Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez

my friends who have listened to far more than their fair share of Border Patrol stories. My good friend, Angela Boyce, conducted “emergency research” on my behalf in San Diego. My father, Cecil, and my Aunt Alice each accompanied me on research trips to watch over my sons while I worked in the archives. They, along with all of my father’s brothers and sisters, have also been a constant inspiration in their personal courage, devotion to family, and commitment to social justice. My mother taught me to write. She told me to listen to the preacher—not just what he says but how he says it—to read more James Baldwin, and to practice the art form of clearly arranging my thoughts. Then, “Be fierce,” she said. She is no longer here, but until the very end she read each and every draft of my school papers. In the hours she spent lovingly and enthusiastically revising my writing, she gave me an enduring gift. And I thank my husband, Sebastian, and our two sons, Isaiah and Solomon. Isaiah and Solomon are the remarkable force that, literally, get me up in the morning; Sebastian carries me through.

      U.S.-Mexico border region, showing selected cities, towns, and deportation routes

      Introduction

      Toward the end of the Great Depression, DC Comics launched its fantastic tale of an orphaned infant alien who grew up to become an American hero named Superman. The Superman saga begins with the young superhero’s dramatic arrival on earth. Just moments before the destruction of his home planet, Krypton, Superman’s parents rocket their infant son toward salvation in Kansas. Adopted by a childless but moral and God-fearing couple, Superman spends his early years as nothing more than an average Anglo-American boy coming of age in rural America. But beneath his external appearance, he is different. Unlike his neighbors, Superman can fly, melt steel, and see through walls. And, unlike his neighbors, Superman is an illegal alien.

      Thirty-one years before Superman landed in American folklore, the United States Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1907. This law required all immigrants entering the United States to pass through an official port of entry, submit themselves to inspection, and receive official authorization to legally enter the United States. Dropping from the sky and failing to register with the U.S. immigration authorities, Superman entered the United States without authorization. According to U.S. immigration law, the incorruptible leader of the Justice League of America was an illegal immigrant. Yet the tale of Superman evolved free of any hint or consideration of his illegal status. Surely, Superman was just a fantasy and, as such, the character and the narrative were not subject to the basic realities of U.S. immigration restrictions. But in the same years that Superman’s popularity soared, the United States became a nation deeply divided over the issue of illegal immigration. From Congress to school boards, Americans decried what many described as an “immigrant invasion” and a loss of control over the country’s borders. These debates swirled around the issue of unsanctioned Mexican immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border. By the mid-1970s, vigilantes were patrolling the border, and Congress was hosting explosive debates about how to resolve the socalled wetback problem. As the issue of unauthorized Mexican immigration rippled across the American political landscape, Chicano activist and songwriter Jorge Lerma asked his listeners to consider the irony of Superman’s enormous popularity. “It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No man, it’s a wetback!” shouted Lerma. But few people took note that the iconic Man of Steel was an illegal immigrant.

      Lerma’s provocative interrogation of Superman as America’s forgotten illegal immigrant was a critique of the U.S. Border Patrol’s nearly exclusive focus on policing Mexican immigrant workers despite many other possible subjects and methods of immigration law enforcement. Established in May 1924, the Border Patrol was created to enforce U.S. immigration restrictions comprehensively by preventing unauthorized border crossings and policing borderland regions to detect and arrest persons defined as unauthorized immigrants. With Asians, prostitutes, anarchists, and many others categorically prohibited from entering the United States and with a massive territory to police, Border Patrol officers struggled to translate their broad mandate into a practical course of law enforcement. Soon, however, in the U.S.-Mexico border region, the officers began to focus almost exclusively on apprehending and deporting undocumented Mexican nationals. Then, during the early 1940s, the entire national emphasis of the U.S. Border Patrol shifted to the southern border. Since the end of World War II, the national police force, which had been established to enforce U.S. immigration restrictions broadly, has been almost entirely dedicated to policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. With his song, Jorge Lerma offered a sharp criticism of the racialization and regionalization of U.S. immigration law enforcement. Superman was an undocumented immigrant who flew across the cultural landscape but, cloaked in whiteness, he escaped capture, while Mexicans in the borderlands, regardless of immigration or citizenship status, were subject to high levels of suspicion, surveillance, and state violence as Border Patrol officers aggressively policed not only the U.S.-Mexico border but also Mexican communities and work-sites.

      This book tells how Mexican immigrant workers emerged as the primary targets of the U.S. Border Patrol and how, in the process, the U.S. Border Patrol shaped the story of race in the United States. It is, in other words, a story of how an American icon lost his illegality and how Mexicans emerged as the “iconic illegal aliens.”¹ Framing the contours of this story are the dynamics of Anglo-American nativism, the power of national security, the problems of sovereignty, and the labor-control interests of capitalist economic development in the American southwest. But this book unfolds at the ground level, presenting a lesser-known history of Border Patrol officers struggling to translate the mandates and abstractions of U.S. immigration law into everyday immigration law-enforcement practices. When the working lives of U.S. Border Patrol officers are considered, and when the chatter of big men in big debates in faraway places is taken as the context rather than the content of U.S. immigration law enforcement, the Border Patrol’s turn toward policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration emerges as a process that evolved in far more complex and contingent ways than indicated by the master narratives that typically frame our understanding of U.S. immigration control. In particular, this book explores U.S. immigration law enforcement as a matter of state violence in community life, unearths the cross-border dimensions of migration control, and explains the U.S. Border Patrol’s growth in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as intrinsically embedded in the expansion of federal law enforcement in twentieth-century American life. The community, cross-border, and crime-control dimensions of the Border Patrol’s development offer new precision to the analysis of how immigration law enforcement evolved as a site of racialization and inequity in the United States. This book, therefore, digs deep into the expansive social world of U.S. immigration law enforcement to chronicle the making and meaning of the Border Patrol’s rise in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

      Although this is the first book dedicated to the history of the U.S. Border Patrol, many scholars have perceptively written about the politics of immigration control that shape Border Patrol practice. The work of Peter Andreas, Joseph Nevins, and Timothy Dunn in particular makes clear that Anglo-American nativism, rising concerns with sovereignty in an era of economic integration, and the labor interests of capitalist economic development play pivotal roles in the shaping of contemporary U.S. immigration law and law enforcement.² Daniel Tichenor, David Montejano, Kitty Calavita, Mae Ngai, Gilbert González, and George Sánchez have pushed this analysis back in time and have confirmed the influence of nativism, sovereignty, and labor control in the design of U.S. immigration control.³ In particular, these scholars emphasize the significant impact of agribusiness in the American southwest upon the early formation of U.S. immigration law-enforcement practices in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The Border Patrol, they explain, was established at a moment of a dramatic expansion in agricultural production in the southwestern United States. To plant, pick, and harvest the rapidly expanding acres of crops, agribusinessmen recruited seasonal labor from Mexico and rarely hesitated to demand immigration control practices that promoted their desire for unrestricted Mexican labor migration to the United States. But many employers also appreciated what Nicholas De Genova describes as the emergent “deportability” of undocumented workers, because the threat of deportation disciplined and marginalized the Mexican immigrant labor force.⁴ Agribusinessmen