When the Border Patrol was established, federal officials desired a national and professional police unit that eschewed the hooliganism of the Texas Rangers but was nonetheless capable of efficacious control. Added to a congressional appropriations bill that was part of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, the Border Patrol was officially established on May 28, 1924.75 Its creation was motivated by the same eugenic arguments that pegged the quotas of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act to the 1890 census. Unable to secure a ban on Mexican immigration, eugenicists such as Johnson, Laughlin, and Box essentially compromised with Southwestern growers, who vehemently opposed any federal interference with their seasonal labor supply.
With a starting budget of one million dollars, this “additional land-border patrol” was formed to defend the “long, wide-open stretches of unguarded border between the ports where inadmissible aliens could readily enter the United States.”76 A year after its formation, the Border Patrol was given the power to arrest, without warrant, any “alien” suspected of entering the country illegally or violating federal law, and to board and search vessels used to transport “aliens” or material contraband.77 In 1925 the Border Patrol was granted an initial force of 472. After nearly doubling to 875 men five years later, with the hiring constraints of the Great Depression, the patrol still had fewer than one thousand employees in 1934.78
Created during a decade characterized by purity campaigns against alcohol, venereal disease, and prostitution, the Border Patrol embodied the era’s fixation on boundary maintenance. Its preferred image was one of reform, efficiency, and technological prowess. Notably, whereas only a common badge had identified previous immigration inspectors and the Texas Rangers, standardized military uniforms and a federal badge exteriorized the Border Patrol’s sweeping authority. With its powers of search, seizure, and arrest, it also possessed official police prerogatives that its predecessor agencies had lacked. As Johnson clarified in a 1926 congressional hearing: “Our border patrolman arrests when he sees a violation of the law exactly like the policeman. He also has the right to serve any warrant that has been issued, exactly as a police officer may do, or as a marshal or deputy. This is the way we made that law work.”79
Entrusted with maintaining the “first line of defense” against an “army of aliens,” the Border Patrol played a critical role in the delimitation of the northern and southern boundaries.80 In a fashion akin to that of the USPHS, the Patrol helped to racialize the United States by enforcing the stringent quotas of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act and by transforming Mexican Americans and border-crossing Mexican laborers who had migrated circularly for years into “illegal aliens” and suspected criminals. In part, this was the outcome of the application of visa requirements, literacy tests, head taxes, and other administrative protocol to Mexicans, who had previously been waived from such demands, and of punitive immigration laws, as, for example, illegal entry became a misdemeanor (and if repeated, a felony).81 Not surprisingly, the Border Patrol’s execution of these laws led to a steep climb in deportations. In 1920, 2,762 people were expelled from the United States; in 1925, this figure had quadrupled to 9,495; and in 1930, it had climbed to 38,796.82 Mexicans bore the brunt of accelerating deportations, at rates higher than all Europeans combined: from 1,751 in 1925 to more than 15,000 in 1929, figures that do not include the 8,000 to 10,000 Mexicans expelled voluntarily each year after 1927.83 In addition, the nebulous legal status of Mexicans made them particularly vulnerable to deportation. Mexicans could be categorized as nonresident aliens (usually migrating across the border for seasonal labor with the intent of returning), commuters recognizable to immigration inspectors or carrying documentation, or American citizens certified by a passport or other identification. If they lacked papers or looked “suspicious” to patrolmen, Mexicans could easily be classified as “aliens” subject to removal. Once combined with low morale, a high turnover rate, and uneven knowledge of immigration law among patrolmen, the slipperiness of Mexicans’ legal status helped to promote an environment of suspicion and uncertainty in the borderlands, in which the Border Patrol arbitrarily used and often abused its authority.84
When out scouting, the Border Patrol relied on new technologies to enhance its surveillance capabilities. Defending the border, for example, meant not just guarding the one-dimensional line that stretched from the Gulf to the Pacific Coast but also developing a “defense in depth” model that conceived of the landscape as a series of interlocking zones and entry as a journey that terminated only at the immigrant’s final destination.85 As the founders of Texas’s Marfa Sector wrote, “to accomplish its mission the Border Patrol is strategically deployed over a wide area to achieve maximum coverage,” an arrangement that allowed for close linkages between headquarters and patrolmen via “short wave radio and other means of communication.”86 This mental mapping, which elongated the boundary line in adjoining sections from El Paso all the way to Los Angeles, extended a racialized logic and practice of surveillance into the borderlands at large. It was this cartographical vision that enabled patrolmen to move swiftly from border into interior cities—such as San Antonio, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles—and deport Mexicans in large numbers during the repatriation campaigns of 1929 and 1930 and Operation Wetback in 1954.
