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Introduction

Toward the end of the Great Depression, DC Comics launched its fantastic tale of an orphaned infant alien who grew up to become an American hero named Superman. The Superman saga begins with the young superhero’s dramatic arrival on earth. Just moments before the destruction of his home planet, Krypton, Superman’s parents rocket their infant son toward salvation in Kansas. Adopted by a childless but moral and God-fearing couple, Superman spends his early years as nothing more than an average Anglo-American boy coming of age in rural America. But beneath his external appearance, he is different. Unlike his neighbors, Superman can fly, melt steel, and see through walls. And, unlike his neighbors, Superman is an illegal alien.

Thirty-one years before Superman landed in American folklore, the United States Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1907. This law required all immigrants entering the United States to pass through an official port of entry, submit themselves to inspection, and receive official authorization to legally enter the United States. Dropping from the sky and failing to register with the U.S. immigration authorities, Superman entered the United States without authorization. According to U.S. immigration law, the incorruptible leader of the Justice League of America was an illegal immigrant. Yet the tale of Superman evolved free of any hint or consideration of his illegal status. Surely, Superman was just a fantasy and, as such, the character and the narrative were not subject to the basic realities of U.S. immigration restrictions. But in the same years that Superman’s popularity soared, the United States became a nation deeply divided over the issue of illegal immigration. From Congress to school boards, Americans decried what many described as an “immigrant invasion” and a loss of control over the country’s borders. These debates swirled around the issue of unsanctioned Mexican immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border. By the mid-1970s, vigilantes were patrolling the border, and Congress was hosting explosive debates about how to resolve the socalled wetback problem. As the issue of unauthorized Mexican immigration rippled across the American political landscape, Chicano activist and songwriter Jorge Lerma asked his listeners to consider the irony of Superman’s enormous popularity. “It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No man, it’s a wetback!” shouted Lerma. But few people took note that the iconic Man of Steel was an illegal immigrant.

Lerma’s provocative interrogation of Superman as America’s forgotten illegal immigrant was a critique of the U.S. Border Patrol’s nearly exclusive focus on policing Mexican immigrant workers despite many other possible subjects and methods of immigration law enforcement. Established in May 1924, the Border Patrol was created to enforce U.S. immigration restrictions comprehensively by preventing unauthorized border crossings and policing borderland regions to detect and arrest persons defined as unauthorized immigrants. With Asians, prostitutes, anarchists, and many others categorically prohibited from entering the United States and with a massive territory to police, Border Patrol officers struggled to translate their broad mandate into a practical course of law enforcement. Soon, however, in the U.S.-Mexico border region, the officers began to focus almost exclusively on apprehending and deporting undocumented Mexican nationals. Then, during the early 1940s, the entire national emphasis of the U.S. Border Patrol shifted to the southern border. Since the end of World War II, the national police force, which had been established to enforce U.S. immigration restrictions broadly, has been almost entirely dedicated to policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. With his song, Jorge Lerma offered a sharp criticism of the racialization and regionalization of U.S. immigration law enforcement. Superman was an undocumented immigrant who flew across the cultural landscape but, cloaked in whiteness, he escaped capture, while Mexicans in the borderlands, regardless of immigration or citizenship status, were subject to high levels of suspicion, surveillance, and state violence as Border Patrol officers aggressively policed not only the U.S.-Mexico border but also Mexican communities and work-sites.

This book tells how Mexican immigrant workers emerged as the primary targets of the U.S. Border Patrol and how, in the process, the U.S. Border Patrol shaped the story of race in the United States. It is, in other words, a story of how an American icon lost his illegality and how Mexicans emerged as the “iconic illegal aliens.”¹ Framing the contours of this story are the dynamics of Anglo-American nativism, the power of national security, the problems of sovereignty, and the labor-control interests of capitalist economic development in the American southwest. But this book unfolds at the ground level, presenting a lesser-known history of Border Patrol officers struggling to translate the mandates and abstractions of U.S. immigration law into everyday immigration law-enforcement practices. When the working lives of U.S. Border Patrol officers are considered, and when the chatter of big men in big debates in faraway places is taken as the context rather than the content of U.S. immigration law enforcement, the Border Patrol’s turn toward policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration emerges as a process that evolved in far more complex and contingent ways than indicated by the master narratives that typically frame our understanding of U.S. immigration control. In particular, this book explores U.S. immigration law enforcement as a matter of state violence in community life, unearths the cross-border dimensions of migration control, and explains the U.S. Border Patrol’s growth in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as 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, but it also unfolded within 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 to federal objectives ranging from domestic security to drug interdiction, namely, those 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 examining the dusty and scattered record of the U.S. Border Patrol, this book provides what Antonio Gramsci once described as an “inventory” of the many “traces,” that is, a catalogue and analysis of the many histories that shaped the making and the meaning of the U.S. Border Patrol in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.²⁸

