Читать книгу Migra! - Kelly Lytle Hernandez - Страница 14

2

____

A Sanctuary of Violence

When they were kids, Jean Pyeatt and Fred D’Alibini would “gather up rocks and pile them up on the school grounds so that they’d fight the Mexicans during recess.”¹ They were children of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands who defended the inequities between whites and Mexicanos when the borderlands’ sometimes ambivalent system of racialization failed to clearly mark the difference. Years later, as officers of the United States Border Patrol, they traded their rocks for shotguns and converted their child’s play into police practice. As Border Patrol officers, their violence introduced a new way of marking the meaning of race in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In particular, by substituting policing Mexicanos for patrolling the border, Border Patrol officers linked being Mexican in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands with being illegal in the United States.

This chapter tells the story of how, why, and with what consequences officers of the United States Border Patrol policed Mexicanos as proxy for policing illegal immigration in the U.S. Immigration Service’s Texas-based districts. It is the story of ordinary men—neither powerful nor dispossessed members of their communities—who had grown from boys of the borderlands to officers of the state. They were few in number—several hundred, at most—and few people outside of the borderlands region took note of how they did their jobs. But it was these men and the intersection of their lives and their work that defined the formative years of U.S. immigration law enforcement in the greater Texas-Mexico borderlands.

TRACKING MEXICANS

With little supervision and no formal training, U.S. Border Patrol officers tested a variety of techniques for enforcing U.S. immigration laws. The simplest method was “line watches,” which consisted of patrolling the political boundary between official U.S. immigration stations to apprehend unauthorized immigrants as they surreptitiously crossed into the United States. In their first year of duty, Border Patrol officers in Texas-based stations reported turning back a total of 3,578 immigrants as they attempted to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.² But with many desolate miles to patrol between the official ports of entry and with fewer than two hundred officers spread across multiple shifts, Border Patrol officers could not provide effective line watches against illegal entry. In December of 1926, Chief Patrol Inspector Chester C. Courtney of the Border Patrol’s subdistrict office in Marfa, Texas, conducted a study of the efficiency of line patrols. Courtney was an Arkansas native who was a drugstore clerk in his home state before serving in the United States Army between 1912 and 1915.³ By 1920, Courtney had taken up residence in Dimmit County, Texas, where he owned and operated his own farm to provide for his wife and infant son.⁴ By 1926, Courtney had left farming and was the chief patrol inspector for the United States Border Patrol several miles up the Rio Grande in Marfa, Texas. In this position, Courtney estimated that 40 percent of unsanctioned border crossers evaded the Border Patrol’s line watches in his subdistrict.⁵ He computed the percentage of missed apprehensions by comparing the number of persons apprehended since 1924 to the growth in the region’s Mexicano population. Any growth in the Mexicano community, Courtney assumed, was attributed to unsanctioned migration, and no group other than Mexican nationals engaged in unauthorized border crossings in the region. His calculation reflects the Border Patrol’s very early focus upon policing Mexicanos in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Officers assumed that only Mexicans crossed the border illegally and that the broader Mexicano community in the region was under suspicion for illegitimately entering into the United States.

To capture the floating mass of Mexico’s unsanctioned border crossers, Border Patrol officers utilized their broad jurisdiction to apprehend undocumented immigrants as long as they were en route to their final destination. Beginning in 1927, most of the activity in the Border Patrol’s Texas-based districts developed in the greater borderlands region rather than along the border line. That year, Border Patrol officers in the El Paso and San Antonio Districts reported turning back only nine immigrants.⁶ Instead of enforcing the boundary between the United States and Mexico, Border Patrol officers patrolled backcountry trails and conducted traffic stops on borderland roadways to capture unsanctioned Mexican immigrants as they traveled from the border to their final destination.⁷ Along major and minor transportation routes, the officers reported questioning hundreds of thousands of people. Border Patrol officers in the Texas-Mexico borderlands thus broadly policed Mexicano mobility instead of enforcing the political boundary between the United States and Mexico.

As the officers pulled back from the border, they could not witness violations of U.S. immigration law; instead, they used what the United Supreme Court would later describe as “Mexican appearance” as a measure for identifying unauthorized border crossers. For example, on March 23, 1927, Border Patrol Inspectors Pete A. Torres, a member of the Spanish-American middle-class from New Mexico, and George W. Parker Jr., an Arizona native from a ranching family, were “driving slowly up the El Paso-Las Cruces Highway when this Ford Car and the two Mexicans in question passed us going north.”⁸ Torres turned to Parker and said, “I believe the two in that car are Mexicans, let us go and see if they are wet aliens.”⁹ In a clear example of policing Mexicans as proxy for policing unsanctioned border crossers, they used “Mexican appearance” as an indicator that the two men, Mariano Martínez and Jesus Jaso, had violated U.S. immigration restrictions. The inspectors ordered Martínez and Jaso to “drive over to one side off the road and stop, or words to that effect, which they did.”¹⁰ Torres then approached the car to “investigate them as aliens.” As he walked closer to the car, “Torres saw something in the car that appeared to be sacks, with the impression of cans on the inside” and rather than inquiring into the men’s immigration status, Torres asked, “What you boys got?”¹¹ When Martínez admitted to carrying liquor, the Border Patrol officers quickly arrested the two men for violating federal prohibition laws.

Martínez and Jaso protested their arrest and sparked a rare investigation into the racial logic of Border Patrol practice in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. They protested their arrest on the grounds that Border Patrol officers had neither the authority nor reasonable evidence to investigate them for violating prohibition laws. Since February of 1925, Border Patrol officers had been authorized to enforce U.S. immigration restrictions, but the constant intersections of undocumented immigration and liquor smuggling created many questions regarding the limits of the Border Patrol’s authority to enforce federal law. As one chronicler of the Border Patrol explained, “Professional contrabandistas (smugglers) enter incidentally because they smuggle. Others smuggle incidentally because they enter,” but the U.S. Border Patrol was only specifically authorized to enforce U.S. immigration laws.¹²

The Bureau of Immigration declined to navigate the complex intersections of prohibition and customs laws with immigration control at the nation’s borders by blithely responding to pleas for clarification from district directors and Border Patrol officers. “What is the status of an Immigrant Patrol Inspector in regard to Prohibition and Narcotic Enforcement . . . . I have never been in a position to get a satisfactory opinion from any one in authority,” wrote Patrol Inspector William A. Blundell on February 3,1926. “I am not sure of my ground and do not know how far I can go . . . several times [I have] been placed in a rather difficult position by not knowing just what the policy of the Immigration Service is in regard to the above matter.”¹³ Blundell’s district director sought clarification from the Bureau of Immigration’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., but all he was told was that there was no uniform policy on Border Patrol officers participating in the enforcement of prohibition laws. “This is a matter which the Bureau has left to the discretion of the District heads,” explained a memo from the Bureau of Immigration.¹⁴

Understanding the Border Patrol’s unclear jurisdiction in terms of enforcing federal prohibition laws, the lawyer for Martínez and Jaso argued that the evidence against his clients should be excluded “on account of illegal arrest; the officers did not have reasonable belief that the car contained liquor.”¹⁵ The U.S. commissioner reviewing the case concurred with the defendants’ position that Border Patrol authority was limited to immigration law enforcement but upheld the arrest of Martínez and Jaso because “if the Immigration Patrol Inspectors stopped these Mexicans to inquire into whether or not they were aliens . . . and . . . during the course of the investigation of the persons’ alienage, the officer saw sacks in the car and asked, ‘Boy what have you in the car,’ and one of the defendants answered, ‘We have liquor,’ then it was the officer’s duty under Section 26 National Prohibition Act to arrest the persons and seize the car and liquor.”¹⁶ The commissioner upheld the actions of Inspectors Torres and Parker, including their use of race as an indicator of illegal entry, and sent the case to the Federal Grand Jury.

