Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez
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