Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez

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СКАЧАТЬ an international framework that established cross-border politics and possibilities for U.S. migration-control efforts. This book details how the Border Patrol took shape within a bi-national context of the politics and practices of controlling unsanctioned Mexican migration along the U.S.-Mexico border.

      When I began research on this project, I did not fully appreciate the importance of the bi-national dimensions of migration control upon the development of the U.S. Border Patrol. The patrol is a national police force dedicated to enforcing federal immigration law, and I proceeded with the assumption that its work, the enforcement of national law against unwanted and excluded outsiders, was the ultimate expression of national sovereignty and nation-bound interests.⁹ Further, its authority as a national police force stopped at the international border. The analytical implication of my early assumptions about the bounded nature of U.S. Border Patrol work was that, while I could examine the translation of national law and federal police power within the local contexts of the borderlands, the final and outer limit of the development and deployment of Border Patrol practice would be defined by the territorial limits of the nation-state. But the more dusty records I read, the more I came to realize that the Border Patrol’s rise took shape within a cross-border context of migration control along the U.S.-Mexico border.

      The first traces I found of the cross-border influences upon U.S. Border Patrol practices and priorities surfaced in the U.S. Border Patrol and U.S. State Department correspondence records. Here and there, memos from U.S. attachés in Mexico and Border Patrol officers working along the border referenced a Mexican Border Patrol within the Mexican Department of Migration that worked with its U.S. Border Patrol counterpart to police unauthorized border crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border. I had never before heard of a Mexican Border Patrol (nor had any of the scholars and archivists with whom I spoke) and was intrigued by the possibility that U.S. Border Patrol practices in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands developed in conjunction with efforts south of the border.¹⁰ To learn more, I headed to the archives in Mexico City, where I conducted research at Mexico’s Archivo General de la Nación, Archivo de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, and the Hermenoteca Nacional. While extraordinarily helpful in terms of understanding the Mexican politics of emigration control, these archives did not hold what I was hoping to find—the records of the Mexican Department of Migration.

      Established in 1926 and known as the Mexican Department of Migration (MDM) until 1993, the Instituto Nacional de Migración (INM) in the Secretaría de Gobernación is responsible for enforcing Mexican immigration law by managing, facilitating, regulating, and policing human migration into and out of Mexico. The officers of the INM spend their days enforcing immigration restrictions against foreign nationals and managing the exit and return of Mexican citizens. Much of the history of migration to and from Mexico during the twentieth century is thus held in the records of the INM. When I first began my research in Mexico, the historical records of the INM, namely, the records of the Mexican Department of Migration, had yet to be officially archived, systematically indexed, or publicly released, much like the records of the U.S. Border Patrol. But in collaboration with the INM and Professor Pablo Yankelevich of Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, we launched the first indexing and research project at the Archivo Histórico del Instituto Nacional de Migración (AHINM). The archive was housed in an abandoned factory in Mexico City. Many of the boxes contained papers that had literally disintegrated into slush, but about four thousand boxes containing an estimated four hundred thousand files had survived the years of disregard in a forgotten and leaky warehouse.¹¹

      The surviving records of the Mexican Department of Migration speak against the tendency to frame U.S. immigration control and border enforcement exclusively in terms of U.S.-based concerns regarding sovereignty, labor control, and unwanted migration. South of the border, Mexican officers attempted to prevent Mexican workers from illegally crossing into the United States and, when politically possible, pushed and prodded representatives of the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and the U.S. Border Patrol to improve border control and to deport Mexican nationals who broke both U.S. and Mexican law by surreptitiously crossing into the United States.¹² Further, a constellation of records pulled from U.S. and Mexican archives trace how the rise of the U.S. Border Patrol in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands developed in partnership with the establishment and expansion of cross-border systems of migration control during the 1940s and early 1950s. The Border Patrol’s deepening focus on the southern border and on persons of Mexican origin evolved during the 1940s, in great part, in response to Mexican demands and in coordination with Mexican emigration-control efforts. This book, therefore, complicates notions that the rise of the U.S. Border Patrol is the product of exclusively U.S.-based interests and makes Mexico a crucial partner in the development of modern migration-control and border-enforcement practices in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

      To incorporate Mexican interests in and influences upon the U.S. Border Patrol, I tell the history of the patrol within the bi-national context of migration control between the United States and Mexico. I narrate the U.S.-Mexico encounter implicit within this bi-national history according to the career of U.S. imperialism in Mexico. Between 1848 and World War II, U.S. economic imperialism in Mexico was aggressive, uncompromising, and punctuated by threats of military invasion. But World War II shifts in U.S. global power and claims by the Mexican political and economic elite forced U.S. imperialism in Mexico to operate with the support and collaboration of Mexican economic and political elites.¹³ John Mason Hart describes the new era of U.S. imperialism in Mexico as one defined by “cooperation and accommodation.”¹⁴ Under the new conditions of U.S. imperialism in Mexico, migration control operated as a site of cross-border cooperation and accommodation. Understanding U.S. Border Patrol practice as a site of cross-border negotiation and cooperation (although still shadowed by an imbalanced relationship between the United States and Mexico) opens space for exploring the pivotal role that Mexico played in deepening the Border Patrol’s focus upon the southern border and policing undocumented Mexican immigration, particularly during World War II.

      While unearthing such community and cross-border influences, this book stretches the domain of the U.S. Border Patrol from its familiar home within U.S. immigration history to write immigration control into the history of crime and punishment in the United States. The history of the U.S. Border Patrol is much more than a chapter in the story of Mexican labor migration to the United States. As such, this book centers upon examining the entanglement of Mexican labor migration and Border Patrol practice, but it enters this story from the perspective of a police force coming of age in twentieth-century America. In particular, this book charts the history of the Border Patrol within the context of the expansion of U.S. federal law enforcement in the twentieth century.

      When Congress first established the U.S. Border Patrol, it joined a small and relatively weak collection of federal law-enforcement agencies.¹⁵ Not until the New Deal did Congress and executive authorities begin to part with the American tradition of local law enforcement by strengthening federal crime-control bureaucracies and expanding federal crime-control powers. In its first decades, the U.S. Border Patrol, like its federal counterparts, was a small outfit of officers working on the periphery of law enforcement and crime control in the United States. In these days, the mandate for migration control may have come from Washington, D.C., but Border Patrol practices and priorities were primarily local creations.

      During World War II and in the decades to come, federal initiatives, resources, and, at times, directives dramatically altered the balance of law enforcement and criminal justice in the United States. While municipal police forces continued to dominate patrol activities, World War II internment and border-security efforts, Cold War concerns regarding saboteurs, the demands of civil rights workers for federal protection from local political violence in the American south, and, most important, the ascent of drug control as a national program all pushed a hard turn toward nationalized systems, discourses, and projects of crime control in the second half of the twentieth century. The U.S. Border Patrol benefited enormously from new investments in and concerns about federal law enforcement. Overall funding increased, payroll expanded, technologies improved, and, most important, immigration control was more tightly linked СКАЧАТЬ