Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez

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СКАЧАТЬ the Border Patrol’s unclear jurisdiction in terms of enforcing federal prohibition laws, the lawyer for Martínez and Jaso argued that the evidence against his clients should be excluded “on account of illegal arrest; the officers did not have reasonable belief that the car contained liquor.”¹⁵ The U.S. commissioner reviewing the case concurred with the defendants’ position that Border Patrol authority was limited to immigration law enforcement but upheld the arrest of Martínez and Jaso because “if the Immigration Patrol Inspectors stopped these Mexicans to inquire into whether or not they were aliens . . . and . . . during the course of the investigation of the persons’ alienage, the officer saw sacks in the car and asked, ‘Boy what have you in the car,’ and one of the defendants answered, ‘We have liquor,’ then it was the officer’s duty under Section 26 National Prohibition Act to arrest the persons and seize the car and liquor.”¹⁶ The commissioner upheld the actions of Inspectors Torres and Parker, including their use of race as an indicator of illegal entry, and sent the case to the Federal Grand Jury.

      Reviewing the decision for the U.S. Border Patrol in El Paso, Texas, Chester C. Courtney, by then the acting chief patrol inspector of the Border Patrol’s El Paso station, interpreted the case’s significance for the use of race as a measure of immigration status. Courtney advised his officers that “as long as Patrol Inspectors [officers] use their heads when stopping Mexicans to inquire into their alienage, and later find liquor, the arrest will be upheld.”¹⁷ But, he warned, “Had the two persons been white Americans the case would have been thrown out on account of illegal search, as it would have been absurd to say they believed the Americans to be aliens.”¹⁸ In this explicit discussion of the logic of U.S. immigration law enforcement, Chief Patrol Inspector Chester C. Courtney reveals that Border Patrol practice pivoted upon racialized notions of citizenship and social belonging in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In particular, by describing the defendants as “Mexican” regardless of their formal citizenship status while seamlessly interchanging the terms of white and American, Courtney revealed that Border Patrol tactics were profoundly shaped by the deeper histories and broader social systems that marked Mexicanos as marginalized and temporary outsiders within the region’s dominant social, cultural, political, and economic systems. Immigration law, therefore, provided the basic framework for Border Patrol operations, but the histories of conquest, displacement, and the rise of Jim Crow in the era of agribusiness penetrated the Border Patrol’s everyday translations of immigration law into immigration law-enforcement practices. Although Torres and Parker had not witnessed Martínez and Jaso illegitimately cross the border, the evidence of their infractions was plainly inscribed in the social world of the borderlands.

      Racialized notions of citizenship and social belonging penetrated the Border Patrol’s development of the pseudo-science of tracking. Tracking is a method by which Border Patrol officers read the markings left by people traveling across the land. Broken twigs, human litter, and footprints are all indicators of human passage that Border Patrol officers used to locate unsanctioned border crossers. The officers would pick up a footprint at the border and then track the human’s movement inland. Tracking is a simple and low-technology technique, but it requires training and experience to learn how to follow a human trail across miles of thick brush, mountain terrain, and open desert.

      In the Texas-Mexico borderlands, some men entered the U.S. Border Patrol with extensive experience in tracking, especially if they had worked in agriculture or ranching prior to joining the patrol. Among the experts was Fred “Yaqui” D’Alibini, who taught tracking to many of the new recruits who passed through his station. D’Alibini liked to joke around, recalled retired officer Bill Jordan, and he would dazzle new recruits with his tracking abilities by “squat[ting] over a clear track—horse or man—study it a bit, and, apparently communing with himself, pontificate. ‘Hmmm. A Mexican male; about 5’5” to 5’8”; dark brown hair; brown eyes; dark complexion; wearing huaraches . . . and so on.’ ”¹⁹ As D’Alibini explained to writer Peter Odens in the early 1970s, human tracks reveal racial characteristics: “A Mexican always walks heavy on the outside of his feet. When he walks, he puts his foot down on the heel first and then rolls it off—Indians will do that, too. Whites and blacks ordinarily put their feet down flat.”²⁰ So, after reading a track for the gender, complexion, and national origins of its maker, D’Alibini would follow the tracks, and “when the last tracks were found with the maker standing in them, sure enough!” exclaimed Jordan, “That’s what he looked like!” ²¹ According to Border Patrol tracking lore, therefore, undocumented immigrants fit a specific profile that could be tracked north from the border by following the particular imprints that Mexicans made upon the land. Illegals were Mexicans—poor, rural, brown, and male Mexicans—and evidence of such an equation was pressed into the landscape by the peculiar gait of Mexican workers as they walked north from Mexico. In a region crisscrossed by Mexicano workers, Border Patrol officers often found what they were looking for when following tracks heading north from Mexico.

      On June 28, 1936, two Border Patrol officers tracked nineteen-year-old José Hernández to a store in Esperanza, Texas (just outside of Fort Hancock). That morning, Hernández left his home, a shack near the U.S.-Mexico border, and began walking north toward the store.²² When he was about halfway there, a man who worked in the store was driving by and stopped to give him a ride. After arriving at the store, Hernández stood outside talking with two other men for awhile. This is when two Border Patrol officers pulled into the driveway. One of the officers walked past Hernández and headed into the store. Hernández followed him in to buy a soda. Nothing transpired between Hernández and the patrolmen until the officers were preparing to leave. Before leaving the premises, one of the officers decided that he should interrogate Hernández about his citizenship status. This officer instructed one of the other men who was standing outside the store, an “American” as described by the officers, to go inside and tell Hernández to come out.²³ “If they want to talk to me they could come in the store,” responded Hernández. The officers entered the store, jerked Hernández by the arm, forced him into their patrol car, and drove off.

      Apprehended, detained, and accused of illegal entry, Hernández carried the burden of proof. The officers took him to his shack, where he showed them his baptismal certificate as evidence of citizenship. “Shut up you son of a bitch!” yelled one of the officers, who did not believe that the certificate was valid, and he pushed Hernández back in the patrol car. This time they took him down to the river where there were the fresh tracks that they had been following before arriving at the store. The officers forced Hernández to “put one of his tracks down opposite the tracks on the river,” and then declared, “They are just the same . . . Yes, you crossed tonight, you son of a bitch.”²⁴

      The Hernández incident exemplifies the significance of the borderlands’ social world of racialized difference and inequity in the Border Patrol’s enforcement of U.S. immigration laws. The officers had been tracking an unsanctioned border crosser when they arrived at the store. At the end of the tracks stood three men: two were “American” men as described by the officers, and the other man, they explained, was Hernández, “the Mexican standing outside of the store.”²⁵ The officers’ decision to question Hernández was unrelated to the tracks; instead, it was rooted in racialized notions of belonging in the borderlands, which Border Patrol officers imported into their tracking techniques. The Hernández incident thus demonstrates that the social world of the borderlands informed how the U.S. Border Patrol narrowed its mandate for migration control into a project of policing Mexicanos.

      The Hernández incident also demonstrates how Border Patrol work introduced a new zone of violence and marginalization to the region. Despite its disorganization and lack of funding, the arrival of the U.S. Border Patrol in the Texas-Mexico borderlands introduced the legal/illegal divide to the region’s established systems of inequity while creating a new apparatus of violence and social control. The Border Patrol’s narrow enforcement of U.S. immigration laws was an intrinsically violent process, sanctioned by the state, that linked Mexicans to illegality and illegality to Mexicanos. The Border Patrol’s racialized sphere of violence and social formation, therefore, СКАЧАТЬ