Recent Immigration from Mexico

A Timeline of Latin American History and Immigration to the United States from Mexico

Before the 13th Century: 

The North American continent was populated almost entirely by Native Americans of many nations and cultures. The border between what is now Mexico and the U.S. did not exist. Instead, the most important barriers to migration were physical: the Sierra Madre Mountain ranges and the Mojave, Sonoran, and Chihuahuan desert.

In the 13th Century: 

The Mexica, for whom Mexico is named, came from what is now the Southwestern United States into what is now Mexico. Here, they founded the Aztec Empire, which is what Cortez encountered when he came to Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City).

1521: 

After Cortez and his 120,000 Native allies who were fed up with living under Mexica rule defeated the Mexica, Spanish rule was established over what came to be known as New Spain, stretching from Florida to California and from California to Panama. This territory included what is now Saint James.

1682: 

France gains control of the region, including the area that is now St. James.

1803: 

With the Louisiana Purchase, the area that is now St. James was sold by France to the United States.

1821: 

Mexico gained independence from Spain, marking the beginning of the U.S.-Mexican border.

1821-1836: 

Mexico’s northern regions were a frontier where the presence of Spanish culture was less pervasive. Apache, Yaqui, and Navajo people put up stiff resistance to colonization under Spain, and many crossed the border to the U.S. during this era. This region became a diverse borderland during this time: Native Americans, formerly-enslaved Black people who had made it off the plantations, some small Mexican settlements, and even Chinese immigrants by the early twentieth century—some of whom were fleeing racial violence in the United States— found home out in the frontier regions of Mexico.

1836: 

Texas separated from Mexico (largely to keep slavery, which was illegal in Mexico).

1845: 

Texas joins the U.S.

1848: 

The United States seized California, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, western Colorado, and western Texas during the Mexican American War. This essentially “Americanized” roughly 100,000 people who had formerly been Mexican but were now part of the United States. These 100,000 people were not a monolith, being multiethnic, with many identifying as Spanish, Indigenous, and Black instead of just “Mexican.”

1848-1855: 

The next major wave of migration came during the California Gold Rush, where around 25,000 more Mexicans entered the United States. Chinese laborers also entered the country, some coming through the Mexican border by the end of the nineteenth century. During this time, the American Southwest was highly racially and culturally diverse, with Indigenous people, Black people, Chinese people, mestizo and white Mexicans, and Anglo-Americans all calling the Southwest states home. This region was still highly Indigenous and Indigenous languages still often served as lingua francas, allowing communication between cultures from four different continents.

1865-1870: 

The end of the Civil War in the United States fundamentally changed labor in the South. While many Black Americans who did not want to work on the plantations that they were formerly enslaved on moved North, this left a vacuum for agricultural workers in the South that was soon filled with Mexican migrant workers. Many Mexican workers came to work in the American South filling similar jobs that enslaved people once filled. However, this immigration was limited, as Black Americans often still worked on the same or similar plantations that they had during legal slavery.

1870-1880: 

Mexicans also came to the United States to work in copper and coal, particularly in the states of Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas during the Gilded Age starting in 1870. Nevada, Wyoming, and Utah also saw large amounts of Mexican migrants entering to work as sheep ranchers during this time. By 1880, there were between 226,000 and 327,000 Mexicans in the Southwest United States, compared to the roughly 100,000 only 30 years before. During this time, Mexican migration into the United States was not regulated or restricted.

1880-1911: 

With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the United States started enforcing its borders for the first time in order to prevent Chinese immigrants from entering the country (this ban on Chinese immigration would last until 1943). Mexico continued to accept Chinese immigrants at the end of the nineteenth century and during the early twentieth century.

1911-1920: 

Mexican Revolution. During this time, Mexico also turned against the Chinese in the wake of the Mexican Revolution (1911-1920), including with racial violence. Prior to WWI, the sugar industry relied on European immigrant labor. But during the war (1914- 1918), the sugar beet industry began losing its ability to sustain itself and began recruiting Mexican workers from the Southwest. In the Southwest, Mexican laborers faced discrimination, poor working conditions, and even lynching. When Northern companies began to advertise to Mexican laborers in the Southwest, many took jobs and headed to the Midwest on railroads.

After the beginning of World War I, around 58,000 Mexican laborers entered the Midwest to work in factories, the sugar beet industry, and on railroads. This increased when the quotas limited Southern and Eastern European immigrants, and it increased even further when Black Americans began to refuse to work under the same conditions they had before World War I. Many Mexican migrants were recruited in San Antonio, Texas and brought along the railroad north to work in factories in big cities like Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Saint Paul. In 1919, for example, Mexican workers were brought into the Detroit steel industry as strike-breakers.

