Part 2 opens with the nationalization of the U.S. Border Patrol during World War II, continues with an exploration of the impact of cross-border systems of managing Mexican labor migration upon U.S. Border Patrol practice, and closes with an examination of the opposition of agribusiness in South Texas to the delocalization of Border Patrol personnel, practices, and priorities during the 1940s. Chapters 5 and 6 address how the establishment of the Bracero Program as a cross-border program for managing U.S.-Mexico labor migration transformed migration control along the U.S.-Mexico border: bilaterally managing the importation of legal Mexican labor into the United States provided new possibilities and demands for the bilateral management of deporting illegal Mexican labor out of the United States. Chapter 7 examines how bilateral migration control upset Border Patrol relations with old friends and neighbors, namely, South Texas agribusinessmen accustomed to familiar Border Patrol officers enforcing federal law according to local customs and interests. Together, Chapters 5, 6, and 7 demonstrate how the dramatic and contested delocalization of U.S. Border Patrol operations actually intensified the patrol’s concentration upon policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration.
By the early 1950s, the U.S. Border Patrol was embroiled in crisis. The South Texas farmers were in rebellion, and a constant upward tick in U.S. Border Patrol apprehension statistics suggested that the patrol had lost all control along the U.S.-Mexico border. Part 3 opens by examining how the U.S. Border Patrol triumphed over the crises of consent and control in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and closes with an analysis of how the patrol proceeded in the quiet years that followed. In particular, Chapter 8 demonstrates that while Border Patrol officials declared that an unprecedented show of force during the summer of 1954 had ended the crises of control and consent in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, it was actually compromise with farmers and a retreat from aggressive migration control that closed the so-called “wetback decade” of 1944 to 1954. Chapter 9 offers an examination of the dramatic reimagination of U.S. migration control after the triumphs of 1954. In particular, subtle changes in U.S. Border Patrol rhetoric, propaganda, and strategies along the U.S.-Mexico border reframed the patrol’s mission from controlling unsanctioned labor migration to preventing cross-border criminal activities, such as prostitution and drug trafficking. In these years, the policing of the unsanctioned migrations of poor Mexican-born workers increasingly intersected with the policing of the cross-border trafficking of marijuana and narcotics such as Mexicangrown heroin, a.k.a. Mexican Brown. My use of the term Mexican Brown, therefore, is not only a conceptual and rhetorical tool that captures the shades of class and color of the people that Border Patrol officers policed but also an intentional indication of the entanglements of migration control with crime control and drug enforcement during the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond.
This book closes at the dawning of the embattled decades of the late twentieth century, when the U.S. Border Patrol’s management of the problems of race, crime, and migration became almost impossible to disentangle. These years were marked by a steady escalation of border enforcement and a dramatic intensification of the raids upon Mexican communities in the borderlands region. In song and litigation, Jorge Lerma and a growing number of Chicano/a activists and immigrant rights advocates protested the impact of U.S. Border Patrol practices upon Mexicans crossing into the United States and Mexicans living north of Mexico. Superman took to the skies and floated right on by, Lerma complained, but Mexicans had to carry identification and, if illegal, be detained or deported. Lerma identified “Mr. Racism” as the root of Border Patrol prejudices and discretions. While the legal/illegal divide functioned as a racial divide through the Border Patrol’s uneven enforcement of U.S. immigration restrictions, the racialization and regionalization of U.S. immigration law enforcement was far more complicated than Lerma imagined, and reducing U.S. Border Patrol practices to Anglo-American racism masks the strange but powerful nexus of men, interests, choices, and chances that, despite a world of other possibilities, ultimately delivered the U.S. Border Patrol to the project of policing Mexicans in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Over the years, farmers, U.S. and Mexican government officials, U.S. Border Patrolmen, influential members of the Mexican American middle-class, and even undocumented Mexican immigrants themselves all played roles in the regionalization and racialization of migration control within the United States. Their participation, unequal and often contradictory, pushed the Border Patrol toward its rise in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands while giving nuanced formation to the problem of race that emerges from the patrol’s uneven policing of the legal/illegal divide.
PART ONE
Formation
U.S. Border Patrol officers near the California-Mexico border, 1926. Courtesy of the Security Pacific Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.
ESTABLISHED IN MAY OF 1924, the United States Border Patrol’s broad police powers rested in its mandate to protect the national interest by enforcing federal immigration laws. Yet, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, poor national coordination effectively regionalized the development of U.S. immigration law enforcement. Part 1 of this book examines the complexity of the U.S. Border Patrol’s turn toward policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In the greater Texas-Mexico borderlands, defined by the two Texas-based Border Patrol districts with jurisdiction extending from the Gulf of Mexico to southeastern Arizona, the first officers were local boys who had come of age in the borderlands before they became officers of the Border Patrol. These men allowed their work as federal law-enforcement officers to unfold in intimate conversation with the social world of the borderlands. They quickly focused the violence of U.S. immigration law enforcement on policing poor Mexicans and thereby racialized the caste of illegals in the greater Texas-Mexico border region. Along the California and western Arizona borders with Mexico, the Border Patrol’s turn toward policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration accompanied a slow turn away from policing unsanctioned European and Asian immigration as policing Mexicans emerged as an expedient and cost-effective strategy for U.S. immigration law enforcement. Finally, part 1 also tells a story that Border Patrol officers of the 1920s and 1930s never would have imagined as part of their own. During this period, conflict was far more common than cooperation between U.S. and Mexican immigration officers working along the U.S.-Mexico border. U.S. Border Patrol officers working during the 1920s and 1930s, therefore, would not have recognized the politics and practices of emigration control south of the U.S.-Mexico border as relevant to the story of U.S. Border Patrol development. These officers had no idea of the massive changes that World War II would bring to U.S. Border Patrol and the practices of migration control along the U.S.-Mexico border. After 1942, U.S. and Mexican officers would often join forces to prevent the unsanctioned border crossings of Mexican nationals and to coordinate mass deportation campaigns not only out of the United States, but reaching deep into the interior of Mexico. Chapter 4, therefore, lays the foundation for U.S.-Mexican collaboration in the 1940s by exploring the politics and practices of emigration control in Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s.
1
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The Early Years
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