Between 1929 and 1936, nearly two million men and women of Mexican heritage were deported from the United States and repatriated to Mexico.  Prompted by the economic downturn of the Great Depression and wide-spread anti-Mexican sentiment, national repatriation efforts took the form of mass raids, government coercion, and harassment, in which anyone who looked Mexican could be targeted by immigration agents and relief workers.  One of the most infamous raids occurred at La Placita Park  in Los Angeles in February 1931, with immigration agents ambushing nearly four hundred Mexican men and women.  While Los Angeles and Detroit were focal points of the deportation frenzy, the small Mexican colonia in St. Paul, Minnesota did not escape notice: on November 10, 1932, eighty-six people from sixteen families, or 15 percent of the local Mexican population, were put on a train to the Mexican border. In the end, approximately 60% of all those sent “home” to Mexico were American citizens.  Two years later, another 328 Mexicans were repatriated from St. Paul.

Set against the framework of these repatriation efforts, Tienda tells the story of Luis Garzón, a Mexican musician who immigrated to Minneapolis in 1886 and opened a small Mexican grocery store, or tienda de abarotes, in St. Paul in the 1920s.  Although Luis was fully integrated into Minneapolitan society, his store served as a community hub for the newest arrivals from Mexico, many of whom had fled the Mexican Revolution to work as betabeleros on the sugar beet farms of rural Minnesota.  Shifting between scenes in Luis’s shop in the 1930s and his early years in America, Tienda explores the immigrant experience, asking what is left behind—and what cannot be forgotten—on the journey to a new home.