Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez
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