In addition to people moving illegally, authorities expressed concern about goods not being properly taxed. Commerce was one engine that drove the busy pace of border crossings, and customs collection became important on both sides of the line, as each government realized it could profit from people being eager to go back and forth. In 1858, Mexico had established a zona libre along the border of Tamaulipas state, and in 1884 this was extended along the entire frontier. Goods could be imported without duties, but exportation was not exempt, causing a number of problems and leading to Mexico’s terminating the zone in 1905 and replacing it with specific tax exemptions on certain items.103 Around the same time, the U.S. and Mexican governments also decided to establish ports of entry. As a result, smuggling proliferated.104 Dutiable goods, such as cigars and spirits, were often carried across out of the sight of customs officials, or with bribed complicity.
Smuggled articles often included harder substances too. Until 1914, when the Harrison Narcotics Act placed a tax on the importation, production, and manufacture of opium and coca, these drugs were not illegal.105 The tax pushed the buying and selling of these substances underground, though their actual use remained legal. It was a lucrative trade: by 1924, a $35 ounce of morphine sourced in Mexico could be sold in Los Angeles for $100.106
The growing border towns soon became targets of moral reformers in the United States. Campaigners against alcohol, narcotics, gambling, and prostitution had made great strides within the United States, culminating in the prohibition of alcohol in 1920, but this stopped at the border. For people who lived on the southern frontier, a drink was never far away. This fact rankled morality campaigners, but it was a boon for Mexican officials. Mexico decided to tax these vices and so raise revenue from the people from the United States who were now forced to head south for a tipple. Tijuana was perhaps the most famous vice district of this time, growing from an outpost of around four hundred people to a thriving gambling mecca, where casinos, boxing, and horse-racing, coupled with a steady stream of alcohol, provided popular—and profitable—entertainment for U.S. visitors. The town was scarcely recognizable as the small village it had been. In 1928 the grand Agua Caliente hotel and casino opened, its $10 million price tag paid for by U.S. investors. Visitors could drink cocktails in its gilt Gold Bar, go for a swim, play golf, or enjoy a bet at the hotel’s dog or horse tracks. The city attracted movie stars from Los Angeles, such as Clark Gable; and mobsters from farther afield, such as Al Capone. Although Tijuana was perhaps the grandest border city of the period, other towns on the southern side of the divide followed its lead and profited from it.107
However, many Mexicans living along the border and its surroundings were upset at the reputation these towns brought the country as a whole, not least because, for the most part, U.S. visitors were doing all of the misbehaving yet claiming such behavior was “Mexican” and that border towns were “lawless.” The casinos were U.S.-owned, and almost all the money spent in these border-town dens of iniquity belonged to people who were not Mexican, leading to growing resentment of this “Americanization.”108
In response to a corresponding rise in smuggling, the United States and Mexico stepped up their patrols of the region. Some of the border crossings on the U.S. side began to shut at night to stop wayward activities—legal or not. In 1924 the government pressed for a nine p.m. closing at the Tijuana and Mexicali crossings, which was later brought forward to six p.m.109 Such restrictions were not popular with consumers or merchants on either side of the border. By the 1930s, however, with the repeal of prohibition, almost all of the crossings returned to opening twenty-four hours a day.110
ALTHOUGH THE UNITED States had felt it necessary to intervene at certain points in the Mexican Revolution, such as after the Punitive Expedition in response to Villa’s Columbus raid, the border was not the most pressing issue of the time. Immigration from elsewhere occupied public discussion to a much greater extent, given that from 1880 until the 1920s, around twenty-four million people had come to the United States, many of them from Southern and Eastern Europe, provoking nativist pressure to limit the numbers of migrants.111 The United States Immigration Commission, known as the Dillingham Commission, met from 1907 to 1911, and its recommendations filtered into legislation that was rolled out in subsequent years. Mexicans, however, were not a target or a priority. Instead, the 1917 Immigration Act focused on Chinese and Japanese people, barring people from a wide swath of Asia, as well as immigrants from Southern Europe, and all manner of others, including “all idiots … persons with chronic alcoholism; paupers; professional beggars … polygamists … anarchists, or persons who believe in or advocate the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States.”112 It was also illegal to contract labor or transport aliens to work without the necessary permission, and barriers to immigration now included literacy tests, a costly $8-a-head tax, and health inspections.