Reviewing the decision for the U.S. Border Patrol in El Paso, Texas, Chester C. Courtney, by then the acting chief patrol inspector of the Border Patrol’s El Paso station, interpreted the case’s significance for the use of race as a measure of immigration status. Courtney advised his officers that “as long as Patrol Inspectors [officers] use their heads when stopping Mexicans to inquire into their alienage, and later find liquor, the arrest will be upheld.”¹⁷ But, he warned, “Had the two persons been white Americans the case would have been thrown out on account of illegal search, as it would have been absurd to say they believed the Americans to be aliens.”¹⁸ In this explicit discussion of the logic of U.S. immigration law enforcement, Chief Patrol Inspector Chester C. Courtney reveals that Border Patrol practice pivoted upon racialized notions of citizenship and social belonging in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In particular, by describing the defendants as “Mexican” regardless of their formal citizenship status while seamlessly interchanging the terms of white and American, Courtney revealed that Border Patrol tactics were profoundly shaped by the deeper histories and broader social systems that marked Mexicanos as marginalized and temporary outsiders within the region’s dominant social, cultural, political, and economic systems. Immigration law, therefore, provided the basic framework for Border Patrol operations, but the histories of conquest, displacement, and the rise of Jim Crow in the era of agribusiness penetrated the Border Patrol’s everyday translations of immigration law into immigration law-enforcement practices. Although Torres and Parker had not witnessed Martínez and Jaso illegitimately cross the border, the evidence of their infractions was plainly inscribed in the social world of the borderlands.

Racialized notions of citizenship and social belonging penetrated the Border Patrol’s development of the pseudo-science of tracking. Tracking is a method by which Border Patrol officers read the markings left by people traveling across the land. Broken twigs, human litter, and footprints are all indicators of human passage that Border Patrol officers used to locate unsanctioned border crossers. The officers would pick up a footprint at the border and then track the human’s movement inland. Tracking is a simple and low-technology technique, but it requires training and experience to learn how to follow a human trail across miles of thick brush, mountain terrain, and open desert.

In the Texas-Mexico borderlands, some men entered the U.S. Border Patrol with extensive experience in tracking, especially if they had worked in agriculture or ranching prior to joining the patrol. Among the experts was Fred “Yaqui” D’Alibini, who taught tracking to many of the new recruits who passed through his station. D’Alibini liked to joke around, recalled retired officer Bill Jordan, and he would dazzle new recruits with his tracking abilities by “squat[ting] over a clear track—horse or man—study it a bit, and, apparently communing with himself, pontificate. ‘Hmmm. A Mexican male; about 5’5” to 5’8”; dark brown hair; brown eyes; dark complexion; wearing huaraches . . . and so on.’ ”¹⁹ As D’Alibini explained to writer Peter Odens in the early 1970s, human tracks reveal racial characteristics: “A Mexican always walks heavy on the outside of his feet. When he walks, he puts his foot down on the heel first and then rolls it off—Indians will do that, too. Whites and blacks ordinarily put their feet down flat.”²⁰ So, after reading a track for the gender, complexion, and national origins of its maker, D’Alibini would follow the tracks, and “when the last tracks were found with the maker standing in them, sure enough!” exclaimed Jordan, “That’s what he looked like!” ²¹ According to Border Patrol tracking lore, therefore, undocumented immigrants fit a specific profile that could be tracked north from the border by following the particular imprints that Mexicans made upon the land. Illegals were Mexicans—poor, rural, brown, and male Mexicans—and evidence of such an equation was pressed into the landscape by the peculiar gait of Mexican workers as they walked north from Mexico. In a region crisscrossed by Mexicano workers, Border Patrol officers often found what they were looking for when following tracks heading north from Mexico.

On June 28, 1936, two Border Patrol officers tracked nineteen-year-old José Hernández to a store in Esperanza, Texas (just outside of Fort Hancock). That morning, Hernández left his home, a shack near the U.S.-Mexico border, and began walking north toward the store.²² When he was about halfway there, a man who worked in the store was driving by and stopped to give him a ride. After arriving at the store, Hernández stood outside talking with two other men for awhile. This is when two Border Patrol officers pulled into the driveway. One of the officers walked past Hernández and headed into the store. Hernández followed him in to buy a soda. Nothing transpired between Hernández and the patrolmen until the officers were preparing to leave. Before leaving the premises, one of the officers decided that he should interrogate Hernández about his citizenship status. This officer instructed one of the other men who was standing outside the store, an “American” as described by the officers, to go inside and tell Hernández to come out.²³ “If they want to talk to me they could come in the store,” responded Hernández. The officers entered the store, jerked Hernández by the arm, forced him into their patrol car, and drove off.

Apprehended, detained, and accused of illegal entry, Hernández carried the burden of proof. The officers took him to his shack, where he showed them his baptismal certificate as evidence of citizenship. “Shut up you son of a bitch!” yelled one of the officers, who did not believe that the certificate was valid, and he pushed Hernández back in the patrol car. This time they took him down to the river where there were the fresh tracks that they had been following before arriving at the store. The officers forced Hernández to “put one of his tracks down opposite the tracks on the river,” and then declared, “They are just the same . . . Yes, you crossed tonight, you son of a bitch.”²⁴

The Hernández incident exemplifies the significance of the borderlands’ social world of racialized difference and inequity in the Border Patrol’s enforcement of U.S. immigration laws. The officers had been tracking an unsanctioned border crosser when they arrived at the store. At the end of the tracks stood three men: two were “American” men as described by the officers, and the other man, they explained, was Hernández, “the Mexican standing outside of the store.”²⁵ The officers’ decision to question Hernández was unrelated to the tracks; instead, it was rooted in racialized notions of belonging in the borderlands, which Border Patrol officers imported into their tracking techniques. The Hernández incident thus demonstrates that the social world of the borderlands informed how the U.S. Border Patrol narrowed its mandate for migration control into a project of policing Mexicanos.

The Hernández incident also demonstrates how Border Patrol work introduced a new zone of violence and marginalization to the region. Despite its disorganization and lack of funding, the arrival of the U.S. Border Patrol in the Texas-Mexico borderlands introduced the legal/illegal divide to the region’s established systems of inequity while creating a new apparatus of violence and social control. The Border Patrol’s narrow enforcement of U.S. immigration laws was an intrinsically violent process, sanctioned by the state, that linked Mexicans to illegality and illegality to Mexicanos. The Border Patrol’s racialized sphere of violence and social formation, therefore, reinvented and reinvested what it had drawn from the borderlands by creating a new mechanism and logic for the marginalization of Mexicanos in the borderlands.

