Managed Migrations: Growers, Farmworkers, and Border Enforcement in the Twentieth Century 1477316140, 978-1477316146

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments......Page 10
Introduction......Page 16
1. “Where Uncle Sam Meets Mexico”: Narratives of Frontier and Progress in Early Twentieth-Century South Texas......Page 32
2. The Social Space of Agriculture......Page 63
3. The Flexible Border: Mobility within Restriction in US Immigration Laws and Enforcement......Page 96
4. Exploitative Villains or Community Leaders? Agricultural Labor Contractors, the State, and Control over Worker Mobility......Page 129
5. El Paso/The Passage: The 1948 El Paso Incident and the Politics of Mobility......Page 153
6. The High Price of Immigration Politics during the 1950s......Page 189
Epilogue......Page 217
Notes......Page 224
Bibliography......Page 267
Index......Page 278

Citation preview

MANAGED MIGRATIONS

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Historia USA A series edited by Luis Alvarez, Carlos Blanton, and Lorrin Thomas

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MANAGED MIGRATIONS Growers, Farmworkers, and Border Enforcement in the Twentieth Century

Cristina Salinas

University of Texas Press austin

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frontispiece photo: Lee, Russell, photographer. Mexican carrot workers near Edinburg, Texas. Edinburg Texas United States, 1939. Feb. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2017738924/. (Accessed March 16, 2018.) Copyright © 2018 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2018 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:      Permissions      University of Texas Press      P.O. Box 7819      Austin, TX 78713-7819      utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form

♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper).

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Names: Salinas, Cristina, author. Title: Managed migrations : growers, farmworkers, and border enforcement in the twentieth century / Cristina Salinas. Other titles: Historia USA. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2018. | Series: Historia USA | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2018013076 isbn 978-1-4773-1614-6 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-1-4773-1615-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 978-1-4773-1616-0 (library e-book) isbn 978-1-4773-1617-7 (nonlibrary e-book) Subjects: lcsh : Immigration enforcement—Texas—Lower Rio Grande Valley— History—20th century. | Migrant agricultural laborers—Texas—Lower Rio Grande Valley—History—20th century. | Agricultural laborers—Texas—Lower Rio Grande Valley—History—20th century. | Agriculture—Texas—Lower Rio Grande Valley—History—20th century. | Lower Rio Grande Valley (Tex.)—Emigration and immigration—Government policy. | Lower Rio Grande Valley (Tex.)—Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. | Lower Rio Grande Valley (Tex.)—Emigration and immigration—Economic aspects. Classification: lcc hd 1527.t 4 s 35 2018 | ddc 325/.764409044—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018013076 doi:10.7560/316146

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For Armando Salinas Jr. and Delia Salinas

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Contents

acknowledgments  ix introduction  1 chapter 1. “Where Uncle Sam Meets Mexico”: Narratives of Frontier and Progress in Early Twentieth-Century South Texas  17 chapter 2. The Social Space of Agriculture  48 chapter 3. The Flexible Border: Mobility within Restriction in US Immigration Laws and Enforcement  81 chapter 4. Exploitative Villains or Community Leaders? Agricultural Labor Contractors, the State, and Control over Worker Mobility  114 chapter 5. El Paso/The Passage: The 1948 El Paso Incident and the Politics of Mobility  138 chapter 6. The High Price of Immigration Politics during the 1950s  174 epilogue  202 notes  209 bibliography  252 index  263

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Acknowledgments

A

lthough the process of research and writing may seem like a solitary endeavor, I have been inspired, helped, challenged, and encouraged by many collectives and individuals along the way in completing this book. Many thanks to the archivists and archival staff who have aided me, especially in the special collections at the University of Texas–Pan American (now UT-RGV), the University of Texas at Arlington, the University of Texas at Austin, and Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. I would also like to thank Kerry Webb, senior editor at UT Press, for her guidance and encouragement. I am eternally grateful to the readers who spent hours poring over my manuscript and giving me such precise and useful suggestions. Thank you very much. The Llano Grande Center for Research and Development created a space that used history and storytelling to empower and build community. Llano Grande helped me understand the transformative capacity of stories. Thank you to Francisco Guajardo and Miguel Guajardo for your work and inspiration. ix

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Ackn o w led g m e n ts

While I was at the University of Texas at Austin I benefited from institutional and student-made spaces committed to Chicano/a studies as an intellectual and political field. The students who created the Advanced Seminar in Chicano/a Research forged a rigorous environment of collective mentorship, political activism, and academic endeavor. Thank you to Luis Alvarez, Estevan Azcona, Manuel Callahan, Rebecca Gamez, Alan Gomez, Pablo Gonzalez, Verónica Martínez-Matsuda, Toni Nelson-Herrera, Isabella Quintana, Gilberto Rosas, Lilia Rosas, and Geoff Valdes for your commitment to the work and to community. In the history department I found dedicated faculty whom I looked to as examples of excellent scholars, teachers, and mentors. Thank you to my committee members, Jose Limon, Anne Martinez, and James Sidbury, and to my advisors, Laurie Green and Emilio Zamora. They each helped guide me through my project from its earliest formulations, and I am grateful for their mentorship. While in Austin, I was fortunate to fall in with the most amazing group of women who have been there with me along the way from literally the first day of graduate school until now. To Olga Herrera, Verónica MartínezMatsuda, Jennifer Najera, Isabella Quintana, and Virginia Raymond: you are inspirations of love, political activism, and committed scholarship, and I treasure your friendship. I have particularly relied on Veronica’s friendship and guidance and have run every question by her, big and small. I will always remember Laura Padilla’s humor, intelligence, and wit, and she is deeply missed. At the University of Texas at Arlington, I was lucky to join a friendly and collegial department and a thriving Center for Mexican American Studies that welcomed me and provided support for my work in various important ways. Thanks especially to Katy Beebe, Stephanie Cole, Joyce Goldberg, David Lafevor, Steven Maizlish, Sarah Rose, and Kenyon Zimmer for their advice, feedback on my work, friendship, and collaboration. Steve was completing his book as I was finishing mine, and it was a pleasure to check in with a fellow traveler to share our updates and anxieties. I must also express my deep gratitude to Marvin Dulaney and Christian Zlolniski. As history department chair and CMAS director, respectively, they provided funds to reduce my teaching load during an especially critical moment in writing this book. I thank both of them for their support. As the director of the Center for Mexican American Studies, Christian Zlolniski reinvigorated an interdisciplinary faculty writing workshop that x

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was key to helping me get my chapters into shape. Thank you to Christian Zlolniski, William Arce, Ignacio Ruiz-Perez, David Lafevor, Erin MurrahMandril, Ana Gregorio Cano, Isabel Montemayor, and Taryn Ozuna Allen for their valuable feedback. Thanks also to Jacqueline Fay for her friendship and for spending countless hours across a table at a coffee shop as we plugged along with our writing. I relied on the help of staff and students who provided key administrative and research support. Thanks go to Diana Botello for her administrative help and to Michael Moore and Cory Wells, who provided research and technical assistance. Upon the advice of Vice Provost Maria Martinez-Cosio, I registered for the Faculty Success Program during my second year at UTA. It was a great piece of advice, and in addition to helping me develop needed organizational skills to balance the demands and priorities of my work and life, the program connected me to three other scholars who formed a group to provide accountability to each other. We have continued our weekly calls for three years now, and these women have become friends as well as accountability partners. I thank Alison Calhoun, Kristina Hood, and Julia McQuade for their constant advice and encouragement. My greatest source of inspiration and strength has come from my family. I thank the Rodriguez family, especially my mother-in-law and father-in-law, Becky and Cecilio, who have sustained me with their love and prayers. To my families, los Becerra y los Salinas, this work has been for you. My big, extended Mexican family has been the foundation of my identity as a Chicana, Tejana, norteña. They have been the models of openness, generosity, and community that defines the Valley for me. I thank all my tíos and tías who are still here, and those who have already gone, for the solid bonds of family that have kept me emotionally and intellectually connected to the Valley despite my physical distance: Salvador (Berta), Israel (Maria), Ismael (Elma), Manuel, Elva (Gilberto), Ernestina, Eloisa, Alicia (Bruno), Felicitas (Natividad), Luis (Amparo), Manuela (Gene), and Leonel (Irma) on my mother’s side, and Cesar (Delia), Jorge (Esperanza), Amparo, Francisca (Chon), Rene (Rosie), and Ernesto (Sandra) on my father’s side. My cousin Marco Bazan has been like a brother to me all my life. My parents, Armando and Delia Salinas, have given their love and affection abundantly and freely, and I am deeply grateful to them. My mother has been my role model since I was a child, instilling in me a love for reading and learning, and I have tried to emulate her honesty and integrity. My brothers, xi

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Orlando and Carlos, have been steadfast in their love and support, and I appreciate their camaraderie and friendship. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my husband, Marcel Rodriguez, and my daughter, Daniela Inés. Marcel has lived with this project for many years now. He cleared the way for me when necessary and sacrificed his own work at times to make room for mine. The ebbs and flows of writing can pattern a life, and when there is a household with two writers, working around each other’s schedules can be an intricate dance. There is no one I would rather dance with. Thank you for your support and encouragement. Thank you also for our daughter, Daniela, the light and delight of our lives. She is a funny and wise little girl, and I am forever grateful.

xii

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Introduction

O

ne warm early summer morning in the Rio Grande Valley during the late 1940s, a crew of Mexican agricultural workers toiled in farmer Carrol Norquest’s fields picking cotton before the day’s heat became too oppressive. The crew supervisor in this instance was Carrol Norquest’s young teenage son, Rikki.1 Teresa, one of the workers, stood in the trailer to retrieve her cotton sack when she caught sight of a large black car approaching along the road adjoining the field. Her experience of the Border Patrol’s methods made her instantly apprehensive, and she raised an outcry to alert the rest of the workers that La Migra was near. In an instant, all the workers stopped their task and ran away as fast as they could, trying to avoid being caught by the Border Patrol’s pursuit. Rikki soon realized that Teresa was mistaken about the car, but his shouts to the workers to return to the fields were too late—everyone had left. Rikki trudged home, the work done for the day. A few days later, the entire crew had made their way back to the Norquest farm; some had returned the same day as the apparent near raid, but others 1

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had waited. Some of the workers had taken the opportunity to return to Mexico, to “cool off,” the elder Norquest later surmised. The workers “were all back on the job—well rested,” Norquest later wrote, “including Teresa with a fresh red skirt over her jeans.”2 The crew was again picking cotton in the field when Rikki spotted his cousin driving up the dirt road in the family’s new maroon sedan. In a spirit of mischief, made possible by his greater power and privilege, Rikki decided to play a joke on the workers. “La Chota! Allí viene la Chota!” he cried while pointing at the oncoming car. The workers reacted immediately. Dropping their cotton sacks, some hid on their bellies amongst the plants, while others rushed out of the field. This time, the workers had not gone far before they noticed Rikki laughing at them and cheering. “They spent fifteen minutes yelling at Rikki—and Rikki razzed them right back. No real harm done . . . and in retrospect, [they] had some fun.”3 What from one perspective might seem like an amusing anecdote, from another point of view represented the ordinary violence that pervaded the daily life of agricultural workers along the US-Mexico border in Texas. The combined power of growers and federal authorities forced workers to interrupt their routines, hide, and flee. Needed at one moment, scorned at others, workers moved back and forth across the US-Mexico border subject to the power of growers, the US government, and even mischievous white teenagers. Yet, the different times of workers’ return to the fields suggest that workers retained some control over their movements. This small but vivid snapshot of the politics of mobility on the US-Mexico border during the mid-twentieth century demonstrates both the fluidity of Mexican migration and the constraints placed upon workers’ movements in the United States. Even when the Border Patrol was not physically there, it was there, shaping the social space of the border and power dynamics between workers and growers. That small story is a microcosm for Mexican immigration to the United States writ large. It is a story of quick movements, back and forth across the border, movements not without violence. In this immigrant story, Mexican workers were both always present in some way and always vulnerable to dislocations and deportations, that harassing fluidity becoming the hallmark of US immigration policy toward Mexicans entering the country. This book focuses on South Texas and El Paso, both border regions with dominant agricultural economies as well as a significant presence of Border Patrol officers. By focusing on these border regions, this book examines the relationship between immigration laws and policy and the agricultural 2

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labor relations between growers and workers on the ground. It argues that immigration law was mainly enacted not in the embassies or the halls of Congress, but on the ground, in daily decisions by the Border Patrol.4 It was at the US-Mexico border that the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) devised techniques that facilitated high-volume yearly deportations. Avoiding the costs of formal deportations, these procedures became the common and routine features of enforcement practices with the intent of managing the seasonal agricultural labor migration across the US-Mexico border. The institutional buildup of state power at the border was intimately connected with agricultural labor, and with managing its mobility. The process of state and border formation did not originate in the central seats of federal authority—Washington, DC, and Mexico City—to be applied and exerted on the farthest reaches of their territories. Growers and workers created, negotiated, experienced, and challenged the power and meaning of the border in the agricultural fields during daily interactions. Individual Border Patrol officers shaped the border every day in the choices they made about where and where not to patrol and which friendships to make and maintain.5 The border was simultaneously a federal and a local space. As the introductory anecdote suggested, the different sites of power were continually at work and intertwined. The Border Patrol did not have to be present to have an effect on the power dynamics in the moment. These interconnecting authorities, each shaping the other, and workers’ negotiations of such dynamics are what I term the “social space” of agriculture on the border. Growers often projected themselves in opposition to the INS and government intervention, arguing that it disrupted their access to Mexican laborers. In truth, the presence of the Border Patrol, and the threat of deportation the police force carried, was crucial in shaping the social space of agricultural production and securing growers’ undocumented labor force. This book begins in South Texas during the 1920s, in the midst of a regional economic and social transformation from cattle ranching to cropbased agriculture. Central to Anglo newcomers’ dreams of creating a modern agricultural empire was continuous access to Mexican workers, made easy by the region’s location on the US-Mexico border. The establishment and growth of commercial farming coincided with the simultaneous formation of the US Border Patrol force. As the two forces intertwined, they shaped each other. This relationship was especially evident during the 1940s and 1950s, which is the temporal focus of much of this book. Comparing Border Patrol 3

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practices in South Texas and El Paso allows a closer examination of the degree to which these forces were responding to local pressures or shaped by decisions from Washington, DC. The 1940s and 1950s were important decades in the history of Mexican immigration to the United States. Positioned between the first major phase of Mexican migration in the 1910s and 1920s and the more recent period of contemporary migration beginning in the 1980s, it was during the midcentury that the US and Mexican governments attempted to impose a greater degree of control over Mexican migration. The bracero program, sanctioned by both governments, also initiated a large illegal migration of agricultural workers to the United States. This was a period characterized by high levels of temporary legal migration and illegal migration, as well as intense levels of immigration enforcement. These simultaneous processes confound a simplistic view of US history as a sequence of alternating periods of immigration expansion and restriction. US immigration law and policy does not resemble a pendulum swinging first one way then the other; rather, both expansion and restriction characterized the 1940s and early 1950s.

Locating Mexican Immigration in US Immigration History Recent histories of US immigration have also moved beyond the classic assimilationist narratives often associated with old concepts of the United States as a nation open to immigrants. Donna Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta’s volume demonstrating the back-and-forth nature of Italian migration between Italy and the United States, as well as the diffuse nature of Italian migration to countries throughout the world, complicates a view of European immigration as unidirectional, ending in the United States with permanent naturalization and assimilation into the nation.6 For many, decisions to return were voluntary, based on family ties and other considerations. Increasingly during the twentieth century, however, US officials denaturalized and deported immigrant labor activists accused of holding radical political views, clear instances in which moving back to one’s country was not voluntary.7 In sum, the practices of migration were much more varied than the narrative of immigrant-to-citizen progression would suggest. That reality does not take away from the fact that immigration law was organized by this teleological expectation.8 This view can be seen in Theodore Roosevelt’s address in St. Louis on the topic of Americanism: “But unless the immigrant becomes in good faith an American and nothing else, then he is out of place in this 4

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country, and the sooner he leaves it the better.”9 Such a view did not admit any ambiguity or barrier to Americanization, or make any room for the large number of migrants who lived and worked in the United States but did not stay there permanently and become citizens. Of course the “Americans-in-waiting” construct was based on the premise of the immigration of white, able-bodied male workers and heads of household. Recent immigration histories have demonstrated the ways in which restriction, deciding who did not belong, characterized US immigration policy as much as admittance, or deciding who did belong.10 When Chinese migrants began coming to the United States after 1849, white working-class laborers fearful of competition stirred up nativist campaigns against the Chinese, first along the West Coast and gradually spreading nationwide, leading to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. To build a case against the Chinese, legislators played on ideas of the Chinese’s cultural unassimilability and legal barriers against their naturalization to craft a ban that radically restricted Chinese immigration. While keeping the principle of birthright citizenship guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment in place, Congress and the nation attempted to solve the dilemma of having a large immigrant group whom they did not want to eventually incorporate into the United States by blocking their access to the United States from the outset. As Erika Lee has noted, the immigration enforcement mechanisms built to exclude the Chinese formed the structures of control that were used against other immigrant groups, especially Mexicans, as the twentieth century wore on. Immigration has held an important place in the histories of the Mexican American experience. Most works that have dealt with Mexican American community and identity formation, racialization, political organizing, and labor history have directly addressed the question of continued migration from Mexico to the United States.11 Scholars have long argued about the inappropriateness of applying the classic assimilative narrative of American immigration history to the history of Mexican migration to the United States.12 Many factors militated against Mexicans’ easy incorporation into US society—including racist views of Mexicans dating back to the Mexican American War, the discrimination that relegated Mexicans to places of social marginalization throughout the twentieth century, as well as the continued migration from Mexico, leading to perceptions among the US public of a permanently immigrant Mexican community, perceptions that were reinforced by periodic mass deportations that emphasized the instability of Mexicans’ presence in the United States. 5

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From the outset, then, US approaches to immigration have been intensely contradictory. The restrictive immigration laws of the 1910s and 1920s, with their fees, literacy tests, quotas, and barred zones, often did not apply to Mexicans. Mexicans were either temporarily or permanently exempted from many of these requirements, which would suggest an openness to Mexican immigration. However, even if not enforced, the design of the system was still in place, rigorously applied at times and relaxed at others.13 In any case, the fees and other barriers to legal immigration, coupled with a largely unenforced and vast land border, meant that most Mexicans crossed the border without visas, lacking the imprimatur of state approval. In that instance, as Mae Ngai has mapped out, immigration laws created the illegal alien, an “impossible subject” that could best be understood as belonging to a “caste, unambiguously situated outside the boundaries of formal membership and social legitimacy.”14 Though most people did not get deported, the potential for their deportation was there, and this potentiality had a significant impact on the economic and social rights of people defined by these categories.15 But while the category of illegal alien has remained stable and exclusive in immigration law, the migrants themselves negotiated various statuses and categories, citizen and alien, in contexts that were sometimes very ambiguous. In one act of illegal crossing, for example, a Mexican migrant could assert his rights as a Mexican citizen, while entering into a status of illegal alien in the United States, defined by precariousness and vulnerability. Along the US-Mexico border, the mechanism for transforming the status of illegality from theoretical to active was, of course, the Border Patrol. Kelly Lytle Hernández’s important history of the Border Patrol examines the vast space between legislation passed to enforce immigration laws at the land borders and their implementation on the ground. As Lytle Hernández argues, in implementing enforcement strategies on the border the fledgling patrol created a policing zone, transforming its mandate from detaining unauthorized migrants as they physically crossed the border to policing brown bodies within the marked-out territory.16 The broad and undefined contours of the early Border Patrol’s police powers paralleled the broad expanse of territory it was charged with watching, and their borders were defined on the ground and over time. Lytle Hernández takes an equally broad view of the Border Patrol’s development as a police body, arguing that it is “best understood as an intrinsically social and political process revolving around questions of violence and social order rather than as a system of unmitigated responses 6

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to criminalized activity.”17 Migra! explains the rise of border militarization as part of the larger story of the “expansion and consolidation” of the power of law enforcement in the twentieth century.18 Managed Migrations also hews closely to the ground, exploring the space between law and enforcement to understand the reality of the history of Mexican immigration during the twentieth century. My work focuses on the effects of Border Patrol actions on the shape of labor relations on the border. Lytle Hernández has cautioned against reading Border Patrol agents as pure instruments of the agricultural industry, arguing that officers working in the margins of class privilege had their own motivations for patrolling a racialized border.19 While I agree that the interests of these groups did not perfectly map onto each other, and sometimes clashed, often their agendas were compatible. Agents patrolled both a border and a labor system—it was a shared space. In her work on sexuality and the border, Eithne Luibhéid has argued that border inspections and surveillance disciplined bodies, excluded some, and regulated the body politic “to produce particular visions of US nation and citizenry.”20 The Border Patrol indeed served such ideological functions of the nation. It also served local aims, and my work explores the connection between national, international, and local spaces.

Concepts of the Border Studies about the US-Mexico border have generally fallen into two conceptual camps—those emphasizing the gradual hardening of border laws and infrastructure, and those emphasizing the continued movement of people, commodities, and ideas across the border.21 These two different approaches to the power and influence of the nation-state on the border have shared one assumption: that harsher laws and border infrastructure signified a strong state establishing itself and asserting its power, while continued movements across borders, especially illegal movements, undermined the power of the state and demonstrated its limits.22 In addition, scholars have defined a temporal aspect to this dichotomy; that is, they have argued that interconnectedness and fluidity of movement characterized the border during the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, and noted the transition to the militarization of the border and fragmented migration of the present day.23 My work, however, sees the mobility within restriction, and thus no clear dichotomy regarding movement and state power. Instead of viewing illegal migration solely as a challenge to the sovereignty 7

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of the nation-state, this study traces the ways in which workers’ movements, and the US and Mexican governments’ responses to them, both forged as well as challenged state power. Because immigration issues legally rested within the almost exclusive authority of the executive branch of the US government, and most decisions were handled administratively, without judicial review or constraints, the border represented an important site for the concentration of federal authority.24 For the United States, establishing power at the border did not always mean stopping the entrance of undocumented migrants. During times of contestation between Mexican and US officials over the migration of Mexicans during the mid-twentieth century, the United States sometimes found that a demonstration of Mexicans’ unregulated mobility undermined the Mexican government’s position in labor negotiations. If managing Mexican migration formed a key site for US state formation, its importance for Mexican state formation was even greater. Scholars have increasingly begun to study the history of Mexican emigration laws.25 Those works, as well as the works detailing the Mexican government’s continued reach in Mexicans’ lives in the United States, challenge the notion of a Mexican policy of nonintervention in Mexican migration.26 Rather than explaining Mexico’s interest in negotiating the bracero program as a mechanism to serve mainly as a safety valve for problems in the Mexican economic and political structure, this book places issues of sovereignty in a more central role in Mexican emigration policies during the mid-twentieth century. Inspired by John Torpey’s thesis that establishing a “monopoly of the legitimate means of movement” of people has been central to modern state formation, I argue that the concerns about maintaining a monopoly over the legitimate means of movement motivated the Mexican government regarding the emigration of its citizens to the United States.27 My study of the ways that US and Mexican federal and state governments responded to and tried to manage workers’ migrations provides insight into the multi­ directional pressures of state power, mobility, and labor.

The State and Agriculture in the Southwest Abstract notions of national sovereignty often collided with the immediate material considerations of business and workers. Rather than “holding the line” at the US-Mexico border, the INS most often worked to manage agricultural workers’ mobility and had an important impact on agricultural 8

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industries along the US-Mexico border and in the greater Southwest.28 Histories of agriculture in the Southwest have necessarily dealt with the government’s role in mediating agricultural labor relations, since many federal government interventions during the twentieth century emerged first in the Southwest. Examples include the Farm Security Administration’s programs during the New Deal and, of course, the bracero program in the 1940s.29 The work of scholar and labor organizer Ernesto Galarza highlighted the ways in which the federal government designed an agricultural labor importation program tailored to growers’ desires for a secure, nonunion labor force.30 In addition to these specific agricultural programs, however, the state has played a role in shaping the power dynamics in agriculture through its policing of the border. As Kelly Lytle Hernández has argued, patrolling the border meant enforcing a “color line”; border enforcement reinforced ideas of racial difference between the “browns” and the “whites.”31 My work shows how enforcing the color line of the border served the particular function of underpinning unequal relations between growers and workers in the agricultural fields.32 Scholars have cautioned against focusing on state power in structuring agricultural relations at the expense of workers’ experiences. As Devra Weber has noted, agricultural workers have been “pictured as victims of a brutal system” and have emerged as “faceless, powerless, passive, and, ultimately, outside the flow of history.”33 Her work and that of others, such as Emilio Zamora’s history of Mexican workers in the early twentieth century in Texas, show how workers fought their conditions and organized (broadly speaking) against very daunting barriers.34 Recent works of agricultural history have relied on oral histories to explore complex transnational family narratives, braceros’ experiences and ideas of masculinity, and the ways in which workers defied the narrow categories imposed on them by both Mexican and American governments.35 The history of the bracero program exemplifies the importance of examining the interconnectedness between local and national sources of authority in agricultural labor relationships. Responding to demands from California growers who feared a labor shortage in their fields because of the wartime draft and war-fueled industrial activities, US government officials approached the Mexican government in 1941 to discuss a possible temporary labor importation program.36 After initial reluctance, the Mexican government agreed to the binational program to provide seasonal workers for US agricultural and railroad industries if the United States could guarantee 9

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a series of measures designed to protect Mexicans while they were in the states, and guarantee workers’ return to Mexico after the season’s end. First, growers had to provide housing and food for workers, as well as access to medical care. Second, growers had to pay braceros the prevailing wage for agricultural labor in a given region, with a minimum wage guarantee of thirty cents per hour.37 Third, the employer had to pay the cost of workers’ transportation to and from Mexican recruitment centers. And finally, the Mexican government stipulated that no racial discrimination against braceros would be tolerated.38 To demonstrate their resolve on this issue, Mexican officials refused to allow growers in the state of Texas to participate in the bracero program until 1947, because of the state’s long history of discrimination against people of Mexican descent. Scholars of the bracero program have divided its twenty-two-year span (1942–1964) into three phases, defined by shifting power dynamics between the different groups involved—the US government, the Mexican government, and growers. For their part, although Mexican workers did not have enough political clout to have a place at the negotiating table, workers’ migrations had a powerful influence on the governments’ negotiating power within the program. The first phase was the wartime bracero program (1942–1947), characterized by a relatively strong position by the Mexican government because of its key role as a wartime ally of the United States. During this period, the US government also played an active role in the administration of the bracero program, shouldering much of the costs of transporting workers to and from Mexico.39 The second phase of the program (1948–1950) was characterized by a diminution in the Mexican government’s negotiating power, as the increasing illegal migration of Mexican workers undermined the Mexican government’s attempt to control the emigration of its citizens. The US government stepped back from its active administration of the bracero program. US growers assumed more visible roles, forcing the Mexican government to deal with them directly.40 This period, often thought of as chaotic and tumultuous, brought to the surface the complex dynamics between local and national authorities that were always intertwined but sometimes hidden. The third phase of the bracero program (1951–1964) began with the passage of Public Law 78 in the United States, which instituted the labor importation program as a permanent part of US law. This phase signaled the US government’s reintervention in the program, and its pledge to enforce the elements of the agreement.41

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Movements of Time on the Border Movement is a function of both time and space. Movement and the control over workers’ movement were fundamental to many of the social processes on the border, from immigration law enforcement to agricultural labor relations. Yet mobility at the border was much more complex and nuanced than merely prohibiting or permitting entrance. Different conceptions of time and movement also collided at the border—circular and linear—and both shaped perceptions of Mexican migration, as well as the migrations themselves.42 One notion of time and movement, circular, is often associated with the organic processes of nature; think of seasons, for example. The other notion of time and movement, linear, is associated with human construction, such as the “march of progress” or history. This book considers the connection between the two notions of time in the experiences of Mexican agricultural migrants, both in the larger legal structures of the border and in the daily, lived experiences of workers. But the two aspects of time do not connect smoothly, as Henri Lefebvre notes: The relations of the cyclical and the linear—interactions, interferences, the domination of one over the other, or the rebellion of one against the other—are not simple: there is between them an antagonistic unity. They penetrate one another, but in an interminable struggle: sometimes compromise, sometimes disruption.43

For instance, many migrants from Mexico came to the United States to work as agricultural laborers. Growers’ demands for labor were cyclical, patterned by the rhythms of the seasonal calendar. Yet, even though Mexican migrants responded to the fluctuating labor conditions of a seasonal industry, their movements were racialized as instinctual, and they were defined as if they were homing pigeons. Thus, Mexican migrants’ circular migrations were attributed to their perceived proclivities, and not to the economic realities of the agricultural industry, nor to the INS’s law enforcement activities. Furthermore, though the demands of agricultural industries were cyclical in nature, immigration laws were constructed in a linear fashion. In general, the United States constructed immigration laws based on the expectation of permanency and eventual naturalization.44 The United States assigned visas on the basis of which migrants the government deemed worthy of becoming US citizens, a very narrow category. The exceptions to this linear approach

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Introduction

to immigration laws existed at both land borders, with border crossing cards that permitted people to cross into the United States daily for work. Through their enforcement methods, Border Patrol officers used a flexible method of deportation in voluntary departure to manage a seasonal demand for labor in the southwestern agricultural region, thereby using deportation to create a process of circularity within a linear system of immigration.

Outline of Chapters Chapter 1, “‘Where Uncle Sam Meets Mexico,’” examines the development of the agricultural industry in South Texas in the early twentieth century and focuses on the promotional campaigns that land companies and railroads sponsored to convince farmers from other regions in the United States to purchase land and move to the border. The promotional literature recycled nineteenth-century notions of the frontier in a new era, weaving in images of Progressive Era capitalist expansion and modernity. Mexican labor was central to developers’ plans for a modern agricultural economy, yet boosters often cast Mexican workers as premodern peons. The sponsored excursions combined tourism and colonization in a heady mixture that allowed all visitors to perform the role of modern-day frontier colonists. Whether or not they purchased land, all visitors kept the wheels of the promotional machine going in the production of cultural messages about the border, its Mexican inhabitants, and the role of whites in the Valley’s modernization. Though initially disappointed in their expectations, this generation of migrants eventually transformed the border from a ranching to a cropbased agricultural economy, becoming the power elite by the middle of the twentieth century. Chapter 2, “The Social Space of Agriculture,” examines the agricultural industry along the Texas-Mexico border during the mid-twentieth century. During this period, the agricultural labor market was the single most important factor in determining the flow of Mexican migration to the United States. The chapter also looks closely at an agricultural labor system along the Texas-Mexico border that was based upon the foundation of an illegal workforce. It examines the cultural, social, and political boundaries of the farm, with its combined living and laboring space. The farm was the site where daily social interactions between growers and workers took place, but that space was profoundly shaped by the presence of the Border Patrol in the region. Rather than reduce access to low-waged Mexican laborers, 12

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the growth of the Border Patrol during the mid-twentieth century helped create the conditions for workers’ low wages through the selective restriction of undocumented workers’ mobility. That social space allowed growers to construct paternalistic images of themselves as protectors of undocumented workers from the Border Patrol. Workers also used the (fictive) relationship between growers and workers to maintain their own actual family and kinship networks, within very unequal power dynamics. Chapter 3, “The Flexible Border,” traces US immigration laws from 1917 to the 1950s to demonstrate how the increasingly restrictive legislation also created loopholes and exceptions, temporarily allowing for the migration of Mexican workers. This seeming paradox of US immigration law had important consequences for Mexican migrants, because while exceptions to immigration laws created a precedent for Mexican cross-border labor mobility, the underlying legal structures of immigration restriction remained in place, always defining Mexican migration as tenuous and temporary. I focus on the INS mechanism of voluntary departure used at the US-Mexico border in lieu of formal deportation proceedings. Voluntary departure became the INS’s most dominant form of expulsion during the 1940s, allowing the agency to move greater numbers of Mexican migrants back across the border. However, voluntary departure also created a situation of low risk for workers to return to the United States. The relative informality of the practice of voluntary departure within the structure of US immigration laws and INS policies reflected the patterns of seasonal migration demanded by the agricultural industries of the US Southwest. Chapter 4, “Exploitative Villains or Community Leaders?,” examines various state governmental programs that managed Mexican agricultural migrants in the state of Texas. South Texas residents often migrated to other parts of Texas and to other regions in the United States to extend their harvesting seasons and to seek higher wages. As part of their efforts to efficiently direct workers to farms in the appropriate numbers and at the appropriate time, the state of Texas instituted measures to extend control over workers’ movements, from highway checkpoints to laws regulating labor agencies. This chapter also focuses on the state’s regulation of labor agencies as a strategy to crack down on the hated middleman, the labor contractor. Disparaged by liberal reformers, growers, and state agencies, labor contractors were charged with exploiting workers and were often blamed for many of the ills of the agricultural industry. While not downplaying the real abuse that contractors inflicted on workers, I argue that the hyperfocus on labor 13

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Introduction

contractors unfairly masked growers’ responsibility for workers’ wages and working conditions. Furthermore, the state of Texas’s crackdown on labor contractors often had the effect of limiting workers’ mobility and workers’ attempts to organize into family-based units that traveled to find the best wages and working conditions. State officials’ efforts to regulate the movement of Mexican migrants beyond state borders tried to extend border controls to the state’s own boundaries. Chapter 5, “El Paso / The Passage,” examines the El Paso Incident, a fourday period during October 1948 when four to six thousand Mexican workers illegally crossed the border at Ciudad Juárez–El Paso in what seemed to have been a coordinated move among US growers, Mexican workers, Texas State Employment Service officials, and INS officers. At the time, Mexican and US government officials were at an impasse over braceros’ wages, and workers and growers were gathered on each side of the border, waiting for bracero contracts to be authorized and processed. After the illegal mass crossing, the Mexican government accused the INS of deliberately undermining the bracero program and US immigration laws, and the US government, responding to the growing public relations embarrassment, issued an official apology to the Mexican government for the events. More than just a brief, messy interregnum in the twenty-two-year history of the bracero program, the El Paso Incident reveals the unequal power of each nation at the border and the way in which much of that power rested on Mexican migrations. Furthermore, the El Paso Incident demonstrated the ways in which local processes, and the persistent and habitual cooperation between the INS and southwestern growers, shaped border policies and affected international agreements. Chapter 6, “The High Price of Immigration Politics during the 1950s,” examines how labor and civil rights activists confronted the problem that Mexican migration posed to Mexican Americans’ wages and working conditions in agriculture. Many labor activists advocated increased border enforcement on both sides of the border and deportations of undocumented workers already in the United States. They claimed that agricultural growers took advantage of the US government’s laxity in enforcing US immigration laws to hire illegal workers, whom they paid a pittance and who lived precarious lives in dangerous and oppressive conditions. This chapter describes the collaboration between the Texas State Federation of Labor and the American GI Forum in the production of the 1954 pamphlet What Price, Wetbacks?, an exposé of growers’ use of undocumented labor in the agricultural industry 14

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in South Texas. The pamphlet received favorable press by organized labor in Mexico, and this chapter follows the attempts to revive transnational labor dialogues between the American Federation of Labor and Mexican labor federations on the question of Mexican migration. I argue that even as Texas labor activists tried to use the pamphlet to forge transnational ties to Mexican organized labor, they could not get away from nation-centered approaches to the problems affecting labor organizing. Their proposed solutions—increased border enforcement and deportations—did not solve the problems of illegal migration and low wages in agriculture, but further stigmatized and marginalized Mexican workers. Additionally, the American Federation of Labor’s excessive focus on stopping Communism from infiltrating labor unions in Latin America hampered the organization in forming effective alliances with Mexican labor federations.

A Note on Terms I mainly use “undocumented migrant” or “unauthorized migrant” when referring to people who crossed the border into the United States without permission. I use the terms “illegal immigrant,” “illegal alien,” or “illegal migration” only when trying to draw attention to the person’s legal status, or when the fact of the worker’s illegality is significant in the sentence. When I include quotes, I retain the original language used in the quote. Frequently that means I have to use the word “wetback,” despite its racist and offensive connotations, because the word was in common usage during the midtwentieth century. At certain points I carefully distinguish between Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans, and sometimes I do not. In Chapter 1, I do not distinguish between the two, referring to both as Mexicans. (They would have referred to themselves as mexicanos.) I begin to distinguish between Mexicans and Mexican Americans from chapter 2 on, because the growing presence of the Border Patrol makes the distinction necessary for my argument. The intricacies of power at the border during the mid-twentieth century, with two states vying for control over workers’ mobility, would suggest a picture of the border as a space of dynamic and dramatic change. Growers’ own assertion of power over workers’ movements, which paradoxically relied upon, yet also came into conflict with, US federal authority, deepened the complexity, further suggesting a state of change as different groups acquired greater power at different times. Underlying all the change, however, is an 15

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element of continuity that links this period on the border to others during the twentieth century, and to the present day as well. The US government has long considered Mexican migrants to the United States as temporary sojourners within a system of immigration ideologically based on permanency and assimilation. That contradiction created the problem of what to do with a permanent population of Mexicans who were never meant to be permanent in the first place. In the present day, whatever their political affiliation, observers agree that the US immigration system is broken. As the histories of immigrant Mexicans and other nonwhite minorities demonstrate, it has always been so.

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chapter 1 •

“Where Uncle Sam Meets Mexico” Narratives of Frontier and Progress in Early Twentieth-Century South Texas

“I 

am one of the unfortunate men that were led to the Rio Grande Valley of Texas by the C. H. Swallow Company on 19 August 1918,” began Adolf Dicke’s letter in response to US Post Office inspector J. M. Donaldson’s mailed questionnaire in 1921.1 Donaldson had begun an investigation into the practices of land companies selling cropland in South Texas, to uncover their fraudulent methods and misrepresentations, as well as to determine the extent to which they used the mail to perpetrate their crimes. In offering to share his story with Inspector Donaldson, Adolf Dicke detailed his journey from his home in Nashville, Kansas, to the US-Mexico border region of South Texas, the arguments that persuaded him to buy ninety uncleared acres, and then his gradual disillusionment as he spent two and a half years in South Texas, planting crops in inadequately irrigated farmland and constantly operating at a loss. Dicke couldn’t quite figure out how he had come to make the purchase in the first place, stating: “I did not mean to buy an acre of said land. But when the excursion party was on the way back home [sales agent] C. M. Roscoe passed the booze whisky freely among the crowd. . . . I must have been under some influence or I would never have purchased.” 17

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Inspector Donaldson’s investigation focused on the techniques that land companies used to influence landowners and farmers from northern states to part with their savings, leave their farms, and/or borrow money from family and friends and move to an entirely new place or embark on expensive investment ventures as absentee landowners in the South Texas border region.2 Through his inquiry, Donaldson wanted to know what specific promises sales agents made to prospective buyers, how the sales pitches were carried out, and what aspects of these pitches were successful. The responses to his questionnaire convinced Donaldson that the land companies employed the “most outrageous, outlandish, and reprehensive methods that can be conceived” in selling the land and “swindling the public.”3 Before his investigation could be completed, the chief inspector of the Post Office took Donaldson off the case following a series of lobbying visits from owners of South Texas land companies and their lawyer to Washington, DC. Two years later, the issue was temporarily revived during a US Senate subcommittee hearing about the suspended Post Office investigation. In the end, Senate investigations petered out without any restitution for swindled owners. In the 1920s, as ranching was eclipsed in South Texas in favor of the more capitalized crop-based agriculture, land company owners flocked to South Texas to buy up land they hoped they could turn into a modern commercial empire. To convince farmers and landowners from other regions in the United States to purchase land and move to the border, land speculators partnered with railroad companies and sponsored promotional campaigns that recycled nineteenth-century notions of the frontier in a new era, weaving them with images of Progressive Era capitalist expansion. Central to their plans for a modern agricultural economy was a reliance on Mexican laborers, who, contradictorily, were often cast as premodern peons. In promotional literature and on tours that speculators organized for prospective buyers, sales agents juxtaposed a land undergoing modern transformation (on the US side) and a sleepy, archaic country (Mexico) and laborers who were perfectly fitted to the landscape. In doing so, they produced new cultural messages about the border and its Mexican inhabitants, and played a determining role in the Rio Grande Valley’s modernization by enabling a migration of white farmers (and their investments) to finance their agricultural projects. Though initially they faced many challenges to farming a difficult land and were disappointed in their expectations, this early generation of white migrants eventually transformed the border from

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a ranching to a crop-based economy, and had firmly become the new power elite by the middle of the century. The Post Office investigation must have surprised land company owners in South Texas, whose deceptive methods for selling land and the unfulfilled promises of prosperity were identical to methods that had been used to sell off the US Trans-Mississippi West for decades.4 In the nineteenth century, optimistic promoters of western development were determined to overcome older romantic views of the Wild West and its accompanying destabilizing violence with a newer, highly exaggerated picture of agricultural bounty.5 Promoters needed little supporting evidence to propose grandiose claims for prospective agricultural wonderlands amid the most inhospitable climates. As David Igler has shown, it was often the overheated visions themselves that attracted the necessary capital to transform the landscape, a process that often benefitted a very few and saw initial investors going bankrupt in the process.6 As geographers Brannstrom and Neuman have argued in their study of boosterism in South Texas, the “imagined landscape” perpetuated by land sellers legitimized the practices that actually altered the material landscape, finally leading to the reality resembling the myth.7 South Texas land agents must have felt that with enough faith, and investment, their exaggerations would become true. Instead of techniques, the difference between regional boosters of the nineteenth-century West and the land companies selling the latest agricultural empire was a burgeoning regulatory apparatus pushed forward by the advertising industry in the private sector. The advent of the Associated Advertising Clubs of America, with their vigilance committees and truth in advertising movement, meant that land companies were held to higher standards of truthfulness than similar operations in the past. Bolstered by the notion that honesty in advertising was crucial to the scientific advancement of modern business, the proponents of the truth in advertising movement condemned fraudulent hucksters and consigned them to the superstitious past.8 Land companies’ practice of trafficking in bold visions for an economic empire in the Valley, in the grand tradition of the nineteenth century, complete with associated images of the frontier, collided with Progressive Era notions of regulation and order. Fortunately for the land companies, and to the misfortune of land buyers, the regulatory authority of the government was insufficient and it was unable to prosecute claims of fraud in many of the cases.

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The testimony from Donaldson’s inquiry also reveals the power of narratives as creative forces in their own right, to persuade, to articulate people’s desires, and to effect real change. What was it about the images and the sales pitch of an agricultural “Magic Valley” that convinced prospective buyers, often against the contradictory images provided by their own senses? As one disappointed buyer later conveyed, while on their excursion trips “we did not notice the hot semitropical sun which beat down upon us so hot, and some other unpleasant things.”9 Those things would only become apparent afterward, when prospects-cum-landowners were trying to raise the promised cornucopia in an arid landscape. Reminiscent of the false fronts of western mining towns in the nineteenth century with their ornamental architectural flourishes and show windows, South Texas land companies presented a veneer to eager prospects, the promise of agricultural abundance, infrastructure, and cheap labor.10 In the process of selling the vision of South Texas (the imagined future), land companies used familiar images of the western frontier and layered on notions of Progressive Era modernity to inscribe onto the border ideas of difference as well as transformation for one side only. Mexico was portrayed as quaint, unchanging, and rooted in the past—separate from the modernizing Valley. These images fixed the border into a binary notion of difference, one side backward and crumbling and one pumping toward the future, denying the connection between the two countries and the mobility between the Mexico space and the United States space. Yet actual Mexicans were fundamental to the plan for the modernizing “Magic Valley,” as was stressed in all of the promotional literature. Within the narrative construct of the American progressive transformation of the region, Anglo Americans had the power to transform Mexican workers as well, from backward peasants (or bloody bandits) into the perfect low-waged agricultural workers. The sponsored excursions combined tourism and colonization in a heady mixture that allowed all visitors to perform the role of modern-day frontier colonists. For those men and women who took the next steps and purchased land and moved with their families to South Texas, the process of journeying to South Texas on the excursions to see the land, the people, and the economic possibilities formed the first stage of their transformation into border growers. Even visitors who traveled to the border on promotional excursions but did not purchase land participated in the process of the region’s conversion. All visitors, both serious buyers and pleasure-seekers, kept the wheels of the promotional machine turning in the production of cultural messages about 20

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the border, its Mexican inhabitants, and the role of Anglos in the Valley’s modernization. In reality, the entire land-selling enterprise was a process of midwesterners peddling a version of South Texas to each other—making, shaping, and marketing the border for each other. The land companies and potential buyers, in producing and consuming the messages in the promotional literature, and in traveling on excursions, together engaged in the process of defining the region from a Mexican to a US space.

Migration and Social Change in South Texas and Northern Mexico Scholars writing about South Texas had characterized the region as a previously isolated, self-contained, and somewhat static social world, disrupted by two periods of transformation during the mid-nineteenth century and again in the early twentieth century. One was directly after the MexicanAmerican War in 1848, and the other, more profound, change at the beginning of the twentieth century transformed the region from a cattle ranching economy to a crop-based agricultural economy.11 Pulling back the lens to consider the region of northeastern Mexico and South Texas as a whole, however, reveals a region greatly in flux throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dramatic changes also occurred in northern Mexico during President Porfirio Díaz’s regime (1877–1911) as well as the subsequent armed revolution that gripped the country for two decades and that also affected South Texas. Railroad construction and the development of large-scale industries in northern Mexico during the Porfiriato spurred a greater amount of internal migration in the region. Though agricultural industry boosters initiated deep changes in the economy, society, and culture in South Texas in the early twentieth century, they did not create an agricultural empire out of the wilderness, as they were wont to suggest. The Porfirian-era modernization projects induced large-scale demographic change in northern Mexico, creating the mobile labor force crucial to South Texas agriculturalists’ development plans.12 The first period of transformation began during the Mexican-American War and the region’s legal incorporation into the United States, and continued through the latter part of the nineteenth century. The intermittent, yet frequent, mobilization of American military troops to the South Texas–Mexico border during these years left a residual presence of former soldiers and support staff who stayed in the region, married into local elite 21

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Mexican families, became merchants and cattle ranchers, and began to take dominant positions in the local economic, social, and political structures. Though some amassed large ranches at the expense of Mexican landowners, and often through violence and intimidation, some scholars have argued that the presence of Anglos did not fundamentally change cultural and social life in South Texas. Cattle ranching still dominated the economy, though it was now integrated into a larger US marketplace, instead of the regional Mexican market the ranches had previously served. Patriarchs still dominated familial dependents and laborers, though now the ranch patriarch might have an English or Irish last name.13 Furthermore, because many Anglo men had married into elite Mexican families to establish themselves socially and economically, these alliances preserved the Spanish language, the Catholic religion, and the prevailing social class structure as the dominant cultural forms in the region. Historian David Montejano has described the attempts by the Mexican elite seeking to keep their power and accommodate a new political reality as the “peace structure.”14 The peace structure, however, did not actually promote peace. Periods of violence and unrest punctured the region as some American newcomers consolidated their power through the paramilitary force of the Texas Rangers. Others placed pressure on the newly formed boundaries of the US-Mexico border through armed incursions into Mexico, called filibusters. Furthermore, tensions escalated as some Mexican border residents struggled against these changes through armed resistance.15 Spurred by Porfirio Díaz’s modernization plan for Mexico, and financed largely by American capital, the completion of the railroad that connected Monterrey, in the northern Mexican state of Nuevo León, to the United States in 1882 wrought significant changes to northeastern Mexico in terms very similar to what South Texas would experience a generation later.16 The coming of the railroad signaled massive changes to the northern Mexican countryside, formerly dotted by large cattle ranches and small landholdings of subsistence farmers. Helped along by Porfirian-era policies allowing for the dispossession of those who could not produce legal titles to their land, as well as rising land prices, large landowners increased their acreage at the expense of small rancheros and communal landholders. As historian Sonia Hernández has shown, the Mexican government declared these lands terrenos baldíos, or empty lands, and offered them up for sale and development, often using the same type of promotional advertising that had been used by boosters all over the US West (and later in South Texas).17 Now landless, 22

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many former small landholders were forced to labor on large haciendas, producing cash crops for extremely low wages. Juan Mora-Torres has identified the state of Nuevo León as an exception to the land acquisitiveness of hacienda owners during the Porfiriato. Neighboring states in northern Mexico, however, did follow the general trend of land dispossession and reconsolidation in favor of haciendas.18 Far from the dormant region that Anglo land developers represented, northeastern Mexico had been undergoing significant changes to its economy and population since the last decade of the nineteenth century in industry as well. The two border states abutting the Rio Grande Valley, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas, were large and highly populated. In 1900, Nuevo León counted 327,937 residents in its state, while Tamaulipas had 218,948 people.19 By the turn of the twentieth century, the city of Monterrey in Nuevo León had emerged as a growing industrial center and soon became the foremost industrial city in Mexico, mostly through foreign investment in ore smelters.20 As industry took hold in the city, wages in Monterrey rapidly increased, paying among the highest levels in the country.21 The industrialization of Monterrey spurred migration to the growing city as people sought those higher-paying positions in factories and other industrial jobs. Thus, during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century, the population in the two northeastern Mexican border states was highly mobile. A substantial portion of the population in Nuevo León and Tamaulipas were migrants from other nearby Mexican states. For Nuevo León, between the years 1895 and 1930, an average of 14 percent of the people had been born in other Mexican states.22 In Tamaulipas, the number of migrants in the state was even higher, averaging 19.6 percent during the same time period.23 Though many migrants traveled to work in both heavy and light industries in Monterrey and the surrounding region of the northeast, migrants also chose to cross the border to work in Texas, thus becoming the available labor force that South Texas land promoters highlighted in their advertising campaigns. Twenty years after northeastern Mexico’s dramatic economic, demographic, and social transformation, the completion of the railroad in South Texas also subjected the area to profound economic pressures and social change. The St. Louis, Brownsville, and Mexico Railway connected the Rio Grande Valley with Corpus Christi to the north during the summer of 1904, and the prospective development spurred intense land speculation in South Texas.24 The same large tract of land that had once belonged to a Tejano 23

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family might have changed hands several times in a few short years, as different groups of investors sought to find the right tract of land to begin to advertise in the Midwest, the Middle Plains, and the South.25 Land companies proliferated quickly in South Texas, and they organized excursions that brought thousands of prospective investors to South Texas per month on the premise that the “Magic Valley” was a future agricultural paradise. As a result of these efforts, the demographics of South Texas changed rapidly: Hidalgo County alone averaged a 125 percent increase in population every ten years between 1900 and 1930, growing from 6,837 in 1900 to 77,004 in 1930. While the county was almost exclusively Mexican throughout the nineteenth century, by 1930 Mexicans made up only about 53 percent of the population.26 The demographic shifts brought other, more substantial, economic and social changes in their wake. Inspired by the spectacle and promise of the physical transformation of the land for intensive agricultural production, early twentieth-century white migrants were determined to modernize a region they perceived to be premodern and backward. Disturbed by what they judged to be corrupt machine politics based on the manipulation of an uneducated, illiterate Mexican vote, “good government” leagues associated with the new migrants sought to disenfranchise Mexican voters through the application of poll taxes.27 New towns built along the newly constructed railroad supplanted the old ranches, now depicted as quaint relics of an earlier time. Agricultural land developers touted the progressiveness of their bustling communities with their modern new buildings and churches. They organized the towns, from their inception, as segregated towns, with the Anglo residential spaces and the Mexican Town or Mexican Colony clearly defined and delineated in their blueprints. Thus Mexicans’ spaces were relegated to small, dense corners of townships, marginalized from new spaces of public and social engagement. Mexicans had to make do within the new agricultural economy as foremen, labor contractors, manual laborers, or sharecroppers. As the prices for land rose in the counties that had begun to introduce large-scale farming, Mexican landowners faced the pressure of having to cultivate agriculture for commercial production as well, or risk losing their land by being unable to pay their property taxes. The replacement of the cattle ranching economy with commercial agriculture undermined the bases of power on which the Mexican social structure rested. Mexicans soon occupied a social space in which their movements were limited by public,

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residential, and educational segregation, all of which combined to place them in a position at the bottom of the new society. Despite the tumultuous changes affecting both northeastern Mexico and South Texas from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, agricultural boosters in the 1920s often portrayed the border region of South Texas as dormant and undeveloped until that time. This conceptualization mistakenly posited their economic endeavors as new, ignoring the earlier transformation of northeastern Mexico, and formed part of a general view of the separateness of South Texas and northern Mexico. It also allowed for an assertion of their particular form of economic development as being uniquely American. Considering the area on both the north and south sides of the border as a whole, regional migration had already been under way in northern Mexico since the late nineteenth century. That regional mobility laid the platform for Mexicans’ migration into South Texas to form the labor force central to the agricultural development in the early twentieth century. Significantly, it was through and within that migration among the working classes of Mexican agricultural laborers that cross-border regional ties continued to exist. Migrating families lived and labored in a transnational context as they maintained households on both sides of the border. Though social stratification worked to separate Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans, they invariably created new relationships and communities with each other as they shared laboring and social spaces.

