The Cristero War (1926-1929), also known as La Cristiada, was a Mexican Catholic uprising against anticlerical reforms by the government of Plutarco Elías Calles. The conflict saw Cristero militants, supported by parish priests and Catholic organizations, battling federal troops and agraristas in west-central Mexico. The war involved Mexican emigrants in the United States who supported the cause through various means. Despite formally ending hostilities in 1929, sporadic uprisings persisted into the 1940s, known as the Second Cristiada or La Segunda (1932-1941). This diaspora formed a transnational identity centered on opposition to anticlericalism and support for religious freedom in Mexico.[1]

The United States has experienced several waves of immigration from Mexico due to several conflicts, political instability, economic downturns, social and cultural factors, and freedom of religion. The Cristero War led to Mexican migration to various cities across the United States. Additionally, Mexicans migrated to other countries.[2] 

This project visualizes the history of the Cristero diaspora who fled the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and subsequently the Cristero War (1926-1929 and 1932-1941)  and settled in Pennsylvania and many other cities in the United States. Bethlehem Steel Corporation recruited undocumented Mexican immigrants to meet labor shortages, causing concern among US agricultural growers.[3]  In the 1920s, the West Side of San Antonio saw a rise in labor agencies due to the high demand for workforce solutions.[4] The many conflicts in Mexico occurring during the same period led to an influx of Mexican immigrants seeking refuge and employment in the US, which many employment agencies took advantage of to hire cheap labor.  Mexican immigrants faced persecution and racial tensions but made significant contributions to the economy of the United States. [5] The influx of Mexican immigrants led to conflicts within the Roman Catholic Church.[6]

 The late 1920s saw increased migration due to the Cristero War, leading to the establishment of Mexican Colonias in various US cities.[7]  During and after the Cristero War, Mexican families frequently moved between the US and Mexico, facing challenges at the borders.[8] They encountered prejudices and discrimination. Mexico’s Confidential Department monitored dissenters in both countries.[9]

During the Great Depression, the immigration movement declined, and many people were repatriated to Mexico. Despite economic challenges, a significant middle-class Mexican-American community emerged in the late 1930s and 1940s, shifting their focus to US affairs.[10]

The Cristero diaspora in the US provided financial and military support to the Cristeros. At the same time, religious refugees strengthened loyalty and actively joined the uprisings.[11]   Catholic parishes and schools in the United States welcomed descendants of the Cristero movement, allowing them to continue their religious practices. The US Catholic community opened its doors to accommodate religious exiles, contributing to preserving their faith and the growth of their community during the early twentieth century.[12]  The legacy of the Cristero War continues to hold profound cultural and historical significance for new Mexican immigrants, resonating strongly across generations.[13]

The United States experienced several waves of immigration from Mexico due to conflicts, political instability, economic downturns, social and cultural factors, and issues related to freedom of religion. The Mexican-American War, which occurred between 1846 and 1848, resulted in the United States acquiring more than half of Mexico’s territory and marked the beginning of Mexican migration to the United States.[14]  Between 1900 and 1930, the Mexican immigrant population in the US increased from one hundred three thousand to six hundred forty thousand. However, during the Great Depression (1929-1939), US policies and nativism led to repatriation campaigns, resulting in a significant decrease in the Mexican immigrant population to approximately three hundred eighty thousand by 1940.[15] Different sources report varying figures on the repatriation of people of Mexican descent, with estimates ranging from four hundred thousand to two million.[16] In the mid-1920s, many Mexicans migrated to the US Southwest due to the Cristero War (1926-1929 and 1932-1941). The Mexican migration phenomenon began in the early twentieth century, with many refugees and exiles joining labor emigrants during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). By the following decade, migration had increased substantially, and the 1920s witnessed Mexico’s first ‘Great Migration,’ surpassing any previous movement in magnitude.[17]  The Bracero Program in 1941, during the US’s entrance into WWII (1939-1945), marked the most significant labor migration between Mexico and the US.[18]  Between 1942 and 1947, approximately two hundred nineteen thousand Mexican braceros migrated to 24 states to work. During this period, a significant number of undocumented Mexicans crossed the Rio Grande into the US without inspection. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) apprehended four hundred twenty-eight thousand illegal Mexican immigrants during that time.[19]

The Cristero War led to Mexican migration to various cities across the US, such as El Paso, San Antonio, Los Angeles, Chicago, Indiana, Arizona, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Milwaukee, Minnesota, Ohio, Michigan, Wyoming, New York, and Washington DC, as well as to countries such as Canada, Spain, Cuba, and Rome and many others.[20]

