commendations and promotions focused upon officers with “a wide knowledge of people and customs of this vicinity,” who knew “everyone in that part of the country,” or had been “employed practically all of their lives in ranch work in this immediate vicinity.”106 In 1929, for example, of the men who held the leadership positions of senior patrol inspector or chief patrol inspector, at least 87.5 percent were borderlanders before joining the Border Patrol.107 Their concentration was heaviest in the Texas-Mexico borderlands, where 90 percent of the chief patrol inspectors were borderlanders, compared to 42.9 percent in the California subdistricts. In Texas subdistricts, 84.6 percent of senior patrol inspectors were borderlanders, compared to 50 percent in the California subdistricts.
E. A. “Dogie” Wright was one of the benefactors of Perkins’s scramble to hire officers for the U.S. Border Patrol during the 1920s. His presence in El Paso, Texas, and his unemployed status made him quickly available to Perkins. Dogie’s experience as a law-enforcement officer was an additional benefit, given that Perkins preferred to hire men who had served as law-enforcement officers or in the military. Yet such preferences did not always materialize into realities. Extensive research with a 1929 roster of Border Patrol personnel shows that only 28.6 percent of early officers had served in civilian law enforcement or the military before joining the patrol. Border Patrol officers and their early chroniclers spun tales of officers as frontiersmen, military men, and career officers, but historical inquiry suggests that many of the early Border Patrol officers entered with eclectic working-class résumés. Most important, few owned land in the agriculture-dominated borderlands.
Only 24 percent of the officers working along the U.S.-Mexico border in 1929 worked in agriculture before joining the Border Patrol, and only 10 percent owned or operated their own farms.108 Overall, most of the early officers, a total of 47.4 percent, worked outside of agriculture before joining the patrol. For example, Horace B. Carter was a senior patrol inspector in Laredo, Texas, in 1929, but he had worked as a tram operator in Hood County, Texas, in 1920.109 Don G. Gilliland was a patrol inspector in San Antonio in 1929 but a salesman at a grocery store in Floresville, Texas, in 1920.110 Orville H. Knight was a patrol inspector in Chula Vista, California, in 1929 but a chauffeur in Illinois in 1920.111 Even the famous Dogie Wright, who was a senior patrol inspector in El Paso, Texas, in 1929, was selling tickets at the movie theater in Marfa, Texas, in 1920.112 Although Dogie had had several short stints as a Texas Ranger, he had also worked as a clerk, as a chauffeur, in construction, and in a café.113 And, while the commissioner of the immigration Service often suggested that the Border Patrol was an organization of independent young men, more than 40 percent of the Border Patrol officers identified by all sources on the 1929 roster were married, and nearly half were between the ages of thirty and forty. Therefore, while some young, single men with law-enforcement and military experience joined the patrol, overall the early officers were less a “hardy band of law enforcement officers” than average working-class men, namely, white men, who used law enforcement as one strategy to earn a living in the agriculture-dominated U.S.-Mexico borderlands.114
In a region where power was rooted in land ownership, early Border Patrol officers were neither elite members of borderland communities nor active participants in their core economies. These were precisely the working-class white men in the Texas-Mexico borderlands whom Paul Schuster Taylor found to be vigorously opposed to unrestricted Mexican immigration to the United States when he conducted interviews in the region during the 1920s. In contrast to the borderland farmers whose vocal and persuasive protest halted congressional efforts to limit Mexican immigration—“without the Mexicans we would be done,” feared the powerful agribusinessmen—average white workers in the region often interpreted Mexican immigration as a source of competition in the labor market. “I hope they never let another Mexican come to the United States,” said one south Texas labor union official.115 “The country would be a whole let better off for the white laboring man,” explained another, “if there weren’t so many niggers and Mexicans.”116 Hired from the ranks of the borderlands’ white working class, the officers of the Border Patrol operated within a political economy that privileged the interests of large landholders, but they did not necessarily wholly share nor strive to protect those interests. The agribusinessmen were powerful, but there were class-based cleavages among whites on the issue of Mexican immigration to the United States. White workers had lost the congressional battle over U.S. immigration law, but when they were hired as U.S. immigration law-enforcement officers, they gained considerable influence over the everyday management of Mexican labor entering the United States. This, in the borderlands, was a new source of power, and the Border Patrol’s working-class officers leveraged their federal authority to police unsanctioned migration in complicated and often contradictory ways that were only consistent in their mindfulness of opportunities to extract bits of dignity, respect, status, and power from the region’s social elite by policing their workforce. The Border Patrol’s turn toward policing Mexicans, in other words, was much more than a matter of simply servicing the interests of agribusiness in capitalist economic development. It was a matter of community, manhood, whiteness, authority, class, respect, belonging, brotherhood, and violence in the greater Texas-Mexico borderlands.
On the back roads and in the small towns where U.S. immigration law enforcement unfolded during the 1920s and 1930s, the men that became Border Patrol officers pursued something more elusive than the singular class interests of the region’s elite. Their working-class and landless backgrounds had long located their labor at the edges of borderland societies, where the profits of southwestern agriculture were unevenly distributed along a racial hierarchy of productive labor. Early officers may have lived in white neighborhoods, worshipped at white churches, and sent their children to white schools, but as salesmen, chauffeurs, machinists, and cowpunchers they had labored at the edges of whiteness in the borderlands. The steady pay and everyday social authority of U.S. immigration law-enforcement work dangled before them the possibility of lifting themselves from a marginalized existence as what Neil Foley has examined as the “white scourge” of borderland communities.117 Policing Mexicans, in other words, presented officers with the opportunity to enter the region’s primary economy and, in the process, shore up their tentative claims upon whiteness. As immigration control was emerging as a critical site of simultaneously expanding the boundaries of whiteness while hardening the distinctions between whites and nonwhites. The project of enforcing immigration restrictions therefore placed Border Patrol officers at what police scholar David Bayley describes as “the cutting edge of the state’s knife” in terms of enforcing new boundaries between whites and nonwhites.118
The project of policing the boundaries between white and nonwhite was also important for the small number of Mexican American men who joined the U.S. Border Patrol during the 1920s and 1930s. According to the 1929 roster of Border Patrol personnel, six officers had Spanish surnames. Among them was Manuel Saldaña, the Texas-born son of Mexican immigrant parents.119 His father had been a stock dealer in Brownsville, Texas, but by the time he registered for the U.S. Army in 1917, Saldaña had taken over the care of both his mother and an adopted son.120 In 1920, he was listed on the United States census as a bridge watchman for the U.S. Immigration Service in Brownsville. Manuel Uribe was another of the six Mexican American officers listed on the 1929 roster. Uribe was born and raised in Zapata, Texas, and was praised as “know[ing] practically everyone from Laredo to Roma.”121 He had gotten to know many people as he grew up working on his father’s farm in the area.122 By 1920, his father had allowed both Manuel and his brother, Enrique, to operate their own sections of the family farm. Manuel took on this work to provide for his wife and four young children.123 But by 1923 he was working for the U.S. Immigration Service, and in 1924 he became a U.S. Border Patrol officer. Jesse Perez, a legend within the Border Patrol, was the son of a Texas Ranger and married to one of the founding families of Rio Grande City, where his father-in-law was a Texas Ranger, a sheriff, and a U.S. marshal. Jesse was stationed in Rio Grande City for his entire tenure with the Border Patrol and, for several years, worked alongside his father, who also served as a patrolman.124 Pete Torres was a member of an established and influential “Spanish-American” family in New Mexico.125 One more officer identified by Border Patrol correspondence as “partly of the Spanish race” is listed on the 1929 roster.