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AMERICAN CROSSROADS
Edited by Earl Lewis, George Lipsitz, Peggy Pascoe, George Sánchez, and Dana Takagi
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Struggling to fit Mexicans into the prevailing discourse of racial difference, inequity, and control, the borderlanders constructed Mexicans as more or less black or more or less white: they were an in-between people without a clear place in a racial order grounded in the black/white divide.66 The overwhelmingly marginalized but generally unfixed position of Mexicanos in the separate and unequal borderlands contrasted sharply with the America that the nativists were trying to formulate through U.S. immigration restrictions. In metaphor, comparison, and everyday social practices the borderlanders had created an unequal but ambiguous place for Mexicans north of the border.
To calm the ardent nativists who did not believe that the southwestern growers could control the racial meanderings of Mexican immigrants in American social and cultural life, the growers made one final pitch. “The Mexican is a homer. Like a pigeon he goes back to roost” explained Frisselle.67 Mexican immigrants, in other words, were at least temporary if not contained, and their transitory presence in the fields of the southwest would benefit agribusiness without having any major or long-term impact upon American society. From the standpoint of the early twenty-first century, Frisselle’s promise appears foolish. During the 1920s, hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants entered the United States. The notion that they would have no impact upon American life was a massive miscalculation drenched in the fundamentally flawed philosophy that Mexicans were both temporary and innately marginal. Mexicans, according to Frisselle, were nothing more than a source of cheap and disposable labor whose impact upon America would only be measured in dollars and sweat. “He is not a man that comes into this country for anything except our dollars and our work,” testified Frisselle, who promised that Mexicans would always go home and leave nothing but profit behind.68 With such promises of control, containment, and, at the very least, impermanent Mexican settlement in the United States, the agribusinessmen triumphed in their clash with the nativists, and the numerical limits of the quota era were never placed upon Mexican immigration to the United States.69
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