Patronage Protection: Violence and Migration in Depression-Era Texas

• In Event: Race, Ethnicity, and American Political Development

Abstract

When do local authorities have an incentive to protect ethnic groups under threat? During the Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were repatriated from the United States to Mexico. There remains considerable debate concerning the extent to which these repatriates left voluntarily or were coerced to do so. In this paper, we argue that local political dynamics influenced whether authorities chose to shield the Mexican population from political and coercive pressures to migrate. We specifically point to the extent to which local patronage machines depended on Mexican residents for income and votes. To assess these claims, we examine county-level net migration patterns across Texas between 1930 and 1940. We find that migration among Mexican and Mexican-Americans was significantly lower in counties controlled by patronage machines, as proxied by the effective number of candidates in local elections as well as the estimated number of Mexicans who paid poll taxes. Additionally, we find higher migration from counties with a history of anti-Mexican lynchings. We further show that these local political and violence factors were specific to the repatriation of Mexicans, as they have no correlation with the migration of local White or African-American populations.

Authors

• Leonardo R. Arriola, University of California, Berkeley

• Juan Campos, University of California, Berkeley

• Juve James Cortes-Rivera, Pablo De Olavide University