being illegal is highly abstract in everyday life. Not only are there countless ways of becoming illegal—entry without authorization, overstaying a visa, or violating the conditions of legal residency—but, as Coutin explains, “The undocumented get jobs, rent apartments, buy property, go to school, get married, have children, join churches, found organizations, and develop friendships. . . . Much of the time, they are undifferentiated from those around them.”20 Without any precise indicators of the condition of illegality, it is difficult to identify unauthorized immigrants. However, with the mandate to detect, detain, interrogate, and apprehend persons for violating U.S. immigration restrictions, officers of the U.S. Border Patrol spend their working hours bringing bodies to the abstract political caste of illegality. Border Patrol officers, therefore, literally embody this site of political disenfranchisement, economic inequity, and social suspicion within the United States. The patrol’s focus upon policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration assigned the inequities, disenfranchisements, suspicions, and violences of being illegal to persons of Mexican origin.21 In other words, as Jorge Lerma and many scholars and activists have noted, the rise of the U.S. Border Patrol in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands effectively Mexicanized the set of inherently and lawfully unequal social relations emerging from the legal/illegal divide.22
U.S. immigration control is widely recognized as a site of racial inequity, but this book’s social history of Border Patrol practice allows for more precision in identifying the targets of immigration enforcement while calling for a more expansive understanding of how migration control in the borderlands evolved as of the story of race in the United States. Border Patrol correspondence records, complaint files, and cultural artifacts—cartoons, humor, autobiographies, and so forth—reveal tacit distinctions of gender, class, and complexion that Border Patrol officers policed. As one officer liked to joke, the Border Patrol’s primary target was a “Mexican male; about 5′5″ to 5′8″; dark brown hair; brown eyes; dark complexion; wearing huaraches . . . and so on.”23 In the 1940s, Border Patrol officers expanded the gender profile of the undocumented immigrant to encompass women and families, but their commitment to class, complexion, and national origins remained firm. Tracing the nuances of the Border Patrol’s targeted enforcement of U.S. immigration restrictions clarifies dimensions of gender, class, and complexion that were rendered invisible when officers simply referred to their targets as “Mexican.” Class and complexion are undeniably slippery social categories, but this book’s focus upon the unarticulated discretions of Border Patrol practices reveals crucial intersections of class and complexion that shaped the Border Patrol’s policing of Mexicans. To capture the complexion-inflected class specificity of these practices, I introduce the term Mexican Brown as a conceptual and rhetorical tool because, regardless of immigration or citizenship status, it was Mexican Browns rather than abstract Mexicans who lived within the Border Patrol’s sphere of suspicion.
Further, the nuances of policing Mexicans unfolded in conversation with questions, discourses, and structures dedicated to upholding distinctions between blackness and whiteness in twentieth-century American life. From the days of Jim Crow racial segregation to the expansion of the prison system, the Border Patrol’s policing of Mexicans always drew degrees of logic, support, and legitimacy from black/white racial stratification. There is, in other words, no “beyond black and white” in the story of U.S. immigration control, and it is precisely the black-and-white dimensions of policing Mexicans for unsanctioned migration that clarify how U.S. immigration law enforcement evolved as a story of race in the United States. This book therefore charts how the black/white divide shaped the Border Patrol’s Mexicanization of the legal/illegal divide.24
Finally, the Border Patrol’s racialization of the legal/illegal divide also evolved as a bi-national formation of migration-control efforts across the U.S.-Mexico border. The participation of Mexican officials in the U.S. Border Patrol’s rise in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands reveals the bi-national dynamics of policing Mexicans in the United States. This story runs contrary to the tendency to interpret the transnational and international impact upon U.S. race relations, particularly in the post—World War II era, as a turn toward progressive reform and liberation politics.25 This book, therefore, provides one example of how anxieties and interests from beyond U.S. borders contributed to the hardening rather than the dismantling of racialized social and political inequities within United States after World War II.26
By the time that Jorge Lerma sang his song, “Superman Is an Illegal Alien,” a song about race, illegality, and inequality in America, the Border Patrol’s turn toward policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands was already complete. The consequences of the Border Patrol’s uneven enforcement of U.S. immigration restrictions were significant, but the reasons for it seemed simple and unalterable: Mexicans crossed the border without sanction, and the Border Patrol, in response, concentrated on policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Yet, all told, the making of the U.S. Border Patrol in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands turned upon much more than the unsanctioned border crossings of Mexican nationals. From the interests and concerns of individual officers to the demands of policing the corridor of international labor migration, the patrol’s turn toward policing Mexican immigrants quite often had less to do with the men, women, and children who crossed the border and more to do with the communities they entered, the countries they crossed between, and the men they confronted along the way.27 From Mexico City to Washington, D.C., down to the sister cities of Brownsville, Texas, and Reynosa, Tamaulipas, the U.S. Border Patrol created the practices of U.S. immigration law enforcement at the vexing crossroads of community life, regional interests, national politics, and international relations in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. And from the expansion of federal police powers in the twentieth century to the shifts in the black/white divide in modern America, the U.S. Border Patrol’s steady rise is a history that unfolded in conversation with far more than the laws that the institution was founded to enforce. Therefore, by carefully examining the dusty and scattered record of the U.S. Border Patrol, this book provides what Antonio Gramsci once described as an “inventory” of the many “traces,” that is, a catalogue and analysis of the many histories that shaped the making and the meaning of the U.S. Border Patrol in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.28
This book is arranged into three chronological parts. Each part represents one of three generations in the U.S. Border Patrol’s first fifty years on patrol between 1924 and 1974. Part 1 addresses the highly regional and local period of Border Patrol operations from the establishment of the U.S. Border Patrol on May 28, 1924, to the entrance of the United States into World War II in 1941. Chapter 1 provides a foundation for understanding Border Patrol work in these years by outlining the mandate, the men, and the bureaucracy of the U.S. Border Patrol during the 1920s and 1930s. Chapter 2 tells the story of the greater Texas-Mexico borderlands, where a concentration of local men hired as U.S. Border Patrol officers directed the development of U.S. immigration law enforcement. Here, the patrol’s narrow enforcement of U.S. immigration restrictions was deeply connected to the social world in which the officers came of age before they became officers of the state. Chapter 3 focuses on the development of Border Patrol practices and priorities along the California and western Arizona border regions, where Border Patrol officers tended to be outsiders struggling to rationalize the many possibilities for U.S. immigration law enforcement. Here, the shifting political economy of Mexican labor migration and the fiscal limitations of policing European and Asian immigration tilted the Border Patrol’s focus toward policing Mexican immigrants. Together, chapters 1, 2, and 3 argue that, while immigration restriction was a national phenomenon, U.S. Border Patrol practice in the 1920s and 1930s was a deeply social project that was defined by highly regionalized interpretations of the possibilities and limitations of U.S. immigration law enforcement. Chapter 4