Narratives of the Frontier and Progress in Land Company Promotional Brochures As more land changed hands in South Texas, and land investors began exploring the agricultural possibilities of the region, dozens of newly formed land companies began advertising their new creation. In conjunction with the two railroad companies serving the region, the Southern Pacific and Missouri Pacific lines, the land companies published a number of brochures and broadcast radio segments aimed at persuading midwesterners to take the excursions down to South Texas. While they were there, sales agents tried to persuade visitors to purchase property, either to resettle with their families in South Texas or for absentee investment purposes. In describing the different characteristics of the area, the brochures did not merely introduce an unknown land, but actively worked to define the land as a commodity to be

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purchased, a landscape that included within it a native Mexican labor force, also a valuable commodity. The exuberant paeans to the economic possibilities available in the Rio Grande Valley evoked nineteenth-century images of the American western frontier, thus creating an easily digestible mental picture of life in South Texas using familiar associations.28 The narratives of an idealized past (the frontier) and Progressive Era discourses of a modernizing future wove together to create, in South Texas, a constructed place out of time in the modern twentieth century. Though seemingly anachronistic images—on one hand nostalgic renderings of a nineteenth-century western narrative, and on another a proud display of the latest infrastructure and technology—both ideas articulated a process of transformation that boosters wished to communicate. Brochure makers mobilized the important iconography of the frontier, bringing its associated images of mastery to the geography of South Texas. By invoking the frontier, brochures also reminded readers of the reasoning that originally supported the nineteenth-century ideology of Manifest Destiny, a divinely granted and masculine authority over a putatively empty wilderness. It was one of the most common tropes narrating the American West, and boosters in the region were quick to employ the imagery and descriptions that would place the Rio Grande Valley within its triumphalist history. In one especially melodramatic tract, the author promoted the Rio Grande Valley as the “Masterpiece” of the “Commanding General of the Universe” who had created a “fit dwelling place for the favored sons of men.”29 According to the logic of Manifest Destiny, God’s approval of any means used, including violence, to dispossess “weaker” peoples became apparent through the aggressors’ very ability to act. That is, God gave the aggressors the strength to conquer because God approved of the conquest, as read through the biblical decree that humans dominate the land. Such reasoning lay behind much of the justifications for violent US westward expansion against Native Americans and Mexicans during the nineteenth century. The brochure’s portrayal of a martial God rewarding favored sons invoked the history of Manifest Destiny and revived it for the twentieth century. For the most part, however, boosters preferred to downplay overt violence and employed the other dominant myth of frontier expansion—that of a virgin land waiting to be inhabited, giving passive consent to its use by white men. The land itself was gendered feminine, and descriptions of the processes by which agricultural development altered the landscape often shaded into sexualized language. One description noted, for instance: 26

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The Rio Grande Valley is the Delta of the Rio Grande River, a land which, in centuries of repose gathered its latent wealth from the richly laden waters of the Rio Grande River and now awakens to the magic touch of man’s efforts, giving foods and comforts to all peoples.30

This narrative portrayed the river delta of the Rio Grande as a female reproductive organ that had lain chastely untouched until white colonization had opened up the land for agricultural production. As Anne McClintock has pointed out in her analysis of British imperialism, “Within patriarchal narratives, to be virgin is to be empty of desire and void of sexual agency, passively awaiting the thrusting, male insemination of history, language, and reason.”31 In this case, since the brochure was dealing specifically with agricultural development, the masculinist imagery of planting seeds was especially apt. The sexual mastery depicted in this narrative helped contextualize the political and economic domination of the region by the newly arrived Americans. In addition to emphasizing the process of transformation by invoking the frontier, brochure writers wanted to place South Texas within a larger history of the economic development of the West, especially California. Despite numerous claims about the uniqueness of the Rio Grande Valley, comparisons to California abounded in the promotional literature of South Texas. One flattering description of the construction of the railroad in South Texas compared it to the “wild and visionary undertaking” of “Bayley’s Dream,” a reference to a nineteenth-century novel about Gold Rush–era California.32 This line, referencing California’s vast transformation during the nineteenth century, also assumed a reader’s familiarity with a body of literature that celebrated the West. By alluding to a nineteenth-century frontier West, area boosters wanted readers to simultaneously recall a period of the glorious claiming of the West from Indians and Mexicans, and to consider their present level of development. Thus, the juxtaposition of the nineteenth-century frontier and twentieth-century modernity was not inconsistent, but was congruent with a narrative of an American process of reclamation. Brochures sketched descriptions of new Anglo towns and communities in South Texas, touting their progressiveness defined in two ways: by the material infrastructure now changing the South Texas landscape and by a sense of civic spirit and reciprocity that pointed to advanced human relations.33 Brochures boasted of twentieth-century towns built along the newly constructed paved highway connecting the Rio Grande Valley in a vast transportation network of roads, highways, and a second railroad 27

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line.34 According to the brochures, fine houses, churches, and schools now populated the towns along the newly built highway. An equally large network of canals and irrigation ditches dug into the Valley landscape and pumped water daily from the Rio Grande, providing the necessary infrastructure to introduce large-scale agricultural development and transform the region from a tangle of wilderness into the “Nation’s Market Basket.”35 In addition to the physical markers of change attributed to modernity and progress, however, boosters wanted to communicate an even more complete transformation of the region, which they described as “Valley Spirit.” This feeling of civic duty manifested itself in a cornucopia of clubs and organizations, which were listed ad infinitum in the pages of the brochures. Examples include the Valley Federation of Women’s Clubs, Rotary Clubs, Masonic orders, Knights of Columbus, Elks, and so forth. Members of these organizations worked to carve up and claim social and public spaces according to middle-class notions of order and sex-segregated civic engagement. For example, members scurried about planting palm trees to beautify the Valley, holding meetings, and organizing balls and parades. As one brochure put it, “Coming from all over the United States these people are welding themselves into a civilization all their own, a civilization marked by its progressiveness.”36 In creating a unified sense of community among a collection of migrants from diverse areas of the country, these organizations also claimed public social, cultural, and political spaces that were explicitly, self-consciously, and aggressively American. Thus, more than one brochure could claim that the highway connecting the Rio Grande Valley, east to west, was “The Longest Main Street in America.”37 By boasting of the road that snaked along the contours of the Rio Grande, at a distance never more than five miles from the international boundary, as “Main Street America,” agricultural boosters pushed the cultural boundaries of the United States to its extreme outer territorial margins. Thus the metonym of “Main Street,” with its associations of traditional American values, the symbolic center of America, and whiteness, crowded out other cultural markings of the region that had been previously Mexican. The Spanishlanguage community schools, the Mexican mutual aid societies, and even the social space of the rancho were relegated to the social and cultural margins, or to a distant past. They had to make way for the segregated public schools, the Rotary Club, and Main Street.

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“Where Uncle Sam Meets Mexico”: Representations of Mexico and Mexicans in Promotional Literature If Uncle Sam was represented in the literature as both a transformational frontier and a modern, bustling Main Street, then Mexico was its foil, the evidence of a static and colorful past, and a sleepy present. The allure of Mexico lay in the “mysteries of past generations,” the ability to turn from the vantage point of “the up-to-date, the strictly modern” to marvel at the

figure 1.1. Detail from promotional brochure, “Brownsville, in Texas on the Lower Rio Grande.” Note the inset and accompanying tagline, “Where Mexico meets Uncle Sam,” a reversal of order of a slogan that was commonly found in the promotional literature, “Where Uncle Sam meets Mexico.” Shary Collection, Library Special Collections and Archives, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

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decayed grandeur of Matamoros, the “retrogression of Reynosa,” and the “sad crumbling of that gem of Aztec construction, historic Mier.”38 In featuring a bygone Mexico in their promotional materials, South Texas’s boosters trod the familiar paths established by other southwestern promoters wishing to elevate the profiles, tourist potential, and unique characteristics of their regions. Unlike literature about Southern California and New Mexico, however, the Spanish colonial past did not feature so prominently and consistently in South Texas materials. Because of its geographical proximity to the US-Mexico border, the existence of Mexico could not be avoided. Yet, as figure 1.1 suggests, Spanish imagery was often layered onto a putatively Mexican scene, so that the señorita engaging in a dance with Uncle Sam appears to be more Spanish than Mexican. Though some of the devices might have been broad and seemingly generic, such as invoking the frontier or a glorious Spanish past, the ideas produced in booster advertising and literature had narrative functions specific to the regions and the economic agendas of the developers of those regions. In New Mexico, for example, boosters, authors, and artists revived the Spanish colonial past beginning in the late nineteenth century for economic development and to recast the territory’s ethnic Mexican population as Spanish, and therefore potentially more acceptable to a US Congress considering New Mexico’s claims for statehood.39 In Southern California the Spanish fantasy heritage was employed in different eras to promote a new citrus industry and later to create a burgeoning and expansive leisure industry.40 Despite a substantial Mexican population in South Texas, a Spanish fantasy heritage was not central to booster literature. Mexicans were not romanticized, but were instead described primarily as a cheap labor force, another commodity available to the prospective South Texas farmer. The quaint (and backward) local color of Mexican culture was easily available to South Texas residents and visitors alike but across the Rio Grande in Reynosa or Matamoros, clearly demarcated and separated from the modern bustle of the “Magic Valley” by an international border. In depicting Mexico as quaintly mired in an ancient history, however, regional promoters elided a more complex and possibly troublesome history in South Texas and northern Mexico. The Mexican Revolution and historic uprisings among Tejanos in South Texas were either ignored entirely or else obliquely referred to as “bandit troubles.”41 Less than a generation before the publication of the brochures, for instance, South Texas had been in the midst of an uprising organized by Mexicans on both sides of the border 30

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over the extensive land loss and social upheaval wrought by incoming Anglo Americans. In 1915, during what became known as the Plan de San Diego uprising, the Mexican combatants’ violence against Anglo persons and property (which included derailing a train on the St. Louis, Brownsville, and Mexico line) was met by a brutal campaign of reprisal by the Texas Rangers and the local Anglo community. Rangers and hastily deputized local whites killed over a thousand Mexicans in 1915 and 1916, and forced thousands of Mexican families to flee from their homes.42 Despite the violence of the recent past, only one brochure referenced, indirectly, that history. The author sought to explain why such an amazingly fertile, potentially productive region had thus far escaped the reach of American developers by describing the Valley as “far removed from the centers of commerce, isolated as a result of continual Border warfare and banditry extending over a period of years.”43 That short statement quickly dismissed more than seventy years of violence between Mexicans and Texas Rangers, as well as the period of the Mexican Revolution. Of course, doing otherwise might have suggested a region still politically unstable, and would have been a very poor advertising strategy. Though separated by only a river, and marketed as part of the tourists’ experience of visiting South Texas, by dint of its relegation to the past, the country of Mexico seemed removed from the modern transformation of South Texas. Actual Mexicans, however, were a different story. As the primary labor force, ethnic Mexicans were central to any plan for the economic development of the region. Mexicans were represented simultaneously as primitive and as important components of a modernizing future. Though seemingly contradictory and discordant, these images fit into the same logic of transformation that dominated most of the promotional literature. In one respect, Mexicans were depicted as part and parcel of the wild, uncultivated landscape. Promotional tracts marveled at the “vast, almost uninhabited wilderness of mesquite and cactus” that existed before 1904 and the changes wrought by the coming of the railroad.44 The land was depicted as wild, untouched, and empty of civilization, save a “few thousand people, mostly Mexicans, living in clusters of ‘jacals’ [sic].”45 By describing the region as a wilderness and lumping Mexicans into a condition of a state of wilderness as well, the brochures discursively reduced Mexicans to being part of the landscape. Furthermore, because the brochures and pamphlets were created to attract buyers for the land, as just another quality of the landscape, Mexicans became a natural resource comparable to the quality of the soil and a commodity just like acreage. 31

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Pamphleteers conflated Mexicans with wilderness landscapes by emphasizing their “primitiveness,” often represented through photographs and descriptions of their houses. Many brochures included photographs of jacales, small houses made of wattle and daub construction with thatched roofs, sometimes with a Mexican young woman or family standing beside them, presumably to provide a sense of visual perspective of the size of the dwelling for the viewer.46 The descriptions accompanying these photos reinforced the notion that Mexicans belonged to the premodern, undeveloped landscape agricultural entrepreneurs had discovered in the Rio Grande Valley, and as Carey McWilliams observed, “exposed [them] as a special item or artifact for study.”47 Describing the Mexican Valley population as living in “Mexican villages,” or “clusters” of Mexican jacales, brochure authors denied them any kind of social or political organization that would fit within the context of the twentieth-century United States.48 While fixing an image of the Mexican home and family as curiosities belonging to a primitive past, the photographs with people standing in front of their homes also served to remind readers of the presence of workers in the landscape in the present. Thus, the tag on the photograph pointed out that they were villages of Mexican laborers (see

figure 1.2. Detail of workers in field from Gulf Coast Lines promotional brochure, “The Beautiful Valley of the Lower Rio Grande.” Shary Collection, Library Special Collections and Archives, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

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figure 1.2). The jacales were not empty artifacts, therefore, and their inhabi­ tants could be useful to prospective agriculturalists. By rendering Mexicans part of the existing landscape, pamphleteers masked the violence that had imposed a racial social system in which Mexicans occupied the bottom sector, and thus Mexicans’ social position could be construed as natural and unquestionable. Though rendered part of the primitive past, Mexican workers were fundamental parts of boosters’ plans for a modern project of large-scale agriculture for the Valley’s future. What seemed like a contradiction actually fit in with the narratives of progress abundant throughout the promotional literature. Just as American vision and initiative had transformed the Valley from a vast wilderness to a productive agricultural region, Mexican laborers could also be transformed into the ideal labor force, malleable and adaptable to all crops and conditions. Almost all brochures mentioned the available labor as part of their pitch, and many also included pictures of Mexicans picking crops in the fields as visual evidence of that labor force. Mexicans were variously described as “adaptable,” “the most skillful of humans in the mere use of his hands,” “quick to learn,” “industrious,” and “law abiding.”49 These characterizations emphasized Mexican workers’ ability to change and adapt to become the perfect workers for the twentieth-century agricultural economy. Mexicans could fulfill other roles to support a growing, prosperous economy as well. Mexican women were especially flexible because they could work both in the fields and in the household. Appealing especially to women readers, a brochure author could advertise another benefit of the region to the women whose families might be considering a move to South Texas: The servant problem is solved by Mexican labor, largely. A well-trained Mexican servant gives good satisfaction under firm, kindly treatment. A fair and friendly dealing with a Mexican usually begets loyalty and dependability, a response to whatever is received.50

Readers unfamiliar with the region became aware of an existing source of labor to form a servant class. Furthermore, the idea that came across clearly was the notion that a system of racial subjugation was firmly in place, because Mexicans, the brochure’s author suggested, either were already well trained to provide unwavering obedience or could be easily trained by the woman of the house.

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To stave off possible concerns that Mexicans, while quick to assimilate “American methods and education,” might want to assimilate too much, one writer assured readers that “they prefer to live by themselves and do not try to mix up in other society.”51 The same sentiments could be discerned in a passage that touted the modern Valley schools and also pointed out the “exclusive building, just as good as the others,” built for Mexican children in the Mexican neighborhood, referring to both educational and residential segregation.52 While the brochure boasted that the “Valley Mexican population is receiving the highest type of education in ideal physical environment,” it was clear that the transformation and assimilation of the Mexican population had its limits. Through descriptions and visual representations of Mexicans as ideal workers for a new agricultural economy, area boosters were transforming previously held perceptions about Mexicans as well as about the region as a whole. As scholars have noted about other regions in the US West, boosters had to overcome views of the West as arid, inhospitable, and wild in order to convince potential immigrants to believe that a particular region could become a dominant agricultural empire.53 Mexicans also had to be renarrated, from nineteenth-century depictions of indolent peasants or dangerous bandits into the low-waged foundation of twentieth-century southwestern economies.54 Narratives of Mexicans’ docility, adaptability to any crop, hardworking nature, and acceptance of their place in society matched the narratives about Mexican stoop labor that representatives of southwestern agricultural industries used so effectively during the early twentieth century to block immigration legislation limiting immigration from Mexico.55 These descriptions, released in scholarly studies of Mexicans in the Southwest, made before various congressional committees by experts and business representatives, and also asserted as part of advertising campaigns to promote budding agricultural regions such as in South Texas, helped create a durable stereotype of Mexicans as low-waged workers especially suited to agriculture. These images would become the dominant views of Mexicans in the twentieth century.

South Texas Excursions: Midwesterners Buying and Selling the Border to Each Other Land development companies operating in South Texas between 1910 and 1930 used excursion trips as their primary mode for selling land. Armed 34

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with colorful brochures and scripted sales pitches, sales agents working for the various land companies scoured the country for likely prospects, people willing to travel to the Valley to look it over, and who might be persuaded to buy an agricultural tract at the end of the visit. Packaging the trips as combination vacation and speculative expedition, land companies brought down groups of prospective buyers by rail and treated them to a three-day program of entertainment and instruction. The trip was tightly controlled in every way—from the information discussed to the places visited. The companies even predetermined the mode of travel in order to facilitate the extended sales pitch. Companies designed the entire experience to hew as closely as possible to the images and narratives of progress, development, opportunity, and ease outlined in sales brochures. Despite the pamphleteers’ romanticized portrayals of South Texas as the last frontier, sales agents and land companies did not want their prospects to actually see very much wilderness after all in the way of inadequate infrastructure, and kept them close to the very narrow corridors of irrigated orchards and paved roads that corresponded to sales agents’ progressive narratives. Prospective buyers’ glimpses of South Texas were as constructed and carefully cultivated as the glossy brochures themselves. Most land companies operated in similar ways, in both their organization and selling techniques. The W. E. Stewart Land Company was one of the largest firms operating in South Texas, raking in $32 million in land sales before Stewart’s conviction for fraud in 1923. John Shary, the proprietor of another major land company in western Hidalgo County, the Southwestern Land Company, owned the land company, an irrigation company, a mortgage company, a newspaper, and a bank. Once a prospective buyer made a decision to purchase land, he or she would make a large down payment, up to half of the purchase price. Often the land company also owned the mortgage company that held the lien on the rest of the property. If a farmer missed a payment, the entire note could become due immediately and the process of foreclosure initiated. Because the connections between the land companies and mortgage companies were not transparent, most buyers did not know that the mortgage companies risked nothing by foreclosing, because the land reverted back to the company to be sold again and again.56 The repossession rate for lands sold by the Southwestern Land Company between 1912 and 1930 was 70 percent, an astounding number.57 Some disillusioned buyers figured out the scheme after the fact. As one disappointed prospect explained, “The game seems to be to get a cash payment down, get a hold 35

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of notes that they try to force them to pay, and then take the land back and resell it again to other parties.”58 Although land companies were selling dreams and visions of the border in South Texas, most were headquartered elsewhere. Kansas City especially was a central entrepôt for land companies’ operations. Most land companies, with the Southwestern Land Company a notable exception, brought their prospects through Kansas City, where they would board the special excursion train cars and proceed to South Texas. Several major land and mortgage companies operating in the Rio Grande Valley were based in Kansas City, and the city was also home to the Lower Rio Grande Valley Land Men’s Association.59 Land company owners paid dues to belong to the association and attended meetings held in Kansas City to coordinate lobbying efforts in Washington, DC, and to counter negative press and official investigations, sometimes using very unsavory tactics.60 Land companies were mostly based in the Midwest. Their owners lived in the Midwest and formed their business association in the Midwest. They employed sales agents to scour the towns and countryside across the Midwest, and they brought their prospects to Kansas City to begin their journey to the border. The entire land-selling stratagem was as much a story of the West as it was a story of the US-Mexico border. By 1930, South Texas land companies had been hosting excursion parties for twenty years and had the process honed and carefully calibrated, yet making the sale was still a heavy and labor-intensive endeavor. Sales agents hailed from states such as Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Tennessee, and they mostly traveled within their home regions in search of customers. Agents visited people’s homes and places of business, sometimes over several days, showing their brochures, implementing their sales pitches, and offering those who were curious trips to see the land for themselves at nominal rates. Because agents were from the areas they worked, they did not have to overcome the perception that they were outsiders selling a far-off land. One circular of the type often used by agents (and entered into evidence in a US Senate investigation into South Texas land companies’ fraudulent sales practices) was written from the perspective of a prospect experiencing South Texas for the first time and demonstrates sales agents’ approach. Its tone was folksy and confiding, and the circular referred to fellow travelers “Pat” and “Willie,” sharing their observations of the lands they passed on the way, and details about the trip.61 Sales agents played up a sense of neighborly intimacy as a central part of their sales pitches. 36

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Once those in the main office heard from all sales agents making plans to make the scheduled excursion trip, employees of the Southwestern Land Company initiated the well-oiled machine of preparation for the incoming group. The office contacted the Missouri Pacific Railroad and ordered them to prepare two railroad cars, “Sharyland” and a standard Pullman car, for the party planning to depart from Dallas at noon on January 25, 1931.62 They placed the order to their usual purveyors, such as the Packing House Market on South Harwood Street and Metzger Dairies, for the veal chops, beef short ribs, and other foodstuffs to feed the group during the train ride and throughout the three days in South Texas.63 They booked their usual porters, Ples Fussel, C. Jackson, Fred Henderson, and James Ballard, to handle passengers’ luggage, turn down their blankets, and help create the atmosphere of luxury and privilege that the Southwestern Land Company was so anxious to convey.64 The company would then await the arrival of travelers from such places as Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado. No part of the trip was wasted—the time on the train was the first opportunity to forge a sense of common endeavor among prospects and strengthen bonds between prospects and sales agents. On the train journey, land company agents worked to foster a spirit of camaraderie, much of it forged within the racially segregated space of the train cars. In a promotional article about the South Texas agricultural industry, Theodore Price, editor of Commerce and Finance, commented on the process: “They travel in special trains, become acquainted with each other, and a feeling of communal interest springs up that has sometimes, so I am told, led the entire train-load to settle in one locality.”65 Passengers each received a copy of the “Sharyland Songbook” and spent part of the time singing well-known tunes popularized during the nineteenth century, such as “Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The juxtaposition of the seemingly contradictory messages of the classic Union tune written by Julia Ward Howe and the post-Reconstruction song that expressed a nostalgic view of the antebellum South and slavery is noteworthy. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” had lost its explicitly Union and Civil War association and had become a song that represented US nationalism in general.66 The juxtaposition of the two songs suggested the emotional strains of religiously inflected nationalism as well as racial domination. The songbook also included new songs written specifically about South Texas, such as “The Rio Grande Valley,” sung to the tune of “Marching through 37

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Georgia.”67 By including new songs about the Valley adapted from popular tunes, as well as old favorites, boosters hoped to include South Texas within an American cultural genealogy. One traveler, Jennie A. Brownell, pointed to one successful technique in her recollection of the excursion trips, writing, “We used to all get together and have a jolly time. The darkies would dance and sing and we all joined in the fun. So they [the agents] managed to work themselves into our confidence and we told them all about our finances, etc.”68 As travel scholar Hal Rothman has described, the railroad generations were accustomed to sharing space with strangers and knew how to negotiate the forced intimacies of the dining and club cars.69 Their ability to share cramped quarters, however, was based on the expectation of racial exclusivity fostered by the separate train cars chartered by the company, and created an atmosphere that perfectly suited the kind of facile sense of community the land companies wished to promote.70 Sales agents used the tradition of segregated train travel to create a feeling of community based on racial exclusivity, which was heightened by the singing and dancing of African American performers. The sense of community led to feelings of trust that sales agents could further nurture, and then later exploit, as the trip went on. The special “Sharyland” railroad car, the singing of the songs, and the Missouri Pacific’s policy of race segregation created a cultural space that also recalled the nineteenth-century history of American westward expansion. Theodore Price observed that “the spirit that led the earlier pioneers of the 40’s and the 50’s to cross the continent in prairie schooners and face the peril of an attack by Indians is the one by which the Pullman pioneers of to-day are inspired, although they travel in greater comfort and have fewer hardships to face.”71 The process of the excursion journeys, then, imitated the narratives of the frontier that the brochures promoted. As many scholars have argued, the nineteenth-century US West was a space in which many European immigrants and American whites could intermingle. European immigrants, whose cultural and racial pedigrees were often viewed with suspicion by American whites, could assert identities of whiteness through the upward social mobility afforded them in the pioneer venture. Sales agents and other employees of the Southwestern Land Company and other land companies always kept visitors together and chaperoned them for almost every moment of their trip. Every moment acted as a tightly organized extension of the sales pitch. This constant chaperonage served another function as well: it severely limited prospects from outside sources of information. At the beginning of each day, sales agents climbed into the 38

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hired cars with the prospects they had personally recruited, and often with the drivers they had specifically requested. Visitors sometimes engaged drivers in conversation about the Valley’s potential, hoping to get an unbiased opinion, and were later disappointed to learn that the drivers were also complicit in the process. As Jennie Brownell explained: I thought to steal a march on them by staying in the car while the men were seeing the crops. I thought the driver being a South Dakota man would tell me the truth about the country, but he could not afford to lose his job and so he told me all fibs.72

Jennie Brownell trusted her fellow South Dakotan, a known quantity in such an unfamiliar place, and believed that regional affinity would cut through any subterfuge. Instead of being a trustworthy element, however, sales agents actively used that familiarity and sense of coregionalism to build trust and confidence, and to paper over the inconsistencies and deceptions in their land schemes. Once the prospects had arranged themselves according to sales agent and assigned car, the whole group set off for their tour of the countryside, stopping at prearranged locations to learn the details of citrus agriculture. One of the first stops would have been near the irrigation works, either the pump house on the river or the networks of canals dug to provide the citrus trees the necessary water for production. Beyond assuring prospective buyers of access to a constant source of water in the arid region, sales agents also had to justify the expensive infrastructure reflected in the price of the land. Furthermore, these pumps, levers, and canals represented the most dramatic physical manifestations of the way in which these developers had physically altered the landscape, siphoning from the waters of the Rio Grande into narrow, concrete-lined channels. This example of manipulating nature to serve human needs further supported a romantic narrative of a modernizing frontier venture. Firsthand accounts from working farmers represented one of the most effective selling techniques sales agents had at their disposal. Prospective buyers were eager to visit a productive working orchard, and the stop at Volz’s farm fulfilled this important function. Mr. Volz spoke to the group about producing the crop: from irrigation schedules, to chemical applications of pesticides, to labor costs. He detailed to an intent audience his yield per tree and per crop, the profits he had brought in the year before, and his 39

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expected profits for the upcoming year. After the group posed for a photograph in front of his attractive and substantial farmhouse, more evidence of the profit potential of the crop, visitors sampled oranges directly from Volz’s orchards.73 The Southwestern Land Company strived to make these stops seem as authentic and spontaneous as possible, to hide any impression of information control and manipulation, yet Volz himself was a practiced performer. Normally on the itinerary, Volz gave these talks twice a month and received ten dollars per talk.74 Volz did not work exclusively for the Southwestern Land Company. Several land companies engaged him as part of their own excursion activities, so the prosperity and abundance on display on the Volz farm might have been due more to income derived from his frequent lectures than from the crops. The Southwestern Land company discouraged other nonapproved landowners from talking to the visiting groups, and if any approached prospective buyers with discouraging reports of diminished returns, offers to sell their land, or any information that deviated even slightly from sales agents’ effusive optimism, disillusioned landowners could expect an angry letter from John Shary threatening legal action.75 This strict adherence to a land company–approved program in the latter 1920s and early 1930s differed only in intensity from the explicit, and sometimes violent, methods of message control employed by land companies and area boosters in the preceding two decades. According to one former sales agent, in the early stages of the South Texas land-selling campaigns, one land company employed burly men to guard land seekers from men he called “knockers.” They were called knockers because they were out to knock the extremely optimistic picture land companies painted for prospective buyers. These knockers might approach the group with stories of their own misfortunes at the hands of duplicitous sales agents and fraudulent land companies, or even just due to the unforgiving climate. Land companies deployed the guards at the first signs of trouble, physically repulsing individuals who would disillusion any of their prospects from making a purchase.76 By 1930, such rough methods of control became unnecessary. It is doubtful that utilizing such techniques as employing bodyguards proved effective in any case, since their very presence must have raised uncomfortable questions in prospects’ minds. The land-selling industry carefully manipulated excursion trips so that prospective buyers would be induced to see South Texas through the seller’s vision. The vista they were shown was deceptively vast, a gaze that calculated the value of all aspects of the countryside and its resources, including 40

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Mexican laborers. When sales agents for Engelman Gardens, another large agricultural operation in northern Hidalgo County, took their prospects on their tour, one of its highlights was the bird’s-eye view from the observation platform atop the six-story administration building in the middle of the Engelman compound. As the visitors admired the verdant rows of citrus trees below, they could not fail to see the large labor camp located nearby, which housed the permanent, year-round agricultural workers and their families. Sales agents could easily direct their visitors’ attention to the small cottages grouped down below, and use the opportunity to speak to them about the abundant availability of Mexicans as an inexpensive labor force. Thus visitors could speculate about the expected labor costs of Mexican workers while looking down at workers’ homes; workers’ domestic spaces were laid bare to gazes sharpened by potential ownership. As important to excursion trips as inspecting the farmland and discussing water and labor sources, land companies sought to create experiences of leisure and pleasure for prospective buyers. Although the pleasure jaunts formed stark contrasts with notions of the work necessary to produce a profit from the land, that juxtaposition was very important. Sales agents wanted potential buyers to clearly see that their pleasure and leisure could be gained from the agricultural labor performed by Mexican workers. Through these side trips, prospective landowners could rehearse the leisure time and activities that would be available to them because of the presence of Mexican workers to labor in the orchards instead of them. More than mere “wining and dining,” jaunts to the beach at South Padre Island and trips across the border to Matamoros or Reynosa for dinner, drinks, and dancing also claimed the space not reserved for commercial agricultural production, which included the uncleared wilderness and even the nearby Mexican border towns, for their use and pleasure. Taking excursion groups across the river into Mexico for dining formed a regular part of the excursion weekend, so that prospects could experience a visit to a foreign country as tourists. On the excursion trip in late January 1931, the Southwestern Land Company spent seventy-two dollars on dinner in Matamoros, including music and tips.77 Because the United States was still in the midst of Prohibition, dining and drinking in Mexico would have been an especially appealing draw, also demonstrating a contrast in laws between the two countries. In the border town of Reynosa, clubs catering to American clientele, such as the New York Bar and the Crystal Palace, would have been likely destinations for excursion parties.78 One brochure 41

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announced that a “dinner across the river is the most favorite feature of entertainment of all Valley guests” and assured readers that everyone would enjoy the meals and not just those who “wash it down.”79 The brochure went on to recommend visiting Mexico, claiming that “the novelty of mailing a few post cards ‘from abroad’ and feeling law-loose holds charm for any stranger,” in a veiled reference to temporarily easing the privations of Prohibition.80 As Prohibition took hold in border states, vice districts sprang up in Mexican border communities, spurring economic activity, yet also creating permanent images of the Mexican border as vice ridden and dissolute.81 Brochures promoted the close vicinity of Mexico and its entertainment districts as selling features for visitors to the Valley and for prospective residents, thus using vice districts to promote economic development on the US side as well. Sales agents often used the train trip back home to place heavy pressure on prospects to close the deal. Either by plying prospective buyers with alcohol, as Adolf Dicke recounted, or by posing as buyers of a particular tract of land themselves in order to create a manufactured sense of demand, agents saw the trip back to the North as the last realistic opportunity to sell land. As F. O. Alin explained to Inspector Donaldson, he never intended to buy any land, but “another land buyer said it was a good piece of land and said he selected it for himself but later took another. But I found out later on he was nothing but a land agent and was working for his commission.”82 One family recounting their losses in their failed South Texas venture reported that they had lost their $4,500 investment in their property when John H. Shary took over their land: Mr. Shary took over the farm but did not allow us one cent for what we had in it or for improvement. He claimed it was a loss to him but I know it to be an absolute fact that he sold it in a short time for about $125.00 of a raise per acre, so I fail to see his loss.83

According to letter-writer Myrtle Turnbaugh, of the eleven families from her region of northern Iowa, only one still remained in South Texas. Yet, despite the disappointments and failures of the individuals who responded to Donaldson’s questionnaire, land companies always found enough willing new prospects to keep the excursions going throughout the decade of the 1920s, eventually dramatically transforming the demographic makeup of the South Texas border region. 42

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A Progressive Era Challenge to the Narrative At the very moment that the land companies in South Texas were coalescing around their new vision for South Texas, amassing land and developing their sales strategies patterned after similar land-selling ventures used throughout the West since the mid-nineteenth century, new developments in private sector–led regulations instigated a serious questioning of the land companies’ sales techniques. Triggered by a complaint by the vigilance committee of the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World, the US Post Office launched an investigation into land companies operating in South Texas to find out whether they were using misleading and deceptive methods in their advertising campaigns. The federal government had limited power to regulate the industry, and its main power lay in determining the extent to which the US Post Office had been used to perpetrate land companies’ fraudulent claims. Working with US Post Office investigators, the US Attorney General’s office successfully prosecuted one case against a South Texas land company, the W. E. Stewart Land Company, in 1923. Lobbying efforts in Washington, DC, by representatives of the Lower Rio Grande Valley Land Men’s Association and by politically connected individual owners, quashed the Post Office’s broader investigation into other land companies also operating in South Texas. In 1924, a Senate subcommittee on post offices and postal roads briefly reopened inquiries into the suspended investigation and the reasons for its demise. Ultimately, the federal government’s investigations did not paralyze the land companies’ business model; the Great Depression did. The advertising industry’s attempts to regulate the land companies’ claims with their “truth in advertising” movement represent one way in which nineteenth-century notions of the western frontier and Progressive Era ideas of order, science, and progress did not fit in so neatly with land companies’ plans. To counter the deep suspicions that the American public had about advertising and the belief that advertisers routinely used lies and misrepresentations to advertise their products, advertising firms and corporations formed associations and vigilance committees to promote “truth in advertising” and root out unscrupulous businesses.84 The precursors to the Better Business Bureau, the Associated Advertising Clubs formed in 1911 with vigilance committees pursuing complaints of duplicitous advertisements in order to “clean up” the industry and improve its reputation with the American public.85 The Associated Clubs advanced the notion of truth in advertising and consigned 43

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those who would use deceitful advertising as relics of the past, the quacks and snake-oil salesmen of yesteryear.86 By contrast, modern businessmen had no need for underhanded techniques, truth in advertising proponents argued, because their scientific methods in business had led to superior products that obviated the need for deceptive advertising.87 The advertising industry’s truth in advertising campaign was a product of the Progressive Era, with its undercurrents of reform, regulation, and scientific approaches to business. In the early 1920s, vigilance committees in the South pursued land developers in Florida for perpetrating deceptive land schemes. In 1920, William Winter, assistant counsel for the national vigilance committee, sent a letter to William H. Lamar of the Post Office Department urging him to conduct a special investigation into the land companies operating in South Texas.88 The Post Office Department assigned Inspector J. M. Donaldson to look into matters of the land companies, specifically tasking him with determining whether the companies were using fraudulent means to sell their properties and whether the US Post Office was used to carry out their schemes. The investigation netted one major conviction: the W. E. Stewart Land Company, one of the largest operations in South Texas. Because the Stewart Land Company was based in Kansas City, the trial was held there. Stewart did all he could to influence the proceedings, hiring a Missouri state senator as his lawyer and pulling strings in Washington, DC, to gain a continuance on the case, with the hope that by drawing the case out, he could eventually get it dismissed. Stewart had succeeded in getting the US attorney to accede to a continuance of the case in early 1923, but because of his premature boast that became public and was reported in the Kansas City Star, the judge in the case declined to grant the continuance. Stewart was found guilty of fraud and liquidated his company soon afterward. During the proceedings of the Stewart case, and in the midst of an investigation into the other land companies doing business in South Texas, Inspector J. M. Donaldson was pulled from the case and replaced by another investigator. Donaldson had written a rather damning initial report of the companies, concluding, “The fraudulent practices are so reprehensible that some effort should be made to put a stop to the swindle.”89 Two of the companies under investigation were the C. H. Swallow Land Company and the Alamo Land and Sugar Company, both of which had been recently managed by R. B. Creager, who had left the job to become the president of the First National Bank of Brownsville. R. B. Creager was a personal friend of US 44

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president William Harding. In fact, before his inauguration Harding and future attorney general Harry Daugherty visited South Texas as Creager’s guests. Harding was even featured in several promotional brochures as evidence of the rising prominence of the region. Donaldson noted in his report that land companies had sent an agent to inquire about the investigation, and the agent “intimated that the post office inspector could get nowhere with the investigation as R. B. Creager would be appointed Minister to Mexico and that the influence would outweigh any facts produced.”90 Despite such warnings, Creager and Mr. Zumbrunn, an attorney for the Lower Rio Grande Valley Land Men’s Association, successfully got Donaldson removed from the case. Soon afterward, the investigation was abandoned in a state of limbo in the Office of the Chief Inspector. Despite assurances of the honesty and transparency of the vigilance committees and the truth in advertising campaigns, political influence won out in the end. The Senate subcommittee met in hearings in 1924 to determine why the Post Office had dropped its investigation of South Texas land companies in medias res, especially since its early investigations had resulted in a conviction in a federal court in Kansas City. No other land company was brought to trial even though evidence suggested many land companies used similar methods to sell property. The Senate subcommittee itself lost steam after the Washington, DC, hearings; the proposed Senate hearings in South Texas were never held.

Conclusion From the turn of the twentieth century until the time that excursion trips began to wane during the first few years of the 1930s, the Rio Grande Valley experienced a dramatic demographic shift in its population. The effects of the two-decade-long campaign to sell the “Magic Valley” as a modern agricultural empire in the last frontier of the continental United States were more widespread than the demographic changes in South Texas. For every individual or family member who pulled up stakes from their homes in Kansas or Oklahoma to move down to the Rio Grande Valley, a greater number purchased land without the intention of ever leaving their present homes. These absentee landowners always outnumbered those who decided to move to South Texas. Absentee landowners represented a group of people scattered throughout the Midwest, the Middle Plains, and the South who had vested interests in the economics and politics of the US-Mexico border region. 45

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The vast majority of the people who took advantage of the special rates to travel to South Texas and witness the marvels of rapid agricultural transformation about which they had heard so much never purchased a single acre. Yet, as consumers of the media produced by land and railroad companies and as travelers, they aided in the colonizing venture of the land and society in the South Texas border region. Referred to as “prospects” by land companies, their very presence as possible buyers of land fired the engines of the excursion trip promotional and representational machine. The interactive relationship of selling and buying, producing and consuming, enveloped the region, with its narrative of progress defined as uniquely American and modern yet imbued with the aura of nineteenth-century images of the frontier. The narrative of American economic development and progress relied on the border and Mexico as indispensable sources of labor, as tourist attractions, and as convenient foils to highlight the boldness of an American transformational power to remake the landscape, society, and the future of the region. In the process, the promotional apparatus in charge of selling the region’s future also rewrote its past, erasing the actual history of nineteenth-century conquest and capitalist incorporation of South Texas and northeastern Mexico. The rhetorical juxtaposition of a modernizing “Magic Valley” and a static Mexico created a binary that separated the two regions and disregarded the ways in which their histories were interconnected and quite similar. As evidence of the Valley’s progressive modernity, promotional brochures touted the carefully planned new towns coming up along the railroad lines, complete with paved roads, banks, churches, schools, and segregated residential zones, separating white migrants from the Mexican labor force. Along with their new communities, land companies promised a new society of clubs and associations and good government to replace the corrupt machine politics, fueled by the control of Mexicans’ votes. In praising the perfect suitability of Mexicans to an agricultural economy and expressing confidence in Mexicans’ abilities and willingness to embrace the latest in techniques and education, boosters also included the transformation and “improvement” of Mexicans in their arguments about modernization. Agricultural boosters promised, in short, a progressive paradise in the “Magic Valley.” Yet the reality was far from ideal. The business of selling the vision of the “Magic Valley” consisted of unfulfilled promises and inadequate infrastructure. Land companies managed to survive a challenge from the vigilance committee of the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World and its truth in 46

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advertising campaign by leveraging that most unprogressive type of political power and pulling political strings to suspend a federal investigation into their practices. Eventually the infrastructure caught up with farmer demand when irrigation systems were made public rather than being privately financed. The main source of disillusionment was then gone, and reality began to match the vision of a highly productive agricultural region. And as the agricultural economy began to grow in South Texas, so did growers’ political influence.

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chapter 2 •

The Social Space of Agriculture

S

etting out at dusk one night in the early 1950s from his home in Rancho Grande, a community of a few hundred residents located along the southern banks of the Rio Grande in Tamaulipas, Noe Magallan crossed the river with a small group of relatives and neighbors on their way to Carrol Norquest’s farm about twenty miles north of the river.1 If they had the money and had so chosen, they could have paid for someone to take them in a truck from Granjeno, located just across the river on the northern side of the border, to Norquest’s farm, located just on the outskirts of Edinburg (see figure 2.1). Because they did not have the money, they walked the entire way, a journey that lasted almost the entire night. Taking care to avoid any chance meeting with an immigration officer on patrol, the group skirted the roads, picking their way through the fields and crossing over irrigation canals. Though not afraid of physical violence from the Border Patrol officers—Noe Magallan claimed that they would not manhandle or otherwise treat one harshly if one behaved oneself—the travelers thought it prudent to take these precautions to avoid the possibility of being seen, 48

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figure 2.1. Map of South Texas border region showing Rancho Grande and Edinburg, the location of Carrol Norquest’s farm. Map by Cory Wells.

stopped, questioned, detained, and then thrown back across the river.2 After a long night of walking, they arrived at the Norquest farm and into a space of relative safety, because “once we were there with him, it was not too easy for one to get caught.”3 South Texas growers helped fashion an agricultural labor system based upon the foundation of illegal workers and rooted within the powerful social, cultural, and political logic of the farm, with its combined living and laboring space. The Norquest farm exemplified the daily social interactions between a farmer and agricultural workers, relationships shaped by the police presence of the Border Patrol in the region. Rather than stop the access to low-waged Mexican laborers that had so attracted farmers to the region, the growth of the Border Patrol during the mid-twentieth century helped create the conditions for workers’ low wages through the selective restriction of undocumented workers’ mobility. That social space allowed growers to construct paternalistic images of themselves as protectors of undocumented workers from the Border Patrol. Recognizing the ways that growers and workers used 49

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different notions of family in describing and defining agricultural relations also disrupts a narrative of twentieth-century agricultural labor relations as being predominantly impersonal wage transactions. The labor force in agricultural regions along the US-Mexico border consisted of Mexican Americans and Mexicans, permanent legal residents and undocumented immigrants. Despite being in the midst of the bracero program, undocumented workers formed the agricultural economy’s base, influencing wage rates for all farmworkers. Because a significant portion of the seasonal agricultural labor force was undocumented, the Border Patrol played an essential role in allowing the border labor system to function. South Texas growers consistently employed undocumented workers year after year, suggesting a culture of collusion between Border Patrol officers and growers. The collusion, though widespread, was understood as unofficial, idiosyncratic, and based on relationships formed within daily social interactions. Workers noted growers’ collusive relationships with Border Patrol officers but perceived them as based on personal ties and providing some modicum of protection against deportation. The personal and idiosyncratic image of Border Patrol–grower relationships helped support growers’ paternalistic pretensions. The dynamic of personal relationships helped locate growers’ authority within the individual personal politics inherent in patriarchy and paternalism. In their seasonal migrations, agricultural workers attempted to keep their families intact by migrating in loose family groups. They found that by taking advantage of growers’ paternalist self-constructions, they could continue to live and work among these large kinship networks even in another country, and even within a context of illegality. In addition, through these seasonal migrations, workers were able to supplement their small farming operations in their homes in northern Mexico. Through their seasonal migrations, Mexican workers maintained and nurtured extensive and transnational family relationships that endured beyond the time they spent on the farms. Examining daily social interactions in South Texas agriculture during the 1940s and early 1950s is important in understanding the competing sources of authority shaping the organization of Mexican agricultural workers’ migrations. During most of the 1940s, Texas growers did not use braceros for their labor force, mainly because of the Mexican government’s ban on Texas. Even after Mexico permitted Texas to contract braceros in 1947, Texas growers’ participation in the program was intermittent for the next few years, frequently interrupted by subsequent blacklists from the Mexican government 50

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as well as by growers’ own refusals to hire legally contracted braceros. The system of undocumented agricultural labor employed in South Texas during this period was not just a precursor to the state-sponsored bracero program. This labor system competed against and placed pressure upon government attempts to organize and control Mexicans’ migrations. Both governments had to respond to the realities of undocumented migration on the ground, and it fundamentally shaped the program as negotiations continued year after year.

A Peak Period in South Texas Agriculture Although land developers drew farmers to South Texas in the 1920s on the promise and glamour of the luxury citrus crops, growers in the Rio Grande Valley raised a variety of crops almost the year round. Citrus remained important, both financially and in visually defining the Valley. In 1946, for example, the twenty-four million boxes of grapefruit Texas growers shipped made that year’s production second only to Florida’s.4 Because of its warm weather, investments in irrigation infrastructure, and long planting season, as well as abundant labor, the Rio Grande Valley became one of the most important agricultural regions in Texas. Throughout the 1940s, growers in the Rio Grande Valley shipped out more than 50 percent of Texas’s vegetable crops, producing the majority of the state’s tomato, cabbage, carrot, potato, beet, corn, green bean, and onion crops.5 Thus, the Rio Grande Valley was a major agricultural region in a state that ranked behind only California and Iowa in income from crops between 1944 and 1950.6 Despite the variety of fruits and vegetables grown in South Texas that required the presence of agricultural workers through much of the year, the heaviest demand for labor occurred during the cotton harvest season in late June and early July. In 1948, Hidalgo and Cameron Counties followed only Lubbock County in the number of cotton bales ginned, making the region a significant cotton producer in the state that produced the most cotton in the United States that year.7 In June and July, thousands of seasonal workers crossed the border from Mexico to work in the cotton harvest. In a study examining South Texas agricultural labor during the latter half of the 1940s, the economists Nelson and Meyers estimated the Rio Grande Valley’s overall labor needs during the peak summer months of 1948 at about 135,000 workers.8 While it is impossible to determine a precise number, a different study placed the seasonal numbers of undocumented workers in 51

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the Rio Grande Valley at 100,000.9 This number corresponds to Nelson and Meyers’s calculations of the permanent residential agricultural labor force at nearly 40,000 workers.10 Thus, rapid growth and seasonal dynamic movement characterized some aspects of the agricultural industry along the South Texas–Mexico border. The farming operation owned by Carrol Norquest, grower and author, located in the border region of South Texas, illustrates the daily social interactions between growers and workers. Forming part of the midwestern and plains states migration flow to the Rio Grande Valley in the early 1920s, the Norquest family moved from Kansas and settled near Edinburg, Texas, in Hidalgo County.11 The Norquests purchased a farm and forty acres containing a large farmhouse, a barn, and several other outbuildings and small houses.12 Over the years, Norquest owned and rented up to four hundred acres, representing a midsize farming operation raising a diverse range of cash crops, from cotton and citrus to vegetable crops. The most acreage he personally owned was 120 acres, broken up into several tracts of land in different areas near town.13 By comparison, the average farm size in Hidalgo County in 1945 was 119.3 acres.14 Of the four counties in the Rio Grande Valley, Hidalgo County was the largest, contained the most cultivated farmland, and had the largest number of farms. In demographic terms, Carrol Norquest represented an average farmer in South Texas. In other respects, Norquest was far from average, nurturing a talent for prose and the ability to capture small vignettes of daily agricultural life written in a vibrant and engaging style. After suffering a stroke later in life, Norquest began writing as a form of therapy. He took a creative writing course by correspondence and then began seeking a publisher for his short stories about agricultural life in South Texas.15 Though the University of New Mexico Press usually published academic books for a college market, the southwestern books editor Jack Rittenhouse responded favorably to Norquest’s stories, commenting that the work was “more than just mere entertainment, it is what the academics call a ‘socially useful document.’”16 The press eventually published his collection of anecdotes about the workers on his farm under the title Rio Grande Wetbacks. Though he had to assign pseudonyms to the people in his stories, Carrol Norquest claimed that the people were real and the stories were “true, as far I was given the ability to write the truth.”17 Norquest crafted his stories from materials culled from his own experiences and those of his friends, neighbors, and acquaintances, providing a picture that went beyond his farm.18 The book and his unpublished 52

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manuscript, “The Swarming of the Wetbacks,” open an important window into daily interactions between white growers and Mexican workers, from a grower’s perspective.19 Carrol Norquest presented a complex and contradictory account of himself in relation to his workers, implying the possibility of equality at some moments and profound asymmetry at others. In “The Swarming of the Wetbacks,” Norquest drew comparisons between his family’s Swedish immigrant background and the immigrant Mexican workers he employed. By doing so Norquest invoked the assimilationist narrative of immigration offering Mexican migrants the possibility of full integration in US society in the future. In this way, he also placed himself and his workers within a common narrative of egalitarian citizenship.20 On the other hand, Norquest also represented his relations with workers in paternalistic terms, based on the permanently unequal dynamics of a father and child. In the introduction to Rio Grande Wetbacks, Norquest described grower-worker relationships during the 1940s and early 1950s in the following terms: His [the worker’s] trust in el patrón, if his patron was good to him, was complete. Life, liberty, health, welfare, money—he put them all in the hands of el patrón. He gave in return the very best that was in him: good wishes, regard, loyalty, and labor.21

Though describing relations of reciprocity, the tenuousness of such a relationship was clarified in another story included in Rio Grande Wetbacks, as was its basis in undocumented workers’ compromised mobility due to their illegal status. In “From Wetbacks to Migrants,” and in other spaces, Norquest revealed the limits to grower authority, as he recounted his and other growers’ ambivalence regarding workers’ acquisition of legal status in the United States. In that story, his acquaintance Jack helped several of his workers acquire citizenship papers, in order to “make it easy, for them and for himself, to have them work here.” To his dismay, Jack found that once workers obtained legal status in the United States, they left his farm, either to migrate north in search of higher wages or for better jobs in town. After several such incidents, Jack vowed not to help anymore. “But I think I’ve helped my last Mexican with his papers,” he declared. “Most of them never even thanked me.”22 The reality that once workers gained the ease of open mobility they often dropped their attitude of loyalty challenged the paternalist self-image that some growers promoted. 53

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But a display of paternalism was never a unidirectional process. Workers themselves also brought their own understandings and collective memories of social relations in agriculture based on the history of agriculture in Mexico. Those collective understandings about relationships between landowners and workers helped shape relations on border farms as well, as workers tried to influence the terms of interaction between themselves and their employers. In an example from Rio Grande Wetbacks, from a chapter entitled “Wetback Women,” Norquest narrates a story in which one of his workers, a conscientious field hand who “saved his money and didn’t carouse,” wanted to borrow money from him so he could get married. Norquest was surprised at his request for a loan; he thought that Pablo had probably saved enough money to get married without having to borrow. Pablo provided a detailed description of how he intended to spend the money. Some went for the bride’s attire: a white dress, underclothing and shoes, and a crown, while the rest went to provide music and drinks after the wedding. Norquest lent Pablo the money, though he continued to question the need for it. He speculated that because Pablo’s chosen bride was a prostitute—though a sister of another one of his workers, and (remarkable to him) treated by all the workers with respect—she was probably in some debt to a pimp and Pablo was trying to buy her out of her former life.23 It is possible Norquest’s speculations were correct; however, it is more probable that Pablo intended to spend the money as he had stated, on the bride’s clothing and the wedding reception. By asking Norquest for a loan on the occasion of his wedding, Pablo could have been modeling expectations of reciprocity based on traditional understandings of Mexican-based paternalism in agricultural relations. As historian Friedrich Katz has shown, hacendados often advanced a sum of money to peones on special occasions, such as weddings and baptisms, with no expectations of being paid back. These interactions were mutually understood to be a kind of payment for workers’ permanent labor on the haciendas, and an expression of the hacendado’s generosity.24 And though Norquest was surprised at the request for a loan, and certainly did not understand it as a part of a tradition between farm owner and farm laborer, he did lend Pablo the money and in this way contributed to the occasion of Pablo’s wedding. And Pablo might have understood this interaction to be a symbolic gesture of goodwill and acknowledgment of his position as a dependable and trusted worker. In this particular case, however, according to the narrative, Pablo’s coworker and prospective brother-in-law, Raul, offered to “stand security” for the loan 54

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when Norquest asked him if “it will be a good thing if I lend him the money.” Despite Norquest’s confusion about the request for the loan, Raul’s assurances and offer to provide security on the loan gave Norquest the confidence to advance the money. In this case Raul facilitated the loan, thus supporting Pablo’s request and possibly allowing for an expression of their (Pablo’s and Raul’s) shared understanding of expected paternalistic behavior between farm owners and farmworkers. In order to get a sense of farm life from workers’ perspectives, I sought the same workers that Carrol Norquest described in his writings. By interviewing Carrol Norquest’s son Kelly, I learned the last name of the extended family the Norquests dealt with most closely, and the town they were from in Tamaulipas, Mexico. Though most of the workers who had worked for Carrol Norquest had already died, I tracked down several family members with firsthand or secondhand experience on the Norquest farm and obtained from them their view of relations with the Norquest family, their border crossings, and negotiations of the social space of agriculture in South Texas. Though I focus on the social space of US border agriculture, it is also important to understand workers’ border crossings within a larger context of migrations and social change in northern Mexico. As discussed in chapter 1, demographic changes brought about by Porfirian-era modernization policies created a shifting and mobile population in northern Mexico. Railroad construction disrupted and displaced families, even as the railroad and other industrial development reshaped towns, cities, and the northern Mexican labor market. Postrevolutionary land reforms brought land back into the hands of small proprietors, but improved nutrition and life expectancy led to larger families, placing a strain over time on the small parcels of land originally allotted to male heads of household. Young male members of these families often had to migrate to nearby farms and haciendas to supplement the family’s earnings.25 Thus, the migrations of workers to Carrol Norquest’s farm on a seasonal basis during the middle of the twentieth century formed part of a longer history of internal and international migrations responding to significant changes in economic and political structures.

