Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez

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СКАЧАТЬ smuggler fled, and Lon slowly rode to the nearest ranch for help. Lon barely made it to the ranch, where he fell off of his horse and collapsed against a fence; but nobody was home to help him, and within hours Lon was dead.⁶⁷

      A few days later, when Washington, D.C., transplant Alvin Edward Moore reported for duty in Patagonia, Arizona, he was handed the badge of the recently slain Lon Parker and told the story of the smuggler who got away. After Lon’s body was discovered, brother Border Patrol officers followed his trail back into the mountains and found the dead smuggler. It was Narciso Ochoa, a noted liquor smuggler in the area. The officers presumed that it was his brother Domitilio Ochoa who had left the tracks fleeing the area.⁶⁸ Soon after Moore arrived in Arizona, Senior Patrol Inspector Albert Gatlin got a tip that Ochoa was going to try to return to Mexico that night. Gatlin told Moore to find Patrol Inspector Lawrence Sipe (Gatlin’s brother-in-law), Deputy Sheriff Jim Kane (raised with Lon on the same ranch and “ate out of the same beanpot”) and “anybody else he can get” and meet at Campaña Pass along the border. When Moore, Sipe, and Kane arrived, they were met by Gatlin and a “posse of officers from Douglas County.” According to Moore, ranchers were “turning out of bed to patrol the line that night . . . stalking off in the moonlight, rifles ready, prepared to shoot and be shot at.”⁶⁹ During such vengeance campaigns, the line between officers and community members disappeared. Together, they took to the night to avenge the murder of Lon Parker.

      It was Lon’s partner, Albert Gatlin, who led the posse. “Lon had been as near to Gatlin as his own brother, and his murder had all but turned him from an impartial officer into an avenging nemesis,” remarked Moore.⁷⁰ Before he stationed the posse at posts along the border, Gatlin gave the officers, ranchers, and farmers who had been deputized for the evening some advice: “All I’ve got to say, men, is if you see anybody comin’ toward the line tonight, yell at ’em in English. And if he don’t answer you in English, shoot!”⁷¹ With that advice, the men took to their posts for the night.

      Several hours later, Moore saw a figure move in the dark. When a bullet blasted through his car window, Moore took aim and shot back. After the figure dropped, Moore ran over. It was Ochoa, and he had been shot in the chest. As daylight broke, Moore proudly displayed the wounded Ochoa to Gatlin, who moaned, “It’s too bad you didn’t kill the son-of-a-bitch,” but “you qualify for the Border Patrol.”⁷² Moore was not a local, but in the blood of Domitilio Ochoa, he was baptized as a Border Patrol officer. Ochoa survived the shooting but was sentenced to death by hanging soon after—at least, this was Moore’s tale of Lon Parker.

      Ralph Williams joined the Border Patrol long after Lon had died, but he was related to Lon by marriage and had heard the legends from family and from brother officers. Williams knew that Lon was an uncle to Sheriff Jim Hathaway of Cochise County. Jim grew up with Officers Jean Pyeatt and D’Alibini and had been with them when they fought the Mexicans during recess. When Lon lost his final fight on that mountain trail, Jim vowed, “That smuggler will never die a natural death.”⁷³ Two years later, Jim found the man he believed had killed Lon, and “in the middle of the night with that boy, he eliminated him. Him and that guy who was riding shot-gun for him.”⁷⁴ According to Williams, two men were dead for the murder of Lon Parker, when only one was accused of fleeing the scene. Still, according to the legend of Lon Parker, the pursuit of justice in the name of their brother officer did not stop.

      Patrol Inspector Robert Moss had his own version of the story to tell. According to Martin, three men were involved in the murder of Lon Parker. Two of the men were later found “hanging from a tree, right where they had killed him. I don’t know how they got back there, but they were found dead, hanging from a tree.”⁷⁵ Moss believed that he later caught a third accomplice in downtown El Paso. When the man saw Moss and his partner coming, he began to run and “started screaming in English ‘Don’t let them kill me.’ ” The man must have known that Patrol Inspector Gatlin had long ago set English as the code for not getting shot by the Border Patrol for the murder of Lon Parker. He too was sent to jail.

