capture the floating mass of Mexico’s unsanctioned border crossers, Border Patrol officers utilized their broad jurisdiction to apprehend undocumented immigrants as long as they were en route to their final destination. Beginning in 1927, most of the activity in the Border Patrol’s Texas-based districts developed in the greater borderlands region rather than along the border line. That year, Border Patrol officers in the El Paso and San Antonio Districts reported turning back only nine immigrants.6 Instead of enforcing the boundary between the United States and Mexico, Border Patrol officers patrolled backcountry trails and conducted traffic stops on borderland roadways to capture unsanctioned Mexican immigrants as they traveled from the border to their final destination.7 Along major and minor transportation routes, the officers reported questioning hundreds of thousands of people. Border Patrol officers in the Texas-Mexico borderlands thus broadly policed Mexicano mobility instead of enforcing the political boundary between the United States and Mexico.
As the officers pulled back from the border, they could not witness violations of U.S. immigration law; instead, they used what the United Supreme Court would later describe as “Mexican appearance” as a measure for identifying unauthorized border crossers. For example, on March 23, 1927, Border Patrol Inspectors Pete A. Torres, a member of the Spanish-American middle-class from New Mexico, and George W. Parker Jr., an Arizona native from a ranching family, were “driving slowly up the El Paso-Las Cruces Highway when this Ford Car and the two Mexicans in question passed us going north.”8 Torres turned to Parker and said, “I believe the two in that car are Mexicans, let us go and see if they are wet aliens.”9 In a clear example of policing Mexicans as proxy for policing unsanctioned border crossers, they used “Mexican appearance” as an indicator that the two men, Mariano Martínez and Jesus Jaso, had violated U.S. immigration restrictions. The inspectors ordered Martínez and Jaso to “drive over to one side off the road and stop, or words to that effect, which they did.”10 Torres then approached the car to “investigate them as aliens.” As he walked closer to the car, “Torres saw something in the car that appeared to be sacks, with the impression of cans on the inside” and rather than inquiring into the men’s immigration status, Torres asked, “What you boys got?”11 When Martínez admitted to carrying liquor, the Border Patrol officers quickly arrested the two men for violating federal prohibition laws.
Martínez and Jaso protested their arrest and sparked a rare investigation into the racial logic of Border Patrol practice in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. They protested their arrest on the grounds that Border Patrol officers had neither the authority nor reasonable evidence to investigate them for violating prohibition laws. Since February of 1925, Border Patrol officers had been authorized to enforce U.S. immigration restrictions, but the constant intersections of undocumented immigration and liquor smuggling created many questions regarding the limits of the Border Patrol’s authority to enforce federal law. As one chronicler of the Border Patrol explained, “Professional contrabandistas (smugglers) enter incidentally because they smuggle. Others smuggle incidentally because they enter,” but the U.S. Border Patrol was only specifically authorized to enforce U.S. immigration laws.12
The Bureau of Immigration declined to navigate the complex intersections of prohibition and customs laws with immigration control at the nation’s borders by blithely responding to pleas for clarification from district directors and Border Patrol officers. “What is the status of an Immigrant Patrol Inspector in regard to Prohibition and Narcotic Enforcement . . . . I have never been in a position to get a satisfactory opinion from any one in authority,” wrote Patrol Inspector William A. Blundell on February 3,1926. “I am not sure of my ground and do not know how far I can go . . . several times [I have] been placed in a rather difficult position by not knowing just what the policy of the Immigration Service is in regard to the above matter.”13 Blundell’s district director sought clarification from the Bureau of Immigration’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., but all he was told was that there was no uniform policy on Border Patrol officers participating in the enforcement of prohibition laws. “This is a matter which the Bureau has left to the discretion of the District heads,” explained a memo from the Bureau of Immigration.14
Understanding the Border Patrol’s unclear jurisdiction in terms of enforcing federal prohibition laws, the lawyer for Martínez and Jaso argued that the evidence against his clients should be excluded “on account of illegal arrest; the officers did not have reasonable belief that the car contained liquor.”15 The U.S. commissioner reviewing the case concurred with the defendants’ position that Border Patrol authority was limited to immigration law enforcement but upheld the arrest of Martínez and Jaso because “if the Immigration Patrol Inspectors stopped these Mexicans to inquire into whether or not they were aliens . . . and . . . during the course of the investigation of the persons’ alienage, the officer saw sacks in the car and asked, ‘Boy what have you in the car,’ and one of the defendants answered, ‘We have liquor,’ then it was the officer’s duty under Section 26 National Prohibition Act to arrest the persons and seize the car and liquor.”16 The commissioner upheld the actions of Inspectors Torres and Parker, including their use of race as an indicator of illegal entry, and sent the case to the Federal Grand Jury.
Reviewing the decision for the U.S. Border Patrol in El Paso, Texas, Chester C. Courtney, by then the acting chief patrol inspector of the Border Patrol’s El Paso station, interpreted the case’s significance for the use of race as a measure of immigration status. Courtney advised his officers that “as long as Patrol Inspectors [officers] use their heads when stopping Mexicans to inquire into their alienage, and later find liquor, the arrest will be upheld.”17 But, he warned, “Had the two persons been white Americans the case would have been thrown out on account of illegal search, as it would have been absurd to say they believed the Americans to be aliens.”18 In this explicit discussion of the logic of U.S. immigration law enforcement, Chief Patrol Inspector Chester C. Courtney reveals that Border Patrol practice pivoted upon racialized notions of citizenship and social belonging in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In particular, by describing the defendants as “Mexican” regardless of their formal citizenship status while seamlessly interchanging the terms of white and American, Courtney revealed that Border Patrol tactics were profoundly shaped by the deeper histories and broader social systems that marked Mexicanos as marginalized and temporary outsiders within the region’s dominant social, cultural, political, and economic systems. Immigration law, therefore, provided the basic framework for Border Patrol operations, but the histories of conquest, displacement, and the rise of Jim Crow in the era of agribusiness penetrated the Border Patrol’s everyday translations of immigration law into immigration law-enforcement practices. Although Torres and Parker had not witnessed Martínez and Jaso illegitimately cross the border, the evidence of their infractions was plainly inscribed in the social world of the borderlands.
Racialized notions of citizenship and social belonging penetrated the Border Patrol’s development of the pseudo-science of tracking. Tracking is a method by which Border Patrol officers read the markings left by people traveling across the land. Broken twigs, human litter, and footprints are all indicators of human passage that Border Patrol officers used to locate unsanctioned border crossers. The officers would pick up a footprint at the border and then track the human’s movement inland. Tracking is a simple and low-technology technique, but it requires training and experience to learn how to follow a human trail across miles of thick brush, mountain terrain, and open desert.
In the Texas-Mexico borderlands, some men entered the U.S. Border Patrol with extensive experience in tracking, especially if they had worked in agriculture or ranching prior to joining the patrol. Among the experts was Fred “Yaqui” D’Alibini, who taught tracking to many of the new recruits who passed through his station. D’Alibini liked to joke around, recalled retired officer Bill Jordan, and he would dazzle new recruits with his tracking abilities by “squat[ting] over a clear track—horse or man—study it a bit, and, apparently communing with himself, pontificate. ‘Hmmm. A Mexican male; about 5’5” to 5’8”; dark brown hair; brown eyes; dark complexion; wearing huaraches . . . and so on.’ ”19 As D’Alibini explained to writer Peter Odens in the early 1970s, human tracks reveal racial characteristics: “A Mexican always walks heavy on the outside of his feet. When he walks, he