The Role of Protection in Grower-Worker Relationships The familial terms that Norquest invoked when describing his relations with Mexican workers were not particular to him, but instead have long shaped notions of agriculture. Although the farm often evokes a pastoral 55

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and pleasant image, the ideological foundations of agriculture have rested upon hundreds of years of power over workers, securing workers’ labor—and limiting their mobility—in relationships other than between wage laborers and employers.26 The family, and its logic, has been central to agricultural production. Geographically fixing a labor force, defined as inherently domestic and belonging wholly within a familial sphere, was a central characteristic of power dynamics in European and early American agriculture.27 The domestic associations of agricultural labor continued long beyond the time that wage labor, democratic institutions, and political struggle transformed economic, social, and cultural relations in other facets of society.28 Even as recent histories of antebellum slavery have emphasized a vast and highly capitalized system of forced migration and a frenzied internal slave trade as slavery moved ever westward, at base the movement and spread of slavery was based on individual households moving west into new cotton frontiers.29 Well into the twentieth century, agricultural workers had difficulty disentangling themselves from the realms of the domestic. Despite claims from labor activists that large-scale agriculture in twentiethcentury California constituted what Carey McWilliams called “factories in the field,” the federal government consistently distinguished between agricultural and domestic laborers and other workers. In the 1930s, New Deal protections, such as those afforded by the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act, excluded agricultural and domestic workers.30 Historians have attributed the exclusions to political expediency on the part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who left out those categories of workers in order to secure support from Southern Democrats.31 These concessions demonstrated Southern whites’ continued desire to control the lives of mostly black agricultural workers. The concessions, and their effects, continued to define agricultural workers as a racialized, as well as a non­ industrial, and therefore domestic, labor force. Thus while scholars such as Carey McWilliams and David Montejano have described twentieth-century Mexican migrant farm laborers as resembling industrial workers in their wage relationships with growers, neither the politics nor the culture of the time recognized this to be the case. They were seen as a case/caste apart. In Factories in the Field, Carey McWilliams first advanced his now-famous thesis regarding California agribusiness, describing the labor force as a rural proletariat: a “huge, rootless, ambulatory alien army moving about, living in shacks and sheds, without homes, without roots of any kind in the community.”32 McWilliams saw similar processes of industrial-capitalist agricultural 56

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relations taking place in Texas, in the transition of the cotton industry in the 1920s from a labor system based on tenancy to a system based on seasonal migrant farmwork. He feared that similar “armies” of seasonal migrant farmworkers were “tearing at the social fabric of rural life and rural towns.”33 Looking specifically at South Texas, and the transformation of its economy from cattle ranching, with its static debt peonage labor system, to crop farming based on waged labor, David Montejano also narrated a destruction of the rancho communities. For both McWilliams and Montejano a significant transformation was located in the shift from permanence and community to impermanence and migrancy, resulting in easily replaceable “units” in a low-waged labor market.34 According to both Montejano and McWilliams the apparent rootlessness and lack of community and kinship relationships facilitated racialization of agricultural workers, although these scholars might differ as to the degree to which rootlessness contributed to racialization or vice versa. They agree that mobility tended to impair or rupture familial and community ties that might otherwise have mitigated, or helped mask, the inequality within the labor structure. There is evidence, however, to support an alternative interpretation, that is, that growers used familial rhetoric in order to rationalize exploitation of “their” workers. Racialization did not crowd out family rhetoric; rather, family rhetoric facilitated racialization. In South Texas, growers primarily employed undocumented Mexican workers, a group who could not more perfectly embody the class of persons both McWilliams and Montejano described. Growers’ representations of labor relations with workers, however, differed markedly from the impersonal wage relationships McWilliams and Montejano detailed. Far from a progression of a faceless army of seasonal migrants, many of the workers who worked at the same farms year after year interacted on the intimate planes of familiarity with growers.35 Such familiarity, linked with an agricultural industry imbued with the trappings of pastoralism, allowed for expressions of paternalism, with its relationships of protection and dependence, processes that growers tried to keep in place.36 The control growers claimed they maintained over their workers was based not on the impersonality of armies of faceless, interchangeable workers, but on the intimacy of familiarity and an established history of social relations. In a 1920 US Senate hearing debating a bill to exempt Mexican agricultural workers from the eight-dollar head tax and literacy test imposed by the 1917 Immigration Act, Fred Roberts, a grower and the president of 57

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the South Texas Cotton Growers Association, spoke about his familiarity with Mexican workers as a group and as individuals in order to emphasize growers’ reliance on Mexicans in particular. That part of Texas, he claimed, “has always been and is to-day dependent upon Mexican labor. We have always had free access to the Mexicans on the other side of the border, and we have always been going there.”37 Claiming access to Mexican workers as almost being a right of South Texas growers, he further elaborated his sense of “knowing” Mexican workers as a group: “And we want the Mexican laborer, because we are used to him. We know the Mexican and he knows us. We are not afraid of him. There never was a more docile animal in the world than the Mexican.”38 While indulging in the kind of stereotyping of Mexican agricultural workers covered elsewhere, Roberts emphasized the relationship between growers and workers by insisting that each knew the other.39 Going further, Roberts claimed to know Mexicans not only as a class, but also as individuals, asserting that a “particular Mexican has been coming to my place now for 10 years,” thus highlighting the personal nature of the working relationship. Growers rhetorically positioned themselves as protectors of undocumented workers from various forces: the Border Patrol, jealous Mexican American workers, and exploitative labor contractors. How were growers able to construct their identities in this way? Scholars of slavery in the ante­ bellum South have offered great insight into the workings of the complex relationships between slaves and plantation owners, including relations of paternalism.40 Based on a foundation of underlying violence and coercion, slaveholders provided basic food, shelter, and care in old age in return for a lifetime of arduous, unpaid labor. In order to justify themselves in such a coercive system, slaveholders constructed themselves as paternalistic protectors of childlike dependents. According to historian Eugene Genovese, slaves often worked within that limited space of familial social relations to establish and expand rights over time—transforming privileges into rights.41 Genovese’s analysis helps explain and explore complexity within a highly repressive system of relations that could account for the vast majority of social interactions that were not outright resistance by slaves or explicit violence by owners. This formation of slavery Genovese describes was most characteristic of the period after the closing of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808. More recent scholarship has challenged Genovese’s portrayal of social relations between plantation owners and slaves, arguing that paternalism was not the 58

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most characteristic expression of social dynamics on plantations, as owners squeezed every ounce of profit from workers in conditions of unrelenting exploitation and impersonal brutality.42 Taking these critiques into consideration, and understanding that relations of paternalism did not match the reality of slavery, the logic of paternalism does serve to explain the ways that growers viewed and described themselves in relation to enslaved people and in comparison to other actors in the labor system. In the context of plantation slavery, the power to immobilize slaves, to mete out punishment for violations of the prescribed boundaries and duties of slavery, and to provide for slaves’ physical needs inhered in the same person: the slave owner. The household, especially the plantation household, served as the seat of social, cultural, and political power.43 By locating the productive process of labor within the parameters of the household, planters contained the most important economic functions of the agricultural South within their private demesnes. “Slavery, they argued, was a domestic relation” and not a labor relation.44 External social mechanisms, such as the institution of the slave patrol as well as the legal system, supported the authority of the slaveholder to keep those power dynamics in place. Violence and coercion held black laborers immobile and dependent in a slave system, but slaves contested and negotiated the boundaries of obligations and responsibilities exchanged by growers and slaves and enacted within the logic of the family, father, and children. South Texas growers, in describing their own position in relation to workers, invoked a tradition of plantation-based paternalism. Furthermore, the labor system at work in South Texas relied on an element of coercion, which allowed South Texas growers to perform roles of paternalism. Notions of paternalism, therefore, went hand in hand with coercion. Instead of inhering in one person, however, the coercive and “benevolent” aspects defining paternalism divided into two separate but connecting entities: the Border Patrol and growers, respectively. Unlike antebellum slave patrols, however, the Border Patrol was not expressly created to support the existing agricultural system. But in reality, the Border Patrol did have the effect of limiting the mobility of the Mexican workers in the fields. Because the agricultural labor system was fundamentally based on the labor of undocumented workers, the Border Patrol played an important role in shaping the contours of labor relations between growers and workers. The mobility of undocumented workers was undeniably circumscribed. Because of their illegal status, a crime carried on their person, undocumented workers 59

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could not move about freely. Growers benefited from workers’ compromised mobility and their illicit legal status in various ways, but growers were not individually responsible for creating their legal social condition. In other words, the authority that created undocumented workers’ condition did not officially rest with growers but with federal immigration laws, and, more important, with the police body tasked with enforcing immigration laws, the Border Patrol.

Compromised Mobility and Its Effect on Relations of Paternalism In an important respect, growers could position themselves discursively on the same side as undocumented workers, as adversaries to the Border Patrol, also with much to lose from Border Patrol raids and deportations. (Of course, workers had much more at stake and much more to lose.) Instead of viewing growers as repressive employers willing to exploit workers’ illicit status to pay extremely low wages, growers created the contexts for sympathetic, though asymmetrical, bonds between themselves and workers. Workers must have been aware of growers’ collusive relationships with the Border Patrol. That awareness and, in fact, the perception that growers could provide an element of protection from the Border Patrol formed the basis for any sense of reciprocity that might have existed between growers and workers. Noe Magallan claimed, for example, that Carrol Norquest personally knew the Border Patrol officers and was friends with them.45 In this way, workers considered any apparent grower collusion with Border Patrol officers as personal and idiosyncratic, an example of Norquest cleverly getting around the system, instead of as systemic and consistent. Judging from the preponderance of undocumented workers in South Texas during the summer peak of cotton harvesting, and how fundamental these workers were to the base of agricultural labor in South Texas, these idiosyncratic personal relationships between growers and Border Patrol officers were the system. In his unpublished manuscript, “The Swarming of the Wetbacks,” Carrol Norquest explored the collusion between Border Patrol officers and growers developed through personal relationships between the two, feeling they belonged to the same social world in which cooperation was expected. In “Lemonade Parties,” Norquest described an account of a conversation he overheard between two farmers while waiting at the cotton gin at the end of one harvest season.46 One summer in the early 1950s, as a grower and his 60

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work crew were picking cotton one Tuesday, a Border Patrol officer raided the field, rounding up the crew for questioning. The grower and the Border Patrol officer, having never previously met, somehow recognized each other. After a bit of conversation, they realized they had served in the same air force unit during World War II. As the two caught up on old times, “the people watched and waited. ‘What was up? Son amigos! Que curioso—How strange.’”47 Workers noticed the interplay between the grower and the Border Patrol officer, their personal connections formed somewhere outside the formal relationship of law enforcement and citizen. According to the story, the Border Patrol agent rued that he had to remove the workers from the field, and as he was explaining the need, he came across a solution to his social difficulty. He offered to wait and come back to the field on Friday, after the work was completed, if the workers promised to be there. He returned on Friday with a paddy wagon to haul the workers to the border and initiate the process known as voluntary departure, in which workers were dropped off at the border without going through formal deportation procedures. While everyone waited, the grower mixed up batches of lemonade, which everyone, including the Border Patrol officer, enjoyed. The workers returned to work on Monday morning, and this process was repeated every week during the harvest. As Norquest sardonically commented, “the people got a free ride home,” and the Border Patrol officer got a “bunch of sure entries in his book—not loafing on the job!”48 The collusion that patterned the interactions in “Lemonade Parties” benefited the grower, since his harvesting was in no way interrupted. The Border Patrol agent also benefited, logging a large number of apprehensions each week with very little trouble, and in a way that might have influenced his overall strategy of enforcement. That is, the patrolman might not have troubled with patrolling the rest of the week if he could count on a certain number of workers through their arrangement. The workers “got a free ride home,” whether they wanted one or not. This story, though apocryphal, did not fully consider the toll that these deportations had on workers. Though the workers are depicted as sharing a friendly lemonade with the Border Patrol, Border Patrol officers most frequently inspired fear, not camaraderie. If collusion did occur, workers were not in on it. If they were not able to successfully flee the migra, they had to submit to being rounded up, placed in temporary detention holdings, and taken across the border. Then they would have to find their way back to the farm to resume work. Of course the Border Patrol’s presence was only pertinent to a particular 61

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kind of worker, a fact not lost on growers. In January 1939, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officers conducted an investigation about the hiring practices and general labor conditions in the border area of South Texas in response to a letter of complaint a migrant laborer from Michigan had penned to President Roosevelt.49 Someone in Roosevelt’s administration instructed the INS to follow up on this complaint, which charged that growers in the Valley only hired undocumented Mexicans for the citrus fields, and that a white man could not get work. William E. Russell from Saginaw, Michigan, had traveled down with his wife and children to South Texas after listening to boosterish reports on the radio about the Valley’s projected bumper citrus crop. After making his way down to the Valley over a period of several weeks, Russell was disappointed to find no one would hire him. He finally landed a job at a canning factory, and after approaching a farmer for work while at the cannery, the farmer replied that he only hired Mexicans because they worked for so cheap. The farmer reportedly said if he needed more workers, he would “tell a Mexican to get him ten or fifteen, or whatever he needed, and the Mexican would go to Mexico and contact some Mexicans there, and the next day they would swim the river and be at his place ready for work, and work for him for $.50 a day.”50 By contrast, Russell earned twenty-five cents an hour and worked five or more hours a day. The officers in charge of various posts in the Rio Grande Valley responded to INS district director William Whalen’s inquiry, and the remarkable similarity in their responses suggests that they coordinated their message. The officers agreed that it was probably true that “a stranger, not of the Mexican race, seeking employment as common laborer in that connection would have great difficulty in finding it even at the same wage paid Mexican labor.”51 The labor force of agricultural workers in South Texas was predominantly composed of ethnic Mexicans. But they refuted the charges that most of the workers were undocumented Mexicans. According to all officers, the bulk of the workers were local American citizens of Mexican descent, and they explained that there was such a surfeit of such labor that there was no necessity “for Mexican labor from the Mexican side of the river to come in or to be brought in.”52 In the past, Inspector D. W. Brewster acknowledged, “it was common for farmers having a seasonal demand for a large number of laborers to go or send someone across the river to Mexico to hire the desired number of laborers to smuggle to this side and perform such seasonal work as was needed.”53 According to the officers, the Border Patrol’s exertions had an effect on that practice, and it had generally subsided. 62

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In the officers’ own words, the region had an established history not just of using undocumented seasonal labor, but even of actively aiding in the illegal migration of workers from Mexico. And despite assurances that these practices had mainly ended, it was clear that the culture of South Texas tolerated, and even facilitated, such practices. Probably in response to a direct question from District Director Whalen, the Border Patrol officials on the ground in South Texas reported recent cases of farmers crossing the border into Mexico and recruiting men from the streets of Mexican border towns. Occasionally, apprehended migrants reported that they had been recruited in such a manner, yet smuggling cases against farmers were never prosecuted. According to the officers’ reports, the US attorney’s office always declined to prosecute because of the “known unreliability of such witnesses,” referring to Mexican apprehended migrants, and the “conclusively demonstrated fact” that juries would never issue a conviction in these cases because the juries were always composed in some part of farmers. The Border Patrol officers concurred with the opinion of the US attorney’s office, and in the six years preceding the inquiry in question, no case had been brought to trial in the McAllen sector.54 Reports from El Paso revealed that similar conditions existed there during roughly the same time period. In a confidential memo to the commissioner of immigration in 1937, district director Grover Wilmoth analyzed the history of growers’ labor use since the late 1920s. Even after being told in 1929 by officials in Washington that they could no longer use “contraband labor,” some border growers continued to rely on undocumented workers to form their labor force. As Wilmoth put it: Others defiantly continued the use of illicit alien labor, and became so brazen in their methods that they boldly went or sent their foremen into Mexico to induce Mexican laborers to slip across the line and work on their farms. When evidence of such acts was presented to the US Attorney’s office a prosecution would not be authorized because the prosecutor knew a jury could not be found to indict or convict.55

For almost a decade, then, many cotton growers continued to employ undocumented workers for their fields, and even to facilitate their migration unhampered by the fear of prosecution for charges of smuggling or violating the contract labor immigration law. In this racially homogenous labor force, distinctions of privilege and subjugation were based not primarily on race, 63

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but on legal status. The presence of undocumented Mexican migrants could be more easily hidden within a labor force that was predominantly Mexican. That fact allowed for the plausible deniability of those growers who employed undocumented laborers and those Border Patrol officers who wished to de-emphasize the presence of undocumented migrants in the border regions of the United States. In the case of the investigation into the use of undocumented labor in South Texas in 1939, the ambiguity regarding the extent of undocumented seasonal migration allowed Border Patrol officers to assure their superiors in San Antonio and Washington that they had the situation well in hand, and by one estimate, a claim by Border Patrol chief inspector Fletcher Rawls, agents captured about 80 percent of illegal entrants.56 In response to Michigan native William Russell’s complaint of farmers’ habitual use of undocumented workers from Mexico, Fletcher Rawls suggested that Russell could probably not tell the difference between illegal Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans. “This is the first time he has been in this section, however, and it probably occurs to him that most of the Mexican people he has seen are from Mexico,” Rawls wrote.57 The extent of the use of undocumented Mexican labor in the fields of South Texas thus remained hidden. Other officers, such as the INS district director in El Paso, Grover Wilmoth, were more willing to face the reality of undocumented migration in the regions over which they presided, and were fully aware of the implications of such a migration. In the fall of 1937, Wilmoth was called to respond to a letter that Hudspeth County farmers had written to their congressman protesting increased Border Patrol activities in the middle of harvest season.58 Wilmoth wrote a long memo to the immigration commissioner, Colonel Houghteling, situating the context of growers’ labor expectations and complaints. According to the memo, earlier in the year, Border Patrol officers had taken five workers from the Lamar Davis farm. One of the sons, Gates Davis, stated that he “would not employ whites or ‘niggers,’ as cotton pickers, in other words that he would use only Mexicans, and he might well have added ‘wet’ Mexicans.”59 Wilmoth felt sure Davis meant that he only hired undocumented Mexicans because Gates Davis had told Wilmoth on another occasion that he did not pay more than fifty cents per hundred pounds of cotton, which Wilmoth stigmatized as “starvation wages anywhere in the United States, but would be attractive to Old Mexico Mexicans.”60 Though growers seemed to base their decisions to exclusively hire Mexican workers mainly on economic rather than racial grounds, considerations 64

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of race did play a part in assessments of Mexicans as an appropriate labor force. When the Border Patrol inspector in charge in Brownsville, D. W. Brewster, reported the wages paid in South Texas in response to an inquiry from his superior, he seemed to adopt an apologetic tone in his report, providing three reasons for the very low wages. First, according to Brewster, the crop was being sold at below cost; second, there was a large labor pool of extremely desperate individuals just across the border; and third, Mexican Americans and Mexicans legally residing in the United States were also in desperate straits, many of them unskilled and unemployed. He added: It must be remembered that aliens of this class [legal residents of Mexican descent] have the faculty of living on very small amounts, a faculty which has existed in their racial group for generations, and the majority of them are entirely satisfied, requiring only a few dollars to live on and if able to earn that small sum in two or three days weekly refusing to work beyond that time.61

Brewster invoked assumptions about Mexicans’ ability to live on very little food and their satisfaction with very little as an explanatory factor for low wages in South Texas, in addition to the pressures of high unemployment and the seasonal ingress of undocumented migrants. He omitted any analysis that took into account the Border Patrol’s role in creating conditions of fear for undocumented migrants. The legal and social vulnerability that undocumented migrants experienced, and which might shape their behavior while in the United States, became emblematic of behavior typical of Mexicans in general.

Camping Out in the Brush Because growers did not have official authority over workers’ legal status, a status that placed them in a position of social vulnerability, they also had no clearly defined social obligations to look after a worker’s well-being. Since workers, because of how the system operated, bore the fault for their own social vulnerability through violating immigration laws, did growers feel obliged to provide a certain basic standard of living for workers laboring and living on their farms? No. Any act farmers performed that mitigated workers’ difficulties, such as providing camp stoves for cooking, tarps for makeshift tents, and the like, growers certainly considered evidence of largesse and kindness. 65

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The summer cotton season was the busiest time of year on the Norquest farm, when Carrol Norquest had to accommodate between thirty and fifty additional people on his forty-acre homestead for a period of several months. The issue of housing—where the workers would live—highlighted both the question of farmers’ obligations to their workers and the wide social distance between farmers and workers inhabiting the same domestic space. When Norquest’s parents made the decision to make the move to South Texas, they traded their farmland and the nineteenth-century-era house in Kansas for forty acres with a large house on it and other edifices and outbuildings, including a barn. Though the main house was in some disrepair when they acquired it in the 1920s, it had once served as a showplace for one of the numerous land development companies, a destination point during the sales pitch to convince prospective landowners from the Midwest about the potential prosperity of South Texas’s nascent agricultural industry.62 The substantial two-story house comfortably accommodated Carrol Norquest and his wife’s large family of seven children. The property also contained a couple of other houses, which Norquest used for both his year-round and seasonal workers, though his entire workforce could not be accommodated in them. Although most of the workers were men, some women also worked in the fields alongside the men. In addition, several other women came with the group, and although they did not work in the fields, they cooked meals for the workers and washed their clothes, charging a small fee to each worker for their services. The larger of the houses could hold between twenty and thirty workers, according to Noe Magallan. This is where the women of the group slept, along with some of the men, all sleeping on the floor on the cotton sacks they used for the daily picking, since Norquest provided no beds for them. The rest of the men slept outside with their cotton sacks spread out “among the weeds” and under the open sky near the house.63 Norquest sometimes provided canvas tarps that workers set up to provide some protection from the elements. Workers set up the camps within the rows of the citrus orchards or in the ten acres of brushland across the road from Norquest’s home, far away from the road and covered by enough dense foliage to shield themselves from any passing Border Patrol vehicle. Living in this kind of housing, which ranged from rudimentary to non­ existent, elicited some envy among the young male members of the Norquest household, who often wished they could leave the comfort of their solid house to camp out in a manner similar to the workers.64 Living outside in the 66

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heat of the South Texas summer and among the elements held some romantic appeal of adventure for the youngsters, who had the luxury of choice the workers lacked. Sometimes after the sun had set on a long day in the cotton fields, Norquest’s teenage sons Kelly and Rikki would make their way to the workers’ camps to hang out and horse around. Kelly remembered the good times they had during these evenings. The workers demonstrated generous hospitality, offering them a share of whatever they had cooked, either over an open fire or on the kerosene-fueled camp stoves that Norquest provided for his workers, and expressing disappointment if the boys refused the food.65 Though these evenings of “horsing around” and eating together might have strengthened the ties of intimacy between the Norquests and the workers, and perhaps demonstrated feelings of genuine liking on both sides, these instances of nonwork social interaction did not necessarily denote a lessening of social distance between the two. What might have been permissible social interaction between the young Norquest boys, who viewed the exchange in a manner of a summertime adventure, and the Mexican men of various ages gathered by their evening campfire might not have been considered proper between Carrol Norquest and the workers.66 In fact, of all the descriptions of demonstrations of hospitality—Carrol visiting the Magallans in their family home in Rancho Grande, some workers occasionally eating dinner in the Norquest home, and of course, the evenings of fun by the fire—there was never a mention of Carrol Norquest partaking of workers’ hospitality at their tarp-covered camps on his own land.67 Was this omission significant, or merely incidental? This method of housing seasonal undocumented workers under tarps as their sole source of shelter was far from uncommon and did not necessarily depend upon the size of the farm. Engelman Gardens, located approximately ten miles from the Norquest farm, was a large farming operation encompassing over ten thousand acres of citrus orchards, cotton fields, and vegetable crops in the same county as the Norquest farm. Engelman Gardens contained a large permanent labor camp of small houses for its year-round workers and their families. According to Ida Montalvo née Rivera, who worked in the payroll office of the massive agricultural operation, all of the people living in the permanent structures were either Mexican American or Mexican nationals legally residing in the United States.68 In her position cutting checks to all the agricultural workers at Engelman Gardens, she never remembers writing out a check to anyone who was not a legally sanctioned worker. Yet, judging from the many letters of complaint from Engelman Gardens’ general 67

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manager, A. L. Cramer, to his many friends and acquaintances within the US Congress about the Border Patrol’s heavy-handed tactics in raiding his operation, clearly a portion of his workforce was undocumented. Furthermore, according to Ida’s husband, Alex Montalvo, many of these workers lived hidden away within Engelman Gardens, staying under tarps deep in the citrus orchards, away from the roads and the Border Patrol’s monitoring.69 Even on one of the largest agricultural operations in South Texas, undocumented agricultural workers had to live in the same kinds of spaces as workers on smaller-sized farms, such as the Norquest farm. In these two cases, then, the differing size and prosperity of the agricultural operations did not materially affect undocumented workers’ living conditions. Workers and growers negotiated the complex and contradictory space of mutual expectation in South Texas agriculture. When asked if he minded sleeping outside using a sack for his only bedding during the cotton season on Carrol Norquest’s farm, Noe Magallan said that he did not mind, because it was during the summer, so the weather permitted such sleeping arrangements.70 Besides, Magallan added, Norquest was so good to them they did not like to ask him for anything. Because Norquest successfully kept the same workers returning to his farm year after year, with younger members of the same kinship network going to work there when the others had moved on, Noe’s view of his employer may have been the dominant one. Angelica Magallan née Castañeda, reflecting on her memories of going to the Norquest farm with her mother on weekends and on the experiences of her future husband, Tomás, as a laborer on the Norquest farm, described the entire experience as “beautiful.”71 She was convinced that Mr. Carrol Norquest was now “well-seated in heaven” beside her Christ because he was such a good boss.72 To support her contention that he was a good patrón, Angelica Magallan provided examples that were not about wages or working conditions strictly within the workday. The workers never lacked for anything, she claimed. If workers did not have food, Mr. Norquest would take them to the store, or he would give them a ride into town if they needed it. Norquest had at least some experience with workers who objected to their working conditions, but he narrated even these instances of worker discontent within the relations of paternalism. In his prefatory material to chapter 8 of his unpublished manuscript, Norquest noted the reactions of some workers to the signs of his wealth that seemed obvious to them. In the chapter entitled “Mejicanos Inocentes” (Naïve Mexicans), he described a scenario in which a Mexican worker, “a non-thinker,” might be vulnerable 68

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to a “demagogue” who would “supply ready-made thoughts” and make him feel unsatisfied with his lot in life.73 Once under the influence of such demagogues, according to Norquest, the worker glances around in disbelief at my car, my pickup, my tractor, my big house. He can’t picture me as not having money in my pocket—plenty of it. A man with many visible possessions must have plenty of money. Notes, debts, taxes. His experience does not cover the agony of debts. He thinks I’m lying to him. Later, the agitator will encourage this belief. “El Patron is lying. He is keeping you down on purpose.” It doesn’t occur to him or his friend the agitator—that all he has to do to relieve himself of the situation (exploiting to forever hold him down) is to go back to where he came from.74

First, by deflecting the origins of such discontent onto an outside agitator or demagogue, Norquest preserved the image of a fully functioning ethic of paternalism at work on his farm, which necessitated the belief of perfectly content workers. Thus, according to Norquest, the worker could not have formulated the critique on his own, within the context of his own experiences working on the farm; it was his inability to think, his childlike simplicity, that made him fall prey to those seeking to make trouble. Second, by positing that the worker’s mistaken assumption of Norquest’s wealth was based on the worker’s naïveté about the complex processes of debt, Norquest again discounted the worker’s intelligence and negated any past experience the worker might have had with debt, making him a blank slate to be instructed by others. Finally, in his dismissal of the worker’s critique by pointing out how easily he could “go back to where he came from,” Norquest clearly sketched out the social terrain as he saw it: workers could leave if they chose, but if they did not leave, they had to submit to the wages and conditions determined by growers. Though changeable, unpredictable, and erratic, the forces threatening undocumented workers kept many workers from venturing very far from the farm, further strengthening their dependence on the farmer for their daily necessities of life. During the cotton season, some workers such as Noe Magallan rarely left the farm. Magallan worked six days a week and did not go to town even on his day off. He explained his reluctance to go into town by pointing out that they were there to make money, not spend it on entertainment on the weekends. That desire to save money, while perfectly understandable, does not fully explain why Magallan and other workers would not 69

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even go to town to purchase food and other supplies. The Norquests believed it was out of fear of being caught by the Border Patrol on their journey to and from town or while they were in town. Therefore, it became part of Carrol and his wife’s duties to purchase food for their workers. Workers wrote down their orders on pieces of paper—for coffee, flour, beans, et cetera—and Carrol or his wife would travel into town to fill the orders.75 Workers would then pick up their groceries from Norquest’s house, at which time they would pay their bill or have it garnished from their wages on Saturday, their payday. A deviation from this seemingly workable arrangement, unwelcome from Carrol Norquest’s perspective, opens a small window to reconsider the neat transaction recounted above. In “Arabe Peddlers,” Norquest described new strategies the town’s shopkeepers developed to reach out to his workers. Recognizing the difficulty for workers to get to town, some shopkeepers decided to come out to the workers directly, packing up an assortment of goods in their cars and driving out to the farms. Norquest disapproved of the poor quality and high prices of the items and tried to discourage his workers from purchasing from the traveling shopkeepers, offering to take them into town himself so they could get better deals: I made several attempts to chase these peddlers off—tried to keep my “Hands” from buying. I couldn’t. I couldn’t patrol my people all the time! The peddlers would slip in anyway—and my people were happy to be found. After all it was their money after I’d handed it over to them.76

Why might workers have been willing to pay higher prices to these doorto-door vendors? Was it as Norquest surmised, that they were unable to “withstand the pressure of these aggressive sales people,” and that they were “flattered” at receiving such personalized service?77 Or perhaps they just wanted to exert a bit of autonomy in making these purchases, outside of the reach, the eyes, and judgment of the patrón? Undocumented workers found that the conditions that constrained their mobility in towns and on public roads and highways helped facilitate the ability of less scrupulous growers than Carrol Norquest to introduce fraudulent and extortionate practices on their farms. An investigation proceeding from a grower’s complaint about Border Patrol practices opened a window into the daily workings of a cotton plantation that edged the Rio Grande near El Paso, Texas, some 1,200 miles upriver from South Texas.78 The report showed that workers lived in “unsanitary conditions in adobe huts”; were 70

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often defrauded during cotton weigh-ins; and were paid in scrip that could only be used in the farm’s commissary, where they were “grossly overcharged”; and if they complained about conditions or wages, they would be threatened with being turned over to immigration authorities. Grover Wilmoth believed workers were held “virtually in a state of peonage.” “What saves the operators from a charge of violation of the peonage statute,” Wilmoth asserted, “is the fact that aliens can always proceed in one direction, i.e., back to Mexico.”79 In March 1937, El Paso district director Wilmoth conducted a lengthy interview with one of his officers, Inspector Almand, who had been closely watching the operations of a large cotton farm located near the US-Mexico border in the district. In response to a question about how the farm could secure a labor force paying wages much lower than farms not directly adjacent to the US-Mexico border, Almand responded that many of the workers were undocumented migrants who were afraid to get caught if they ventured away from the river farms.80 Foremen on that farm encouraged migrants to believe that they would be apprehended if they moved off the farms. When a foreman learned that one of the workers had left the farm and gone into town (the worker was in fact one of Inspector Almand’s informants), the foreman warned him to “stay strictly on the farm and off the roads and highways or the border patrol would catch him.”81 To make even more clear the disquieting knowledge that the Border Patrol was used for leverage against Mexican workers, Wilmoth pursued this idea in a further line of questioning: Q. Do you know whether these particular farm operators, or any other farmers in this valley, have threatened to turn the aliens in to the border patrol if the aliens persisted in their demands for higher wages? A. Yes, sir. I know of instances where aliens have been turned into the border patrol and the alien stated that he had persisted in asking for an accounting and some cash money after working as much as one month and receiving only a hand-out of provisions from day to day.

The INS report revealed rampant abuses on that large cotton farm, which kept many workers from being able to accumulate any earnings even after weeks of labor. Workers received slips of paper with amounts written on them after cotton weigh-ins, which would then be redeemed at the company store. Only some of the slips could be redeemed for cash, and the rest had to be used on food and products in the company store. Border Patrol agent Almand estimated that the farm operators inflated the prices between 50 71

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and 75 percent. Agent Almand observed, through conversations with his informers and in the process of apprehending workers and taking them to the store to collect any outstanding wages, that they rarely had more than three or four dollars in the bank, so to speak, and were frequently in debt to the store for groceries.82 Wilmoth asked Almand whether workers were compelled to buy their goods from the commissary, and Almand replied that since many of them had little or no money upon arriving at the farm, they could not “slip off to the independent stores and purchase groceries to run them from day to day, which they would have to do without allowing the foreman to know it.” Thus, though foremen might have kept a close eye on the ingress and egress of all workers, undocumented migrants had to face an additional layer of surveillance with the Border Patrol’s monitoring of the roads leading from the farm into town. During 1947 the mid-Valley daily, the Valley Evening Monitor, published a series of editorials discussing workers’ living conditions, as well as farmers’ responsibilities to them, within a larger discussion of the imminent introduction of the bracero program in the Rio Grande Valley. In considering prospective changes that the bracero program could bring to workers’ conditions, the author of the editorial opened up a view into the labor system status quo. In order to encourage South Texas growers to participate in the program, the Border Patrol had recently announced a crackdown on illegal labor, a sharp turn from their normal operations. Their usual efforts, the author claimed, did not stop workers from coming to the region, “beyond the point which the Immigration Service felt was necessary to keep up appearances.”83 Despite growers’ resistance to the Mexican government’s stipulations, the author couldn’t blame the Mexican government for insisting that employers provide housing for their workers. According to the editorial, the Mexican government was well aware that “thousands of farm workers, if not provided housing, will be forced to live in makeshift camps in the brush and along canal banks.”84 This scenario, however, did not describe a prospective scene of increased numbers of Mexican migrants working in South Texas. Since the agricultural economy in South Texas was already heavily dependent on undocumented workers—the editorial claiming that “many of the Valley’s biggest farms are operating with wetback labor almost exclusively”—then it is clear that these scenarios were already established facts.85 If many seasonal undocumented workers were forced to live in substandard housing, either on growers’ lands or along public rights-of-way, what did this say about growers’ sense of obligation to their workers? In another 72

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newspaper editorial, the writer posed questions about farmers’ obligations to do more for their workers, bringing the notion of paternalism into public debate. While growers’ associations and government officials of both the United States and Mexico took up the issue of the low prevailing wages for agricultural work in the Valley (between twenty and twenty-five cents per hour), the author took time to consider the wage rate: A man working for 20 cents an hour will earn $2 in a 10-hour day. If he works six days per week, he will earn $12 per week. If such a man is single, and doesn’t smoke or drink an occasional bottle of beer, and if he never has to visit a doctor or dentist, and buys only those clothes he needs to hide his nakedness, he can live on $12 a week. That is, he can buy enough food to keep alive, always providing of course that he abstains from such delicacies as beefsteak and butter. But suppose such a man has a wife. And maybe a couple of kids. Could he feed them well enough to ward off rickets on $12 per week? Could he send the kids to school, particularly on those cool days when us rich folks wear shoes?86

The writer continued: It is not a farmer’s responsibility, of course, to worry about whether any of his workers can afford shoes for their children.87

If, indeed, it was not the farmer’s responsibility that workers earn a wage that could support them and their families, then who held that responsibility? By rejecting the notion that growers were obliged, by an ethic of paternalism, to take care of their workers, the editorial author judged that the state had a responsibility to do so, a difficult and rather unprecedented proposition, since the workers’ illegal status kept them outside of the state’s labor regulatory purview.88 Growers bitterly resented any attempts by either national government to limit their access to undocumented Mexican workers. Growers used an argument about a natural law of supply and demand—workers needed jobs, and they needed workers—to demonstrate the mutual benefit of the present arrangements for both parties. And while many growers felt and expressed a strong sense of paternalism, which they touted to idealize the workers’ conditions in South Texas, it was not a complete process of mutual and clearly defined sets of obligations. The mutual set of obligations and 73

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responsibilities that historically governed paternalistic agricultural relations based on coercion and immobility—food, shelter, and care in old age in return for a lifetime of labor—was complicated by the unique circumstances surrounding Mexican undocumented agricultural workers in South Texas. Undocumented workers’ illegal status was based on their irrepressible mobility, in that they crossed the border without official authorization from either government. While they resided in the US border region, however, they lived their daily lives in a state of conditional immobility based on the ever-present threat of capture and deportation. Therefore, the unequal relations of power that characterized paternalistic relationships based on workers’ immobility were compressed into the short period of growers’ and workers’ social and economic transactions—a couple of months or a period of years, and not an entire lifetime. That period, however short, was important because it set the prevailing wages and physical and social conditions for an entire region.

A Transborder Family and Community Young Noe’s nighttime trek across the border to Carrol Norquest’s farm in the early 1950s as a teenager was not the first time he had crossed into the United States for seasonal agricultural employment. Rancho Grande’s location along the southern banks of the Rio Grande made crossing into South Texas a very accessible option. Furthermore, the many different experiences Noe had as a migrant laboring in agriculture—working with extendedfamily crews under a Mexican crew leader, working as an undocumented migrant for Carrol Norquest and as a bracero for Carrol Norquest and others—represent the complex patterns of seasonal migration that characterized the picture of Mexican labor migration to the United States during the mid-twentieth century. Noe’s varied experiences also represent the different options he had in employment, and the specific limitations he faced. Being part of a large extended family that had straddled the US-Mexico border for generations, Noe Magallan accessed the vast transborder kinship network in order to maintain his life and his family relationships. Even while working on Carrol Norquest’s farm, with his freedom of movement circumscribed by the threat of deportation by the Border Patrol, and living in less than ideal conditions for very low pay, Noe and his family negotiated within the context and logic of Carrol Norquest’s paternalism to maintain their own wide kinship networks and family relationships. 74

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Noe first began crossing the river to work in the fields as a youth of eleven or twelve years in the late 1940s, though keeping closer to home during the first few years. Staying with relatives in Granjeno, an equally small community located directly across from Rancho Grande on the northern banks of the river, Noe worked in the nearby tomato fields during the summers. There he might have formed part of a larger agricultural crew made up of relatives and neighbors from both sides of the river, headed by a labor contractor also from the same community. During the short season he would stay with an aunt, mixing among cousins and temporarily joining her family but within easy reach of his own parents a short distance away.89 As a Magallan, Noe formed part of a large extended family with roots on both sides of the Rio Grande, in South Texas and northern Mexico. The Magallans had migrated to the northern frontier during the mid-1800s, from a small community farther south, Concepción de Oro, in the state of Zacatecas.90 Once they settled in Rancho Grande, then a small village situated on the southern banks of the Rio Grande near the larger town of Reynosa, they began to intermarry with the various families in Rancho Grande and the surrounding ranchos on both sides of the border. In the early 1950s, by the time Noe Magallan was a young man, the extended Magallan family network had already established a consistent seasonal migration to work for Carrol Norquest near Edinburg, Texas. Established through a family connection, Noe’s older cousins and neighbors had begun to form the bulk of Norquest’s work crews. Carrol Norquest typically hired a few workers to work on his farm year-round, then hired seasonal crews of workers during peak harvest periods. One of his year-round employees was Senaido Olguin, who lived in a house on the Norquest property with his wife, Tomasa Macedo de Olguin, and their children.91 Tomasa’s sister was a Magallan by marriage and thus formed part of the large Maga­ llan kinship network. Once the initial contact was established, various members of the Magallan family, as well as other families from Rancho Grande, traveled to Edinburg on a consistent basis, forming Carrol Norquest’s work crews and working for his brother-in-law as well, Eddy Nordmeyer, who also farmed nearby. Though Carrol Norquest sometimes described his workers as unintelligent and childlike, and even directionless, the complex and overlapping transnational migrations the members of the Rancho Grande community undertook to maintain their seasonal work required a large amount of planning and cooperation. The planning that went into the decision-making 75

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process to migrate involved the participation of several members of a family, including the mother, father, and adult children. Furthermore, the ways in which the Rancho Grande families maximized their earnings, by keeping as much of their money within the family network as possible, demonstrated a great deal of resourcefulness. In relating the story of her husband’s, Tomás’s, seasonal migrations from Rancho Grande to the Norquest farm as a young man, Angelica Magallan explained that Tomás Magallan and his two brothers, Marcelino and Carlos, all did stints with the Norquests even though they each owned their own piece of farmland in Rancho Grande. Because their father was still alive and still strong, however, he was capable of tending their lands as well as his own while his sons spent the harvest season on the Norquest farm. After the end of the season, they returned to Rancho Grande with their earnings and again took up the reins of their own land.92 Tomás Magallan’s father agreed to look after his sons’ plots, and his sons contributed their earnings to a family who otherwise relied on subsistence farming for survival. Rancho Grande migrants also found other ways to maximize their earnings and keep them within their families as much as possible. Angelica Magallan remembers being a young girl of eight and traveling with her mother from their home in Rancho Grande to the Norquest farm every weekend. Angelica’s two brothers, Antonio and Mauro Castañeda, were working with the Norquests that season in the late 1940s. On Friday afternoons, Angelica’s mother collected young Angelica from school, and together they boarded the bus from Rancho Grande to nearby Reynosa. In Reynosa, they took another bus across the border to McAllen, and from there, another to Edinburg. Once they reached the bus station in Edinburg, Mrs. Castañeda phoned the Olguin house, and Mrs. Olguin sent her husband Senaido to pick them up. Angelica and her mother stayed with the Olguin family during the weekend. Both Mrs. Castañeda and Mrs. Olguin spent the weekend doing the laundry and ironing for the young Castañeda and Magallan men. While Mrs. Castañeda presumably did not get paid for doing her sons’ laundry and ironing, Mrs. Olguin could expect to receive a small sum for her services. In addition, Mrs. Castañeda cleaned the men’s quarters, described by Angelica as barracks, and the other men did pay her for the cleaning. On Sunday afternoons, Angelica and Mrs. Castañeda returned to their home by the same route, stopping in the shops in Reynosa to purchase food from her earnings to take back to Rancho Grande.93 Since Noe Magallan also related an instance of his mother accompanying 76

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him and their kin to the Norquest farm to perform similar duties, it seems probable that women from Rancho Grande often fulfilled this role.94 Having some of the workers’ mothers travel to the Norquest farm to spend some, or all, of the season is important for a number of reasons. First, their labor, some of which was paid, some of which was not, ensured that the workers’ wages stayed within the Rancho Grande kinship network. Through this practice, only the money workers spent for food or other incidentals left the family circle. Otherwise, the workers got to keep their money, or if they paid for laundry services and cleaning, the money perhaps went to an aunt, cousin, or neighbor. Having the ability to extend their money in this fashion might have been a determining factor in migrants’ decisions to stay close to home. While they might have received higher wages farther north, their living expenses also would have increased. Secondly, in addition to the monetary considerations, the emotional sustenance that their mother’s presence gave the Castañeda brothers cannot be overlooked. Instead of the homesickness and loneliness endemic to seasonal migration far from home, these migrant farmworkers were able to enjoy frequent visits from their younger siblings and their mother. The workers from Rancho Grande negotiated the social laboring space loosely built around the idea of family to maintain their own family and kinship relationships. They helped strengthen family bonds that carried them through other periods in their lives that extended beyond the period in which the Magallans worked for the Norquests. For example, Angelica related that after she married Tomás Magallan and had her two sons, she and her husband decided to move to South Texas permanently in 1968.95 When they moved, they stayed with the Olguin family, who had long since stopped working for the Norquests and had bought a house in town in McAllen. Tomás, Angelica, and their two boys stayed with the Olguin family until they could find an appropriate apartment to rent. The relationships that Angelica and her mother had nurtured while on the Norquest farm, spending all those weekends with the laundry and the ironing, stood them in good stead for years after their experiences there. Noe’s and Angelica’s narratives of migration—depending on extensive family networks and cooperation for survival—differed sharply from Carrol Norquest’s interpretation of workers’ migration decision-making process. In the preface to his book, Rio Grande Wetbacks, which he had originally wanted to title “The Swarming of the Wetbacks,” Norquest described the meaning behind his choice of titles. Informed by his early experiences as 77

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a young farmer trying to raise bees, Norquest compared Mexican workers’ migrations to those of bees. When bees swarm, they merely divide. They allow a queen to develop. When this queen decided to leave, half of the bees went with her. Their pasture will not support all of them. But they know nothing of where they are going—what direction—how far—or when they’ll get there. They just go. . . . Compulsion, ignorance of route, a total disregard of the location and their ultimate home base of operation. . . . This is an accurate description of the early wetbacks.96

According to Norquest, undocumented workers’ migration processes were based not on logic or knowledge about their destination, but on a presumably ingrained compulsion. Furthermore, by disparagingly likening their family migrations to a swarming of bees, Norquest seemed not to recognize the complex kinship networks that Mexican migrant workers accessed and maintained so successfully. By the time Noe Magallan turned seventeen years old, in 1955, he had been accompanying his mother, brother, and other relatives and neighbors to work at the Norquest farm for three years. In 1955 Noe went to work without his mother and immediate family members, though he still worked in a crew of about twenty people made up of neighbors and kin from Rancho Grande. According to Noe Magallan, 1955 was different from earlier years, when Border Patrol enforcement had been a sham that allowed growers to get their crops harvested. This time, the law cracked down.97 “The order was given [that] now there is no defense,” Noe recalled.98 But the work crews continued to work and evade the surveillance. They went out to the fields very early in the mornings, and they returned to pick at night, sometimes by the light of the moon “if there was a pretty moon,” since the cotton was white and would be visible. If they went out to pick in the early mornings, workers gathered the cotton into mounds and covered the mounds with weeds, so as to be invisible from above and out of the sight of the Border Patrol flying in planes overhead. The work crews had almost made it through the entire cotton harvest season before they were caught by the Border Patrol while they were out working in the fields. Though they tried to hide amongst the cotton plants, they were apprehended and rounded up and locked up in a detention facility a few miles away in McAllen, Texas. This detention facility, called the 78

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Corralón, or pound, was enclosed by a high fence and contained barracks for sleeping and bathrooms. Noe and his companions were detained at the Corralón for two or three days, while Border Patrol agents waited to apprehend enough people to fill one load. After a couple of days of waiting, the workers were boarded onto a bus and, in Noe’s words, “thrown across” the border into Ciudad Juárez, about 1,200 miles away from his home in Rancho Grande.99 Rancho Grande was located less than five miles from the international bridge at Hidalgo, Texas. At the time, Noe recounts, the Border Patrol was also taking people by boat to Veracruz, or by plane to Irapuato, Guanajuato.100 In 1945, the United States and Mexican governments had agreed to work together on the process of deporting Mexican citizens back to Mexico, an attempt to decrease easy return migration to the United States. Under this arrangement the Border Patrol transported workers to various border points, and the Mexican government paid for their transport by train to points inland: Torreón, Coahuila; Monterrey, Nuevo León; and Jiménez, Chihuahua.101 This is exactly what happened to Noe. Noe and his companions were given tickets for transportation to Torreón, Coahuila, from whence they pooled their money and made their way home to Rancho Grande, Tamaulipas. The INS classified Noe’s deportation in 1955 as a voluntary departure, a mechanism INS officials used to deport people without having to go through the time and expense of the administrative hearings associated with formal deportation.102 Though informal, Noe Magallan’s deportation when he was seventeen years old still contained the violence and humiliation of forced expulsion, the memory of which was graven clearly in the mind of a seventy-three-year-old man.

Conclusion In the case of Noe Magallan, he was deported only one time in his life, yet the threat of deportation hovered constantly, having a significant impact on agricultural relations in South Texas between growers and workers. Growers, who sought to take advantage of the Border Patrol’s presence, represented their farms to undocumented workers as spaces of protection from law enforcement. Ironically, through collusion, an undermanned force, restrictions on its jurisdiction, or a combination of factors, the presence of the Border Patrol proved to be an advantage to border growers. Growers along the border took full advantage to construct a labor system fundamentally based on undocumented workers. Whether in El Paso or the Rio Grande 79

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Valley, farm owners and operators hired undocumented Mexican migrants even if white, black, or Mexican American workers could be hired at the same rates. The result was a border culture that accommodated growers’ labor needs without lessening the penalties for workers who violated US immigration laws. Within the intertwining of the Border Patrol’s federal authority to enforce immigration laws and growers’ traditional sources of power derived from patriarchal notions of agricultural relations, growers created paternalistic images of themselves in relation to workers. Paternalism was only one expression of grower power in a spectrum of possible relations that also included naked exploitation; large, impersonal work crews; and high turnover. While I would agree with historian Walter Johnson, who characterized the concept of paternalism in antebellum slavery more as “a sort of pose that slaveholders put on for one another than as a praxis through which they governed their slaves,” I would also add that paternalism was a way in which growers convinced themselves of the legitimacy of their operations.103 In the case of border agriculture during the mid-twentieth century, that pose created the space for undocumented Mexican migrants to nurture and sustain their own transnational family networks within a context of illegality. The introduction of a bracero program in South Texas that legalized formerly illegal workers, as well as the Mexican government’s pressure on the Border Patrol to change their approach to border enforcement, threatened to undermine growers’ power base, and to transform social relations between growers and workers in South Texas. Yet, these labor systems outlived the bracero program and eventually undermined the promise of protection that the bracero program offered.

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chapter 3 •

The Flexible Border Mobility within Restriction in US Immigration Laws and Enforcement

T

railing after a group of Mexican workers on September 24, 1947, US Border Patrol officer John P. Longan reached a farm in Doña Ana County in southeastern New Mexico, bordering El Paso. 1 Longan entered the property of farmer E. N. Crossett and apprehended the fifteen workers he had been following for not having the necessary documentation authorizing their presence in the United States. Crossett violently objected to the patrolman’s actions, and a fight broke out between the two men on the road outside Crossett’s property; Crossett later claimed that Longan had broken his nose. According to Longan, Crossett’s attack was unprovoked—Crossett cursed at him and struck him in the face. For his part, Crossett did not dispute the sequence of events, saying, “I admit hitting Longan, but after the name he called me, I feel that I was justified in doing so.” Despite his broken nose, Crossett, himself a former Border Patrol officer, felt the incident portended more important issues than a mere dustup between himself and Patrolman Longan, wondering “whether or not the American people are going to live under the Gestapo method,” referencing 81

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the Third Reich’s notorious police force, a still-fresh memory in the immediate postwar period. Crossett’s concerns centered on two distinct yet interrelated claims: that the US Border Patrol was engaging in raids on farms in Doña Ana County to search for undocumented agricultural workers, and that they were doing so without warrants or permission. Crossett and the New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau fired off telegrams to members of New Mexico’s congressional delegation, US Senator Carl Hatch and US Representatives Georgia Lee Lusk and Antonio Manuel Fernández, demanding they investigate the Border Patrol.2 Telegrams from the Farm Bureau charged the Border Patrol with “unjustified and illegal tactics” and asked public officials to intervene on growers’ behalf. New Mexico grower Mrs. H. C. Mandell also likened the Border Patrol to the Gestapo, claiming that the “Gestapo has struck again—they took all our cotton pickers.” Invoking a fundamental principle of American democracy, Mrs. Mandell recommended that district director Grover C. Wilmoth’s “attention . . . be called to our Fourth Amendment in the Constitution, assuring us of no search without a warrant.” W. P. Thorpe, the secretary of the New Mexico Farm Bureau, wondered aloud to newspaper reporters whether the Border Patrol had the authority to search farms without warrants: There is still one issue we want settled. That is the right of a border patrolman to search a farm without getting the owner’s consent or having a search warrant. It’s not constitutional. While it’s not likely to come up again, we still want a ruling on it.3

Wilmoth also exhibited some confusion about this issue, saying, “It is a legal question whether officers can seize aliens on private property.” In response to a query from Senator Hatch’s office, the El Paso district of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) initiated an investigation into the quarrel between Patrolman Longan and E. N. Crossett and organized a meeting in Las Cruces, New Mexico, attended by representatives of area farm bureaus, El Paso district director Grover C. Wilmoth, as well as Willard F. Kelly, assistant commissioner for the INS in charge of enforcement, who came in from the central office in Philadelphia to tamp down the commotion wrought by the fight.4 At the meeting, the INS agreed to conduct a “reeducation program” to teach border patrolmen courtesy in dealing with the public. Second, the Border Patrol agreed that they would ask growers 82

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for permission to search their properties for undocumented labor. However, if property owners declined to permit Border Patrol officers to enter their property, the INS would cancel the contracts legalizing the individual growers’ labor.5 The fight between E. N. Crossett and Patrolman Longan reflected the larger struggle for control over the nature and rhythm of the flow of labor, and thus control over the border itself. What seemed like a chaotic, laissezfaire immigration enforcement policy on the US-Mexico border during the mid-twentieth century was actually an approach to enforcement resulting from years of contestations and negotiations between border growers and the Border Patrol. That approach was also shaped by the limitations of the federal policing body’s authority. The combination of forces melded to maintain a flexible border open to the movement of undocumented Mexican laborers, while creating a diffuse border zone of broad enforcement potentiality. In other words, immigration laws, immigration enforcement officials, and growers helped create a labor system that encouraged Mexican workers to migrate to work in US agricultural fields, but the workers were not free from the possibility of apprehension and deportation once they crossed the border. The increasingly restrictive US immigration laws in the early twentieth century also created loopholes and exceptions, temporarily allowing the migration of Mexican workers. The temporariness of these exceptions became continuous features of Mexican migration to the United States, however. This seeming paradox of US immigration law had important consequences for Mexican migrants, because while exceptions to immigration laws created a precedent of Mexican cross-border labor mobility, the underlying legal structure of immigration restriction remained in place, thus defining Mexican migration as tenuous and temporary.6 Immigration and border control legislation, testimony given during congressional hearings, and annual reports published by the INS tell a story about Border Patrol’s approach to enforcement on the US-Mexico border paradoxically based on flexibility, the facilitation of movement, and ambiguity, rather than on deterrence, rigidity, and clarity. From its earliest years, the Border Patrol’s mode of operation permitted growers’ access to undocumented Mexican laborers. Even in cases of deportation, the agency opted for the less rigid voluntary departure mechanism instead of initiating measures of formal deportation. The mechanism of voluntary departure became the INS’s most dominant form of expulsion during the 1940s, its speed and ease relative to formal deportation allowing the INS to move a greater number of 83

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Mexican migrants back across the border. Furthermore, the lighter penalties associated with voluntary departure compared to formal deportation created a situation of low risk for workers returning to the United States. This chapter examines the INS’s increasing use of voluntary departure during the 1940s, arguing that this strategy of border enforcement characterized the US-Mexico border as a space of mobility within restriction. This chapter also explores the spatial and temporal dimensions of Border Patrol authority. The Border Patrol’s decisions about where its territory ended, and which spaces officers considered appropriate for policing, or as off-limits, had important consequences for Mexican undocumented migrants. The blurred boundaries of INS authority meant that much of the real limits and reach of the Border Patrol were worked out on the ground, in the intimate, daily back-and-forth interactions between growers and members of the Border Patrol. Growers, Border Patrol officers, and workers were all highly attuned to the complex nature of immigration enforcement. Slight nuances in the where and the when of enforcement efforts made the difference between facilitating or disrupting a vast illegal agricultural labor system along the US-Mexico border.

