Melita M. Garza's "They Came to Toil," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression by Melita M. Garza.

The entry begins:

Since the key dramatic tension revolves around how three competing U.S. news organizations with distinctive editorial voices covered Mexican immigration in the early 1930s, the casting of the three editors and publishers is most critical.

I would cast Mexican actor Adan Canto (Designated Survivor’s Aaron Shore) as Ignacio Lozano, publisher of La Prensa, then the most important Spanish-language publication in the United States. Canto would bring the enterprising immigrant’s sensibility to the part. I’d cast Gary Oldman as William Randolph Hearst, who during the early Great Depression owned the biggest newspaper chain in the United States, and who wrote numerous anti-immigrant editorials that were published in many of his newspapers, including the San Antonio Light. Hugh Jackman would appear as...[read on]

Learn more about They Came to Toil at the University of Texas Press website.

The Page 99 Test: They Came to Toil.

My Book, The Movie: They Came to Toil.

--Marshal Zeringue