As a fundamentally social process, the Border Patrol’s policing of Mexicanos was a contested project. The Hernández incident, for example, was recorded and investigated because the store’s proprietor, Mr. G. E. Spinnler, argued that his rights as a landholder and property owner had been violated by U.S. Border Patrol officers who entered his store to enforce U.S. immigration restrictions against a “Mexican laborer.”²⁶ Eighteen months later Spinnler’s complaint was included in a broader protest by members of the Hudspeth County Conservation and Reclamation District no. 1, who provided the Hernández incident as evidence of “high-handed” behavior by Border Patrol officers, whose actions produced a “shortage of farm laborers in Hudspeth County.”²⁷ Such concerns were unfounded because the Border Patrol’s impact upon the flow of Mexican workers into the Texas-Mexico borderlands was nominal. In 1926, the 175 Border Patrol officers in the two Texas-based districts registered apprehending 1,550 persons for immigration violations. The next year, they apprehended a total of 10,875 persons for immigration violations.²⁸ In 1928, they apprehended 16,661 persons.²⁹ And after reaching a high of 25,164 such apprehensions in 1929, the number apprehended for immigration violations in the Texas-based Districts of the U.S. Border Patrol plunged to just 14,115 in 1930 and continued to drop during the 1930s.³⁰ Therefore, while the Texas “army” of migrant workers reached an estimated three hundred thousand at the height of the season in the late 1920s, Border Patrol officers reported apprehending only a small fraction of the number of workers needed for the region’s seasonal harvests. Still, the long life of Spinnler’s complaint indicates that the Border Patrol’s policing of Mexican immigrants had created a powerful yet contested institution in the borderlands by introducing a new regime of authority over the region’s labor supply.

Mexicanos also contested the authority and attentions of Border Patrol officers. Although Border Patrolmen carried enormous authority in their jobs as armed immigration law-enforcement officers, Mexicanos did not always quietly submit to the officers’ demands. Retired Patrol Inspector E. J. Stovall told the story of a time when he quickly assessed the limits of his authority according to the immediate context of his work. One day in 1928, explained Stovall, he was patrolling alone near San Elizario, Texas, when he decided to drive through town. “San Elizario was this little Mexican town on the Rio Grande,” said Stovall, who remembered that when he got into town that day he saw a Mexicano “come out from behind the bank of the drainage ditch and then duck back.”³¹ Stovall admitted to knowing the man but stopped the car and asked him, “What do you have there in your bosom?”³² The man reached into his shirt pocket and “pulled out two bottles of beer and put them down on the bridge and broke them, so we wouldn’t have any evidence.”³³ Reflecting upon the incident, Stovall wondered, “Why I didn’t pull out my gun and fire at that Mexican. I don’t know. I don’t know why.”³⁴ Instead of reaching for his gun and firing, Stovall fled. “I got in my car and got away from there,” remembered Stovall, because “it was in daylight about one o’clock. If I had pulled my gun and fired there would have been fifty Mexicans around me that quick.”³⁵ According to Stovall, God spared his life that day by “taking charge” of his hands and preventing him from shooting at the Mexicano. Perhaps Stovall instinctively knew that his only immediate supervisor was “this little Mexican town” whose residents may have immediately challenged his actions. All alone in San Elizario, Stovall fled before beginning a battle he could not win. And borderland resident Julio Santos Coy recalled a time when Border Patrol officers were “[yelling] at one person like in the movies when sergeants yell loudly at new recruits three millimeters from their faces.”³⁶ Coy challenged the officers and was warned, “Shut up or you’ll be where he is,” but his opposition to the officers’ aggression is evidence of Mexicano resistance to Border Patrol work.³⁷ Resistance in the moment of interrogation was critical because street-level investigations, examinations, and confrontations were at the heart of Border Patrol work.

TABLE 1 Principal activities and accomplishments of the U.S. Border Patrol for the years ended June 30, 1925–1934

Quite often, the impact of Border Patrol work is measured according to the number of people apprehended or deported each year. While this is a critical indicator of Border Patrol activity, apprehension statistics provide only a partial snapshot of what was occurring in the development of U.S. immigration law enforcement. Each year Border Patrol officers apprehended less than 3 percent of the number of persons they reported having questioned, examined, or investigated during the year. Border Patrol activity, therefore, constructed a broad net of surveillance that far exceeded the product of their police work as captured by the annual apprehension statistics.

In 1925, the eight officers working out of the Del Rio, Texas, station referred 102 people to a U.S. Immigration inspector for suspicion of immigration violations. To refer these 102 people, the Del Rio officers questioned or investigated 32,516 persons. These officers did not conduct 32,516 extensive individual interrogations; rather, they included a variety of interactions in their tally of interrogations. For example, when officers boarded a train and walked through the cabins, they recorded the total occupancy of the train in their tally for persons questioned. In Del Rio in 1925, this amounted to 12,109 people riding on 2,092 trains. Similarly, they included all occupants of the cars that they stopped and questioned. In Del Rio in 1925, this included 20,055 persons riding in 5,599 automobiles. Statistics for the total number of people questioned or investigated by the Border Patrol reflect a broad net of surveillance rather than a specific set of individual interrogations. In the sparsely populated border counties of the Del Rio station, Border Patrol racial profiling practices concentrated the officers’ wide net of surveillance upon the region’s Mexicano workers.³⁸

The Del Rio station’s territory stretched 137 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border across Kinney, Val Verde, and halfway through Brewster Counties. In 1930, the total population of these three counties combined was 25,528, of whom 14,559 (57 percent) were Mexicano.³⁹ In addition to resident populations, there was the seasonal arrival and departure of migrant laborers, linked most closely to the amount of cotton that had to be harvested.

In the 1920s, Kinney, Val Verde, and southern Brewster County farmers were only beginning to raise cotton. Although statistics for the amount of cotton harvested in the three counties in 1925 are not available, in 1924 only 27,970 acres of cotton were planted in Kinney, Val Verde, and Brewster Counties combined.⁴⁰ Using Paul Taylor’s calculation that a good cotton crop would yield 170 lb./acre, and a good picker can pick 200 lb. of cotton per day, it would only require 792 workers to pick all three counties’ cotton in five weeks. The three counties were already home to 2,166 male farm workers who would have performed much of the labor during the cotton harvest, leaving little work for migrant laborers.⁴¹ Compared to the rapid expansion of cotton in areas such as the Lower Rio Grande Valley, Texas, or the Imperial Valley, California, the three counties in the Del Rio station’s territory had few labor needs, and the Del Rio area was not a major beltway for migrant laborers heading north. Therefore, the bodies present and marked for interrogations in the Del Rio station’s territory would rise and fall over the year but hovered around 15,000 Mexicanos. Still, setting the Del Rio station’s 32,516 interrogations beside the estimated 15,000 possible subjects of their work only begins to reveal the impact of Border Patrol police practices upon Mexicano communities in the borderlands.

Gendered racial profiling dropped the number of “suspicious” Mexicans in the Del Rio area to 7,500, if approximately half of the resident Mexican population was male. And, assuming that only half of the Mexican population was over the age of fifteen, the number of suspicious Mexicans would be further reduced to 3,750. Understanding that Del Rio’s officers reported questioning and investigating 32,516 persons within a region that was home to an estimated 3,750 racialized and gendered adult subjects of Border Patrol work reveals that the patrol’s work amounted to police harassment of Mexicano laboring men in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Despite occasional complaints from regional elites such as storeowner E. G. Spinnler and the members of the Hudspeth County Conservation and Reclamation District no. 1, farmers typically appreciated the Border Patrol’s policing of Mexicano workers as a new tool of labor control in the region.

IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT AS LABOR CONTROL

Farmers and ranchers wanted migrants to come and go with the seasons, but they did not want workers to deploy their mobility as a strategy to improve their labor conditions and wages by seeking work elsewhere in the middle of the harvest. In response to the agribusinessmen’s concerns regarding migrant mobility, municipalities placed restrictions upon out-of-state labor contractors and passed vagrancy laws that threatened migrant workers with arrest while en route to new jobs. The power vested within the United States Border Patrol was just another weapon in the arsenal of agribusinessmen who understood the advantages that Border Patrol work presented. As one farmer admitted, “The mexicans are afraid to run off they are afraid of what will be done to them and they don’t know the law. They are afraid to come to town now because of the immigration officers.”⁴² Some regional elites protested Border Patrol intrusions upon their property and, at times, objected to the policing of Mexican laborers. In 1929, for example, a resident of Cameron County, Texas, protested that “our immigration officials are like dog catchers the way they go after the Mexicans.”⁴³ A farmer in Carrizo Springs complained that Border Patrol officers “think their job is to pack a gun and to shoot even if a man is running.”⁴⁴ But others recognized that without Border Patrol surveillance on the county roads and even of their own fields, migrant workers would “leave to go where wages were higher.”⁴⁵ As one farmer explained, “We tell the immigration officers if our mexicans try to get away into the interior, and they stop them and send them back to Mexico. Then in a few days they are back here and we have good workers for another year.”⁴⁶

The Border Patrol’s contributions to the agribusinessmen’s interests in limiting and regulating the mobility of the industry’s primary workforce cannot simply be explained by describing Border Patrol officers as the lackeys of agribusinessmen or as the tools of the capitalist state. Agribusinessmen often had the opportunity and ability to exercise direct influence over the development of Border Patrol practices, but the officers were local men, community members, and workers who maximized and manipulated the project of policing Mexican workers. Dogie Wright, for example, understood the interests of local agribusinessmen and utilized his position as a Border Patrol officer to demand respect from local elites. Indicating his authority to police Mexican workers, Dogie explained that “an officer’s job is he’s got to enforce the law.”⁴⁷ The price for flexible enforcement against Mexico’s unsanctioned border crossers was respect for his authority. So long as ranchers “treat me alright. And they always did,” Dogie explained, he was happy to remain flexible in the enforcement of federal immigration restrictions against Mexican workers.⁴⁸ “We used our head. We wasn’t rabid,” recalled Dogie. “It makes a lot of difference right here on the border,” he explained, “ ’cause we can’t be too observant . . . they need labor right here on the border.”⁴⁹ Structured by the political economy of Mexican labor migration to the Texas-Mexico borderlands, Dogie’s strategic approach to U.S. immigration law enforcement reveals the more nuanced dynamics at work when Patrol officers—former tram conductors, auto mechanics, salesmen—extracted dignity, respect, and authority from the region’s social, political, and economic elite by selectively policing the region’s primary low-wage labor force.

The Border Patrol’s contributions to the interests of agribusinessmen and ranchers were also a matter of self-protection because upsetting relations with local farmers and ranchers would have estranged officers from a critical source of assistance in the backcountry regions where Border Patrol officers worked alone, in pairs, or, at most, in groups of three. In particular, officers depended upon the support of local ranchers and farmers when policing the dangerous intersections of unsanctioned migration and liquor smuggling because, unlike migrant workers, liquor smugglers were typically armed and willing to engage Border Patrol officers to protect and move their loads. Prohibition, therefore, created a context in which protecting the interests of ranchers and farmers afforded the small and scattered force of Border Patrol officers with a crucial network of support.

Patrol Officer Frank Edgell understood the value of maintaining close relations with local ranchers and farmers. A Texan by birth, Edgell was a farmer in Pima County, Arizona, before joining the Border Patrol in 1924. Edgell was assigned to a series of Arizona stations and knew many of the local farmers because of his personal history in the region. Two of his acquaintances were Mary Kidder Rak and her husband, who owned a cattle ranch in the southeastern corner of Arizona. Rak broke the tedium of ranch life by writing about her life and experiences. In 1938, she published Border Patrol. Although Border Patrol is often cited as a text that chronicles the history of the U.S. Border Patrol, it is better understood as an artifact of the close relations between borderland ranchers and farmers and the officers of the U.S. Border Patrol’s greater El Paso District during the 1930s.

Edgell told Rak of the dangers of Border Patrol work and celebrated the critical support provided by local ranchers such as Rak and her husband. For example, in December 1924, Edgell recalled, he had spotted the tracks of a horse in a desolate region near Sasabe, Arizona. Suspicious of off-road traffic in this isolated area, Edgell drove to the nearby Palo Alto Ranch and borrowed a horse.⁵⁰ He followed the tracks and found liquor concealed in a thicket. Crossing the thin line between enforcing U.S. immigration restrictions and policing liquor smugglers, Edgell continued to follow the tracks. Soon he came upon six armed men. Rather than confront the six men, Edgell opted for a distraction. “ ‘I am a Federal Officer,’ he began frankly, taking his tobacco sack from his shirt pocket and rolling a cigarette as he sat at ease on his horse,” wrote Rak, who admired her friend’s bravery and ingenuity. “ ‘I hear that two Chinamen have come across from Mexico and are headed for Tucson, on foot. Have any of you men seen their tracks when you were riding around?’ ” The smugglers answered that they had not seen any Chinese passing through the area, and Edgell’s successful ruse allowed him to avoid a conflict and continue on without incident. Edgell circled back and took a concealed position near the liquor hidden in the thicket. The smugglers were sure to return for their stash. Soon, two of them did. Edgell took them by surprise and placed them under arrest, but he was alone, and the two liquor smugglers had four friends in the area. One of smugglers’ friends approached from a far-off hilltop and quietly prepared to shoot Edgell. Fortunately, explained Rak, Edgell’s borrowed horse alerted him to the man in the distance. Edgell took cover, shot first, and downed the accomplice. Still, there were three other smugglers wandering about the area, and it was only the fortuitous arrival of “a trusted Mexican cowboy” that allowed Edgell to escape.

Together, Dogie Wright’s reflections and Frank Edgell’s anecdote provide unique insight into why the officers of the United States Border Patrol actively policed Mexicans while only meekly attempting to cut off the flow of Mexican workers into the greater Texas-Mexico borderlands. The corridors of migration between Mexico and the southwestern United States were certainly too broad, deep, and embedded for several hundred officers in scattered stations to patrol effectively, but, in addition to the systems of mass labor migration that the farmers and ranchers had lobbied to protect, Border Patrol officers empowered themselves by demanding respect in exchange for selective immigration law enforcement and protected themselves in an era of prohibition by fostering collaborative relationships that allowed them to call upon farmers and ranchers for support in times of need. The Border Patrol’s simultaneously flexible and focused policing of Mexican workers was thus a complicated matter, a deeply social and political tactic of law enforcement that developed within the very specific socio-historical context of race, labor, power, and policing in the greater Texas-Mexico borderlands.

The violence that emerged from the Border Patrol’s narrow enforcement of U.S. immigration restrictions also evolved in the dense social world of policing Mexicans in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. As of February 1925, Border Patrol practice was rooted in each officer’s authority to use physical coercion. When their efforts at U.S. immigration law enforcement intersected with prohibition, Border Patrol coercion escalated into spectacular gunfights that became the backbone of border lore that painted the men of the Border Patrol as a “band of hard-bitten patrol officers.”⁵¹ While these legends of Border Patrol violence appropriately capture the extreme possibilities of Border Patrol work, they overlook the more everyday manifestations of Border Patrol authority, such as the net of surveillance, and elide the ways in which Border Patrol violence was often grounded in community life and folded into the fabric of family relations.