In the early twentieth century, Bethlehem Steel Corporation faced challenges in sourcing labor due to the closure of migration from Eastern Europe and southern Italy due to World War I (1914-1918) and subsequent anti-immigrant legislation.[21] To address this, the company sought alternative sources of labor. It began recruiting workers from Mexico, Portugal, and Spain for the physically demanding steel jobs. Later, after World War II (1939-1945), the company turned to Puerto Rico for new labor as agricultural workers moved to the South Side for employment in the mill’s coke works. The company’s recruitment efforts were focused on attracting a diverse workforce and played a significant role in shaping the working-class communities in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.[22]

The relocation of illegal Mexican laborers from the Southwest reservoir had specific implications in Texas, Colorado, and Washington.[23] The transportation of undocumented Mexican immigrants to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, caused worry among Colorado’s sugar beet growers and Texas farmers because it impacted the available supply of agricultural labor and wages. However, due to the seasonal ups and downs of employment and unemployment, the transportation of undocumented Mexicans to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and other parts of the North was seen as a positive opportunity for jobless undocumented Mexican immigrants while simultaneously causing concern among Texas farmers.[24]

On April 4, 1923, The San Antonio Light newspaper reported that it was a departure of the first train-load of Mexican immigrants for Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The statement recognized the dire need for work among many Mexicans. Local farmers and ranchers expressed concerns over the significant movement of laborers to northern industries and the sugar beet fields.[25]

Illegal Mexican immigrant workers were brought to northern industries and beet fields, which occasionally created challenges for Texas farmers. These challenges included competition for labor and political agitation to restrict illegal Mexican immigration as a result of the spread of Mexicans into new areas. In response to these concerns, Texas enacted its Emigrant Labor Agency Law in 1929 to regulate “the shipment” of illegal Mexican laborers out of the state.[26]

During the 1920s, several state laws were passed in the United States to limit the movement of Mexican-origin labor from Texas to other states. Employers in the Midwest and the North began recruiting Mexican workers when quotas were placed on European immigration. The sugar beet companies recruited ten thousand Mexican immigrant workers every year to work in the beet fields of Michigan and northern Ohio. State Representative Andrew Percy Johnson from Carrizo Springs, Texas, introduced a bill in 1929 to charge out-of-state labor recruiters $7,500 to address this issue. However, it was invalidated by a federal court when a Michigan sugar beet company challenged it. A later law required labor agents in Texas to pay a $1,000 charge if they were seeking workers for non-Texas jobs.[27]

Moreover, there was a county surcharge in Texas of $100 to $300, depending on the local labor market, and each agent had to buy a ten-dollar license annually from each county he contracted. Another law required labor agents to post a $5,000 bond to guarantee the return of recruited workers. However, this law was also challenged by the sugar beet companies and was ruled unconstitutional by a federal court. The sugar beet companies also exploited a loophole that exempted “private agents,” such as those who worked for a single employer, from paying the tax. As early as 1923, awareness of these issues was present.[28]

[1] Olivera de Bonfil, Aspectos del conflicto religioso de 1926 a 1929; Butler, Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion; Fallaw, Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico; Gema Kloppe-Santamaría, In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, 1st ed., vol. 7 (University of California Press, 2020); Meyer, La Cristiada: la guerra, 1979; Young, Mexican Exodus.

[2] Young, Mexican Exodus, 182; José Angel Hernández, Mexican American Colonization During the Nineteenth Century: A History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 7–8.

[3] Jim Norris, North for the Harvest: Mexican Workers, Growers, and the Sugar Beet Industry (St. Paul, Minn.: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2009); “Steel Company Recruits 350 Laborers Here,” The San Antonio Light, April 4, 1923, Vol. 43, No. 75, Ed. 1 edition, The Portal to Texas History by the University of North Texas Libraries, https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1592509/m1/4/?q=mexicans; Paul S. Taylor, Mexican Labor in the United States: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, vol. 7 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1931), 2, https://fau.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fau%3A32404/.

[4] Edward L. Bates, “Disposable Labor: Urban and Rural Agricultural Migrants from the Monterrey Center Through the Nuevo Leon Corridor to San Antonio, 1915-1925” (PhD diss., DeKalb, Illinois, Northern Illinois University, 2016), 261, https://huskiecommons.lib.niu.edu/allgraduate-thesesdissertations/2263.

