Former AZ Senator Discusses New Book, ‘To Sin Against Hope: How America Failed its Immigrants’

By: Joseph Guzman

Cronkite Special to AZLatinos.com

Former Arizona Senator and activist Alfredo Gutierrez spoke to Phoenix college students and community members Thursday, using stories from his recently released book to cover over one hundred years of Mexican-American history.

Gutierrez’s book, “To Sin Against Hope: How America Failed its Immigrants” is part personal narrative and part American history. The book tells the tale of what he says is the United States war on Mexican immigrants.

“The book covers over a hundred years of history through anecdotes and lots of explanation of public policy that was adopted by this country. It does this in an interesting fashion. I had to explain the family. I had to explain how all this came about from a personal point of view,” Gutierrez said.

Gutierrez traces his family all the way back to 1870 where he shows a photo of his great-great grandmother arriving in Clifton, Arizona in an Ox cart.

“Since that time we have been citizens of the United States,” Gutierrez said.

Gutierrez was born in Miami, Arizona where his father was a mine worker. His father would then be deported during Operation Repatriation, and would eventually return to work in the U.S. during the Bracero program.

Under the Hoover administration from 1926 to 1936, Operation Repatriation forced people of Mexican descent out of the United States and into Mexico.

“In 1932, our family’s world changed,” Gutierrez said.

“Someone has to always be blamed. So it was the Mexicans. This was the pre-cursor to Operation Wet-back, and what is going on now in the Obama administration”

Gutierrez showed photos of mine workers being forced onto trains that would drop them off in Juarez.

“The mining company ordered trains, and marched 1400 workers to the trains at gunpoint. The trains were sent east; and somewhere near Columbus, New Mexico, the doors were open and the men were forced out. There was no water, there was no food,” Gutierrez said.

Gutierrez jumps back and forth through history during his presentation, tying in Eugenics role in immigration policy in the United States in the early 1900’s, as well as Operation Wet-back, in which there were mass deportations under the Eisenhower administration.

He talks in detail about the Bracero program which brought Mexican labor to the U.S. to work in agricultural and on the railroads during WWII, saying the U.S. essentially recruited Mexican workers it had just deported years prior.

Gutierrez keeps the theme that “The early history of Mexicanos in the United States, is a story of absolute struggle from the beginning.”

He maintains that the Obama administration carries on an immigration policy that is just as harsh as Herbert Hoover’s.

Gutierrez took questions from students and signed books after the lecture.