If these modalities of spatial control were seen as state of the art, patrolmen also honed practices of detection that they viewed as similar to the ancestral skills of Native Americans. Describing the techniques patrolmen used to pursue and apprehend “aliens,” the INS deputy commissioner wrote in 1934, “There is one angle to the work of the Border Patrol which links it with the Indian fighters of the early days. The science of tracking is constantly called into use by inspectors. Broken reeds on a river bank may tell the plain story of the landing of a smuggler’s boat.”87 By developing an instinctual connection to the Southwestern topography, its flora and fauna, inhabitants, and weather patterns, patrolmen revived and perfected their latent primordial capacities for hunting and capture. Many patrolmen referred to this mode of perception as a “sixth” or “super sense” and claimed that they had learned it, either directly or derivatively, from Southwestern Indians.88 In one book dedicated entirely to the topic, an ex-patrolmen profiled one of California Imperial Valley’s “greatest trackers.” Once a dude rancher, Apache fighter, and reservation range rider, Fred D’Albini led Border Patrol tracking efforts on the Arizona and California borderlands in the 1920s and 1930s. Albini claimed that his mentor had been a Papago Indian. According to Albini, to be an effective tracker “you have to have good eyes” to read clues such as gum wrappers, barely discernible footprints, and trampled vegetation.89 Illustrating the assumptions about the comportment of nonwhite bodies that underpinned the perception of the first generation of patrolmen, Albini averred that a fugitive’s nationality could usually be ascertained because “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 off it—Indians will do that too. Whites and blacks ordinarily put their feet down flat.”90
By appropriating the primordial “sixth sense” of Papagos or Apaches, the Border Patrol simultaneously symbolically erased the presence of living Indians in the borderlands and tied the maintenance of the nation’s boundaries to a powerful story of origins. In this sense, it shared much with the Boy Scouts and the Seton Indians, founded in the early twentieth-century to mold young boys into maturity through scouting, nature study, wilderness trips, and survival games.91 By “playing Indian,” patrolmen brought out the childlike, natural, and intuitive sides of themselves, which could then be harnessed in the name of border control.
If the mythology of the Border Patrol revolved around renditions of the past that romanticized the Vanishing Indian, it was also driven by myopic visions of the nation’s racial and demographic future. Like the eugenicist Goethe, who told the morality tale about mating gone awry at the hands of a typhus-ridden Mexican maid, patrolmen and their superiors were charged with pr
otecting the “American” family-nation from potential contamination from alien outsiders. As one military expert said when presenting his plan for an enlarged Border Patrol to Congress in 1926, “undesirable aliens often become public charges and must be cared for by our pauper institutions and insane asylums . . . many are a further menace to the health of the communities in which they settle.”92 For many patrolmen this meant embracing the hero-image of the lone ranger who risked his life against all odds to save others. Many recruits were attracted to the Border Patrol because they viewed it as another incarnation of the rough and tumble Texas Rangers or the Rough Riders that Teddy Roosevelt had led up Cuba’s San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War. In this sense, if the USPHS and Pierce, in particular, can be interpreted as bringing colonial medicine from island and isthmus to the U.S.-Mexican border, then many of the Border Patrol’s first members should be seen as embodying a cowboys-and-Indians primitive masculinity born out of imperial conflict and conquest in the U.S. West.93 The so-called grandfather of the Border Patrol, Jefferson Davis Milton, one of the original Texas Rangers, epitomized this macho persona. After chasing Apaches, Milton resigned from the Rangers in the 1880s to work as a deputy sheriff, a customs inspector, El Paso’s chief of police, and a Wells Fargo messenger. In 1904 he joined the Immigration Bureau, was presented a badge, and soon became known in the lore as the “one man Border Patrolman.” Personifying gritty ruggedness and bravado, Milton “was known throughout the great Southwest for his many feats of derring-do” and recognized by his admirers as a “real hombre.”94
While this legacy attracted a mix of cowpunchers, ranch hands, war veterans, and civil servants to the Border Patrol, it also troubled many of the agency’s officers, especially those concerned with presenting an image of sober professionalism. As soon as the Patrol was established, both immigration officers in the field and their superiors in Washington embarked on a campaign to shift the authority of surveillance from the local to the federal level. Clifford Perkins, who helped to design the organizational scheme of the Border Patrol and wrote a memoir about his career, directed attempts to temper the unruliness of many patrolmen.95 Responding in part to denunciations that trigger-happy patrolmen were arbitrarily arresting Mexican American citizens and unlawfully entering homes, Perkins traveled from El Paso headquarters in the late 1920s to take stock of the Laredo and San Antonio branches. In these districts, a large percentage of patrolmen were ex-Rangers.96 Perkins explained that the professionalization of such men was a trying and sometimes unsuccessful endeavor: “It took considerable indoctrinating to convince some of the inspectors they were not chasing outlaws, and we never did get it out of the heads of all of them, for we had to discharge several for being too rough.”97 Nonetheless, Perkins asserted that through repeated inculcation of the need for hierarchy, self-discipline, and adherence to the agency’s motto “Honor First,” he was eventually able to turn coarse frontiersman into well-mannered soldiers. From the Border Patrol’s inception, this makeover was linked to practicing marksmanship and daily calisthenics. In 1934, when the Border Patrol Academy was established in El Paso, more involved screening and preparation of recruits was put in place.98 Perkins boasted that it required just two years of his leadership in El Paso for the district patrol to become a “healthy, coordinated outfit” that inspired “a considerable amount of public confidence.” He claimed that close to a decade after its formation, “the officers were well trained and disciplined; they could be counted on in any tight spot they encountered; generally, they reflected the efforts expended to set up a model of the nationwide, responsible division of the Immigration Service we hoped the Patrol would become.”99