This book is arranged into three chronological parts. Each part represents one of three generations in the U.S. Border Patrol’s first fifty years on patrol between 1924 and 1974. Part 1 addresses the highly regional and local period of Border Patrol operations from the establishment of the U.S. Border Patrol on May 28, 1924, to the entrance of the United States into World War II in 1941. Chapter 1 provides a foundation for understanding Border Patrol work in these years by outlining the mandate, the men, and the bureaucracy of the U.S. Border Patrol during the 1920s and 1930s. Chapter 2 tells the story of the greater Texas-Mexico borderlands, where a concentration of local men hired as U.S. Border Patrol officers directed the development of U.S. immigration law enforcement. Here, the patrol’s narrow enforcement of U.S. immigration restrictions was deeply connected to the social world in which the officers came of age before they became officers of the state. Chapter 3 focuses on the development of Border Patrol practices and priorities along the California and western Arizona border regions, where Border Patrol officers tended to be outsiders struggling to rationalize the many possibilities for U.S. immigration law enforcement. Here, the shifting political economy of Mexican labor migration and the fiscal limitations of policing European and Asian immigration tilted the Border Patrol’s focus toward policing Mexican immigrants. Together, chapters 1, 2, and 3 argue that, while immigration restriction was a national phenomenon, U.S. Border Patrol practice in the 1920s and 1930s was a deeply social project that was defined by highly regionalized interpretations of the possibilities and limitations of U.S. immigration law enforcement. Chapter 4 heads south of the U.S.-Mexico border to explore how the 1924 consolidation in U.S. immigration control sparked Mexican efforts to prevent Mexican workers from committing the crime of illegal entry into the United States.

Part 2 opens with the nationalization of the U.S. Border Patrol during World War II, continues with an exploration of the impact of cross-border systems of managing Mexican labor migration upon U.S. Border Patrol practice, and closes with an examination of the opposition of agribusiness in South Texas to the delocalization of Border Patrol personnel, practices, and priorities during the 1940s. Chapters 5 and 6 address how the establishment of the Bracero Program as a cross-border program for managing U.S.-Mexico labor migration transformed migration control along the U.S.-Mexico border: bilaterally managing the importation of legal Mexican labor into the United States provided new possibilities and demands for the bilateral management of deporting illegal Mexican labor out of the United States. Chapter 7 examines how bilateral migration control upset Border Patrol relations with old friends and neighbors, namely, South Texas agribusinessmen accustomed to familiar Border Patrol officers enforcing federal law according to local customs and interests. Together, Chapters 5, 6, and 7 demonstrate how the dramatic and contested delocalization of U.S. Border Patrol operations actually intensified the patrol’s concentration upon policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration.

By the early 1950s, the U.S. Border Patrol was embroiled in crisis. The South Texas farmers were in rebellion, and a constant upward tick in U.S. Border Patrol apprehension statistics suggested that the patrol had lost all control along the U.S.-Mexico border. Part 3 opens by examining how the U.S. Border Patrol triumphed over the crises of consent and control in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and closes with an analysis of how the patrol proceeded in the quiet years that followed. In particular, Chapter 8 demonstrates that while Border Patrol officials declared that an unprecedented show of force during the summer of 1954 had ended the crises of control and consent in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, it was actually compromise with farmers and a retreat from aggressive migration control that closed the so-called “wetback decade” of 1944 to 1954. Chapter 9 offers an examination of the dramatic reimagination of U.S. migration control after the triumphs of 1954. In particular, subtle changes in U.S. Border Patrol rhetoric, propaganda, and strategies along the U.S.-Mexico border reframed the patrol’s mission from controlling unsanctioned labor migration to preventing cross-border criminal activities, such as prostitution and drug trafficking. In these years, the policing of the unsanctioned migrations of poor Mexican-born workers increasingly intersected with the policing of the cross-border trafficking of marijuana and narcotics such as Mexicangrown heroin, a.k.a. Mexican Brown. My use of the term Mexican Brown, therefore, is not only a conceptual and rhetorical tool that captures the shades of class and color of the people that Border Patrol officers policed but also an intentional indication of the entanglements of migration control with crime control and drug enforcement during the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond.

This book closes at the dawning of the embattled decades of the late twentieth century, when the U.S. Border Patrol’s management of the problems of race, crime, and migration became almost impossible to disentangle. These years were marked by a steady escalation of border enforcement and a dramatic intensification of the raids upon Mexican communities in the borderlands region. In song and litigation, Jorge Lerma and a growing number of Chicano/a activists and immigrant rights advocates protested the impact of U.S. Border Patrol practices upon Mexicans crossing into the United States and Mexicans living north of Mexico. Superman took to the skies and floated right on by, Lerma complained, but Mexicans had to carry identification and, if illegal, be detained or deported. Lerma identified “Mr. Racism” as the root of Border Patrol prejudices and discretions. While the legal/illegal divide functioned as a racial divide through the Border Patrol’s uneven enforcement of U.S. immigration restrictions, the racialization and regionalization of U.S. immigration law enforcement was far more complicated than Lerma imagined, and reducing U.S. Border Patrol practices to Anglo-American racism masks the strange but powerful nexus of men, interests, choices, and chances that, despite a world of other possibilities, ultimately delivered the U.S. Border Patrol to the project of policing Mexicans in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Over the years, farmers, U.S. and Mexican government officials, U.S. Border Patrolmen, influential members of the Mexican American middle-class, and even undocumented Mexican immigrants themselves all played roles in the regionalization and racialization of migration control within the United States. Their participation, unequal and often contradictory, pushed the Border Patrol toward its rise in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands while giving nuanced formation to the problem of race that emerges from the patrol’s uneven policing of the legal/illegal divide.