During the 1930s, in part due to the economic difficulties of the time, Mexican-Americans were made the target of attacks based on the rhetoric of taking jobs from “real Americans” and were “repatriated” to Mexico under questionable legal and moral grounds. Volver (2018) sets to music excerpts from three rich oral histories collected by historian Christine Valenciana in the early 1970s — Emilia Castañeda de Valenciana and Carlos Munatones, who were both repatriated to Mexico in the ‘30s, and John Anson Ford, a mid-level bureaucratic functionary for Los Angeles County and a reticent participant in the “repatriation.”

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