Mediating Mexicans: Immigrant news portrayals time can’t erase

A recent cartoon by Lalo Alcaraz, winner of the Herblock Prize, shows a brown-skinned man standing at a street corner and holding a large homemade sign.

As a couple in a red Volkswagen approach, perhaps expecting to be confronted by a panhandler. They instead read: “Exhausted Immigrant: I don’t want money! Just a vacation from being blamed for everything bad in the U.S.A.! P.S. We Don’t Eat Pets.”

It’s comical and absurd. It’s also an accurate nod to the onslaught of xenophobic media representations that have bombarded this country for decades, well before the results of the recent presidential election and the threat of massive deportations by the incoming administration.

This brand of racism traces back to the founding of the republic, when diplomat, Founding Father and newspaper owner Benjamin Franklin openly expressed in 1751 that too many German immigrants would spoil the English-speaking colonial zeitgeist.

“Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion,” Franklin wrote.

Following this trail of rabid rhetoric through American media history matters, because as legendary media theoretician and critic James W. Carey expressed in 1974, journalism of a particular age represents the consciousness of the people of that time.

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While modern consumers remain enthralled with each pivotal technological media development, from the telegraph — the wonder of its age — to artificial intelligence, the troubling sameness of the messages gets less attention. The medium may be modern, but the rhetoric circulating through it is merely recycled from earlier eras.

As the granddaughter of immigrants, a former immigration reporter, and now a scholar and professor in higher education of news as an agent of democracy — including how it defines who is considered American — I’ve had a front row seat on the impact of immigrant hate rhetoric.

What’s startlingly different now is that xenophobia and anti-immigrant policy are decoupled from severe economic strife. The hard times of the Great Depression were the catalyst for a repatriation campaign that sent at least 500,000 jobless Mexicans and Mexican Americans “back” to Mexico, even though some had never set foot in Mexico.

Local and state governments were involved in this repatriation effort, even though immigration falls under federal jurisdiction.

Likewise, during the Great Recession, December 2007 to June 2009, several states once again intervened, passing sweeping laws to restrict immigration. Some of these, such as Arizona’s SB 1070, were overturned by the Supreme Court in whole or in part.

Today, the economy is booming, yet the scapegoating of immigrants continues. And yet again, state governments are increasingly involved. Between 2020 and 2024, state-level anti-immigrant legislative proposals have increased 357 percent, according to a new report by the League of United Latin American Citizens.

Despite the fact that nearly one-third of the United States was once part of Mexico, America’s southern neighbor has historically taken the brunt of nativist sentiment, even now when the latest asylum seekers are coming from further south, including Guatemala and Venezuela, as well as from other continents.

Latinos, a majority of whom are of Mexican descent, now number 65 million people and account for 19.5 percent of the U.S. population.

The epithets and other dehumanizing rhetoric surfacing today are a throughline to media representations of years ago. The idea that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” directly ties to the eugenics movement popular in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

It mirrors the 1930s rhetoric of Rep. John C. Box of Texas, whose references to Mexicans as “mongrels” and “menaces” and “inferior” were printed regularly in newspapers at the time, arguments used in support of forced sterilization of Mexicans. Box was one of the most ardent proponents of legislative measures to keep Mexicans out for lacking the genetic stock to make good Americans.

Likewise, William Randolph Hearst, the “owner of the biggest pile of newspapers in the world” in the 1930s, echoed Box’s hate rhetoric on the editorial pages of his newspaper chain. Hearst editorials referred to immigrants from Asia and Mexico as “vermin” and “undesirables,” suggesting that immigrants should be swept out of the country the way a farmer cleans his barn.

Even language on ostensibly neutral news pages was patronizing and riddled with words that dehumanized while evoking the danger posed by Mexican immigrants. A 1931 wire service story datelined Brownsville — a Texas border city — referred to Mexicans diminutively as “our little brown brother.”

The headline of that story described Mexicans as a menacing force of nature: “Tide Which Brought Thousands North Across Rio Grande Now Recedes, Aiding Immigration Problem.” And that problem had been created when “thousands of ‘wetbacks’ streamed across the Rio Grande, and remained,” the story said. An accompanying photo showed a Mexican driving a rustic mule-driven cart and carried the mocking caption: “Returning home ‘in style’.”

A 1951 five-part New York Times special project, known as “the wetback” series, helped bring this objectifying term to a national audience. Two years later, broadcaster Edward R. Murrow produced an episode of “See it Now,” a special report on “Mexican Wetbacks,” crediting the Times for its series.

Murrow’s program likened apprehended Mexican workers to fish, calling them the latest “catch.” The border patrol’s effort to stem illegal immigration was like trying “to scoop the tide off the page and pour it back into the ocean,” Murrow said.

The following year, in 1954, the Eisenhower administration initiated Operation Wetback, a heavily publicized deportation program that was more public relations effort than effective border control. Thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans from the U.S. were deported amid a post-Korean War recession.

To be sure, “wetback” is rarely seen in print today and has long been barred in newspaper stylebooks along with the term “illegal alien.” The words may have changed, but the sentiment and the objective remains the same. The media are modern, but today’s messages reveal an antiquated consciousness.

To forge an equitable and sound immigration policy, journalists, politicians and the public must excise loaded language and recognize immigrants as people, not mongrels, vermin or fish.

Garza is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana – Champaign, author of “They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression,” and a public voices fellow with The OpEd Project.