Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez

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СКАЧАТЬ of hard-bitten patrol officers.”⁵¹ While these legends of Border Patrol violence appropriately capture the extreme possibilities of Border Patrol work, they overlook the more everyday manifestations of Border Patrol authority, such as the net of surveillance, and elide the ways in which Border Patrol violence was often grounded in community life and folded into the fabric of family relations.

      JACK’S REVENGE: THE SOCIAL WORLD

      OF BORDER PATROL VIOLENCE

      John H. (Jack) and James P. (Jim) Cottingham were brothers. Jack was born in El Paso, Texas, in January 1881, and Jim was born five years later, in Brownsville, Texas, in March 1886. Although Jack was the older brother, he was born with limited mental facilities, and his younger brother watched over him as they grew from childhood to adulthood in the Texas-Mexico borderlands.⁵² In 1900, their father was a farmer in Cameron County, Texas, their mother was a homemaker, and Jack, Jim, and their sisters, Susie and Mary, were in school.⁵³ By 1910, their father had left farming to become a real estate agent in Uvalde, Texas, and Jack and Jim had moved with the family to Uvalde, where they worked as merchants.⁵⁴ By 1920, the family had moved back to Cameron County. Jack and Jim were in their thirties and working as peace officers, and their father had returned to farming. Living with the family in Cameron County was their sister Susie’s new husband, John Peavey. Peavey was a military man who had been born in Missouri but came to the Lower Rio Grande Valley as a child with his family. Between 1920 and 1924, Peavey and the Cottingham brothers joined the U.S. Customs Mounted Guard and then switched over to the U.S. Immigration Service Mounted Guard.⁵⁵ In July 1924, they were transferred into the new U.S. Border Patrol. In the patrol, they all worked closely together, but Jack and Jim were inseparable partners, as Jim spent his days enforcing U.S. immigration restrictions and looking after his brother.⁵⁶

      The stories of Jack and Jim tell of two brothers deeply dedicated to one another. They worked together and lived together almost all their lives. Jack, the older and slower brother, never married, but rumor has it that when Jim got married, Jack joined him and his new bride on their honeymoon. Out on patrol, they shared the responsibilities of driving the patrol car. Regardless of where they were, every hundred miles they would trade. Every now and then, one officer recalled, “the time to change drivers would come right in the middle of downtown Mission or McAllen, or where ever . . . so they stopped their car, got out, changed sides, and then went on about their business.”⁵⁷

      While on patrol one evening, their partnership almost came to an end when Jim was shot by a Mexican liquor smuggler. Jim shot back and killed the smuggler, but he was critically wounded. The bullet had gone through his arm and chest and punctured his lung. Jack picked up his brother and took him to the hospital. Jim’s wounds were serious, and it was “touch and go for him in the hospital for some time.”⁵⁸ He did recover, but on the day that Jim had been shot and it seemed as if Jack was to be left behind, Jack headed to the border to take vengeance for his wounded brother. As Jim lay in the hospital, “someone came to the bridge from across the river to complain because some one was down there doing a lot of shooting. When they went to investigate, they found Jack. He had gone on down to the river below where Jim had been when he was shot, and just stayed there. He killed every person who came in sight on the Mexican side of the river during that time.”⁵⁹

      The story of Patrol Inspectors Jack and Jim Cottingham exemplifies the social entanglements of Border Patrol violence. In the course of enforcing U.S. immigration law, the transitions from investigation to aggression and lethal violence were often embedded in a world of family relations among the local officers of the Texas-Mexico borderlands. What had begun as a matter of immigration law enforcement ended as a matter of brotherhood. Border Patrol violence moved outward and onward through a socially integrated network of officers who sought vengeance against those who had harmed their own. Chief Patrol Inspector Herbert C. Horsley acknowledged this when he wrote to the parents of Patrol Inspector Benjamin T. Hill. Hill had joined the Patrol on May 14, 1929, and sixteen days later he was killed in a shootout with liquor smugglers. As Horsely wrote to Hill’s parents, “We are leaving no stone unturned in our search for the murderer whose hand caused the death of your son, our beloved comrade.”⁶⁰ Adding Hill’s name to the Honor Roll, the list of officers killed in the line of duty, Horsley pledged that “your son’s name will go down in Border Patrol history as a martyr to the cause of justice and as an example of fearlessness in the enforcement of the Laws of our Country.”⁶¹

