Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez

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      During his tenure in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Jeff earned many admirers, but made few friends. He was a nomad who moved often, spent long periods of time working alone in remote places, and spoke little when he came to town. Still, his name was a “byword and his exploits legendary.”¹⁰⁰ The favored memory of Jeff is the time he disappeared after pursuing three bandits. Confident in his skills as a law-enforcement officer, but worried for the man who alone dared to challenge three train robbers, anxious borderlanders began to wonder if Jeff had fought his last fight. Their worries subsided when Jeff sent a characteristically simple telegraph message, “Send two coffins and a doctor. Jeff.”¹⁰¹

      In 1904, Jeff joined the Immigration Service of the Labor Department as a Mounted Chinese Inspector. When Congress established the Border Patrol in 1924, Jeff was sixty-three years old and had already spent twenty years enforcing immigration restrictions. Still, he was not a wealthy man and joined the new organization out of a love for law enforcement and, most likely, because he needed to work. To this day, Jefferson Davis Milton—a man born in the shadow of slavery, hardened by the battles to settle the American West, and a pioneer in the enforcement of Chinese Exclusion laws—is remembered as the father of the U.S. Border Patrol. He is often referred to as the “one-man Border Patrol,” and generations of U.S Border Patrol officers focus less on Jeff’s long career and prefer to remember him as a legendary loner and social nomad who represents their origins in a “hardy band of border law enforcement officers.”¹⁰² Yet the representation of Jeff as a man without deeply consequential historical entanglements is, most likely, as much a myth as it is a misleading representation of the men who served as Border Patrol officers in the 1920s and 1930s. The officers who worked along the U.S.-Mexico border were not legends, nomads, or loners. They did not aggressively enforce the law or secure the border without compromise. Like Jeff, most early officers joined the Border Patrol because they needed a job, and the new organization offered steady work.

      The position of U.S. Border Patrol officer was subject to civil service regulations, but the quick organization of the Border Patrol between May 28 and July 1,1924, did not allow time for the Border Patrol to draft and administer an exam for new recruits. Perkins, therefore, began to hire men who had passed the railway mail clerk civil service exam instead. Recruits from the railway civil service exam filled the majority of Border Patrol positions in 1924, but they did not remain in the organization for long. Turnover of Border Patrol officers in the first three months hovered around 25 percent and did not settle until 1927. “So fast did resignations occur that the register soon became exhausted,” recalled the commissioner of immigration, who admitted that the Border Patrol was quickly forced to hire patrol inspectors “without regard to civil-service regulations.”¹⁰³ The main benefactors of the Border Patrol’s dire need to fill positions quickly were men already in the borderlands looking for work—men such as Dogie Wright.¹⁰⁴

      Despite Dogie’s rich family history in the Texas borderlands, in September of 1924 he was out of work and roaming about in El Paso, Texas. There he ran into Grover Webb, an old family friend with whom he had served in the Texas Rangers and who had become the head of the U.S. Customs Mounted Patrol in El Paso. Webb suggested that Dogie go see the new Border Patrol chief, Clifford Perkins, saying “Tell him I sent you.”¹⁰⁵ Two months after the U.S. Border Patrol began policing the border, Perkins was still scrambling to hire officers with law-enforcement or military experience. Dogie walked straight to the Border Patrol office, and upon the recommendation of Webb and another friend, Sheriff Jeff Vaughn of Marfa, Texas, Perkins immediately hired him.

      The influence of local men such as Dogie Wright within the U.S. Border Patrol outweighed their numbers because early commendations and promotions focused upon officers with “a wide knowledge of people and customs of this vicinity,” who knew “everyone in that part of the country,” or had been “employed practically all of their lives in ranch work in this immediate vicinity.”¹⁰⁶ In 1929, for example, of the men who held the leadership positions of senior patrol inspector or chief patrol inspector, at least 87.5 percent were borderlanders before joining the Border Patrol.¹⁰⁷ Their concentration was heaviest in the Texas-Mexico borderlands, where 90 percent of the chief patrol inspectors were borderlanders, compared to 42.9 percent in the California subdistricts. In Texas subdistricts, 84.6 percent of senior patrol inspectors were borderlanders, compared to 50 percent in the California subdistricts.