US Immigration Legislation and Its Effects on Mexican Immigration, 1917–1939 Immigration laws became increasingly devoted to restriction during the 1910s and 1920s, yet created exceptions and loopholes to allow for the continued migration of Mexican laborers to the United States, but within limiting and temporary parameters.7 The Immigration Act of 1917 expanded deportation categories and initiated further restrictions on immigration, seeking to exclude low-waged laborers.8 For example, the new law instituted a literacy test as a prerequisite for obtaining a visa. Even with the ink still fresh on the new immigration law, the US government bowed to pressure from the agricultural industry in the Southwest and began issuing temporary exemptions in 1917. The Department of Labor waived the eight-dollar head tax each immigrant had to pay as well as the literacy test for Mexican laborers coming to work in the US agricultural industry. This action, often referred to as the first bracero program, lasted until 1921 and brought in between fifty thousand and eighty thousand Mexican agricultural workers.9 The flexibility in the enforcement of the law resulted from southwestern growers’ significant political influence. Though the exemptions were meant 84

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as a temporary wartime measure, southwestern growers clamored for the government to extend them, citing shortages of appropriate labor and customary access to Mexican migrant workers. As one growers’ representative from South Texas testified in a 1920 Senate committee hearing: “Until now we had no cause to complain, for the reason that, the restrictions being suspended, we were permitted to get the labor we needed.”10 Another farmer from South Texas explained about the region’s historical dependence on Mexican labor and growers’ inability to hire enough workers from elsewhere, such as African American workers from Dallas or Shreveport. He warned the committee about the possible consequences if Congress allowed the exemptions to lapse: Of course, if this law stands, if you do not put a river guard on there, we will get our help all right. If you gentlemen have any objections to admitting Mexicans by law, cut them out and take the river guard away and let us alone, and we will get them all right. . . . I prefer to get them lawfully, if I can.11

With his testimony the grower revealed his determination to hire Mexican workers, legally or illegally. Though the 1917 immigration law introduced new restrictions for prospective immigrants, official but temporary exemptions for Mexican laborers created ambiguity about its applicability on the southern border of the United States. This allowed space for growers to place continued pressure on legislators and the INS to pass legal measures to relax the immigration enforcement of Mexican migrants for the growers’ benefit. The National Origins Act of 1924, the next major piece of US immigration legislation, again presented a Janus face on the prospect of Mexican immigration. On its surface, the National Origins Act represented an opening for legal Mexican migration to the United States. While legislators assigned numerical quotas for visas to prospective migrants from almost all regions of the globe, countries from the Americas were exempted from the quota system. Theoretically, US consuls could assign unlimited numbers of visas to migrants from Mexico, Canada, and Central and South America. Scholars have largely attributed this exemption to desire within the US diplomatic community to preserve cordial relations in the Americas, as well as to pressure from the powerful agricultural lobby, who wanted to preserve their access to cheap and plentiful Mexican labor.12 85

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The prospect of unlimited Mexican migration induced fear in immigration restrictionists, who sought ways to limit it by attempting to pass legislation extending the quota limits to include the Western Hemisphere. Additionally, restrictionists raised questions in at least one committee hearing about Mexicans’ racial makeup in order to determine whether or not they could be targeted for exclusion on the basis of racial inadmissibility, since the 1924 law held that those barred by their race from naturalization could not be issued immigration visas.13 In response to a question about whether or not Mexican Indians were allowed entrance to the United States, the INS district director in El Paso replied that he had no directions from the courts to indicate that Mexicans were ineligible for citizenship.14 The lack of established precedent in the courts on the issue of race and the naturalization of Mexicans, as well as Mexicans’ mixed racial heritage, made the legislators’ line of questioning unsuccessful.15 In addition to facing difficulties regarding the racial inadmissibility of Mexican migrants, legislative attempts to limit their migration on the basis of applying quota limits to Mexicans were defeated during the 1920s and 1930s. Belying restrictionists’ concerns of untrammeled immigration from Mexico, the Western Hemisphere quota exemption did not lead to significant increases in legal Mexican immigration. According to A. M. Warren, chief of the visa division of the Department of State, testifying before a Senate subcommittee on immigration in 1939, immigration from those areas was “not a problem.”16 Officials from the visa division pointed out that immigration from Canada and emigration to Canada generally balanced each other out.17 And while legal immigration from Mexico had been heavier between 1921 and 1930, officially numbered at 459,287, the numbers dramatically trailed away during the Great Depression. Between 1931 and 1940 only 22,319 persons legally immigrated to the United States from Mexico.18 Warren credited these reduced numbers to immigration restrictions already on the books, arguing that “existing immigration law, particularly those sections of the 1917 Immigration Act dealing with public charges, illiterate, and contract laborers, would seem, as administered for a number of years past, to form an effective and permanent barrier against any undue immigration of Mexican labor.”19 The strictures of the 1917 immigration law, if rigidly enforced, were already sufficient to block a significant portion of legal immigration from Mexico. Thus, the exemptions from quota limits many have pointed to as evidence of a US open door policy toward Mexican immigration during the first half of the twentieth century had little statistical effect on legal Mexican 86

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migration. In reality, US policy toward Mexican immigration was much more limiting and complicated. The US government enforced exclusionary immigration categories or relaxed their enforcement in response to economic and political demands. When economic and political circumstances changed during the Great Depression, government agencies began to interpret some of the clauses of the 1917 law so strictly that very few prospective migrants could acquire immigration visas during the 1930s.20 Local, state, and federal government entities also initiated intense campaigns throughout the US Southwest and Midwest to rid the country of Mexicans during the Great Depression through a coercive combination of deportations and repatriations.21 These efforts at both exclusion and expulsion worked together during the 1930s to create the context by which Mr. Warren, the head of the visa division of the State Department, could report in 1939 that legal immigration from Mexico had averaged less than 1,400 persons per year for the last three years.22 Despite the evidence of some malleability within immigration laws, Mexicans found it increasingly difficult to obtain legal visas for immigration

figure 3.1. Mexican immigration to the United States, 1940 to 1964. Graph detail taken from Douglas S. Massey, Jorge Durand, and Nolan J. Malone, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), 38.

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during the 1930s, their exemption from quota laws notwithstanding. Even as the US economy rebounded after 1939, legal Mexican immigration did not increase dramatically. Legal immigration from Mexico declined sharply in the 1930s—22,319, down from 459,287 during the 1920s. Surprisingly, the 1940s did not bring a surge of legal immigration. Between 1941 and 1950, immigration had increased only to 60,589 persons, a very slight increase and far below the actual numbers of Mexicans migrating to the United States during the 1940s (see figure 3.1).23 Thus, the fight in Congress between immigration restrictionists and agricultural business interests about whether Mexicans should be subjected to quotas seems to have been of secondary importance in the end. Most migration from Mexico to the United States during the 1940s was illegal— managed almost exclusively within the shadowy administrative channels of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Officials from the INS, especially those involved on the ground in the early contact with migrants, bore an extraordinary amount of discretionary power over the process of migration at the southern border of the United States.

The INS Border Patrol: Legal and Political Foundations of Power Since much of the migration from Mexico to the United States was illegal during the 1940s, the INS had an outsized role in affecting Mexican migration and deserves closer examination. The first in-depth study of the workings of the INS, conducted by the Wickersham Commission in 1931, came to a startlingly contradictory conclusion about the agency: it had at once too much and too little power. Both the power vested in the police body by legislation as well as the authority the agency itself developed as its on-theground modus operandi formed the basis for the Border Patrol’s authority. Over the years, these processes became established as settled law over time. On the US-Mexico border, the Border Patrol worked mostly within a nebulous zone of loosely interpreted laws in which constitutional rights did not fully apply. Most immigration procedures, such as deportation, fell almost completely within the power of the executive branch of the federal government and deprived most migrants of access to the judicial system. Legal constitutional scholars have argued that deportation laws consistently came under the plenary powers doctrine, delegating power to the executive branch and remaining outside the purview of judicial due process.24 The 88

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process of deportation, easily the most common police act on the US-Mexico border, was contained within the power of the executive branch and made the border itself a preconstitutional space in some ways. In 1924 and 1925, the US Congress created the Border Patrol, gave the newly formed police body its first budget of one million dollars, and outlined its original powers. Though Border Patrol officials bemoaned the strictures placed upon them by the legislation, namely, limiting their ability to make arrests without warrants, officers quickly hammered out procedures to work around the limitations they faced. According to the 1925 legislation, an officer could arrest, without a warrant, only “any alien who in his presence or view is entering or attempting to enter the United States” in violation of immigration laws.25 Though this wording would seem to indicate a very narrow spatial and time-sensitive window in which officers could make arrests without warrants, the INS stretched the boundaries of those powers to an extraordinary degree. In 1928 the El Paso district director was questioned before a House committee on immigration and naturalization about the Border Patrol’s authority to apprehend migrants away from the border and take them immediately to a port of entry for deportation. District Director Grover Wilmoth alluded to a federal court ruling, Lew Moy et al. v. United States, which found that “an alien was in the act of effecting entry until he had reached his interior destination.”26 “We exercise that authority,” Wilmoth averred, and added, “I believe, based upon that, that we could get away with taking them into custody as we do, and delivering them to the nearest immigration office.” The ways in which INS officials stretched the powers granted to them had temporal and spatial dimensions that defined the nature of federal authority on the US-Mexico border. A close consideration of the Wickersham Commission’s findings helps demonstrate the importance of temporality in a space in which legal historian Daniel Kanstroom described “government power [operating] largely unmediated by constitutional or significant legal constraint.”27 Formed by President Hoover, the Wickersham Commission undertook an extensive, multivolume study of law and order in the United States, released in 1931, with an entire volume dedicated to deportation laws. Lead investigator Reuben Oppenheimer found that the process of deporting migrants from the United States violated American ideals of transparency and due process. In one of the first in-depth studies of INS procedures in deportation cases, Oppenheimer declared that the agency operated in an environment excessively free from oversight—combining in one administrative 89

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agency (often in one office, and even in one person) the functions of police, judge, and jury, and basing many of its most fundamental procedures in nonstatutory authority.28 “It is believed,” he claimed, “that nowhere else in legal processes of so important a nature is there the deplorable combination of all the elements of illegal procedure, absence of safeguards and despotic power which is to be found in the proceedings of deportation.”29 One of the most pointed critiques to emerge from the Wickersham Commission centered on deportable migrants’ limited access to rights, as well as the ways in which even those limited rights were not available until the deportation process was well advanced. Because the INS interpreted the Lew Moy case so liberally, border patrol and immigration inspectors generally waited until after they made arrests to obtain warrants, thus often initiating warrantless searches of businesses, other public places, and property. During this initial period, the immigration officer subjected the migrant to a series of interrogations, first at the scene, in order to determine whether or not the officer would detain the migrant, and then at the immigration office, where the officer initiated a lengthier questioning to gauge whether acquiring a warrant was necessary.30 At no time during these primary interrogations did the migrant have access to a lawyer. Once a warrant was received, the migrant went through a hearing, similar to a judicial proceeding in that evidence could be heard and presented, but different because the hearing was performed by immigration officials and not an independent judiciary.31 Only when the proceedings had reached the hearing stage could a migrant summon counsel, paid for at his or her own expense and not guaranteed by the state. Because many migrants could not afford lawyers’ fees, Oppenheimer found, lawyers were present at fewer than 20 percent of the hearings.32 At the US-Mexico border, this situation was greatly exacerbated: lawyers represented migrants at no more than 2 percent of the hearings.33 The results of such closed-door proceedings were stark: district-level hearings recommended deportation for 95 percent of the cases.34 The district offices sent their recommendations for final approval to the office of the secretary, where a review board considered them and followed the district’s recommendations 90 percent of the time.35 Several conclusions can be drawn from the genealogy of deportation narrated here. One, the local Border Patrol district office, especially the investigating Border Patrol inspector, held a great deal of power over the deportation of migrants. Second, getting caught by the Border Patrol meant almost certain expulsion from the country, whether through voluntary departure or 90

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formal deportation. Third, migrants existed within an administrative, nonconstitutional time and space. The few quasi-constitutional rights migrants could claim in the process of deportation were triggered very late, if at all. Because deportation was not deemed a criminal procedure but an administrative one, it was considered not a punishment per se but a withdrawal of the privilege of staying in the country because of immigration violation.36 Kanstroom notes that “compared with criminal defendants, the rights of deportees are minimal.”37 However, as Ngai has demonstrated, though the process of deportation was administrative, in 1929 Congress made illegal entry into the country a misdemeanor, with any subsequent unauthorized entry deemed a felony.38 Thus, migrants occupied a space in which their unauthorized migrations were categorized as illegal and criminal, yet the method of enforcement resided outside of the criminal justice system. When applied to the physical jurisdiction in which most INS officers operated, at the borders of the United States, one can see the ways in which the seeming temporariness implied by Lew Moy could go beyond a temporary individual state and become a permanent condition. That is, until an undocumented migrant was apprehended, he or she could be considered to be in the process of effecting entry into the United States. Through the temporal and spatial expansion of their powers to patrol the border in the enforcement of immigration laws, the Border Patrol extended the liminal, nebulous state of permanent temporariness of individual migrants to the space of the border region, creating a federally administrated, nonconstitutional space. INS officials’ strategic decision to use their expanded powers established two discernible layers of police presence in the border region and created a border zone of enforcement based on the elasticized notion of a migrant’s sustained status of effecting illegal entry. The Border Patrol’s construction of a patrollable border zone occurred early in the formation of that police body. Questioned in a 1928 hearing, El Paso INS district director Grover Wilmoth described the physical dimensions of their patrols: We have about 900 miles of border in our district, about 300 miles for each subdistrict, but you can put an army out there right on the border and you could not stop their crossing. The only way to do [it] is to station your force at strategic points where you know that the main crossing is done, or station them back in the interior where you will catch them after they have left the border at points on the road where they are almost forced to pass.39 91

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The Border Patrol set up their force in both places, at the border and at strategic points in the interior, often up to one hundred miles into the interior, thus forming two clear boundary lines.40 All Mexicans moving within that border zone were suspect and subject to being questioned and detained.41 As Lytle Hernández has argued, the Border Patrol “policed Mexicano mobility instead of enforcing the political boundary between the United States and Mexico.”42 The physical territory of the strategically constructed border zone became a movement zone of sorts: all workers were judged to be in transit, their residence in the border fragile and insecure.

Voluntary Departure and the Maintenance of a Flexible Border The INS mechanism of voluntary departure became the most common form of managing Mexican migration at the US-Mexico border during the 1940s. This method gave the INS the power to expel migrants from the United States while avoiding the expensive and time-consuming process of formal deportation, by allowing them to leave the country at their own expense. Codified into law in 1940, this procedure allowed for the full operation of a border agricultural system based predominantly on undocumented Mexican labor, and shaped a flexible border with a consistent movement of Mexican workers back and forth across the boundary line.43 Faced with the possibility of high fines, jail time, and formal deportation, migrants might have considered voluntary departure a preferable (but not good) alternative. Because voluntary departure was still a method of deportation, however, INS administrators could protect themselves against critiques of ineffectiveness by touting the large numbers of expulsions its officers had effected in a given year and the many miles they had patrolled. It seemed to be an ideal arrangement for all concerned: growers acquired the labor force they desired, and workers caught in the country illegally were expelled from the country without serving long detentions and were theoretically free to obtain legal visas in the future, while the Border Patrol maintained a semblance of control of the border without overwhelming the system. This process, however, continued to define Mexican migrants as temporary and illegitimate sojourners in the United States, and did not provide avenues for Mexican migrants’ permanent legal migration. The increased movement of Mexican workers into the United States and their forcible removal through “voluntary” departure formed a

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picture of Mexican migration that was circular and temporary, placing the image of Mexican migrants as illegitimate in high relief. Voluntary departure had been used at both the Canadian and Mexican land borders since the late 1920s, though employed for different reasons and with different effects. Between 1927 and 1930, annual figures for voluntary departures ranged from 11,387 to 25,888. Rueben Oppenheimer of the Wickersham Commission noted that voluntary departures were used primarily on the Canadian and Mexican land borders adjacent to the United States. Because people who utilized voluntary departure had to shoulder the costs for their return, few deportable European migrants left the country in this manner.44 However, by the early 1940s, the overall numbers of voluntary departures had decreased substantially, reflecting the many years of diminished levels of immigration during the Great Depression. In 1942, for example, there were a total of 6,904 voluntary departures, with 2,552 departing to Mexico and 2,189 departing to Canada. While the figures seem very evenly matched, a closer look behind the figures reveals how the INS used voluntary departure differently at each border, helping crystallize a fundamental difference between the US-Canada and US-Mexico borders. On the Canadian border, voluntary departure formed part of a legalization process for illegal immigrants, called preexamination. In use since 1935, preexamination was a procedure by which a migrant would be preapproved for legal entry by the INS, “depart voluntarily” to Canada, immediately apply to the nearest American consul for a visa, and then return to the United States as a legal immigrant.45 Preexamination was used briefly at the US-Mexico border, but protests from the US consul in Juárez ended its use on the southern border, because migrants’ poverty made them inadmissible for immigration, the consulate argued. Preexamination became exclusive to the northern border.46 At the northern border, then, voluntary departure represented a technical mechanism toward legalization. At the southern border, voluntary departure remained strictly a process of deportation.47 The INS used the voluntary departure procedure much more during the mid-1940s than before, and almost exclusively at the US-Mexico border. The numbers of voluntary departures steadily crept upward as the 1940s wore on: in 1944 the INS conducted 32,270 voluntary departures, a sharp increase from the 6,904 just two years before. However, the numbers of voluntary departures per year exploded in 1946 (see table 3.1).

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table 3.1. Deportations and voluntary departures

Year

Deportations

Voluntary Departures

Total

1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950

7,179 11,270 14,375 18,663 20,371 20,040 6,628

32,270 69,490 101,945 195,880 197,185 276,297 572,477

39,449 80,760 116,320 214,543 217,556 296,337 579,105

Modified from table in US Department of Justice, Annual Report of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (Washington, DC: 1950), 50.

In the post–World War II period, from 1946 to 1950, the INS conducted 1,343,784 voluntary departures, a staggering increase from the preceding years and decades. The great majority of the voluntary departures passed through the US-Mexico border. For example, of the 572,477 voluntary departures in 1950, 98 percent were from the Border Patrol districts in San Antonio, El Paso, and Los Angeles.48 In discussing the procedure of voluntary departure, INS officials consistently defined it as a more humane and efficient method of deportation that allowed migrants the possibility of an eventual legal return. According to INS policy, migrants who were found to be “deportable on other than criminal, moral, or subversive grounds, or because of mental or physical defects” were expelled through voluntary departure.49 The 1949 INS annual report added: Such a procedure is advantageous to the alien since he is not prevented from applying immediately for readmission if the basis for his deportable status includes no element which might disqualify him for readmission. It is also advantageous to the Service as it results in a saving of deportation expense.50

Though touting voluntary departure as a humane method of deportation, clearly the cost savings and the ability to amass huge numbers of deportations were of the utmost importance to the INS. 94

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After a migrant’s apprehension, a Border Patrol officer subjected him or her to a quick initial interrogation, to determine his or her legal status. Once the officer discovered the migrant’s legal status, the officer made a further decision whether to opt for voluntary departure or initiate formal deportation proceedings. Unless the migrant had been caught committing another form of criminal act, the Border Patrol officer most often decided to use voluntary departure. Though its name implied a migrant’s consent in the proceedings, it is not clear that most migrants did consent. As Reuben Oppenheimer pointed out, though their participation was technically voluntary, “these suspects are confronted by a man obviously invested with some kind of authority, often wearing the uniform of his office and generally conducting himself as one entitled to obtain the information for which he asks.”51 Furthermore, in his testimony before a House committee hearing on immigration and naturalization, El Paso district director Grover Wilmoth admitted that the Border Patrol tried to keep the nature of their work a secret from migrants, so migrants probably did not know that the method by which they were removed from the United States was voluntary.52 But faced with the choice of quick expulsion or several weeks or months of detention, followed by an administrative hearing with no counsel, and then almost certain deportation, most migrants would have chosen voluntary departure in any case. At that point, the migrant remained in custody for several hours, in detention facilities at or near immigration offices, until Border Patrol officials could transport him or her to the nearest international port of entry and release the migrant to cross the border into Mexico. The humanity of the process of voluntary departure depended almost entirely upon the individual Border Patrol officer. Many of the everyday cruelties and humiliations of expulsion were lost amidst the high volume of traffic sent across the international bridges, only occasionally surfacing in newspaper reports or investigations. On one mid-August day in 1950 a group of ninety migrants waited to cross into Mexico at the Gateway International Bridge in Brownsville, Texas, after having been apprehended in the Harlingen area earlier in the day.53 Among that group was Abelino Mendez Leon, his wife Rufina Barajas Ramirez, and their six children, ranging in ages from four to fourteen.54 Mendez had just purchased groceries for his large family that morning and had no money to pay for the bridge fare to cross back, for himself or for his family.55 Mendez had made his way halfway across the bridge when the toll collector turned him back, telling him that US immigration officials would give him tickets to cross. Mendez claimed 95

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that he approached the immigration inspector who was checking vehicular and foot traffic on the bridge, Officer Boudreaux, and told him he “had no money to get across.” In response, Boudreaux “spoke to him roughly in English . . . and motioned him to go on and get across the bridge.”56 Upon turning to walk back, Mendez says he was “hit on the back and almost knocked to the ground.” José Julian Sanchez Peña of Matamoros corroborated Mendez’s account, reporting that he had seen a “short man in khaki clothes” hit Mendez.57 After the press reported this story, INS officials in Brownsville questioned the officer and submitted their own version of events contradicting Mendez’s testimony. The report to the district office in San Antonio cleared Immigration Inspector Boudreaux of any wrongdoing. According to his testimony in the report, Boudreaux did not strike Mr. Mendez, but had merely placed “his hand on the alien’s back, pushed him to the head of the steps, and told him to remain there until he got his tickets.”58 Boudreaux further accused Mendez of speaking to him “loudly and insolently,” while demanding money or tickets to cross the bridge.59 In his report Charles Lonergan, the officer in charge at Brownsville, Texas, concluded that Boudreaux acted just as any other officer would act in a similar situation. Instead, Lonergan charged the chief of the Mexican immigration service at Matamoros, Tamaulipas, with concocting a “lurid story” for the press based only on hearsay and trusting the word of a “three-time criminal law violator.”60 The three-time “criminal law violator” to whom Officer Lonergan referred was Abelino Mendez Leon, who had been apprehended in Harlingen, Texas, on two previous occasions and sent back to Mexico through voluntary departure. On three occasions, a Border Patrol officer had deemed Mendez “worthy” of voluntary departure, normally offered to people of otherwise good moral character, as Border Patrol officials themselves had defined the procedure before Congress. Suddenly Mendez became an untrustworthy criminal who should have been in jail but for the mercy of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Voluntary departure, therefore, was a highly flexible process that could instantly transform a person deemed formerly worthy into a criminal whose charge of mistreatment at the hands of a Border Patrol officer held no value. As voluntary departure became the most common form of immigration enforcement on the US-Mexico border, the act of removal moved further out of the processual and adjudicatory and into the informal realm. The dominant form of enforcement at the US-Mexico border was characterized 96

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by its flexibility and built on the possibility and probability of transborder Mexican mobility and labor migration. The INS touted voluntary departure as a humane process of deportation that allowed migrants the opportunity to initiate the process of legal immigration to the United States. This approach emphasized the probability of Mexicans’ return migrations. In doing so, however, INS administrators must have been well aware that most Mexican migrants, under the current laws, would be judged inadmissible, unable to meet literacy requirements or considered likely to become a public charge. Thus, INS officials knew that Mexican migrants’ return migrations would most likely be illegal. Voluntary departure theoretically wiped migrants’ slates clean—a subsequent illegal entry treated as the first. Yet, as seen above, officials could conveniently use the number of a person’s illegal crossings as evidence of a criminal character. The very large number of expulsions the INS effected during the second half of the 1940s, over 1.3 million in a span of five years, would not have been possible without the mechanism of voluntary departure. The INS’s physical and administrative infrastructure could not have handled so many formal deportations. The mechanism of voluntary departure, a response to a high volume of migration at the US-Mexico border, also contributed to that volume and made deportations a characteristic experience on the southern border. Relying so heavily on voluntary departure as a form of deportation meant that the INS conducted most expulsions of Mexicans without providing any form of written accounts of their actions whatsoever, apart from taking their names, time and place of apprehension, and time and place of departure. Forcing expulsions without documenting the process left a great deal of room for manipulation, collusion, and maneuvering.

The Contested Terrain of Border Patrol Practices Within the broadly defined border zone, members of the Immigration and Naturalization Service wove their enforcement routines into the daily social interactions between employers, the Border Patrol, and Mexican workers. The relationship between growers and the Border Patrol would seem to have been necessarily adversarial. Growers sought the cheapest possible (i.e., illegal) labor force, and the Border Patrol’s primary mission involved stopping the entrance of unauthorized migrants. Though a measure of mutual hostility and tension did exist between growers and the Border Patrol, the Border Patrol’s quiet but consistent commitment to protecting the border’s 97

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agricultural industry provided a shared foundation of stasis and stability. The local social dynamics of power continued to play a fundamental role in shaping the space and timing of enforcement, even when INS enforcement strategies changed during the 1940s and in the early 1950s. During the early 1950s, the Border Patrol conducted several large-scale deportation drives that temporarily relocated Border Patrol officers from other posts to South Texas. For the most part the INS merely sought to control growers’ excesses regarding the manipulation of labor mobility, and did not seek the overall destruction of the system based on undocumented labor. As the opening anecdote to the chapter, the Crossett affair, attested, growers strenuously, and sometimes violently, objected to what they perceived were new Border Patrol encroachments on their power and their property. Legislation passed in the second half of the 1940s and the early part of the 1950s gradually augmented the power of the Border Patrol to make searches and arrests without warrants.61 However, the increase of Border Patrol powers did not lead to a correspondingly clear path toward the disengagement of federal and local bases of authority. Occasionally, Border Patrol authorities did use their expanded powers to keep certain disagreeable or uncooperative growers or employers in line, though they had to take great care in these instances. Growers, for their part, sought to apply social and political pressure to contain the Border Patrol within the scope of their world and to use the police force as a tool for the maintenance of their labor system. Even as overall Border Patrol apprehensions increased during the 1940s, the border agricultural labor system continued to operate. The Crossett affair in 1947 and similar events that took place in the El Paso immigration district signaled a period of increased tensions between the INS and the agricultural industry in the area. These incidents reflected a slight shift in the operations of the El Paso district. In the late 1940s, the longtime district director of the El Paso region, Grover C. Wilmoth, began instructing his officers to use their authority to target those growers who were severely exploiting or otherwise abusing Mexican workers.62 In a May 1949 memorandum circulated among his staff officers, section chiefs, chief patrol inspectors, and officers in charge, Wilmoth advised his subordinates to continue operating under the policy directives he had recommended in a memorandum he had sent a year earlier. Wilmoth reminded officers to use the full extent of their authority against growers who were “taking advantage of the situation to under-pay or otherwise mistreat deportable farm laborers.”63 In addition, he urged officers to “include those farmers 98

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who actively engage in smuggling aliens, or in transporting aliens from the Border, or whose farms are used as relay stations.”64 In directing officers to focus on growers subjecting workers to extraordinary abuse, Wilmoth used apprehension policy to attempt to influence and ameliorate growers’ treatment of their workers. By inference, the absence of these kinds of explicit instructions directing officers would have given growers greater freedom to continue mistreatment and exploitation. In any case, even with Wilmoth’s specific and explicit directions, not all of the officers were following his lead, he noted, and he exhorted them to do so.65 In the second part of his memorandum, Wilmoth distinguished between growers who were passive recipients of undocumented laborers and those who played a more active role in recruiting laborers and facilitating their migration process. Wilmoth directed his officers to disrupt a common practice by which border-area growers communicated with workers and prearranged to meet them at the border and transport them to their farms. By focusing on this particular part of the transaction, Wilmoth hinted at a possible direction for border enforcement, that is, defining growers as alien smugglers and thus subject to criminal prosecution. Instituting a widespread practice of arresting farmers on charges of alien smuggling would have represented a radical legal and procedural departure on the US-Mexico border, and there is no evidence to suggest that Wilmoth tried to do so in the El Paso area. However, in one instance in October 1947, six New Mexico farmers were arrested for alien smuggling and faced trial in US district court.66 More commonly, however, Wilmoth advised his officers to target these growers by simply apprehending their workers, without bringing charges against the growers themselves. Any evidence of aggressions by Wilmoth would have greatly alarmed area growers and could have accounted for the various outbreaks of hostility between growers and Border Patrol officers in the area. Despite the evidence of an increasingly aggressive enforcement strategy in the El Paso region, Border Patrol agents continued to exercise circumspection when it came to entering growers’ properties. In a June 6, 1949, memorandum from District Director Wilmoth to the central office, Wilmoth recounted a confrontation between Border Patrol officers and a particularly hostile Doña Ana County grower, Jake Sweet. Wilmoth pointed out that Sweet took every opportunity to “‘cuss out’ the Border Patrol and everyone connected with the Immigration Service,” including calling the district director a “son of a bitch.”67 Despite such open provocation, or perhaps because of it, Border Patrol officers took great care to obtain arrest warrants to enter 99

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Sweet’s property once rumors began circulating that he had amassed a “considerably larger number of farm workers than were actually needed.”68 Although Border Patrol officers had the authority to obtain arrest warrants to apprehend any undocumented migrants on Sweet’s farm, officers felt the need to further justify their actions by pointing out that the workers were surplus labor. Wilmoth’s assurances that “Jake Sweet’s cotton was chopped” suggests that he believed that conducting a raid upon Sweet’s farm during a critical point in the cotton season might have left him open to criticism, certainly from farmers, but perhaps even from the INS central office itself. On June 7, 1949, the same day that Wilmoth sent the report on Jake Sweet to Washington, DC, the central office issued a lengthy memorandum to the El Paso and San Antonio districts resulting from an internal survey conducted reviewing policies and conditions in those areas.69 INS commissioner Watson B. Miller initiated this survey in order to “effect coordinate policies and procedures” within the southern border districts. The memorandum also had the effect of drastically revising El Paso district director Wilmoth’s more aggressive enforcement strategies.70 Miller concluded that in general, the San Antonio and El Paso districts followed similar procedures. To discuss the similarities in enforcement procedures, which Miller proposed both districts continue, the commissioner used the San Antonio district to provide a case study about their daily operations. He found that officers in the San Antonio district mostly apprehended “all moving illegal aliens found upon the highways, in railway stations, bus stations, or other public or quasi-public places,” and intercepted workers crossing the “Rio Grande River without documents or inspection.”71 According to Miller’s findings, INS officials in El Paso also followed this general approach. Therefore, the Border Patrol’s common strategy of patrolling public spaces in towns and public places of transport made workers in movement or transit more vulnerable to apprehension than those that stayed on farmlands and away from public spaces. This was characteristic of the southern border as a whole. Miller also outlined the limited and specific circumstances in which it was appropriate to enter growers’ properties, revealing the central office’s cautious and circumscribed approach in dealing with border enforcement. As Miller noted, the San Antonio district director “has cleaned up some farms and stock ranges where the proprietors have been acting as labor hoarders of illegal Mexican nationals, and who have been ‘farming out’ or ‘transferring’ the workers so hoarded to other ranches or farms.”72 Thus, officers did not necessarily target the general grower population who might also have 100

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been using undocumented labor, but only those they knew were engaging in activity that resulted in undocumented workers moving inland beyond the geographical location of the border. Miller further clarified this geographical containment strategy in the memorandum, reminding officers that their approach was a “job of forcing all possible illegals toward the border.”73 By also targeting labor hoarding, which could possibly create restiveness among workers through oversupply and underemployment, Border Patrol officers attempted to maintain a semblance of stability in the overall labor system. Though the murkiness regarding the INS’s legal authority to enter private property without warrants might have contributed to Commissioner Miller’s advocating extreme caution regarding entering growers’ properties, the overall tone of his memorandum suggested restraint and cooperation rather than aggression. His directions provided a clear signal to Border Patrol officers regarding their relations with growers. Commissioner Miller encouraged officers to enter farms in the “presence of conditions of such as set out the fore part of this memorandum,” thus limiting their raids to labor hoarders.74 These directions also limited Border Patrol officers to targeting growers who were on the verge of releasing their workers to other agricultural areas, thus signifying that such growers had already harvested their crops and workers were no longer necessary. In addition to his directions that supported an immigration enforcement strategy sensitive to growers’ harvesting schedules, INS commissioner Miller even more clearly communicated the message that INS officials should keep the protection of the agricultural industry in mind while still doing their job. In a statement aimed at both the El Paso and the San Antonio district directors, Commissioner Miller sought to rein in El Paso district director Wilmoth’s aggression, while very gently spurring San Antonio district director William Whalen to more action: It has been said that some of our District Directors are not interested in the crops or the farmers. I think this cannot be well sustained though it is conceded that the officials of our Service do meet with exasperating circumstances, and yet the feeling and even truculence of producers who are engaged in vital production who have been discommoded can be understood. It seems better, however, to chance occasional complaints or disaffectations where the circumstance[s] giving rise to them are fully warranted and at the same time to lend a hand to proper crop protection than to refrain from ever approaching the premises of the producers.75 101

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In this statement Miller reminded officers of growers’ important work, advocating forbearance even in the face of hostility. The reminder to officers of the vital nature of growers’ production seemed to be aimed at Director Wilmoth, whose district had a record of heated confrontations between growers and officers.76 On the other hand, when he gently advised officers to risk the wrath of growers by occasionally approaching their premises if officers were fully in the right, Miller seemed to be addressing Whalen. In trying to coordinate the activities at the two southwestern districts, Miller’s overall tone supported Whalen’s understated approach in San Antonio rather than Wilmoth’s more aggressive strategy in El Paso. In his internal investigation, Miller pointed out the one major difference separating the two districts’ general enforcement strategies. Miller noted that Wilmoth paid attention to issues of workers’ “disastrously low wages,” “overcharging at some commissaries,” “inadequate quarters,” and “sanitary conditions.”77 By contrast, Whalen had rarely “interjected his forces” to address these issues. Commissioner Miller directed Wilmoth to “refrain from entering premises for the purpose of correcting these particular reported abuses.”78 Miller made clear that dealing with worker abuses did not fall within the INS’s purview; that was the responsibility of the US Employment Service and Mexican consular authorities in the bracero program. In order to make his directive even plainer, Miller drove the point home by noting, The San Antonio District Director has not generally concerned himself in the matter of wages, living conditions, prices of commodities or personal treatment of the workmen. The El Paso District Director has concerned himself with these conditions. It is agreed that, pending the completion of the proposed international agreement between Mexico and the United States, neither District will enter into these personal and economic matters.79

In fact, neither the protection of worker welfare nor the protection of growers’ interests fell within the explicit mission of the Border Patrol. Yet Miller’s instructions had expressed the idea that protecting the agricultural industry was a valid concern when considering enforcement strategies. On the other hand, Miller instructed Wilmoth to stop using Border Patrol raids to target those growers who were mistreating undocumented Mexican workers. In addition to revealing a great deal about the strategies behind the Border Patrol’s daily operating procedures, the memorandum revealed possible 102

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enforcement paths not taken, and the implications of such decision-making. For at least a year, Grover C. Wilmoth had instructed the officers in his district to follow up on reports of abuse they heard about during interrogations of apprehended workers, or that they witnessed themselves in their raids on farms and during general patrols. By raiding these farms, and perhaps even using the tool of repeated raids on these properties, Wilmoth might have hoped to force growers into modifying their practices, be it by improving housing conditions or raising wages.80 In employing these strategic raids, Wilmoth was evidently aware of the overall impact Border Patrol enforcement had, and could have, on workers’ lives while they were in the United States. By explicitly rejecting Wilmoth’s initiatives, the INS commissioner revealed the central agency’s unconcern with migrants’ living and working conditions. Far from being a position of neutrality, a policy of nonintervention meant the Border Patrol allied itself with growers’ interests, matched as it was with the agency’s position on protecting crops. As the memorandum made clear, the Border Patrol policy of extreme sensitivity to growers’ harvest schedules and nonintervention in worker abuse was the standard operating procedure in the San Antonio district, a set of practices that the INS commissioner wanted to see in El Paso as well. Directives from the central office had clear effects on Border Patrol officers’ practices in El Paso. Following Commissioner Miller’s memorandum, Border Patrol officers in the El Paso district had to take even greater care when deciding to enter growers’ properties, especially as word leaked out about their new instructions. In June and July of 1949, Wilmoth reported several incidents with growers in New Mexico and Arizona and warned Miller that his office would “probably receive a report or complaint about this occurrence as nearly every farmer in West Texas and New Mexico is now aware of the limitations placed upon the authority of patrol officers of this Service.”81 In one case near the town of Tucumcari, in northeastern New Mexico, Border Patrol officers searched the farm of Mr. Brown based on information from a former worker who claimed he had been displaced by undocumented workers who were being paid thirty-five cents per hour to drive a tractor, when he had been making seventy-five or eighty cents an hour for the same work.82 Upon receiving this tip, Patrolman Clayton believed “the Mexicans should be investigated as it did not appear to be fair for American laborers to have to compete against such low wages.”83 Immigration investigator Clyde Nichols did not approve a raid on the farm, however, until he received information from the local sheriff ’s office that 103

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Mr. Brown had traveled to El Paso to acquire the workers, thus possibly engaging in alien smuggling. After questioning the apprehended workers, Nichols discovered that although Mr. Brown had traveled to Ysleta, Texas, just outside of El Paso, and had transported the workers to his farm in northeastern New Mexico, “apparently he had not smuggled them into the United States.”84 Perhaps in anticipation of criticism from the central office, or to communicate the difficulties his officers faced under the new directives, Wilmoth forwarded Nichols’s report to Washington, attaching his own memorandum. With a slight inflection of sarcasm, he reported going ahead and processing the paperwork to deport the apprehended migrants anyway, having “deemed it inadvisable to return the aliens to the Brown farm.”85 In the months following, growers in the El Paso district continued to openly resist the Border Patrol, emboldened by the knowledge of the spatial limitations of Border Patrol authority. According to one report from Wilcox, Arizona, Border Patrol officers attempted to stop grower Joe Deerman Jr. while he was driving on a county road near his farm after recognizing the passenger in the car as a migrant whom they had previously deported. According to the report, “Deerman did not stop the car, however, until he had turned into the gate at the farm, this move was apparently deliberate as we had signaled him we wanted him to stop.”86 As Border Patrol officers apprehended the worker, Deerman pointedly reminded them that “you fellows need a warrant to come on to a place and the next time you come here, you had better have one before you come in my front gate.”87 Deerman’s threat was ultimately successful. In a memorandum to District Director Wilmoth, Carson Morrow, chief patrol inspector in charge of the Tucson area, reported that “in view of outstanding, confidential instructions . . . the apprehension of Mexican alien farm laborers on the farms in the Wilcox, Arizona territory should be discontinued for the time being.”88 Growers’ continued contestation over the Border Patrol’s authority to enter their property, coupled with directions from the INS central office, led El Paso Border Patrol authorities to curb their activities in the region.

Border Patrol Collusion in South Texas As the INS central office’s memorandum stated, Border Patrol relations with growers in South Texas operated more smoothly than in the El Paso region, due to a greater amount of collusion between officers and growers. Examining a few INS central office internal investigations over the corruption of 104

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senior patrol inspectors in South Texas helps contextualize the undifferentiated mass of annual enforcement statistics. Innovations in border enforcement practices beginning in the late 1940s shifted officers from other posts to a particular locale for short-term, high-intensity deportation drives, often disrupting local relations between growers and the Border Patrol. Because such mobilizations were temporary, however, nothing prevented local Border Patrol officers from reverting to their customary relations with growers once the drives were over. Two cases involving senior patrol inspectors in charge, Charles Wroten in 1952 and Albert Quillin in 1954, reveal the deep interconnections between Border Patrol officials and local communities. Though the two stations headed by Officers Wroten and Quillin were small, and the officers the men supervised were few, these stations were located in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley, in intensively cultivated areas with large numbers of agricultural workers. During the spring of 1952, the INS initiated an internal investigation against Charles Wroten for allegations of neglect of duty, misuse of a government vehicle, and employment of undocumented migrants on his own farm. At the time of his investigation, Charles Wroten was in charge of the Border Patrol office in Weslaco, Texas, whose jurisdiction included the town, located about seven miles north of the Rio Grande, as well as the territory extending down to the river. Although it is not clear who brought the charges, or which event or events triggered the complaints, the investigating officers in charge of the Wroten case primarily focused on incidents that had occurred during the preceding year.89 The nature of the charges, however, suggested a pattern of behavior by Wroten extending far beyond 1951 alone. A picture emerged from the report of a Border Patrol office run with such extreme laxity that officers did not even attempt a pretense at enforcement. The officers who served under Wroten, either permanently or temporarily during a special detail in the summer of 1951, testified that Wroten communicated an attitude against apprehending migrants on farms, and even against patrolling the Rio Grande. Wroten only permitted officers to apprehend migrants found in public places.90 INS investigators thought it particularly damning that none of the officers, even those who worked under him on a permanent basis, were familiar with Wroten’s schedule or the nature of the work that he did, calling into question whether he did any work at all. According to the testimony of his subordinate officers and the owner of the local domino hall in town, Wroten spent much of his time playing dominoes.91 When he was not playing dominoes, he also spent some 105

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of the time while supposedly on duty supervising the work of the crews in his own cotton fields while his government-issued Border Patrol vehicle was parked nearby. Under questioning, Wroten explained that he had driven the government vehicle onto his land merely to check on governmentowned property he had stored there. Investigators found this explanation profoundly unpersuasive, noting that “the stored Government property was later found to be two old Border Patrol stop signs (used in checking highway traffic) which had been nailed to the wall of a shed. Both were described as in a state of collapse.”92 Wroten’s complete disregard for his duties as the senior patrol inspector in charge in Weslaco signaled more than just laziness. Wroten cultivated a large circle of friends and acquaintances in town. Those friendships, together with his own property interests, influenced his enforcement practices. Among his other charges, Wroten was also accused of improperly releasing migrant Doroteo Lara from custody after he had been apprehended by other patrolmen from the Weslaco office during the spring of 1951. Wroten claimed that he had released the migrant because Lara was married to an American citizen and was also ill, producing a doctor’s note from a local clinic as supporting evidence. Further investigation found that Lara was neither ill nor married, and had been released by Wroten as a favor to his friend, the city manager of Weslaco.93 The incident surrounding Doroteo Lara’s release illustrates the close relations between Border Patrol officers and the local grower community in Weslaco, as well as the wide acceptance in the area for hiring undocumented laborers. In the first place, the city manager, a public servant, had hired Lara, an undocumented immigrant. Secondly, in trying to cover up his violation, Wroten persuaded a local doctor to write a note falsely diagnosing an illness for Lara. Furthermore, in trying to defend himself against other various charges, Wroten claimed that his wife owned and operated the farm, not him, and submitted five letters from area businessmen supporting his claim.94 Wroten’s subterfuge broke down under questioning, and he admitted his ownership of the property, but the five letters written on his behalf again demonstrate the ties between Wroten and members of the local agricultural industry, as well as their willingness to lie for him to try to undermine an official INS investigation. The fact that the San Antonio district director allowed INS officers to own agricultural property at all is surprising as well, considering the possible conflicts of interest that could arise. The San Antonio district director, William Whalen, had addressed these concerns before in a 1949 memorandum 106

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to all the employees in his district. Whalen stated that though he felt such a reminder was hardly necessary, because of the large amount of publicity and criticism the INS was presently receiving “from certain sources because of the presence of wetbacks in such large numbers,” he had decided to issue “a word of caution” to his employees: Some of you may own or have an interest in acreage or other business enterprises on the side, in connection with which it may be necessary to employ laborers. As stated above, it is hardly necessary to advise you not to use any wetback labor. However, someone else may employ the laborers for you, and you may not be in a position yourself to determine whether such laborers are wetbacks. You should not take anything of that nature for granted. You should personally see to it that alien laborers of any kind of a job in which you have an interest, are lawfully in this country.95

Despite his many assurances to the contrary, Director Whalen evidently felt it necessary to issue his warning. Though most employees probably did not compromise themselves as much as Charles Wroten, the use of undocumented labor was so pervasive, and enough INS employees also owned external businesses and properties, that Whalen felt he had to issue a warning for them to maintain a sense of professionalism. The social and economic ties linking Border Patrol officers to their local communities were so varied and so extensive that operating at odds with the community’s wishes was very difficult, if not impossible. Investigators found Wroten guilty of neglect of duty, of misusing a government vehicle, and of employing undocumented laborers on his farm. Considering the severity of the violations as well as Wroten’s obvious guilt, investigators would have ordinarily called for his firing. Several mitigating circumstances, however, convinced investigators to recommend a lesser punishment. First, because he was eligible for retirement, investigators evidently believed he should be given the option to retire instead. Second, as they stated, “the wetback situation in the Lower Valley of Texas was completely out of hand and tremendous pressure was on the entire Service to relax its efforts there.”96 Whether the investigators believed the pressure came from within the agency or from the outside community remains unclear, but this statement suggests that Charles Wroten’s approach to enforcement was perhaps not so singular after all. In the end, investigators recommended Wroten’s demotion to a nonsupervisory position and transfer to a location outside 107

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the San Antonio district. After offering several locations along the northern US border and receiving no response from Officer Wroten, officials decided to transfer him to Detroit.97 Before his transfer could be effected, Wroten applied for retirement from the Immigration and Naturalization Service.98 The periodic drives that the INS undertook through the first half of the 1950s, culminating in Operation Wetback during the summer of 1954, momentarily disrupted the typical daily interactions between local Border Patrol officers and growers. For a few weeks or a month, Border Patrol chiefs had to incorporate officers from as far away as Buffalo and Miami into task forces designed to “sweep” the area’s agricultural fields. The task forces traveled in convoys and were often supported by an airplane providing directions from above to fields filled with workers. During the operation of these mass deportation drives, officers temporarily stationed in South Texas might note irregularities in local officers’ procedures, or get feedback from surprised farmers irate at the task forces’ disruption of normal enforcement patterns, thus exposing local Border Patrol officers’ practices. This scenario embroiled Albert Quillin, senior patrol inspector in charge of the San Benito unit, in controversy in July 1954. The best-known mass deportation campaign of the mid-twentieth century, Operation Wetback, targeted the agricultural fields between California and Texas, and was lauded at the time for its military-style innovations and splashy deportation numbers.99 Scholars have identified Operation Wetback as a key turning point in the history of immigration enforcement on the US-Mexico border, signaling the beginning of the hardening and militarization of the border that would become characteristic of the border in the late twentieth century. The INS’s investigation of Patrol Inspector Albert Quillin demonstrates that increased militarization on the border did not equal a rigid approach to immigration enforcement. In fact, a few years before, Quillin had been credited for innovating many of the techniques that were later used during Operation Wetback.100 He organized several rapid response Border Patrol details involving ground transportation and air support that led to the capture and detainment of over one thousand workers in four days.101 Ironically, the large-scale implementation of those techniques created the context that brought Quillin under suspicion for collusion with growers during Operation Wetback. During the summer of 1954, Task Force D-8 was conducting operations in Cameron County, in and around the areas of San Benito, Rio Hondo, and Harlingen. The officer in charge of the task force, Senior Patrol Inspector 108

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Maurice Dixon, was disturbed by how badly things were going for his group of officers. Dixon was not permanently posted in South Texas, and had been leading sweeps throughout the Southwest earlier in the summer. He had just wrapped up a very successful drive in Northern California, and the task force had been working as a well-oiled machine. Yet it seemed to the men that every field they hit in their assigned territory in South Texas was filled with either legally contracted braceros or American citizens of Mexican extraction.102 Dixon’s early misgivings about the officer assigned to act as their guide, Albert Quillin, increased daily. Dixon began to suspect Quillin of deliberately leading them astray. Dixon’s suspicions were confirmed when Quillin botched their planned raid on one of the largest farms in the San Benito area. Instead of guiding the convoy to the Wells farm as planned, he sent them way past, alerting workers to the Border Patrol’s presence. This allowed workers the time to escape across the Rio Grande to Mexico.103 After the raid went awry, Quillin explained to Dixon that he had gotten “turned around and lost his bearings,” despite his eight years as a patrol inspector in that exact territory.104 Disbelieving his story, Dixon lodged a complaint against Quillin, which triggered an internal INS investigation soon afterward. In the course of the investigation, Immigration Investigator Decker and Immigration Inspector C. W. Gordy questioned officers who had worked with Quillin, including colleagues from nearby Border Patrol units who were familiar with his territory and practices. Some of Quillin’s subordinate officers showed a marked reluctance to give negative testimony, whether out of fear that their words would get back to him or fear of being implicated themselves.105 But others were more open. His second-in-command, Wally Baxter, testified to Quillin’s coziness with area farmers, stating, “My opinion is that he is friendly with the majority of the farmers in the San Benito area to the extent that when he meets them on the street, he drinks coffee with them and discusses everything about the farming situation.”106 The officers from the nearby Brownsville unit provided some of the most damning testimony when they reported straying onto territory normally patrolled by the San Benito unit and being met by surprised and hostile farmers who asserted that Quillin had assured them they would be able to keep their workers until a particular date. “Over a period of time this became such a common practice that some patrol inspectors told me they didn’t like to work in that area, because of what they termed the static and mouthing of the farmers,” stated Senior Patrol Inspector David Snow of the Brownsville unit.107 109

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The investigation’s testimony revealed both the general inertia that seemed to exist among Border Patrol officers when it came to reporting on the misconduct of fellow officers and the ways in which special law enforcement disrupted regular enforcement patterns. Officers such as Quillin were placed in difficult positions as they sought to negotiate between their relationships with the local agricultural establishment and the momentarily altered Border Patrol practices. In addition to the tales of contretemps with San Benito–area growers used to working with Quillin, as well as general rumors about Quillin’s closeness to the influential farmers of the area, Snow recounted a conversation he had with Quillin during the time of the airlifts in 1951. After a month of intensive patrolling, Quillin had apparently had enough. During one visit to the Brownsville station, where the San Benito unit officers dropped off apprehended migrants for deportation processing, Quillin bitterly complained to Snow and another colleague that “he thought the airlift had gone on long enough now and it ought to quit and give farmers a chance to pick their cotton. The Immigration Service had promised the farmers that they would be able to pick their cotton with wetbacks and he thought the Immigration Service was obligated to keep its promise.”108 Though Snow professed to be “amazed” at his attitude, he did not report Quillin to their superior officer, Fletcher Rawls. “I always more or less took the position that Quillin would sooner or later hang himself anyway,” he said, “and I never made any attempt to run to McAllen to report such things.”109 At the very least, Snow’s reluctance in reporting a colleague’s behavior allowed Quillin to operate as he wished for years. At most, it indicated a general tolerance of the type of patrolling that Quillin engaged in. While Quillin might have been an extreme case, if he had been completely outside the bounds of patrolling norms, he would have been brought to account earlier. In the end, though most local officers seemed to be well aware of Quillin’s inappropriate relationship with growers, it was an officer from West Palm Beach, Florida, working temporarily in South Texas who brought a complaint against Quillin.110 Quillin’s own testimony only raised more questions about the nature of his specific relationships with growers. He admitted to being in significant personal debt to Rio Hondo grower Ernest Talbert, who had loaned Quillin $5,500 to purchase his house.111 Thus, Quillin was under obligation to a man whose farm lay within his jurisdiction. Furthermore, Ernest Talbert was a member of an extensive family who owned several farms within Quillin’s 110

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territory, inevitably raising questions about Quillin’s professional interactions with the entire Talbert clan. In questioning Quillin, investigators became suspicious about his general approach to immigration enforcement. In response to a line of questioning about whether or not he had ever prearranged with growers to deliver a certain number of migrants to the Border Patrol office, he said, “I have done that hundreds of times.”112 Quillin then began to spin an incredible tale about how growers sometimes drove truckloads of workers to the international bridge in Brownsville upon Quillin’s request, due to Border Patrol officers’ lack of proper hauling equipment. The questioner seemed skeptical: Q: In this connection, you mean that the farmers, during the harvest season would voluntarily haul these aliens to Mexico for you? A: Yes. In fact I will go so far as to say that I could have caught half of the aliens in my territory with my own telephone.113

Quillin’s fantastical boast was belied by the Wells farm incident for which he was being investigated in the first place. If the farmers were so well trained that Quillin had merely to call them on the telephone for them to deliver their illegal workforce, why had Mr. Wells allowed his workers to evade arrest and flee across the river into Mexico? If indeed growers hauled workers to the border themselves, then the more likely scenario was that they did so not during the height of the harvest season, but once it was already over. Quillin’s unit could register the apprehension numbers they desired and growers could rid themselves of a surplus workforce after getting their crops picked. That scenario corresponded more closely to Brownsville officers’ reports of growers’ stunned dismay if they were raided by forces other than Quillin’s men, as well as growers’ complaints that Quillin had promised them they could get their tomatoes harvested.114 In addition, the existence of these types of arrangements between Senior Patrol Inspector Albert Quillin and area growers explains why Quillin was so flustered during special deportation drives, such as the airlifts of 1951 and Operation Wetback in 1954. During these campaigns, which were initiated during the summer cotton-harvesting season, Quillin had no control over the timing of the deportations. As the investigation revealed, during these campaigns Quillin made clumsy attempts to undermine the INS’s enforcement efforts, ultimately unmasking his operations in the San Benito territory. These campaigns were temporary, however. Most of the time, local Border 111

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Patrol forces controlled the rhythm of enforcement. If South Texas Border Patrol units delivered the apprehension numbers, was the INS predisposed to look behind the numbers? In the end, Investigator Decker and Inspector Gordy concluded that the evidence against Albert Quillin, while extensive, was not specific enough to convict him of collusion or other misconduct beyond the failure to lead the Border Patrol unit onto the Wells farm. However, because of the comprehensive nature of the suspicions against him, investigators felt Quillin should be “removed from the supervisory position in his present area.”115 His ultimate fate is unclear in the records. It appears that he was not immediately fired. A memorandum listing the INS officers who separated from duty during 1954 did not contain Quillin’s name.116 The INS investigation of Albert Quillin for misconduct during 1954 complicates the notion of a Border Patrol force becoming independent from local bases of authority during the first half of the 1950s. If Albert Quillin represented a new generation of Border Patrol officers when he first joined the Service in 1940, by 1954 he was part of the old guard, with deep and extensive ties to local power brokers. The agricultural system, whose foundation was built by undocumented labor, was so deep and wide that INS officers could easily become implicated in it by seemingly simple acts of living life. In Quillin’s case, in buying a house and becoming indebted to an area grower, he ratcheted up the social ties connecting himself to the local growing establishment. Finally, the investigation of Albert Quillin helps shed light on the burgeoning apprehension numbers in South Texas during the latter part of the 1940s and first half of the 1950s. As the extensive testimony from the investigation revealed, Quillin’s apprehension numbers were not all they seemed to be. Large numbers of apprehensions and deportations, as experienced in South Texas, did not necessarily disrupt the agricultural economy.

