The Depression of the 1930s saw up to 1 million Mexicans (and their Mexican American children) pushed southward across the border by deportation campaigns, pressured repatriation, and financial destitution. There is no evidence of large-scale deportation campaigns in Lane County, and given the high cost of such actions and the minimal visibility of railroad workers dispersed at rural boxcar settlements, it is unlikely that immigration raids occurred here. Nonetheless, there were far fewer Mexicanos present on the 1940 Census than had been here in 1930—the result of reduced economic opportunity and a general anti-Mexican climate. 

In 2025, the students in Professor Julie Weise’s History class utilized a variety of sources to capture Mexican-born individuals (who generally were given the race category “white”) who had been present in the county in the 1930s-40s. These included 21 entries on the 1940 manuscript census, nine World War II draft cards, four naturalizations that took place between 1931-49, and three marriages that took place between 1936-46. We identified these households via searches in Ancestry.com; these numbers should not be taken as definitive as they rely on Ancestry’s AI “reading” of old scanned documents, but they do likely include the vast majority of relevant records. We found that as a whole, the Mexicanos here deep into the Depression were older and more likely to be married than their 1930 counterparts, with the median age of adults up from 28 in 1930 to 43 in 1940. This suggests that Mexicanos who were here in 1940 had migrated as younger adults and weathered the Depression in the United States; they were not newcomers. 

Here we present the life histories from the 1930s-40s and beyond that are our students were able to reconstruct. They include railroad workers, but also many of these workers’ Mexican American children, who settled up and down the West Coast, married white (or in one case) Black people, and made their mark on Lane County, Portland, or parts of California. Regardless of where they settled, these Mexicans and Mexican Americans are an integral part of Lane County’s history whose stories should be remembered.