Vicente Serrano remembers sitting under a tree as a kid in Navojoa, Mexico, listening to his grandmother’s tales of her childhood in Los Angeles. “Most of her stories ended in tears,” he says. Serrano’s grandmother, Concepción “Concha” Covarrubias, was born in LA in 1924. But her mother died when she was about ten, and afterward, she says, social workers came to the house and coerced her father, a U.S. citizen, into returning to Mexico. “They told him, ‘If you’re still here at midnight, we’ll take the kids away,’” Serrano says.
But after the 1929 stock market crash, the Hoover administration and local agencies across the country sought to alleviate white unemployment by targeting Mexicans—and Mexican Americans—for removal. “It’s not a question of rights, it’s a question of pigment,” a representative of the LA Chamber of Commerce wrote to the LA Board of Supervisors, urging the emptying of Mexican neighborhoods in the city. Mexicans were convenient victims: they were easily identified and concentrated in certain neighborhoods, and returning them to Mexico was far cheaper than expelling European immigrants.
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Serrano wanted to attend journalism school in Mexico, but it was too expensive for his family. He studied education for a year at a university in Sonora, then, in 1996, went to live with his father in LA. “I thought, ‘If I go to the U.S. maybe I would have a better shot,’” he says. “The community colleges were very welcoming, and I found a very good TV production program.” While studying at Santa Ana College he interned at Univision in LA, and after getting his associate’s degree in 1998 landed a job as a reporter for the station. In 2001 he became an anchor for Univision in Phoenix, then moved to Telemundo Chicago in 2003.
Last summer, Serrano noticed frequent comparisons being made between the Great Depression and today’s economic crisis, and decided that five years of production was enough: it was time to stop revising and release the film. A Forgotten Injustice premiered last October at the Instituto Cervantes of Chicago. Since then he’s taken it around to schools and community centers, inviting audiences to help him track down people who were expatriated and to talk to their own families about it.
Sat 4/18, 9 PM, and Sun 4/26, 4 PM, Facets, 1517 W. Fullerton, 312-409-1757, aforgotteninjustice.com, $10.