JACK’S REVENGE: THE SOCIAL WORLD

OF BORDER PATROL VIOLENCE

John H. (Jack) and James P. (Jim) Cottingham were brothers. Jack was born in El Paso, Texas, in January 1881, and Jim was born five years later, in Brownsville, Texas, in March 1886. Although Jack was the older brother, he was born with limited mental facilities, and his younger brother watched over him as they grew from childhood to adulthood in the Texas-Mexico borderlands.⁵² In 1900, their father was a farmer in Cameron County, Texas, their mother was a homemaker, and Jack, Jim, and their sisters, Susie and Mary, were in school.⁵³ By 1910, their father had left farming to become a real estate agent in Uvalde, Texas, and Jack and Jim had moved with the family to Uvalde, where they worked as merchants.⁵⁴ By 1920, the family had moved back to Cameron County. Jack and Jim were in their thirties and working as peace officers, and their father had returned to farming. Living with the family in Cameron County was their sister Susie’s new husband, John Peavey. Peavey was a military man who had been born in Missouri but came to the Lower Rio Grande Valley as a child with his family. Between 1920 and 1924, Peavey and the Cottingham brothers joined the U.S. Customs Mounted Guard and then switched over to the U.S. Immigration Service Mounted Guard.⁵⁵ In July 1924, they were transferred into the new U.S. Border Patrol. In the patrol, they all worked closely together, but Jack and Jim were inseparable partners, as Jim spent his days enforcing U.S. immigration restrictions and looking after his brother.⁵⁶

The stories of Jack and Jim tell of two brothers deeply dedicated to one another. They worked together and lived together almost all their lives. Jack, the older and slower brother, never married, but rumor has it that when Jim got married, Jack joined him and his new bride on their honeymoon. Out on patrol, they shared the responsibilities of driving the patrol car. Regardless of where they were, every hundred miles they would trade. Every now and then, one officer recalled, “the time to change drivers would come right in the middle of downtown Mission or McAllen, or where ever . . . so they stopped their car, got out, changed sides, and then went on about their business.”⁵⁷

While on patrol one evening, their partnership almost came to an end when Jim was shot by a Mexican liquor smuggler. Jim shot back and killed the smuggler, but he was critically wounded. The bullet had gone through his arm and chest and punctured his lung. Jack picked up his brother and took him to the hospital. Jim’s wounds were serious, and it was “touch and go for him in the hospital for some time.”⁵⁸ He did recover, but on the day that Jim had been shot and it seemed as if Jack was to be left behind, Jack headed to the border to take vengeance for his wounded brother. As Jim lay in the hospital, “someone came to the bridge from across the river to complain because some one was down there doing a lot of shooting. When they went to investigate, they found Jack. He had gone on down to the river below where Jim had been when he was shot, and just stayed there. He killed every person who came in sight on the Mexican side of the river during that time.”⁵⁹

The story of Patrol Inspectors Jack and Jim Cottingham exemplifies the social entanglements of Border Patrol violence. In the course of enforcing U.S. immigration law, the transitions from investigation to aggression and lethal violence were often embedded in a world of family relations among the local officers of the Texas-Mexico borderlands. What had begun as a matter of immigration law enforcement ended as a matter of brotherhood. Border Patrol violence moved outward and onward through a socially integrated network of officers who sought vengeance against those who had harmed their own. Chief Patrol Inspector Herbert C. Horsley acknowledged this when he wrote to the parents of Patrol Inspector Benjamin T. Hill. Hill had joined the Patrol on May 14, 1929, and sixteen days later he was killed in a shootout with liquor smugglers. As Horsely wrote to Hill’s parents, “We are leaving no stone unturned in our search for the murderer whose hand caused the death of your son, our beloved comrade.”⁶⁰ Adding Hill’s name to the Honor Roll, the list of officers killed in the line of duty, Horsley pledged that “your son’s name will go down in Border Patrol history as a martyr to the cause of justice and as an example of fearlessness in the enforcement of the Laws of our Country.”⁶¹

Hill was the twelfth Border Patrol officer to be killed in the line of duty. By 1933, nine other officers had died.⁶² Each death and injury brought a search for vengeance. For example, on January 20, 1939, Presidio County Sheriff Joe Bunton delivered the body of Gregorio Alanis to his relatives living near Presidio, Texas. The delivery finished a battle that had begun eight years earlier between Alanis, a Mexican American, and officers of the U.S. Border Patrol. During a daybreak raid upon his father’s property, Gregorio shot Patrol Inspector James McCraw just below the left clavicle and then fled to Mexico. Immediately after the shooting, Senior Patrol Inspector Earl Fallis secured a felony warrant against Alanis from the county sheriff “in the event it should become necessary to shoot Gregorio Alaniz, for in all probability he will resist arrest.”⁶³ Time did not distract the officers, and on the evening of January 20, 1939, Patrol Inspector Dorn assigned all his men to a remote trail outside of Presidio, Texas. At 9:30 P.M., in an abandoned house along the trail, Dorn shot and killed Gregorio Alanis.

At the inquest, Justice of the Peace W. G. Young of Presidio County found that “Gregorio Alaniz came to death at the hands of Patrol Inspector Edwin Dorn, who while in the line of duty, commanded Gregorio Alaniz to halt and hold up his hands, Gregorio having refused and put up fight with a razor, the said Edwin Dorn shot him with a shotgun, in self-defence.”⁶⁴ The other man who had crossed with Alanis that night and who had witnessed the shooting “offered no resistance, but while being conveyed to the patrol car which was some distance from the scene of the encounter by Inspectors Dorn and Temple, succeeded in escaping from them.”⁶⁵ Eight years after the shooting of Patrol Inspector McCraw, Gregorio Alanis was dead, the witness was missing, and a brotherhood of law enforcement exonerated Dorn without any further investigation.

The composition of the Border Patrol (an ensemble of white men, including the Spanish or Mexican Americans who fought for whiteness by enforcing U.S. immigration laws against Mexican Browns) and the composition of its subjects (poor, male, brown-skinned Mexicans) structured the vengeance campaigns as struggles between white men and brown men of the borderlands. In the case of Jack Cottingham, Jack headed to the border to exact revenge for the shooting of his brother. With the gunman already dead, Jack’s vengeance followed the Texas Rangers’ tradition of “revenge by proxy.” Jack shot Mexicans, any Mexicans, for the offense of one, and his outburst was implicitly gendered as he randomly subjected Mexicans to a highly masculine and public form of violence, pistol shooting. In the case of Gregorio Alanis, the officers of the patrol pursued a more slow, patient, and temperate approach: they waited eight years to avenge the shooting of Patrol Inspector James McCraw and took their vengeance at the often violent intersection of migration control and liquor interdiction.