      All together, the legends of Lon Parker tell of seven men dead and one in jail after a Sunday afternoon in 1926. Lon and Narciso were the first to die. Then, after one man fled the scene, a posse shooting and jury hanging, a dual nighttime elimination, two mountain lynchings, and a final El Paso apprehension followed. The legend tells of violence that was dispersed but not random. Patrolmen serving as officers of the state, brothers of the deceased, and men of the community exacted compensation from Mexicano men for the murder of Lon Parker. The legends suggest that in many ways and on many nights, Border Patrol violence was used to exact personal vengeance and defend community interests. In the battles that ensued between Border Patrol officers and Mexicanos, schoolyard clashes were replayed between grown men, but the white boys who had become Border Patrol officers had gained the authority of the state. As immigration law-enforcement officers, their violence carried new meaning by unfolding in the field in which illegality was being defined. When Border Patrol officers shot, killed, arrested, hung, eliminated, or otherwise brutalized Mexicanos, the violence that had so long defined the differences between whites and Mexicans in the borderlands—those of conquest, land ownership, employment, and so on—became inscribed within the violence that marked the differences between being legal and illegal.

      But the legend of Lon Parker must be read as a matter of both fact and fiction. As historian Alexandra Minna Stern has observed, Border Patrolmen of the 1920s and 1930s actively embraced, among other things, a “primitive masculinity” whereby they forged their institutional identity in the image of frontier cowboys and other pioneering conquerors of the American West, namely, the Texas Rangers.⁷⁶ Such notions elided the complex personal and employment histories of the early officers—the tram drivers, the mechanics, and the Texas Rangers included—but it was a powerful narrative that officers carefully projected to one another and to the world around them. Whether or not their predecessors had actually engaged in the exploits that comprised the legends of Lon Parker, they spent years swapping stories of having brought a more primitive and manly form of justice to some smuggler, some night, at the hands of some Patrol inspector. The legends of Lon Parker were a form of cultural production in which Border Patrol officers defined themselves as inheritors of a masculine and highly racialized renegade tradition of violence in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

      The life, career, and celebrated lethality of Patrol Inspector Charles Askins Jr. was another source of bravado for the early officers. Askins is heralded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest gunfighters. At the time of his death in 1999, a hesitant but admiring obituary in the gun-enthusiast magazine American Handgunner described Askins as a “stone cold killer. For those of us who knew him, there was just no gentler way to put it.”⁷⁷ Askins himself listed his official body count at “Twenty seven, not counting [blacks] and Mexicans.”⁷⁸

      Askins was not from the borderlands. He was born in Nebraska and grew up in Oklahoma before moving to Montana, where he took a temporary job fighting fires in Flathead Forest.⁷⁹ He then moved down to New Mexico, where he again worked fighting fires, this time on the Jicarilla Indian reservation. When fire season ended, he worked in logging camps. By 1929, he was working full-time as a forest ranger in the Kit Carson National Forest. In 1930, Askins’s friend, George W. Parker Jr. recruited him to the U.S. Border Patrol. Parker had boasted of “a gunfight every week and sometimes two.”⁸⁰ Always in search of a gunfight, Askins “succumbed to the glowing reports from my amigo Parker who was having a hell of a good time in the Border Patrol.”⁸¹ Stationed in El Paso, Texas, Askins had plenty of opportunities to do battle with contrabandistas attempting to bring liquor into the United States. Askins disagreed with Prohibition—“an ill-fated attempt to force the thirsty American public to give up John Barleycorn,” as he described it—but liquor control presented him with the opportunity to engage in the “sport” of human hunting.⁸²

      Askins recounted his life of guns, violence, and immigration law enforcement in his autobiography, Unrepentant Sinner. Recalling his first day on the job СКАЧАТЬ