Framing Mexicans in Great Depression Editorials: Alien Riff-Raff to Heroes

Abstract

Great Depression editorials published in English- and Spanish-language newspapers in San Antonio, Texas, waged a war of ideas about the role of Mexicans and immigrants in the United States that went beyond socially constructing news events to another kind of storytelling—the mythmaking power of idea-driven opinion writing about “the other.” Against a backdrop of mass deportations and repatriations to Mexico, the city's three major daily newspapers staked dichotomous positions. William Randolph Hearst's Light railed against “the criminal menace,” competing against the independent San Antonio Express and its concept of the Mexican as “indispensable” worker hero. Meanwhile, the Spanish-language La Prensa offered a complex representation of the immigrant, creating a mythology that was largely absent from the mainstream media.

Notes

1 “Glosario del Dia,” Rodolfo Uranga, La Prensa, October 14, 1929, 1.

2 Ibid.

3 “Think,” San Antonio Express, October 14, 1929, 1.

4 “Today,” Arthur Brisbane, October 14, 1929, 1.

5 Chilton R. Bush, Editorial Thinking and Writing: A Textbook with Exercises (New York: D. Appleton, 1932), 1–2.

6 Richard A. Garcia, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class, San Antonio, 1929–1942 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991), 3.

7 Ibid.

8 Repatriation refers to an immigrant (and sometimes US citizens) leaving the country either voluntarily or through a federal government action to remove impoverished immigrants. Repatriation may also have been organized by local private and public welfare agencies. The Mexican consulate and/or the local Mexican community may have organized repatriations. Finally, Mexicans and US citizens of Mexican descent living in the United States may have been forcibly repatriated. Deportation refers to a federal government action to remove an immigrant under warrant proceedings or for the immigrant to leave voluntarily without the warrant proceeding. For more on the definition of repatriation, see Abraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexicans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929–1939 (1974; repr.,Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1979), 166. All citations refer to the 1979 printing.

9 R. Reynolds McKay, “The Impact of The Great Depression on Immigrant Mexican Labor: Repatriation of the Bridgeport, Texas Coal Miners,” Social Science Quarterly 65, no. 2 (1984): 354. See also R. Reynolds McKay, “Texas Mexican Repatriation during the Great Depression” (PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 1982). McKay, a geographer, found that roughly half of all Mexicans designated as repatriates—two hundred and fifty thousand people—were repatriated from Texas. Thousands of others were deported. See also Rodolfo F. Acuña and Guadalupe Compeán, Voices of the US Latino Experience, Vol. II (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008), 586: “The study of repatriation remains a neglected area of investigation. Indications are that there was a substantial Mexican repatriation from Texas—probably more Mexicans were returned to Mexico from this state than from any other state.”

10 Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004; repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 60.

11 Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 57.

12 J. David Stern, “The Renaissance of the Editorial Page,” Literary Digest, August 26, 1933, 9.

13 Ibid.

14 Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 151.

15 Ibid., 147.

16 Ibid., 207.

17 Felix Gutiérrez, “Spanish-language Media in America: Background, Resources, History,” Journalism History 4, no. 2 (1977): 37.

18 Carlos E. Cortés, “The Mexican-American Press,” in The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical Analysis and Handbook, ed. Sally M. Miller (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 254.

19 Roberto R. Treviño, “Prensa y Patria: The Spanish-language Press and the Biculturation of the Tejano Middle Class, 1920–1940,” Western Historical Quarterly 22, no. 4 (1991): 452–453.

20 Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, “Ignacio E. Lozano: The Mexican Exile Publisher Who Conquered San Antonio and Los Angeles,” American Journalism 21, no. 1 (2004): 75–89.

21 Vicki Mayer, “From Segmented to Fragmented: Latino Media in San Antonio, Texas,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 78, no. 2 (2001): 293.

22 Ibid.

23 San Antonio's five Franciscan-built missions, which are the “largest collection of Spanish colonial architecture in the United States,” were named UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 2015. See “United States Celebrates World Heritage Inscription of San Antonio Missions,” PR Newswire, October 17, 2015, http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/united-states-celebrates-world-heritage-inscription-of-san-antonio-missions-300161597.html. San Fernando Cathedral, built by the Spanish missionaries in 1731, is the oldest continuously operating religious community in the state of Texas. See also the Pluralism Project, Harvard University, http://pluralism.org/profile/the-san-fernando-cathedral.

