Nearly one year to the day after that incident, Johnson declared martial law. After just a few days, the workers came back to Colorado and reported the situation to the Mexican Consulate in Denver, Romero said on the podcast, leading to “a little bit of international incident.” “Yeah, you’re talking about people that are coming to the state that are just looking for jobs like anybody else,” Romero went on to note, saying the federal government’s policy wasn’t “to punish the hungry and those that, you know, are trying to make a better life for themselves.”įollowing Johnson’s 1935 address, a truck of seasonal workers tried to enter the state with letters from their employers asking them to return for sugar beet season, and the workers were all detained. In the Lost Highways podcast episode, Romero said Johnson “was hoping the federal government would be a partner with him in ,” but he didn’t find support federally. government at the time, “Mexican Americans who no longer have access to land are now sort of forced into wage labor.” In the time before many of the modern labor laws, workers could be exploited and forced into brutal labor contracts, the podcast hosts explained. Romero noted in the Lost Highways episode that, because of various shady land practices by the U.S. Colorado in the 1920s was the state that produced the most sugar and most sugar beet farms relied on seasonal and migrant workers to maintain that level of production. In an address, the outlet reported Johnson claimed there were “aliens in Colorado living on relief or holding jobs which should be filled by American citizens” The outlet went on to note “The situation, the chief executive pointed out, has resulted from the severe drouths in southeastern states and in old Mexico, forcing the alien population to seek other areas for their livelihood.”Īt the time, the jobs Johnson was referring to were mostly in sugar production via sugar beets. In March 1935, one year before the 1936 declaration, Colorado Springs Farm News published coverage of Johnson threatening mass deportation and calling out the National Guard. Romero, who’s also an advisor for the History Colorado podcast, focuses his curriculum and research on the legal history of the American West, with an “emphasis on the relationship between race and water law, school desegregation, property, land use, and urban development and local government,” according to his online biography.
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