      E. A. “Dogie” Wright was one of the benefactors of Perkins’s scramble to hire officers for the U.S. Border Patrol during the 1920s. His presence in El Paso, Texas, and his unemployed status made him quickly available to Perkins. Dogie’s experience as a law-enforcement officer was an additional benefit, given that Perkins preferred to hire men who had served as law-enforcement officers or in the military. Yet such preferences did not always materialize into realities. Extensive research with a 1929 roster of Border Patrol personnel shows that only 28.6 percent of early officers had served in civilian law enforcement or the military before joining the patrol. Border Patrol officers and their early chroniclers spun tales of officers as frontiersmen, military men, and career officers, but historical inquiry suggests that many of the early Border Patrol officers entered with eclectic working-class résumés. Most important, few owned land in the agriculture-dominated borderlands.

      Only 24 percent of the officers working along the U.S.-Mexico border in 1929 worked in agriculture before joining the Border Patrol, and only 10 percent owned or operated their own farms.¹⁰⁸ Overall, most of the early officers, a total of 47.4 percent, worked outside of agriculture before joining the patrol. For example, Horace B. Carter was a senior patrol inspector in Laredo, Texas, in 1929, but he had worked as a tram operator in Hood County, Texas, in 1920.¹⁰⁹ Don G. Gilliland was a patrol inspector in San Antonio in 1929 but a salesman at a grocery store in Floresville, Texas, in 1920.¹¹⁰ Orville H. Knight was a patrol inspector in Chula Vista, California, in 1929 but a chauffeur in Illinois in 1920.¹¹¹ Even the famous Dogie Wright, who was a senior patrol inspector in El Paso, Texas, in 1929, was selling tickets at the movie theater in Marfa, Texas, in 1920.¹¹² Although Dogie had had several short stints as a Texas Ranger, he had also worked as a clerk, as a chauffeur, in construction, and in a café.¹¹³ And, while the commissioner of the immigration Service often suggested that the Border Patrol was an organization of independent young men, more than 40 percent of the Border Patrol officers identified by all sources on the 1929 roster were married, and nearly half were between the ages of thirty and forty. Therefore, while some young, single men with law-enforcement and military experience joined the patrol, overall the early officers were less a “hardy band of law enforcement officers” than average working-class men, namely, white men, who used law enforcement as one strategy to earn a living in the agriculture-dominated U.S.-Mexico borderlands.¹¹⁴

      In a region where power was rooted in land ownership, early Border Patrol officers were neither elite members of borderland communities nor active participants in their core economies. These were precisely the working-class white men in the Texas-Mexico borderlands whom Paul Schuster Taylor found to be vigorously opposed to unrestricted Mexican immigration to the United States when he conducted interviews in the region during the 1920s. In contrast to the borderland farmers whose vocal and persuasive protest halted congressional efforts to limit Mexican immigration—“without the Mexicans we would be done,” feared the powerful agribusinessmen—average white workers in the region often interpreted Mexican immigration as a source of competition in the labor market. “I hope they never let another Mexican come to the United States,” said one south Texas labor union official.¹¹⁵ “The country would be a whole let better off for the white laboring man,” explained another, “if there weren’t so many niggers and Mexicans.”¹¹⁶ Hired from the ranks of the borderlands’ white working class, the officers of the Border Patrol operated within a political economy that privileged the interests of large landholders, but they did not necessarily wholly share nor strive to protect those interests. The agribusinessmen were powerful, but there were class-based cleavages among whites on the issue of Mexican immigration to the United States. White workers had lost the congressional СКАЧАТЬ