Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez

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СКАЧАТЬ population was plummeting to its nadir; Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino workers were prohibited from entering the United States, and black settlement was unwanted. A few experiments with white farm collectives had been tried throughout the state but, by and large, agribusinessmen were looking for temporary, cheap, and marginalized workers who would come and go with the harvests. It was within this context that California’s agribusinessmen developed a dependence upon Mexican laborers migrating across the U.S.-Mexico border. By the mid-1920s, Mexicans comprised the vast majority of agricultural workers in the Golden State. Of the estimated eighty thousand workers migrating across the state picking alfalfa, melons, and cotton in the Imperial Valley, peas, cotton and asparagus in the San Joaquin Valley, and citrus in Los Angeles County and the Inland Empire, between 80 and 95 percent were Mexicans by the mid 1920s.²⁵

      Some agribusinessmen described their turn to Mexican immigrant workers as a result of the “docile” nature of Mexican workers. Mexican workers, they argued, were quiet, diligent, docile, and therefore ideal farm workers. This characterization of Mexican workers disregarded the robust activity of Mexican labor organizing in the United States—the 1903 strike in Oxnard, California; the 1904 railroad strike in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas; and, the 1922 strike in Imperial, California, for example—and ignored the role of Mexican workers in the making of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, but it was a comforting thought for agribusinessmen, who realized that U.S. immigration restrictions had left them with few options by the 1920s.²⁶ As one of California’s many agribusiness lobbyists admitted, “We have gone east, west, and north, and south and he is the only man power available to us.”²⁷

      In south Texas, the story of labor, migration, and agribusiness was different. With a history of black slavery, Texans had fewer hesitations about encouraging black settlement, but while cotton cultivation and fruit production expanded during the 1910s and 1920s, World War I had drawn black southerners north. Texans were unable to attract enough black farm laborers away from their northern destinations. Texans, particularly those in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, quickly turned to and depended upon Mexican labor.²⁸ By the 1920s, local farmers estimated that Mexican workers comprised almost 98 percent of the agricultural workforce in south Texas and 80 percent of the state’s annual “army” of migrant laborers.²⁹ They began their work, twenty-five thousand members strong, picking fruits, vegetables, sugarcane, and cotton in the Lower Rio Grande Valley and grew to a migrating army of three hundred thousand workers throughout the state of Texas at the height of the cotton-picking season.

      To encourage Mexicans to cross into the United States, U.S. agribusinessmen sent labor contractors into Mexico.³⁰ Disruptions in the Mexican countryside made their job relatively easy. Until the late nineteenth century, the majority of Mexican laborers were locked in debt peonage and isolated in rural areas that lacked the railroads or other transportation systems that facilitated massive migrations. But the presidency of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911), a period popularly known as “el Porfiriato,” changed the history of Mexican immobility. Díaz pursued a program of modernizing Mexico in the image of nations such as Argentina and the United States. He dramatically expanded Mexico’s railroad system (with significant investments from U.S. and English financiers), sparked massive land accumulation (land most often purchased by foreign investors), and encouraged a switch to wage labor. His campaign for “order and progress” released an estimated five million Mexican campesinos from debt peonage and laid tens of thousands of miles of track as economic production increased at a relatively robust rate of 2.7 percent annually, exports in general rose by 6.1 percent per year, with agricultural exports, in particular, expanding by 200 percent between 1876 and 1910. These marks of modernity were followed by a dramatic population increase from nine million in 1876 to more than fifteen million in 1910. In addition, literacy was on the rise. Yet, Díaz’s world of “order and progress” was forged at a tremendous price of dispossession and poverty for Mexico’s overwhelmingly rural population.³¹

      Unabated poverty was the consequence of Díaz’s program. More Mexicans were free wage laborers, but more Mexicans were also dangerously poor. Therefore, Mexico’s newly mobile wage-labor force migrated in search of work and higher wages.³² In 1884, the completion of the railroad at El Paso, Texas, directly linked Mexican workers in the populous central regions of Mexico to jobs north of the U.S.-Mexico border.³³ The expansion of U.S. capital in Mexico created corridors of migration that brought Mexican workers north when the southwestern agribusiness boom began in the early twentieth century.

      Lawrence Cardoso estimates that Mexican nationals made at least five hundred thousand border crossings into the United States between 1900 and 1910.³⁴ Migration continued during the 1910s, when the violence of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, combined with disease and the ongoing entreaties of U.S. labor contractors, encouraged Mexican labor migration to the United States. It was during the 1920s, however, that Mexican labor emigration surged with the massive expansion in southwestern agribusiness. Cardoso estimates that the total number of border crossings undertaken by Mexican nationals skyrocketed to more than one million during the 1920s.³⁵ Amid the convergent booms in southwestern agriculture and Mexican labor migration, the United States Congress launched a new era of work, labor, and migration in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands by tightening U.S. immigration laws and establishing the U.S. Border Patrol. Although Mexico’s emigrant workers were not the primary targets of U.S. immigration restrictions, in time and according to a collision of dynamics, they would become the primary targets of U.S. immigration law enforcement.

      U.S. IMMIGRATION LAW: THE GENEALOGY OF A MANDATE

      The United States Congress established the U.S. Border Patrol on May 28, 1924, by discreetly setting aside one million dollars for “additional land-border patrol” in the Department of Labor Appropriations Act of that year, but the congressional effort of migration control began many years earlier and carried many ambitious projects within it. Beginning with the passage of the 1862 Act to Prohibit the “Coolie Trade,” Congress launched an era of increasingly restrictive immigration laws that climaxed with the passage of the National Origins Act of 1924. Passed during the Civil War and driven by the notion that Chinese immigrants were unfree workers, that is, “coolies,” the 1862 act functioned, argues historian Moon-Ho Jung, as both the “last slave-trade law” and “the first immigration law.”³⁶ In the era of black emancipation, Jung explains, the turbulent and contested intersection of race, labor, and freedom in the United States framed the origins of U.S. immigration control.

      After the passage of the 1862 coolie labor law, Congress spent the next several decades deeply shaping the course of American history by placing a series of limits on immigration to the United States.³⁷ In 1875, Congress prohibited criminals and prostitutes from legally entering the United States and extended the ban upon contract labor from China.³⁸ In 1882, Congress passed a general Immigration Act that banned all “lunatics, idiots, convicts, those liable to become public charges, and those suffering from contagious diseases” and expanded the 1862 and 1875 bans on the coolie trade by prohibiting all Chinese laborers from entering the United States.³⁹ To fund the growing bureaucracy of migration control, the 1882 Act also introduced a 50-cent tax on each person entering the United States. In 1885, Congress expanded the prohibition upon Chinese contract labor by making it unlawful to import any contract laborer into the United States.⁴⁰ In 1891, Congress added polygamists to the list of banned persons and authorized the deportation of any person who unlawfully entered the United States.⁴¹ In 1903, epileptics, anarchists, and beggars joined the growing group of excluded persons, and Congress transferred the Bureau of Immigration to the newly created Department of Commerce and Labor.⁴² The 1903 Immigration Act also provided for the deportation of immigrants who became public charges within two years of their arrival in the United States and extended to three years the period during which an immigrant could be deported if found to have been inadmissible at the time of entry. The Immigration Act of 1907 increased the head tax to four dollars per person and added each of the following to the list of excluded persons: “imbeciles, feebleminded persons, persons with physical or mental defects which may affect their ability to earn a living, persons afflicted with СКАЧАТЬ