Honoring Imbolc on the Day the Mexican-American Deportations Began.
How to honor Imbolc, the European pagan holiday, as a white* American while holding it in tension with the fact that Feb. 2nd is *also* one of the worst days in Mexican-American history (both the official day America stole Mexico in the 1840s and the mass deportations of the 1930s)? As an antiracist, I cannot in good conscience just celebrate Imbolc this year without acknowledge the best and worst of my ancestors that February 2nd lays bare. I'll do the more fun, ancestral stuff tomorrow.
February 2nd is a day of purification. Pre-Christian European pagans would engage in "Spring" cleaning because of the first signs of spring (the sun returning, crocus flowers blooming, etc.), and February is named after the purging of sweat (fever = feber in Latin). Europeans and those in Catholic Central/South American/Caribbean nations take down their Christmas decorations. Today, neo-Pagans are celebrating the holiday Imbolc. Witches, get out your brooms - for cleaning your rooms, but also your cast out things in your life that are holding you back (there is attracting and repulsive magic, acquiring and letting go, and today we let go).
But there is another kind of purification associated with those of European descent - a very evil kind - that my fellow white Americans need to recognize, and to take responsibility for. America has committed crimes against Chicanos, and does what it always does - waits long enough for historical amnesia to set in. But the wounds remain, and the least I am asking you to do today is to bear witness to the human cost of "Make America Great Again." Purity is an illusion, but we should engage in trying to purge in the sense of healing - to go through the discomfort like a fever - and sweat off our illusions about American nationalism being anything other than white nationalism. Then we can ask the question, "where do we go from here"?
Hitler's program of aggressive territorial expansion was called "lebensraum," a German word meaning "living space." Hitler's purification program was part of a larger European trend called a "pogrom," which was essentially a riotous "purge" of Jews. To do this, he enlisted the work of “stormtroopers.” America, in its form of nationalism in the name of money and power for white people, with its entitlement mentality for whites, is no better than a fascist country like Hitler's. And yes, both governments would tell you they are doing it for peace.
General (and future U.S. President) Zachary Taylor ordered scores of U.S. soldiers executed for refusing to fight in México. The Southern planter class insisted that the U.S. Army go down to México City and take the whole country, as well as Cuba and some Central American countries, for more plantations.
The treaty leads the American newspaper called the Whig Intelligencer to boast, with no sense of irony, "we take nothing by conquest.... Thank God."
II. Pogroms Feb 2nd, 1931: The first Chicanos that were a part of the mass deportations of Mexicans were rounded up in a park in Los Angeles. Some of the worst round-ups would later take place in Detroit. “There were deportations in states as far flung as Alaska, Alabama and Mississippi.” In the end, 1.8 million were deported in the pogroms. As if to add insult to injury, it was on the same date that México had officially been stolen by America.
The context was the Great Depression, characterized by high unemployment. From 1931-1936, Mexican-Americans were targeted for mass deportations called "repatriation" - a false name, given how as many as sixty percent of those sent “home” to México were U.S. citizen. City and county governments would go through their employee index, find anyone with a Mexican-sounding last name, have them arrested and deported, to free up job openings for whites.
"The raids were vicious. With national concerns over the supposed burden that outsiders were putting on social welfare agencies, authorities targeted those Mexicans utilizing public resources. In Los Angeles, they had orderlies who gathered people [in the hospitals] and put them in stretchers on trucks and left them at the border.”
"The efforts were equally chaotic. The first raid in Los Angeles was in 1931—they surrounded La Placita Park near downtown L.A. It was a heavily Latino area. They, literally, on a Sunday afternoon, rounded everyone up in park that day, took them to train station and put them on a train that they had leased. These people were taken to Central México to minimize their chances of crossing the border and coming back to the U.S.”
"It was not like there was a master committee mapping out blocks. It was more fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants. As in, Here’s a park where Mexicans go, okay let’s go there.”
As a social worker, I have to take responsibility for the fact that social workers were often the ones doing this. It was the Great Depression, and everyone was on some sort of assistance, no matter their race or ethnicity. Social workers cut off Mexican people's food rations to push them out of the country, leaving them to starve, rather than the cruder method of holding a gun to their head. As a socialist, I have to acknowledge that American socialist policies were for the poor whites first, and its poor people of color last, if at all. Ethno-nationalism, whether we are talking about Nazi’s national socialism or Trump’s supposed desire to increase employment through infrastructure projects, is always going to present itself as “America first/Germany first,” and you can tell who they believe their country is supposed to be - Anglo-Saxon Americans/Aryan Germans - by who they exclude - Latinos, Blacks, and Semitic peoples. Nationalism distorts socialism.
III. Stormtroopers:
"Perhaps more than anything, the humanitarian cost of the Hoover-era deportations are the specter that looms largest over Trump’s immigration policy of today. Given the burden mass deportations would have placed on the federal bureaucracy, Hoover’s administration outsourced the raids, targeting and deportation to local and state officials—persons not particularly well versed in constitutional law, nor the sensitivities surrounding deportation."
"Trump appears ready to do the same: while the administration has directed the hiring of 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to oversee the dramatic increase in deportations, the administration has also revived the controversial 287(g) program, which recruits local law enforcement and sheriff’s deputies to assist in deportations. they don’t have the training, expertise or sensitivity to enforce accurate immigration decisions.”
On ICE agents: "Two officials in Washington said that the shift [in policy]— and the new enthusiasm that has come with it — seems to have encouraged pro-Trump political comments and banter that struck the officials as brazen or gung-ho, like remarks about their jobs becoming “fun.” Those who take less of a hard line on unauthorized immigrants feel silenced, the officials said."
Will America ever take responsibility?
"In the meantime, only a limited number of Americans seem to even be aware of the gross mistakes their country made in the name of security. While still a state senator, Dunn successfully sponsored the Apology Act, an official mea culpa from the state of California to its Mexican residents—it passed in 2006. He also led efforts to have a memorial erected in La Placita park, the site of the first raids on L.A.’s Mexican community, where it now stands in memoriam."
"And yet, when Dunn took his apology proposal to members of the U.S. Congress, no one was interested. 'They would say, ‘Immigration is really volatile right now. We’re gonna look like we’re only fighting for Latinos.’ We couldn’t convince anyone to pick it up.'"
"Those whose families were affected by the deportations—in some cases forever changed—appear no more eager to delve into the sins of the past. “They never talked about it,” said Herrada, “there was a lot of shame associated with it … They didn’t know why they got deported. They didn’t know what they did to bring that on. The only thing they knew was that they were Mexicans—and this only happened to Mexicans.”
She added, “My grandfather still didn’t want to say he was deported. And my father, on his deathbed, said to me, You know, I never liked that word. He was really angry that I had used it.”
Quotes from Alex Wagner's article "America’s Forgotten History of Illegal Deportations," which includes information about the oral history project, “Los Repatriados: Exiles from the Promised Land.” The last quote was from Elena Herrada, one of the founders of the oral history project.
*Shep Glennon is a mixed race (one side: WASP, other/Other side: French-Afro-Cuban) neo-Pagan and a Christian-Muslim. Whew!