Conclusion During the first half of the twentieth century, restrictive US immigration laws continuously narrowed the boundaries of acceptability for legal immigration into the country. Even as migrants found it increasingly difficult to obtain immigration visas, US economic demands for the kind of cheap labor usually performed by immigrants did not diminish. Under pressure from business interests in the Southwest, legislators extended exemptions to allow 112

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for the temporary migration of Mexican workers into the United States. These exemptions and loopholes created a precedent of labor mobility and flexibility at the US-Mexico border, while still maintaining the logic and scaffolding of restriction. As a result, Mexicans were defined as in a state of permanent temporariness, and as less than full members of US society. The US state was not alone in contributing to this formulation of Mexican migration. The Mexican government also played a significant role in maintaining the temporariness of Mexican migration through its reluctance to let go of its citizens and its support of US deportation efforts up through the mid-1950s. As the agency charged with the enforcement of immigration laws, the INS also had to face the paradox of the US desire for Mexican labor but unwillingness to have many Mexican American citizens. The INS used the technique of voluntary departure at the US-Mexico border because it was more convenient and less expensive than formal deportation. The INS had used voluntary departure since the 1920s, but it became the primary tool for deporting Mexicans during the 1940s. Between 1945 and 1950, over 1.4 million Mexicans were deported through voluntary departure. What was once a “convenient” tool for effecting the expulsion of unauthorized migrants helped create a “convenient” border that facilitated movement through the mechanism of restriction. Scholars have begun to take a closer look at the defining role of deportation in US immigration history. That is, immigration has not been all about entrance and eventual integration. It has also been as much about restriction and expulsion. Nowhere has this been more evident than at the US-Mexico border. Rather than thinking about deportation only as a failure of the system of enforcement, the Border Patrol’s heavy use of voluntary departure on the US southern border has shown that expulsion through voluntary departure was also a mechanism for the management of the mobility of Mexican laborers. Though concerned with fundamental issues of national sovereignty and authority, immigration laws and Border Patrol enforcement practices were not pure expressions of national power. On the contrary, they were influenced, shaped, and contested in daily interactions between local growers and Border Patrol officers living and working in the border region. Border Patrol enforcement practices were as much shaped by the contours of the border agricultural system as the border agricultural system was shaped by the Border Patrol’s enforcement of laws.

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chapter 4 •

Exploitative Villains or Community Leaders? Agricultural Labor Contractors, the State, and Control over Worker Mobility

O

n September 12, 1946, a group of fifty men, women, and children gathered in the yard adjacent to Armando Salinas’s house in Elsa, Texas, in Hidalgo County.1 Their belongings already packed, the migrant workers climbed into trucks to begin the long journey north from deep South Texas to work in cotton fields outside the state. Before they could leave the yard, however, the small convoy was stopped by the arrival of Thad Hoot, deputy labor commissioner for the state of Texas, who detained the entire group and threatened them with arrest if they did not stay put. According to the subsequent suit brought by Armando Salinas against Maureen Moore, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Thad Hoot, her deputy, Hoot had used “threats and intimidation” in “browbeating and frightening this plaintiff and his relatives and friends, and [having] his said friends and relatives bunched up like little pigs in a sty; without shelter or food.”2 Thad Hoot detained the migrant workers because he accused Armando Salinas of operating as an unlicensed labor agent in Texas. Salinas had not purchased the licenses, posted the bonds, and paid the occupation taxes required by state law. For his part, Salinas denied being a labor agent, describing himself instead as a crew leader, the head of a self-organized 114

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kinship group working together to find the places with the best wages and working conditions to maximize their earnings. More than just a technical dispute about licenses and taxes, the disagreement between Salinas and Hoot centered on competing definitions of labor brokers and the role of the state in regulating them. State laws created a regulatory apparatus to manage large employment agencies that moved thousands of workers into the agricultural and railroad industries. In some cases, such as with Armando Salinas, state officials did not distinguish between large and small operations and sought to apply the same regulations to smaller field crews. Labor agents primarily made their money in connecting laborers to employers, charging workers or employers, or both, a fee for providing the procurement service. Labor agents often provided transportation to the place of employment, charging workers for that as well. By contrast, agricultural crew leaders traveled with workers to their destinations, often shared their accommodations, served as intermediaries between employers and workers, and supervised some aspects of the agricultural work. Though they did not fulfill the same role in the agricultural economy, labor agents and crew leaders resembled each other in that they both facilitated the movement of low-waged workers. Despite the differences between types of labor facilitators, including labor agents, crew leaders, or coyotes, both the US and Mexican governments depicted them as exploiters of poor workers.3 In sharing this view of such people, US growers and Mexican government officials were able to forge common ground during difficult bracero program negotiations. The agreement between American growers and Mexican government officials about the villainy of the labor contractor created a convenient target that could be held responsible for the ills of the agricultural labor system, and allowed both parties to face each other during the negotiations of the many iterations of the bracero program. As a 1947 labor conference held in South Texas between growers, Mexican officials, and US Immigration and Naturalization Service officials demonstrated, once the parties deflected the blame for workers’ desperate conditions onto the intermediary labor contractors, then they could paper over the real problem of extremely low wages in agriculture. Blaming labor contractors allowed negotiators to gesture toward “turning the page” on the past and pledge to cooperate more closely in the future. Labor middlemen often did exploit migrant farmworkers by charging high fees for transportation and skimming a percentage from the workers’ wages; thus state regulation was not inappropriate. Mexican workers complained 115

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about being cheated by such middlemen, and labor union activists also pointed to self-organized crews as a hindrance to labor organizing.4 Liberal reformers also commented on the hazardous and overcrowded conditions that migrants experienced on the journey in rickety agricultural trucks.5 By contrast, Texas state officials’ concern for worker safeguards while in transit did not lead to a similar concern for their wages and conditions while they were in the fields. Such a spotty approach to regulating the agricultural industry suggested that officials were most concerned about Mexican workers’ mobility rather than their overall well-being. By focusing on the labor contractor, in the contexts of the domestic migration of Mexican American farmworkers and the international migration of Mexican agricultural workers, US and Mexican government officials attempted to establish greater state control over workers’ mobility. Regarding self-organized migration groups as chaotic, inefficient, and/or exploitative, officials sought to organize worker mobility while leaving many aspects of migrants’ work experiences unorganized and unregulated.6 The threats and intimidation state labor officials used against Mexican American migrant farmworkers to inhibit and control their movement stood in great contrast to the manner in which agencies such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Texas Agricultural Extension Service presented themselves to the public. Emphasizing the building facilities they helped maintain for migrants’ rest and refreshment, officials touted their service to migrants as helping efficiently direct migrants to available work, thus decreasing time lost on the migrant road. The actions of state employees such as Thad Hoot, supported by legislation such as the Texas Employment and Labor Agency Law of 1943, revealed state officials’ true intent in keeping Mexican American labor within the state’s borders as much as possible during harvesting season. Ironically, to be able to pass laws restricting the mobility of American citizens within the borders of their own country, seemingly violating the migrants’ fundamental civil rights of free movement, the state of Texas targeted the labor intermediary long designated as the enemy of free labor in American history: the labor contractor.

Controlling Mexican Migration: Texas Employment and Labor Agency Law Armando Salinas and his partner Tomás Castillo owned three trucks, which they used to transport the workers to their destination, a location chosen after 116

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consultation with the entire group and decided upon as a group. According to Salinas, he did not charge the workers, whom he referred to as his “relatives and friends,” for their transportation, or deduct anything from the wages they earned picking cotton. He was paid directly from the grower—fifty cents per hundred pounds of cotton picked by the crew—for his job weighing cotton, hauling cotton to the gin, and hauling water from town to the workers. In his petition to the Ninety-Second District Court in Hidalgo County, he pointedly and repeatedly stated that he received not a “penny in compensation” from the workers themselves.7 The group, described by Salinas as working together as “friends and co-laborers” for “their common good,” entrusted him to lead and negotiate for them with prospective employers, relying on his “judgment and loyalty to see that they are treated fairly.”8 Charging Hoot with trespassing on his property and attempting to force him to buy licenses and post the bonds, fees he deemed “unlawful” and “prohibitive,” Armando Salinas hired Edinburg attorney and longtime Hidalgo County politico Joe V. Alamía to represent him in a suit against Maureen Moore and Thad Hoot. In the suit, Salinas’s legal counsel asked Judge Bryce Ferguson for an injunction against the two and their “servants, lackies [sic], employees, deputies and Inspectors,” ordering them from “interfering with this plaintiff in the free use and operation of his said trucks or causing this plaintiff or his truck drivers, relatives and friends to be arrested or otherwise interfered with on any of the highways of the State of Texas or elsewhere.” Judge Ferguson rejected the suit, ruling that the question should be settled in criminal court, if or when Maureen Moore filed criminal charges against Salinas for being an unlicensed labor agent. Though he ruled that the lawsuit fell outside his jurisdiction, Judge Ferguson concluded that Salinas was indeed operating as a labor agent, while also agreeing with Salinas that the fees levied by the state of Texas were excessive. “We could not operate in the Valley without the crew leaders, and the costs of his licenses and bonds is prohibitive,” Ferguson averred.9 Ferguson observed that the Employment and Labor Agency Law was in place to “discourage Texas labor from crossing state lines,” noting that “little attention is paid by state officials to the crew leaders who move from county to county.”10 As it happened, the crew led by Salinas had been working in the South Texas cotton fields during the entire summer, and it was not until they were preparing to leave the state to follow the cotton crop that the labor officials began to harass the workers. Demonstrating their awareness of the motivations behind such legislation, Salinas and his partner took pains to 117

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convince the court that neither he nor the workers were depriving South Texas of their agricultural labor force, arguing that in addition to having worked during the South Texas cotton season, they intended to return to Hidalgo County in time for the beginning of the vegetable harvest.11 The Fourth District Court of Civil Appeals agreed with Judge Ferguson’s original assessment, however, and Armando Salinas was ordered to pay the defendants $200 plus court costs. Though often accused by American growers and Mexican government officials alike of corruption, the figure of the labor contractor/crew leader represented one of the few options ethnic Mexican agricultural laborers had for achieving financial stability in the United States. Crew leaders were often agricultural laborers who had accumulated enough capital after years of labor to buy a truck that they used to transport people and goods to and from the agricultural fields. In many cases, relatives, neighbors, and other kin made up the crews the leaders organized. Some crew leaders engaged in the kind of corrupt practices that growers alleged took place—skimming off the workers’ already low wages and charging exorbitant prices for food and transportation—but often the crew leaders earned the trust of Mexican families and communities of which they were a part. Scholars and labor activists discussed this ambivalence of crews and crew leaders, and the role they played in the agricultural system. On the one hand, “crews provided opportunities for leadership as well as a means for locating jobs.” On the other hand, crews were “often used by leaders as an instrument for personal gain.”12 Armando Salinas contended that he was not a labor agent because he did not charge workers a fee for finding the group employment, housing, or transportation, but state officials cited the Texas Employment and Labor Agency Law to the contrary. The law classified any person as a labor agent who, with or without a fee, attempted to procure employment for “common laborers or agricultural workers.”13 Under the guise of protective regulation for agricultural workers, the legislation represented a thinly veiled attempt to discourage the movement of migrant farmworkers, especially out of the state. Focusing on manual laborers, and specifically on agricultural workers, the legislation broadly encompassed anyone who might procure work for another. The law did not recognize the distinction that Salinas wanted to draw between himself, as a crew leader and co-laborer along with the other workers, and a labor agent whose remuneration was drawn from the workers themselves. 118

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According to the 1943 legislation, labor agents had to apply for licenses to operate within the state, post a hefty bond, and pay an additional annual tax if the agent transported workers across state lines. The agent was required to purchase a license, costing $150, for each county in which the agent intended to operate.14 For a crew leader at the head of one group of fifty workers who traveled the state following the cotton harvest, these licenses were prohibitive and impracticable. Furthermore, in order to obtain an operating license, the agent had to include with his or her application the “affidavits of at least five creditable citizens” from the counties in which the agent intended to operate, to testify to the agent’s “good moral character.”15 Moreover, labor agents had to post a $5,000 bond in order to guard against any “false statement or representation” made to prospective workers. The bond guaranteed a fund from which the state could draw if workers were in any way “injured or aggrieved” by any “false or fraudulent” statements made by labor agents.16 The state’s seeming concern for workers’ possible victimization by defrauding and corrupt labor agents stood in stark contrast to the complete lack of legislation regulating agricultural workers’ wages, housing, and working conditions in Texas.17 In addition to licenses and bonds, Texas labor agents who wished to take workers across state lines had to pay an annual state tax of $600 as well as a county tax ranging from $100 to $200, depending on the county’s population.18 The numerous taxes, bonds, and fees assessed against labor agents, on the one hand, and the paucity of legislation regulating other aspects of agricultural labor in Texas, on the other, suggest that the state was less concerned with workers’ well-being and more concerned with workers’ mobility. Judge Ferguson’s statement asserting that the labor agency law was mainly used to discourage migrants from leaving the state, and mostly left crew leaders alone as long as they stayed in Texas, supports this view. The labor laws regulating private employment agencies used indirect methods to impede the mobility of ethnic Mexican agricultural laborers, and bore a striking resemblance to emigrant labor agency laws passed by the Texas Legislature in 1929. As historian David Montejano has demonstrated in Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, the Texas agricultural industry and the state legislature implemented a series of informal and formal measures to create a temporarily captive seasonal agricultural labor force in order to keep wages extraordinarily low, a phenomenon he termed the “web of labor controls.”19 In addition to the vagrancy and convict lease laws used early in the 1920s, the emigrant labor agency law was designed 119

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to immobilize workers and discourage migration. It imposed occupation taxes, licenses, and bonds on labor agents seeking to recruit workers to labor outside state lines, especially in midwestern sugar beet fields.20 The 1943 law was structured very similarly to the 1929 emigrant labor agency law. Each required a $5,000 bond. The emigrant agent had to post a bond to guarantee transportation for migrants’ return to Texas. A federal court ruled the assessment of this bond unconstitutional.21 In the private labor agency legislation, a $5,000 bond was required to protect the job seeker from fraudulent or misrepresenting statements, instead of to guarantee the migrants’ transportation back home. This revision between the two laws further suggests that the state of Texas made demands on labor agents for the sake of expediency rather than any moral rationale. The main difference between the two laws centered on their purported intent: emigrant labor agency laws functioned only to immobilize labor, while the private agency legislation was supposed to curb labor contractors’ abuses of workers.22 Structurally, however, they functioned in much the same way. Texas laws regulating labor middlemen resided within two seemingly contradictory labor ideologies at the same time: systems of labor immobility from the US South and concepts of free labor from the US West. During the mid-twentieth century, ten southern states had emigrant agency laws on the books, some dating back to the end of Reconstruction.23 Emigrant agency laws fit within a larger system of labor immobilization that also included contract enforcement laws, vagrancy laws, and the convict-lease system.24 Such laws sought to devalue the labor of black workers, decrease competition, deliver a captive labor force to southern employers, and impede the ability of black workers to migrate to other areas in search of higher wages. Though not able to immobilize black workers from moving north for better employment opportunities in places such as Chicago, these laws did erect barriers to such migration, making workers’ ability to move more difficult, and tried to limit their access to information about out-of-state jobs.25 In Texas, similar laws existed, though some were aimed at African Americans and others at Mexican Americans. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Texas penal system operated a series of prison farms, mostly in the Gulf Coast region. Administrators, expected to operate at a profit, forced mostly black prisoners to work under grueling conditions enforced through corporal punishment.26 State officials also leased black, Mexican, and white prisoners to companies to lay track for railroads and even to quarry the granite to build the state capitol in Austin.27 120

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By the middle of the twentieth century, labor laws such as the emigrant agency laws targeted Mexican American workers. Though the various types of labor immobilization laws had differing impacts—from mild or moderate inconvenience to actual imprisonment—they fit within a scheme of labor control based on the logic of slavery, which is why they were all prevalent in the South. In keeping with Texas’s geographical position in the borderlands between the South and the West, however, certain labor laws reflected an animus against constraining labor, characteristic of ideas of free labor associated with the US West. In targeting labor contractors and imbuing the legislation with moral overtones, state legislators exploited a deep-seated hostility in US society against labor middlemen, exemplified by the immigrant padrone of the nineteenth century. As historian Gunther Peck has shown, during the last decades of the nineteenth century an expanding federal immigration bureaucracy, middle-class reformers, and labor unions joined together in a campaign against padrones, identifying such immigrant labor contractors as being the enemies of free labor.28 Padrones were often stigmatized in the popular press as purveyors of the Old World vices of servility and degradation, thus undermining the values of freedom and independence attributed to the American worker. The confluence of the efforts from government agencies and civil society to undermine the influence of the immigrant padrone helped usher in the passage of the Foran Act in 1885, which prohibited the “importation and migration of foreigners and aliens under contract or agreement to perform labor in the United States.”29 By the middle of the twentieth century, then, the figure of the exploitative and despoiling labor contractor had already been an enduring image in American society for over fifty years. In the late 1930s, the California state government in Sacramento attempted to pass an ambitious plan of legislation to protect agricultural workers’ rights and address the deplorable quality of rural housing for migrants. Liberal governor Culbert Olson supported the legislation, which was modeled after Upton Sinclair’s popular, yet unsuccessful, gubernatorial campaign in 1934. The bills proposed to build state-run labor camps, regulate labor contractors, create a fair-wage-standards board for the agricultural industry, and tighten the regulation of private labor camps.30 Fierce opposition from the agricultural industry and their supporters in the legislature meant that all of the laws were defeated, except for the piece regulating labor contractors.31 It seemed that the regulation of labor middlemen was the one element of worker protection acceptable to all sides. 121

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It represented no big leap for the state of Texas to also pass legislation regulating the operations of agricultural labor agents. Furthermore, in requiring affidavits that testified to the labor agents “good moral character” in the 1943 legislation, state officials were calling into question the agents’ moral integrity, thus playing into existing concerns about labor agents’ typical modes of operation. Texas officials played on long-held fears of labor middlemen as the enemies of free labor in order to pass legislation designed to manipulate and control the free movement of Mexican American migrants. In his lawsuit against labor officials from the state of Texas, Armando Salinas protested against what he called the illegal “trespass” of Thad Hoot onto his private property when Hoot entered Mr. Salinas’s yard to detain Salinas and the rest of the group when they were on the verge of initiating their journey up north.32 The petition suggested that Mr. Hoot had entered the Salinas property on numerous occasions, and was one reason Salinas sought the restraining order against him. In some ways, Salinas’s complaint echoed the complaints of farmers challenging the actions of Border Patrol officers (addressed in chapter 3). In contrast to the ambiguity surrounding the power of the Border Patrol to enter farmers’ property, and the political pressure farmers could bring upon Border Patrol officers from above, no ambiguity existed regarding Hoot’s authority to enter Salinas’s property and conduct interrogations. According to the Texas Employment and Labor Agency Law of 1943, deputies and inspectors from the Bureau of Labor Statistics had the “authority of peace officers in making arrests of any person or persons who violate, in their presence, any of the provisions of this Act.”33 Furthermore, as a deputy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Hoot also had the power to “enter any employment office at any time when such employment office is open for business and inspect the registers and all other records” belonging to that office.34 Though the wording of this section of the law suggested that lawmakers had public, bricks-and-mortar establishments in mind when crafting the employment agency legislation, it nonetheless gave Hoot the power to enter Armando Salinas’s homestead. While there, Hoot allegedly asserted his authority in an aggressive and threatening manner, thus going beyond the letter of the law, to inspect labor agencies, and more closely approaching the spirit or motivation of the law, which was to discourage the movement of workers out of the state of Texas into other labor markets. Hoot sought to accomplish this aim by threatening and intimidating the migrants. Armando Salinas’s account of abusive labor officials provided a stark contrast to the image that state labor agencies projected to the public. In a 122

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special feature insert included in the Sunday, April 20, 1947, edition of the South Texas publication the Valley Morning Star, the Texas A&M College Extension Service promoted its expanding services to traveling farmworkers, all geared toward managing the agricultural labor flow. The story described the Extension Service’s various services, including distributing information at the quarantine stations at Falfurrias and Riviera on highways bound north out of the Rio Grande Valley.35 The Extension Service also employed female agents to visit the homes of migrant farmworkers in order to give the women “an understanding of the program and to obtain their assistance in getting the cooperation of the male workers.”36 In addition, the Extension Service also managed community-funded reception centers “where workers can rest, bathe, and cook a hot meal.”37 The Extension Service used some of the worker-centered language developed a decade earlier by the federal Farm Security Administration (FSA) to describe its own extremely pared down service program. Created as a response to the crisis of the Great Depression, the FSA began building and maintaining migrant labor camps in 1935.38 The FSA promoted labor camps as sanitary living spaces that offered a wide range of medical and social services to migrant farmworkers. Though the FSA tried to sell the camp program to local farming communities by emphasizing its role in providing a stable and predictable workforce, growers remained suspicious of the agency. They considered that the housing and other amenities, such as programs of camp government, would radicalize workers and promote unionization. By the 1940s, under constant attack from the agricultural industry, the FSA shifted from its responsibilities over domestic farmworker welfare to a short-lived stint administering the foreign labor importation plan known as the bracero program. With the bracero program emerging as the federal government’s answer to growers’ labor demands, support for the FSA continued to wane until the agency was terminated, in 1946.39 Though the state’s Extension Service promoted its program as a resource to workers, the service’s primary objective to rationalize labor migration was never far from the conversation. Because of the program, officials asserted, “unlike the hit-or-miss migrations of other days, the laborers this year, as they have for the past three years, will be following an orderly pattern, will know where there is a need for their labor, and will be certain of a welcome on their arrival.”40 Though the government promoted the program as an ideal resource for traveling migrant families, workers’ reluctance to use the services perhaps demonstrated past experiences with state labor officials or 123

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suspicions about the agency’s motives. According to the Valley Morning Star article, “at first workers were suspicious of this newly developed interest in their welfare, but as they tested the word of the fieldmen and the county agents, they learned to trust them and to depend more and more on their advice as to where to go.”41 The article attested to a new feeling of cooperation between growers, workers, and the government, with government officials playing an important role in facilitating this improved relationship. As Armando Salinas’s lawsuit demonstrated, however, the friendly instructions about where migrants could travel for work sometimes turned into threatening and coercive attempts to limit workers’ mobility within the borders of the United States. As Carey McWilliams has described, many migrants believed that state and law enforcement officials sought to prevent their movements. As they left their home regions, migrants tried to avoid the intervention of labor officials and law enforcement officers, traveling at night and skirting the major highways. WcWilliams writes, “They drive by night, hide out during the day, and follow circuitous routes. In their minds, they are fugitives fleeing through the night, attempting to avoid innumerable perils and hazards.”42 What labor officials considered a necessary intervention in order to rationalize the agricultural labor market and for the migrants’ own good, some migrants saw as the state’s attempt to interfere with their rights to travel in search of better wages. In focusing its regulatory might solely on workers on the move rather than on conditions on farms, the state of Texas thus inhibited the free movement of workers within the boundaries of the United States and used its power to respond to the labor needs of the agricultural industry and not the needs of migrants.

Migrant Crews: Exploitation or Self-Organization? Though the state of Texas made no distinction between labor contractors and crew leaders for the purposes of its legislation in the Texas Employment and Labor Agency Law, Carey McWilliams captured the significant differences in Ill Fares the Land. McWilliams’s descriptions echo those of Armando Salinas. According to McWilliams: The Mexican contractor is not a contractor in the strict sense of the term. . . . The contractor is really a capitán or jefe who happens to own a truck.

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In addition to transporting workers, he is hired to weigh the cotton, take charge of the commissary, and oversee the work. . . . He may also be paid for the use of his truck in hauling cotton to the gin.43

McWilliams’s description of the jefe, or crew leader, matched Salinas’s almost exactly, even going as far as noting that many of the crews were made up of family units that, because they often did not speak English, turned to the leadership of the crew leader, who with his knowledge of English mediated between the crew and the English-speaking grower.44 McWilliams deplored this system overall, arguing that such worker groups tended to defer to the crew leader and shunned union organizing, “for it confers upon the contractor a virtual monopoly of employment opportunities. It functions in many areas like a company union.”45 During the mid-1940s most mainstream labor unions paid little attention to agricultural workers, especially in Texas. Thus, the fact remained that workers and family members organized themselves into these groups as a method of finding work and negotiating conditions. According to Carey McWilliams’s estimation, 60 percent of the cotton in Texas was harvested by workers organized and headed by a crew leader.46 Labor crews’ mobility to other regions of the country with better wages and working conditions than those in Texas also represented one of the few viable options for improving their conditions, and for those with no personal form of transportation, becoming part of a work crew was a necessity. The crew leader as described by Carey McWilliams and Armando Salinas differed significantly from the classic labor contractor. That labor contractor tended to receive a fee from the employer per worker. The labor contractor might also charge workers a fee for finding employment and charge them for their transportation and housing.47 Thus, the labor contractor made money several times for the same labor transaction. Furthermore, because he made his money up front, the labor contractor had no incentive to make sure he sent workers to areas where the work was abundant and sustained.48 On the other hand, crew leaders made their money alongside the workers, by weighing the cotton, bookkeeping, hauling water to workers, and hauling cotton to the gin. If the field-workers did not work, neither did the crew leader, and thus neither were paid. In that way, it behooved the crew leaders to find the locations with the most sustained work. And while unscrupulous crew leaders might cheat workers, by overcharging them for groceries or

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skimming off the top of their wages, the crew leader system was not inherently more exploitative than any other agricultural labor system, and it had the possibility for being a good deal less. For many Mexican male agricultural workers, accumulating enough capital to purchase a truck and become a crew leader represented one of the few avenues for economic stability for themselves and their families. Growing up in Granjeno, Texas, a small town located on the north bank of the Rio Grande in Hidalgo County, Alberto Magallan began to work in the field as a young schoolboy during the 1940s and 1950s, working weekends, Christmas vacations, and during the summer.49 He and his siblings worked for a crew leader, Carlos Garza, who also lived in the same small town. While Alberto Magallan’s father worked in nearby construction jobs, he entrusted his children to Carlos Garza’s crew. During the summer, Alberto and his siblings traveled with Garza up from the border to the coastal cotton region near Corpus Christi. After that, the younger siblings traveled back to the Rio Grande Valley to begin the school year, while the older Magallans continued with Carlos Garza’s crew into the cotton region near the Texas Panhandle. Carlos Garza’s crew was made up of his relatives and other members of his small community in Granjeno. Alberto Magallan’s father purchased his own truck to transport workers and also became a crew leader, after a number of years of working in manual labor in South Texas. His labor, in addition to his children’s agricultural labor with Carlos Garza’s crew, and his wife’s unpaid labor in their home, allowed him to accumulate enough money to purchase a bobtail truck. “At a later date my dad bought a truck and he would haul people. . . . We became a crew, ’cause there was a bunch of us and he said, might as well buy my own truck. I could use my whole family. But we took other people with us, related to us, cousins, uncles,” Alberto Magallan recalled.50 In buying a truck and forming a labor crew from amongst his own children and other relatives, Alberto Magallan’s father followed the path of many other residents of Mexican communities in South Texas. In doing so, he built on his own experience, the knowledge and experience of people like Carlos Garza, and the experience of his children who worked in Carlos Garza’s crews. Though often depicted as chaotic wanderers crowded into rickety trucks traveling the highways, Mexican farmworkers established their migratory circuits according to many years of experience. Even as they consistently remarked upon the “aimless wandering” of migrant workers, labor officials from the Texas State Employment Service and other state labor institutions 126

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carefully studied workers’ migratory patterns as they constructed their plans for the rationalization of the agricultural labor system in Texas.51 Mexican migrant workers began picking cotton in the Rio Grande Valley from midJune through the end of July. Workers then headed to the Coastal Bend region of Texas around Nueces County once the cotton season got under way there. As autumn approached, the Central Texas region’s cotton season kicked into high gear, its season overlapping somewhat with that in the Coastal Bend and perhaps creating some competition for labor. Many workers then moved on farther north after that, picking cotton in the region near the Texas Panhandle, around Lamesa and Lubbock. Migrant workers then returned to South Texas in time for the winter fruit and vegetable crops, thus completing their migratory circuit.52 Using the established migrant circuit as a model, labor officials from the Texas State Employment Service fashioned a systematic state intervention into agriculture, attempting to regulate the state’s agricultural migration flow. Soon after it had been established, in 1935, the Texas State Employment Service (TSES) undertook a comprehensive survey of worker migrations, agricultural regions, and growers’ labor needs in order to design “employment techniques” for future agricultural seasons. According to the TSES, its goal was to “furnish a working knowledge of the available labor supply at any given time and of farmer-employer needs in the successive seasons.”53 Describing the Texas labor market as being completely disorganized before the existence of the TSES, the report’s authors commented that “there was no disinterested agency in those years to organize a labor market that would provide labor supply when and where needed within the State and to set up an economy of employment that would abolish wasted movement and loss to both employer and worker.”54 With its aim in creating an organized and efficient agricultural labor market, the TSES focused on undirected movement as being the primary factor for the market’s dysfunction. Wanting to facilitate the distribution of agricultural labor around the state of Texas, TSES labor officials identified “unscrupulous” labor contractors as both their main source of competition and the major perpetrators of migrant workers’ miserable conditions. The report detailed the state’s long-standing efforts to discourage the operation of labor agencies through the passage of various pieces of regulatory legislation. In order to emphasize the need for their agency, officials detailed many examples of workers stranded in desperate destitution, far away from their homes, with no work. The report attributed these heartbreaking scenes to either workers’ naïveté, 127

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labor contractors’ greed, or both, downplaying the role growers played in creating labor oversupply as they overexaggerated their labor needs: It was a crazy pattern in which worried farmers wanted an ample supply of labor on hand at peak seasons in any way available, credulous migrants dreamed of better picking a little farther on, and opportunist labor agents wanted as much money as they could fleece from uneasy farmers and hopeful migrants—white, brown, and black.55

Through their efforts scouring the agricultural regions of Texas, talking to growers, labor contractors, and workers, the TSES reported a growing role in placing agricultural workers where they were needed without disrupting the domestic labor market. According to the 1940 report, officials were pleased they had obtained the confidence of workers and labor contractors in a short period of time, commending themselves for having done away with the “labor racketeer.” Making a distinction between labor agents and crew leaders that would be lost a few years later, labor officials reported dealing mostly with a type of contractor that was “usually a truck owner acting as ‘capitán’ or ‘jefe’ in handling contracts for a group which he represented.” “For the most part,” the report stated, “these truckmen-contractors were found to be reliable and fair in their transactions.”56 It seemed that once crew leader–contractors established contact with officials from the TSES, and were willing to be directed by them to agricultural fields, then the labor contractors were considered acceptable and trustworthy and not greedy and opportunistic. Wanting to rationalize the Texas agricultural labor market, and having studied migratory workers’ seasonal migratory circuits, the TSES felt confident by its 1940 report that it could fill growers’ needs and create a sense of order and predictability in a highly unpredictable industry. The migration of Texas-based workers out of the state in search of higher wages represented the only visible threat to the agency’s plans for the efficient administration of the agricultural labor market. The TSES concluded its report with the following observation: The interstate problems centering upon migratory labor are so serious as to demand either new legislation or strict enforcement of the legislation already on the statute books. The disrupting of the labor market in Texas at peak seasons reveals itself with special force in 1940 as a very real peril to workers, farmers, and State prosperity.57 128

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Perhaps it was this attitude that led to the labor officials’ aggressive pursuit of Armando Salinas, because he had refused to accede to labor officials’ plans and expectations in staying within the bounds of the state of Texas. Thus, officials ceased to view Salinas as an honest and reliable type of truckman-contractor who cooperated with state officials, and began to see him instead as an unsavory labor agent who needed to be regulated. In trying to control and inhibit migrants’ movements in the name of efficiency and rationalization, the TSES failed to make a few key calculations, however. First, in designing their farm placement techniques in the middle of the Great Depression, when immigration was down—there was, in fact, a great deal more emigration to Mexico during this decade through voluntary and coercive means—they failed to account for a time when immigration might pick up again, therefore creating the same labor surpluses they were trying to avoid. Second, the TSES did not seem to account for the possibility that growers might not prefer the orderly scenario the employment service proffered. The TSES publicized the work of the Farm Security Administration’s construction of migrant labor camps as a stabilizing factor for migrant farmworkers. Perhaps such stability might have sent troubling signals to Texas growers.58 As long as growers could be sure to get their crops harvested when they wanted, they preferred a superabundance of workers living in inadequate housing because unstable conditions allowed them to pay workers lower wages.

South Texas Interaction with the Bracero Program Even as the various labor bureaus in Texas sought ways to direct a domestic agricultural migration flow, other states, mainly in the US Southwest, had been participating in an international labor importation program since 1942, bringing in workers from Mexico on a temporary, seasonal basis to labor in the agricultural and railroad industries. The labor importation program, commonly known as the bracero program, began as a temporary wartime measure as a response to farmers clamoring for the protection of their labor force in the face of losses due to the draft and surging defense industries.59 The bracero program assured growers a guaranteed workforce at wages determined by industry-friendly US government agents. The Mexican government viewed the program as a way to institute a modicum of protection for its citizen-workers who crossed the international border, often illegally, to labor in US agriculture. According to the dictates of the bracero agreement, 129

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the employer had to pay for braceros’ transportation to and from recruitment centers in Mexico and their place of employment.60 Workers were guaranteed minimum wages as high as the prevailing wages in a given area. In addition, growers had to provide adequate housing, board, and medical services at no extra charge to workers. Lastly, the Mexican government reserved the right to unilaterally terminate the program by region if US growers or government officials failed to satisfy the program’s requirements. After five years of shutting the state of Texas out of the bracero program, Mexican government officials decided to allow Texas growers to obtain legally contracted Mexican agricultural laborers during the spring of 1947. The Mexican government had officially barred Texas from participation because of the state’s long history of violence and discrimination against Mexicans, discrimination that continued during the mid-twentieth century. Trying to appease the Mexican government and to make it appear that his administration was tackling the problem of racism in the state, Texas governor Coke Stevenson established the Good Neighbor Commission in 1943 to investigate issues of discrimination in the state and promote good relations through special programs and cultural exchanges between Texas and Mexico.61 Another feature of Governor Stevenson’s efforts to “deal” with racism against Mexicans was the passage of the Caucasian Race Resolution, condemning any act of discrimination against anyone belonging to the Caucasian race, which included Mexicans. This resolution was designed to keep Jim Crow policies directed at African Americans undisturbed. From the outset, Mexican officials had reservations about the efficacy of the Good Neighbor Commission, realizing that while the committee was charged with investigating instances of discrimination, it had no enforcement capacity to address any reported abuses. After five years of denying Texas growers access to braceros, Mexican officials reluctantly realized that their strategy had not appreciably transformed the racial climate in Texas; their efforts to leverage Mexican agricultural labor during a time of relative scarcity due to World War II had been unsuccessful. Ever-rising rates of illegal migration from Mexico meant that Texas growers had abundant access to Mexican workers in positions of legal and social vulnerability, which worsened their overall conditions. The Mexican government recognized a need to intervene in Texas agriculture, however, and thus grabbed at the token gesture of the Good Neighbor Commission in order to bring the thousands of Mexican agricultural laborers now working illegally in Texas under the protective confines of the bracero program. Because Mexican officials wanted to 130

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preserve some negotiating space and also did not want to be perceived by the Mexican public as having backed down on the question of racial discrimination in Texas, they insisted that Texas’s entrance into the bracero program was temporary and experimental and should not be considered permanent.62 Though the Mexican government had encountered difficulties in administering the bracero program throughout the Southwest and the Pacific Northwest, with many growers violating the wage rates and housing provisions of the bracero contract, Mexican officials soon found Texas to be an even more hardened case than the rest. Even after the Mexican government offered to legalize undocumented workers already in the United States, thereby guaranteeing growers the right to keep the workers they already had, Texas growers protested many of the features of the bracero contract, from the housing stipulations to the bonds required to ensure braceros’ return transportation back to Mexico.63 Most important, the wages in Texas for agricultural labor were far below the wage rates in other states, creating another obstacle for the Mexican government. Mexican officials were bound by the prevailing wages determined by Texas State Employment Service agents, but the Mexican government was reluctant to approve bracero contracts with wages under thirty-seven cents an hour.64 Soon after they extended legalization to South Texas, Mexican government officials faced serious problems in South Texas, the result of years of collusion between growers and Immigration and Naturalization Service officials. As the day approached to begin the process of legalizing Mexican agricultural workers in the Rio Grande Valley, news stories abounded with details and clarifications about the new program, with observers and officials alike speculating about the prospective changes the program would bring to the Rio Grande Valley. José Reyes Nava, the official in charge of processing workers in the Reynosa office, was cited in the Valley Morning Star, one of the Rio Grande Valley’s two prominent newspapers, proclaiming his satisfaction that the legalization program would “crack down on labor ‘contractors’ who have grown wealthy through the exploitation” of undocumented workers.65 According to the story, Reyes Nava was aware of several cases of “labor contractors taking advantage of Mexican workers, and he intended to see the practice stopped immediately,” judging that labor contractors deserved to be in jail. Reyes Nava placed much of the blame for workers’ exploitation on the heads of labor contractors, and none, at least publicly, on the farmers. One advantage to that approach was that the Mexican official established cordial relations with prospective grower-clients. 131

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The local Valley news media reacted similarly about the possible benefits of replacing the system of undocumented labor with braceros. Heralding the end of the era of “fugitive wetbacks,” the Valley Evening Monitor declared the new agreement “one of the most far-reaching humanitarian moves in the area for years.”66 The article touched very briefly on the prospective benefits workers could experience being free from the fear of deportation, which hindered their movement and left them vulnerable to cheats and hucksters. According to the article, the most egregious exploiters were labor contractors, crew leaders, and coyotes. Migrants “were sometimes defrauded of their wages, particularly by crew leaders, who will be ineligible to contract for alien workers under the new program.” The article also looked forward to the eradication of the “profitable boat transportation business.” Farmers, on the other hand, were portrayed as fair and just, often providing workers with the necessities of life, such as blankets, clothing, and food. “In many cases,” the “alien workers have been employed by the same farmer for several years, with mutual respect and fair dealing.” Although the author of the piece did admit the possibility that the wages could be considered too low, he quickly resolved the question and surmised that the wages must be acceptable to workers, “otherwise they wouldn’t have come 500 miles or more and undertaken risks and hardships to work here.”67 Again, labor middlemen shouldered most of the blame for the exploitation of Mexican agricultural workers. Monday, April 21, 1947, dawned with great fanfare. It was the first day of contracting, the process by which undocumented workers presently living and working in the Rio Grande Valley would be transformed into legal braceros. Administrators of the program chose A. L. Cramer to be the first grower to bring one hundred of his employees to the labor office for certification.68 It was deemed appropriate that he, as the manager of Engelman Gardens, a large citrus- and cotton-growing operation in Hidalgo County, and the chairman of a growers’ committee to study the labor issue in South Texas, be the first to model the new program to other Valley growers. The certification process necessitated visits to several offices on both sides of the border, where workers had to submit to interviews and examinations. Cramer accompanied the workers to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) office at the north end of the international bridge in Hidalgo, Texas. After INS officials interviewed the workers, the workers walked across the international bridge to the offices of the Mexican Intersecretarial Commission, located on the second floor of the Mexican immigration 132

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building, situated near the southern end of the international bridge.69 At that office, workers received a copy of their contract and identification cards. Newspaper reporters and photographers were on hand on both sides of the bridge to record every step of the process. Workers received their documents and walked back across the river to the United States. At the offices of the US Public Health Service, physicians administered physical examinations to workers. If they passed the exam, they returned to the INS offices, where they had first begun earlier that morning, to receive permission to enter the United States.70 After that series of trips back and forth across the international border, being questioned, processed, and prodded, workers were granted permission to enter the United States, transformed from “wetbacks” to braceros. Such a spectacle of state approval (through questions and physical examinations) was meant to suggest a transformation of the individual workers from illegal to legal. The workers, however, were exactly the same; it was the state’s treatment of the workers that was now supposed to be transformed. The good feelings over such demonstrated international cooperation between Mexican and US officials and US growers proved to be short-lived. Growers objected to Reyes Nava’s insistence that they provide a ten-dollar deposit per worker up front, to be placed in the Bank of Mexico in Reynosa and to be deducted at a rate of 5 percent per week from workers’ paychecks.71 The Mexican government designed the measure as an involuntary savings plan, meant to ensure that workers would have enough money at the end of the season to return to their homes in Mexico.72 Growers thought that a statement from their financial institutions testifying to their financial solvency would obviate the need for a deposit. A second problem arose over questions regarding the prevailing wages. Though the Rio Grande Valley border counties all belonged to one zone, according to the Mexican Intersecretarial Commission office, different county farm advisory councils in the Valley had placed the prevailing wages at different rates, ranging from twenty to thirty-five cents per hour.73 Reyes Nava naturally wanted to certify contracts for the higher wage, but disagreements arose about which wage would prevail for the entire region. Soon after these difficulties slowed the worker legalization process, Mexican officials and Valley growers agreed to hold a labor conference to provide further information, clarify details, and possibly hash out the points of divergence between the two parties. A. L. Cramer presided over the meeting, held on April 29–30, 1947, and acted as a representative for the growers. 133

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Gustavo Ortiz Hernan, consul general in San Antonio, headed the Mexican delegation. José Reyes Nava, head of the Intersecretarial Commission office in Reynosa, and Lauro Yzaguirre, Mexican consul in McAllen, also formed the Mexican delegation. The US officials present were William A. Whalen, district director of the INS in San Antonio, and Allan Skinner, officer in charge of the INS office in Hidalgo, Texas. The rest of the attendees included growers and representatives from packing and shipping cooperatives and other industry organizations.74 Cramer began the meeting by summarizing the growers’ complaints, which centered on the required deposits and the differences over the prevailing wages. Mexican officials quickly conceded on the question of the deposits once it became known that the Mexican minister of labor had agreed at a previous meeting with Valley growers that a receipt from a grower’s financial institution was an acceptable substitute.75 The prevailing wage, however, was a more difficult matter. Growers pointed out that the minister of labor had agreed to follow the prevailing wages in the area, as was customary in the bracero program. Though Mexican officials agreed that they had promised to abide by the prevailing wages determined by US county agents, Consul Ortiz Hernan explained that those drawing up the plan in Mexico City had no idea that the prevailing wages in the Rio Grande Valley would be so low.76 The prevailing wages in the Rio Grande Valley were far below the Mexican government’s long-established rule, written into previous iterations of the bracero agreement, of requiring a minimum wage of at least thirty-seven cents per hour. Consul Ortiz Hernan pointed out South Texas’s unique position regarding wages. He noted that the program was proceeding smoothly in the El Paso area because Mexican officials were certifying contracts there for forty cents an hour, not to mention the fifty and sixty cents workers garnered in New Mexico and California.77 According to Consul Ortiz Hernan, “when [Minister of Labor] Mr. Castorena publicly stated that county agents’ certifications would be satisfactory, he never once thought it would be any lower than 37 cents.”78 In response, Cramer assured the Mexican delegation that the twenty-fivecent wage rate was not really as bad as it seemed. In a revealing statement that probably did not inspire much confidence on the part of the Mexican officials, Cramer asserted, “If you will investigate this twenty-five cents prevailing wage, you will probably find that this is actually at least [a] 25% increase over what workers were getting before.”79 According to Cramer, the 134

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majority of the workers made twenty cents an hour or less. Thus, a twentyfive-cent-per-hour wage rate represented a significant increase. Cramer attempted to further deflect attention from the low wage rates by placing blame on Mexican American crew leaders. The crew leaders were the real problem, Cramer argued, which the new agreement would address. “If you leave out the sub-contractor, who has been exploiting the worker, these men could continue to make this [increased] amount of money even though the minimum prevailing wage written into the contract showed only 25 cents. The crew leader is the fellow who has been making the money, and he is the fellow they want to eliminate.”80 William Whalen, the INS district director in San Antonio, added his support for Cramer’s point by assuring Mexican officials that his service would aggressively police crew leaders, and not allow them to continue operating. “Our Service will check the crews of sub-contractors and take the ‘wets’ away from them.”81 Consul Ortiz Hernan admitted to feeling pressure from all sides. The Mexican government wanted to institute a program of legalized labor in South Texas, but was reluctant to project to the Mexican public that the government had caved in so drastically on the minimum wage rate. The fact that this problem was occurring in Texas made it much worse. “The Mexican government cannot grant special privileges to any one section of the country,” the consul declared, “particularly to a section in Texas because of Mexico’s attitude toward Texas due to discrimination and racial prejudice against the Mexican people.”82 Because Mexican officials felt they had to be realistic about workers’ conditions in South Texas, however, they accepted the small improvements that growers and the INS promised. In addition to the housing and board, and medical services now provided by growers, the major “improvement” seems to have been the projected demise of the crew leader. In the end, Consul Ortiz Hernan agreed to the twenty-five-cent prevailing wage, though he maintained the government’s view that wages should be higher. He authorized Reyes Nava to sign contracts for twenty-five cents an hour, but not “in the name of the Government of Mexico but for immigration purposes only.”83 According to Allan Skinner’s report on the proceedings, Consul Ortiz Hernan explained: They are going to sign the contracts in this manner in order to save face. In other words this will be a little trick they will be pulling on their own people, but they do not want their Mexican nationals to know about it. He 135

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agrees to fix a certified rate of wages on all kinds of work and in this way try to make the program operate.

In response to this statement from the consul, “all present clapped heartily.”84

Conclusion From the nineteenth century onward, labor middlemen have been crucial yet reviled components of the development of US capitalism. Often connecting immigrant, low-waged, manual laborers to labor-hungry industries throughout the country, these labor middlemen formed a key piece of the immigration story in US history. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, immigration agents, middle-class reformers, and labor union activists waged a successful public relations battle against such agents, branding them the enemies of American free labor. These forces succeeded in passing legislation prohibiting the contracting of foreign labor, but ultimately did not succeed in stopping the practice. Employers relied on labor contractors and kept the practice alive and well, especially in the railroad and agricultural industries. These types of anti-labor-contractor campaigns created a broad, undifferentiated category, labeling all manner of labor middlemen as exploitative, fraudulent predators. During the mid-twentieth century, the system of agricultural labor was structured in a way that required workers to band together in crews in search of work. For Mexican male agricultural workers, becoming a crew leader represented one of the very few options they had to attain economic stability for their families, as well as social prestige for themselves. Growers and their representatives in state and federal legislatures successfully shielded the agricultural industry from regulations and minimum wage laws, and also shifted the moral costs of a brutal agricultural labor system onto labor brokers and workers and away from themselves. Devoid of any other meaningful legislation targeting the problems surrounding the agricultural industry, even well-intended laws rooting out abuse and corruption by labor contractors did not appreciably reform the agricultural labor system. They only served to further delegitimize the movement of Mexican workers as they sought to move about the country to secure higher wages. An emphasis on the dangers of Mexican migrants in transit, due to the machinations of labor middlemen and unsafe transportation, cast a spotlight on that aspect of the labor terrain while shrouding the rest in 136

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shadow. The harsh working and living conditions that Mexican agricultural workers endured once they reached their destinations remained unregulated and unaddressed. But it is not clear that these laws were well intended. Texas laws taxing and regulating labor contractors and emigrant labor agents fit into a larger history of deliberate attempts by state governments to immobilize agricultural workers, especially in the US South, and thus restrict their employment options and keep agricultural wages low. In these ways, such regulatory apparatuses, while seeming to protect workers, managed their movements both literally and figuratively. Labor middlemen also featured in the compromise reached by Mexican officials and South Texas growers as they struggled to bring the South Texas agricultural industry into the bracero program. Very soon after South Texas growers began bringing their undocumented workforce to the border town of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, to be certified, Mexican officials and South Texas growers became tangled in disagreement over the very low prevailing wage rates in the Rio Grande Valley. The seeming impasse between Mexican officials, who wanted a minimum wage of at least thirty-seven cents per hour, and Valley growers, who would never agree to such a rate hike, broke when the Mexican government relented on the wage issue. Though the wage of twenty-five cents an hour was the lowest wage rate for agricultural work in the country, and far below the Mexican government’s stated minimum wage stipulations, both sides were able to come to an agreement forged upon the figure of the hated labor contractor. Agreeing that eradicating the labor contractor from South Texas agriculture was an acceptable level of improvement for workers, growers and Mexican officials shook hands over their new understanding at the close of the two-day meeting. Once again, a focus upon the border-crossing labor middleman screened the more fundamental problems in the Texas agricultural labor system.

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chapter 5 •

El Paso/The Passage The 1948 El Paso Incident and the Politics of Mobility

W

aiting for the sun to fall on Saturday, October 16, 1948, a group of over a thousand men massed at the river’s edge in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Mexican troops from the First Battalion, lately dispatched to the river to guard the areas around the two international railroad bridges in response to reports that Mexicans were crossing the border illegally, watched the crowds intently. According to newspaper reports, the scene of thousands crowding at the river at dusk had been repeated every evening since Wednesday, October 13.1 Directly on the other side of the river, in El Paso, another massing was taking place. Large trucks pulled in and parked in the area directly across from where the men were gathered. American growers, or growers’ employees, climbed out of the trucks and also waited.2 As dusk fell, Mexican men by the hundreds, responding to an apparent signal given by the growers, began to wade across the shallow river. Mexican troops shouted at the men to stop, to stay on the Mexican side of the border, but they were met only with jokes and jeering insults from the men as they crossed. A few overzealous soldiers also crossed the river in pursuit 138

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of the men but were quickly called back to Mexico by their commanders, who were aware that any such action by armed soldiers might be viewed by American authorities as a violation of the sovereignty of the United States.3 What followed next must have been a chaotic scene, as growers rapidly conferred with workers and counted out the number that they wanted before loading them onto the trucks that were normally used to transport cattle. Once growers had their desired numbers, they trudged over to the immigration offices to report the number of men they were taking, and promised to send along a list of their names at a later date. Some growers found upon returning to their trucks that the workers had moved to the trucks of other growers who had promised them higher wages. Arguments soon broke out amongst the growers, greatly adding to the noise and confusion. In an official report to officials at the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores in Mexico City, Consul Raul Michel referred derisively to this scene as an auction. Some cattle trucks loaded with workers rumbled away to their destinations in the cotton fields in and around West Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, while other trucks headed to the train station to send their human cargo on to more remote locations in the Colorado sugar beet fields.4 Consul Michel dispatched other officials from his El Paso office to the scene to witness the events. Deputy Consul Urrea approached one truck full of workers in order to question them. The workers verified that they had indeed crossed the border illegally by wading across the river, and the driver of the vehicle confirmed that the workers were being taken to work in agricultural fields, in this case to Roswell, New Mexico. At Urrea’s request, Vice Consul Chavez brought two American immigration inspectors back to the truck so they too could be present to hear the statements, which to the Mexican officials’ minds clearly showed that US immigration laws had been violated. After listening to the statements repeated at the consul’s request, one of the inspectors headed back to the office to phone his superior and soon returned with the information that his boss, M. R. Toole, had given instructions that they not intervene in these matters. Urrea thanked him politely, having secured formal confirmation of what must have been evident to anyone observing the scene: that the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) had foreknowledge of the event and had given their approval to the transactions now taking place.5 Mexican officials had to consider a response to what looked like the US government’s deliberate undermining of a binational labor importation program that both countries had agreed to and tortuously negotiated just eight months prior. 139

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The El Paso Incident, as it become known in the press, represented a rupture in the administration of the bracero program. Over a period of four days in mid-October 1948, between four and six thousand Mexican workers illegally crossed the Rio Grande in full view of assembled Mexican government officials, Mexican military troops, and American immigration authorities. Workers had been gathering in the border city of Ciudad Juárez for a number of days awaiting bracero processing and then transport to agricultural fields in the United States. Tensions mounted in the city as disagreement over wage rates for workers caused delays in processing. Mexican officials had been resisting locating processing centers right on the border, fearing possible chaos, and their fears were realized during the El Paso Incident. Frustrated Mexican officials bitterly accused the INS officers of abandoning their duty to uphold US immigration laws and of deliberately undermining the bracero agreement by their calculated inaction in allowing the workers to cross uncontested. For their part, officials from the US Employment Service, a division of the Department of Labor, accused the Mexican government of instigating the chaos by attempting to usurp the service’s role in determining the prevailing wages of prospective braceros and thus mucking up the process. INS officials pointed to the inadequacy of their numbers for stopping the assault of thousands of Mexicans determined to cross the border at any cost. The incident became a public relations embarrassment, and the United States was forced to offer an official apology to the Mexican government for the poor judgment demonstrated by INS officials in El Paso. The Mexican government, furthermore, dissolved the binational agreement in response to the events in the El Paso–Ciudad Juárez border region, and the two countries would not begin negotiations for a new agreement until early the next year, with ratification coming only at midsummer 1949. The El Paso Incident resulted from both countries’ struggles to manage Mexican migration and through it maintain their power over the bracero program on the ground. The bracero program was fundamentally a contestation between two sovereign nations to exert control over a highly mobile labor force. The El Paso Incident represented much more than just a dramatic, yet brief, interruption in what would become a twenty-two-year program of labor importation. It revealed just how both governments scrambled to respond to a large-scale migration that posed various challenges to each nation. The Mexican government sought to manage the emigration of its citizens, sometimes in the face of resistance from the workers themselves. The US government’s response reflected the profound ambivalence with 140

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which US officials viewed the flow of undocumented labor across the border, as local and national interests became hopelessly tangled and often worked in contradiction to each other. Finally, the El Paso Incident is important to consider because it exemplified the ways in which the policies and actions of both the Mexican and the US governments concentrated the unequal politics of Mexican migration at the physical location of the border. Most immigration scholars agree that the advent of the bracero program also spurred a parallel illegal migration of workers to the United States. Few have considered the interconnections between the two beyond noting the negative effects of illegal migration on the Mexican government’s position regarding the bracero program. A close examination of the El Paso Incident opens up a space to consider how both governments responded to, and tried to manage, the intertwined strands of these migrations, legal and illegal. An important aspect of understanding the politics of workers’ mobility is understanding how the migrants themselves effected this migration, their movements converging and diverging from the interests of both governments at different times. Mexican migration has often been described in terms pointing to its mass and the seemingly inexorable quality of its movement. Racializing discourses often emphasized the mass of Mexican migration, employing animal imagery, specifically large groups of like animals, such as swarms of bees, locusts, and the like. These discourses de-emphasized workers’ agency, rendering workers’ migrations as instinctive rather than arising from decision making. At times, however, workers themselves used their numbers to challenge the Mexican government’s attempts to regulate their mobility. Despite the strategies and maneuvers of both governments, workers’ mobility could never be wholly contained within each country’s authority.

