services wasted. Despite the country’s
large immigrant population, the army
only slowly developed a training program
designed to work with foreign language
speakers in their native tongues. By the
time the program was in place, the war
was over. Nevertheless, some Hispanic
Americans made it to the front to distin-
guish themselves in battle.
David Barkley of Laredo, Texas,
whose Anglo-sounding surname belied
his Hispanic ancestry, received the Medal
of Honor posthumously for a daring and
fatal reconnaissance mission at the Meuse
River in France in 1918. Marcelino Serna,
a Mexican immigrant from El Paso, Texas,
received seven decorations for valor,
including the Distinguished Service
Cross. He single-handedly captured 24
Germans during the St. Mihiel Offensive
of 1918—and then refused to allow a fel-
low American soldier to murder the pris-
oners. Another Hispanic American,
Nicolas Lucerno from Albuquerque, New
Mexico, received the French croix de
guerre for destroying two German
machine gun emplacements and keeping
enemy positions under prolonged fire.
Mexican Americans played an impor-
tant part on the home front as well. The
draft depleted the U.S. work force just
when factories and farms needed to step
up production to keep up with wartime
demand. Immigration from Mexico
helped meet the demand, but it was tem-
porarily slowed by the threat of conscrip-
tion as well as by legislation in 1917 that
imposed literacy qualifications and an $8
head tax on immigrants. At the behest of
employers suffering labor shortages, the
government waived these requirements
for agricultural workers from Mexico in
1917 and extended the waiver to railroad
and other industries in 1918. From 1917
to 1920, 50,000 Mexicans crossed legally
into the United States on a temporary
basis, while about 100,000 are believed to
have entered without documents.
Even as the immigration flow across
the border continued, Mexican
Americans began an internal migration,
moving out of the Southwest in large
numbers for the first time, responding to
industrial labor shortages in northern
factories. Mexican Americans were soon
living throughout the Midwest and
Northeast, in such cities as Chicago
(which had about 4,000 Mexican
Americans by war’s end), Detroit, NewYork, St. Louis, Omaha, Gary, and
Kansas City.
Some jobs in the Midwest were agri-
cultural. By 1927 Mexican Americans
constituted 75 to 95 percent of sugar
beet workers in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana,
Minnesota, Colorado, and the Dakotas.
Other immigrant groups, such as the
Flemish, Germans, and Russians, had
previously done this back-breaking and
low-paying work but moved up as soon as
they had the opportunity, leaving the
chore to the Mexicans.
As Mexicans for the first time began
to disperse throughout the United States,
and as they returned from service in the
military, their assumptions and expecta-
tions about the manner in which they
deserved to be treated in American soci-
ety changed. The Mexican community
became less isolated and less monolithic
than it had been in the Southwest, and its
members were more aware of the many
opportunities that had previously passed
them by. Mexican and Mexican-American
migration to the Midwest laid the seeds
for growth in ethnic consciousness and
organization.Changing
Immigration LawsBetween 1890 and 1914, about 15 million
immigrants had come to the United
States, most of them from southern and
eastern Europe, including Italians, Poles,
Russian Jews, Ukrainians, and Slovaks. In
the decade after World War I, as the
U.S. economy boomed (except for a
recession in 1921–1922), employers con-
tinued to need laborers. But the flow of
laborers from Europe was choked off by
tighter immigration laws, instituted large-
ly in response to growing xenophobia
against southern and eastern Europeans,
who had been coming in great numbers
since the late 19th century. Legislation in
1921, 1924, and 1929 established an
annual quota for how many people would
be accepted from each country, with
northern Europeans strongly favored
over southern Europeans.
Western Hemisphere countries,
including Mexico, were not included in
the quota system, which meant that
employers seeking cheap labor now
looked even more hungrily toward
Mexico. With the Mexican Revolution142 ATLAS OF HISPANIC-AMERICAN HISTORY