24 The Hispanic American Newspapers database was used to search La Prensa for editorials referring to the topic of “inmigración.” The search yielded twenty-three relevant editorials in La Prensa from 1930 to 1934. The Access Newspaper Archive was used to search the Light and the Express using the comparable English term “immigration” and identified twenty-nine and fifty-four editorials respectively. The author examined all editorials, reading them to discern the news frames that were used to organize the journalistic arguments concerning Mexicans and immigrants presented in the aforementioned newspapers.

25 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's framing in economics and psychology and the work of Alexander Rothman, Roger Bartels, and others in health communication are also relevant here. For more, see Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974; repr., Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986); Robert M. Entman, “Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm,” Journal of Communication 43, no. 4 (1993): 51. Entman descried the multiple applications of framing theory. See also Robert M. Entman, Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion and US Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Choices, Values and Frames,” American Psychologist 39, no. 4 (1984): 341–350; Alexander J. Rothman, Roger D. Bartels, Jhon Wlaschin, and Peter Salovey, “The Strategic Use of Gain- and Loss-framed Messages to Promote Healthy Behavior: How Theory Can Inform Practice,” Journal of Communication 56, Supplement 2006): S202–S220. Also see Stephen D. Reese, “The Framing Project: A Bridging Model for Media Research Revisited,” Journal of Communication 57, no. 1 (March 2007): 148.

26 James K. Hertog and Douglas McLeod, “A Multiperspectival Approach to Framing Analysis: A Field Guide,” in Framing Public Life: Perspectives on Media and Our Understanding of the Social World, ed. Stephen D. Reese, Oscar H. Gandy Jr., and August E. Grant (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2003), 142, 144.

27 Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 8.

28 George Lakoff and Sam Ferguson, “The Framing of Immigration,” Rockridge Institute, 2006. Lakoff, a University of California Berkeley professor of linguistics, founded the now-defunct Rockridge Institute as a progressive think tank in 1997.

29 Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997; repr., London: Sage, 2010), 239–242. All citations refer to the 2010 edition. Also see Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 3.

30 Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Penguin, 1991), 51–61.

31 Michael Schudson, “The Anarchy of Events and the Anxiety of Story Telling,” Political Communication 24, no. 3 (2007): 253.

32 James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, rev. ed. (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989; New York: Routledge, 2009), 17. All citations refer to the 2009 edition.

33 Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 5. S. Elizabeth Bird and Robert W. Dardenne, “Myth Chronicle and Story: Exploring the Narrative Qualities of News,” in Social Meanings of News, ed. Dan Berkowitz (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997), 335.

34 Bird and Dardenne, “Myth, Chronicle,” in Berkowitz, Social Meanings of News, 335.

35 Ana Gonzalez-Barrera and Mark Hugo Lopez, “A Demographic Portrait of Mexican-origin Hispanics in the United States,” Pew Hispanic Center, May 1, 2013, accessed November 6, 2016, http://www.pewhispanic.org/2013/05/01/a-demographic-portrait-of-mexican-origin-hispanics-in-the-united-states/.

36 Frances Donecker, “San Antonio Light,” Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, accessed November 6, 2016, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/ees05.

37 Alfred M. Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social Instrument (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 220.

38 Ben H. Procter, William Randolph Hearst, Final Edition 1911–1951 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), 214–215.

39 Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 220.

40 Donecker, “San Antonio Light.”

41 Patrick Cox, The First Texas News Barons (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005).

42 William Walker Nesbitt, History of the San Antonio Express, 1865–1965 (Master's thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1965), 139.

43 Nemesio Garcia Naranjo, “Los 19 Años de La Prensa,” La Prensa, February 13, 1932, 1. See also Nora Rios-McMillan, “A Biography of a Man and His Newspaper,” Americas Review 17, nos. 3–4 (1989): 136–149.

44 For instance, Alfred M. Lee, in the Daily Newspaper in America (New York: Macmillan, 1937), noted that E. C. Pulliam and C. E. Marsh started General Newspapers, Inc. in 1928, a chain that “had no central editorial policy,” 220.

45 “The Hearst Papers Advocate,” San Antonio Light, September 1, 1930, 14.

46 Ibid. Hearst might well have become familiar with eugenics principles in the late 1800s while a student at Harvard, where the ideas gained intellectual support at the highest levels of the institution. Boston Brahmins linked eugenics with immigration restrictions, helping pass the Immigration Act of 1924, which set quotas to bar Jews, Italians, and Asians. See Adam S. Cohen, “Harvard's Eugenics Era: When Academics Embraced Scientific Racism, Immigration Restrictions, and the Suppression of ‘the Unfit,’” Harvard Magazine, March–April 2016, http://harvardmagazine.com/2016/03/harvards-eugenics-era.

