Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez

Чтение книги онлайн.

      2

      ____

      A Sanctuary of Violence

      When they were kids, Jean Pyeatt and Fred D’Alibini would “gather up rocks and pile them up on the school grounds so that they’d fight the Mexicans during recess.”¹ They were children of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands who defended the inequities between whites and Mexicanos when the borderlands’ sometimes ambivalent system of racialization failed to clearly mark the difference. Years later, as officers of the United States Border Patrol, they traded their rocks for shotguns and converted their child’s play into police practice. As Border Patrol officers, their violence introduced a new way of marking the meaning of race in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In particular, by substituting policing Mexicanos for patrolling the border, Border Patrol officers linked being Mexican in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands with being illegal in the United States.

      This chapter tells the story of how, why, and with what consequences officers of the United States Border Patrol policed Mexicanos as proxy for policing illegal immigration in the U.S. Immigration Service’s Texas-based districts. It is the story of ordinary men—neither powerful nor dispossessed members of their communities—who had grown from boys of the borderlands to officers of the state. They were few in number—several hundred, at most—and few people outside of the borderlands region took note of how they did their jobs. But it was these men and the intersection of their lives and their work that defined the formative years of U.S. immigration law enforcement in the greater Texas-Mexico borderlands.

      TRACKING MEXICANS

      With little supervision and no formal training, U.S. Border Patrol officers tested a variety of techniques for enforcing U.S. immigration laws. The simplest method was “line watches,” which consisted of patrolling the political boundary between official U.S. immigration stations to apprehend unauthorized immigrants as they surreptitiously crossed into the United States. In their first year of duty, Border Patrol officers in Texas-based stations reported turning back a total of 3,578 immigrants as they attempted to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.² But with many desolate miles to patrol between the official ports of entry and with fewer than two hundred officers spread across multiple shifts, Border Patrol officers could not provide effective line watches against illegal entry. In December of 1926, Chief Patrol Inspector Chester C. Courtney of the Border Patrol’s subdistrict office in Marfa, Texas, conducted a study of the efficiency of line patrols. Courtney was an Arkansas native who was a drugstore clerk in his home state before serving in the United States Army between 1912 and 1915.³ By 1920, Courtney had taken up residence in Dimmit County, Texas, where he owned and operated his own farm to provide for his wife and infant son.⁴ By 1926, Courtney had left farming and was the chief patrol inspector for the United States Border Patrol several miles up the Rio Grande in Marfa, Texas. In this position, Courtney estimated that 40 percent of unsanctioned border crossers evaded the Border Patrol’s line watches in his subdistrict.⁵ He computed the percentage of missed apprehensions by comparing the number of persons apprehended since 1924 to the growth in the region’s Mexicano population. Any growth in the Mexicano community, Courtney assumed, was attributed to unsanctioned migration, and no group other than Mexican nationals engaged in unauthorized border crossings in the region. His calculation reflects the Border Patrol’s very early focus upon policing Mexicanos in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Officers assumed that only Mexicans crossed the border illegally and that the broader Mexicano community in the region was under suspicion for illegitimately entering into the United States.

      To capture the floating mass of Mexico’s unsanctioned border crossers, Border Patrol officers utilized their broad jurisdiction to apprehend undocumented immigrants as long as they were en route to their final destination. Beginning in 1927, most of the activity in the Border Patrol’s Texas-based districts developed in the greater borderlands region rather than along the border line. That year, Border Patrol officers in the El Paso and San Antonio Districts reported turning back only nine immigrants.⁶ Instead of enforcing the boundary between the United States and Mexico, Border Patrol officers patrolled backcountry trails and conducted traffic stops on borderland roadways to capture unsanctioned Mexican immigrants as they traveled from the border to their final destination.⁷ Along major and minor transportation routes, the officers reported questioning hundreds of thousands of people. Border Patrol officers in the Texas-Mexico borderlands thus broadly policed Mexicano mobility instead of enforcing the political boundary between the United States and Mexico.

      As the officers pulled back from the border, they could not witness violations of U.S. immigration law; instead, they used what the United Supreme Court would later describe as “Mexican appearance” as a measure for identifying unauthorized border crossers. For example, on March 23, 1927, Border Patrol Inspectors Pete A. Torres, a member of the Spanish-American middle-class from New Mexico, and George W. Parker Jr., an Arizona native from a ranching family, were “driving slowly up the El Paso-Las Cruces Highway when this Ford Car and the two Mexicans in question passed us going north.”⁸ Torres turned to Parker and said, “I believe the two in that car are Mexicans, let us go and see if they are wet aliens.”⁹ In a clear example of policing Mexicans as proxy for policing unsanctioned border crossers, they used “Mexican appearance” as an indicator that the two men, Mariano Martínez and Jesus Jaso, had violated U.S. immigration restrictions. The inspectors ordered Martínez and Jaso to “drive over to one side off the road and stop, or words to that effect, which they did.”¹⁰ Torres then approached the car to “investigate them as aliens.” As he walked closer to the car, “Torres saw something in the car that appeared to be sacks, with the impression of cans on the inside” and rather than inquiring into the men’s immigration status, Torres asked, “What you boys got?”¹¹ When Martínez admitted to carrying liquor, the Border Patrol officers quickly arrested the two men for violating federal prohibition laws.

      Martínez and Jaso protested their arrest and sparked a rare investigation into the racial logic of Border Patrol practice in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. They protested their arrest on the grounds that Border Patrol officers had neither the authority nor reasonable evidence to investigate them for violating prohibition laws. Since February of 1925, Border Patrol officers had been authorized to enforce U.S. immigration restrictions, but the constant intersections of undocumented immigration and liquor smuggling created many questions regarding the limits of the Border Patrol’s authority to enforce federal law. As one chronicler of the Border Patrol explained, “Professional contrabandistas (smugglers) enter incidentally because they smuggle. Others smuggle incidentally because they enter,” but the U.S. Border Patrol was only specifically authorized to enforce U.S. immigration laws.¹²

      The Bureau of Immigration declined to navigate the complex intersections of prohibition and customs laws with immigration control at the nation’s borders by blithely responding to pleas for clarification from district directors and Border Patrol officers. “What is the status of an Immigrant Patrol Inspector in regard to Prohibition and Narcotic Enforcement . . . . I have never been in a position to get a satisfactory opinion from any one in authority,” wrote Patrol Inspector William A. Blundell on February 3,1926. “I am not sure of my ground and do not know how far I can go . . . several times [I have] been placed in a rather difficult position by not knowing just what the policy of the Immigration Service is in regard to the above matter.”¹³ Blundell’s district director sought clarification from the Bureau of Immigration’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., but all he was told was that there was no uniform policy on Border Patrol officers participating in the enforcement of prohibition laws. “This is a matter СКАЧАТЬ