In 1925, the eight officers working out of the Del Rio, Texas, station referred 102 people to a U.S. Immigration inspector for suspicion of immigration violations. To refer these 102 people, the Del Rio officers questioned or investigated 32,516 persons. These officers did not conduct 32,516 extensive individual interrogations; rather, they included a variety of interactions in their tally of interrogations. For example, when officers boarded a train and walked through the cabins, they recorded the total occupancy of the train in their tally for persons questioned. In Del Rio in 1925, this amounted to 12,109 people riding on 2,092 trains. Similarly, they included all occupants of the cars that they stopped and questioned. In Del Rio in 1925, this included 20,055 persons riding in 5,599 automobiles. Statistics for the total number of people questioned or investigated by the Border Patrol reflect a broad net of surveillance rather than a specific set of individual interrogations. In the sparsely populated border counties of the Del Rio station, Border Patrol racial profiling practices concentrated the officers’ wide net of surveillance upon the region’s Mexicano workers.38
The Del Rio station’s territory stretched 137 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border across Kinney, Val Verde, and halfway through Brewster Counties. In 1930, the total population of these three counties combined was 25,528, of whom 14,559 (57 percent) were Mexicano.39 In addition to resident populations, there was the seasonal arrival and departure of migrant laborers, linked most closely to the amount of cotton that had to be harvested.
In the 1920s, Kinney, Val Verde, and southern Brewster County farmers were only beginning to raise cotton. Although statistics for the amount of cotton harvested in the three counties in 1925 are not available, in 1924 only 27,970 acres of cotton were planted in Kinney, Val Verde, and Brewster Counties combined.40 Using Paul Taylor’s calculation that a good cotton crop would yield 170 lb./acre, and a good picker can pick 200 lb. of cotton per day, it would only require 792 workers to pick all three counties’ cotton in five weeks. The three counties were already home to 2,166 male farm workers who would have performed much of the labor during the cotton harvest, leaving little work for migrant laborers.41 Compared to the rapid expansion of cotton in areas such as the Lower Rio Grande Valley, Texas, or the Imperial Valley, California, the three counties in the Del Rio station’s territory had few labor needs, and the Del Rio area was not a major beltway for migrant laborers heading north. Therefore, the bodies present and marked for interrogations in the Del Rio station’s territory would rise and fall over the year but hovered around 15,000 Mexicanos. Still, setting the Del Rio station’s 32,516 interrogations beside the estimated 15,000 possible subjects of their work only begins to reveal the impact of Border Patrol police practices upon Mexicano communities in the borderlands.
Gendered racial profiling dropped the number of “suspicious” Mexicans in the Del Rio area to 7,500, if approximately half of the resident Mexican population was male. And, assuming that only half of the Mexican population was over the age of fifteen, the number of suspicious Mexicans would be further reduced to 3,750. Understanding that Del Rio’s officers reported questioning and investigating 32,516 persons within a region that was home to an estimated 3,750 racialized and gendered adult subjects of Border Patrol work reveals that the patrol’s work amounted to police harassment of Mexicano laboring men in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Despite occasional complaints from regional elites such as storeowner E. G. Spinnler and the members of the Hudspeth County Conservation and Reclamation District no. 1, farmers typically appreciated the Border Patrol’s policing of Mexicano workers as a new tool of labor control in the region.
IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT AS LABOR CONTROL
Farmers and ranchers wanted migrants to come and go with the seasons, but they did not want workers to deploy their mobility as a strategy to improve their labor conditions and wages by seeking work elsewhere in the middle of the harvest. In response to the agribusinessmen’s concerns regarding migrant mobility, municipalities placed restrictions upon out-of-state labor contractors and passed vagrancy laws that threatened migrant workers with arrest while en route to new jobs. The power vested within the United States Border Patrol was just another weapon in the arsenal of agribusinessmen who understood the advantages that Border Patrol work presented. As one farmer admitted, “The mexicans are afraid to run off they are afraid of what will be done to them and they don’t know the law. They are afraid to come to town now because of the immigration officers.”42 Some regional elites protested Border Patrol intrusions upon their property and, at times, objected to the policing of Mexican laborers. In 1929, for example, a resident of Cameron County, Texas, protested that “our immigration officials are like dog catchers the way they go after the Mexicans.”43 A farmer in Carrizo Springs complained that Border Patrol officers “think their job is to pack a gun and to shoot even if a man is running.”44 But others recognized that without Border Patrol surveillance on the county roads and even of their own fields, migrant workers would “leave to go where wages were higher.”45 As one farmer explained, “We tell the immigration officers if our mexicans try to get away into the interior, and they stop them and send them back to Mexico. Then in a few days they are back here and we have good workers for another year.”46
The Border Patrol’s contributions to the agribusinessmen’s interests in limiting and regulating the mobility of the industry’s primary workforce cannot simply be explained by describing Border Patrol officers as the lackeys of agribusinessmen or as the tools of the capitalist state. Agribusinessmen often had the opportunity and ability to exercise direct influence over the development of Border Patrol practices, but the officers were local men, community members, and workers who maximized and manipulated the project of policing Mexican workers. Dogie Wright, for example, understood the interests of local agribusinessmen and utilized his position as a Border Patrol officer to demand respect from local elites. Indicating his authority to police Mexican workers, Dogie explained that “an officer’s job is he’s got to enforce the law.”47 The price for flexible enforcement against Mexico’s unsanctioned border crossers was respect for his authority. So long as ranchers “treat me alright. And they always did,” Dogie explained, he was happy to remain flexible in the enforcement of federal immigration restrictions against Mexican workers.48 “We used our head. We wasn’t rabid,” recalled Dogie. “It makes a lot of difference right here on the border,” he explained, “ ’cause we can’t be too observant . . . they need labor right here on the border.”49 Structured by the political economy of Mexican labor migration to the Texas-Mexico borderlands, Dogie’s strategic approach to U.S. immigration law enforcement reveals the more nuanced dynamics at work when Patrol officers—former tram conductors, auto mechanics, salesmen—extracted dignity, respect, and authority from the region’s social, political, and economic elite by selectively policing the region’s primary low-wage labor force.
The Border Patrol’s contributions to the interests of agribusinessmen and ranchers were also a matter of self-protection because upsetting relations with local farmers and ranchers would have estranged officers from a critical source of assistance in the backcountry regions where Border Patrol officers worked alone, in pairs, or, at most, in groups of three. In particular, officers depended upon the support of local ranchers and farmers when policing the dangerous intersections of unsanctioned migration and liquor smuggling because, unlike migrant workers, liquor smugglers were typically armed and willing to engage Border Patrol officers to protect and move their loads. Prohibition, therefore, created a context in which protecting the interests of ranchers and farmers afforded the small and scattered force of Border Patrol officers with a crucial network of support.
Patrol Officer Frank Edgell understood the value of maintaining close relations with local ranchers and farmers. A Texan by birth, Edgell was a farmer in Pima County, Arizona, before joining the Border Patrol in 1924. Edgell was assigned to a series of Arizona stations and knew many of