In the case of Lon Parker, the murder of a fellow officer sparked years of violence as men who were both kin and colleague to Parker sought vengeance for their losses. Lon Parker was born in Arizona in 1892 and grew up in southern Arizona. In 1924, both Lon and his brother, George W. Parker Jr., joined the United States Border Patrol. By any measure, Lon was popular and epitomized the early Border Patrol officer as a man who was familiar with local customs and highly integrated into local communities. “It was said that if one met a strange man anywhere within a wide radius of the Huachucas, one could say “Good morning, Mr. Parker,’ and be right four fifths of the time,” explained Mary Kidder Rak.⁶⁶

On a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1926, Lon left a family picnic to follow the tracks of two liquor smugglers into the mountains. The smugglers, however, found Lon before he found them, and they shot him when he came into range. Seriously wounded, according to the stories told to Mary Kidder Rak, Lon drew his gun and killed one of the smugglers and his horse. The other smuggler fled, and Lon slowly rode to the nearest ranch for help. Lon barely made it to the ranch, where he fell off of his horse and collapsed against a fence; but nobody was home to help him, and within hours Lon was dead.⁶⁷

A few days later, when Washington, D.C., transplant Alvin Edward Moore reported for duty in Patagonia, Arizona, he was handed the badge of the recently slain Lon Parker and told the story of the smuggler who got away. After Lon’s body was discovered, brother Border Patrol officers followed his trail back into the mountains and found the dead smuggler. It was Narciso Ochoa, a noted liquor smuggler in the area. The officers presumed that it was his brother Domitilio Ochoa who had left the tracks fleeing the area.⁶⁸ Soon after Moore arrived in Arizona, Senior Patrol Inspector Albert Gatlin got a tip that Ochoa was going to try to return to Mexico that night. Gatlin told Moore to find Patrol Inspector Lawrence Sipe (Gatlin’s brother-in-law), Deputy Sheriff Jim Kane (raised with Lon on the same ranch and “ate out of the same beanpot”) and “anybody else he can get” and meet at Campaña Pass along the border. When Moore, Sipe, and Kane arrived, they were met by Gatlin and a “posse of officers from Douglas County.” According to Moore, ranchers were “turning out of bed to patrol the line that night . . . stalking off in the moonlight, rifles ready, prepared to shoot and be shot at.”⁶⁹ During such vengeance campaigns, the line between officers and community members disappeared. Together, they took to the night to avenge the murder of Lon Parker.

It was Lon’s partner, Albert Gatlin, who led the posse. “Lon had been as near to Gatlin as his own brother, and his murder had all but turned him from an impartial officer into an avenging nemesis,” remarked Moore.⁷⁰ Before he stationed the posse at posts along the border, Gatlin gave the officers, ranchers, and farmers who had been deputized for the evening some advice: “All I’ve got to say, men, is if you see anybody comin’ toward the line tonight, yell at ’em in English. And if he don’t answer you in English, shoot!”⁷¹ With that advice, the men took to their posts for the night.

Several hours later, Moore saw a figure move in the dark. When a bullet blasted through his car window, Moore took aim and shot back. After the figure dropped, Moore ran over. It was Ochoa, and he had been shot in the chest. As daylight broke, Moore proudly displayed the wounded Ochoa to Gatlin, who moaned, “It’s too bad you didn’t kill the son-of-a-bitch,” but “you qualify for the Border Patrol.”⁷² Moore was not a local, but in the blood of Domitilio Ochoa, he was baptized as a Border Patrol officer. Ochoa survived the shooting but was sentenced to death by hanging soon after—at least, this was Moore’s tale of Lon Parker.

Ralph Williams joined the Border Patrol long after Lon had died, but he was related to Lon by marriage and had heard the legends from family and from brother officers. Williams knew that Lon was an uncle to Sheriff Jim Hathaway of Cochise County. Jim grew up with Officers Jean Pyeatt and D’Alibini and had been with them when they fought the Mexicans during recess. When Lon lost his final fight on that mountain trail, Jim vowed, “That smuggler will never die a natural death.”⁷³ Two years later, Jim found the man he believed had killed Lon, and “in the middle of the night with that boy, he eliminated him. Him and that guy who was riding shot-gun for him.”⁷⁴ According to Williams, two men were dead for the murder of Lon Parker, when only one was accused of fleeing the scene. Still, according to the legend of Lon Parker, the pursuit of justice in the name of their brother officer did not stop.

Patrol Inspector Robert Moss had his own version of the story to tell. According to Martin, three men were involved in the murder of Lon Parker. Two of the men were later found “hanging from a tree, right where they had killed him. I don’t know how they got back there, but they were found dead, hanging from a tree.”⁷⁵ Moss believed that he later caught a third accomplice in downtown El Paso. When the man saw Moss and his partner coming, he began to run and “started screaming in English ‘Don’t let them kill me.’ ” The man must have known that Patrol Inspector Gatlin had long ago set English as the code for not getting shot by the Border Patrol for the murder of Lon Parker. He too was sent to jail.

All together, the legends of Lon Parker tell of seven men dead and one in jail after a Sunday afternoon in 1926. Lon and Narciso were the first to die. Then, after one man fled the scene, a posse shooting and jury hanging, a dual nighttime elimination, two mountain lynchings, and a final El Paso apprehension followed. The legend tells of violence that was dispersed but not random. Patrolmen serving as officers of the state, brothers of the deceased, and men of the community exacted compensation from Mexicano men for the murder of Lon Parker. The legends suggest that in many ways and on many nights, Border Patrol violence was used to exact personal vengeance and defend community interests. In the battles that ensued between Border Patrol officers and Mexicanos, schoolyard clashes were replayed between grown men, but the white boys who had become Border Patrol officers had gained the authority of the state. As immigration law-enforcement officers, their violence carried new meaning by unfolding in the field in which illegality was being defined. When Border Patrol officers shot, killed, arrested, hung, eliminated, or otherwise brutalized Mexicanos, the violence that had so long defined the differences between whites and Mexicans in the borderlands—those of conquest, land ownership, employment, and so on—became inscribed within the violence that marked the differences between being legal and illegal.

But the legend of Lon Parker must be read as a matter of both fact and fiction. As historian Alexandra Minna Stern has observed, Border Patrolmen of the 1920s and 1930s actively embraced, among other things, a “primitive masculinity” whereby they forged their institutional identity in the image of frontier cowboys and other pioneering conquerors of the American West, namely, the Texas Rangers.⁷⁶ Such notions elided the complex personal and employment histories of the early officers—the tram drivers, the mechanics, and the Texas Rangers included—but it was a powerful narrative that officers carefully projected to one another and to the world around them. Whether or not their predecessors had actually engaged in the exploits that comprised the legends of Lon Parker, they spent years swapping stories of having brought a more primitive and manly form of justice to some smuggler, some night, at the hands of some Patrol inspector. The legends of Lon Parker were a form of cultural production in which Border Patrol officers defined themselves as inheritors of a masculine and highly racialized renegade tradition of violence in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

The life, career, and celebrated lethality of Patrol Inspector Charles Askins Jr. was another source of bravado for the early officers. Askins is heralded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest gunfighters. At the time of his death in 1999, a hesitant but admiring obituary in the gun-enthusiast magazine American Handgunner described Askins as a “stone cold killer. For those of us who knew him, there was just no gentler way to put it.”⁷⁷ Askins himself listed his official body count at “Twenty seven, not counting [blacks] and Mexicans.”⁷⁸

Askins was not from the borderlands. He was born in Nebraska and grew up in Oklahoma before moving to Montana, where he took a temporary job fighting fires in Flathead Forest.⁷⁹ He then moved down to New Mexico, where he again worked fighting fires, this time on the Jicarilla Indian reservation. When fire season ended, he worked in logging camps. By 1929, he was working full-time as a forest ranger in the Kit Carson National Forest. In 1930, Askins’s friend, George W. Parker Jr. recruited him to the U.S. Border Patrol. Parker had boasted of “a gunfight every week and sometimes two.”⁸⁰ Always in search of a gunfight, Askins “succumbed to the glowing reports from my amigo Parker who was having a hell of a good time in the Border Patrol.”⁸¹ Stationed in El Paso, Texas, Askins had plenty of opportunities to do battle with contrabandistas attempting to bring liquor into the United States. Askins disagreed with Prohibition—“an ill-fated attempt to force the thirsty American public to give up John Barleycorn,” as he described it—but liquor control presented him with the opportunity to engage in the “sport” of human hunting.⁸²

