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All the Stars Denied: History That Echoes Today
By lynmiller-lachmann on 2018-12-03 19:13:51
Beginning in 1930, in the throes of the Great Depression, the U.S. government “repatriated”
more than one million Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Sixty percent of them were U.S. citizens — children born in the
United States to one or both parents who were Mexican nationals, spouses of Mexican nationals, and people whose papers
were not available at the time they were detained and dropped on the other side of the border. For these people — and others
who, like today’s Dreamers, had come to the United States as young children — Mexico was an unknown country. Many did
not speak Spanish or have family members in Mexico who could take them in. The arrival of a million refugees strained
Mexico’s capacity to take care of them, as that country suffered as well from the Depression and churches were quickly
overwhelmed. Guadalupe Garcia McCall’s sequel to her award-winning Shame the Stars (Tu Books, 2016) takes place one
generation later, when Joaquin and Dulcefia are parents of 15-year-old Estrella and toddler Luis, known as Wicho. Their
large ranch, Las Moras, has been in the family for generations, but Estrella’s less privileged schoolmates are disappearing
one by one. After she and her remaining friends in the town’s segregated school are arrested for demonstrating against
discrimination and deportation — and she and her father speak up at a town council meeting — unknown persons set her
family’s house on fire and kidnap them. Estrella, her mother, and Wicho are driven across Texas to the border crossing in El
Paso; they have no idea where Joaquin has been taken. They spend a week in a crowded corral in the rain and cold, deprived
of food and medicine, before shipped by train to Mexico City, where they must begin a new life, find Joaquin and other
missing family members (including Dulcefia’s parents, the publishers of a newspaper), and try to make their way back home
as Wicho’s health deteriorates. All the Stars Denied is a gripping adventure story of a family confronting catastrophe and
ruin. At the beginning, Estrella is the spoiled daughter of a wealthy family, complaining about having to help take care of her
equally overindulged brother. Like her parents, she believes her wealth — the extended family owns a large amount of land,
as well as a newspaper and a bookstore, and employs a dozen farm workers and domestic servants — will insulate her from
spreading racism and violence. Yet the family’s wealth only means there’s more for those in power to take from them.
McCall shows that at the root of racism lies the effort by those in power to take what others have, whether it be jobs, money,
or property. Estrella and her family are helpless before the power of the white-controlled State; all they can do is survive in
conditions in which they thought they would never have to live. As the current administration separates families at the
border and threatens to strip permanent residencies and birthright citizenships at will — confiscating homes and property in
the process — it’s important for readers to understand that the United States has committed similar atrocities in the past. By
choosing a seemingly privileged protagonist, McCall shows that no one is safe, and an attack on one group is an attack on all
of us. For more information about this little-known chapter of history, read Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the
1930s by Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez. Rodriguez, who died in 2013 at the age of 87, lost his father in
the repatriation.