[5] John Higham, Strangers in the Land Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Julia G. Young, “Making America 1920 Again? Nativism and US Immigration, Past and Present,” Journal on Migration and Human Security 5, no. 1 (August 8, 2018): 217–35, https://doi.org/10.1177/233150241700500111; Andrew Burlingame, “From Londonderry to Pittsburgh-the Scotch-Irish: A History of Nativism and Religious Intolerance in Southwestern Pennsylvania” (Master’s Thesis, Harrisburg, PA, Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg, 2018), https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/resources/58482606-c9a2-46f9-a66b-82294038ee76.

[6] Timothy M. Matovina, “The National Parish and Americanization,” U.S. Catholic Historian 17, no. 1 (1999): 45–58, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25154657; Bill Tonelli, “Columbus, Fabian, Rizzo and Me,” Philadelphia Magazine (blog), October 1, 2008, https://www.phillymag.com/news/2008/10/01/columbus-fabian-rizzo-and-me/; Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 294–303; George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 157.

[7] Jean A. Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion: The Mexican People Between Church and State, 1926-1929, vol. 24 (Cambridge: University Press, 1976), 179.

[8] Young, Mexican Exodus, 105; Julie Leininger Pycior, Democratic Renewal and the Mutual Aid Legacy of US Mexicans, First edition (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014); Ashley Yeaman, “Mutualista Hall (La Mutualista Sociedad de Jornaleros),” Waco History, accessed April 1, 2024, https://wacohistory.org/items/show/185; Eva Mendieta, “Celebrating Mexican Culture and Lending a Helping Hand: Indiana Harbor’s Sociedad Mutualista Benito Juárez, 1924–1957,” Indiana Magazine of History 108, no. 4 (2012): 311–44, https://doi.org/10.5378/indimagahist.108.4.0311; John H. Flores, The Mexican Revolution in Chicago: Immigration Politics from the Early Twentieth Century to the Cold War, vol. 34, Latinos in Chicago and the Midwest. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2018).

[9] Julian F. Dodson, Fanáticos, Exiles, and Spies: Revolutionary Failures on the US-Mexico Border, 1923-1930, First edition, Connecting the Greater West Series (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2019); César Enrique Valdez Chávez, Enemigos fueron todos: vigilancia y persecución política en el México posrevolucionario (1924-1946), Primera edición, Pública memoria (Ciudad de México: INAH: Bonilla Artigas Editores, 2021); Ulices Piña, “Rebellion at the Fringe: Conspiracy, Surveillance, and State-Making in 1920s Mexico,” Journal of Social History 55, no. 4 (June 10, 2022): 973–1000, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab054.

[10] Young, Mexican Exodus, 153–54; Balderrama, Francisco E., “Revolution Mexican Nationalism and the Mexican Community in Los Angeles during the Great Depression,” in The Mexican Revolution: Conflict and Consolidation, 1910-1940, ed. Douglas W. Richmond and Sam W. Haynes, 1st ed., vol. 44, Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures Series (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013), 117–34; Fernando Saúl Alanís Enciso, They Should Stay There: The Story of Mexican Migration and Repatriation During the Great Depression, trans. Russ Davidson (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 1–10; Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America., Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014), 127–66; Douglas Monroy, Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression, Reprint 2019 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 209–32.

[11] Young, Mexican Exodus, 52.