Askins recounted his life of guns, violence, and immigration law enforcement in his autobiography, Unrepentant Sinner. Recalling his first day on the job as a Border Patrol officer, Askins explained that there was “no training school for recruits. . . . I was handed a badge and since I had my own shooting irons I did not draw the old .45 Colt Model 1917 nor one of the next to worthless Enfield rifles.”⁸³ With his own weapon and a U.S.-issued Border Patrol badge, Askins headed out for his first “tour of duty.” That evening, at about 9:30 P.M., Patrol Inspectors Jack Thomas and Tom Isbell “ran into an ambush and killed a smuggler.” Askins had not been at the fight, but he arrived soon after and helped to collect the body of the dead contrabandista.“I was enthralled, I’ll tell you!” exclaimed Askins, “I hadn’t fired a shot but I’d been close to the smell of gunpowder and I thought, ‘Boy, this is for me!’ ”⁸⁴

Askins eagerly pursued gunfights with the smugglers and reveled in the Border Patrol’s besting of the contrabandistas. He estimated that while Border Patrol officers killed five hundred smugglers between 1924 and 1934, the Border Patrol’s Honor Roll listed only twenty-three officers lost in the process.⁸⁵ Askins so enjoyed the sport of battling the liquor smugglers that he seemed to forget the primary function and authority of the United States Border Patrol. “Actually the primary job of the Border Patrol was not alcohol at all but illegal aliens,” he said.⁸⁶ “The BP was part of the Immigration Service and, believe it or not, was part of the Department of Labor.”⁸⁷

When Askins did engage in immigration law enforcement, his methods were rough. “I was really in favor of banging a suspect over the ears with a sixshooter and then asking him when he crossed out of Mexico,” explained Askins, “This I found reduced the small talk to a few syllables and got a confession in short order.”⁸⁸ Although he was transferred from the El Paso station after the district director read one too many gunfight reports that included his name, Askins believed that his chief patrol inspector sanctioned his excess and aggression because “only those jazbos who had not been raised along the border, were not happy with this system.”⁸⁹

Over the years, Askins was promoted for his enthusiasm, expertise, and knowledge in firearms. First, he was tapped to organize a pistol team. Under his tutelage, the Border Patrol Pistol Team won multiple regional and national competitions. While Askins routinely complained about the average patrolman’s inexperience with guns, the success of the Border Patrol Pistol Team helped brand the organization as an outfit of straight shooters. In 1937, Askins was appointed as the firearms trainer at the Border Patrol Training School in El Paso, Texas, boasting that this position made him the highest paid officer in the U.S. Border Patrol. That Askins not only survived but prospered in the patrol during the 1930s is particularly significant because it was an era of reform in federal law enforcement.

In 1929, widespread concerns regarding crime and crime control, focused on issues emerging from Prohibition, prompted President Herbert Hoover to establish the National Committee on Law Observation and Enforcement, popularly known as the Wickersham Commission. The Wickersham Commission assessed the causes of crime, concentrating on the rise of organized crime and efforts to stem liquor consumption and trafficking, and examined the many problems of enforcing Prohibition. As the Wickersham Commission examined the enforcement of Prohibition, it uncovered patterns of police corruption and brutality that exposed all arms of federal law enforcement to increased scrutiny.

In 1930, the Department of Labor began to investigate corruption and excessive violence within the Border Patrol by compiling a list of all criminal charges that had been filed against Border Patrol officers since July 1, 1924.⁹⁰ The officers had been convicted of everything from murder to speeding. Then, in 1933, the Department of Labor reorganized the Immigration Service and Naturalization Service by forming the joint Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and attempted to clean out the Border Patrol by firing all officers and rehiring them on a temporary basis. To secure a permanent position with the Border Patrol, the officers had to appear before a board of officials from the Department of Labor and the Immigration Service, popularly remembered as the Benzene Board. Dogie Wright explained that the board’s function was “to cut out the men who were doing a lot of gun fighting, too prone to use their guns.”⁹¹ Some were removed, but many of the officers, including Charles Askins, made it through.

As suggested by Askins’ retention, the impact of the Benzene Board was limited. The country was in the depths of the Great Depression, and jobs were hard to come by. The board made a quick pass over Border Patrol personnel, but even someone as unrepentant as Charles Askins must have spoken wisely and judiciously before the Benzene Board. Further the board depended upon local law-enforcement systems to expose and document cases of corruption and brutality. However, as in the case of Gregorio Alanis, local law enforcement typically buried incidents of Border Patrol violence.

Just a few months before the Benzene Board began, the death of Miguel Navarro exemplified how local law enforcement concealed Border Patrol violence. On August 18, 1932, two patrol inspectors and a special state ranger heard that some liquor smugglers were going to try to cross the border illegally that evening at the Las Flores crossing near La Feria, Texas. At around 9 P.M., they hid behind a tree and waited for the smugglers to cross. The inspectors had been waiting about forty-five minutes when they “saw three men carrying something on their shoulders . . . from the direction of the river.”⁹² When the smugglers got within fifty feet of the officers, Patrol Inspector John V. Saul stepped out from behind the tree and told the men to halt. Two of the men—Anselmo Torres, a U.S. citizen, and José Sandoval, a Mexican national—stopped and raised their hands. The third smuggler, a U.S. citizen and resident of Mercedes, Texas, named Miguel Navarro “half turned and threw his right hand to his body reaching under the sack he had across his left shoulder,” according to Saul, who was “sure he [Navarro] was drawing a gun and fired.”⁹³ Navarro fell to the ground, shot in the leg. With the help of the “other two Mexicans,” the officers loaded Navarro into the back of their car and drove him to the nearest hospital in Mercedes before they took the other two men to the jail in Weslaco, Texas. The officers then returned to the scene of the shooting with their chief patrol inspector, a U.S. Customs officer, at least two deputy sheriffs of Hidalgo County, and the assistant supervisor of the Customs Border Patrol.⁹⁴

At daylight, the officers “began searching for a gun which we believed must be there for we were certain the Mexican wounded had attempted to draw one.”⁹⁵ Saul depended upon his brother officers to exonerate him of excessive force by locating Navarro’s gun. After a short search around the “pool of blood there on the road where the Mexican fell,” one of the deputy sheriffs called out, “Here it is,” and “picked up a 32 double-action revolver . . . about five or six feet from where the Mexican fell.”⁹⁶ The officers passed the gun around for inspection and agreed that it was the one carried by Navarro. With no further investigation, the deputy sheriff’s discovery of the gun allowed the Border Patrol to find Saul’s shooting of Navarro justifiable and close the case.

Within a few days, Navarro died from the gunshot wound. During the external investigation by local law-enforcement authorities, the sheriff assured the Border Patrol that he was “entirely satisfied the matter was a justifiable homicide and that they [saw] no reason . . . to investigate or proceed with the matter any further.”⁹⁷ The local justice of the peace followed suit and declared that “the deceased came to his death from shock and hemorrhage caused by a bullet wound inflicted on him while resisting lawful arrest with a deadly weapon.”⁹⁸ In the end, Miguel Navarro—the “Mexican” born in Mercedes, Texas—was dead, and Patrol Inspector Saul was exonerated without further inquiry.

Quick exonerations by a brotherhood of local and state officers shielded the men of the Border Patrol from the potentially less sympathetic scrutiny of a federal grand jury or even the Benzene Board. Such impunity fortified the localized structure of Border Patrol operations. Still the broader effort to professionalize federal police practice during the 1930s did prompt the establishment of the Border Patrol Training School (BPTS) in 1937, which brought a new level of uniform training into the Border Patrol project.