This trend toward professionalization meant that by the 1930s, the exaltation of the patrolman as cowboy-ranger was being overshadowed by the veneration of a tamer type of male hero, the compassionate yet brawny protector. This reorientation fit well with eugenic concerns about the need to enforce immigration laws in order to guarantee the proper boundaries of the nation and the intactness of the white American family. Converging with the nascent discourse of the welfare state, which stigmatized dependency and valorized propagation only of the fit, immigration officials and patrolmen began to cast their activities of seizure, arrest, and deportation in paternalistic terms. It is striking that INS deputy commissioner I. F. Wixon chose to conclude his 1934 instructive tract, “The Mission of the Border Patrol,” by demonstrating compassion for the “honest, industrious alien whose only offense has been his illegal entry into the United States.” Despite this benevolent gesture, however, Wixon went on to claim that although such an “alien” might seem quite innocent, his integration into the country would necessarily lead to disruption and familial disintegration. Speaking hypothetically, Wixon proposed the following scenario: “In the natural course of events, he marries an American citizen, establishes a home, becomes the father of American-born children. Then comes his arrest on deportation charges.”100 Once excluded, this “alien” would be forced to abandon his wife and children, who, in turn, would have no choice but to turn to the largesse of the federal government. In this vision, human sympathy and defense of the nation’s borders were one and the same. It was imperative to debar such interlopers before “they had sunk their roots into this country and given hostages to fortune in the shape of American-born wives and children who would be the main sufferers in the almost inevitable event of their ultimate defection and deportation.”101 By the 1930s the logic of paternal surveillance at play during the Laredo branding incident had developed into one of the core operating principles of the Border Patrol.
The degree to which familial metaphors were mobilized to express the links between patriotism, gender, and race is illustrated by the writings of Anglo border women who corresponded with the Border Patrol. For example, the sister of a patrolman who had been killed in a smuggling shoot-out along the Rio Grande penned the agency a letter in 1929. Referring to the Border Patrol as “the boys,” she thanked her brother’s compatriots for their fraternalism and told them that she could be found praying every night for the “God-fearing men who for the sake of civilization leave your happy homes and loved ones day and night, rain or shine, and go down to that terrible river, trying to uphold and enforce the laws of our country.” Asking God to watch over all the patrolmen, she implored “the boys” to “think of your fathers and mothers, wives and babies, and homes,” and act carefully.102 Similar analogies between patriarchy at home and manliness on “the line” were echoed by Mary Kidder Rak, the wife of an Arizona rancher, in her two popular books on the Border Patrol.103
In 1904, white Irish orphans living with their legal adoptive Mexican parents in the Arizona copper towns of Bisbee and Morenci were forcibly removed by an Anglo posse. This abduction augured the impending solidification of racial lines between Anglos and Mexicans and the shrinking of the ambiguous space of “Latins” often occupied by Spanish, French, and even Slavic residents in the borderlands.104 Two decades after this violent and emotional encounter, the culture of racial division that was emergent in 1900 had hardened into an uneven but pervasive version of Jim Crow segregation. In many parts of the Southwest and California, this process of social differentiation often involved more than just a binary equation. Sometimes it revolved around the triangulation of identities and shifting hierarchies between poor whites, African Americans, and Mexicans.105 At other times it meant pronounced animosity between middle-class and professional Mexican Americans and more recent working-class arrivals from Mexico.106
From the 1910s to the 1940s, the USPHS and the Border Patrol promoted and shaped this complicated process of racialization in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. By making admissibility into the United States dependent on standards of health and cleanliness, the USPHS merged medicalization with the politics of social and racial labeling. This pattern was clearly underway in incipient form in 1916 when Laredo’s Mexicans discovered that passage across a previously open space had become contingent upon a ph
ysical examination and the ink-stamping of their arms. When the typhus quarantine was inaugurated the following year, medicalization along the border became systematic and streamlined. For more than two decades, the quarantine and its accompanying procedures of disinfection and vaccination discursively linked Mexicans with disease and pathology. Nativists and eugenicists repeatedly mobilized the stereotypes that spiraled out of this context in the 1920s and 1930s in an effort to curtail immigration from the south. Furthermore, the quarantine also left its mark, as the external borders of nation became intimate frontiers for Mexican border-crossers whose memories of unidirectional or circular migration came to include humiliation as their naked bodies were showered with chemicals, their hair sheared, and their baggage fumigated and often ruined.107
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