[12] Young, 165; Bali K. Nelson, “Early History of the San Francisco Monastery,” Early history of the San Francisco Monastery, 2010, http://www.adorejesus.org/About_Early_History_San_Francisco_Community.aspx; “Our History | Carmelite Sisters of the Most Sacred Heart of Los Angeles,” Carmelite Sisters of the Most Sacred Heart of Los Angeles, accessed December 26, 2023, https://carmelitesistersocd.com/about/history/; Darryl V. Caterine, Conservative Catholicism and the Carmelites: Identity, Ethnicity, and Tradition in the Modern Church, Religion in North America; v. 30 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 18, 38; Ann Lozano and Texas State Historical Association, “Seminary of St. Philip For Mexican Students,” The Handbook of Texas Online, accessed December 26, 2023, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/seminary-of-st-philip-for-mexican-students; Anne M. Martínez, “‘From the Halls of Montezuma’: Seminary in Exile or Pan-American Project?,” U.S. Catholic Historian 20, no. 4 (2002): 35–51, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25154829; Timothy Matovina, Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, From Colonial Origins to the Present, Lived Religions (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Jean A. Meyer, La cruzada por México: los católicos de Estados Unidos y la cuestión religiosa en México, 1a ed, Tiempo de memoria (México, D.F.: Tusquets, 2008); Elaine A. Peña, Performing Piety Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Matthew Redinger, American Catholics and the Mexican Revolution, 1924-1936 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); Mathew Butler, “¿Bienvenidos al Hotel Montezuma? Negociaciones trasnacionales y la formación de un clero ‘mexicano’ en el exilio, 1937–1947,” in Cruce de fronteras: La influencia de Estados Unidos y América Latina en los proyectos de nación católicos en México, siglo XX, ed. Yves Bernardo Roger Solís Nicot, Matthew Butler, and Camille Foulard, Primera edición (Ciudad de México, Zapopan: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Azcapotzalco: CEMCA, Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centro Americanos; El Colegio de Jalisco, 2020), 199–225; Mathew Butler, “El sarcerdocio de Montezuma. El jocismo franco-canadiense y la identidad clerical mexicana, 1943-1962,” in Cruce de fronteras: La influencia de Estados Unidos y América Latina en los proyectos de nación católicos en México, siglo XX, ed. Yves Bernardo Roger Solís Nicot, Matthew Butler, and Camille Foulard, Primera edición (Ciudad de México, Zapopan: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Azcapotzalco: CEMCA, Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centro Americanos; El Colegio de Jalisco, 2020), 423–53; Padilla Rangel, Los desterrados.

[13] Young, Mexican Exodus, 176–78.

[14] Young, 182; Hernández, Mexican American Colonization During the Nineteenth Century, 7–8.

[15] Alberto García, Abandoning Their Beloved Land: The Politics of Bracero Migration in Mexico (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2023), 1, 16, 167; Catherine Vézina, Diplomacia migratoria: una historia transnacional del Programa Bracero, 1947-1952, Primera edición, Relaciones México-América del Norte (Ciudad de México: CIDE: Acervo Histórico Diplomático, Estados Unidos Mexicanos, Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, 2017), 10; Jorge Durand and Patricia Arias, La Vida en el Norte: historia e iconografía de la migración México-Estados Unidos, 1. ed (San Luis Potosí, S.L.P., Guadalajara, Jalisco: Colegio de San Luis; Universidad de Guadalajara, 2005), 14; Jorge Durand, ed., Migración México-Estados Unidos: Años Veinte, Regiones (México: Conaculta, 1991), 14, 147. The Bracero Program (1941-1964) was the unofficial name given to the reciprocal initiative and was and remains unprecedented, the only time that the Mexican and U.S. governments formally reached an agreement to manage the Mexico-U.S. migratory flow.

[16] Maggie Jane Elmore, “Claiming the Cross: How Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Catholic Church Worked to Create a More Inclusive National State, 1923-1986” (PhD diss., Berkeley, CA, University of California, Berkeley, 2017), 30, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1z96x52z. Even census data and United States Immigration Services (USIS) data differ. In 1980, the US Commission on Civil Rights estimated that around five hundred thousand individuals of Mexican descent, more than half held US citizenship, were expelled by federal officials. The state of California issued a bill of apology in 2006, acknowledging that in California alone, about four hundred thousand American citizens and legal residents of Mexican ancestry were forced to return to Mexico. Numerous scholars and sources have provided different estimates regarding the number of people who have been repatriated. The estimated figure varies greatly, ranging from four hundred thousand to two million. There are two figures in the range, so it is difficult to determine a single, accurate estimate.

[17] Young, Mexican Exodus, 6.

[18] Vézina, Diplomacia migratoria, 10; Julie M. Weise, Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910, David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 50–81.

[19] Ramón A. Gutiérrez, “Mexican Immigration to the United States,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, July 29, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.146.

[20] Stephen J. C. Andes, The Mysterious Sofía: One Woman’s Mission to Save Catholicism in Twentieth-Century Mexico, The Mexican Experience (Lincoln: UNP – Nebraska, 2019), 109; Butler, “El sarcerdocio de Montezuma,” 99–126; Young, Mexican Exodus, 52–78; Julia Young, “La experiencia del exilo en dos familias cristeras mexicanas,” in Cruce de fronteras: La influencia de Estados Unidos y América Latina en los proyectos de nación católicos en México, siglo XX, ed. Yves Bernardo Roger Solís Nicot, Matthew Butler, and Camille Foulard, Primera edición (Ciudad de México, Zapopan: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Azcapotzalco: CEMCA, Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centro Americanos; El Colegio de Jalisco, 2020), 129–43; Deborah Kanter, “Faith and Family for Early Mexican Immigrants to Chicago: The Diary of Elidia Barroso,” Diálogo 16, no. 1 (2013): 21–34, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/620700; Deborah E. Kanter, Chicago Católico: Making Catholic Parishes Mexican, Latinos in Chicago and the Midwest (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020), 143; Sergio M. González, “Interethnic Catholicism and Transnational Religious Connections: Milwaukee’s Mexican Mission Chapel of Our Lady of Guadalupe, 1924–1929,” Journal of American Ethnic History 36, no. 1 (2016): 7–8, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerethnhist.36.1.0005; Taylor, Mexican Labor in the United States: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 7:3, 5, 11.