THE BORDER PATROL TRAINING SCHOOL

The BPTS was actually the expansion of a training program first developed in 1935 by the chief patrol inspector of the El Paso District, Herbert C. Horsley, and his supervisor, district director of the Immigration Service in El Paso, Texas, Grover C. Wilmoth. Wilmoth had spent years struggling with a rag-tag group of officers in his district. He repeatedly issued circulars requiring officers to wear their uniforms, to stop drinking, gossiping, and sleeping on the job, to cease their cavorting in Mexican border towns, and to stop over-reaching their authority by conducting random traffic checks. But nobody seemed to listen. The culture of immigration law enforcement in the far-flung offices seemed resistant to his interventions by memo. In February of 1928, for example, Wilmoth found it necessary to recirculate a memo dated September 2, 1924, which asserted that “employees must not while on duty indulge in the use of intoxicating liquors in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, or elsewhere.”⁹⁹ In October 1929, incidents of officers “accept[ing] gifts of small value” prompted Wilmoth to instruct officers as to the “impropriety of any officer or employee of the Immigration Service accepting gratuities of any sort from any alien or from any person in any way interested in the immigration status of an alien.”¹⁰⁰ The next month Wilmoth wrote that “despite frequent warnings . . . certain officers and employees have continued to indulge in useless and harmful talk to outsiders . . . concerning official matters,” and he advised his staff that “upon proof of receipt of a copy of this formal warning, no leniency will be shown one who offends in the respect indicated.”¹⁰¹

In 1930, Wilmoth attempted to forge a measure of uniformity and a culture of professionalism within his district by providing a detailed welcome letter for all new recruits. “You are congratulated on having been selected as a member of the U.S. Immigration Service Border Patrol, which we . . . believe to be the finest law-enforcing agency of the Federal Government,” the letter began.¹⁰² After listing a series of “don’ts”—don’t fail to tell the truth, don’t drink, don’t gamble, don’t grumble, and so forth—the letter explained the Border Patrol’s on-the-ground training process by urging the new recruits to submit themselves to the more experienced officers. “For the next few months your attitude should be that of a student,” advised the letter.¹⁰³ “You should show a desire and willingness to learn this business from officers who have served long and faithfully and who KNOW IT. You may have had excellent training in other lines of police work but bear in mind that you are expected to learn to do things the Border Patrol way.”¹⁰⁴ Wilmoth spoke of a “Border Patrol way” but, as he well knew, the El Paso District was fraught with disorder. From his office in El Paso, Wilmoth had little direct control over Border Patrol officers working in stations spread from Nogales, Arizona, across New Mexico and over to the western edges of the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. There was no consistency or uniformity that amounted to a “Border Patrol way”; rather, there was an assortment of localities that received and trained new recruits, each in their own way. If Wilmoth doubted the disorder in his district, he was reminded in March 1931, when he toured stations along the border and found that officers did not regularly wear their uniforms. “It is a matter of regret for the writer,” explained Wilmoth “that it is again necessary for him thus formally to call attention to the wide-spread disregard of the uniform regulations. He recently noted that some of the officers were on duty without any pretense of wearing the uniform; that some of the uniforms were unbelievably shabby; and that some of the officers, both on and off duty, violated instructions by wearing merely a portion of the uniform.”¹⁰⁵

One decade after the establishment of the U.S. Border Patrol, G. C. Wilmoth attempted to impose order and uniformity on his region by establishing the El Paso District Training School.¹⁰⁶ The first session of the three-month training course was held at the El Paso headquarters on December 3, 1934. During the morning, the trainees received instruction in the Spanish language, immigration law, conduct, rights of search, seizure, evidence and court procedure, firearms, fingerprinting and identification, line patrolling, and equitation. After listening to lectures by instructors such as Charles Askins, who served as the firearms instructor, the trainees spent their afternoons working alongside experienced patrolmen for a ground-level education in the application of U.S. immigration law. On patrol and in the classroom, the new recruits learned from the old-timers how U.S. immigration law was interpreted on a daily basis in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Wilmoth’s efforts to impose uniformity and discipline therefore simply formalized the localization of immigration law enforcement in the El Paso District. Without improving lines of ongoing supervision and training, Wilmoth allowed the old-timers to continue to exert significant control over the development of U.S. Border Patrol practices.

In 1937, the Immigration Service renamed the El Paso District Training School the Border Patrol Training School (BPTS) and began requiring all new recruits, nationwide, to attend. The establishment of the BPTS in El Paso, Texas, represents an important moment in the history of the U.S. Border Patrol. The informalism, disorder, and regionalism that characterized the patrol’s first ten years were certainly reduced by the adoption of a national training program. But the establishment of the BPTS is most remarkable in the ways that it centralized the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the making of U.S. immigration law enforcement.

The year that the BPTS opened, the U.S.-Mexico border was not the epicenter of Border Patrol activity. That year, 325 officers worked along the U.S.-Canada border, while 234 worked along the U.S.-Mexico border; another 34 worked in Jacksonville, Florida, and there was 1 officer in New Orleans, Louisiana.¹⁰⁷ However, requiring all officers to attend the BPTS and to conduct their first patrol activities in the El Paso district forged uniformity and commonality around the particularities of the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Further the establishment of the BPTS in El Paso, Texas, greatly empowered the officers of the turbulent El Paso District to shape the definition of the “Border Patrol way.”¹⁰⁸ The establishment of the BPTS, therefore, was significant for the Border Patrol’s focus on the U.S.-Mexico border, with an area of concentration in the Texas-Mexico borderlands.

Among the first officers to be trained at the BPTS was Harlon B. Carter. Harlon grew up in Laredo, Texas, where the disjointed structure of U.S. immigration law enforcement had once allowed the city’s Mexicano majority and elite to dominate the development of local Border Patrol operations. In 1927, however, Clifford Perkins made an inspection trip to the area and was alarmed by the development of U.S. immigration control in the city. “Laredo was strictly a Mexican town. . . . probably ninety-percent of the people were either Mexican or of Mexican descent,” wrote Perkins, who distrusted the Laredo sector’s ability to enforce U.S. immigration restrictions independently. “The only Anglo on the police force was the chief himself,” which distressed Perkins. During his two-week investigation, Perkins waged a “full-scale housecleaning.” He charged local officials, the chief patrol inspector, and Border Patrol officers in the Laredo station with immigrant smuggling and forced just under half of Laredo’s twenty-eight Border Patrol inspectors and the chief patrol inspector to quit or be fired. Perkins then transferred select Border Patrolmen who had all been Texas Rangers into the Laredo sector because “all were experienced, well-disciplined fighters who knew the country well.”¹⁰⁹

Detailing former Texas Rangers to Laredo was a strategy used to divorce the Border Patrol station from the local Mexican-American political elite. Tension quickly mounted between the ex-Rangers and the Laredo community, particularly the Laredo Police Department. While the Border Patrol enjoyed close relations with the local police in most borderland communities, in 1927 several officers of the Laredo Border Patrol “got in their Model T automobiles and spent about a half hour circling and shooting up the police station.”¹¹⁰ The 1927 cleanup of the Laredo station reflected the limits of Border Patrol disorganization that allowed for local management of immigration law enforcement. Although most local stations developed their own strategies, policies, and procedures, the Laredo station was exempt until the men and the infamously brutal racial violence of the Texas Rangers slashed away at the bonds between the Laredo Border Patrol and local Mexican-American leadership. The cleanup transformed the Laredo Border Patrol into a refuge for white violence within Mexican-dominated Laredo. One of the men who found sanctuary in the U.S. Border Patrol was Harlon B. Carter.