Full caption: “Mexicans at the U.S. immigration station.” El Paso, Texas. Dorothea Lange. June 1938. Photograph. Farm Security Administration Collection. Prints and Photographs Division. LC-USF34-018215-E.

Full caption: “Mexicans at the U.S. immigration station.” El Paso, Texas. Dorothea Lange. June 1938. Photograph. Farm Security Administration Collection. Prints and Photographs Division. LC-USF34-018215-E. Full caption: “Mexicans at the U.S. immigration station.” El Paso, Texas. Dorothea Lange. June 1938. Photograph. Farm Security Administration Collection. Prints and Photographs Division. LC-USF34-018215-E.

This photograph taken by Dorothea Lange at the El Paso, Texas, Immigration Station in June 1938 reveals a world of emotions. The woman with the white hat and pearls, decked out in her Sunday best, seems much more eager to go north than does the older señora in the middle wearing a house dress and a wary expression, perhaps fearful of the camera's gaze and of her future. As historian Vicki Ruiz notes in From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America, El Paso was the Ellis Island for Mexican immigration. The community there grew from 8,748 in 1900 to almost 70,000 by 1930.