Although the number of Mexican workers in the United States between 1900 and 1910 was not well documented at the time, early estimates put it at around fifty thousand.113 Once the head tax and literacy tests were implemented, documented immigration dropped 40 percent, in part because some people started crossing surreptitiously to avoid the taxes and tests.114 However, the growers in California’s Imperial Valley needed workers, and so after the 1917 act, they, along with railways and mining interests, lobbied the U.S. government to exempt Mexicans from the restrictions, which it did. For many, Mexicans were different from other immigrants, in that they were neighbors crossing by land, coming to work in a place that not so long before had been part of Mexico.115
The exemption to the 1917 act allowed Mexicans to continue to cross the border and work in agriculture, mining, railroads, construction, and factories. The United States’ involvement in the First World War also meant there were extra jobs to fill.116 Undocumented people continued to slip across the Río Grande rather than enter through the checkpoints in the border towns; this suited some employers because of the many rules governing the exemption, including the retention of 25 cents a day of a worker’s wage to ensure there was enough money for his fare back to Mexico once his contract expired. It was often easier for everyone concerned to find a way around the regulations.117 The term “wetbacks” came into use to describe the people who crossed the river—a slur, like the earlier “greaser,” that would become racist shorthand for Mexicans living in the United States.
Another image was also developing, of Mexicans as having a timeless rural, agrarian nature, making them ideally suited to be seasonal field hands for low wages—an idea that persists to the present day. A 1930 article in Nation’s Business, the magazine of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, claimed, “Apparently the Mexicans are especially well adapted to the common labor tasks required in the Southwest; they are fond of outdoor life and rural occupations … they easily enter a nomadic mode of living which permits them to meet the seasonal, migratory demands of southwest agriculture, and they remain in farm occupations more loyally than other groups, the growers say.”118
Mexican immigration rose throughout the 1920s, in part because of the displacement caused by the revolution, coupled with the fact that many industries in Mexico, such as mining, had been damaged or disrupted by the fighting. Prospects in the United States, for the moment, appeared brighter. Alongside this, however, discrimination against Mexicans grew, fed by the pseudoscientific discourse that positioned them as inferior to Anglos, “dirty,” and unable to assimilate to U.S. life. Some of this reflected the economic anxieties of the border region in the 1920s: in Texas, large landowners—regardless of their racial ideas—wanted cheap Mexican labor while smaller farmers and business owners, fearing for their livelihood, wanted Mexicans deported and the border strictly monitored.119
The next significant change in immigration law was the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which placed quotas on “undesirable” groups while making exceptions for Mexicans and people from “contiguous countries,” includ
ing Canada, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. For everyone else—though this did not include people from what was called the “Asiatic Barred Zone”—the annual quota was set at 2 percent of the number of people of that nationality already residing in the United States as reported in the 1890 census, with a minimum quota of one hundred people.
In 1924, the government also set aside $1 million to establish a Border Patrol. Small outposts soon dotted the U.S-Mexican frontier, as the initial 472 inspectors started work, a handful of whom were sent to the Canadian border.120 One of the first posts on the southern border was in Del Rio, Texas, where two men were put in 1924. They were mounted on horses, receiving extra pay if they brought their own steeds, though patrol cars were introduced by 1926. The men in Del Rio were responsible for covering about two hundred miles of the Río Grande area, most of which was ranches and farmland.
