As suggested by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a leading Mexican American political and cultural organization of the era, middle-class Mexican American officers brought a unique ensemble of social investments to the development of U.S. immigration control. The Mexican American middle class enjoyed uncertain access to whiteness in the borderlands. Although many were often able to participate in centers of social, cultural, political, and economic power, the class-based flexibility in the application of racial segregation could be unpredictable. Organizations such as LULAC, established in Texas in 1929, emerged to promote Mexican American integration into mainstream American society. LULAC members cherished American institutions, political philosophy, and capitalism, but they protested the discrimination that prevented their full participation. Rather than challenging the racial hierarchies that organized American society, namely, the black/white divide that operated as the foundation of racial inequity, Mexican American political leaders worked to construct themselves as white ethnics.127 So although they sponsored festivals and activities to instill pride in their Mexican heritage, many middle-class Mexicanos simultaneously demanded that their European origins be acknowledged by defining themselves as “Spanish Americans.” Therefore, as U.S. immigration control was remapping the boundaries of whiteness, Spanish Americans of Mexican descent fought to be included within the margins of white ethnicity. According to much of the LULAC leadership, it was their association with the “colored races” that prevented them from gaining full inclusion in white American society. Therefore, they put distance between Mexican Americans and the colored races, particularly African Americans. However, the particular conditions of the U.S.-Mexico border region also forced Mexican American political leaders to construct their ethnic white identity in contrast to Mexican immigrants. Mexican immigrant laborers were poor, dark-skinned, and did not speak English.128 These new arrivals, many believed, undermined the quest of acculturated Mexican Americans for civil rights through the highly racialized politics of citizenship and whiteness in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In other words, as middle-class Mexicanos stepped up on the ledges of the black/white divide, many feared that the continuous arrival of Mexican laborers would pull them toward nonwhite status according to the sharpening distinctions of the emerging regime of immigration control. Therefore, the small, Mexican American middle class represented by LULAC tended to advocate limiting Mexican immigration and supported increased border enforcement.129 What evidence remains of the work of the Border Patrol’s first Mexicano officers firmly points toward their grounding in the racialized politics of whiteness and citizenship in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. No one made this clearer than Patrol Inspector Pete Torres when, one day, an acquaintance began to tease him by calling him a Mexican. In response, Torres “pulled out his revolver and shot right at his feet. He says, ‘I am not a Mexican. I am a Spanish-American,’ ” recalled an onlooker.130 In the Border Patrol and through Mexican exclusion, he and the others literally shot their way into whiteness.
From Pete Torres to Dogie Wright, these were the men to whom the development of U.S. immigration law enforcement was assigned in the early years of the U.S. Border Patrol. Though it was established to function as a national police force dedicated to broad enforcement of federal immigration restrictions, the disorganization of Border Patrol supervision and coordination effectively granted control over that enforcement to the officers of the patrol. The intense localization of U.S. immigration control empowered local men to determine the direction of U.S. immigration law enforcement. For these sons of the borderlands, immigration law provided the basic framework for their work, but local interests and customs defined by the social world of agribusiness provided the immediate means of interpreting the priorities of immigration law enforcement. As chapter 2 details, not only did the introduction of the Border Patrol to the Texas-Mexico borderlands allow its officers to rise from the working class—often from work as unskilled laborers to positions with significant authority—but, by joining the patrol, these landless laborers found a unique way to participate in the agricultural economy: they policed the region’s primary workforce. In the process, they created a new axis of racial division in borderland communities by linking Mexican immigrants to the crimes, conditions, and consequences of being illegal in the United States.
2
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A Sanctuary of Violence
When they were kids, Jean Pyeatt and Fred D’Alibini would “gather up rocks and pile them up on the school grounds so that they’d fight the Mexicans during recess.”1 They were children of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands who defended the inequities between whites and Mexicanos when the borderlands’ sometimes ambivalent system of racialization failed to clearly mark the difference. Years later, as officers of the United States Border Patrol, they traded their rocks for shotguns and converted their child’s play into police practice. As Border Patrol officers, their violence introduced a new way of marking the meaning of race in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In particular, by substituting policing Mexicanos for patrolling the border, Border Patrol officers linked being Mexican in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands with being illegal in the United States.
This chapter tells the story of how, why, and with what consequences officers of the United States Border Patrol policed Mexicanos as proxy for policing illegal immigration in the U.S. Immigration Service’s Texas-based districts. It is the story of ordinary men—neither powerful nor dispossessed members of their communities—who had grown from boys of the borderlands to officers of the state. They were few in number—several hundred, at most—and few people outside of the borderlands region took note of how they did their jobs. But it was these men and the intersection of their lives and their work that defined the formative years of U.S. immigration law enforcement in the greater Texas-Mexico borderlands.
TRACKING MEXICANS
With little supervision and no formal training, U.S. Border Patrol officers tested a variety of techniques for enforcing U.S. immigration laws. The simplest method was “line watches,” which consisted of patrolling the political boundary between official U.S. immigration stations to apprehend unauthorized immigrants as they surreptitiously crossed into the United States. In their first year of duty, Border Patrol officers in Texas-based stations reported turning back a total of 3,578 immigrants as they attempted to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.2 But with many desolate miles to patrol between the official ports of entry and with fewer than two hundred officers spread across multiple shifts, Border Patrol officers could not provide effective line watches against illegal entry. In December of 1926, Chief Patrol Inspector Chester C. Courtney of the Border Patrol’s subdistrict office in Marfa, Texas, conducted a study of the efficiency of line patrols. Courtney was an Arkansas native who was a drugstore clerk in his home state before serving in the United States Army between 1912 and 1915.3 By 1920, Courtney had taken up residence in Dimmit County, Texas, where he owned and operated his own farm to provide for his wife and infant son.4 By 1926, Courtney had left farming and was the chief patrol inspector for the United States Border Patrol several miles up the Rio Grande in Marfa, Texas. In this position, Courtney estimated that 40 percent of unsanctioned border crossers evaded the Border Patrol’s line watches in his subdistrict.5 He computed the percentage of missed apprehensions by comparing the number of persons apprehended since 1924 to the growth in the region’s Mexicano population. Any growth in the Mexicano community, Courtney assumed, was attributed to unsanctioned migration, and no group other than Mexican nationals engaged in unauthorized border crossings in the region. His calculation reflects the Border Patrol’s very early focus upon policing Mexicanos in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Officers assumed that only Mexicans crossed the border illegally