Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez

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СКАЧАТЬ “No Negroes, Mexicans, or Dogs” signs were posted on restaurant doors.⁵⁹

      Agribusinessmen of the borderlands lobbied on behalf of their industry and held up the social world that they had built as evidence that unrestricted Mexican immigration would profit American businesses without infiltrating American society, culture, and politics. The hierarchy of race in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, they promised, provided barriers against Mexican incorporation. But in a nation most intimately versed in the black/white divide as the basic unit of racial control and social inequity, nervous onlookers worried about the place of Mexican immigrants—neither black nor white—in America. As Professor William Leonard explained, Mexicans “are not Negroes . . . they are not accepted as white men, and between the two, the white and the black, there seems to be no midway position.”⁶⁰

      The nativists’ concerns were not assuaged by the class-based flexibility of the borderlanders’ system of racialized social organization. For example, the assistant superintendent of schools in San Diego, California, described middle-class Mexican Americans as “Spanish” and argued that middle-class Mexican American children were “the equal of our white children.”⁶¹ According to Mexican scholar Manuel Gamio, a similar class- and complexion-based flexibility was accorded to Mexicanos by private proprietors. Although some Mexicans were denied entry to certain facilities, Gamio found that Mexican immigrants who were “white and even blue-eyed” were considered to be American and given “first place in everything.”⁶²

      The nativists hounded the borderlanders for a clear answer as to where Mexicans fit within the presumably crisp racial orders of eugenics, national origins, and the one-drop rule of the black/white divide. Texans typically referenced the logic of the black/white racial hierarchy to explain the place that they had assigned Mexican immigrants. For example, when asked about Anglo-Mexican relations by economist Paul Schuster Taylor in the late 1920s, one Texan stated that Mexicans were “not so bad as the Negroes,” while another elaborated that “The mexicans will eat in the restaurants and at the tables in the drug stores, but the niggers would not,” because even a “nigger with money couldn’t associate with white persons.”⁶³

      Californians often deployed a multirelational approach that positioned Mexicans against the Chinese, Japanese, Hindus, Filipinos, and others that had worked in the fields before Mexican immigrants began to dominate the agricultural workforce during the 1920s. In defense of Mexican immigration, Fred Bixby of Long Beach, California, explained during the 1928 hearings to restrict Mexican immigration that “we have no Chinamen; we have not the Japs. The Hindu is worthless; the Filipino is nothing, and the white man will not do the work.”⁶⁴ But engaged in a debate with outsiders—namely, when battling the nativists who discussed the social threat of Mexican immigration by constantly evoking the “negro problem”—Bixby and the Californians proved capable of mapping Mexicans against the prevailing black/white divide. “I want to tell you that you people have no understanding at all of the Mexicans. They are loyal,” charged Bixby. “I have a family—three of them are girls,” he explained. “Ever since they were that high,” he indicated, “I have had them out on the range, riding the range with Mexicans . . . . Do you suppose we would send them out with a bunch of negroes? We would never think of such a thing.”⁶⁵ In these very strategic discourses that negotiated the differences between regional particularity and national trends, the Californians drew upon the black/white divide to explain the social position of Mexicans north of the border. African Americans, they argued, represented the unmitigated bottom of the racial hierarchy, and Mexico’s migrant laborers, they suggested, presented a superior alternative of racial inferiors to labor in the fields of the American southwest.

      Struggling to fit Mexicans into the prevailing discourse of racial difference, inequity, and control, the borderlanders constructed Mexicans as more or less black or more or less white: they were an in-between people without a clear place in a racial order grounded in the black/white divide.⁶⁶ The overwhelmingly marginalized but generally unfixed position of Mexicanos in the separate and unequal borderlands contrasted sharply with the America that the nativists were trying to formulate through U.S. immigration restrictions. In metaphor, comparison, and everyday social practices the borderlanders had created an unequal but ambiguous place for Mexicans north of the border.

      To calm the ardent nativists who did not believe that the southwestern growers could control the racial meanderings of Mexican immigrants in American social and cultural life, the growers made one final pitch. “The Mexican is a homer. Like a pigeon he goes back to roost” explained Frisselle.⁶⁷ Mexican immigrants, in other words, were at least temporary if not contained, and their transitory presence in the fields of the southwest would benefit agribusiness without having any major or long-term impact upon American society. From the standpoint of the early twenty-first century, Frisselle’s promise appears foolish. During the 1920s, hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants entered the United States. The notion that they would have no impact upon American life was a massive miscalculation drenched in the fundamentally flawed philosophy that Mexicans were both temporary and innately marginal. Mexicans, according to Frisselle, were nothing more than a source of cheap and disposable labor whose impact upon America would only be measured in dollars and sweat. “He is not a man that comes into this country for anything except our dollars and our work,” testified Frisselle, who promised that Mexicans would always go home and leave nothing but profit behind.⁶⁸ With such promises of control, containment, and, at the very least, impermanent Mexican settlement in the United States, the agribusinessmen triumphed in their clash with the nativists, and the numerical limits of the quota era were never placed upon Mexican immigration to the United States.⁶⁹

      With the exemption provided for immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, the National Origins Act of 1924 capped Congress’s sixty-two year drive for increasingly restrictive immigration legislation. Yet legislators understood that the passage of the National Origins Act did not automatically translate into a new social reality. Many years of experience had taught them that without aggressive U.S. immigration law enforcement, persons excluded from legal entry would simply disregard and violate U.S. immigration law by entering the United States without authorization. “So long as the border is not adequately guarded,” explained F. W. Berkshire, supervising inspector of the U.S.-Mexico Border District for the Immigration Service, “the restrictive measures employed at ports of entry, simply tend to divert the illegal traffic to unguarded points.”⁷⁰ For example, since the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, an enterprise of smuggling Chinese immigrants into the United States had thrived along the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada borders and between Florida and Cuba.⁷¹ In addition to the categorically excluded Chinese workers, other classes of immigrants—persons infected with contagious diseases, illiterates, and those unable to pay the head taxes and visa fees—also chose the poorly guarded land borders as a “back door” entry into the United States.⁷² The vibrant world of unsanctioned migration along the U.S.-Mexico border registered in the United States District Courts that heard immigration cases. Between April of 1908 and the spring of 1924, for example, more than one-third of the persons tried for immigration offenses in the Laredo Division of the U.S. District Court carried non-Spanish surnames.⁷³ And between July of 1907 and September of 1917, only 15 percent of the persons tried for immigration violations in the Southern California division of the U.S. District Court carried Spanish surnames, most of whom were tried for immigrant smuggling.⁷⁴ The majority of persons standing trial in U.S. District Courts were Chinese, Japanese, Eastern European, and East Indian immigrants who had evaded U.S. immigration restrictions by entering the United States without sanction. Therefore, to prevent unlawful entry into the United States, three days after passing the National Origins Act of 1924, Congress set aside one million dollars to establish a “land-border patrol” in the Immigration Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor.⁷⁵

      THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE U.S. BORDER PATROL

      The Border Patrol’s beginnings were inauspicious. The million-dollar kick-off appropriation comprised less than 25 percent of the Immigration Bureau’s total budget of $4,084,865 for СКАЧАТЬ