This book shores up the notion that agribusinessmen and the overall demands of labor control within the vortex of capitalist economic development, especially in the American southwest, significantly influenced the development of the U.S. Border Patrol. Established to manage human migration across the nation’s borders, the Border Patrol policed the corridor of international labor migration between the United States and Mexico.6 But a close look at the Border Patrol’s everyday efforts to enforce U.S. immigration restrictions reveals that the Border Patrol’s project in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands was far from an inevitable and unmitigated expression of the interests of capitalist economic development. Rather, Border Patrol practice was a site of constant struggle. Employers, immigrants, Border Patrol officers, bureaucrats, Mexican politicians, nativists, Mexican American activists, and many others battled over the translation of U.S. immigration restrictions into a social reality in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. This book foregrounds the constant struggle involved with the Border Patrol’s enforcement of immigration restrictions.
To tell this story of struggle required many years of digging through boxes stored in garages, closets, back rooms and, in one case, an abandoned factory where the records authored by and written about the U.S. Border Patrol have sat undisturbed for decades. Gaining access to records that had yet to be officially archived and/or properly indexed required the generosity of a wide range of people who supported my requests to literally unlock and unpack the history of the Border Patrol. For example, when I began this study, the vast majority of the Border Patrol correspondence records remained lost in the stacks of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), unseen since first archived in 1957. With the expert guidance of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) historian, Marian L. Smith, and the support of NARA archivists, David Brown and Cynthia Fox, I was able to move out of the research room and into the NARA stacks to sift through the archival goldmine of Border Patrol memos, personnel files, field activity reports, and internal investigations.7 Similarly, the National Border Patrol Museum in El Paso, Texas, provided full access to the stacks and suitcases of material that retired Border Patrol officers have donated to the museum over the years. Out of these boxes, stacks, and suitcases emerged reams of records that had yet to enter the official historical record. The detailed and candid documents of the officers of the U.S. Border Patrol—their poetry, their memos, their letters, their memories, their reports, and their handwritten notes—are at the center of this book’s narrative and present a complicated portrait of the Border Patrol’s rise in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
First, Border Patrol correspondence records and oral histories offer new insight into the many ways that Border Patrol officers and the border communities in which they lived shaped the development of U.S. immigration-control practices. Revealing the community histories embedded within the making of federal law enforcement offers a crucially important perspective upon the complicated process of translating U.S. immigration law into law enforcement because, although higher authorities barked mandates and established a broad context for immigration control, Border Patrol officers typically worked on back roads and in small towns. There, they made discretionary decisions, compromises, and innovations that intimately bound Border Patrol work to community life while profoundly shaping the organization’s overall development. Most important, Border Patrol officers negotiated how to use the authority invested in them as U.S. immigration law-enforcement officers, engaging in daily struggles over their unique police function to distribute state violence in the pursuit of migration control. At the intersection of their lives in the borderlands and their authority as federal police officers, Border Patrol officers rationalized and prioritized their mandate for immigration law enforcement with regard to the social anxieties, political tensions, and economic interests invested in the overall police project of using state violence to establish and maintain social order through migration control. The development of the Border Patrol, in other words, is best understood as an intrinsically social and political process revolving around questions of violence and social order rather than as a system of unmitigated responses to criminalized activity.
This book concentrates on the negotiations and contests over the use of violence as it became embedded within the Border Patrol’s evolving practices. I explore this story at its most basic level of the uneven struggle among officers, immigrants, and community members over the violence implicit to the project of controlling human mobility not only across the U.S.-Mexico border but also within the greater U.S.-Mexico borderlands. This approach to the history of the Border Patrol forwards a textured understanding of how Mexican immigrants emerged as the primary targets of U.S. immigration law enforcement. For example, during the Border Patrol’s early years in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, a region where the deeply rooted divisions between Mexican migrant laborers and Anglo-American landowners dominated social organization and interactions, Border Patrol officers—often landless, working-class white men—gained unique entry into the region’s principal system of social and economic relations by directing the violence of immigration law enforcement against the region’s primary labor force, Mexican migrant laborers. Still for the men who worked as Border Patrol officers, the authority vested in them as federal immigration law-enforcement officers did not simply mean servicing the needs of agribusiness. Rather, it also functioned as a means of commanding the respect of local elites, demanding social deference from Mexicans in general, achieving upward social mobility for their families, and concealing racial violence within the framework of police work. In this social history of Border Patrol practice—a history of the violence emerging from the everyday politics of enforcing U.S. immigration restrictions—I argue that the U.S. Border Patrol’s rise in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands not only evolved according to economic demands and nativist anxieties but also operated according to the individual interests and community investments of the men who worked as Border Patrol officers.8
At the same time that the officers of the U.S. Border Patrol shaped the enforcement of federal immigration restrictions, they also pursued their specific mandate for U.S. immigration law enforcement by policing foreign nationals for crimes committed along a shared boundary. Border Patrol work, therefore, emanated from national mandates and pivoted on local conditions, but it also unfolded within an international framework that established cross-border politics and possibilities for U.S. migration-control efforts. This book details how the Border Patrol took shape within a bi-national context of the politics and practices of controlling unsanctioned Mexican migration along the U.S.-Mexico border.
When I began research on this project, I did not fully appreciate the importance of the bi-national dimensions of migration control upon the development of the U.S. Border Patrol. The patrol is a national police force dedicated to enforcing federal immigration law, and I proceeded with the assumption that its work, the enforcement of national law against unwanted and excluded outsiders, was the ultimate expression of national sovereignty and nation-bound interests.9 Further, its authority as a national police force stopped at the international border. The analytical implication of my early assumptions about the bounded nature of U.S. Border Patrol work was that, while I could examine the translation of national law and federal police power within the local contexts of the borderlands, the final and outer limit of the development and deployment of Border Patrol practice would be defined by the territorial limits of the nation-state. But the more dusty records I read, the more I came to realize that the Border Patrol’s rise took shape within a cross-border context of migration control along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The first traces I found of the cross-border influences upon U.S. Border Patrol practices and priorities surfaced in the U.S. Border Patrol and U.S. State Department correspondence records. Here and there, memos from U.S. attachés in Mexico and Border Patrol officers working along the border referenced a Mexican Border Patrol within the Mexican Department of Migration that worked with its U.S. Border Patrol counterpart to police unauthorized border crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border. I had never before heard of a Mexican Border Patrol (nor had any of the scholars and archivists with whom I spoke) and was intrigued by the possibility that U.S. Border Patrol practices in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands developed in conjunction with efforts south of the border.10 To learn more, I headed to the archives in Mexico City, where I conducted research at Mexico’s Archivo General de