9781422277461

11

Getting Here

Thousands of men from Mexico took advantage of the Bracero program to move to the United States for good-paying, if hard, work.

factories or fields. The second factor was the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910. Although the revolution officially ended in 1920, turbu- lence from it continued for years afterward. The violence and economic uncertainty inMexico forcedmany thousands of people fromtheir homes. In the 1920s, the United States was taking in as many as 100,000 Mexicans per year. Itmight sound strange, given the 21st century politics surrounding im- migration, but in the 1920s,Mexicanswere usually acceptedbynative-born Americans. At the time, America was also seeing a lot of immigration from southern Europe and Asia—and it was those immigrants who were viewedwith suspicion. That’s not to say that Mexicans did not experience