Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez

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СКАЧАТЬ as U.S. immigration law-enforcement officers, they gained considerable influence over the everyday management of Mexican labor entering the United States. This, in the borderlands, was a new source of power, and the Border Patrol’s working-class officers leveraged their federal authority to police unsanctioned migration in complicated and often contradictory ways that were only consistent in their mindfulness of opportunities to extract bits of dignity, respect, status, and power from the region’s social elite by policing their workforce. The Border Patrol’s turn toward policing Mexicans, in other words, was much more than a matter of simply servicing the interests of agribusiness in capitalist economic development. It was a matter of community, manhood, whiteness, authority, class, respect, belonging, brotherhood, and violence in the greater Texas-Mexico borderlands.

      On the back roads and in the small towns where U.S. immigration law enforcement unfolded during the 1920s and 1930s, the men that became Border Patrol officers pursued something more elusive than the singular class interests of the region’s elite. Their working-class and landless backgrounds had long located their labor at the edges of borderland societies, where the profits of southwestern agriculture were unevenly distributed along a racial hierarchy of productive labor. Early officers may have lived in white neighborhoods, worshipped at white churches, and sent their children to white schools, but as salesmen, chauffeurs, machinists, and cowpunchers they had labored at the edges of whiteness in the borderlands. The steady pay and everyday social authority of U.S. immigration law-enforcement work dangled before them the possibility of lifting themselves from a marginalized existence as what Neil Foley has examined as the “white scourge” of borderland communities.¹¹⁷ Policing Mexicans, in other words, presented officers with the opportunity to enter the region’s primary economy and, in the process, shore up their tentative claims upon whiteness. As immigration control was emerging as a critical site of simultaneously expanding the boundaries of whiteness while hardening the distinctions between whites and nonwhites. The project of enforcing immigration restrictions therefore placed Border Patrol officers at what police scholar David Bayley describes as “the cutting edge of the state’s knife” in terms of enforcing new boundaries between whites and nonwhites.¹¹⁸

      The project of policing the boundaries between white and nonwhite was also important for the small number of Mexican American men who joined the U.S. Border Patrol during the 1920s and 1930s. According to the 1929 roster of Border Patrol personnel, six officers had Spanish surnames. Among them was Manuel Saldaña, the Texas-born son of Mexican immigrant parents.¹¹⁹ His father had been a stock dealer in Brownsville, Texas, but by the time he registered for the U.S. Army in 1917, Saldaña had taken over the care of both his mother and an adopted son.¹²⁰ In 1920, he was listed on the United States census as a bridge watchman for the U.S. Immigration Service in Brownsville. Manuel Uribe was another of the six Mexican American officers listed on the 1929 roster. Uribe was born and raised in Zapata, Texas, and was praised as “know[ing] practically everyone from Laredo to Roma.”¹²¹ He had gotten to know many people as he grew up working on his father’s farm in the area.¹²² By 1920, his father had allowed both Manuel and his brother, Enrique, to operate their own sections of the family farm. Manuel took on this work to provide for his wife and four young children.¹²³ But by 1923 he was working for the U.S. Immigration Service, and in 1924 he became a U.S. Border Patrol officer. Jesse Perez, a legend within the Border Patrol, was the son of a Texas Ranger and married to one of the founding families of Rio Grande City, where his father-in-law was a Texas Ranger, a sheriff, and a U.S. marshal. Jesse was stationed in Rio Grande City for his entire tenure with the Border Patrol and, for several years, worked alongside his father, who also served as a patrolman.¹²⁴ Pete Torres was a member of an established and influential “Spanish-American” family in New Mexico.¹²⁵ One more officer identified by Border Patrol correspondence as “partly of the Spanish race” is listed on the 1929 roster. Before joining the Border Patrol, he had served as a Texas Ranger for the influential King Ranch family in south Texas, a family that he married into several years after joining the Patrol.¹²⁶ This is not an exhaustive list of the Mexican American Border Patrol officers during the 1920s and 1930s. Border Patrol correspondence records tell of other Mexicano officers who cycled in and out of the patrol, and not all of the Mexicano officers can be identified by searching for Spanish-surnamed individuals, but these few biographies suggest that while Anglo Border Patrol officers tended to come from working-class backgrounds, Mexican American officers joined the patrol from the middle and upper echelons of the borderlands’ Mexican American communities.

      As suggested by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a leading Mexican American political and cultural organization of the era, middle-class Mexican American officers brought a unique ensemble of social investments to the development of U.S. immigration control. The Mexican American middle class enjoyed uncertain access to whiteness in the borderlands. Although many were often able to participate in centers of social, cultural, political, and economic power, the class-based flexibility in the application of racial segregation could be unpredictable. Organizations such as LULAC, established in Texas in 1929, emerged to promote Mexican American integration into mainstream American society. LULAC members cherished American institutions, political philosophy, and capitalism, but they protested the discrimination that prevented their full participation. Rather than challenging the racial hierarchies that organized American society, namely, the black/white divide that operated as the foundation of racial inequity, Mexican American political leaders worked to construct themselves as white ethnics.¹²⁷ So although they sponsored festivals and activities to instill pride in their Mexican heritage, many middle-class Mexicanos simultaneously demanded that their European origins be acknowledged by defining themselves as “Spanish Americans.” Therefore, as U.S. immigration control was remapping the boundaries of whiteness, Spanish Americans of Mexican descent fought to be included within the margins of white ethnicity. According to much of the LULAC leadership, it was their association with the “colored races” that prevented them from gaining full inclusion in white American society. Therefore, they put distance between Mexican Americans and the colored races, particularly African Americans. However, the particular conditions of the U.S.-Mexico border region also forced Mexican American political leaders to construct their ethnic white identity in contrast to Mexican immigrants. Mexican immigrant laborers were poor, dark-skinned, and did not speak English.¹²⁸ These new arrivals, many believed, undermined the quest of acculturated Mexican Americans for civil rights through the highly racialized politics of citizenship and whiteness in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In other words, as middle-class Mexicanos stepped up on the ledges of the black/white divide, many feared that the continuous arrival of Mexican laborers would pull them toward nonwhite status according to the sharpening distinctions of the emerging regime of immigration control. Therefore, the small, Mexican American middle class represented by LULAC tended to advocate limiting Mexican immigration and supported increased border enforcement.¹²⁹ What evidence remains of the work of the Border Patrol’s first Mexicano officers firmly points toward their grounding in the racialized politics of whiteness and citizenship in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. No one made this clearer than Patrol Inspector Pete Torres when, one day, an acquaintance began to tease him by calling him a Mexican. In response, Torres “pulled out his revolver and shot right at his feet. He says, ‘I am not a Mexican. I am a Spanish-American,’ ” recalled an onlooker.¹³⁰ In the Border Patrol and through Mexican exclusion, he and the others literally shot their way into whiteness.

      From Pete Torres to Dogie Wright, these were the men to whom the development of U.S. immigration law enforcement was assigned in the early years of the U.S. Border Patrol. Though it was established to function as a national police force dedicated to broad enforcement of federal immigration restrictions, the disorganization of Border Patrol supervision and coordination effectively granted control over that enforcement to the officers of the patrol. The intense localization of U.S. immigration control empowered local men to determine the direction of U.S. immigration law enforcement. For these sons of the borderlands, immigration law provided the basic framework for their work, but local interests and customs defined by the social world of agribusiness provided the immediate means of interpreting the priorities of immigration law enforcement. As chapter 2 details, СКАЧАТЬ