Workers’ Migrations and the State For the Mexican government, it was crucial that Mexican workers entered the United States as legally contracted braceros rather than undocumented migrants. The Mexican government was fighting to preserve the legal social status of its citizens, which illegal migration certainly nullified. In supporting the bracero program, the Mexican government claimed that it pursued this issue so persistently in order to improve migrants’ well-being once they entered the United States. This was a motivating factor, but did not account for all of the government’s investment in the matter. It was also a matter of sovereignty, the realization that once the individual Mexican 141

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became a documentless illegal migrant in the United States, his or her legal status was effectively compromised. If that process happened on a large scale, many thousands of Mexican citizens would fall outside of the state’s official purview. As John Torpey has discussed, one of the prime functions of the modern nation-state has been to “monopolize the legitimate means of movement” of its people through identity-producing documents such as passports and other identification cards, thus marking who belonged and who did not belong to the nation-state.6 The illegal migration of large numbers of Mexican citizens into the United States was a movement that, in a practical sense, threatened the Mexican state’s ability to monopolize the legitimate means of movement of its citizens. As soon as workers crossed the border from Mexico without the imprimatur of either state through the mechanism of the bracero program, they lost access to the formal advocacy channels built into the architecture of the bracero labor contract. Mexicans’ illegal status in the United States demonstrated the limits of the Mexican nation-state, and a large migration of undocumented Mexicans made those limits readily apparent to both the Mexican public and the United States. Scholars have considered the Mexican government’s participation in the bracero program as a departure from its policy of discouraging Mexican emigration in the first half of the twentieth century.7 In addition to periodic attempts to stop the emigration of Mexicans by refusing to issue passports to migrants from some central states and even trying to stop some migrants from boarding trains bound for the border, the Mexican government initially supported the US government’s repatriation campaigns during the Great Depression.8 Postrevolutionary nationalism in Mexico viewed the permanent emigration of Mexican citizens to the United States as a failure of the promises of the revolution, or, more optimistically, viewed the eventual return of Mexican migrants as the potential building blocks of a modern Mexico.9 Mexican consulates in US Southwest cities actively engaged in local Mexican communities, sometimes providing support for labor union activity and Mexican American civil rights agendas, straying far into the territory of Mexicans’ permanent, daily lives in the United States.10 This history demonstrates the Mexican government’s reluctance to let Mexicans venture outside of its state “embrace.”11 Rather than view the Mexican government’s participation in the bracero program as a radical departure from its previous stance, when seen in conjunction with the simultaneous illegal migration of Mexican migrants, the Mexican government’s active support of the bracero program can be 142

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seen as a way to keep Mexican migrants within the scope of the country’s authority. That is, when faced with the difficulty of stopping the emigration of its citizens to the United States during a time of increased labor demand, the Mexican government viewed the bracero program as a way to secure workers’ legitimacy, but also their return to Mexico. For the United States, the issue regarding Mexican migration was more ambiguous. Historically speaking, the country was as invested as Mexico, if not more so, in monopolizing the legitimate means of movement of its citizens, and as a nation that regularly received immigrants, the United States was intensely interested in identifying and managing the process by which immigrants were accepted or denied entry into its territory.12 The onset of the Cold War only intensified concerns about the integrity of national borders, anxieties about the authenticity of national identities, and fears of infiltration from afar and from within the national body politic. The US government actively moved to closely track immigrants through legislation such as the Alien Registration Act in 1940, which stipulated that people seeking admittance into the United States register and submit to fingerprinting within thirty days of arrival. The Internal Security Act of 1950 required American citizens and residents affiliated with Communist and other “subversive” organizations to register and submit to controls over their international travel.13 Despite the increased interest in monitoring migrants’ entrances into the United States and the travel of political migrants outside the country, a large illegal migration clearly benefited the interests of the very powerful agricultural industry, which was a major consideration. Furthermore, the creation of a large class of illegal subjects allowed the United States, in the short term, to avoid the problem of integrating an undesired, nonwhite population into its body of citizens, yet still allowed the powerful agricultural industry to avail itself of the labor of the same illegal aliens. However, as Mae Ngai has shown, to create a permanent underclass of this nature posed a conundrum to a (theoretically) open society based on civil/citizenship rights. Though Mexicans were deemed a social problem, the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed any US-born children of undocumented migrants legal citizenship in the United States. Thus, during the summer of 1948, the US Southwest was a complex landscape for agricultural labor. States such as California, Arizona, and Colorado that used legally contracted braceros were situated near a large state like Texas that relied significantly on undocumented Mexican workers to harvest crops. With their movements, workers practiced their own politics of mobility 143

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that was interconnected with, yet not totally defined by, the Mexican state. As this chapter will show, the group of workers that gathered at the grounds of the prospective bracero recruitment office were willing to participate in a state-run program and avail themselves of its benefits. Over the course of subsequent days, however, workers collectively made demands upon the Mexican state, asserting their identities as citizens, and openly challenged, and even sometimes disdained, Mexican authority. Although the Mexican government and the Mexican press accused rebellious workers of placing themselves in positions of almost certain exploitation, in the highly public and collective manner in which they discarded the protection of the state, workers played up the politics of border crossing. They politicized and made public an act usually hidden and undertaken individually, and in the process highlighted the weaknesses of the bracero program.14

Struggling to Place Recruitment Centers: Labor and the Border One main point of contention that consistently surfaced between the Mexican and US governments in the bracero agreement negotiations centered on where in Mexico to establish recruitment facilities to process and provide workers for American agricultural industries. Mexico preferred to keep recruitment centers as far away from the northern border as possible, while the United States constantly pushed the Mexican government to open centers in border states, and even in border towns. Allowing bracero contracting centers to be located in the border region brought together in the same geographical space the two strands of migration that the Mexican government wished to keep separate and distinct: the legitimate migration protected by bracero contracts and the unauthorized migration that became illegal at the border once the migrant crossed into the United States without proper documentation. Mexico wished to preserve a buffer zone of sorts between the legal and illegal transactions of capital and labor. US pressure to move recruitment centers closer to the border intensified once the new bracero agreement was signed between the two nations on February 21, 1948. In a shift from earlier policy, the new agreement stipulated that employers pay for workers’ transportation costs from the point of recruitment to their final destination, and for their return upon the completion of their contracts.15 During the administration of the program through World War II and into the immediate postwar period, the US government 144

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had covered the costs of transporting workers to American farms from recruitment centers in Mexico. That program had expired in 1947, however.16 Now that the transportation of workers was not subsidized by the US government, and growers had to cover the costs, growers became very aware of the additional costs of a train ride from the Mexican interior to various points in the United States. Not surprisingly, employers resented having to pay these transportation costs at all, and wished to pay as little as possible for their workers’ round-trip travel. Locating recruitment centers closer to the border would cut down substantially on those costs, and thus growers placed pressure on the US government to have them moved farther north. The gradual movement of the centers to areas closer to the border reflected the power of growers to influence the daily administration of the bracero program, both through direct lobbying, and more important, indirectly through their power as consumers of labor. After a few months of operation in Tampico and Aguascalientes, the Mexican government decided to close the centers during the middle of the summer of 1948 due to lack of activity, which the US embassy in Mexico attributed in part to the “high cost of transportation over the long distances involved.”17 The two processing centers had received between them only ten thousand orders for braceros, certainly many fewer than expected. In an attempt to pique the interest of recalcitrant growers, the Mexican Intersecretarial Commission in charge of emigrant workers’ affairs proposed opening bracero recruitment centers in Culiacán, Sinaloa; Torreón, Coahuila; and Monterrey, Nuevo León, all located in Mexican states bordering the United States, but not in border cities.18 The US Employment Service (USES) in turn proposed sites in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas; Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua; and Mexicali, Baja California, all towns located directly along the US-Mexico border. Mexico turned down this proposal, expressing the desire to avoid the “accumulation of masses of Mexican workers at the international line.”19 A series of conferences followed, in Mexico City in August 1948, to deal with this impasse. Both governments finally agreed to open recruitment centers at Monterrey, Nuevo León; Chihuahua, Chihuahua; Culiacán, Sinaloa; and Mexicali, Baja California, all but Mexicali being relatively close to, but not actually on, the border (see figure 5.1).20 Despite strong reservations, the Mexican government had to move the centers closer to the border in response to growers’ economic pressure. The Mexican government consistently opposed moving bracero recruitment centers closer to the border, being well aware of problems that could, and often did, arise from overwhelming responses to the government’s call 145

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figure 5.1. Map of Mexico showing proposed and final locations for bracero recruitment centers. Map by Cory Wells.

for workers. Officials from both governments had frequently witnessed the overburdened and overcrowded conditions at many bracero recruitment centers in central Mexico. In 1943, INS immigration inspector Dorr Roubos, temporarily assigned to Mexico City to help facilitate the bracero recruitment process, wrote to the assistant inspector in charge at El Paso, Gordon Cornell, to explain delays in processing, attributed to the Mexican government’s desire to get a clear head count on orders from the United States: To me that was a fair demand as the infiltration to Mexico City from the surrounding towns created quite a problem for local officials. At one time there were over 5,000 trying to get into our office for processing. We could not handle them in such quantities so they would stay in the street all night and wait for the office to open the next morning. Most of them had no other place to go and nothing to eat. One morning it was impossible for us to get through the mob and into the building so we had to return to our hotel.21 146

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Such scenes were endemic to the bracero recruitment process in Mexico, and the Mexican government often shouldered several associated costs relating to this process. First, the government often had to pay to transport back to their homes workers who had not received contracts. Often, workers’ meager resources had dwindled while they waited for their turn in the processing offices.22 Perhaps more important for the government, officials had to face the political costs of the Mexican public’s awareness of the events: the visual evidence of thousands of Mexican men leaving their homes, massing in the streets, often without enough food or water, waiting to be processed to work in a foreign country because they presumably could not make a living in Mexico.23 The Mexican government was clearly cognizant of the dangers associated with having this scenario play out in a border setting. US demand for workers obviously influenced labor patterns in central Mexico by spurring intense concentrations of workers responding to calls for braceros, as described above. By keeping these transactions in the interior, however, the Mexican government retained some control over the process—it remained a domestic issue. Once the sites were moved to the border, the sovereignty of the Mexican nation-state came into direct contact with the sovereignty of the US nation-state. And while American markets caused the chaotic labor movement, even in central Mexico, that power would became even more apparent the closer the chaos moved to the border. The Mexican state’s claim over the legitimate means of movement of its own citizenry would be threatened, thus diminishing its sovereign power. The US government also responded to the dynamics of migration from Mexico, and played the large numbers of workers migrating illegally, especially to Texas, to advantage in negotiations with the Mexican government over the authorized movement of bracero workers. At the time, in the middle of 1948, the Mexican government had suspended the bracero program in Texas after evidence of racial discrimination against Mexicans had surfaced in a number of Texas counties. Texas had, in fact, only just begun to import braceros the year before, in 1947, after being banned from the program for the first five years for a problem of race discrimination in the state.24 The Mexican government had sought to leverage Texas growers’ desire for bracero laborers against the issue of discrimination, clearly attempting to use a politics based on workers’ labor migrations. Tellingly, the US government used the same state, and the heavy annual illegal migration of Mexicans to Texas, to pressure the Mexican government into making concessions 147

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regarding the bracero program, their own play on the politics of the workers’ mobility. Federal officials used Texas as an example of what the rest of the Southwest could become if the Mexican government demanded too much from American growers through the bracero program. Visions of an unregulated agricultural labor market based on undocumented Mexican workers dogged the Mexican government’s decision-making during the late 1940s. Both governments tried to position themselves within the almost constant negotiations of the bracero program, exemplified in the impasse regarding the placement of recruitment centers. As the end of the summer approached in 1948, and ripening fields loomed in the American Southwest, officials from the Mexican Intersecretarial Commission and the USES met on August 5, 1948, in Mexico City to hash out points of difficulty.25 As the crops in the ground grew, so did growers’ pressure on the United States to secure their labor source in time for the harvesting season. On September 3, A. W. Motley, assistant director of the USES, wrote to Robert E. Wilson, economic policy officer of the division of Mexican affairs in the State Department, to share his frustrations with the ongoing negotiations. Motley was primarily concerned about the Mexican government’s refusal to go through with a plan to open a recruitment center in the state of Chihuahua, and the effects that might have on the agricultural industries of New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. Motley worried that without a conveniently close location from which to recruit braceros, farmers would begin recruiting and hiring undocumented workers, resulting in the illegal migration of thousands of Mexican workers into New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado.26 This course of action would then undermine, in his view, the work of the INS, who had been “exerting every effort on growers to abide by the procedures outlined in the Mexican Agreement.”27 According to Motley, keeping the Chihuahua center shuttered was tantamount to barring those states from participation in the bracero program, even though growers were not specifically limited to the Chihuahua center to acquire braceros, but could enlist workers from other recruitment centers. In Motley’s view, anything that inconvenienced growers would cause them to abandon the program. He pointed to Texas as the classic example of growers’ easy access to unauthorized migrants for their labor. According to Motley, Mexico’s strategy to ban Texas from the program had achieved the result in which “Mexican laborers have flooded into the State of Texas by the tens of thousands to engage in agricultural employment in an illegal status and without the protection of work contracts.”28 He saw that this could 148

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happen in Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado as well. Workers were already gathering by the thousands in Ciudad Juárez; in anticipation of the harvest, he noted, “1,200 arrived in Juarez from the interior of Mexico by Mexican National Railway last Saturday, and 1,000, 800, and 300, on three successive days.”29 In the face of Mexican resistance to opening new recruitment centers, Motley advised Robert Wilson to pursue an aggressive strategy for the unilateral legalization of Mexican workers, one that would have significantly altered the balance of power of the two countries at the border. He felt the United States should be prepared to countermand the binational agreement and admit Mexican workers as they tried to enter the country, and also to temporarily adjust the status of workers already in the United States illegally.30 This would at least serve to place needed Mexican agricultural workers in a legal status, which is the only reasonable alternative we can suggest to the continuous process of the Border Patrol apprehending thousands of such workers and sending them back to Mexico only to have them almost immediately return to the United States unlawfully.31

Motley’s suggestion resembled several bills in the US Congress throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Mexican officials responded very forcefully to such proposals in Congress, however, because they realized a passage of such legislation would further erode their power to negotiate modifications in the binational agreement by threatening to withhold workers. If the US government took such measures, it would have the unilateral right to recreate Mexican workers’ legal identities without reference whatsoever to the Mexican government’s sovereign power in issuing or denying passports or other permissions to leave the country. This would have represented a serious breach of diplomatic norms between the two countries.32 Motley requested that the State Department forward the letter to the Mexican embassy, and also assured Wilson that the INS was in complete agreement with his recommendations.33 INS officials’ support for Motley at the USES demonstrates that the two agencies were in close communication and were sharing ideas about which strategies were best employed at the border. Everyone involved in negotiating the bracero program was well aware of the importance of the INS to the administration of the program. Strong enforcement of immigration laws supported the Mexican government’s 149

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positions within the program, while lax enforcement weakened Mexico’s negotiating ability. Officials in the State Department passed a copy of the letter along to the Mexican embassy in Washington, DC, along with a note that appeared to express support for Mr. Motley’s propositions. The State Department’s apparent willingness to consider the USES proposal was notable because the agency was usually quick to guard good relations with Mexico. Paul Reveley, head of the division of Mexican affairs at the State Department, passed along the letter “on an informal basis,” he said, but indicated that the State Department was directing the US embassy in Mexico City to propose to the Mexican Intersecretarial Commission to “reconsider its recent decision not to permit recruiting at Chihuahua.”34 Reveley reiterated much of the substance of Motley’s message, warning that if the Mexican government failed to open a center in Chihuahua, “it will be impossible to prevent their entry as wetbacks, and in such a capacity their earnings approximate only about one-third the amount they would have received had they been legally recruited.”35 Reveley intimated that the Border Patrol would be unable to curb the unauthorized migration of Mexican workers once harvesting season was in full swing. The US opening volley set off a flurry of communications between Mexico City and the Mexican embassy in Washington, DC, as Mexican officials considered how to respond to the United States. The Mexicans were most concerned about Motley’s threat to allow Mexican workers into the United States even without legal contracts if the Mexican government did not follow through with its plans to open up a recruitment center in Chihuahua. In his letter to the Mexican embassy in Washington, DC, Manuel Tello, the head of the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, wanted the Mexican chargé d’affaires, Rafael de la Colina, to remind Reveley that the basic agreement stipulated Mexico’s right to choose, “at liberty,” the locations for contracting centers.36 Tello wanted to remind the Americans that the Mexican government had already once conceded to US pressures to move centers closer to the border, despite their initial resolution not to do so under any circumstances.37 He pointed out that officials were still planning to open a recruitment center in Chihuahua; they were merely postponing it until after the cotton crops in the state of Chihuahua were completely harvested.38 Tello wanted Colina to communicate to Reveley that the Mexican government was acting simply “in legitimate defense of its economic interests” with this temporary postponement and that the postponement in no way 150

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justified the US threat to use this matter to refuse to comply with the articles of the agreement.39 Accusing Motley of acting in a manner “contrary to the friendly spirit of those Agreements,” Tello wished to make Motley aware of the inappropriateness of proposing such unilateral action on the part of the United States. “In the event that one party wishes to extricate itself from the obligations place[d] by the Agreement,” Tello wrote, “it is imperative that this intention should be previously announced in the manner stipulated by the Agreement, at which time, then, we express our complete acquiescence.”40 Until that time, however, he wished to assure the United States of the Mexican government’s complete cooperation to alleviate the problem of unauthorized migration to which Motley referred, by alerting Mexican civil and military authorities at the border to use all the means at their disposal to prevent the workers without contracts from departing Mexico.41 He acidly added that he hoped the US immigration service would use all its appropriate authority to keep the integrity of the agreement intact.42 The Mexican government followed up this correspondence by sending a high-level official from the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores to Washington, DC, to meet with officials from the United States. Alfonso Guerra, first undersecretary of the foreign affairs department, was already in the States, making a tour of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.43 The most contentious issue in the meeting centered on the ability of the INS to effectively control illegal immigration and its obligations to do so. Guerra stressed the urgent need for the INS to “adopt the necessary measures to reduce the clandestine entrance of Mexican workers,” noting that in the absence of “strict vigilance,” the bracero agreement would be a futile exercise. 44 American officials pointed out that the INS lacked the sufficient number of Border Patrol officers to effectively stop the entrance of thousands of Mexican workers who daily crossed the border through back channels and paths, often with the help of smugglers.45 Mr. Kelly of the INS, perhaps unwilling to accept the image of the complete ineptitude of his force, indicated that small recent increases in the Border Patrol force, by relocating officers from other posts, had correspondingly increased the number of deportations at the southern border. He hoped, furthermore, that the INS’s request for more appropriations in Congress would be granted and result in a much more effective Border Patrol. Kelly also intimated that the problem with unauthorized migration from Mexico lay less with the US Border Patrol and perhaps more with Mexican migration authorities, who he claimed did not 151

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sufficiently concern themselves with Mexican workers illegally emigrating from Mexico.46 Representatives from US agencies reiterated their request that the Mexican government open a recruitment center in the state of Chihuahua to hire at least two thousand workers for a period of forty-five days. Mexican officials repeated their determination to retain control over the placing of recruitment centers.47 Though no official agreement emerged from that specific meeting, the Mexican government agreed soon afterward to temporarily open a bracero recruitment center in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.

Narrating Mexican Migration Meanwhile, the annual concentration in the border city of Juárez of Mexican workers who planned to cross into the United States for the cotton season, and were the subject of so much discussion between Mexican and US officials, was also generating comment in the local El Paso media. News stories relied heavily on animal imagery as metaphors for Mexican migration to the United States. Though seemingly unconnected to the US government’s political maneuvering regarding Mexican migration, this discourse was connected to US politics in several ways. First, many of the narratives were perpetuated by state actors, such as INS officials interviewed by the press. Second, the discourses closely corresponded to the US government’s policy positions regarding Mexican migration, and thus helped reinforce those positions. By employing the imagery of animal migrations when reporting about Mexican migrants, the discourses communicated two ideas. One, the imagery constructed the migration as part of the natural environment, rendering it harmless. Second, if, like animal migrations, Mexican migration was natural, then it was also inevitable. Therefore, despite the Border Patrol’s best efforts, it was difficult to stop a “natural” and “inevitable” migration. The depiction of the migration of thousands of Mexicans crossing the border illegally every year as natural, unthreatening, and unrelenting was surprising within a Cold War context increasingly concerned with fears of the political infiltration of the nation. Newspaper coverage in El Paso noted an increase in the numbers of Mexican workers crossing into the El Paso region from Mexico throughout the month of September, framing the migration as part of the natural order of the seasonal calendar. One brief news article reported that during the weekend of September 4–6, the Border Patrol had “chalked up a catch of 152

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596 wetbacks,” calling it a record for a weekend, also noting that “hundreds of other laborers are flocking to Juarez daily from the interior.”48 Using language that evoked game hunting and fishing, newspapers narrated Border Patrol apprehensions of undocumented immigrants as a kind of sport, thus symbolically reducing Mexican workers to animals. This imagery also served to downplay the Border Patrol’s own job, imbuing the work not with national gatekeeping functions, but with the actions of a harmless game. In another story, Border Patrol inspector Griffith McBee was quoted as saying, “This season’s aliens are just like grasshoppers, going from farm to farm with the hope of finding employment.”49 Such imagery, which compared workers to migratory birds, swarms of locusts, or other insentient creatures, reduced Mexican workers to a force of nature and also tended to obscure the role that US growers and the US government played in facilitating such movement.50 Some commentators went beyond the naturally occurring animal kingdom in search of metaphors to describe Mexican migrants, looking to the popular comic strip Li’l Abner for inspiration. Created by artist Al Capp, Li’l Abner depicted the Appalachian community of Dogpatch and its inhabitants. Within a newspaper article in the El Paso Herald-Post on October 14, 1948, in the early days of the El Paso Incident, a reporter relayed the following anecdote:

Wetbacks Now Called “Shmoos”

The word “shmoo” is now rivaling “wetback” as the US Immigration Patrol’s unofficial name for illegally entered aliens. Immigration men said they started calling the aliens “shmoos” because they are “docile, likeable creatures who don’t harm anybody and, though they can’t be cooked for chicken, they just want to produce something to eat or wear.”51

Introduced in Li’l Abner on August 20, 1948, the shmoo was a small animal, shaped like a bowling pin, and prominently featured in that comic strip until December 22, 1948.52 Shmoos had many amazing characteristics: they reproduced at astounding rates, thus being in unlimited supply; they could provide countless quantities of milk and eggs; and they dropped dead at the first glance of anyone who looked their way hungrily, saving people the trouble and pain of having to kill them for meat (see figure 5.2). Once dead, they could be fried, roasted, boiled, or fricasseed, tasting just like chicken, 153

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figure 5.2. The character of Abner explains the many functions of “shmoos.” Detail from Al Capp, The Short Life and Happy Times of the Shmoo (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2002), 20.

pork, steak, catfish, or any other much-desired dish. Since shmoos ate nothing, they conveniently cost nothing in upkeep.53 For a short time shmoos helped lift the residents of Dogpatch out of poverty, providing for all of their needs and allowing them to disconnect from the American system of capitalism. Li’l Abner was one of the most popular comic strips of its day, printed in about nine hundred newspapers at its height, and the shmoo characters quickly caught on nationally, inspiring dozens of shmoo-related merchandizing items.54 Though clearly not making the same critique of capitalism as the comic strip’s creator, the Border Patrol agent quoted for the news article was certainly tapping into several of that era’s powerful discourses through his association of shmoos and Mexicans. First, by referring to Mexican undocumented migrants as “docile” and “likeable,” he was participating in a long and durable process of stereotyping Mexicans as the ideal stoop laborers. Since the time the National Origins Act was debated in the early 1920s, southwestern growers advocating for excluding Mexicans from quota restrictions employed arguments emphasizing Mexicans’ (and Asians’) unique fitness for agricultural labor.55 Second, by saying they “don’t harm anybody,” the Border Patrol agent was also attempting to disaggregate Mexican migration 154

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from the kinds of migrations and movements the United States perceived to be harmful or subversive, keeping the issue separate from politics and in the natural realm. Third, by emphasizing Mexicans’ productive capacity in wanting only to make something to eat or wear, he was drawing the most direct comparisons to shmoos: what shmoos produced by their very bodies Mexicans produced through their labor. By making the comparison, the Border Patrol agent reduced the distance between the two, placing them on the same plane. His joking expression of faux dismay that Mexicans could not be “cooked for chicken” was also intended to reinforce the notion that Mexicans were like animals. Finally, shmoos were animal-like in that they never spoke, but unlike the migrations of the wild animals mentioned earlier, moving of their own accord and without reference to people at all, shmoos were domesticated, seemingly living only to be of use and to serve. The discourse comparing the movement of Mexican workers to seasonal migration was a very specific process of racialization, as well as a justification for the Border Patrol’s own policies. This narrative negated the individual actions that went into each migrant’s decision to make a move. The mass quality of the migration was emphasized, described as being an unthinking process undertaken by instinct-driven beings. This discourse also downplayed the politics of the state influencing that migration. It justified the approach taken by different federal agencies, such as the Border Patrol, that allowed for this illegal migration, even though the process of illegal entry into the country had theoretical potential to destabilize the authority of the state.

Political Pressures at the Border President Truman’s visit to El Paso as part of a whistle-stop tour of the western states during his bitterly fought campaign against Thomas Dewey added to the complicated whirl of politics in the El Paso–Juarez region in late September 1948. Local politicos seized the opportunity of a national election to press the federal government to a greater degree on the question of labor importation. Dewey and Truman were running particularly closely in the western states, according to polls, and thus the West became a key battleground for the two candidates, as each chased the other through campaign events in the region.56 On September 25, President Truman delivered a campaign speech at El Paso’s train station before a crowd of ten thousand.57 As was customary, Democratic politicians holding statewide office 155

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accompanied the Democratic president as he traveled through their state. In Texas, Governor Beauford Jester and US Representative Sam Rayburn formed part of Truman’s entourage, as did the US attorney general, Tom Clark.58 Though Clark was a Texan, it seems noteworthy that a member of Truman’s cabinet would travel with the president while he campaigned. As attorney general and head of the Justice Department, the INS fell within his administrative purview. During the fall of 1948, Truman was in the political fight of his life and would have greatly desired the support of the very powerful agricultural interests in Texas and the West. Truman’s support in Texas, a traditionally Democratic stronghold, was rather shaky. Dewey received very positive press coverage in Texas, and Governor Jester was quoted in the press predicting Truman’s defeat in the upcoming presidential election.59 After the events of the El Paso Incident broke open, investigative reporters from the El Paso Herald-Post uncovered a stronger connection between the president’s visit to El Paso in late September and the dramatic events of mid-October. During the train ride from Deming, New Mexico, to El Paso on the morning of September 25, Representative Ken Regan of Midland, Texas, and Clinton P. Anderson, US Senate candidate from New Mexico, met with President Truman specifically to discuss the issue of acquiring Mexican laborers to work in the cotton fields of West Texas and New Mexico.60 President Truman made no promises regarding the workers during the meeting, but while he was in El Paso he pledged to “see what he could do to ‘ease’ the situation.”61 When Attorney General Clark returned to Washington, DC, he immediately met with US immigration service commissioner Watson Miller to discuss the situation, in advance of Commissioner Miller’s own trip to El Paso to attend a regional interagency conference regarding border issues, held on the twenty-ninth and thirtieth of September. 62 The conference, held in the offices of the federal courthouse in El Paso, brought together representatives from US federal agencies to discuss issues and problems along the US-Mexico border. The proceedings were not open to the public, but officials disclosed general topics that were discussed to the press, which included reviewing and reconsidering “various regulations and policies affecting border crossings.”63 One of the participants, Carl Strom, US consul at Mexico City, proposed that the United States waive the need for Mexicans traveling temporarily to the United States to hold passports when traveling to interior points in the United States, and instead issue identification cards.64 For Mexican officials already dubious of American motives based on 156

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Motley’s earlier propositions, the news coming from this conference must have deepened suspicions that the United States was trying to get around existing policies limiting Mexican migration. It seemed that US agencies were considering ways to put Motley’s ideas into practice, to facilitate options for temporary migration outside the parameters of the bracero program. The remarks Commissioner Miller made a few days later would have only intensified Mexican concerns that the United States wished to undermine the bracero program. Congressman Ken Regan, who had previously met with President Truman on that train ride from Deming to El Paso, met with Commissioner Miller a few days later to reiterate his request that the US government do something to secure Mexican laborers for the West Texas cotton harvest.65 After the meeting, Miller announced that he had received word from Washington that Mexico had decided to open a recruitment center in Ciudad Juárez to process two thousand braceros. Those two thousand braceros were slated to go to New Mexico, however, and fell far short of demands by growers in the region.66 The Great Western Sugar Company alone wanted three thousand workers for their sugar beet fields in northern Colorado and Wyoming.67 Furthermore, under the dictates of the bracero program, none of the workers contracted would be sent to Texas, which was banned by Mexico from participating in the program during the fall 1948 harvest. That fact notwithstanding, Miller declared that the INS “will watch the situation in Pecos, Texas, where there is a great need for cotton pickers, and will do everything it can to avert an emergency.”68 This was a bold statement from INS commissioner Miller, although it remained unclear what he could possibly do for growers in this area. The El Paso Herald-Post surmised that “farmers conceivably might interpret the commissioner’s statement as a hint that immigration officers will not be too active in deporting wetbacks during the cotton picking season.”69 Congressman Ken Regan kept pressure on federal officials through a series of telegrams to the commissioner of immigration, urging the INS to act on the growers’ behalf. Regan accused El Paso Border Patrol forces of being “prejudiced against our farmers” and wondered why officers could not just “relax and conduct their office for the benefit of our citizenship to some greater extent,” betraying a view of the INS as more of a labor management force than an immigration law enforcement body.70 Regan wanted more than a simple relaxation of immigration enforcement, though he called for that as well. He wanted the INS to actively intervene to supply workers to the Pecos region of West Texas. He stated, “It is of utmost importance that 157

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some immediate relief be not only authorized but directed and [I] hope and feel confident you will do so.”71 Regan requested a reply from Miller, and it seems to have been given, because the telegram he sent Commissioner Miller the following day continued an ongoing conversation. Regan referenced the proposed bracero processing in Ciudad Juárez, and noted that farmers were becoming restive by the delays in approving workers for the United States.72 Clearly, Regan was asking the INS to contravene the bracero agreement in order to provide workers for Pecos and the surrounding area. “It beats me how such a simple problem can become so involved,” he asserted, and warned again that “our farmers are getting a strong feeling that our government is discriminating against them.”73

The Unraveling of Events at Juárez Perhaps the combined efforts of the Motley letter and the veiled threats emanating from the conference in El Paso convinced the Mexican government to reverse its previous decision regarding the recruitment of workers at Ciudad Juárez. On October 8, a Mexican functionary from the Intersecretarial Commission arrived in Ciudad Juárez to announce the opening of a recruitment center in that city. The Intersecretarial Commission was the Mexican federal agency with authority over the recruitment centers. Francisco Reyes Cortez, the official from the Intersecretarial Commission, announced that on Monday the eleventh he would be opening offices at the grounds of the old hippodrome, in order to begin processing braceros to work in the United States.74 Reflecting the amount of confusion that prevailed in the entire undertaking, Reyes Cortez declared that two thousand men would be contracted for work sites in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.75 These proposed destinations differed greatly from the expectations of growers in New Mexico, Arizona, and the mountain states of the West that they would be receiving the workers. By Sunday, a large group of men began to gather in the grounds of the hippodrome, in expectation of the office’s opening on Monday morning. In addition to men from the locality of Juárez, trainloads of workers from the surrounding areas in the state of Chihuahua and other points south in central and southern Mexico had been arriving daily since the news had been announced. The next day, representatives from the INS arrived at the site accompanied by Stephen Aguirre, the US consul at Ciudad Juárez. INS officials were set to begin identifying, processing, and documenting workers, 158

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a process that included officials from both countries. When the US officials arrived at the hippodrome, however, they encountered six thousand restless men, many of whom clamored around the Americans for information about when the office would be ready to receive workers. The offices were not open, and Reyes Cortez was nowhere to be found.76 The US officials left the hippodrome but asked Consul Raul Michel to provide military protection for them, because they felt that the situation at the hippodrome was precarious.77 Workers reportedly broke the doors of the offices under the grandstand of the old racetrack, where the bracero program recruiting offices were to be located.78 Michel noted that the municipal police had sent six officers to the scene. At once, the police ascertained that the job was too large for their force, and a force of military soldiers was sent to the site instead.79 Raul Michel crossed the border into Juárez and returned to the hippodrome the next morning to monitor any new developments, and to confirm the large numbers of workers that had been reported at the site.80 He found the men still waiting. Many had been there for two days, but the office remained closed. Negotiations had broken down between the Intersecretarial Commission and the USES over wage rates for prospective braceros. Reyes Cortez wanted workers to receive three dollars per hundred pounds of cotton for the first cotton picking, four dollars for the second picking, and five dollars for the third.81 In a reversal from previous arguments the Mexican government had made that US officials were trying to interfere with its stated power to decide where to open bracero recruitment centers, US officials now accused the Mexican government of straying into US authority. The USES angrily decried Reyes Cortez’s negotiations, arguing that wage rates had already been set by US officials, according to the stipulations of the bracero agreement. In other words, they asserted, Reyes Cortez of the Intersecretarial Commission had no authority to negotiate wage rates in any case.82 These negotiations seemed to be held solely between the Intersecretarial Commission and the USES, since Michel charged that Reyes Cortez held himself aloof from other Mexican officials in the area, keeping them in the dark about the proceedings. In his several reports to the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Raul Michel often complained that in the course of the entire crisis, he never set eyes on Reyes Cortez and never even exchanged words with him over the telephone. He remarked caustically that Mr. Reyes Cortez, through his continued absence from the grounds of the hippodrome, was “becoming indeed a man of mystery.”83 159

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The dispute over wages is important to consider in closer detail because the issue bogged down the recruitment process, later triggering the El Paso Incident. The USES contention that the Intersecretarial Commission had no authority to set wages for braceros was technically true. According to the bracero agreement, workers placed under contract were to be paid the same wages normally paid for agricultural work in a particular region, a rate presumably set by the market. USES officials certified the wage rate, and it formed the basis for a worker’s individual contract. The Mexican government could not modify this wage rate, nor could the worker negotiate for higher wages. As scholars have demonstrated, however, the market did not set the prevailing wage. Growers colluded with each other and with the USES to set the prevailing wages at the rates they wanted to pay.84 The Mexican government had insisted on the prevailing wage measure so that braceros with lower wages would not be used to displace US domestic agricultural workers, though in reality, that is exactly what occurred. Any official from the Mexican Intersecretarial Commission with intimate knowledge about every point contained in the bracero agreement would have been perfectly aware of these facts. Of course, as we have seen with the question of locating the bracero recruitment centers, each country often tried to encroach upon the other’s territory to influence the administration of the program. With his determination to renegotiate braceros’ wages before beginning the processing in Ciudad Juárez, Reyes Cortez might have been trying to take advantage of quickly maturing crops in the fields in need of workers to pick them to gain favorable concessions from the growers. USES officials certainly believed this to be the case, as they accused the Intersecretarial Commission office of “holding a pistol at the American farmer’s head.”85 Curiously, the specific wage rates Reyes Cortez desired for bracero workers came nowhere close to prevailing wages in New Mexico, the presumed destination of the workers. Prevailing wages in New Mexico were $2.00 per hundred pounds of cotton, regardless of the harvest cycle. Some accounts indicate that growers in New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado might have been willing to pay $2.00, $2.50, and $3.00 per cycle, but no more.86 Wages in nearby El Paso were even lower, ranging from $1.50 to $2.00 per hundred pounds.87 The wages that Mr. Reyes Cortez insisted upon, however, were based on the prevailing wages that Mexican braceros were receiving in Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, and Louisiana. USES officials pointed out that prevailing wages for agricultural work varied across the country, the wages 160

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in New Mexico and the mountain states were lower, and growers in these areas were not predisposed to pay the going rate of Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, and Louisiana. Mr. Reyes Cortez merely replied that he had been instructed by his superiors to secure these wages for the workers.88 While US and Mexican officials were snarled in these negotiations, workers continued to wait at the hippodrome, under armed guard, to begin the process of contracting. Although military troops at the hippodrome might have imposed a modicum of order upon the men, workers waited with increasing impatience for any sign that the processing would commence. Several days of waiting intensified their mounting frustration, until they exploded into action beginning on Wednesday evening. The workers began to move in large groups toward the river that divided Mexico and the United States. According to Michel, labor contractors hired by American growers who were becoming desperate to secure laborers instigated the move. One such labor contractor, Mr. Maddux, employed by the Great Western Sugar Company to acquire workers for its sugar beet fields in northern Colorado and Wyoming, hired Juárez tour guides to direct workers to the river’s edge.89 In a scene that would be repeated night after night from Wednesday evening to Sunday morning, workers waited for a sign from employers gathered on the other side of the river, and once that sign was transmitted just after sundown, they began to cross in large numbers.90 To cross the border, workers either waded across the river or employed the two railroad bridges connecting Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. It is unclear at this point whether or not Border Patrol officers detained workers whom they witnessed crossing at these different points. Border Patrol officials claimed to have apprehended four hundred workers on the first evening and sent them back across the river to Juárez. One employer on the scene, however, noted that Border Patrol officers were not interfering with employers as they loaded their vehicles with workers, even when the workers had obviously just crossed minutes before. “Some of the men were wet up to their waist, but the immigration did not bother them. Once the men get to our trucks, they were not bothered.” And though Border Patrol officials attempted to downplay the numbers coming through, estimating that only two hundred men successfully crossed on the first evening, observers witnessed employers zooming away in large trucks and trailers completely packed with workers. Mr. Maddux, representing the Great Western Sugar Company, loaded two passenger cars with workers en route to Denver on Wednesday night and Thursday morning.91 161

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On Thursday morning, Michel demanded explanations from US authorities regarding the surprising events of the evening before, to try to make sense of the seeming chaos. He first received a noncommittal answer from immigration officials, who assured him they were following usual procedure by detaining, then deporting, individuals whom their patrols encountered and who were found to be in the United States unlawfully. Patently incredulous, Michel pressed for more. INS authorities said that the large number of workers who had crossed had been authorized to enter by the Texas State Employment Service. The next day, Michel reached out to Will Rogers, an official from the USES, by telephone but was unsatisfied with what he called his “evasive answers.” He finally tracked Will Rogers down later that day, in a restaurant in Juárez as he was dining with US consul Stephen Aguirre and M. R. Toole, the INS officer in charge at the Santa Fe Bridge in El Paso, and had an official letter of protest hand delivered to Rogers.92 The INS and the Texas State Employment Service (TSES) offered weak explanations of their actions to Mexican officials and the press. According to immigration officials, the large numbers of workers crossing the border each day between Wednesday night and the early hours of Sunday morning were authorized by the TSES. Because the TSES had certified the workers, the INS considered the workers of no proper concern for their agency, even though it was quite evident to all that the workers had not been authorized by the Mexican government to work in the United States as braceros.93 Furthermore, the workers had also failed to take the steps the United States normally required from prospective immigrants, such as applying for visas, paying the necessary taxes, and receiving the medical examinations that would have determined their eligibility to enter the United States under current laws. Although the INS had the power to waive such requirements for agricultural workers, they did not point to this authority in public, but instead gestured to the authority of the TSES over this issue.94 Officials from the TSES claimed that its agency did not inquire into a person’s immigration status before assigning the person to an employer requesting workers.95 They were merely an agency connecting workers desirous of positions with employers needing workers. It was not their job to determine a worker’s legal status, nor had they any way of making that determination, they asserted. In this way they tried to drape an absurdly thin layer of legality over their actions to somehow discount the fact that officials from the TSES were positioned at the very edge of the border, and could see the spectacle of hundreds and thousands of workers crossing the river with their own eyes. 162

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Their claim might have been technically correct. Once the workers were on Texas soil, the TSES could treat them like any other worker in their state, and post them to sites even in West Texas, regardless of the strictures placed by the Mexican government. The state authority of the TSES to direct workers to given employment locations could not have superseded the federal authority of the INS to detain undocumented immigrants, however. Thus, the INS was treading on even thinner ice than the TSES. While the diplomatic firestorm was just beginning on Saturday, October 16, and continued for several tense days of intra- and intergovernment negotiations, the daily crossings of thousands at the Ciudad Juárez–El Paso border juncture had begun to abate. By early Sunday morning many of the crowds had thinned, and Sunday night did not see a repeat of the preceding four days.

Pecos Gets Workers One of the regions that benefited from the INS’s and the TSES’s actions in El Paso in October 1948 was the Pecos area of West Texas, so actively represented by Ken Regan. Pecos growers had recently transformed twenty thousand acres of former ranchland to cotton raising the previous year. Writing to his supervisor about the past harvest season, George Harrison, acting chief patrol inspector in Alpine, Texas, looked back on the recent season to observe that growers had always intended to use undocumented labor.96 Instead of the typical measures West Texas growers used to advertise for domestic migrant workers, Pecos-area growers did nothing. They did not erect signs along the roads to inform people that work was available. They did not post newspaper advertisements or engage the TSES to ask them to direct domestic farm laborers there. They did not build housing or open up public buildings as “rest stops” for migrant families. According to Harrison, “the farms, having recently been placed under cultivation, were unimproved and very few were equipped with adequate shelter to protect the laborers from the weather.”97 Most important, growers refused to pay the going rate for migrant cotton workers in West Texas, virtually guaranteeing that such workers would not travel to Pecos for the cotton harvest.98 Instead, growers and their elected political representative began to place pressure on the INS and others to allow them access to undocumented workers, and local growers and the INS seemed to have worked out a deal. Inspector Harrison reported that growers appealed to the INS for two 163

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thousand workers to work the twenty thousand acres of cotton, a request which was fulfilled. Perhaps referring to the events of the El Paso Incident, Harrison noted, “A request was made to allow the farmers to import Mexican Nationals from the Republic of Mexico, which was eventually done.” At the time of his letter, in January 1949, about two thousand Mexican workers had been deported back to Mexico, while an “estimated 400 to 700” remained employed on farms in the area. Harrison was concerned that though the INS had “repeatedly warned” growers that “all alien laborers illegally in the United States would be apprehended” during the first week of January after the cotton harvest, growers had not responded by switching over to US “citizen labor.” Harrison noted that though growers had agreed to turn their workers over to Border Patrol officials, they continued to complain that the Border Patrol was stripping them of necessary labor. Leaving aside the absurdity of Harrison’s reference to workers the INS had themselves allowed to cross the border as “alien laborers illegally in the United States,” his letter to the district director reveals an acute awareness of the artificiality of growers’ claims of labor crisis, the role the INS played in securing workers for these growers, and the effects on said workers. As Harrison pointed out, growers had taken none of the steps required if they had actually wanted to attract workers. They expected immigration officials to provide undocumented workers for their fields, and their expectations were rewarded. According to the deal, the INS had given them a specific timetable for when they would be arresting Mexican workers who had been paroled to growers. Yet, growers still cried out that they would be left without workers when the Border Patrol came to pick them up, which was a crisis of their own making. Harrison expected the simulated labor crisis to continue. He saw no changes to growers’ tactics in the upcoming season, except that growers had doubled the acreage under cultivation. “The farmers have made no effort to secure citizen labor. . . . In all recent discussions had with the farmers, it was apparent that they expected to receive alien laborers again this year.”99 Inspector Harrison also acknowledged the power that growers had over undocumented workers, and the role that the INS had in such a relationship. In noting a vast difference in wage rates between undocumented and documented workers, Harrison pointed out the reasons for such a gap. “In other words, the aliens have no choice or bargaining power; he has to remain in the area or be apprehended.” Farmers also took advantage of workers in other ways, such as overcharging workers stranded at farms for necessary 164

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supplies purchased for them in local stores. But perhaps more important to the growers, at least in Harrison’s estimation, was the performance of subservience enforced by workers’ legal vulnerability. “Previous to the time the aliens were paroled to the farmers,” Harrison wrote, “I was present at many of their discussions of the labor situation. . . . Various reasons were given as to why they preferred alien laborers. However, to my belief, one farmer summed the general reasons by stating that the reason he liked Mexican alien laborers so much was because they removed their hats when he gave orders . . . and called him ‘sir’ when they spoke to him.”100 Despite praising the INS for their actions during the El Paso Incident, Pecos businessmen continued to press the agency for ever more cooperation, replicating efforts by US growers nationally to influence the negotiations of the bracero program. In a letter to INS district director Grover Wilmoth, Pecos chamber of commerce manager Alton Hughes lauded the INS for having done “an outstanding job under trying circumstances,” and expressed his gratitude for the agency’s “help and cooperation.”101 Despite his gratitude, the bulk of the letter contained complaints about the Mexican government’s decision to exclude Texas from the bracero program because of the persistence of racial discrimination against Mexicans. Adopting an injured tone, the letter writer set up Pecos growers and businessmen as victims of the Mexican government. “We think that the labor contract now held with Mexico is a gross injustice to Texas and discrimination in the worst form—that is, discrimination against one group in the same nation, namely Texas.”102 In addition to being a sly appropriation of the language of rights and equality, this sentiment also revealed a strong sense of entitlement to Mexican workers. Texas, wrote Hughes, “is first in the nation in the production of a number of highly essential commodities, yet it was denied the use of labor that was allowed to cross the international border and travel across the entire state en route to favored states who were allowed to use this labor.” Pecos-area businessmen felt they had a “right” to those workers, and they expected that the US government would deliver those workers to them in a new bracero agreement.

