October 31, the Washington Post began a series of emotionally crushing photographs, “Portrait of Child Laborers in the Great Depression.”
Luckily, my close friends and I (at the end of the 1930s) had kinder experiences than both the adults and children in that harsh “Portrait.” (But some city stranger did take a photo of me — age three — nakedly climbing a wood-pile looking for choice kindling.)
Later, a bit older, I was lucky to have had as a friend the only Mexican student enrolled in St. Patrick’s School, grades one to 12. That was in North Platte, Nebraska, a rail-head town, but one that didn’t fold when the line recommenced cutting the way west, aiming for the Pacific.
That school and the subsequent settlement of the majority of Mexicans living today in the middle of Nebraska’s Great Plains were descendants (parents and grandparents) of two “massive” waves of migrations occurring after 1900.
Amazingly, according to early studies, there were only 71 Mexicans living in Kansas in 1900, just 27 in Nebraska. In only ten years — by 1910 — the Mexican immigrant population increased to 9,429 in Kansas, 3,611 in Nebraska.
Yet the first wave immigration occurred from 1900 to 1920, the second from 1920 into the 1930s. One scholar estimated that between 1900 to 1920 the astonishing number of Mexicans immigrating to the United States is placed at one-tenth of the total population of Mexico at that time. This growth in population is due to a far-reaching, long-lasting brutal Mexican dictatorship, the 31 years of the megalomaniacal dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. That, of course, was in sharp contrast to the far lesser violence of U.S. rule. One country was “pushing” its citizens out, say historians, as the other country was engaged in “growth” changes that “pulled” them in.
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