One of the initial Del Rio Border Patrol guards recalled his early days: “No one knew what we were supposed to do to or how we were supposed to do it. … So we just walked around and looked wise.”121 They soon figured it out; the Del Rio sector reported that in 1925 its officers—by then there were eight—had questioned or investigated 32,516 people in an area that had a population in 1930 of just 25,528, of whom 14,559 were Mexican. To reach such figures, they massaged their numbers through such techniques as counting the total number of passengers in a train or car as being “interrogated” as they cast a wide net of surveillance.122
By 1929 at least six men with Spanish surnames were on the Border Patrol roster. While the Anglo officers were often from working-class backgrounds, the Mexican-American members tended to be from the middle and even upper classes of their community. Because of their status, they had what one historian termed “uncertain access” to a sort of official whiteness, which allowed them to take up roles in bodies like the Border Patrol, policing their own people.123
SOME MEXICANS FOUND relief from the pressures of the border in other parts of the United States. In New Orleans, Mexicans were able to claim a degree of “whiteness” in a way that was not possible in the Southwest.124 With its access to the Gulf ports of Mexico and its long history of connection through trade, the city had offered an alternative for people looking to leave revolutionary Mexico. By the 1920s, Mexicans were the largest group of Latin Americans in New Orleans, though they would later be eclipsed by Cubans.125 Mexicans of all classes came to the Gulf region, and while the middle class settled in New Orleans, workers were lured to the cotton fields of the Mississippi delta, where they were paid more than they would have been in Texas or California.126 Mexicans in the Gulf and delta region were able, unlike African-Americans, to send their children to white schools and to marry whites with little interference from the law.127
Florida, however, continued to present problems for other Spanish-speaking people. The Afro-Cubans in Tampa were under increasing pressure from Jim Crow laws by the turn of the century, and the larger Cuban community was driven further apart because of these laws. Not long after their arrival in the late nineteenth century, Cubans in Tampa had organized mutual-aid societies, such as El Círculo Cubano and the Centro Español. Through membership dues, these organizations provided a number of social services, such as paying for medical care, funeral costs, and other necessities, as well as staging activities such as dances and drama performances. By the early 1900s, the local authorities in Florida decided that dark-skinned Cubans—anyone who looked “black”—had to form their own distinct social organizations. They were forced to leave groups like El Club Nacional Cubano, which had been concerned with independence and, until that point, was open to members of all hues. Dark-skinned Afro-Cubans were no longer permitted by the rules of Jim Crow Florida to access “white” mutual-aid societies, so they had to set up their own, which they did in Tampa in 1904: the Sociedad La Unión Martí-Maceo, which merged two other Afro-Cuban groups. Membership photos from the early 1900s show men of varying shades of skin tone, continuing to blur a color line that white Florida wanted to imagine was distinct.
The anger in the Cuban community lasted far after this segregation was first enforced. A writer working on a Works Progress Administration (WPA) guide to Tampa in the 1930s noted: “Since negroes in Cuba are accorded social and economic equality with whites, Cuban negroes in Florida are naturally dissatisfied with the inferior position which they must accept when they come to live here.”128 Being lighter-skinned, however, was no guarantee of easy assimilation. Another WPA report described Ybor City as “a Latin community where a large number of the inhabitants have not become American citizens.” The anonymous writer observed: “The government … has done very little toward making the Cuban people … feel that they are Americans. Even many of the second and third generations of the Cubans, although born in the United States, and by right of the constitution, Americans, are not considered as Americans by many of the English-speaking Americans.”129 Through their enforced segregation, Cubans were experiencing a different type of “Americanization.”