Bracero Program Negotiated Anew On Sunday evening, October 17, 1948, the Mexican government announced the end of the current bracero agreement. In a press statement, the secretary of foreign relations blamed the “strange attitude” of US immigration 165

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officials in permitting Mexican workers to cross the border illegally as the sole basis for the agreement’s dissolution. “Considering that such actions fundamentally destroy the Agreement signed on February 17, 1948 for the recruitment of Mexican agricultural workers, the Mexican Government deems the agreement in question to have been dissolved through unilateral action of which it was not responsible.”103 Mexican officials rejected the claim made by some US government officials that the El Paso Incident had been precipitated by the Mexican government’s delays in approving contracts which had endangered US crops. Had that been the case, Mexican officials asserted, then the workers who had been allowed to cross would have been rushed to the areas scheduled to receive braceros. Yet the workers were placed at the disposal of the TSES, and many workers were sent to West Texas, where braceros were prohibited.104 According to the statement, the Mexican government’s primary motivation in participating in the program had always been to encourage the legalization of more workers and bring workers the protection of documentation, since without it their presence in the United States was solely based on the toleration of US immigration officials. The lengthy press statement ended by declaring that “the Mexican government will not authorize any new contracts.”105 The seemingly unequivocal end to the program was in fact more complicated. Even as the Mexican government was sending press releases announcing the end of the bracero program, Mexican officials were anxious to certify the validity of bracero contracts already in force in the United States. Mexican officials wanted confirmation that US agencies would continue to enforce the bracero agreement’s provisions for workers currently under contract, even after the agreement’s dissolution.106 US State Department officials responded by assuring Mexican officials that they were commencing the immediate deportation of workers back to Juárez, and affirming that workers under bracero contracts would “continue to enjoy the immunities and prerogatives set forth in the agreement and individual work contracts.”107 The fact that Border Patrol officers in Pecos, Texas, had promised growers they could keep workers until the first week in January, after the cotton harvest, belies the State Department’s claims. Despite being angered by US actions at the border in El Paso–Juárez, Mexican officials remained convinced that the bracero program was their best option to manage the legal emigration of Mexican citizens. The Mexican government surprisingly allowed growers to extend the contracts of braceros already working in the United States whose terms were set to expire after the agreement’s end.108 166

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Even before formal negotiations for a new bracero agreement began, in mid-January 1949, US and Mexican officials were hashing out a plan to bring undocumented workers in California and Arizona under a temporary legal status similar to the bracero program. US officials sent a memorandum to the Mexican embassy outlining a proposal that would allow the temporary legalization of Mexican workers until a new bracero agreement could be reached. Pointing out that despite the best intentions of the INS, many Mexican migrants had eluded border patrols and were now working illegally in the United States, the memo stated that “it would be very helpful in enabling the United States to meet its immediate [labor] need pending completion of permanent arrangements for new contracting in Mexico, if those Mexican nationals . . . could be permitted to enter into contracts with American growers.”109 Quick to assure the Mexicans that these were not the same workers who had crossed into El Paso in October, US officials pointed out that the workers in question had been in the United States for more than three months.110 Though US officials did not technically need the Mexican government’s permission to legalize workers, they realized that any such unilateral action would certainly anger Mexico and probably endanger the negotiation of a new bracero agreement. The Mexican government assented to the proposals, with some modifications. Arguing that it did not wish to “stimulate the illegal emigration of workers,” Mexico wanted to keep the contracting of undocumented workers a secret. “The contracting shall be carried out without publicity and should, rather, appear to be an operation of legalizing the workers’ status.”111 In addition to discouraging further undocumented migration, the Mexican government most likely wanted to avoid being viewed by the Mexican public as inconsistent, since in consenting to this arrangement, Mexico was directly contradicting its publicly stated positions. The memorandum warned, however, that this arrangement was a one-off, not to be repeated. “This contracting is to be considered extraordinary in view of the special circumstances pertaining, and its terms shall by no means be considered to be a precedent.”112 Mexico insisted on another modification, to move the internal “recruitment” sites to Phoenix, Arizona, and Fresno, California, rather than to the sites the United States had proposed, at Nogales, Arizona, and Calexico, California, which the United States agreed to do.113 US officials met with Mexican officials in January 1949 to begin the long negotiations for a new bracero agreement, with several contentious issues to resolve. INS chief Watson Miller worried about his reception in Mexico 167

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City, but the US embassy sent a message of assurance that Mexican officials held a reasonable attitude toward the El Paso Incident and that Commissioner Miller’s presence “would not be resented.”114 The INS chief joined the rest of the US delegation in mid-January and reported on the ongoing talks. Though he found the road difficult, Miller believed a “workable plan” had been reached, but for two issues of ongoing disagreement. The United States would not decide on any plan, however, “pending final decision among ourselves in the several matters involved.”115 At the time of his letter, the two issues dividing the US and Mexican governments were the US position that the bracero program be available to every state, thus denying Mexico the right to blacklist a state for a pervasive climate of racial discrimination against Mexicans, and the US contention that bracero recruitment centers be located at the US-Mexico border, the context that led to the El Paso Incident the fall before. Miller was heartened, however, that the American delegation was led by Leslie Wheeler, second-in-command at the US embassy in Mexico City, who had been at the Department of Agriculture for twenty years before his diplomatic post.116 “He has been active in all the discussions and is doing an excellent job, keeping the interests of the United States out in front.”117 The actions of the US delegation made it clear whom they believed their constituency to be, as well as which interests the United States had kept out in front. Labor union representatives wrote to various agencies in response to the ongoing bracero negotiations. Jacob Potofsky, chairman of the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ Committee on Latin-American Affairs, wrote to offer his ideas about how the bracero program could be improved. Specific recommendations included allowing organized labor a place at the negotiating table in the binational talks. He also envisioned union involvement in the administration of the program, calling for the “creation of a permanent supervising and grievance agency with full union participation.”118 H. L. Mitchell, president of the National Farm Labor Union, wrote a lengthy memorandum to the State Department criticizing the US bracero proposal by questioning the legitimacy of the determination of the prevailing wage rate, the lack of worker representation in negotiations, and the decision to place recruitment centers at the border, along with other critiques. “This situation lends itself to repetition of the incident occurring last October when thousands of nationals were admitted in a pre-arranged ‘invasion’ in violation of the immigration laws and the previous international agreement with Mexico.”119 Recommendations made by labor unions did not seem to make it into bracero agreements, but the complaints made by 168

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Pecos-area businessmen and others like them were primary concerns for the US delegation. By the beginning of February, the United States had managed to attain one of its priorities: getting Texas into the bracero program. US officials worried briefly that Mexico might step away from that provision when Mexican president Miguel Alemán responded to a journalist’s question about whether Mexico would allow the exit of workers to regions accused of discrimination by stating that the country would not “at present.” Officials were reassured to learn from the head of the Mexican delegation that the president was speaking to a domestic audience, and his statement had no effect on the talks under way “looking toward participation [of ] all states in benefits of agreement.”120 Though the delegations resolved one large point of contention, several disagreements remained. The Mexicans and Americans were still insisting on different sites for bracero recruitment centers, and the Mexican government also wanted US growers to pay the return transportation for workers deemed unsatisfactory. US officials presented the latest version of the agreement to growers and their representatives in person at a meeting in Kansas City on March 1. As officials readied for the meeting, US secretary of state Dean Acheson worried that growers would resist the measures. “Distinct possibility growers dissatisfied with arrangements, particularly repatriation clause and interior recruitment points, that USES compelled to reject agreement.” Acheson considered that only the “applicability [of ] Texas without reservation” might make the agreement palatable to growers.121 He directed the US embassy to try to persuade Mexican negotiators to withdraw these conditions before the March 1 meeting. The events of the El Paso Incident, as well as the negotiations for a new bracero agreement to replace the one Mexico had declared null and void in the aftermath of El Paso, reflected the extent to which growers’ interests factored into US policies. Clearly growers’ concerns loomed large in the politics enacted at the US-Mexico border. The secretary of state’s involvement in these matters, as well as the placement of a former Department of Agriculture official in such a prominent position at the US embassy in Mexico City, demonstrated the importance of the issue of labor importation to US-Mexico relations. Against Mexico’s continued reluctance to locate bracero processing centers at the US-Mexico border, the United States insisted on moving the sites to the border, sometimes using subtle threats about the uncontrollability of Mexican migration as a pressure point. In late April 1949, US officials were still pressing the Mexican government 169

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about border recruitment sites. US consulates in Ciudad Juárez and Mexicali began reporting to the State Department about workers gathering at the border in anticipation of the upcoming harvest season. In a memorandum to INS commissioner Watson Miller, Paul Reveley of the State Department doubted the efficacy of Mexican claims that it could control the emigration of its citizens, and suspected that many of them would end up in the United States illegally. “Although I know there is no intention on the part of any American Government agency to open the gates and admit these workers to the United States without documents, the possibility that large numbers of them may elude our vigilance and enter the United States illegally exists, and the Department had considered that this should also be brought to the attention of the Mexican Government at this time.”122 The next day, Secretary of State Acheson directed the US embassy in an airgram to make this point to Mexican officials, a point they must have been critically aware of already, even without US input. Acheson wanted the embassy to remind Mexican officials that their claims that they could “control movement of workers to the border are recalled but apparently not being borne out.” He added, “Effective control [of ] situation to prevent large-scale violation [of ] laws [of ] both countries requires simultaneous vigilance by enforcement officers [in] both countries, and unless Mexico either keeps workers away from border or permits contracting there, it is difficult to assure that, despite best US efforts to prevent it, there may be no large-scale ‘invasion’ such as that of October 1948.”123

Conclusion Whether he intended it as a threat or just a realistic assessment of the limits of the Border Patrol’s abilities, Secretary of State Acheson used the movement of Mexican workers to try to get Mexico to accept US positions regarding the bracero program. Growers’ desire to keep their costs to the lowest possible levels remained at the top of the priority list for American officials, even if it increased the possibility of chaos at border points of entry. As American officials realized, the specter of chaos could prove to be an important negotiating tool during talks with Mexico. As both governments sought to manage Mexican workers’ movements back and forth across the US-Mexico border, deportations became increasingly common tools for both sides, as mechanisms to try to maintain balance in the bracero program, in the case of Mexico, or to vacate Mexican workers from US fields after harvest 170

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seasons, in the case of the United States. Calls for deportations seemed to be tossed about so glibly, and deportations carried out so frequently, often by people considering Mexican migration as a large-scale problem to be solved or managed. Yet Mexican consuls and US immigration officers alike had to encounter individual realities of Mexican workers and the hardships they experienced within this dynamic of labor and migration. On October 26, 1948, the Mexican consul at Albuquerque, New Mexico, wrote to the consul general in El Paso about two workers stranded in New Mexico. Guillermo Carreras and Fernando Hernandez, both residents of Ciudad Juárez, had been among those who had crossed illegally during the El Paso Incident. They had agreed to work for a grower near Grants, New Mexico, for a wage of sixty cents an hour. After working on the farm for a week, Carreras and Hernandez found that the grower did not keep his promise about the wages, and so they left, reporting to the consulate that about 150 workers remained on the farm. Carreras and Hernandez were stuck in New Mexico, in a rural area about seventy-five miles from Albuquerque, with no money and no way to get back home, and they appealed to the Mexican consulate for help. The consul contacted the INS, who got the grower to pay for the pair’s transportation back to the border.124 A few days later, Consul Lopez del Castillo wrote once more to El Paso and reported that the two had been sent by the 10:30 p.m. train to Mexico through the method of deportation known as voluntary departure.125 By opening a bracero recruitment center in Ciudad Juárez, however temporary, the two governments created the conditions for the dramatic events of those four days in October 1948, a viscerally visual manifestation of the historically unequal relationships between the United States and Mexico. It was a compression, a collapse of those politics at the border, and the border would become a metonym for them. That process intensified over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, and has become the primary mode through which the US-Mexico relationship is filtered today. Traces of the events in the preceding week did not immediately disappear. Early Sunday morning, October 17, 1948, José Gurrola encountered the body of a man who lay unconscious on the terrain underneath one of the railroad bridges located to one side of the international bridge, at Santa Fe Street and Juárez Avenue in El Paso. An ambulance quickly transported the man to El Paso’s county hospital for treatment for a broken leg and possible internal injuries. Police detectives set out to discover the man’s identity, which was yet unknown, since he had no identifying documents upon his person. His 171

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pockets contained only a small amount of money in Mexican currency. Later in the day, however, the man awoke and identified himself as Macario Acosta, aged fifty-five, divorced, with two young children, and a resident of Ciudad Juárez. Hoping to find employment with one of the many growers inundating El Paso during the past week, Macario Acosta had attempted to traverse one of the railroad bridges in the dead of night. The poor visibility caused him to lose his footing on the tracks and he fell many feet to the ground below.126 Macario Acosta’s experience can be seen as a microcosm of the contested and uneven terrain of the US-Mexico border. His accident, as well the entire episode of the El Paso Incident, palpably exemplifies a space in which both the Mexican and US governments made concerted efforts to control the movement of people within and across the border region. By waiting until the small hours of the morning to make his move, Mr. Acosta perhaps hoped to avoid the patrols of the Mexican soldiers temporarily stationed along the river, as well as the more permanent installations of INS Border Patrol on the other side. The situation in El Paso had devolved into chaos, much to the Mexican government’s consternation. The Mexican government had instituted several restrictions upon workers seeking to receive contracts through the temporary processing office in Juárez, hoping perhaps to avoid disruptions in local labor markets. Government officials prohibited workers from Ciudad Juárez and the state of Chihuahua to apply for contracts. In fact, Mexican soldiers stationed at the river could legally apprehend only men who were from the state of Chihuahua, and by that authority had returned over one thousand workers to the hippodrome site at which they had been gathering.127 Mr. Acosta might have been aware that his status as a resident of Ciudad Juárez would have given the military the power to thwart his crossing—he might well have been one of the thousand returned to the hippodrome by the soldiers. Furthermore, although INS officers seemed to have been standing by while Mexican workers crossed the river before their very eyes, Mr. Acosta could not have been certain that these novel procedures would remain in place indefinitely. In any case, although we do not know the reasons for Mr. Acosta to have chosen to cross as he did, there were significant impediments to Mr. Acosta crossing the border with the rest. The very mode in which he attempted to cross is also quite suggestive. He climbed onto railroad tracks that spanned the Rio Grande, a connective infrastructure that had long been used to transport goods and people into each country. Though he did not use the structure in its authorized manner, 172

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it did facilitate his crossing in some way. He tried to walk across the uneven path shrouded by darkness, but he could not successfully navigate the way, and he fell through the gaps between the tracks. Mr. Acosta’s fall is a stark reminder that within the high-stakes world of diplomatic and political wrangling between the United States and Mexico for control over the border, individual workers were the ones who risked the most.

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chapter 6 •

The High Price of Immigration Politics during the 1950s

D

uring the hot, dry days of 1953, Mexican American civil rights activist Ed Idar Jr. and Rio Grande City pharmacist and labor activist Andrew McLellan roamed the farms, hidden labor camps, and canal banks of the El Paso area and the Rio Grande Valley, armed with notepad and camera, intent on capturing and exposing the shocking details of undocumented Mexican migration to the American public.1 Idar and McLellan interviewed workers and US Border Patrol officers while McLellan also acted as photographer for their joint endeavor (see figure 6.1). Though they were working on their own initiative, the researchers also represented two important political constituencies in the state of Texas: the American GI Forum, a Mexican American civil rights organization, and the Texas State Federation of Labor, the statewide branch of the American Federation of Labor. The product of their investigative foray into the agricultural fields of South Texas was a fifty-five-page report entitled What Price, Wetbacks?, published in late 1953 and widely disseminated the following year. The booklet was cosponsored by the American GI Forum and the Texas State Federation of Labor, whose names appeared on the front cover rather than the authors’. 174

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figure 6.1. Ed Idar Jr. interviews migrants in South Texas. Photograph from Mexican-American Affairs Committee, Series 7 Collection, The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.

In What Price Idar and McLellan set out to highlight what they characterized as the “wetback problem,” detailing the incredibly low wages migrants earned in South Texas and the appalling living conditions undocumented migrants were forced to endure. They also wanted to emphasize the threat that undocumented migration posed to the country. They hoped their report would help awaken the people of America to the danger of this wetback invasion. Perhaps with pictures showing the wetbacks and the conditions under which they live, we can convince the skeptics that there actually are wetbacks and they actually are a threat to our health, our economy, our American way of life.

The 1954 booklet formed a part of a growing body of literature about undocumented migration from Mexico to the United States. What Price identified this migration as the root cause of the foundering of Mexican 175

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Americans at the lower end of the economic ladder, as well as of their social isolation in the United States. Though What Price was a collaboration between the Texas State Federation of Labor (TSFL) and the American GI Forum, they each had their own reasons for wanting to support this publication. The TSFL was hoping to burnish its credentials as a serious player in the complex politics of Mexican international labor migration during a period in the 1950s of increased dialogue between organized labor in Mexico and the United States. They wanted to impress upon Mexican labor unionists the idea that the TSFL was doing something about labor conditions for Mexican agricultural workers in Texas. For the American GI Forum, this booklet represented an increased commitment to an issue of import for the organization almost since its formation in 1948. In addition to being a didactic tool for its own membership and consolidating opinion therein, the pamphlet was a move to elevate the issue above the others in the crowded panoply of the American GI Forum’s interventions during the 1950s. Both groups also hoped to parlay collaborations such as these into a long-term liberal coalition that could help push back against Texas’s conservative political environment.2 The pamphlet crudely confronted the issue of undocumented migration, which was technically separate from, but in reality completely entangled in, the bracero program. Though undocumented migration predated the bracero program, the uptick in this migration was unquestionably linked to it. Both groups endorsed increased deportations by the Border Patrol as a solution to this issue, conforming to the position held by many labor unions, other liberal organizations, and the Mexican government.3 Labor and civil rights activists accused southwestern growers of encouraging undocumented migration in order to increase the pool of vulnerable, and therefore exploitable, workers and believed that shutting down undocumented migration would ultimately help protect and elevate domestic American workers. Yet at the same time that Idar and McLellan were publishing their pamphlet on the evils of undocumented immigration, the United States continued to import Mexican workers through the bracero program, which organizers also believed undermined domestic labor. While US growers used their power to mobilize a cross-border governmental initiative to provide workers for the agricultural industry, labor and civil rights activists were wedded to a national labor model that was reliant on strong borders to stem the flow of migration. In the midst of the Cold War, growers exploited the politics of anti-Communism to claim that 176

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their attempts to undermine unionization in the fields, through the bracero program or the use of undocumented workers, were anti-Communist acts. Government crackdowns on labor unions’ historical ties to Communist groups and individuals renewed perceptions that labor unions were themselves Communist, which growers used to their benefit. Liberal activists also participated in anti-Communist rhetoric when they pointed out the dangers of an unprotected border vulnerable to Communist infiltration. Both sides used the same anti-Communist vocabulary to endorse very different aims.

What Price, Wetbacks? Eduardo Idar Jr. hailed from a prominent Laredo family with a long history of political and labor activism. Idar’s grandfather, Nicasio Idar, helped found one of the first railroad workers’ unions in Mexico while he was working for the Mexican National Railroad. Upon settling in Laredo, he started a newspaper, La Crónica, and became heavily involved in the local and regional affairs of the day. He and his family were steeped in Mexican politics on both sides of the border, hosting Mexican political exiles from the Díaz regime in 1904 and putting on a regional conference of Mexican mutual aid societies in 1911 to discuss persistent problems affecting the Mexican community along the border.4 Ed Idar’s uncle, Clemente, began working as a union organizer for the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1918 to organize Mexican American workers as part of the AFL’s larger hemispheric strategy in Latin America.5 Ed Idar Jr. served in the air force during World War II and attended the University of Texas after the war ended. He became a member of the American GI Forum in 1950 and served as state chairman, then executive secretary, all the while attending the University of Texas Law School.6 Andrew C. McLellan, the pamphlet’s coauthor, also made his home in the South Texas border region. Born and reared in Scotland, McLellan moved to Canada as a teenager before moving to the border in the mid-1930s. He served for four years in the army during World War II. At two separate times he worked for the joint US-Mexico commission for eradication of hoof-andmouth disease. In the biographical section of the pamphlet, McLellan touted his wide knowledge of Mexico and the Mexican people, and spoke of his extensive travels in that country.7 At the time he was working with Idar, McLellan also owned and operated Starr Pharmacy in Rio Grande City, in Starr County, the western edge of the Rio Grande Valley. After producing the pamphlet, McLellan began traveling extensively in Central America, sending 177

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regular posts about labor union and Communist activity in the late 1950s to Serafino Romualdi, the Latin American representative for the AFL, and later the AFL-CIO.8 The authors sought to introduce the phenomenon of undocumented migration to a larger audience generally unfamiliar with the details of the workings of the agricultural industry on the border, as well as the federal government’s infrastructure for border enforcement. Even for readers familiar with the labor and migration dynamics of South Texas and El Paso, the authors hoped to define the problem in such terms as to denaturalize seasonal undocumented migration and the pervasive problem of Mexican poverty, as well as the inadequate immigration enforcement by the federal government. The authors tried to delineate the issue so it would seem like a solvable problem that could be effectively addressed through legislation and changes in existing policies, rather than a fact of border life. After introducing themselves and the objectives they were trying to achieve with their booklet—convincing the American public of the presence of large numbers of undocumented workers in the United States, as well as suggesting policy implications—the authors first set out to define the migrants themselves and their spread throughout local border economies. In these first few pages, Idar and McLellan defined the issue of undocumented migration as complex and diffuse, with a direct connection to the legal migration of the bracero program, but also extending beyond the bounds of the agricultural industry. The authors achieved this complexity with their choice of subjects to describe. One subject was a young woman “whose neat dress and appearance” suggested she worked as a maid in the border town of Eagle Pass. With the choice to foreground this young woman, the authors suggested that undocumented workers filled employment positions in multiple sectors of local economies, not just in agriculture.9 Other undocumented migrants included Joe Sanchez and Julio Ortega from Guadalajara, who crossed the border illegally because they could not afford the costs associated with the process of becoming braceros. By highlighting these migrants, the authors depicted a diverse migration in terms of gender and type of employment. In addition, by pointing out Sanchez’s and Ortega’s dilemma, the authors highlighted flaws in the bracero program, arguing it further contributed to the illegal migrant flow. In their contradictory characterization of undocumented migrants, Idar and McLellan acknowledged ties to these migrants even as they sought to emphasize migrants’ difference from Mexican Americans. The authors wrote 178

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of migrants’ numbers, “hundreds of thousands of them pushing across the Rio Grande day after day, pushing their blood brothers, American citizens of Mexican descent, out of jobs in the border country and into competition farther north, pushing wages down, down, down.”10 In this case, the acknowledgment of commonality was based on racial grounds. Yet within the same statement that referred to Mexican Americans’ consanguine bonds with undocumented migrants, the authors also accused these migrants of harming fellow Mexicans by displacing them and pushing them further into poverty. The nod toward brotherhood, then, was intended more as an indictment than a mutual starting place. The more consistent message was one of difference rather than similarity. The authors sought to create a picture of Mexican undocumented migrants as fundamentally different from Mexican Americans based on terms of class, citizenship, and culture. First, Idar and McLellan created this distance and difference by employing the term “wetback” again and again, to create an essentializing category of the despised Other. It is true that the word was in quite common usage at the time, used in official government documents, personal correspondence, and daily speech. However, it was clear that the word was used in this tract as more than just a simple noun. The bulk of the book, in fact, was divided into sections that employed the word deliberately to create an impression of difference. The authors achieved this effect through repetition, by using an italicized phrase, these are the wetbacks, and descriptions that completed those sentences to define the people and the threat: These are the wetbacks—sad-eyed and sick, desperate beings unaware that their illegal entry and existence bring with them to the area they infest soaring statistics on syphilis, tuberculosis, infantile diarrhea and other diseases, along with a host of crime and other socio-economic problems.11

Though the authors were well aware that many of the health problems described were problems of poverty and lack of access to health care, through these definitional sentences, the aforementioned diseases became connected to the migrants themselves, suggesting that if the migrants disappeared, so would the diseases. Though the migrants were culpable for being carriers of disease, the pamphlet warned that diseases would spread beyond the initially affected to infect the rest of the population and other regions of the United States. 179

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figure 6.2. Photograph from a series of images in What Price, Wetbacks?, from between the sections titled “Health and Sanitation” and “Disease.” Photograph from Mexican-American Affairs Committee, Series 7 Collection, The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.

Through language, but also images, Idar and McLellan portrayed undocumented migrants as a serious threat to Mexican Americans as well as to the rest of the United States. The section preceding a photograph of a migrant mother and child called attention to the flies buzzing around the tent where the obviously sick migrant family languished with no access to health care for their illnesses (see figure 6.2). The flies, the authors warned, spread the migrants’ sicknesses beyond the confines of their makeshift labor camps. Using the specter of disease, the authors suggested both a literal and a figurative contamination of the nation. In reproducing these images, the authors engaged in a discourse with long historical roots, using the issue of public health to contain nonwhite populations within a certain geographical space, or exclude them from the nation entirely.12 These public health efforts, at US border ports of entry and in urban spaces, also produced 180

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their own narratives of disease and uncleanliness that reinforced ideas of racial difference. The photographs, intended to evoke pity for a suffering population and to humanize an often faceless migration, did nothing to further the project to create a clear divide between citizens and migrants emphasized in the surrounding text. Because of their shared racial heritage (as the booklet itself pointed out), the photos served to document the pathos of ethnic Mexican suffering and poverty in general. The careful distinctions that the authors sought to make between Mexican undocumented migrants and Mexican American agricultural workers might have been lost on readers. Though the pamphlet placed the onus of the migration problem on growers who hired and exploited migrant workers, its authors carefully refrained from naming or photographing specific growers. Texas governor Allan Shivers would have been an obvious target for them, since through his marriage to Marialice Shary he had inherited the management of a massive agricultural enterprise in South Texas. Idar and Hector García, the leadership of the American GI Forum, would have loved to bring down a conservative governor whom they believed to be anti-Mexican, but the pamphlet was relatively circumspect in this regard, surely for purposes of self-preservation. Naming names probably would have led to costly lawsuits and intense political retaliation. Thus growers remained an abstract, faceless force, while migrants were clearly photographed and represented. Both representationally in this volume and in the laws the American GI Forum and TSFL sought to change, migrants bore the burden of responsibility for the “crime” of illegal migration. In addition to the repeated use of the phrase these are the wetbacks, the authors defined two separate categories of undocumented migrants—the “simple peasant” and the “pachuco,” both excludable from legal immigration options. According to the text, simple peasants accounted for most of the migrant flow—people who were “humble, amenable, easily dominated and controlled,” and accepting of “exploitation with a fatalism characteristic of their class,” characteristics that made them antithetical to the labor movement. These people, the pamphlet seems to suggest, were simply unorganizable because of their putative docility, a well-worn stereotype employed by business interests, social scientists, and organized labor alike. According to the underlying logic of the pamphlet, then, the simple peasants displayed sociocultural characteristics that made them unfit for citizenship in addition to the other factors of poverty and disease that would have excluded them 181

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from admittance into the United States on legal grounds. Though the simple peasants were morally harmless, the authors charged them with inflicting economic harm upon Mexican Americans and also with being culturally suspect, not having the experience and education of being Americans. The other category of migrant the authors created, identified as the pachuco element, formed a smaller portion of the migrant flow but one that was criminal and morally deviant. This group represented a threat to the United States because of criminality, a criminality couched in the language and logic of the Cold War. Usually defined by a particular zoot suit–wearing aesthetic, pachucos became associated with urban hooliganism in the World War II–era US Southwest, and were targets of mob violence in Los Angeles in 1943.13 In this text, however, “pachuco” was used as an umbrella term to signify criminality, duplicity, and unfitness for citizenship. Displaying Linnaean attention to categorization, Idar and McLellan subdivided pachucos into smaller constituent parts. “In one are found the criminals, the marijuana peddlers and users, the falsifiers of identity documents, the smugglers, the prostitutes and the homo-sexuals.”14 Apart from the criminal drug dealers and users, the other categories of questionable migrants focused on people expert in clandestine activities, such as creating false or double identities and engaging in other shadowy behavior that would have been especially concerning to a nation already afraid of covert Communist infiltration.15 At the same time that they focused on the categories of objectionable migrants, with the desperately poor and diseased simple peasants and the criminally and morally suspect pachucos, the authors pointed to the unguarded nature of the border itself, and the easy conduit it opened up for Communist infiltrators. They quoted El Paso federal judge R. E. Thompson, who claimed that the “rising tide of wetbacks” contained “Communist agents and narcotics peddlers.”16 Again emphasizing the porous border’s vulnerability, Idar and McLellan speculated: “Who is to say how many Communists mingle with the hordes of wetbacks wandering casually into the country across the Rio Grande?”17 Rather than being dangerous themselves, undocumented migrants became dangerous for the cover they offered to other, more dangerous elements. Offering another wrinkle to the image of Soviet agents exploiting the US southern border for clandestine ingress into the country, the authors posed the possibility that Central Americans from “Communist-dominated Guatemala” could cross into the United States virtually indistinguishable from the Mexican illegal agricultural migration, presumably with the intent to agitate among the agricultural classes.18 Here, 182

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the Communist threat did not just come from the Soviet Union, but also from Latin America. Though pronouncements about Communists sauntering across the border amongst migrating Mexican workers were common in writings about the border migration problem, they were generally speculative. Authors painted a picture of a wide-open border and invited readers to imagine how easy it could be for subversive agents to enter the United States through these corridors. As part of a five-part series on illegal migration and the border, journalist Gladwin Hill used similar methods in hazarding that “in cold fact Joseph Stalin might adopt a perfunctory disguise and walk into the country this way.”19 What Price followed a similar path, though the authors tried to include more authoritative information by quoting the judge in El Paso and including a reference to Communist organizing in Latin America. In a letter to Jerry Holleman in November 1953, Andrew McLellan expressed his belief that more could be done to investigate Communists using the US-Mexico border to sneak into the country and thought that a separate piece on just this issue could be fruitful.20 He rued that he had gotten to Ben Gitlow’s exposé on the American Communist Party too late to include the following tidbit from The Whole of Their Lives: Stalin’s personal representatives [to the Communist International] were always Russian. The Moscow representatives to the Communist party entered the United States illegally through Mexico across the MexicanTexas border.21

McLellan believed that this nugget of information confirmed the suspicions he had held all along, and more clearly advanced a notion of the danger of an unchecked migratory flow of humanity.

An Emerging Literature on Undocumented Migration The works on undocumented migration that emerged in the early 1950s, in media ranging from scholarly studies to journalism to works of public advocacy, all tended to rely on each other for information and support, thus creating a cohesive message about the dangers that illegal migration posed to the United States. Most of the literature defined the problem in very similar ways, though differing most crucially in the proper solutions for the problem. In his five-part series for the New York Times on illegal migration, 183

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journalist Gladwin Hill relied on two University of Texas studies, undertaken by economists Eastin Nelson and Frederic Meyers, and sociologists Lyle Saunders and Olen Leonard, respectively.22 Hill quoted Saunders at length and referenced the findings from Saunders and Leonard’s study throughout the series. The two studies were published through the Inter-American Education series at the University of Texas, a program started by education professor and civil rights activist George I. Sánchez.23 The series published research on Mexicans in Texas and the factors, such as segregation and poverty, that inhibited students’ educational success. The Inter-American Education occasional papers continued the work Sánchez had begun as head of the Inter-American Relations Committee at the University of Texas, which used the concept of improving hemispheric relations to investigate persistent problems of inequality for people of Mexican origin in the United States.24 Part of the funding for that committee came from the Program for Cooperation with Spanish-Speaking Minorities in the United States, a joint effort from the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and the State Department that was specifically concerned with Mexican Americans’ vulnerability to Communist appeals.25 Sánchez used the government’s increased concern with the spread of Communism among Latin American people to promote a long-held Mexican American civil rights agenda focused on ending segregation, racism, and poverty. Gladwin Hill also relied heavily on George Sánchez’s own research on Mexican Americans in the United States. To make the argument that unchecked illegal migration materially impeded the assimilation of Mexican Americans into American society, Hill directly quoted George Sánchez, using Sánchez’s concept of the US Southwest as a cultural peninsula of Mexico to make his point. Hill referred to Sánchez as “probably the foremost student of regional interracial affairs,” and showcased Sánchez’s analysis in the article focusing on the effects illegal migration had on the domestic ethnic Mexican population.26 Hill’s journalism for the New York Times disseminated to a wider national audience the ideas produced by Texas-based scholarship and activism on the issue of illegal migration at the US-Mexico border. George Sánchez also had very close connections to the leadership of the American GI Forum, who were allies of Sánchez and staunch supporters of the research produced by the Inter-American Education series, even as that work faced mounting criticism by other voices in the Mexican American civil rights community. Mexican American civil rights leaders from the more 184

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conservative LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) bitterly resented the racist commentary Anglo border residents expressed about Mexicans and that was included in the study as evidence of continuing problems of race relations in South Texas.27 The leadership of the American GI Forum faced criticism for their support of the study but continued to advocate for its importance and clearly agreed with the research. The founder of the American GI Forum, Dr. Hector P. García, and its executive secretary, Ed Idar Jr., were also familiar with Hill’s work and commented favorably on his journalism and assessment of the illegal migration across the US-Mexico border. Though all the works shared important assumptions about the nature of the issue—that undocumented migration if left unchecked was a severe problem that caused many social ills—they did differ on how best to address the problem. The academic studies refrained from overtly prescribing solutions, though by ending their study with a discussion of the limited and ineffectual border control measures that were taken on both sides of the border, Saunders and Leonard seemed to be suggesting a possible area for remediation.28 In the final installment of the New York Times series, Gladwin Hill proposed that the best solution lay in increasing wages in agriculture by introducing a federal minimum wage and thereby taking away employers’ incentive to seek out the cheapest possible labor force. The only proposal he rejected outright was the notion of increased jail time for illegal border crossers, not because of any moral objections but because their large numbers would “overwhelm the facilities for apprehension and prosecution.”29 As an advocacy piece, What Price took the most strident position on possible solutions, calling for legislation to enact sanctions on employers who knowingly hired undocumented migrants, as well as the enforcement of criminal penalties already on the books for migrants themselves. Though Idar and McLellan conceded that in their present form “it is obvious that apprehensions are not the final answer,” they did not advocate reducing apprehensions, but rather called for increasing their effectiveness through airlifts into the center of Mexico, in addition to prosecuting migrants who crossed illegally and introducing employer sanctions.30 Though their recommendations for solutions varied substantially and produced starkly different results, all of these interventions—academic, journalistic, and advocacy pieces—worked together to delineate the contours of the debate and produced a pathological subject in the undocumented migrant who deserved to be punished and excluded for his or her crimes. 185

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Taken together, the academic studies and journalistic pieces introduced the issue of undocumented migration at the US-Mexico border to a larger public. Many readers would have been unfamiliar with the migrations occurring at the border, in terms of both their numbers and anything about the migrants themselves. The fact that Gladwin Hill explained the term “wetback” when first using it in a given story, “so called because of those who swim the Rio Grande, the Texas-Mexico boundary,” demonstrates how strange and novel these concepts were to the general public.31 As mentioned earlier, one of the rationales Idar and McLellan gave for producing What Price was to “convince the skeptics that there actually are wetbacks and that they actually are a threat to our health, our economy, our American way of life.”32 Now readers could learn about undocumented migrants and the multivalent threat they posed to the United States. In addition to humanitarian concerns about the exploitative living and working conditions undocumented migrants experienced, other concerns centered on the economic threat these workers posed to dislocated and displaced Mexican American agricultural workers. Mexican American activists particularly worried about negative stereotypes of undocumented migrants that would hurt Mexican Americans as well, by reinforcing biases and impeding their assimilation into US society. Instead of placing blame on undocumented migrants for being too close to the negative stereotype, perhaps more attention could have been focused on Anglos who created such definitions and categories in the first place. The overwhelming focus on the migration as the root of the economic and social problems that Mexican Americans experienced created a foreign subject to blame for the racism in society rather than those who held racist views and exploited Mexican workers. The net effect created narratives of hordes of diseased and impoverished immigrants that might have also been shielding Communist infiltrators. These narratives accompanied similar descriptions offered by Congress and Immigration and Naturalization Service officials in the years before the massive deportation campaign Operation Wetback, initiated in 1954. As Kitty Calavita has shown, immigration officials and members of Congress increasingly employed anti-Communist rhetoric in their discussions of illegal immigration across the US-Mexico border. An Immigration and Naturalization Service annual report in 1951 warned that the border was vulnerable to non-Mexicans who might take advantage of the “uncontrolled border.” This scenario was a grave threat in times when “forces of political and social evil” were working against the US government.33 Senators Hubert Humphrey 186

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and Pat McCarran went even further to sound the alarm about possible Communist infiltrators using the unprotected border as pathways to entry. Humphrey stated that Mexico was under threat from a Communist takeover of the country, and he wondered how many Communist agents might try to cross into the United States. In his view, the United States was vulnerable not only to non-Mexicans attempting to cross the US southern border, but also to Mexicans “contaminated” by the ideology of Communism.34

The American GI Forum–Texas State Federation of Labor: A “Political Action Alliance” The work on What Price persuaded Ed Idar Jr. and Andrew McLellan of the political possibilities of continuing collaborations between the two organizations at the local and state levels. McLellan especially worked as a bridge between the American GI Forum and the Texas State Federation of Labor to encourage both entities to find ways to cooperate. Though their relationship was tentative, both the TSFL and the American GI Forum reached out to engage with one another on the issue that tied them both together: their concern with rising levels of undocumented migration from Mexico. In a letter to the head of the TSFL, Jerry Holleman, McLellan criticized the pending bracero legislation and the ease with which an extension of the program seemed to be moving through Congress. But McLellan saw one bright spot. “I wrote [to Romualdi] that if nothing else, the attitude taken by both Houses had tended to crystallize the political alliance between the Federation and the Latin organizations in Texas.”35 The politics of agricultural labor migration became a common ground from which a lasting political alliance could be formed. Through private informal meetings and public formal gatherings, representatives of the American GI Forum and the TSFL sought to foster their common political agendas, trying to overcome decades of neglect by the American Federation of Labor that had built up hostility and suspicion within the Mexican American activist community. Both groups understood the potential benefits of successfully overcoming their differences to work together effectively. In a letter to McLellan about his upcoming meeting with members of the American GI Forum, the TSFL’s Jerry Holleman advised McLellan to bring up the many points of convergence between the two organizations. Though separately the two organizations were politically marginalized within a very conservative state Democratic Party, Holleman 187

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reminded McLellan that “should the two ever learn to stand together their strength will be felt from the school board to Washington.”36 One method that the American GI Forum and the TSFL used to improve relations between the two constituencies was ceremonial in nature. They invited representatives from each other’s organizations to attend their annual state conventions, often reserving a keynote speech slot and an opportunity to address the assembled participants. For example, the TSFL chose to hold their 1954 state convention in Corpus Christi, the city in which the American GI Forum had its headquarters. Ed Idar Jr. attended the 1954 meeting and delivered a keynote address. As historian Max Krochmal has detailed in his history of interracial coalitional politics in mid-twentieth-century Texas, the Texas Congress of Industrial Organizations had attempted to harness liberal labor unionists from among whites, blacks, and Mexican Americans to support liberal candidates for political office about a decade before, in the 1940s. Though they were able to stave off the most conservative developments in Texas politics, the organization did not successfully build a long-term electoral politics coalition, and its efforts foundered by 1950.37 The moves the TSFL and the American GI Forum made in the mid-1950s represented a renewed attempt to build liberal political alliances. Idar opened his talk by delivering his labor bona fides: his family had long belonged to the International Typographical Union, and his uncle, Clemente Idar, had been an international organizer for the American Federation of Labor in the early twentieth century, during Samuel Gompers’s attempt to forge ties with Latin America with the formation of the Pan American Federation of Labor in 1918.38 Idar obliquely addressed the fact that Mexicans were underrepresented in labor unions in Texas. In a wide-ranging talk that covered the historical and cultural contributions of Spanish-surnamed people to the US Southwest, Idar spent most of his time seemingly trying to convince the convention attendees that the Mexican American community was solid, trustworthy, and deeply rooted in the Southwest. In narrating Mexicans’ many contributions, especially in war, Idar established Mexican Americans’ right of belonging to the nation. Despite their battlefield contributions, Mexican Americans remained socially and economically marginalized, suffering from poor health and mired in poverty. Idar appealed to the audience with a liberal message that argued that it was every Texan’s responsibility to lift the Mexican American population from poverty into the middle class, in order to ensure the health and well-being of the entire polity. Also appealing to the conservative business unionism of 188

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the American Federation of Labor, Idar projected a future of the consumer potential of an economically stable Mexican American population: “How many more houses would be built?” Idar pondered. “How many more radios, television sets, automobiles, household goods of all types, groceries, and all types of consumer goods would be bought and sold?”39 The realization of this middle-class dream for Mexican Americans required the nurturing of political alliances working toward common aims. In order to do so, these groups had to overcome barriers to possible coalition building. The specter of Communism loomed large in the imaginations of all activist groups working in early 1950s America, as legislation such as the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 questioned the contemporary and historical ties to Communism of all organizations and their associates. For many in the labor movement, interracial cooperation itself often signaled possible Communist leanings and became warning signs that undermined such organizing.40 Leaders of many organizations carefully sussed out the political leanings of their members and the members of organizations they formed associations with, and the American GI Forum was no exception. In his talk, Idar clearly laid out the American GI Forum’s anti-Communist credentials by emphasizing its members’ battlefield service during World War II, as well as their Catholic faith. “Because of their long tradition as a freedom-loving people coupled with their great Catholic culture and heritage, the Spanish-speaking citizens form one of the major bulwarks against Communism in our own State and in the Southwest,” Idar declared.41 Idar’s strong anti-Communist stance reflected both a sincerely held belief as well as a defensive strategy to counter accusations from conservative elements and institutions that used Communism as a weapon to battle against any kind of social change. All of the attendees must have been intensely aware of this dynamic, since labor unions and Mexican American civil rights organizations had all been red-baited by conservative Texas politicians. In correspondence with Hector García, Idar complained more than once about Texas governor Allan Shivers’s attempts to paint the American GI Forum as Communists in the wake of the publication of What Price.42 The mutual attendance at each other’s conventions and banquets was a public display of more frequent conversations between Idar and McLellan that planted the seeds for a burgeoning alliance between organized labor and Mexican American activist circles. In their shared work of What Price and its supplemental follow-up published a year later, Idar and McLellan had occasion to engage in frequent discussions with each other. It was clear that 189

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the two conversed quite regularly, though unclear how often those conversations were on the phone, in written correspondence, or in person. McLellan often acted as a mediator between the American GI Forum and the TSFL. In a letter to Jerry Holleman, Andrew McLellan shared a conversation he’d had with Ed Idar in which he advised him to move closer to labor and to develop links between local labor groups and American GI Forum chapters.43 In the same letter McLellan also pushed the TSFL to improve its relationship with Latino organizations. He did this by sharing one of Idar’s frustrations with the TSFL, thus offering a possible remedy for improved relations in the future. According to McLellan, Idar resented that Latinos were not in the room when it came to discussions about which candidates to support for various elections. Presumably, the choices about candidates would be made beforehand and then Latinos were expected to support whomever the progressives had lined up. “The Latinos think they are mature enough now politically to be in there with the others helping to call the shots and discuss candidates,” McLellan commented, somewhat condescendingly. As the executive secretary of the American GI Forum and located in Austin, Ed Idar Jr. was positioned to be an effective conduit between the Mexican American left and other liberal political constituencies in Texas. While Hector P. García was the undisputed head and founder of the American GI Forum, his headquarters were located in Corpus Christi, Texas. The American GI Forum’s location in the heart of South Texas was important because it represented a Mexican American stronghold in Texas. However, the organization wanted to reach outside the traditionally Mexican areas of the state and was also interested in developing its political relationships beyond the Mexican American community. In connecting with the TSFL, the American GI Forum was attempting to solidly establish itself amongst the liberal political establishment in the state. At the beginning of 1954, Idar informed García of office space opening up in the Littlefield Building in Austin, Texas. He proposed that the American GI Forum relocate their Austin offices into this space, as it was “better known” than their current situation. Furthermore, the tenants of the Littlefield Building included “Judge Yarborough, the AFL, the Mexican Consulate, Piñedo and Longoria (who has moved here also), and a number of people that we have frequent contact with.”44 Idar envisioned that such easy and convenient contact with the other tenants would facilitate stronger alliances and also establish the American GI Forum among the other Texas liberal political voices of the day.45 190

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With these maneuvers Idar sought to broaden and multiply new relationships outside the Mexican community as well as to challenge the American GI Forum’s dependence on existing political alliances. In a stormy letter to Hector García in May of 1954, when it seemed that García was trying to question the wisdom of attending an anti-Communist conference to be held in Mexico City, Idar criticized what he saw as García’s overreliance on US Senator Lyndon Johnson for advice. In response to García’s objections, Idar first dismissed Johnson and his staff ’s full understanding of the proposed conference. “They [US embassy officials] will have far more information than you can get from any of Johnson’s clerks who half the time don’t know their ass from you know what.”46 With this critique of Senator Johnson’s clueless staff, Idar was also criticizing García’s overreliance on Johnson and “your constant running to him every time you are unsure about something. There’s other sources for information besides him and more sincere at that.” In Idar’s estimation, Johnson could not be fully trusted because he was always motivated by his own agenda: “Half the time you don’t know whether he is giving you the truth or not anyway since everything he does is tinged from the angle of whether it is going to help him or not.”47 Idar not only criticized García’s judgment in trusting Johnson’s advice so implicitly, he also believed his own connections were more legitimate and valuable. Idar backed his own connections and channels of information, much of it going back to Andy McLellan.48

Building Relationships with the Immigration and Naturalization Service For the American GI Forum and the TSFL, their dual goals of stopping illegal migration and making inroads against Texas’s conservative political scene coalesced against the figure of Texas governor Allan Shivers. Shivers, the head of the political establishment in Texas, also owned a vast agricultural plantation in the Rio Grande Valley, which his wife had inherited after her father’s death.49 Shivers epitomized Texas grower power. McLellan and Idar saw in the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the Border Patrol an avenue to break up the cronyism between government and agricultural interests in the state. To that end, representatives from the American GI Forum and organized labor assiduously wrote to federal officials in Washington, DC, in the Department of Justice and the Department of Labor to try to influence immigration policy and the bracero program, 191

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with very little obvious success. More important, Idar and McLellan tried to cultivate closer relations with INS officials at the state level, frequently meeting with them and publicly endorsing Border Patrol policies. They hoped that the Border Patrol would move decisively away from the deference shown to growers in the past, and toward a more aggressive border control strategy in the name of national security. The American GI Forum and TSFL’s vision of a more rigidly enforced USMexico border climaxed with the Border Patrol’s 1954 Operation Wetback, which both organizations heartily endorsed. Both constituencies believed that the shift in Border Patrol policing and the massive deportation campaign would solve the economic and social problems caused by illegal migration. A supplementary piece to What Price published by the TSFL in 1955 focused almost exclusively on the deportation campaign of the previous summer and predicted the transformation of labor relations as a result. “There is no major wetback problem today,” the report touted. “The task of ridding the U.S. of its heavy wetback population, rated as an absolute impossibility by a great number of people a little more than a year ago, was accomplished by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service in June and July, 1954.”50 Despite this very public celebration of the Border Patrol’s militaristic deportation campaign as a vindication of their own policy proposals, members of organized labor and the American GI Forum worried that their trust in the Border Patrol was perhaps misplaced, especially when they learned of very pro-business remarks that INS commissioner General Joseph Swing had delivered to a room full of agricultural industry reps in Dallas. The American GI Forum maneuvered itself into the position of being the most vocal defender of the Border Patrol and the process of deportation in general by drawing too direct a line between Mexican immigration to the United States and Mexican Americans’ continued economic, social, and racial marginalization. In taking this position, middle-class Mexican American civil rights organizations and labor unions in Texas gave up precious rhetorical space to the growers, the exploiters of Mexican workers. It was the extremely low wages growers paid that kept workers in dire poverty and suffering, yet the growers took the incredibly ironic position of protesting the harshness of Border Patrol practices and the violence of the deportation process, protestations that they made for very self-serving reasons. This upending of expected rhetorical positions on the immigration debate was part of the racializing of Mexican immigrants. By framing Mexican immigration as the primary culprit for Mexican American poverty, disease, 192

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and marginalization, the American GI Forum, and to a lesser extent the TSFL, insisted on making the border a more meaningful dividing line. Activists such as Idar and McLellan correctly pointed out that employers used workers’ illegal status and vulnerability to limit workers’ mobility and forced them to accept inhumane wages and working and living conditions. In their assessment, however, they believed the solution to this problem of exploitation lay in closing the border to further migration and deporting Mexicans who were illegally in the United States. In advocating such a hard line on undocumented migration and championing projects of mass deportation, these activists left the growers the room to rhetorically position themselves as protecting the workers from Border Patrol abuse. That positioning was in line with the paternalist self-image that many growers adopted, a process that further racialized Mexican migrant workers. Growers’ positioning also accorded with their oft-voiced and diversionary contention that Mexican migrants suffered the most abuse at the hands of their racial compatriots, rather than from their paternalistic Anglo employers. In taking such a stance on immigration, which was very much in line with the views of other liberal groups of the day, the American GI Forum committed a grievous strategic mistake.51 They overestimated their ability to use the national fear of Communist infiltration to close the border to migration, they overestimated their influence with the Border Patrol, and in the process they helped to further criminalize and pathologize Mexican migrants and Mexican migration. By the time that Idar and McLellan published their pamphlet at the end of 1953, both men had worked to cultivate good relations with the INS, specifically with John Holland, director of the San Antonio district. It is clear that even before Holland succeeded William A. Whalen, longtime San Antonio district director, on September 1, 1951, the American GI Forum had already established contact with him. While he was still an INS enforcement officer of the San Antonio district, Holland wrote to Hector García informing him that he might have to miss the American GI Forum’s annual convention and coronation ball, though he had previously agreed to attend. INS Commissioner Mackey had called for Holland to be in Washington, DC, earlier that week, and Holland was unsure whether he would be back in Texas in time to attend the festivities. “In the event I am able to return to Texas in time, you may rest assured that I shall be present.”52 The correspondence suggested that contact between the leadership of the American GI Forum and Holland was of some duration, and Holland ended the letter with some 193

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news that was probably pleasing to Dr. García: “You might be interested in knowing that effective September 1, 1951, I will become the District Director of the San Antonio District of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.” Ed Idar Jr. and Andrew McLellan carefully developed their relationship with John Holland over the next few years. Correspondence from each of the men was rife with mentions of meetings with Holland to discuss politics, the labor situation, and the bracero program. For example, in a letter to Jerry Holleman, Andrew McLellan reported having a “nice visit” with Holland, Ed Idar, and “two other directors of the Forum.”53 One of the topics of conversation was the upcoming congressional race for the Fifteenth District, and McLellan teased Holleman about a possible candidate for that race: “Tell John not to worry; we have a candidate, if he will run, and I’m sure you’ll all find him acceptable . . . He dislikes the same people we do, but in a much bigger way.”54 That McLellan and Idar would initiate such a conversation in the presence of the INS district director, even if in a casual way, seems to indicate a surprising level of intimacy with the immigration chief. Both McLellan and Idar clearly hoped that in nurturing close relations with the INS, they could influence Border Patrol policy to more closely coincide with their overall aims to stop the illegal migration of Mexicans across the border. While Holland might run some risks if growers and the political establishment perceived him to be too close to organized labor and Mexican American activists, he must have believed that he and the Border Patrol benefited from such relationships. One manifestation of their accord was in the way these groups publicly defended the Border Patrol and its mission. In addition to the very positive treatment that the Border Patrol received in What Price, Idar continued to support the actions of the Border Patrol as a vital and positive force in stopping illegal migration into the United States. In a letter to Senator Price Daniel, Idar downplayed accusations made of the Border Patrol’s harshness in their treatment of migrants in the bus lifts that they operated in 1953. We would like to make emphasis of the significant fact that all public criticisms of harshness and discrimination and mistreatment by immigration authorities in handling and deporting illegal aliens always come from those sources which stand to profit from the existence in large number of illegal workers. You never hear those protestations coming from the people of Mexico or the Mexican government or from American citizens of Mexican descent or the organizations that represent them.55 194

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By taking such a stand, Idar made the exact point that Border Patrol officials did not then have to make for themselves. Idar’s and the American GI Forum’s defense gave the Border Patrol cover against increasingly aggressive and militaristic tactics in deportations. Idar defended the Border Patrol’s use of bus lifts and airlifts because, he argued, “when he [the migrant] is merely dumped across the river, in some border city, it is easier for him to try illegal entry again rather than return to his home in the interior.”56 Idar did not reflect on the violent nature of either “dumping” people across the border or transporting people far into the interior of Mexico, with little regard for where the migrants might be from. Even though the INS benefited from the public support of the American GI Forum, which could shield the Border Patrol from accusations of cruelty, abuse, and racial bias, INS officials were also wary of appearing too closely connected with organizations such as the TSFL or the American GI Forum. After the publication of What Price, McLellan went into the field once again to collect more data for a follow-up piece, which would be published in 1955 as “Down in the Valley,” a supplement and reflection on the aftermath of Operation Wetback. In a letter to Jerry Holleman, McLellan reported that the Border Patrol was cooperating with his data collection, though Holland had urged McLellan to use caution in his maneuverings, a warning that McLellan took in good stead. “The situation here is delicate and Holland does not want to stick his neck out and I think that is perfectly understandable.”57 Though reluctant to be seen publicly facilitating McLellan’s research, Holland did share some information about continuing raids on Governor Shivers’s Shary Farms. McLellan supposed he could look up his contact in Mission, Texas, Officer Sabin, to get a more precise schedule for their raids so that he could arrange to be nearby and witness the action. “We could easily be driving along about the time the raid is being made and see for ourselves how the Patrol operates.”58 The caution notwithstanding, McLellan and Idar must have felt that their influence had been effective once the news of the INS deportation campaign, Operation Wetback, was announced for the entire US-Mexico border in 1954. In outlining the operation scheduled to begin in California, INS commissioner General Joseph Swing and US attorney general Herbert Brownell assumed much of the rhetoric that Idar and McLellan had used to define illegal migration and migrants as a threat to the United States. Because trumpeting the impending deportation campaign in the news beforehand formed part of the Border Patrol’s strategy, both to encourage 195

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growers to abandon their undocumented labor force and hire domestic workers and to induce undocumented workers to self-deport and return to Mexico, interested observers of the Border Patrol’s campaign had plenty of time to anticipate its arrival in South Texas. McLellan especially seemed to view the imminent arrival of the Border Patrol campaign with delight. He wrote to Holleman in June 1954 informing him that “South Texas newspapers” estimated that the Border Patrol task force would be rolling in with men and machinery before July 15.59 “The heat is on and already boll weevils like Jim Griffin are advising farmers to get rid of the wets,” McLellan wrote gleefully.60 McLellan was intensely aware of the implications of Operation Wetback for the Texas political scene and even seemed to believe that these politics informed INS officials’ decision-making in executing it. McLellan had met and spoken with General Swing and “felt sure that the General was cognizant of the political situation in Texas,” he shared with Holleman, though he had to admit, “it was never brought directly into the conversation.”61 He could be more certain about Holland, however. “Knowing Holland as I do . . . I am convinced that they are doing all in their power to give us, at least, a terrific moral boost.”62 McLellan felt he detected such a shift in attitude by the Border Patrol in the words and actions of General Swing. “Swing has already stated that he doesn’t give a dam [sic] about the cotton harvest or any scarcity of domestic or contract labor. He has given the Valley farmers enough time to get their own house in order, and the clean-up will be a complete one.”63 McLellan hoped that Operation Wetback would not only stop employers’ use of undocumented labor in South Texas for the harvest season, but also fundamentally challenge the right that employers in South Texas felt they had to gain access to and hire undocumented workers. Such a shift, McLellan believed, would permanently disrupt grower power economically and especially politically, and thus disrupt the bases of power that supported state politicians such as Governor Allan Shivers and Attorney General John Ben Sheppard. Seeing Operation Wetback as a boon to activists’ political aspirations in the state to shift the balance of power, McLellan did everything possible to bring these issues before the national media. National outlets had covered the deportation raids in California, but many had already left the scene by the time the special units were making their way to Texas. Milton Plumb, the publicity director for the Congress of Industrial Organizations, had covered the California deportations but had informed McLellan that he 196

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was returning to Washington before the beginning of the Texas campaign.64 McLellan proposed that Holleman get radio host Frank Edwards to go down to the Valley and cover the raids and deportations. “I myself would like to cover part of it with the camera, but think that it would be far more effective if Edwards was brought into the picture.”65 As a radio personality who hosted a popular national program sponsored by the American Federation of Labor on the Mutual Broadcasting System, Frank Edwards covering the Border Patrol deportations would have brought the kind of national attention that McLellan craved.66 He felt that Operation Wetback provided the opportunity to attack the roots of grower power in South Texas. As he informed Holleman, “The deposition story broke here yesterday with the Monitor giving upper-fold prominence to the story. A number of people in this area are shocked . . . Somebody had better start lowering the boom now while interest will be running high.”67 The deposition story in question was about Governor Shivers’s sale of land for $425,000 to defendants of a lawsuit who were accused of engaging in fraudulent land sales. Positioned right next to the newspaper story of the governor’s deposition and the issue of corrupt land sale practices was a story about the start of Operation Wetback and its prospective move into South Texas. The juxtaposition of these two stories was most suggestive and highlighted McLellan’s hopes for an end to the system of grower power in Texas.68 Judging from this correspondence in anticipation of the Border Patrol’s arrival, McLellan seemed to be as interested in how Operation Wetback could benefit him politically, by sullying the liberals’ chief adversary, as in the prospect that the campaign would help destroy a system that he and Idar had argued had led to so many people’s oppression and misery. The American GI Forum launched its own public campaign to support the Border Patrol’s deportation efforts in South Texas. INS chief John Holland traded on his history and relationship with groups such as the American GI Forum and LULAC to seek their public support. In letters to each, Holland asked them to help with the operation by urging their Mexican American members to counter any negative reports of Border Patrol behavior by people intent on injuring “the good relations existing between this Service and the Spanish speaking residents of this area.”69 Ed Idar Jr. sent a message to all American GI Forum chapters informing members about the impending deportation campaign and urged them to cooperate and show restraint if they were questioned about their immigration status.70 Despite these precautions, the intensity and chaos of the operation did lead 197

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to instances of attacks on Mexican American citizens. In response to such accounts, covered heavily in local newspapers, the American GI Forum retained the services of attorneys and fellow forum members Virgilio Roel and Robert “Bob” Sanchez to investigate such accounts and “protect the rights of American citizens of Mexican extraction who may get into difficulties with the Border Patrol.”71

Conclusion: Transnational Labor and Immigration Politics The coalition-building efforts of the American GI Forum and the TSFL coincided with the reemergence of attempts by the TSFL’s parent organization, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), to build a hemispheric labor organization that would encompass the countries in North, Central, and South America.72 The basis of these plans was fundamentally anti-Communist, with the AFL expending much of its institution-building energy engaging in nation-building efforts throughout Latin America. This agenda did not always endear the AFL to Latin American labor organizations, many of whom accused the AFL of being in lockstep with the American government, and not pursuing an independent path, as they claimed. The AFL’s intense focus on countering Communism in Latin American countries by promoting AFL-allied labor unions blinded it to really considering ways that the AFL and Mexican counterparts could work together on the issue of Mexican migrants’ transnational labor experiences. The approach that the AFL took in Latin America, building bases of support on ties of anti-Communism, had patterns similar to the TSFL–American GI Forum coalition, raising the possibility that McLellan’s work in South Texas was part of the AFL’s larger Latin American strategy. The AFL began aggressively constructing a hemispheric labor organization in the postwar era and came into immediate conflict with Vicente Lombardo Toledano, the head of the Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos (CTM), Mexico’s largest labor federation. Lombardo Toledano had himself chaired a multicountry labor federation, the Latin American Workers’ Confederation, in 1938. While the Latin American Workers’ Confederation did maintain ties with US organized labor, specifically the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the AFL refused to participate because of the presence of Communist unions in the confederation.73 After the end of World War II, the AFL empowered Serafino Romualdi as its Latin American representative to travel throughout Latin America and organize an AFL-led labor 198

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confederation based on the principles of anti-Communist business unionism. Romualdi, an Italian-American immigrant, was already very familiar with Latin America and had worked with the US Office of Inter-American Affairs to undertake anti-Fascist propaganda campaigns among Italian and German immigrant communities in Latin America during World War II.74 After one short-lived hemispheric coalition collapsed, the AFL was finally able to establish a permanent presence through the Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers (ORIT), founded in 1951.75 The AFL’s methods of promoting “free trade unions” in Latin America took the form of nation-building activities. The AFL, and later the AFL-CIO, worked with the US State Department and big business to establish free trade unions and to exclude Communists and other leftists from taking root in the labor movements in Latin America.76 In his memoir Romualdi later explained, “As free trade unionists, we were convinced that our efforts to reach the millions of Latin Americans suffering under the yoke of military dictatorships would be futile unless and until the democratic nations of the hemisphere, particularly the United States, were willing to demonstrate through their actions their friendship and alliance with the oppressed—not the oppressors.” These interventions often took the form of opposition to leftist governments. Such work discomfited many labor leaders who felt that these policies were overly interventionist and represented US continued meddling in the political affairs of Latin American sovereign nations. AFL relations with two of the largest Mexican labor federations, the CTM and the Regional Confederation of Mexican Labor, continued to founder on these questions throughout the 1950s.77 The US AFL and Mexican CTM attempted to mend fences in 1953 and organized a series of conferences in Mexico in 1953 and 1954 with the stated goal of addressing the Mexican migration problem. Though an initial meeting between the top brass in the AFL and CTM remained secret, Jerry Holleman, at the time a representative for the TSFL, speculated that the two organizations would publicly make recommendations to “check the tide of wetbacks and strengthen the bracero program.” Though unable to provide specifics, he conjectured that such recommendations might include forming an “International Bracero labor union.”78 These plans seemed to imitate earlier efforts to organize braceros in California, which began with the worker-initiated organization La Alianza.79 Leaders from La Alianza began working with Ernesto Galarza, a labor leader associated with the National Farm Labor Union, an AFL affiliate in 199

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California.80 As Mireya Loza has shown, however, the Alianza faced considerable opposition from the Mexican government for its attempts to organize braceros against mandates in the bracero agreement prohibiting union organizing. She questions whether the Mexican government–allied CTM had genuine plans to organize braceros, a process that might destabilize the program that the Mexican government was committed to keeping in place, arguing that “although Fidel Velasquez spoke in favor of organizing guest workers, the CTM did nothing concrete to carry this out.”81 Perhaps blinded by too-close ties to their respective governments, the AFL and the CTM could never seriously grapple with the underlying issues implied in the “problem of Mexican migration.” The large problems of structural economic inequalities between nations were well beyond their capacity to address. However, even places of possible collaboration—transnational labor organizing, coordinated attempts to pressure both governments to reform the bracero program—seemed beyond their reach. The AFL’s intense focus on anti-Communist nation building in Latin America tended to alienate the large Mexican federations. Andrew McLellan’s hopes that the publication of What Price, Wetbacks? would heighten the TSFL’s international bona fides and make the organization a serious player in a new transnational labor dialogue only partially materialized. Andrew McLellan did come to be completely embedded in the AFL-CIO Latin American project, first becoming an ORIT field officer reporting to Serafino Romualdi, and then succeeding Romualdi as AFL-CIO Latin American representative when Romualdi gave up that post.82 The TSFL and the American GI Forum had their own complex agendas and plans that did not always mesh smoothly with each other. Though often proclaiming that they were each other’s “best friends,” their methods and goals were not identical. The two organizations continued to work together in the future, on voter drives, for example, but the collaboration that occurred on What Price was not repeated. They found the most common ground on their mutual anti-Communist liberal politics. The other issue they could agree on was the conviction that undocumented migration posed a great threat to American labor and had to be stopped. Those two points of commonality converged in the production of What Price, Wetbacks?, which framed undocumented migration as a threat to the social and economic well-being of the American people and a possible Communist threat to the very foundation of the US system of government. The long-term effects of this position continued to place a weighty burden 200

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on migrants, who shouldered a disproportionate portion of the blame for a larger transnational system. Efforts to stop the movement of undocumented migration through increased deportations had only temporary success during Operation Wetback. Undocumented immigrants felt the most impact as they became increasingly seen as criminals and the border itself seen as a dangerous place, open to all radical subversives and potential attackers.

