Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez

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СКАЧАТЬ concerning the U.S.-Mexico border. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, there would be expansions and contractions in Border Patrol budgets, but the organization never returned to its origins as a decentralized outfit of local men enforcing federal law. In many ways, the rise of the U.S. Border Patrol in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands is a story about the expansion and consolidation of federal law-enforcement capacities in the twentieth century.

      In detailing these many dimensions of the patrol’s turn toward policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration, this book sharpens our understanding of how U.S. Border Patrol practice evolved as a very specific site of racial inequity. Immigration control, as legal scholars Linda Bosniak, Kevin Johnson, and others argue, is not simply matter of keeping immigrants out or letting immigrants in. Rather, the U.S. immigration regime operates as a formal system of inequity within the United States because, beyond questions of basic political enfranchisement, various social welfare benefits are distributed according to immigrant status, and individual protections such as those against indefinite detention are categorically denied to excludable aliens. The U.S. immigration regime, in other words, operates as a deeply consequential system that manages, shapes, and participates in the inequitable distribution of rights, protections, and benefits between citizens and immigrants and among the various immigrant-status groups within the United States.¹⁶

      For unauthorized immigrants, the formal tiers of inequity embedded within the U.S. immigration regime are compounded by the fear of deportation that encourages unauthorized migrants to attempt to evade detection by finding safety in zones of social, political, and economic marginalization. Susan Bibler Coutin describes these zones of marginalization as “spaces of nonexistence” that function as “sites of subjugation” and “loci of repression” by both formally and informally “limiting rights, restricting services, and erasing personhood.”¹⁷ Similarly Mae Ngai defines illegal immigrants as “a caste, unambiguously situated outside the boundaries of formal membership and social legitimacy.”¹⁸ Whether understood as a manifestation of nonexistence or caste, the relentless marginalizations of illegal status, formal and informal, transform persons guilty of the act of illegal immigration into persons living within the condition of being illegal.¹⁹

      Yet being illegal is highly abstract in everyday life. Not only are there countless ways of becoming illegal—entry without authorization, overstaying a visa, or violating the conditions of legal residency—but, as Coutin explains, “The undocumented get jobs, rent apartments, buy property, go to school, get married, have children, join churches, found organizations, and develop friendships. . . . Much of the time, they are undifferentiated from those around them.”²⁰ Without any precise indicators of the condition of illegality, it is difficult to identify unauthorized immigrants. However, with the mandate to detect, detain, interrogate, and apprehend persons for violating U.S. immigration restrictions, officers of the U.S. Border Patrol spend their working hours bringing bodies to the abstract political caste of illegality. Border Patrol officers, therefore, literally embody this site of political disenfranchisement, economic inequity, and social suspicion within the United States. The patrol’s focus upon policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration assigned the inequities, disenfranchisements, suspicions, and violences of being illegal to persons of Mexican origin.²¹ In other words, as Jorge Lerma and many scholars and activists have noted, the rise of the U.S. Border Patrol in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands effectively Mexicanized the set of inherently and lawfully unequal social relations emerging from the legal/illegal divide.²²

      U.S. immigration control is widely recognized as a site of racial inequity, but this book’s social history of Border Patrol practice allows for more precision in identifying the targets of immigration enforcement while calling for a more expansive understanding of how migration control in the borderlands evolved as of the story of race in the United States. Border Patrol correspondence records, complaint files, and cultural artifacts—cartoons, humor, autobiographies, and so forth—reveal tacit distinctions of gender, class, and complexion that Border Patrol officers policed. As one officer liked to joke, the Border Patrol’s primary target was a “Mexican male; about 5′5″ to 5′8″; dark brown hair; brown eyes; dark complexion; wearing huaraches . . . and so on.”²³ In the 1940s, Border Patrol officers expanded the gender profile of the undocumented immigrant to encompass women and families, but their commitment to class, complexion, and national origins remained firm. Tracing the nuances of the Border Patrol’s targeted enforcement of U.S. immigration restrictions clarifies dimensions of gender, class, and complexion that were rendered invisible when officers simply referred to their targets as “Mexican.” Class and complexion are undeniably slippery social categories, but this book’s focus upon the unarticulated discretions of Border Patrol practices reveals crucial intersections of class and complexion that shaped the Border Patrol’s policing of Mexicans. To capture the complexion-inflected class specificity of these practices, I introduce the term Mexican Brown as a conceptual and rhetorical tool because, regardless of immigration or citizenship status, it was Mexican Browns rather than abstract Mexicans who lived within the Border Patrol’s sphere of suspicion.

      Further, the nuances of policing Mexicans unfolded in conversation with questions, discourses, and structures dedicated to upholding distinctions between blackness and whiteness in twentieth-century American life. From the days of Jim Crow racial segregation to the expansion of the prison system, the Border Patrol’s policing of Mexicans always drew degrees of logic, support, and legitimacy from black/white racial stratification. There is, in other words, no “beyond black and white” in the story of U.S. immigration control, and it is precisely the black-and-white dimensions of policing Mexicans for unsanctioned migration that clarify how U.S. immigration law enforcement evolved as a story of race in the United States. This book therefore charts how the black/white divide shaped the Border Patrol’s Mexicanization of the legal/illegal divide.²⁴

      Finally, the Border Patrol’s racialization of the legal/illegal divide also evolved as a bi-national formation of migration-control efforts across the U.S.-Mexico border. The participation of Mexican officials in the U.S. Border Patrol’s rise in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands reveals the bi-national dynamics of policing Mexicans in the United States. This story runs contrary to the tendency to interpret the transnational and international impact upon U.S. race relations, particularly in the post—World War II era, as a turn toward progressive reform and liberation politics.²⁵ This book, therefore, provides one example of how anxieties and interests from beyond U.S. borders contributed to the hardening rather than the dismantling of racialized social and political inequities within United States after World War II.²⁶

      By the time that Jorge Lerma sang his song, “Superman Is an Illegal Alien,” a song about race, illegality, and inequality in America, the Border Patrol’s turn toward policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands was already complete. The consequences of the Border Patrol’s uneven enforcement of U.S. immigration restrictions were significant, but the reasons for it seemed simple and unalterable: Mexicans crossed the border without sanction, and the Border Patrol, in response, concentrated on policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Yet, all told, the making of the U.S. Border Patrol in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands turned upon much more than the unsanctioned border crossings of Mexican nationals. From the interests and concerns of individual officers to the demands of policing the corridor of international labor migration, the patrol’s turn toward policing Mexican immigrants quite often had less to do with the men, women, and children who crossed the border and more to do with the communities they entered, the countries they crossed between, and the men they confronted along the way.²⁷ From Mexico City to Washington, D.C., down to the sister cities of Brownsville, Texas, and Reynosa, Tamaulipas, the U.S. Border Patrol created the practices of U.S. immigration law enforcement at the vexing crossroads of community life, regional interests, national politics, and international relations in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. And from the expansion of federal police powers in the twentieth century to the shifts in the black/white divide in modern America, the U.S. Border Patrol’s steady rise is a history that unfolded in conversation with far more than the laws that the institution was founded to enforce. Therefore, by carefully СКАЧАТЬ