Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez

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СКАЧАТЬ intrinsically embedded in the expansion of federal law enforcement in twentieth-century American life. The community, cross-border, and crime-control dimensions of the Border Patrol’s development offer new precision to the analysis of how immigration law enforcement evolved as a site of racialization and inequity in the United States. This book, therefore, digs deep into the expansive social world of U.S. immigration law enforcement to chronicle the making and meaning of the Border Patrol’s rise in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

      Although this is the first book dedicated to the history of the U.S. Border Patrol, many scholars have perceptively written about the politics of immigration control that shape Border Patrol practice. The work of Peter Andreas, Joseph Nevins, and Timothy Dunn in particular makes clear that Anglo-American nativism, rising concerns with sovereignty in an era of economic integration, and the labor interests of capitalist economic development play pivotal roles in the shaping of contemporary U.S. immigration law and law enforcement.² Daniel Tichenor, David Montejano, Kitty Calavita, Mae Ngai, Gilbert González, and George Sánchez have pushed this analysis back in time and have confirmed the influence of nativism, sovereignty, and labor control in the design of U.S. immigration control.³ In particular, these scholars emphasize the significant impact of agribusiness in the American southwest upon the early formation of U.S. immigration law-enforcement practices in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The Border Patrol, they explain, was established at a moment of a dramatic expansion in agricultural production in the southwestern United States. To plant, pick, and harvest the rapidly expanding acres of crops, agribusinessmen recruited seasonal labor from Mexico and rarely hesitated to demand immigration control practices that promoted their desire for unrestricted Mexican labor migration to the United States. But many employers also appreciated what Nicholas De Genova describes as the emergent “deportability” of undocumented workers, because the threat of deportation disciplined and marginalized the Mexican immigrant labor force.⁴ Agribusinessmen kicked, screamed, winked, lobbied, and cajoled for Border Patrol practices that allowed unrestricted access to Mexican workers while promoting effective discipline over the region’s Mexicano workforce.⁵

      This book shores up the notion that agribusinessmen and the overall demands of labor control within the vortex of capitalist economic development, especially in the American southwest, significantly influenced the development of the U.S. Border Patrol. Established to manage human migration across the nation’s borders, the Border Patrol policed the corridor of international labor migration between the United States and Mexico.⁶ But a close look at the Border Patrol’s everyday efforts to enforce U.S. immigration restrictions reveals that the Border Patrol’s project in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands was far from an inevitable and unmitigated expression of the interests of capitalist economic development. Rather, Border Patrol practice was a site of constant struggle. Employers, immigrants, Border Patrol officers, bureaucrats, Mexican politicians, nativists, Mexican American activists, and many others battled over the translation of U.S. immigration restrictions into a social reality in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. This book foregrounds the constant struggle involved with the Border Patrol’s enforcement of immigration restrictions.

      To tell this story of struggle required many years of digging through boxes stored in garages, closets, back rooms and, in one case, an abandoned factory where the records authored by and written about the U.S. Border Patrol have sat undisturbed for decades. Gaining access to records that had yet to be officially archived and/or properly indexed required the generosity of a wide range of people who supported my requests to literally unlock and unpack the history of the Border Patrol. For example, when I began this study, the vast majority of the Border Patrol correspondence records remained lost in the stacks of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), unseen since first archived in 1957. With the expert guidance of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) historian, Marian L. Smith, and the support of NARA archivists, David Brown and Cynthia Fox, I was able to move out of the research room and into the NARA stacks to sift through the archival goldmine of Border Patrol memos, personnel files, field activity reports, and internal investigations.⁷ Similarly, the National Border Patrol Museum in El Paso, Texas, provided full access to the stacks and suitcases of material that retired Border Patrol officers have donated to the museum over the years. Out of these boxes, stacks, and suitcases emerged reams of records that had yet to enter the official historical record. The detailed and candid documents of the officers of the U.S. Border Patrol—their poetry, their memos, their letters, their memories, their reports, and their handwritten notes—are at the center of this book’s narrative and present a complicated portrait of the Border Patrol’s rise in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

      First, Border Patrol correspondence records and oral histories offer new insight into the many ways that Border Patrol officers and the border communities in which they lived shaped the development of U.S. immigration-control practices. Revealing the community histories embedded within the making of federal law enforcement offers a crucially important perspective upon the complicated process of translating U.S. immigration law into law enforcement because, although higher authorities barked mandates and established a broad context for immigration control, Border Patrol officers typically worked on back roads and in small towns. There, they made discretionary decisions, compromises, and innovations that intimately bound Border Patrol work to community life while profoundly shaping the organization’s overall development. Most important, Border Patrol officers negotiated how to use the authority invested in them as U.S. immigration law-enforcement officers, engaging in daily struggles over their unique police function to distribute state violence in the pursuit of migration control. At the intersection of their lives in the borderlands and their authority as federal police officers, Border Patrol officers rationalized and prioritized their mandate for immigration law enforcement with regard to the social anxieties, political tensions, and economic interests invested in the overall police project of using state violence to establish and maintain social order through migration control. The development of the Border Patrol, in other words, is best understood as an intrinsically social and political process revolving around questions of violence and social order rather than as a system of unmitigated responses to criminalized activity.

      This book concentrates on the negotiations and contests over the use of violence as it became embedded within the Border Patrol’s evolving practices. I explore this story at its most basic level of the uneven struggle among officers, immigrants, and community members over the violence implicit to the project of controlling human mobility not only across the U.S.-Mexico border but also within the greater U.S.-Mexico borderlands. This approach to the history of the Border Patrol forwards a textured understanding of how Mexican immigrants emerged as the primary targets of U.S. immigration law enforcement. For example, during the Border Patrol’s early years in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, a region where the deeply rooted divisions between Mexican migrant laborers and Anglo-American landowners dominated social organization and interactions, Border Patrol officers—often landless, working-class white men—gained unique entry into the region’s principal system of social and economic relations by directing the violence of immigration law enforcement against the region’s primary labor force, Mexican migrant laborers. Still for the men who worked as Border Patrol officers, the authority vested in them as federal immigration law-enforcement officers did not simply mean servicing the needs of agribusiness. Rather, it also functioned as a means of commanding the respect of local elites, demanding social deference from Mexicans in general, achieving upward social mobility for their families, and concealing racial violence within the framework of police work. In this social history of Border Patrol practice—a history of the violence emerging from the everyday politics of enforcing U.S. immigration restrictions—I argue that the U.S. Border Patrol’s rise in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands not only evolved according to economic demands and nativist anxieties but also operated according to the individual interests and community investments of the men who worked as Border Patrol officers.⁸

      At the same time that the officers of the U.S. Border Patrol shaped the enforcement of federal immigration restrictions, they also pursued their specific mandate for U.S. immigration law enforcement by policing foreign nationals for crimes committed along a shared boundary. Border Patrol work, therefore, emanated from national mandates and pivoted on local conditions, СКАЧАТЬ