Mexican Americans in the city. U.S. consular agent George Carothers wrote, "A large portion [of the] Mexican population of El Paso have arms ... which will create [a] dangerous situation here ... The possibility exists of them starting something serious." In January 1916, white Americans took matters into their hands and started a "race riot" in the majority-Mexican neighborhood of Chihuahuita, attacking every Mexican refugee and Mexican American they found in the streets. While Mexican American historians have continued to debate the long-term consequences of the Mexican Revolution, one of its most long-lasting legacies was the mass dislocation of entire communities from Mexico to the United States. Men, women, and children fled on foot, traveled by wagon and horseback, and by railroad to enter the United States as refugees. In the aftermath of Pancho Villa Expedition, one press report described the "hundreds" of refugees fleeing to the United States in the course of a single day: "Following the troops were hundreds of refugees. Prosperous Mormon families rode in comfortable farm wagons or in small motor cars. Some Mexicans rode in carriages, on horses, mules, burros and on the motor lorries of the expeditionary forces while hundreds of them and Chinese residents from the evacuated region walked through the deep dust which had been made by the feet of hundreds of troops." Treatment in the U.S. Life in the United States was difficult and violent for Mexican refugees and Mexican Americans in the latter half of the Progressive Era. Reformers in the era believed that non-white people were "primitive" and biologically inferior. The eugenics-influenced Dillingham Commission argued for drastic reductions in the number of immigrants to the United States, while academics such as Charles Davenport claimed racial "deficiencies" were the root of violence and poverty. This elite nativism had a direct translation on the ground, as refugees of the Mexican Revolution were regularly denied humanitarian aid. In one incident in 1914, refugees fleeing the violence of the revolution crossed into West Texas; in response, white Texans arrested the refugees and imprisoned them in Ft. Bliss. Most of the hundreds of thousands of Mexican refugees who fled to the United States during the Revolution settled in California and the U.S. Southwest. In Los Angeles, many of the resettled refugees lived in the historically Mexican American area of East Los Angeles. State and local resources were thinly spread, and Mexican refugees and Mexican