over age sixteen) in New Orleans, 1920 and 1930

1920 1930 White collar total 45% 32% Professional /student 11 10 Clerical/sales 17 17 Artist/musician 3 Maritime 14 3 Blue collar total 32 S1 Skilled 9 12 Semiskilled 10 12 Unskilled 9 27 Not employed/unknown 28 17

Source: 1920 and 1930 manuscript census analysis. See Appendix for methodology.

country,” in the words of one upper-class man.** Conversely, a sizable minority—about a third of Mexican men—entered blue-collar jobs of various skill levels: they were carpenters, shoemakers, cooks, busboys, or, like Francisco Cervantes, machinists. In contrast, Spanish-surnamed men in Santa Barbara, California, that same year counted just 10 percent of their ranks in white-collar professions, and Mexican immigrants who naturalized in Los Angeles were about a quarter white collar during the 1920s-30s. In both California cities, the vast majority of Mexican men worked as laborers.® White perceptions of Mexicans as uniformly working class helped solidify their racialization as a distinct group in the Southwest. In New Orleans, by contrast, Mexicans did not coalesce in any one employment category and thus did not experience the same brand of racialization in the early years of their arrival.

The Catholic Church, however, did attempt to transplant some southwestern understandings of Mexican identity to New Orleans. When Archbishop John Shaw was transferred to New Orleans from San Antonio, he quickly assumed that New Orleans’s Mexican arrivals would be just like those he had served in his previous post. New Orleans's Catholic leadership had resisted racial segregation for decades longer than their counterparts elsewhere in the United States, but in the late 1910s Shaw was instrumental in ejecting African Americans from their traditional mixed parishes and sending them instead to newly formed black parishes, usually in run-down buildings on small side streets.°° For Mexicans, he invited the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, whose work with Mexicans he had admired in San Antonio, to New Orleans, asking them to found a Spanish-speaking parish.” Unlike blacks’ parishes, Mexicans’ parish would be housed in one of New Orleans’s finest buildings: the Old Mortuary Chapel on Rampart Street, a large classical revival-style building with expansive arches.** The church was renamed Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, and in the 1920s, priests held both Spanish and English masses and delivered sermons in both languages.” Shaw believed Mexicans belonged in their own parish, yet his choice of a stately building on a central thoroughfare likely reflected his perception that newly arrived Mexicans were mostly high-class refugees from their country’s dangerously radical revolution.”°

As happened so often in the history of Mexico, paths blazed by emigrants with financial resources were soon trod by those who were poorer.’! By the 1920s, revolutionary violence had quieted, and many of New Orleans's middle-class refugees returned home while more working-class Mexicans began arriving, largely but not exclusively from the Gulf Coast. While the number of Mexicans in New Orleans was about the same in 1930 as a decade before, 1930 manuscript census pages show that over half of Mexican immigrant men in New Orleans that year occupied blue-collar positions, as middle-class refugees returned home and more working-class immigrants arrived (see table 1). The fastest growth was in the ranks of unskilled labor: by 1930, more than a quarter of Mexicano men in New Orleans were performing unskilled common labor just like their counterparts in the Southwest, and over half worked in blue-collar jobs of all skill levels. For example, Jesús Elizondo arrived in New Orleans in 1928 and found work at a dredging company. In 1930, he lived in a boardinghouse on Bancroft Drive with eleven other recently arrived single Mexican dredge workers, all ages twenty-four through thirty-seven, as well as Italian and black single boarders.”? Even those who had arrived prior to 1920 reflected this new, more working-class balance of occupations since middle-class emigrants of the revolution years were more likely to have returned home. Shipyard laborer Vicente Gonzalez, for example, arrived during the revolution but did not follow the self-proclaimed “refugees” home when it ended.’ By 1930, then, outsiders could well have perceived that most Mexicans worked blue-collar jobs—a stigma that could have branded the entire group as racially inferior.

Changes in women’s migration and labor patterns also signaled the increasingly working-class character of New Orleans's Mexican population over the course of the 1920s, as more single Mexican women came to work in the city. Women comprised 42 percent of New Orleans’s adult Mexicanos

TABLE 2 Occupations of Mexicana women age sixteen and over (as percentage of all Mexicana women over age sixteen) in New Orleans, 1920 and 1930

1920 1930 White collar total 5% 13% Professional /student 1 10 Clerical/sales 4 3 Blue collar total 13 21 Skilled blue collar 0 1 Semiskilled blue collar 5 10 Unskilled blue collar Domestic 6 9 Not employed/unknown 82 65

Source: 1920 and 1930 manuscript census analysis. See Appendix for methodology.

immigrants in 1920 and 49 percent in 1930, a gender balance similar to that among Mexican immigrants in the United States as a whole in those years.”* Just one in six New Orleans Mexicana immigrants counted in the 1920 census were single working women, but by 1930 that share had doubled.”* Those who immigrated after 1920 had an even higher percentage of single blue-collar working women than their counterparts who had arrived prior to 1920 and remained to be counted on the 1930 census.” These women worked as housekeepers, laundresses, seamstresses, or waitresses (see table 2). Mexican widow Analeta Cruz, for example, did not know how to read and write and so supported her Louisiana-born son and niece by working as a housekeeper in a private home.”” Never-married Ethel Sastre, age forty-two, lived as a roomer in a boardinghouse of native-born white people.” She worked as a seamstress—in Spanish, sastre—suggesting that the census enumerator might have misconstrued her profession for her last name. Again, Mexican immigrants increasing deviation from the white middle-class norm could—and did, in other U.S. locations—shape the racial ideas that white Americans held about them by the early years of the Depression. ”?