Evelio Grillo, an Afro-Cuban who grew up in the Ybor City of this time, said that in Florida “black Cubans went to a neighborhood … inhabited by black Americans and a scattering of poor whites” while lighter-skinned Cubans “had a much wider range of choices.”130 His parents worked in a cigar factory where “black Cubans and white Cubans worked side by side,” but this intermingling did not extend outside the workplace.131 “I don’t remember playing with a single white Cuban child,” he recalled.132
The issue of whiteness dragged on through the 1920s, while the United States grappled with immigration. Who was deemed “white”—and therefore a U.S. citizen—was still unresolved. People from India and Japan were still considered not quite “Caucasian,” as described by the Supreme Court, yet they were not black. They were “nonwhite.”133 On the back of this, renewed efforts by nativist groups, judges, and politicians challenged naturalization of Mexicans on the grounds that they were also in this nonwhite category, implying that Mexicans should be denied citizenship.134
OBSERVING THE MANY changes to south Texas in the 1920s and ’30s was a young Mexican-American woman named Jovita González. She had been born in 1904, in Roma, Texas, a border town, though her family later moved to San Antonio. Her father’s family was Mexican, and her mother’s included Tejano landowners reaching back at least five generations.135 At a time when most women did not pursue higher education, González earned a degree in Spanish from Our Lady of the Lake College in 1927 and went on to complete a master’s degree in history at the University of Texas at Austin three years later.
Of special interest to her was local folklore, and with the encouragement of academic mentors she gathered up Texan histories and stories. González became the president of the Texas Folklore Society in 1930, when it was dominated by Anglos in full thrall to the romanticized versions of the state’s history, as embodied in the works of one mentor, the writer J. Frank Dobie. González, however, published work that was unearthed from the soil of the present rather than spun out of the mists of time, and received a Rockefeller grant for her efforts.136
In her master’s thesis, Social Life in Cameron, Starr, and Zapata Counties, she described a place where “Anglo-Americans … look down upon the Mexicans of the border counties as interlopers, undesirable aliens, and a menace to the community.”137 Her work attempted to document these communities, as well as to restore their place within Texas, pointing out that “the majority of these so-called undesirable aliens have been in the state long before Texas was Texas.”138 González’s pioneering work was unsparing about what she observed, such as the growing segregation, under which Tejanos “resent the fact that in some of the Valley towns, Mexicans are not admitted at cafes, picture shows, hotels, and bathing beaches.” She conducted fieldwork, speaking to residents of the border counties. One interviewee in Edinburg, Hidalgo County, summed up the complexity of Anglo-Mexican relations:
We were wholly unprepared, politically, educationally, and socially w
hen the avalanche of Americans fell upon us. … And it is our place and our duty now to learn American ways, to send our children to American schools, to learn the English language, not that we are ashamed of our Mexican descent, but because these things will enable us to demand our rights and to improve ourselves. … Americans are egoists, and provincial, they overestimate their power and doing so are unwilling to see any other way but their own. It is to our advantage then, to educate ourselves in American institutions, to learn the English language and to exercise our rights as citizens.139
Around the time González was putting together the history of her region, the wider public’s strange love affair with “Spanish” culture intensified. Not long before, a frustrated Spanish journalist named Julián Juderías popularized the term “Black Legend” (leyenda negra) in a 1914 book, which finally gave form to the nebulous prejudice that Spaniards in Europe and, by extension, Hispanics in the Americas had been shrouded by for more than four hundred years. To him, this legend was “not a thing of the past, but something that influences the present.”140 He wrote that the legend continued to suggest an “inquisitorial, ignorant, fanatical” Spain that was “an enemy of progress.”141
Prejudicial ideas die a slow death, and as they die they can give life to other complex notions that are likewise untethered from historical realities. In the United States, the imagined “Spanish” culture that emerged in California around the 1880s began to move east. What evolved was a vision of a “de-Mexicanized” and pseudo-Spanish people that Anglos now wanted to “discover,” served up with a large dollop of nostalgia. This recasting of the past created an image of a people who were absorbed through conquest but whose “culture” rendered them “other.” By creating and promoting the Southwest on the basis of this mythical past, the Anglo world was able to control the image of Hispanics in the region, reducing their experience to a form of tourist spectacle. Yet real Mexicans were still in this landscape, relegated to the fields and other labors.142 Their everyday experiences, as well as those of Mexican-Americans, were being written out of history, the prejudices and discriminations replaced by an imagined heritage. These extremes—romantic and exclusionary—developed in the context of rising immigration, nativist agitation, lynchings, and continued discrimination.
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