Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez

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      As a fundamentally social process, the Border Patrol’s policing of Mexicanos was a contested project. The Hernández incident, for example, was recorded and investigated because the store’s proprietor, Mr. G. E. Spinnler, argued that his rights as a landholder and property owner had been violated by U.S. Border Patrol officers who entered his store to enforce U.S. immigration restrictions against a “Mexican laborer.”²⁶ Eighteen months later Spinnler’s complaint was included in a broader protest by members of the Hudspeth County Conservation and Reclamation District no. 1, who provided the Hernández incident as evidence of “high-handed” behavior by Border Patrol officers, whose actions produced a “shortage of farm laborers in Hudspeth County.”²⁷ Such concerns were unfounded because the Border Patrol’s impact upon the flow of Mexican workers into the Texas-Mexico borderlands was nominal. In 1926, the 175 Border Patrol officers in the two Texas-based districts registered apprehending 1,550 persons for immigration violations. The next year, they apprehended a total of 10,875 persons for immigration violations.²⁸ In 1928, they apprehended 16,661 persons.²⁹ And after reaching a high of 25,164 such apprehensions in 1929, the number apprehended for immigration violations in the Texas-based Districts of the U.S. Border Patrol plunged to just 14,115 in 1930 and continued to drop during the 1930s.³⁰ Therefore, while the Texas “army” of migrant workers reached an estimated three hundred thousand at the height of the season in the late 1920s, Border Patrol officers reported apprehending only a small fraction of the number of workers needed for the region’s seasonal harvests. Still, the long life of Spinnler’s complaint indicates that the Border Patrol’s policing of Mexican immigrants had created a powerful yet contested institution in the borderlands by introducing a new regime of authority over the region’s labor supply.

      Mexicanos also contested the authority and attentions of Border Patrol officers. Although Border Patrolmen carried enormous authority in their jobs as armed immigration law-enforcement officers, Mexicanos did not always quietly submit to the officers’ demands. Retired Patrol Inspector E. J. Stovall told the story of a time when he quickly assessed the limits of his authority according to the immediate context of his work. One day in 1928, explained Stovall, he was patrolling alone near San Elizario, Texas, when he decided to drive through town. “San Elizario was this little Mexican town on the Rio Grande,” said Stovall, who remembered that when he got into town that day he saw a Mexicano “come out from behind the bank of the drainage ditch and then duck back.”³¹ Stovall admitted to knowing the man but stopped the car and asked him, “What do you have there in your bosom?”³² The man reached into his shirt pocket and “pulled out two bottles of beer and put them down on the bridge and broke them, so we wouldn’t have any evidence.”³³ Reflecting upon the incident, Stovall wondered, “Why I didn’t pull out my gun and fire at that Mexican. I don’t know. I don’t know why.”³⁴ Instead of reaching for his gun and firing, Stovall fled. “I got in my car and got away from there,” remembered Stovall, because “it was in daylight about one o’clock. If I had pulled my gun and fired there would have been fifty Mexicans around me that quick.”³⁵ According to Stovall, God spared his life that day by “taking charge” of his hands and preventing him from shooting at the Mexicano. Perhaps Stovall instinctively knew that his only immediate supervisor was “this little Mexican town” whose residents may have immediately challenged his actions. All alone in San Elizario, Stovall fled before beginning a battle he could not win. And borderland resident Julio Santos Coy recalled a time when Border Patrol officers were “[yelling] at one person like in the movies when sergeants yell loudly at new recruits three millimeters from their faces.”³⁶ Coy challenged the officers and was warned, “Shut up or you’ll be where he is,” but his opposition to the officers’ aggression is evidence of Mexicano resistance to Border Patrol work.³⁷ Resistance in the moment of interrogation was critical because street-level investigations, examinations, and confrontations were at the heart of Border Patrol work.

TABLE 1 Principal activities and accomplishments of the U.S. Border Patrol for the years ended June 30, 1925–1934