Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

by Stacey Abrams

For Latinos who inhabited the American West, the Mexican-American War ended with a grant of citizenship to all who decided to stay in the United States, under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. However, soon thereafter, the reality of a significant Mexican American population began to result in laws stripping them of the perquisites of citizenship. In Botiller v. Dominguez, the Supreme Court refused to recognize Mexican Americans’ titles to land in California. The decision came in the wake of the California Gold Rush, when the U.S. Supreme Court read federal law to strip Mexican American citizens of certain property rights in the 1800s. During the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover oversaw the mass deportation of more than one million people of Mexican descent, an estimated 60 percent of whom were U.S. citizens. Like Blacks in the South, the Latinos in the West also faced lynchings, segregation, and expulsion, including Operation Wetback authorized by President Dwight Eisenhower, which purports to have forcibly deported more than 1.3 million Hispanics living in the United States.