The Weight of Shadows Read Online Free Page B

had been regular.
    Regular?
    They said when they found out, it was clear what they needed to do.
    Martín’s aunt, Hilda, had moved to Chicago a few years before. A friend of hers from Fortín lived in Chicago and worked as a housekeeper for a wealthy family. When one of their other housekeepers quit, they asked the friend if she knew anyone who wanted to fill the spot. “Someone like you,” they’d said, meaning a Mexican, rather than a black person, not understanding that there are black Mexicans, so they sponsored Hilda’s arrival and got her a green card just like that.
    We would always have a complicated relationship with Chicago, but it’s where I first remember coming into consciousness. Martín had gone to the United States before us,to get a job and save some money. He got here in the winter, and the coat he imagined would be enough wasn’t. The first steps he took outside of the airport were into negative-ten-degree cold. Before that, the coldest he’d ever experienced was around forty degrees, when he climbed with Yoli’s brothers to the peak of Citlaltépetl, where he saw snow for the first time. He didn’t know that cold could hurt inside, and he could feel on that first Chicago night that cold could very easily stop him from living. It was nighttime, and before his aunt Hilda arrived to pick him up, he felt alone in a strangely familiar way. It was a feeling he associated with Manuel, his biological father. He didn’t know when he would see his wife and baby again. When he thought about this something turned between his ribs and his heart. A man outside the airport asked him something in English, he just shook his head,
No
.
    Martín arrived in the United States on the cusp of shifting sentiment, a flux that was consistent with history. In 1921, the US Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, which restricted the flow of southern and eastern European immigrants, and in 1924 the Immigration Act restricted the flow of eastern and southern Asians. Mexicans, however, were excluded from these and weren’t really considered immigrants but laborers. The agriculture lobby had been successful in insuring that Mexicans were allowed to come and go with the seasons because they were cheap and pliant, so many of them did. Others settled. When the Great Depression hit, between four hundred thousand and two million Mexicans and Mexican Americans, many of whom were US citizens, “left” the United States. This period, known as the Mexican Repatriation, isn’t widely known by the general public. Repatriation usually referred to the official process by which the now defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) returnedsomeone to his or her country of origin or citizenship, but a relatively low number of the people expelled during this period were expelled through INS-directed removal. The administrative process of deportation was not as fully developed and institutionalized as it is today. Instead, the lives of many Mexicans and Mexican Americans were made untenable when the federal government provided support for, and turned a blind eye to, draconian state and local government initiatives like conducting arbitrary raids on Latino communities, wrongfully removing US citizens, and securing “transportation arrangements with railroads, automobiles, ships, and airlines to effectuate wholesale removal of persons out of the United States to Mexico.” Mexican and Mexican American communities were “forced to abandon, or were defrauded of, personal and real property, which often was sold by local authorities as ‘payment’ for the transportation” to Mexico.
    Mexicans and other people perceived as foreigners were blamed for taking jobs from white people in the United States during the period after World War I. This accelerated during the Great Depression even though many of the areas where the blame occurred had been Mexican territory