Borderlands and the Mexican American Story

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
In this lesson, students analyze who is to blame for the illegal, mass deportations of Mexican Americans and immigrants during the Great Depression.

Teaching Activity. Lesson by Bill Bigelow and student reading by Howard Zinn. Rethinking Schools. 21 pages.
Interactive activity introduces students to the history and often untold story of the U.S.-Mexico War. Roles available in Spanish.

Teaching Guide. By Bill Bigelow. 2006. 160 pages. Rethinking Schools.
Lessons for teaching about the history of U.S.–Mexico relations and current border and immigration issues.

Book — Non-fiction. By Kelly Lytle Hernández. 2022. 384 pages.
Taking readers to the frontlines of the magonista uprising and the counterinsurgency campaign that failed to stop them, Kelly Lytle Hernández puts the magonista revolt at the heart of U.S. history.

Book — Non-fiction. By Juan Gonzalez. 2022. 560 pages.
An updated and thorough account of the role the United States in the mass migration of Latinos to the U.S.

Book — Non-fiction. By Alice L. Baumgartner. 2020. 384 pages.
The story of why Mexico abolished slavery and how its increasingly radical antislavery policies fueled the sectional crisis in the United States.

Book — Non-fiction. Edited by Cantú-Sánchez, de León-Zepeda, and Cantú. 2020. 360 pages.
Essays on the first-hand use of Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s theories in classrooms and community environments.

The Bisbee Deportation was the illegal deportation of more than 1,000 striking mine workers (IWW-led strike), their supporters, and citizen bystanders by 2,000 vigilantes.

Immigration agents raided La Placita Park where they arrested and deported dozens of Mexican Americans.

When Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez, two California farmers, sent their children to a local school, their children were told that they would have to go to a separate facility reserved for Mexican American students.

Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop were close-knit Mexican American communities that were destroyed in the 1950s to make way for Dodger Stadium.

Mexican-American youth walked out of school to protest racial discrimination in Denver, Colorado.

Twelve-year-old Santos Rodriguez and his 13-year-old brother David were pulled from their home in Dallas, Texas, handcuffed, and put inside a police car. Santos was killed when one of the officers played Russian roulette to try to force the boys to confess to a crime.

During a Spring filled with pro-immigrant activism, on this day the largest number of people gathered in over 100 cities in the United States to protest new anti-immigrant legislation.