[21] Jill A. Schennum, As Goes Bethlehem: Steelworkers and the Restructuring of an Industrial Working Class (Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 2023), 23; Elmore, “Claiming the Cross,” see Chapter 1 and 2, 2-61; Young, Mexican Exodus, 31; George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 51; Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America., Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014), 18–19; United States, ed., Immigration Laws: Act of February 5, 1917; and Acts Approved October 16, 1918; October 19, 1918; May 10, 1920; June 5, 1920; December 26, 1920, and May 19, 1921, as Amended, and Act May 26, 1922. Rules of May 1, 1917, 7th ed., August, 1922 (Washington: Govt. print. off, 1922).

[22] Schennum, As Goes Bethlehem, 23; Domenic Vitiello et al., “Mexicans and Mexico,” in Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, accessed April 9, 2024, https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/mexicans-and-mexico/; Alyssa Ribeiro, “Puerto Rican Migration,” Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, accessed April 7, 2024, https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/puerto-rican-migration/; Peter J. Antonsen, “A History of the Puerto Rican Community in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1944-1993” (PhD diss., Bethlehem, PA, Lehigh University, 1994), https://www.proquest.com/docview/304144162/abstract/FCD3668DB29344C7PQ/1; Erika Davis, “From PR to PA,” ArcGIS StoryMaps, August 31, 2022, https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/9211623bd14d47a48772340fad8062a1.

[23] David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997); Roberto R. Treviño, Church in the Barrio: Mexican American Ethno-Catholicism in Houston (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Dan Boyce, “Pueblo’s Steel Mill Was A Melting Pot Of Ethnic Diversity In Colorado 100 Years Ago,” Colorado Public Radio, July 23, 2019, https://www.cpr.org/2019/07/23/pueblos-steel-mill-was-a-melting-pot-of-ethnic-diversity-in-colorado-100-years-ago/; Durand, Migración México-Estados Unidos; Jorge Durand and Patricia Arias, La experiencia migrante: iconografía de la migración México-Estados Unidos (México: Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Occidente, 2000); Durand and Arias, La Vida en el Norte; Erasmo Gamboa, Bracero Railroaders: The Forgotten World War II Story of Mexican Workers in the U.S. West, Border and Migration Studies Online (Text) (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016); Erasmo Gamboa, Mexican Labor & World War II: Braceros in the Pacific Northwest, 1942-1947, Columbia Northwest Classics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000); Erasmo Gamboa, “Mexican Migration into Washington State: A History, 1940-1950,” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 72, no. 3 (1981): 121–31, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40490704; Zaragosa Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008); Taylor, Mexican Labor in the United States: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Zaragosa Vargas, “Armies in the Fields and Factories: The Mexican Working Classes in the Midwest in the 1920s,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 7, no. 1 (1991): 47–71, https://doi.org/10.2307/1052027; Rubén Donato, Mexicans and Hispanos in Colorado Schools and Communities, 1920-1960 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007); Gregory Chase, “Hispanic Migration to Northeastern Colorado During the Nineteen Twenties: Influences of Sugar Beet Agriculture” (MA Thesis, Denver, CO, University of Denver, 2011), https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/777.

[24] Norris, North for the Harvest; “Steel Company Recruits 350 Laborers Here”; Taylor, Mexican Labor in the United States: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 7:2.

[25] “Steel Company Recruits 350 Laborers Here”; Taylor, Mexican Labor in the United States: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 7:2.

[26] Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 66, 131; Norris, North for the Harvest; Taylor, Mexican Labor in the United States: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 7:2.

[27] Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986, 210; Texas State Historical Association and Cynthia E. Orozco, “Emigrant Agent Acts,” Texas State Historical Association, accessed April 23, 2024, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/emigrant-agent-acts; Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 66, 131.

[28] Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986, 210; Association and Orozco, “Emigrant Agent Acts”; Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 66, 131.