1920-1930: 

It becomes clear that Mexican presence would outlast the Detroit strike. The population of Mexicans in Detroit rose to 15 thousand in 1928 out of the total population of 993,000, lured there partially by Ford’s promise of a 5 dollar a day wage. Many Mexican people had crossed the border into Texas to escape the violence of the Mexican Revolutionary War and its fallout, which claimed the lives of over 1 million people. Texas depended on Mexican migrant labor, with 85% of Texas’s agricultural labor force being Mexican. Pay in Texas and the agricultural South was based on the number of acres of land worked, and Mexican groups were hired instead of individuals. These groups were often made up of families and friends, which kept workers accountable. Many Mexican laborers during this time did not return to Mexico during the off-season, as different off-seasons and on-seasons allowed them to work year-round in Texas. However, life in the southern states was far from perfect: low wages, lynchings, and the presence of the KuKlux Klan made many Mexican workers unhappy. These poor working conditions were capitalized on by the forty-five licensed labor agencies that made their home in Texas and recruited Mexican laborers to work in the North. Mexican migrants were funneled out of San Antonio and brought north along the railroad tracks.

Initially, many Mexican migrant workers were male and young, with half being between the ages of 18 and 30. Moving along the railroad lines, they worked in big cities like Detroit, Chicago, and the Twin Cities, but also increasingly in rural areas in the sugar beet industry. The Red River Valley in particular saw a boom in its sugar industry, largely due to predictions by companies like American Crystal about its productivity. While the industrial sector was largely dominated by single men, the agricultural sector still had its place for the family-style labor groups that characterized agriculture in the South. In 1922, after the pause in immigration from the 1920-21 depression, there were 63,700 Mexicans in the midwest, which swelled to 80,000 during the summer. Increasingly, Mexican laborers stayed in the midwest. The better working conditions, relatively little racial violence, and distance from Mexico encouraged many Mexicans to stay in the United States year-round. When conditions were good, Mexican laborers would tell family and friends to come north, which the growing sugar industry was happy to accept. In 1922, only 33% of sugar beet growers were Mexican, with the rest being Eastern European, German, and Japanese, but by 1927, this number swelled to 75%. Sugar beets were quickly becoming an industry dominated by Mexican labor. While many Mexican people settled down in the United States, many others were moved around by sugar beet companies wherever they needed labor, sometimes as far north as Ontario.

1930s: 

The state of Sonora bordering Arizona actually forced most of its Chinese residents (where a majority of the country’s Chinese lived) to leave Mexico in the early 1930s. This anti-Chinese campaign in Mexico drove many Chinese-Mexicans to seek refuge in the United States, but the United States did not welcome these Chinese refugees, refusing to make an exception to its Chinese exclusion laws. Thus, the beginning of U.S. enforcement of the border with Mexico consisted of keeping the Chinese out, not necessarily keeping Mexicans out, though that was a result of the enforcement. Mexican migrants, like most Americans, faced difficulties during the 1930s with the beginning of the Great Depression. However, they often faced even more difficulties than white Americans, as they were the last hired and first fired. Aside from a reprieve during World War II, Mexicans in the United States continued to face massive deportations unlike anything that had been seen before. As stated before, Mexican migrants and immigrants were not policed in the same way they are today; although they had to go through border security, the militarized border that we see today was completely absent.

1940-1960:

In response to Fidel Castro’s triumphant revolution in 1959 and his efforts to eliminate U.S. economic and political power over the island, the United States reduced its Cuban sugar quota to zero and established the economic embargo that lasts with us to this day. The void created by the loss of Cuban sugar allowed American sugar companies to expand, and the growing unprofitability of crops like wheat opened up land in the Red River Valley for United States companies to expand to for sugar beet production.

1960-1980:

The 1960s and 1970s also saw increasing political mobilization in Minnesota among Mexican immigrants, and though most of this action was focused on the Twin Cities, important unions were formed for rural Mexican workers, particularly those working in sugar beets and meat.

Eventually, the sugar industry began to have less and less prestige, and Mexicans who had been in the United States for a while decided to move away from the sugar beet industry into others. Organizations centered around helping Mexican-American entrepreneurs popped up as well, leading to increased economic mobility for Mexican-Americans.

1980-present day

From 1980 to the present day, a number of Minnesota industries, particularly agricultural industries, have relied on immigrants to keep their operations open and growing. These industries explicitly recruited from cities in Mexico, bringing single men (and married men who left their families behind) to the U.S. and providing papers to ensure they were able to work. In addition, immigrants without proper documentation crossed the border and eventually made their way to Minnesota–or left other jobs by necessity or choice, thus losing their documentation, and made their way to Minnesota to work in the agricultural and other industries. As these populations grew in many rural communities across the state, a strong tradition of Mexican immigrants building their own businesses, nonprofits, and spiritual and social communities tomeet their own needs also developed.