I’ve heard there’s a crisis at the border. There’s a wave of people. It’s a flood. They’re pouring over the border to rape and murder and pillage and eat your pet ferret, blood and saliva dripping from their jaws as they thrash out of the straitjackets of the insane asylums they escaped from. Donald Trump says this wave includes the dreaded MS-13 gang that is terrorizing our cities. That’s just what I heard, anyway.
Come to think of it, this has been a problem for as long as I can remember. And I don’t even have to tell you which border is in question, because nobody’s trying to build a wall between the United States and Canada. The most recent target of rage against illegal immigration is our Haitian population, which is a little weird, because most of them are here legally, with a protected immigration status that started when an earthquake decimated their country in 2010 and killed 200,000 people. Apparently, things in Haiti have not improved since then.
But, Republicans say, there’s a crime wave. It’s a wave of crime committed by illegals who have come from “shithole” countries to murder our children or steal our jobs—or both, because they can multitask.
I could lay out all sorts of information about how immigrants are less likely to commit crime than U.S. citizens, or how most immigrants are here legally, or how a lot of them work jobs you wouldn’t take if you were on your last packet of ramen. But frankly, if you’re of the “rapists and murderers are pouring over the border” ilk, you likely won’t be swayed. So I thought I’d just talk about what’s happening at that border. People from a lot of different countries cross the border, but for the last century most of them have come from Mexico.
So what do you know about Mexico? If you are the average American citizen, probably not a whole lot. Hopefully you know where it is. Then maybe you envision a vague outline of a lawless country ravaged by cartels and corrupt police where you can get cheap drugs and questionable plastic surgery. It has scary prisons and its citizens wallow in poverty, right? Maybe you’re one of those many Americans who refers to all Latinx people as Mexican, regardless of their country of origin, even if it’s the United States. Or maybe you know a little more—maybe even something about Mexican culture, food, music, spectacular holiday festivals, and colorful style.
What you probably don’t know is much, if anything, of Mexico’s history and how it is intertwined with that of the United States. Because if you’re like me, you had a whole lot of American history classes growing up, and not one of them really mentioned Mexico at all. The American public tends to have a pretty myopic and amnesic perception of things, so our opinions are often formed without any context. Whether we view the thousands of people entering our country as hardworking new neighbors or unwanted riff raff, we don’t know exactly when they started coming here or why. What happened to make Mexicans the largest immigrant group in the United States?
Up until the mid 1800s, Mexico was a lot bigger than it is now. A whole chunk of the United States used to be part of Mexico. California? Part of Mexico. Arizona? Mexico. Utah was Mexico. But Americans are scrappy and they like their space, so they told Mexico repeatedly, “Gimme that,” and by “that” they meant Texas. And when Mexico said no, they attacked, and the Mexican-American War raged until the United States secured a treaty through which it usurped 55 percent of Mexico.
All this newly acquired land wasn’t a barren lifeless scrubland waiting to be settled. It was inhabited by Mexican people. If you’re of the opinion that every Mexican American you meet scrambled illegally over the border, keep in mind that many of them have lived here for nearly 200 years, since the United States annexed more than half of their country.
The other 45 percent of Mexico struggled with political turmoil. They were beaten up from the war. They amassed a whole lot of debt. And then they elected Porfirio Díaz as president. Díaz was a big fan of murder and suppressing critics, and he stayed president for most of the next thirty-five years, mainly by putting opponents in jail until after each election was over. Shortly after election number one, Díaz got this idea to start refilling Mexico’s coffers by opening it to foreign investors.
The United States pounced. All those rich guys, you know, the ones whose names are still on everything? Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Guggenheim, J.P. Morgan—they went crazy buying up Mexican land. They dominated mining and production industries and agriculture. Some broke their land up and sold it to other Americans who then moved to Mexico to farm it. By 1910, twenty-seven percent of Mexico’s arable land was soon owned by non-Mexicans. Seventy-five percent of their exports went to the United States.
Did you know that Mexico was a U.S. colony? That’s because it technically wasn’t. But it was an experiment in U.S. imperialism. As William Randolph Hearst put it, “I really don’t see what is to prevent us from owning all of Mexico and running it to suit ourselves.” And the thing is, they practically did.
Díaz was celebrated. He was praised by famous people like Theodore Roosevelt and Douglas MacArthur. He became popular internationally, but not among Mexican citizens, whose land he had sold to foreign investors. They had farms and homes and businesses with just as much right to it as any U.S. settler had to his own land. But it was bought out from under them as if they weren’t even there.
This project displaced 98 percent of rural Mexican citizens. They moved to the cities looking for work. Those who remained worked for the new landowners, where they ended up trapped in debt, and if they tried to leave, they were rounded up, dragged back, and forced to return to work.
So to answer the question, what started Mexican migration to the United States, it was when the United States bought up Mexicans’ land, kicked out the inhabitants, and shipped all of Mexico’s resources, including their food supply, out of the country. If anyone resisted, they were jailed or murdered. So they headed north, to the land of supposed opportunity.
In the United States, they faced “Juan Crow laws.” They endured lower wages and poor treatment by employers. They were lynched. A lot. La Matanza, which means massacre in Spanish, was a state-sanctioned campaign of terror carried out by the Texas Rangers that resulted in the murder of up to 5,000 people.
If you want a more thorough picture of U.S.-Mexican history, including all the malicious, often ridiculously illegal ways the U.S. government worked to subdue anyone working towards Mexican independence, I highly recommend you read Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands by Kelly Lytle Hernández. Suffice it to say, America is an asshole. I know that sounds harsh, but if we can’t recognize that—if we can’t accept responsibility for the impact our actions have had on our own citizens and the rest of the world—then we can’t learn, we can’t do better, and we can’t grow.
While Mexicans eventually had a revolution that resulted in the overthrow of Díaz, they did it with absolutely no help from their northern neighbors. In fact, the United States did everything it could to stop it, because it conflicted with our desire to continue to bleed Mexico dry.
Today, Mexican labor is integral to the United States. This country would screech to a halt without it. Yet there are thousands of people out there seething. The number of times I hear “No one wants to work anymore” is rivaled only by the number of times I hear “They’re coming to steal our jobs.”
The United States has been chipping away at Mexico and its resources for two centuries, displacing its citizens and driving them across the border, where they face more mistreatment and abuse. So in a way, I suppose all those people screeching about the border and screaming “Go back to your own country” at strangers in restaurants are just carrying on an American tradition.
No matter what your views of the border—be it a source of culture, asylum and new community, or a vortex to ultimate evil—know this: The MS-13 is not coming across it. They’re not from Mexico. They’re based in El Salvador, but they originated right here, in Los Angeles. And they exist because America is an asshole. But that is a story for another day.