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On September 4, 1781, a group of forty-four settlers known as "Los Pobladores" founded the pueblo called "La Reyna de los Angeles", named for Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula (Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the Porciúncula River)
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The Mexican War of Independence (1810–1821) was an armed conflict between the people of Mexico and the Spanish colonial authorities which started on September 16, 1810
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The doctrine of Manifest Destiny, the belief that the United States had the right to expand all the way to the pacific, provided the reason for this war.
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When Mexico surrendered, it paid an enormous price : half its territory, including the entire present day states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas plus parts of Oklahoma and Colorado.
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Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting all immigration from China
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It started the first great wave of Mexican immigrants to the US. Nearly one million people fled the fighting which raged from 1910 to the early 1920s.
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The US government authorized 4.5 million bracero agreements
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The federal government launched a massive round of deportations.
The campaign called "operation wetback" drew widespread criticism and was finally abandoned. -
The number of Mexicans in the US was nearly as large as the number who had immigrated in all the years before 1965.
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One result = a surging immigration from Mexico.
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Legal status is granted to almost 3 million undocumented immigrants, most of them Mexicans.
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Increased Mexican immigration to unprecedented heights.
