“Oh say can you see …” began the 1930s with Americans toasting the end of Prohibition and proudly singing their newly adopted  National Anthem.  It was an anthem, about a flag, standing defiantly though a battle, and marching proudly into the future.  It set the tone.

 

Gas prices were 21 cents per gallon at start of the Great Depression.  One in four fathers was jobless; their children hungry.  Who was to blame?  Well, it didn't matter for an estimated 1.8 million Latinos who summarily were repatriated or exiled to Mexico as scapegoats.  The economic disaster that lead to this social injustice was just the start.  Drought upon drought, year after year, spread throughout the plains turning farmland to dust and piling on the dismal misery.

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In 1933 crushing debt lead Rio Grande City voters to dissolve the city.  Then came the Memorial Day Murders of 1934 one afternoon on Britton Avenue at political rally attended by thousands.  The New Party sought to wrest control of Starr County from the Old Party.  Two laid dead and six injured.  These murders were not the first … nor would they be the last.

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Yet, the New Deal began to put people back to work.  Hoover Dam was completed (1935), and Texans celebrated their Centennial (1936).

 

Pedro married Eugenia, and Jose Pedro was born in 1937 -- the year the Hindenburg exploded.

Then came the 1938 March Massacre of the suspects in the Memorial Day Murders.  The assailants were tried, but found innocent.

 

In 1935 Nazi Germany enacted the Nuremberg Laws stripping Germans of Jewish ancestry of their citizenship.  Yet again, "others" were scapegoated as the world crept closer to war.  Soon, “… the land of the free, and the home of the brave,” would answer the call to arms.  Gas prices dropped to 19 cents in 1939.