Читать книгу Migra! - Kelly Lytle Hernandez - Страница 12

PART ONE

Formation

U.S. Border Patrol officers near the California-Mexico border, 1926. Courtesy of the Security Pacific Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

ESTABLISHED IN MAY OF 1924, the United States Border Patrol’s broad police powers rested in its mandate to protect the national interest by enforcing federal immigration laws. Yet, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, poor national coordination effectively regionalized the development of U.S. immigration law enforcement. Part 1 of this book examines the complexity of the U.S. Border Patrol’s turn toward policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In the greater Texas-Mexico borderlands, defined by the two Texas-based Border Patrol districts with jurisdiction extending from the Gulf of Mexico to southeastern Arizona, the first officers were local boys who had come of age in the borderlands before they became officers of the Border Patrol. These men allowed their work as federal law-enforcement officers to unfold in intimate conversation with the social world of the borderlands. They quickly focused the violence of U.S. immigration law enforcement on policing poor Mexicans and thereby racialized the caste of illegals in the greater Texas-Mexico border region. Along the California and western Arizona borders with Mexico, the Border Patrol’s turn toward policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration accompanied a slow turn away from policing unsanctioned European and Asian immigration as policing Mexicans emerged as an expedient and cost-effective strategy for U.S. immigration law enforcement. Finally, part 1 also tells a story that Border Patrol officers of the 1920s and 1930s never would have imagined as part of their own. During this period, conflict was far more common than cooperation between U.S. and Mexican immigration officers working along the U.S.-Mexico border. U.S. Border Patrol officers working during the 1920s and 1930s, therefore, would not have recognized the politics and practices of emigration control south of the U.S.-Mexico border as relevant to the story of U.S. Border Patrol development. These officers had no idea of the massive changes that World War II would bring to U.S. Border Patrol and the practices of migration control along the U.S.-Mexico border. After 1942, U.S. and Mexican officers would often join forces to prevent the unsanctioned border crossings of Mexican nationals and to coordinate mass deportation campaigns not only out of the United States, but reaching deep into the interior of Mexico. Chapter 4, therefore, lays the foundation for U.S.-Mexican collaboration in the 1940s by exploring the politics and practices of emigration control in Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s.