pendent holdings. A government immigrant receiving station 

 will be located on the city's new municipal pier. It is suggested 

 that a trained nurse be appointed by the immigration authori- 

 tes, to care for immigrants detained for medical inspection, es- 

 pecially women. If this were done, serious evils now found at 

 some of the older immigrant stations could be avoided at the 

 start. A private home for immigrant women and girls has been 

 opened recently, to meet future needs. 



Mexicans 



The Mexicans both foreign and native-born number at present 

 from three to four thousand. About them center the most defi- 

 nite problems in the social life of the community, such as over- 

 crowding and unsanitary home conditions. These problems are 

 focused about this nationality not only by reason of their num- 

 ber, but because a considerable proportion are a stable element 

 in the community, centered about family groups. About one- 

 quarter are located in the neighborhood of Rose Park playground 

 in the southeastern section of the city — the district where crowd- 

 ing in cottages, shacks and tenements is at its worst. Others are 

 scattered along the water front and the more prosperous may be 

 found in different sections of the city. It is said that there are 

 but few Mexicans in the skilled trades as carpenters, masons, etc. 

 For the most part they work with pick and shovel for the gas 

 company, street railway, and on water works, or for general con- 

 tractors at a minimum wage of $2.00 a day. Other Mexicans are 

 employed as teamsters. Mexican boys who are educated in the 

 city schools, as a rule do not obtain employment in mercantile 

 establishments. Mexican girls are found in the laundries, cracker 

 factories, olive works, and fish canning industry. As a class, the 

 Mexicans in San Diego are said to offer more promising material 

 from which to develop good citizens than those of the same na- 

 tionality who enter the country through El Paso, Texas, a prin- 

 cipal immigration point. At present two small Protestant Mis- 

 sions are working among the Mexicans, the Baptist and Presby- 

 terian. The main social agency, however, which reaches them 

 upon a community basis, outside of the public schools, and the 

 Catholic Church, is the Rose Park playground. With a small day 

 wage restricted for the most part to intermittent manual labor, 

 with the large families and low standards of living of the Mexi- 

 cans, it becomes the special duty of the city's social agencies to 

 afford all possible opportunities for development for this nation- 

 ality and especially for the children, on a basis of proper Ameri- 

 can standards. An important agency for accomplishing this 

 purpose might well be a Social Settlement established possibly in 

 the neighborhood of the Rose Park playground. Such a settle- 

 ment could interpret the needs of this section to the community 

 as a whole, and join as well in a movement shaping itself toward 

 a definite social program for the city. 



34 



