Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez

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СКАЧАТЬ 1, farmers typically appreciated the Border Patrol’s policing of Mexicano workers as a new tool of labor control in the region.

      IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT AS LABOR CONTROL

      Farmers and ranchers wanted migrants to come and go with the seasons, but they did not want workers to deploy their mobility as a strategy to improve their labor conditions and wages by seeking work elsewhere in the middle of the harvest. In response to the agribusinessmen’s concerns regarding migrant mobility, municipalities placed restrictions upon out-of-state labor contractors and passed vagrancy laws that threatened migrant workers with arrest while en route to new jobs. The power vested within the United States Border Patrol was just another weapon in the arsenal of agribusinessmen who understood the advantages that Border Patrol work presented. As one farmer admitted, “The mexicans are afraid to run off they are afraid of what will be done to them and they don’t know the law. They are afraid to come to town now because of the immigration officers.”⁴² Some regional elites protested Border Patrol intrusions upon their property and, at times, objected to the policing of Mexican laborers. In 1929, for example, a resident of Cameron County, Texas, protested that “our immigration officials are like dog catchers the way they go after the Mexicans.”⁴³ A farmer in Carrizo Springs complained that Border Patrol officers “think their job is to pack a gun and to shoot even if a man is running.”⁴⁴ But others recognized that without Border Patrol surveillance on the county roads and even of their own fields, migrant workers would “leave to go where wages were higher.”⁴⁵ As one farmer explained, “We tell the immigration officers if our mexicans try to get away into the interior, and they stop them and send them back to Mexico. Then in a few days they are back here and we have good workers for another year.”⁴⁶

      The Border Patrol’s contributions to the agribusinessmen’s interests in limiting and regulating the mobility of the industry’s primary workforce cannot simply be explained by describing Border Patrol officers as the lackeys of agribusinessmen or as the tools of the capitalist state. Agribusinessmen often had the opportunity and ability to exercise direct influence over the development of Border Patrol practices, but the officers were local men, community members, and workers who maximized and manipulated the project of policing Mexican workers. Dogie Wright, for example, understood the interests of local agribusinessmen and utilized his position as a Border Patrol officer to demand respect from local elites. Indicating his authority to police Mexican workers, Dogie explained that “an officer’s job is he’s got to enforce the law.”⁴⁷ The price for flexible enforcement against Mexico’s unsanctioned border crossers was respect for his authority. So long as ranchers “treat me alright. And they always did,” Dogie explained, he was happy to remain flexible in the enforcement of federal immigration restrictions against Mexican workers.⁴⁸ “We used our head. We wasn’t rabid,” recalled Dogie. “It makes a lot of difference right here on the border,” he explained, “ ’cause we can’t be too observant . . . they need labor right here on the border.”⁴⁹ Structured by the political economy of Mexican labor migration to the Texas-Mexico borderlands, Dogie’s strategic approach to U.S. immigration law enforcement reveals the more nuanced dynamics at work when Patrol officers—former tram conductors, auto mechanics, salesmen—extracted dignity, respect, and authority from the region’s social, political, and economic elite by selectively policing the region’s primary low-wage labor force.

      The Border Patrol’s contributions to the interests of agribusinessmen and ranchers were also a matter of self-protection because upsetting relations with local farmers and ranchers would have estranged officers from a critical source of assistance in the backcountry regions where Border Patrol officers worked alone, in pairs, or, at most, in groups of three. In particular, officers depended upon the support of local ranchers and farmers when policing the dangerous intersections of unsanctioned migration and liquor smuggling because, unlike migrant workers, liquor smugglers were typically armed and willing to engage Border Patrol officers to protect and move their loads. Prohibition, therefore, created a context in which protecting the interests of ranchers and farmers afforded the small and scattered force of Border Patrol officers with a crucial network of support.

      Patrol Officer Frank Edgell understood the value of maintaining close relations with local ranchers and farmers. A Texan by birth, Edgell was a farmer in Pima County, Arizona, before joining the Border Patrol in 1924. Edgell was assigned to a series of Arizona stations and knew many of the local farmers because of his personal history in the region. Two of his acquaintances were Mary Kidder Rak and her husband, who owned a cattle ranch in the southeastern corner of Arizona. Rak broke the tedium of ranch life by writing about her life and experiences. In 1938, she published Border Patrol. Although Border Patrol is often cited as a text that chronicles the history of the U.S. Border Patrol, it is better understood as an artifact of the close relations between borderland ranchers and farmers and the officers of the U.S. Border Patrol’s greater El Paso District during the 1930s.

      Edgell told Rak of the dangers of Border Patrol work and celebrated the critical support provided by local ranchers such as Rak and her husband. For example, in December 1924, Edgell recalled, he had spotted the tracks of a horse in a desolate region near Sasabe, Arizona. Suspicious of off-road traffic in this isolated area, Edgell drove to the nearby Palo Alto Ranch and borrowed a horse.⁵⁰ He followed the tracks and found liquor concealed in a thicket. Crossing the thin line between enforcing U.S. immigration restrictions and policing liquor smugglers, Edgell continued to follow the tracks. Soon he came upon six armed men. Rather than confront the six men, Edgell opted for a distraction. “ ‘I am a Federal Officer,’ he began frankly, taking his tobacco sack from his shirt pocket and rolling a cigarette as he sat at ease on his horse,” wrote Rak, who admired her friend’s bravery and ingenuity. “ ‘I hear that two Chinamen have come across from Mexico and are headed for Tucson, on foot. Have any of you men seen their tracks when you were riding around?’ ” The smugglers answered that they had not seen any Chinese passing through the area, and Edgell’s successful ruse allowed him to avoid a conflict and continue on without incident. Edgell circled back and took a concealed position near the liquor hidden in the thicket. The smugglers were sure to return for their stash. Soon, two of them did. Edgell took them by surprise and placed them under arrest, but he was alone, and the two liquor smugglers had four friends in the area. One of smugglers’ friends approached from a far-off hilltop and quietly prepared to shoot Edgell. Fortunately, explained Rak, Edgell’s borrowed horse alerted him to the man in the distance. Edgell took cover, shot first, and downed the accomplice. Still, there were three other smugglers wandering about the area, and it was only the fortuitous arrival of “a trusted Mexican cowboy” that allowed Edgell to escape.

      Together, Dogie Wright’s reflections and Frank Edgell’s anecdote provide unique insight into why the officers of the United States Border Patrol actively policed Mexicans while only meekly attempting to cut off the flow of Mexican workers into the greater Texas-Mexico borderlands. The corridors of migration between Mexico and the southwestern United States were certainly too broad, deep, and embedded for several hundred officers in scattered stations to patrol effectively, but, in addition to the systems of mass labor migration that the farmers and ranchers had lobbied to protect, Border Patrol officers empowered themselves by demanding respect in exchange for selective immigration law enforcement and protected themselves in an era of prohibition by fostering collaborative relationships that allowed them to call upon farmers and ranchers for support in times of need. The Border Patrol’s simultaneously flexible and focused policing of Mexican workers was thus a complicated matter, a deeply social and political tactic of law enforcement that developed within the very specific socio-historical context of race, labor, power, and policing in the greater Texas-Mexico borderlands.

      The violence that emerged from the Border Patrol’s narrow enforcement of U.S. immigration restrictions also evolved in the dense social world of policing Mexicans in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. As of February 1925, Border Patrol practice was rooted in each officer’s authority to use physical coercion. When their efforts at U.S. immigration law enforcement intersected with prohibition, Border Patrol coercion escalated into spectacular gunfights that became the backbone СКАЧАТЬ