47 “Favor the Fit,” Light, June 28, 1930, 6; “Undesirable Aliens Heavy Charge on Uncle Sam,” Light, August 4, 1930, 10.

48 “Favor the Fit,” Light, June 28, 1930, 6.

49 Ibid.

50 Prescott Hall, “Immigration and World Eugenics,” Journal of Heredity 10, no. 3 (1919): 126.

51 Cohen, “Harvard's Eugenics Era.”

52 “Undesirable Aliens Heavy Charge on Uncle Sam,” Light, August 4, 1930, 10.

53 For more on the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, see Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 3, 21–55.

54 Natalia Molina, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid.

57 “Chasing Them Out—Out Where?” Light, August 15, 1930, 18.

58 Ibid.

59 “No Call for New World Immigration Quota,” San Antonio Express, January 15, 1930, 14; “Sound Objections to the Box and Johnson Bills,” San Antonio Express, January 24, 1930, 12; “Widespread Opposition to the Box Bill,” San Antonio Express, January 29, 1930, 14; “Most Obnoxious of the Quota Bills,” San Antonio Express, February 19, 1930, 12; “Fresh Immigration Blunders,” San Antonio Express, February 25, 1930, 12.

60 David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (1987; repr., Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 182, 186. All citations refer to the 1992 printing.

61 “Bill Bars Employing of Aliens Illegally in United States,” San Antonio Express, February 4, 1930, 4.

62 “Widespread Opposition to the Box Bill,” San Antonio Express, January 29, 1930, p. 14.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid.

65 Teresa J. Guess, “The Social Construction of Whiteness: Racism by Intent, Racism by Consequence,” Critical Sociology 32, no. 4 (2006): 22.

66 Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966; repr., Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 40. All citations refer to the 1967 edition.

67 Alberto Rembao, “Las Golondrinas de Becquer,” La Prensa, March, 22, 1930.

68 “Selective Amendment to Immigration Act,” Light, September 22, 1930, 12.

69 Ibid.

70 “La Condicion de los Deportados,” La Prensa, April 3, 1930.

71 Rodolfo Uranga, “Glosorio del Dia,” La Prensa, April 3, 1930.

72 Luigi Barzini, “Los Inmigrantes Clandestinos,” La Prensa, May 24, 1930.

73 Ibid.

74 “400,000 Undesirable Aliens Infest This Country,” Light, March 11, 1931, 14.

75 “America's Lack of Immigration Safeguards,” Light, March 11, 1931, 11.

76 Ibid.

77 Ibid.

78 “Swift Deportation and Selective Immigration,” Light, April 2, 1931, 18.

79 “National Welfare Demands Stricter Alien Laws,” Light, April 28, 1931, 16.

80 “United States Gradually Closing Gates against Immigration,” Light, June 21, 1931, 31.

81 Ibid.

82 William Randolph Hearst, “What Are You Going to Do about It?,” Light, August 2, 1931, 1.

83 “Why Not a Round-up of Undesirable Aliens?,” Light, August 7, 1931, 18.

84 Ibid.

85 “El Regreso a la Patria,” La Prensa, January 7, 1931, 3.

86 Ibid.

87 “Distribution of Native and Foreign-born Population,” San Antonio Express, August 16, 1931.

88 “Immigration Records and the Harris-Box Bill,” San Antonio Express, October 19, 1931.

89 Ibid.

90 Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 220.

91 “Undesirable Aliens Heavy Charge on Uncle Sam,” Light, August 4, 1930.

92 Juan Sanchez Azcona, “Exodo y Repatriaciones de Mexicanos,” La Prensa, June 7, 1932.

93 Ibid.

94 Ibid.

95 “California con Mexicanos,” La Prensa, February 26, 1932.

96 Ibid.

97 “Commissioner Hull's Report on Immigration,” San Antonio Express, December 12, 1932.

98 “American Program Endorsed by Legion,” Light, October 12, 1933.

99 Read Lewis, “¿Se Tiene Aun Problema de Inmigración en EEUU?” La Prensa, August 28, 1933.

100 “Good Beginning,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reprinted in the San Antonio Express, April 9, 1933.

101 Distribution of Native and Foreign-born Population,” San Antonio Express, August 16, 1931.

102 Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 218.