This nearly 100-year-old ballad tells the story of mass deportations. Is history repeating itself?

On a cool afternoon in February 1931, some 400 people strolled about La Placita Olvera in downtown L.A. when, suddenly, immigration agents descended on the site and sealed off its exits. Some agents wore olive green uniforms, others wore plainclothes. Wielding guns and batons, they forced people to line up and prove they were authorized to be in the U.S.

The agents ultimately arrested a few people, including 11 Mexicans, five Chinese people and one Japanese person.

Scholars of the period agree the raid was designed to incite fear. It was part of wider efforts to forcibly remove people of Mexican descent from the U.S. during the Great Depression — or to make life so miserable for them that they would choose to leave on their own.

Throughout the 1930s, local, state and federal authorities across the country either expelled or pressured an estimated 1 million people of Mexican descent to leave the U.S. According to historians, about 60% of them were U.S. citizens.

Adriana Darielle Mejía Briscoe, a fourth-generation Mexican American, did not know about this history growing up. She also didn’t know her family bore witness to it. Now, she’s sharing what she uncovered with the world.

A fateful party

Mejía Briscoe is an evolutionary biologist at UC Irvine, where she studies the evolution of color vision and coloration in butterflies.

“We mostly work on butterflies from Mexico, Central and South America,” she told LAist. Currently, she and her team are focused on morpho butterflies, known for their large, iridescent blue wings.

In 2017, two decades into her career, Mejía Briscoe went to a family party in Redlands. There, an uncle showed up with an unexpected favor: a thumb drive, full of scanned photos that once belonged to her grandmother.

Adrian Mejía Briscoe stands in front of a Zapotec rug from Oaxaca dyed with cochineal scale insects at her home in Irvine, Calif.

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The women in the family gathered around a computer and pored over each image. As they clicked through the black-and-white photos, Mejía Briscoe learned about her great great grandfather, Luis Hernández. Before immigrating to the U.S. from Mexico in the late 1800s, her family said, he’d been a teacher. He was also a writer.

"What did he write?" Mejía Briscoe asked.

Poetry, they told her.

"Really? Do we have any of his writings?"

In 2021, a relative sent Mejía Briscoe copies of Hernández’s work.

No one had stopped to look at his writing in ages. His great great granddaughter studied every word.

A ballad for Juan Caldera

The documents Mejía Briscoe received were written in the 1930s. One poem, titled “Despedida” (a farewell or departure), grabbed her attention. Composed of 24 verses, it tells the story of a man named Juan Caldera and others who were forced to leave. As Mejía Briscoe translated the words from Spanish to English, the phrase “Mexican Repatriation” stayed with her.

Then, being a scientist, she delved into research.

Mejía Briscoe, at home in Irvine, surrounded by photos of Luis Hernández, his children and his grandchildren.

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With time, the biologist realized that her great great grandfather’s poem was actually a corrido, or ballad, a traditional style of Mexican songwriting made up of quatrains.

According to the late music critic Agustín Gurza, historically, corridos “served as newspapers for society’s oppressed and dispossessed. They were a first draft of history from the perspective of the poor.”

Through archival research, Mejía Briscoe learned that Juan Caldera had lived in Colton, the same city in San Bernardino County where her family had settled. But Caldera was “perhaps, the most successful businessman in [the region].”

At 39, Caldera owned a dance hall, a public pool, a baseball field, a park, a grocery store and other property. And yet, in 1931, he and his family boarded a train to Mexico.

If a man with all those resources decided, “I better leave,” how terrible was it for everybody else? Mejía Briscoe wondered.

Among other texts, she read Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, a seminal work co-authored by California scholars.

In it, Mejía Briscoe learned that U.S. employers recruited scores of Mexican workers to fill agricultural and industrial jobs. Then, during the depression, those workers were accused of “stealing American jobs.”

She learned laws were passed barring Mexicans from employment in public and private sectors. She learned that people were accosted in public places because they “looked Mexican.” She learned about the immigration raids, including the one at La Placita Olvera. She learned that individuals who were detained were denied the right to seek legal counsel and not accorded due process. She learned that some people were duped into thinking that, if they left voluntarily, they could return to the U.S. once the economy improved. She learned that the term “repatriation” did not adequately capture the forced exodus of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens.

“Decade of Betrayal,” one of the first texts Mejía Briscoe used to learn about "Mexican Repatriation" in the 1930s.

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Aside from narrating what happened to Juan Caldera and others like him, Hernández’s corrido personifies California and bids the state a sad goodbye, from the perspective of people of Mexican ancestry.

“You are the Pearl of the West,” he tells her. A “Beautiful Star of the Sea.”

One of the corrido’s quatrains inspired Mejía Briscoe to dig into what compelled her family to leave Mexico in the first place. It reads:

La suma necesidad (The utmost need)

Nos hizo venir aquí (Made us come here)

No ha sido por ambición (It wasn't for ambition)

Solo por casualidad (Only by chance)

Learning from family

Through her research, Mejía Briscoe discovered that Hernández was a teacher at a hacienda in Michoacán, a state in southwestern Mexico rich in butterflies.

The estate, however, was not idyllic. It was owned by a Frenchman of Basque descent, who received it as part of a dowry. It was the sort of place where laborers had 14-hour workdays. It was also the sort of place where henchmen brought back anyone who tried to flee.

The owner, Mejía Briscoe learned, did not pay his employees in pesos. Instead, he printed vouchers, with the words “half a job” on them. This gave him the power to determine the value of his employees’ labor. Workers could only use the vouchers at his store.

The workers “would have to pay whatever he felt like charging them,” Mejía Briscoe said. “So people accumulated a lot of debt. And when you accumulated debt, you never got rid of it. If you died, it got passed on to your family. It was impossible for anybody to escape from poverty.”

Perhaps that’s why Mejía Briscoe’s great great grandfather, who was in his 90s when he wrote the corrido, opted to stay in the U.S. and risk being removed, she said.

“He was a very old man at that point,” she said. “He was definitely not going to be able to go back to Mexico. He wouldn't have survived the journey.”

'History's repeating itself'

Earlier this month — after immigration agents arrested hundreds of undocumented workers at licensed cannabis greenhouses in Camarillo, after a Mexican farmworker named Jaime Alanís García died after being critically injured during the raid — farmworkers and activists gathered at La Placita Olvera to call for a three-day strike. Chief among their demands was an end to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, this at the very site where hundreds of people were once rounded up.

Reading the news brings Mejía Briscoe a sense of déjà vu. Then, as now, she told LAist, immigrant laborers are being blamed for the country’s woes and pressured to “self-deport.” Then, as now, U.S. citizens are getting caught up in immigration dragnets.

“History's repeating itself,” she lamented. “The kinds of things that my family experienced in the Great Depression are happening again.”

That's why Mejía Briscoe shared her research with the Zinn Education Project, which is offering it on its website as a resource for teachers.

“We make this reality for people,” she said, “but it doesn't have to be this way.”