      Hill was the twelfth Border Patrol officer to be killed in the line of duty. By 1933, nine other officers had died.⁶² Each death and injury brought a search for vengeance. For example, on January 20, 1939, Presidio County Sheriff Joe Bunton delivered the body of Gregorio Alanis to his relatives living near Presidio, Texas. The delivery finished a battle that had begun eight years earlier between Alanis, a Mexican American, and officers of the U.S. Border Patrol. During a daybreak raid upon his father’s property, Gregorio shot Patrol Inspector James McCraw just below the left clavicle and then fled to Mexico. Immediately after the shooting, Senior Patrol Inspector Earl Fallis secured a felony warrant against Alanis from the county sheriff “in the event it should become necessary to shoot Gregorio Alaniz, for in all probability he will resist arrest.”⁶³ Time did not distract the officers, and on the evening of January 20, 1939, Patrol Inspector Dorn assigned all his men to a remote trail outside of Presidio, Texas. At 9:30 P.M., in an abandoned house along the trail, Dorn shot and killed Gregorio Alanis.

      At the inquest, Justice of the Peace W. G. Young of Presidio County found that “Gregorio Alaniz came to death at the hands of Patrol Inspector Edwin Dorn, who while in the line of duty, commanded Gregorio Alaniz to halt and hold up his hands, Gregorio having refused and put up fight with a razor, the said Edwin Dorn shot him with a shotgun, in self-defence.”⁶⁴ The other man who had crossed with Alanis that night and who had witnessed the shooting “offered no resistance, but while being conveyed to the patrol car which was some distance from the scene of the encounter by Inspectors Dorn and Temple, succeeded in escaping from them.”⁶⁵ Eight years after the shooting of Patrol Inspector McCraw, Gregorio Alanis was dead, the witness was missing, and a brotherhood of law enforcement exonerated Dorn without any further investigation.

      The composition of the Border Patrol (an ensemble of white men, including the Spanish or Mexican Americans who fought for whiteness by enforcing U.S. immigration laws against Mexican Browns) and the composition of its subjects (poor, male, brown-skinned Mexicans) structured the vengeance campaigns as struggles between white men and brown men of the borderlands. In the case of Jack Cottingham, Jack headed to the border to exact revenge for the shooting of his brother. With the gunman already dead, Jack’s vengeance followed the Texas Rangers’ tradition of “revenge by proxy.” Jack shot Mexicans, any Mexicans, for the offense of one, and his outburst was implicitly gendered as he randomly subjected Mexicans to a highly masculine and public form of violence, pistol shooting. In the case of Gregorio Alanis, the officers of the patrol pursued a more slow, patient, and temperate approach: they waited eight years to avenge the shooting of Patrol Inspector James McCraw and took their vengeance at the often violent intersection of migration control and liquor interdiction.

      In the case of Lon Parker, the murder of a fellow officer sparked years of violence as men who were both kin and colleague to Parker sought vengeance for their losses. Lon Parker was born in Arizona in 1892 and grew up in southern Arizona. In 1924, both Lon and his brother, George W. Parker Jr., joined the United States Border Patrol. By any measure, Lon was popular and epitomized the early Border Patrol officer as a man who was familiar with local customs and highly integrated into local communities. “It was said that if one met a strange man anywhere within a wide radius of the Huachucas, one could say “Good morning, Mr. Parker,’ and be right four fifths of the time,” explained Mary Kidder Rak.⁶⁶

      On a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1926, Lon left a family picnic to follow the tracks of two liquor smugglers into the mountains. The smugglers, however, found Lon before he found them, and they shot him when he came into range. Seriously wounded, СКАЧАТЬ