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Epilogue

T

he American GI Forum experienced criticism for its part in the publication of What Price, Wetbacks? Some of its members felt uncomfortable about the portrayal of undocumented migrants, and several local chapters debated the pamphlet’s merits during their meetings.1 They responded to the callous language used to describe Mexican migrants, judging these descriptions to be at variance with protestations about migrants’ distressing conditions of poverty and exploitation. The leadership of the American GI Forum was so enmeshed in the intertwined World War II and Cold War politics of citizenship, national belonging, and the optimism of a newly emergent Mexican American middle class that they did not fully appreciate the effects that the pamphlet and its writers’ position on immigration might have. As historian Ignacio García has observed, the pamphlet did not end the bracero program or stop undocumented migration.2 But it did contribute to anti-Mexican nativism in the United States and the perception that Mexican migration was a significant social problem. And it left an unsettling legacy for subsequent generations to grapple with. 202

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The cultural nationalism of the Chicano Movement—while mostly focused on the experiences of Mexican Americans in the United States—decentered the mental geography of the nation enough to allow for a new position on Mexican migration. One of the first Chicano-oriented organizations to redefine a Mexican American position on immigration was CASA, the Centro Acción Social Autónomo, which advocated a pro-immigrant position based on a politics of working-class solidarity.3 Based first in Los Angeles, CASA locals spread to Texas, Colorado, Washington, and Illinois.4 Their organizing principles found voice in a slogan, “Somos un Pueblo sin Fronteras” (We Are a People without Borders), and offered direct services for undocumented immigrants.5 By the mid-1970s most Mexican American organizations had shifted their position on immigration, including undocumented immigration. In 1975, the Texas-based Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund sued Texas schools who were denying undocumented children access to public education, facilitated by the passage of a state law that cut off state funds for students who were not citizens or legal residents of the state.6 The US Supreme Court ruled in this case, Plyler v. Doe, that denying children access to an education on the basis of their citizenship status was unconstitutional.7 Such moves reflected a shift to a broader definition of civil rights that included advocacy for the rights of undocumented immigrants. The increasing militarization of the border in the late twentieth century and the steroidization of the Border Patrol have not resolved the struggle between local and state forces and the federal government over the control of immigration enforcement. Though the federal government still retains the exclusive power to pass immigration legislation and to manage its enforcement, it is still true that immigrants live and work in local and state jurisdictions. Based on their own politics, local and state governments have created spaces that have either tried to offer sanctuary to immigrants and mitigate the federal government’s enforcement reach in those locales, or far exceeded the federal government’s enforcement practices to create a hostile environment for immigrants. Immigrants continue to live in spaces shaped by the policies of law enforcement, even when immigration law enforcement is not literally on the scene. More recently, however, immigration authorities have meshed with local law enforcement to have a daily presence in the jails of most cities and counties. The sanctuary movement emerged in the 1980s in response to increased immigration from Central Americans fleeing war and violence in their home 203

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countries. Immigrant advocates from nongovernmental organizations and churches treated Central American migrants as refugees even though the federal government did not offer them that designation. Nongovernmental organizations and churches opened spaces of refuge to these migrants and used moral arguments to make the case that Central American migrants deserved protection from the privations of war as well as from US immigration law enforcement actions. They invoked a religious tradition of refuge, a history of abolitionism, and the Underground Railroad as instances in which people could engage in morally justifiable actions, even if they were illegal, in order to counter immoral and unjust laws.8 Over time, cities took up the idea and language of sanctuary to respond to the broader issue of immigration in their jurisdiction. Trying to deal with the reality of immigration in the United States—the fact that large numbers of undocumented migrants lived and worked in communities all across the United States, often without avenues to make claims upon an unresponsive and overburdened immigration system—these municipalities recognized the contributions that these immigrants made as community residents and the lives they built for themselves and their families. Although very different from the paternalistic farmers of the mid-twentieth century, cities that declared themselves sanctuary cities attempted to provide spaces of protection for the undocumented residents in their midst. On the other hand, cities and states that felt threatened by increasing numbers of immigrants to their areas used their power to drum out undocumented migrants from their locales. Feeling increasingly frustrated at the perceived inaction by the federal government enforcing immigration laws and stopping undocumented migration, states beginning with Arizona began to pass laws that would multiply the enforcement and surveillance power over migrants. Arizona’s draconian SB 1070 empowered local law enforcement to track down and interrogate Latinos/as about their immigration status. Other states quickly followed Arizona’s lead. Various federal administrations have attempted to establish their superior legal claim over immigration issues and thus their control over immigration vis-à-vis local municipalities and state governments. The Obama administration attempted to beat back harsh anti-immigrant measures by state governments, and now more recently, the Trump administration is trying to undermine sanctuary cities. While those efforts have met with varying success, the patchwork of immigrants’ experiences in various areas has differed

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greatly according to the political climate in each locale, belying the notion that immigration is solely the purview of the federal government.

And now to return to the border. In 2010, I met Alberto Magallan in the parking lot of the Walmart on Shary Road, near the Burger King. He had offered to take me across the border to meet his cousin Noe. When I pulled up, I saw him leaving the nearby Baskin-Robbins with an ice cream in his hand. He was wearing a tan pair of Wrangler slacks, a tan, long-sleeved shirt, well-pressed, and a tan straw cowboy hat. He had dressed up for a meeting with his cousin in Rancho Grande, on the south side of the Rio Grande. He asked if I was bringing anyone with me. I said, “No, it’s just me.” He seemed a bit surprised, as if he had expected me to bring someone. He responded, “You are a very trusting young lady.” I thought it was interesting because just the day before, my mother had expressed some nervousness that I would be traveling to Reynosa alone with him, and I heard her whisper to my father that maybe he should go with me, but he said he didn’t have a passport. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 instituted new requirements for US citizens to carry passports for travel to and from Mexico, a precondition that had just kicked in on January 1, 2009.9 Such documentation had not been necessary before for casual, everyday travel across the border, and lacking passports, my parents were cut off from the trips to Reynosa or Las Flores that had formed part of their daily lives in the past. My mother, like many other Mexican Americans along the border, had been unable to receive a passport because her birth at home by a midwife in South Texas in the 1940s rather than in a hospital made her claim to citizenship suspect in the eyes of the federal government, and too easily open to fraud.10 Carelessness on the part of officials often led to typographical errors in registering the births of Mexican American children. My mother’s birth certificate lists her as male, which has been an additional barrier to her acquiring a passport. We drove across the bridge from Granjeno, Texas, to Rancho Grande, Tamaulipas, Mexico. We paid the $2.25 toll to get onto the bridge. It is very long but narrow, two lanes on each side. It begins about a mile, maybe more, north of the Rio Grande and spans about a mile south of the same river. At the time of our crossing in January 2010, the Anzalduas Bridge had opened only a month earlier and provided a third international link between

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McAllen and Reynosa. Built on the western edge of both metropolitan zones, which had a combined population of 1.4 million, the Anzalduas Bridge was intended to lighten the traffic on the main international bridge linking Hidalgo to downtown Reynosa.11 The three international bridges handle the daily traffic of tourists, shoppers, workers, and semitrucks hauling their cargo into the United States. Four hundred and seventy-five acres of the land on the US side to build the bridge had been donated by the Hunt Corporation, a large oil and gas conglomerate that had acquired much of the farmland north of Granjeno in the 1970s. Part of Hunt’s far-flung real estate holdings, the six-thousandacre Sharyland Plantation is touted on Hunt’s website as “one of the largest master-planned, mixed-use developments on the Texas-Mexico border.”12 After the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) the company constructed the Sharyland Business Park, an industrial park built to accommodate the needs of large international corporations with maquiladora factories located on the south side of the Rio Grande. Companies such as Motorola, Panasonic, and Black and Decker have warehousing facilities and management offices in Sharyland Business Park.13 Sharyland Plantation now inhabits the same land once developed by John Shary in the 1910s and 1920s, when he promised to create a new agricultural empire from the wilderness of the US-Mexico border. The NAFTA-fueled development, of which Anzalduas Bridge forms a part of the emergent infrastructure, is but the latest capitalist transformation of the US-Mexico border. Alberto pointed out the new border wall built right up against the levee about a mile or two north of the border. It looked brand new, built of whitish-gray concrete, but it didn’t seem very imposing when viewed from the distance of the bridge. The Secure Fence Act of 2006 directed the secretary of state to “provide at least two layers of reinforced fencing” at specific points along the US-Mexico border, including from “fifteen miles northwest of the Laredo, Texas, port of entry to the Brownsville, Texas, port of entry.” Construction of the border fencing varies along the border, but at Granjeno it is a thick, gray concrete wall. The wall was completed in early 2009, against the wishes of most of the three hundred residents of the small town. The levee is high, and then just to the other side, to the south, is a large, low floodplain, a vast open area leading up to the brush and trees bordering the river. The long bridge, made of silver steel, white-gray concrete, and silver chain-link fencing, travels above that floodplain, which was a muted brown in the winter afternoon. Alberto mentioned as we were still crossing, 206

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“We used to go hunting all around here.” He also informed me that the bridge goes over the land that used to belong to his cousin Noe, the man we were traveling to see. Noe used to plant watermelon on that land right next to the border, with access to water from the river. Once we crossed into Mexico, we had to pass through a high-tech system that photographs the car and flashes either a green light or red. If it flashes red, your car will be inspected. If it is green, you can go through. It flashed green. “Good, we can go,” Alberto said with a touch of relief. We made our way slowly through the inspection apparatus and approached a group of uniformed, armed men. We stopped and waved at them, and they waved us through. “Federal soldiers,” he said. They were not wearing olive-green fatigues, however, but black cargo pants and tight black T-shirts. We made our way to a narrow highway that leads back north to the river, the sign indicating that it leads to the Ribereño. That carretera hugs the river all along from Matamoros to the east to Nuevo Laredo to the west. As we passed by a thicket that was just hiding an old backstop, Alberto said he used to come to Rancho Grande all the time to play baseball. He played as a teenager and then again when he returned to the area after he retired from the air force. At that time, he sponsored a team. “What was it called?” I asked. “Magallan Brothers.” There was an amateur league, and teams from across the river in Texas would play teams just south of the river. We passed by quite a bit of new construction on the south side of the highway. There is housing and what looks like a brand-new school and a hospital. On the left, near the river, is an entrance to a maquiladora. The tall industrial building can be seen from the highway. We traveled about a mile until we got to a colonia, which is Rancho Grande. It is not the original settlement of Rancho Grande. The original rancho was right along the river, and not the half mile to mile or so distant that it is now. We turned up a road to the right. It is packed caliche, and the little side roads are very rough and uneven. We turned down another street, and after asking at the convenience store, we found Noe Magallan’s house, tucked within a large enclosure that also includes a mechanic shop and house belonging to his son. I conducted the interview in his backyard in the early afternoon. During the talk, he shared some stories about the changes he had been witnessing in the seemingly quiet colonia. He talked about the time he heard commotion outside at two o’clock in the morning. He peeked out from behind the curtains and saw, not far from his house, several cars pulled up at the four-way stop. A group 207

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of men emerged from their cars and changed into what seemed to him like military uniforms. They then jumped back into their vehicles and sped away at top speed. These interviews took place just a few months before the city of Reynosa was rent by all-out war between two previously allied drug cartels. The Gulf Cartel and its paramilitary arm, the Zetas, began to compete with each other over the northeastern drug-trafficking corridor, with conflict between the two erupting into battles in the streets of cities and towns all over northeastern Mexico, including Reynosa. This violence increased exponentially over the intervening years, disrupting local governments and commerce and movement between Mexico and the United States.14 On the way back across, after paying the $2.50 toll to return to the United States, we waited at US Customs. There were not many cars, but the line moved slowly. It looked like the inspector was berating the occupants of the car before us in line. He seemed to be speaking at great length and with some intensity. Once we were finally in front of the officer, we handed over our passports. The inspector, a middle-aged Mexican American man, swiped the passports through a machine, looked inside the trunk of the car, asked us what we had been doing in Mexico, and then waved us through. We ended the afternoon by driving to Anzalduas Park, located right along the river, just west of the town of Granjeno. Upon entering the park, we drove past the end of the border wall and what looked like a Border Patrol blind. As we slowly snaked our way around the park, we saw a park on the other side, La Playita, directly across the river, separated by a wall and two sets of federal authorities, and connected by three miles of bridge.

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Notes

In trod u cti on 1. This story is taken from Carrol Norquest’s unpublished manuscript, “The

Swarming of the Wetbacks,” shared by his son Kelly Norquest. In addition to his unpublished stories, Carrol Norquest published a book of stories about agricultural life and work in South Texas during the mid-twentieth century, titled Rio Grande Wetbacks: Mexican Migrant Workers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972). 2. Carrol Norquest, “They Flushed Like Quail,” in “The Swarming of the Wetbacks” (unpublished typewritten manuscript, n.d.). 3. Norquest, “Swarming of the Wetbacks.” 4. For a recent legal history that explores the making of immigration law on the ground, see S. Deborah Kang, The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917–1954 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). See also Hiroshi Motomura, Immigration Outside the Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 5. See Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 6. Donna Gabaccia and Franca Iovetta, eds., Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2002). 7. Kenyon Zimmer, Immigrants against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015); Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 112–121; Natalia Molina, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 91–111. 8. This expectation is what legal scholar Hiroshi Motomura has called “Americans in waiting.” Hiroshi Motomura, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of

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Immigration and Citizenship in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 9. Theodore Roosevelt, “America for Americans,” speech delivered in St. Louis, May 31, 1916, transcript, http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research /txtspeeches/672.pdf. 10. Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Eithne Luibhéid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Douglas Baynton, Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 11. To understand the culturally regenerative effects of immigration on Mexican American community formation, as well as the ways in which nativity and citizenship status became places of fissure in Mexican American political organizing, see David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). In George J. Sánchez’s history of Mexican American Los Angeles, he identifies the repatriation campaigns of the 1930s as an important turning point in the transformation of a Mexican-identified community to a Mexican American cultural and political identification. George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). In Vicki Ruiz’s history of Mexican American women, Mexican women’s experiences crossing the US-Mexico border and negotiating Progressive Era Americanization programs often aimed at women exemplified their resilience and adaptive resources. Vicki Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 12. Oscar Handlin is the exemplar of the assimilation argument. See Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951). Of course the field of European migration history has changed a great deal over the years, rejecting the assimilationist model, such as with John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), and then reassessing assimilation from a critical perspective, with the very influential whiteness studies. For a good historiography of the concept of assimilation see Russell A. Kazal, “Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept in American Ethnic History,” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (April 1995): 437–471. 13. Aristide Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 14. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 2. 15. For work theorizing deportation as a global phenomenon, see Nicholas De

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Genova and Nathalie Peutz, eds., The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 16. Lytle Hernández, Migra!, 45–46. 17. Lytle Hernández, Migra!, 5. 18. Lytle Hernández, Migra!, 9. 19. Lytle Hernández, Migra!, 41. 20. Luibhéid, Entry Denied, xi–xiii. 21. Examples of works emphasizing the growing power of the state and rigidity of the border are: Timothy Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1978–1992: Low-Intensity Conflict Doctrine Comes Home (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996); Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (New York: Routledge, 2002); and Luibhéid, Entry Denied. A group of works on state power and public health destabilize the location of the border, finding it in immigrant urban areas, but nonetheless emphasize the power of the government to mark immigrants as outsiders. See Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); see also John McKiernan-González, Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the TexasMexico Border, 1848–1942 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 22. The following are examples of works that highlight the complex processes of migration as resistance to the ordering power of the nation-state, contesting the line: Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); and Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries. While these works view migrations as forms of resisting and undermining the border, they do not discount the power and importance of the border as a force. For another work that emphasizes the fluidity of the US-Mexico border see Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 23. Exceptions to this view are scholars of late capitalist globalization, who have pointed to the supranational power of corporations, beyond the bounds of accountability of the nation-state, as well as to global information networks like the internet, also transcending national boundaries. See Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). See also Manfred Steger, ed., Globalization: The Greatest Hits, A Global Studies Reader (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010). 24. Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 25. See David FitzGerald, “Inside the Sending State: The Politics of Mexican Emigration Control,” International Migration Review 40, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 259–293; and FitzGerald, A Nation of Emigrants: How Mexico Manages Its Migration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

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N o t es to Pag e s 8 – 1 0 26. On the presence and influence of Mexican consulates in US Mexican communi-

ties, see Francisco Balderrama, In Defense of La Raza: The Los Angeles Mexican Consulate and the Mexican Community, 1929 to 1939 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982); and Gilbert González, Mexican Consuls and Labor Organizing: Imperial Politics in the American Southwest (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999). For a work connecting Mexican American civil rights activists and the Mexican government during World War II, see Emilio Zamora, Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009). 27. John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 28. Operation Hold the Line refers to a 1993 Border Patrol initiative at El Paso, Texas, that involved aggregating officers and technology to shore up enforcement in this highly populated border-crossing pathway and to push migrants toward the more treacherous and less populated mountainous desert terrain near Arizona. For more on Border Patrol practices in the 1990s and beyond, see Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond. 29. Linda C. Majka and Theo J. Majka, Farm Workers, Agribusiness, and the State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982). 30. Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story: An Account of the Managed Migration of Mexican Farm Workers in California, 1942–1960 (Charlotte, NC: McNally and Loftin, 1964). 31. Lytle Hernández, Migra!, 10. 32. Two other recent works have also dealt with agricultural labor and the border in South Texas: John Weber, From South Texas to the Nation: The Exploitation of Mexican Labor in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2015); and Timothy Paul Bowman, Blood Oranges: Colonialism and Agriculture in the South Texas Borderlands (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2016). 33. Devra Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 2. 34. Emilio Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993). 35. Ana Elizabeth Rosas, Abrazando el Espiritú: Bracero Families Confront the USMexico Border (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Deborah Cohen, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); and Mireya Loza, Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 36. Otey Scruggs, Braceros, “Wetbacks,” and the Farm Labor Problem: Mexican Agricultural Labor in the United States, 1942–1954 (New York: Garland, 1988), 155–161. 37. The stipulation of paying the prevailing wage was meant to address the Mexican

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government’s determination that braceros should not be used to displace domestic agricultural workers and depress wages. Also, the minimum-wage rate of thirty cents per hour was a feature of the original bracero agreement of 1942. This minimum-wage guarantee changed over time during subsequent bracero negotiations. 38. For a list of all the elements of the 1942 bracero agreement, see Scruggs, Braceros, “Wetbacks,” and Farm Labor, 178–179. 39. Richard Craig, The Bracero Program: Interest Groups and Foreign Policy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), 36–52. 40. Craig, Bracero Program, 53–55. 41. Craig, Bracero Program, 72. Of course critics of the bracero program pointed out the government’s deficiencies in its oversight of the bracero program. 42. Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life (London: Continuum, 2004). 43. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 76. 44. Of course the United States did issue temporary visas for visitors, but those included strict instructions prohibiting or limiting the visa holders’ ability to work in the States. Cha p ter 1 1. Adolf Dicke to J. M. Donaldson, box 3, folder 53, series 6, Legal Actions and

Lawsuits, John H. Shary Collection, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Special Collections and Archives, Edinburg Campus (hereafter cited as Shary Collection). 2. The investigations by the fraud division of the US Post Office into South Texas land companies came to light during a Senate subcommittee hearing about the matter. 3. Memorandum signed by Chief Inspector Rush D. Simmons, May 19, 1921, box 3, folder 51, series 6, Legal Actions and Lawsuits, Shary Collection. 4. Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Random House, 1965); David Wrobel, Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002). 5. Jan Blodgett, Land of Bright Promise: Advertising the Texas Panhandle and South Plains, 1870–1917 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), 8–11. 6. David Igler, Industrial Cowboys: Miller and Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 7. Christian Brannstrom and Matthew Neuman, “Inventing the ‘Magic Valley’ of South Texas, 1905–1941,” Geographical Review 99, no. 2 (April 2009): 125. 8. Herbert Hess, “History and Present Status of the ‘Truth-in-Advertising’ Movement: As Carried On by the Vigilance Committee of the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 101, no. 1 (May 1922): 212.

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George C. Brownell and Jennie A. Brownell to J. M. Donaldson, June 8, 1921, box 3, folder 53, series 6, Legal Actions and Lawsuits, Shary Collection. 10. Randall Rohe, “The Geography and Material Culture of the Western Mining Town,” Material Culture 16, no. 3 (Fall 1984): 99–120. 11. For this view, see Jovita González, Life along the Border (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006); Américo Paredes, “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958); and David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987). 12. Sonia Hernández, Working Women into the Borderlands (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014); John Mason Hart, Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 13. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 75–85. 14. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 34–37. For a work that argues for a more economically aggressive and successful tenure by Tejanos in South Texas during the latter nineteenth century, see Armando C. Alonzo, Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas, 1734–1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998). 15. Robert Rosenbaum, Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1998); and Manuel Callahan, “Mexican Border Troubles: Social War, Settler Colonialism, and the Production of Frontier Discourses, 1848–1880” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2003). 16. José Antonio Olvera, Monterrey y sus caminos de hierro (Monterrey, Mexico: Consejo para la Cultura de Nuevo León, 1998), 13. 17. Hernández, Working Women into the Borderlands, 21–32. 18. Juan Mora-Torres, The Making of the Mexican Border: The State, Capitalism, and Society in Nuevo León, 1848–1910 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 53. 19. Secretaría de Fomento, Colonización e Industria, Censo General de la República Mexicana (Mexico City: Dirección General de Estadística, 1900). 20. Mora-Torres, Making of the Mexican Border, 85–103. 21. Mora-Torres, Making of the Mexican Border, 137. 22. Secretaría de Fomento, Colonización e Industria, Censo General de la República Mexicana (Mexico City: Dirección General de Estadística, 1895, 1900, 1921, and 1930). 23. Secretaría de Fomento, Colonización e Industria, Censo General de la República Mexicana. In Tamaulipas the numbers for people born in other states rose dramatically in the 1921 and 1930 censuses, forming 29.4 percent and 24.3 percent of the entire population, respectively. 24. J. Lee Stambaugh and Lillian J. Stambaugh, The Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas (San Antonio, TX: Jenkins, 1974), 173. 25. David E. Vassberg, Stockholm on the Rio Grande: A Swedish Farming Colony

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on the Mesquite Frontier of Southernmost Texas, 1912–1985 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2003), 12–15. 26. “Historical Census Browser,” University of Virginia Library Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, accessed May 13, 2010, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu /collections/stats/histcensus/index.html (site discontinued). 27. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 143. 28. These methods of definition and characterization of Mexicans fit within a long and enduring discourse first established in the mid-nineteenth century, when the United States was considering war against Mexico, and directly afterward, in the process of consolidating the territory acquired through war. For works that link the Mexican-American War, Manifest Destiny, and the creation of racialist discourses of Mexicans, see: Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Antonia Castañeda, “The Political Economy of Nineteenth-Century Stereotypes of Californians,” in Between Borders: Essays on Mexicana/Chicana History, ed. Adelaida R. Del Castillo (Encino, CA: Floricanto Press, 1990); and Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 29. “The Land of Continuous Crops: The Lower Rio Grande Valley,” promotional brochure produced for O. H. Stugard and Sons, Publications, box 1, folders 1–63, Shary Collection. 30. “Land of Continuous Crops,” Shary Collection. 31. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 30. For works dealing with the concept of virgin land within the specific context of the United States, see: Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); and Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). As Kolodny showed, newcomers to the Americas invoked the notion of virginity when describing the land long before Frederick Jackson Turner used similar metaphors in describing the frontier. Kolodny, Land Before Her, 4. 32. George Alfred Henty, Captain Bayley’s Heir: A Tale of the Gold Fields of California (London: Blackie and Son, 1889). 33. David Montejano has explored another way in which agricultural land developers mobilized the term “progressive,” specific to South Texas politics, to define themselves in opposition to an old system of machine politics based on patronage and deference. Progressives favored the disenfranchisement of Mexicans and implemented a kind of Jim Crow system of racial segregation in their “progressive cities.” Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 129–178. 34. The St. Louis, Brownsville, and Mexico Railway first connected South Texas to points north in 1904 and was portrayed by many brochures as one of the first signs of civilization. The line was owned by the Missouri Pacific Railroad,

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who went on to build lines connecting the Rio Grande Valley east to west. The Southern Pacific Railroad constructed several lines also linking the Valley to places farther north and also containing lines heading east and west, thus providing connections between Valley cities. 35. “Valle Rico del Rio Grande,” promotional brochure, Publications, box 1, folders 1–63, Shary Collection. 36. “The Gulf Coast Country, the Rio Grande Valley: Happiness Is the Reward of Hard Work,” promotional brochure, p. 25, Publications, box 1, Shary Collection. 37. “Sales Canvass on Selling Sharyland Units,” 1932, in brochure packet “Now! A Sharyland Citrus Grove Within Reach of All,” Publications, box 1, Shary Collection. 38. Julia Cameron Montgomery, “A Camera Journey through the Lower Valley of the Rio Grande, the Garden of Golden Grapefruit” (Monty’s Monthly News, 1929). 39. Charles Montgomery, The Spanish Redemption: Heritage, Power, and Loss on New Mexico’s Upper Rio Grande (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); John M. Nieto-Phillips, The Language of Blood: The Making of Spanish American Identity in New Mexico, 1880s–1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004). 40. Douglas C. Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Lawrence Culver, The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010). 41. “Valle Rico del Rio Grande,” Shary Collection; Julia Cameron Montgomery, “A Little Journey through the Lower Valley of the Rio Grande, the Magic Valley of Texas,” p. 24, produced in 1928 for the Southern Pacific Railroad, Publications, box 1, folders 1–63, Shary Collection. 42. James A. Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904–1923 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 101–110; Benjamin H. Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 119–120. The number that perished during this period has been difficult to determine, with estimations varying from five hundred to five thousand. 43. “A Little Journey through the Lower Valley,” p. 24, Shary Collection. 44. “In Rio Grande Valley, Paradise, Sharyland: Where Nature Produces the World’s Sweetest Citrus Fruits,” promotional brochure, Publications, box 1, folders 1–63, Shary Collection; “Valle Rico del Rio Grande,” Shary Collection. 45. “In Rio Grande Valley,” Shary Collection. A jacal refers to a type of housing that was commonly found in South Texas. 46. According to cultural geographer Daniel Arreola’s study, photographs of rural Mexican dwellings were favorite subjects for the popular picture-postcard industry in the early twentieth century. Photographers from border regions often created their own series of postcards, which they mass-produced and sold in

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local curio shops and in shops throughout the Southwest. Daniel Arreola, “The Picture Postcard Mexican Housescape: Visual Culture and Domestic Identity,” in Landscape and Race in the United States, ed. Richard Schein (New York: Routledge, 2006), 113–126. As Anne McClintock has argued: “In the colonial postcard, time is reorganized as spectacle; through the choreographing of fetish icons, history is organized into a single, linear narrative of progress. Photography became the servant of imperial progress.” McClintock, Imperial Leather, 125. 47. Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish Speaking People of the United States, quoted in Arreola, “Picture Postcard Mexican Housescape,” 119. 48. Mixed in with these images of “primitive” Mexicans, however, was also contradictory commentary about the construction of modern, progressive Mexican schools—financed by the Mexicans themselves, the pamphleteers were quick to add, presumably to allay concerns that newcomers might have about paying school taxes. 49. “Gulf Coast Country”; “A Little Journey”; “The Treasure Land of the Lower Rio Grande: Where Nature’s Smiles Are Brightest” (American Rio Grande Land and Irrigation Company, n.d.), all Shary Collection. 50. “A Little Journey,” p. 7, Shary Collection. 51. “Treasure Land of the Lower Rio Grande Valley,” Shary Collection. 52. “A Little Journey through the Lower Valley,” Shary Collection. 53. Blodgett, Land of Bright Promise, 3–9. 54. Brannstrom and Neuman, “Inventing the ‘Magic Valley,’” 129. 55. David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 46–51. 56. F. O. Alin to J. M. Donaldson, April 6, 1921, box 3, folder 55, series 6, Legal Actions and Lawsuits, Shary Collection. 57. Silvia Zulema Silva-Bewley, “John H. Shary and the Promotion and Development of Hidalgo County Land, 1912–1930” (MA thesis, University of Texas–Pan American, 1998), 105. 58. F. O. Alin to J. M. Donaldson, April 6, 1921, box 3, folder 54, series 6, Legal Actions and Lawsuits, Shary Collection. 59. The W. E. Stewart Land Company, Stewart Mortgage Company, Alamo Land and Sugar Company, C. H. Swallow Land Company, Farm Mortgage and Loan Company, Rio Grande Valley Land Corporation, Rio Grande Valley Land Company, La Lomita Irrigation Company, Valley Sales Company, and Texas Coast Irrigated Land Company were all headquartered in Kansas City. Report by J. M. Donaldson, Post Office Inspector, May 14, 1921, Kansas City, Missouri, box 3, folder 55, series 6, Legal Actions and Lawsuits, Shary Collection. 60. According to the minutes from one meeting of the association, Mr. Zumbrunn, the association’s attorney, was sent to South Texas to deal with a troublesome former employee of the W. E. Stewart Land Company, Mr. Page, who was organizing farmers to bring lawsuits against the company. At the meeting Mr.

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Zumbrunn assured the members that he would not resort to violence or do anything illegal, which one would assume would be a given and not necessary to state outright. 61. “Where Land Makes Riches,” circular produced by Alamo Land and Sugar Company, included in Senate hearing testimony, box 3, folder 55, series 6, Legal Actions and Lawsuits, Shary Collection. 62. Telegram from Southwestern Land Company to C. W. Strain, Missouri Pacific Railroad, January 25, 1931, folder 2, box 1, Old Excursion Parties, Shary Collection. 63. Loose receipts, excursion May 31–June 3, 1931, folder 1, box 1, Old Excursion Parties, Shary Collection. 64. Expense breakdown, excursion January 26–January 29, 1931, folder 44, box C7D4 1, Old Excursion Parties, Shary Collection. 65. Theodore Price, “Where Water Is Made to Run Up-Hill,” Outlook, November 30, 1931, box 1, folders 1–63, Publications, Shary Collection. Although it looked like a regular journalistic magazine article, it contained the very specific buzzwords and pieces of promotional information that indicate this piece might have been written for hire. In 1926 John H. Shary, along with several other land developers, hired Associated Press reporter W. C. Grant to write stories publicizing the Rio Grande Valley. Zulema Silva-Bewley, “John H. Shary,” 75. 66. John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis, The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song That Marches On (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 67. “Sharyland Songbook,” published by the Southwestern Land Company, pp. 3–23, folder 38, box 2, Publications, Shary Collection. 68. George Brownell and Jennie Brownell to Donaldson, June 8, 1921, Shary Collection. 69. Hal K. Rothman, introduction to The Culture of Tourism, The Tourism of Culture: Selling the Past to the Present in the American Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003). 70. For more on segregation on railway transportation, see Grace Elizabeth Hale, “‘For Colored’ and ‘For White’: Segregating Consumption in the South,” in Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights, ed. Jane Dailey, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, and Bryant Simon (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2000), 162–182. For more about railroad workers and race in South Texas, see Jennifer Borrer, “The Colored Trainmen of America: Kingsville Black Labor and the Railroads,” in African Americans in South Texas History, ed. Bruce A. Glasrud (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011), 151–176. 71. Theodore Price, “Where Water Is Made to Run Up-Hill.” 72. George Brownell and Jennie Brownell to Donaldson, June 8, 1921, Shary Collection. 73. Expense breakdown, folder 10, box C7D4 1, Old Excursion Parties, Shary Collection.

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N o t es to Pag e s 40– 49 74. Expense breakdown, Shary Collection. 75. Zulema Silva-Bewley, “John H. Shary,” 85–89. 76. Virgil Lott and Virginia Fenwick, People and Plots on the Rio Grande

(San Antonio, TX: Naylor, 1957), 128–134. 77. Expense breakdown, excursion trip January 26–29, 1931, folder 44, box C7D4 1,

Old Excursion Parties, Shary Collection. 78. David Lorey, The U.S.-Mexican Border in the Twentieth Century: A History of

Economic and Social Transformation (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 47. 79. “A Little Journey through the Lower Valley,” p. 62, Shary Collection. 80. “A Little Journey through the Lower Valley,” Shary Collection. 81. Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 150–162; Lorey, U.S.-Mexican Border, 47. 82. F. O. Alin to J. M. Donaldson, April 6, 1921, box 3, folder 55, series 6, Legal Actions and Lawsuits, Shary Collection. 83. Myrtle Turnbaugh to P. M. Jewell, October 15, 1920, box 3, folder 55, series 6, Legal Actions and Lawsuits, Shary Collection. 84. Edward J. Balleisen, “Private Cops on the Fraud Beat: The Limits of American Business Self-Regulation, 1895–1932,” Business History Review 83, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 113–160. 85. Hess, “History and Present Status,” 211. 86. Hess, “History and Present Status,” 212. 87. Hess, “History and Present Status.” 88. William Winter to William Lamar, November 27, 1920, box 3, folder 52, series 6, Legal Actions and Lawsuits, Shary Collection. 89. Report by J. M. Donaldson, May 14, 1921, box 3, folder 55, series 6, Legal Actions and Lawsuits, Shary Collection. 90. Report by J. M. Donaldson, May 14, 1921. Cha p ter 2 1.

Noe Magallan, interview by author, audio recording, Reynosa, Tamaulipas, June 2, 2010. 2. Noe Magallan was referring to the method of deportation the Border Patrol often employed known as voluntary departure. Border Patrol officers preferred utilizing the voluntary departure mechanism with its minimal processing as an easier, cost-effective alternative to formal deportation procedures, which included a deportation trial before a judge and rights to legal representation for the accused (though not provided by the government), as well as possible prolonged detention. Though voluntary departure was most often used, formal deportation proceedings were common enough to be considered legitimate threats to undocumented migrants. US Department of Justice, Annual Report

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3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (Washington, DC: 1948), 22. See Immigration Act of 1917, sec. 20, further amended by act of September 22, 1950, then replaced by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. Noe Magallan, interview, June 2, 2010. Texas Almanac and State Industrial Guide, 1947–1948 (Dallas: A. H. Belo Corporation, 1947), 212–213. Grapefruit was the Valley’s most successful citrus crop. The citrus industry in South Texas ranked behind both California and Florida. Texas Almanac and State Industrial Guide, 1949–1950 (Dallas: A. H. Belo Corporation, 1949). Texas Almanac and State Industrial Guide, 1945–1946 (Dallas: A. H. Belo Corporation, 1945); Texas Almanac, 1947–1948; Texas Almanac, 1949–1950. Texas Almanac, 1949–1950, 215–220. Eastin Nelson and Frederic Meyers, Labor Requirements and Labor Resources in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, Inter-American Education Occasional Papers 6 (Austin: University of Texas at Austin, 1950), 9–11. Estimates of labor requirements were based on the almost six hundred thousand acres of cotton and thousands of acres of summer truck crops. David E. Vassberg, “The Use of Mexicans and Mexican Americans as an Agricultural Work Force in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas” (MA thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1966), 46. Nelson and Meyers, Labor Requirements and Labor Resources, 16. These numbers, however, did not include the older school-aged children in the Rio Grande Valley, many of whom also worked in agricultural fields on a seasonal basis. Carrol Norquest, Rio Grande Wetbacks: Mexican Migrant Workers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972), ix. Kelly Norquest, interview by author, audio recording, Edinburg, Texas, June 4, 2010. Kelly is Carrol Norquest’s eldest son. Norquest, Rio Grande Wetbacks, xi. Texas Almanac, 1949–1950. Kelly Norquest, interview. Jack Rittenhouse to Carrol Norquest, July 9, 1970, and October 26, 1970. In the correspondence between Carrol Norquest and Jack Rittenhouse, it became evident that Norquest considered his work, in part, to be a response against the political activity of the Chicano Movement emerging in South Texas. I thank John W. Byram, director of the University of New Mexico Press, for sharing this correspondence with me. Norquest, Rio Grande Wetbacks, xii. Norquest, Rio Grande Wetbacks. Norquest’s original name for the book manuscript was “The Swarming of the Wetbacks.” He organized the anecdotes that were not used in Rio Grande Wetbacks, as well as ones newly written, and retained the title “The Swarming of the Wetbacks” for the unpublished story collection.

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N o t es to Pag e s 5 3 – 5 6 20. Norquest, “Exploited,” in “The Swarming of the Wetbacks” (unpublished

typewritten manuscript, n.d.). Norquest, Rio Grande Wetbacks, 4. Norquest, Rio Grande Wetbacks, 146–147. Norquest, Rio Grande Wetbacks, 68–69. “For the acasillados salary advances were largely an expression of traditional forms of paternalism on the part of the hacendado. The salary advances at Easter and Christmas and on certain important occasions in the laborer’s life, such as the day of his marriage, advances tacitly acknowledged as non-repayable, were considered an expression of the hacendado’s generosity and of his concern for the well-being of his laborers. Traditionally on many haciendas the prestige and importance of the laborer increased in proportion to the amount of the advances granted to him by the hacienda owner. Even if there was no need to tie laborers to the hacienda, such advances frequently became the price the hacendado paid, or thought he had to pay, to insure the loyalty of the acasillados and their transformation into trusted retainers.” Friedrich Katz, “Labor Conditions on Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico: Some Trends and Tendencies,” Hispanic American Historical Review 54, no. 1 (February 1974): 29. 25. John Tutino, “The Revolutionary Capacity of Rural Communities: Ecological Autonomy and Its Demise,” in Cycles of Conflict, Centuries of Change: Crisis, Reform, and Revolution in Mexico, ed. Elisa Servín, Leticia Reina, and John Tutino (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 246. 26. In the United States, the logic of binding agricultural workers within the domestic boundaries of the household was carried out to its extreme in plantation-based chattel slavery. Within this system, African American slaves had no legal identities separate from their owners, their labor production belonged solely to their owners, and their very bodies constituted plantation owners’ economic assets. 27. For works that analyze agricultural relations within a manorial system in England and/or changes and continuities in colonial America, see: David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Customs to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); and James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 28. Gordon S. Wood has argued that the central contribution of the American Revolution was to radically alter social and political relations from the vertical, dependent, and personal that characterized Old World monarchies, to the horizontal, egalitarian, and impersonal that defined American democracy. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). 29. Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014). 21. 22. 23. 24.

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N o t es to Pag e s 5 6 – 5 9 30. Zaragosa Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in

Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 8. 31. Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York:

Times Books, 1984), 257. See also Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights, 65. 32. Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in

California (Boston: Little, Brown, 1939), 145. 33. Carey McWilliams, Ill Fares the Land: Migrants and Migratory Labor in the

United States (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942), 253. 34. McWilliams, Ill Fares the Land; and David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in

the Making of Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987). 35. Even within the formalistic confines of the bracero program, some workers

36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

cultivated relationships with growers and tried to arrange a return to the same farm year after year as a way to introduce a measure of predictability in their work. Michael Snodgrass, “The Bracero Program, 1942–1964,” in Beyond la Frontera: The History of Mexico-U.S. Migration, ed. Mark Overmyer-Velázquez (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 96. By “pastoralism,” I am referring to a romanticized and nostalgic reading of the agricultural past mapped onto the present. See Stephanie Lewthwaite, “Race, Paternalism, and ‘California Pastoral’: Rural Rehabilitation and Mexican Labor in Greater Los Angeles,” Agricultural History 81, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 1–35. Admission of Mexican Agricultural Laborers: Hearings on S.J. Res. 66, 66th Cong., 2nd Sess. (1920), 3–4. Admission of Mexican Agricultural Laborers. For two examples of works that describe the ways in which agricultural representatives stereotyped Mexican workers in congressional hearings to convince Congress to exclude Mexicans from restrictive immigration legislation in the early 1920s, see: Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, ch. 8, “The Mexican Problem”; and David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 46–56. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). Genovese, Roll, Jordon, Roll, 49. For an example of such an argument, see William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000). Edward Baptist’s latest book has also rejected the notion of the paternalistic plantation owner: Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014). Also, a recent retrospective essay on Genovese’s work contains an excellent discussion of the most recent scholarship that engages with the concept of paternalism in antebellum slavery: J. William Harris, “Eugene Genovese’s Old South: A Review Essay,” Journal of Southern History 80, no.2 (May 2014): 327–372.

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N o t es to Pag e s 5 9 – 6 7 43. Nancy Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of Household

in the Delta, 1861–1875 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003). Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms, 3. Noe Magallan, interview, June 2, 2010. Norquest, “Lemonade Parties,” in “Swarming of the Wetbacks.” Norquest, “Lemonade Parties,” in “Swarming of the Wetbacks.” Carrol Norquest did not italicize the Spanish words and phrases in this quote, and I have kept the style consistent with the original. 48. Norquest, “Lemonade Parties,” in “Swarming of the Wetbacks.” 49. Letter from William Whalen, January 21, 1939, file 55854-100A, RG 85, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC (hereafter cited as National Archives). 50. Sworn Statement from William E. Russell, January 25, 1939, file 55854-100A, RG 85, National Archives. 51. Report from D. W. Brewster to District Director Whalen, January 25, 1939, file 55854-100A, RG 85, National Archives. 52. Report from Brewster, January 25, 1939. 53. Report from Brewster, January 25, 1939. 54. Report from Brewster, January 25, 1939; report from Charles Lonergan, Inspector in Charge at Hidalgo, January 27, 1939, file 55854-100A, RG 85, National Archives; and report from Fletcher Rawls, Chief Patrol Inspector, January 26, 1939, file 55854-100A, RG 85, National Archives. 55. Report from Grover Wilmoth to Commissioner Houghteling, October 29, 1937, file 55854-100A, RG 85, National Archives. 56. Report from Rawls, January 26, 1939. 57. Report from Rawls, January 26, 1939. 58. Hudspeth County is the border county just east of El Paso County. 59. Wilmoth to Houghteling, October 29, 1937. 60. Wilmoth to Houghteling, October 29, 1937. 61. Report from Brewster, January 25, 1939. 62. Kelly Norquest, interview. 63. Noe Magallan, interview, June 2, 2010. 64. Kelly Norquest, interview. 65. Rikki Norquest, prefatory material to Norquest, Rio Grande Wetbacks. 66. The fact that the boys were teenagers is significant because they were in the liminal stage between childhood and manhood, old enough to work and perhaps feeling the need to establish good relationships with workers, but since they were living under their parents’ roof, they did not ultimately hold the positions of highest male authority within the household. Carey McWilliams describes a similar anecdote in which California growers romanticized the temporary, camp-like housing for seasonal agricultural workers, when “all the camp gathers together then and the pickers sing and play banjos, and they make love and 44. 45. 46. 47.

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gossip—and turn at all hours of the night, always good-natured and jolly and care-free for a season at least.” McWilliams, Factories in the Field, 173. 67. Taken from Norquest, Rio Grande Wetbacks; Norquest, “Swarming of the Wetbacks;” Kelly Norquest, interview; and Noe Magallan, interview, June 2, 2010. 68. Ida Montalvo and Alex Montalvo, interview by author, audio recording, Elsa, Texas, February 1, 2009. 69. Ida Montalvo and Alex Montalvo, interview. 70. Noe Magallan, interview, June 2, 2010. 71. Angelica’s descriptions of life on the Norquest farm generally correspond to her overall memories about her life as a youth living in her parents’ home in Rancho Grande. To her, that entire time was beautiful in comparison with the contemporary period. Angelica Magallan, interview by author, audio recording, Palmview, Texas, December 14, 2009. 72. In Spanish, the word patrón can mean boss, with its emphasis on capitalistic employer-employee relationships, or master, indicating a more coercive relationship based on unfree labor. The ambiguity of that word, in this context, is interestingly suggestive of the blurred boundaries between free and unfree labor. 73. Norquest, preface to chapter 8, “Mejicanos Inocentes,” in “Swarming of the Wetbacks.” 74. Norquest, “Swarming of the Wetbacks.” 75. In recounting this story, Noe Magallan pointed out that Carrol Norquest could speak Spanish very well. One example of his fluency was how Norquest sometimes corrected the spelling on the workers’ grocery lists. Noe Magallan, interview by author, audio recording, Reynosa, Tamaulipas, January 18, 2010. 76. Norquest, “Swarming of the Wetbacks.” 77. Norquest, “Swarming of the Wetbacks.” 78. According to INS district director Grover Wilmoth, farmers’ periodically visiting INS offices to register complaints about INS policing practices was a common tactic and timed to coincide with all-important cotton-chopping and -harvesting seasons, when the demand for agricultural workers was at its greatest. They hoped to generate an investigation as a diversionary tactic, to tie up manpower in investigating the complaints and keep officers off the farms. In this case, an investigation did ensue, probably much to the grower’s delight. Report, Grover Wilmoth to Houghteling, March 27, 1937, file 55854-100A, RG 85, National Archives. 79. Wilmoth to Houghteling, March 27, 1937. 80. Interview of Inspector Almand, conducted by Grover Wilmoth, March 25, 1937, file 55854-100A, RG 85, National Archives. 81. Interview of Almand, March 25, 1937. Interestingly, this informant was a Mexican American posing as an undocumented Mexican migrant in order to get a job on the farm. 82. Interview of Almand, March 27, 1937.

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N o t es to Pag e s 7 2–7 8 83. 84. 85. 86.

“Inviting a Labor Deluge?,” editorial, Valley Evening Monitor, March 23, 1947. “Inviting a Labor Deluge?” “Inviting a Labor Deluge?” “Can We Afford Cheap Labor?,” editorial, Valley Evening Monitor, April 20, 1947. 87. “Can We Afford Cheap Labor?” 88. Save for a few notable exceptions, the federal government refused to regulate the wage rates and working and living conditions of agricultural workers during the first half of the twentieth century. While the federal government recognized workers’ right to organize through the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) and set up a social safety net for workers with the Social Security Act (1935), agricultural workers were consistently excluded from such protections. One important exception was the Farm Security Administration’s establishment of federal labor camps for agricultural workers. For more information regarding the labor camps, see Verónica Martínez-Matsuda, “Making the Modern Migrant: Work, Community, and Struggle in the Federal Labor Camp Program, 1935–1947” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2009). 89. Noe Magallan, interview, June 2, 2010. 90. Alberto Magallan, interview by author, audio recording, Granjeno, Texas, December 29, 2009. Historian John Tutino has described this entire region, from the Bajío northward, as characterized by migration, fluidity, and commercialization from the colonial period onward. Tutino, “Revolutionary Capacity of Rural Communities,” 226. 91. Angelica Magallan, interview. 92. Angelica Magallan, interview. 93. Angelica Magallan, interview. 94. Noe Magallan, interview, June 2, 2010. 95. Angelica Magallan, interview. She discovered in the course of casual conversation while visiting relatives in Granjeno, Texas, that her father had been born, raised, and married in the United States, and had moved to Mexico just after he married. Her father’s US citizenship made it easy for her to obtain her US citizenship and, through her, US citizenship for her husband and two sons. 96. Carrol Norquest, prefatory material, “Swarming of the Wetbacks.” 97. Noe Magallan, interview, June 2, 2010. 98. Noe Magallan, interview, June 2, 2010. This change in Border Patrol policy was part of a larger coordinated effort, named Operation Wetback, to deport Mexicans working illegally throughout the Southwest, beginning in California and moving east through Arizona, New Mexico, and then Texas. Though much of the publicity for this military-style campaign focused the nation’s attention on Border Patrol activities along the US-Mexico border during the summer of 1954, scholars have argued that some of these techniques began earlier than 1954 and continued well after that summer. For more information regarding Operation Wetback, see Juan Ramon García, Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation

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of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980); and Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 99. The word Noe consistently used during the course of this account to describe being deported, or sent across the border by the INS, was aventar, saying, for example, “Nos aventaron por allá en Ciudad Juárez.” He used the same word to describe being sent to the detention facility in McAllen, and the process of being deported in general. The word conveys a particular physicality, and even violent action, different from “nos mandaron a Ciudad Juárez” (they sent us) or “nos llevaron a Ciudad Juárez” (they took us). 100. Noe Magallan, interview, June 2, 2010. 101. Lytle Hernández, Migra!, 127–130. 102. In the next chapter I more closely examine the policy of voluntary departure as a border enforcement mechanism the Border Patrol used to facilitate a flexible labor migration at the US-Mexico border. 103. Walter Johnson, “A Nettlesome Classic Turns Twenty-Five,” Common-Place 1 (July 2001), quoted in Harris, “Eugene Genovese’s Old South,” 346. Cha p ter 3 1. The following account was taken from “Farmers Charge Border Patrol Raids

Farms,” El Paso Herald-Post, September 25, 1947; “Dona Ana Farmers Will Contract Juarez Laborers,” El Paso Herald-Post, September 26, 1947; “Valley Farmer Says Patrolman Beat Him Up,” El Paso Times, September 25, 1947; “Federal Man Says Farmer Began Fight,” El Paso Times, September 26, 1947; and “30 Patrolmen Round-Up ‘Wetbacks,’” El Paso Times, September 27, 1947. 2. Lusk served one term from 1947 to 1948, and Fernández served seven terms and was first elected to Congress during World War II. “Representative Georgia Lee Lusk of New Mexico,” US House of Representatives Office of the Historian, http://history.house.gov/HistoricalHighlight/Detail/35637?ret=True; “Representative Antonio Manuel Fernández of New Mexico,” US House of Representatives Office of the Historian, http://history.house.gov/HistoricalHighlight/Detail /35216?ret=True. 3. “Dona Ana Farmers Will Contract Juarez Laborers,” El Paso Herald-Post, September 26, 1947. 4. “Juarez Workers Move to Farms Not in Texas,” El Paso Herald-Post, September 27, 1947, p. 1. The headquarters for the INS were located in Philadelphia at the time. The headquarters moved to Washington, DC, in 1948. US Department of Justice, Annual Report of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (Washington, DC: 1948). 5. Wilmoth was referring to a new practice, agreed upon by both governments, allowing growers to place undocumented workers already employed with them under legal contract, if the growers agreed to the terms and conditions set by

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the bracero agreement. This practice stripped the Mexican government of the power to control worker recruitment and regulate Mexican emigration, but the government had to deal with the reality of the significant numbers of Mexicans working illegally in US agricultural fields. Otey Scruggs, Braceros, “Wetbacks,” and the Farm Labor Program: Mexican Agricultural Labor in the United States, 1942–1954 (New York: Garland, 1988), 323–337. 6. Of course history has shown that many migrants deemed temporary stayed in the United States permanently. They married, raised families, and contributed to the growing Mexican communities across the US Southwest and Midwest. Many of these migrants had to negotiate permanent settlement in the United States as undocumented migrants, regularizing their legal status many years after the fact or not at all. 7. In beginning this examination of immigration laws in 1917, I do not mean to imply that US immigration restriction first began in this period, as some have argued. I acknowledge Erika Lee’s contention that the US regime of immigration restriction began in the late nineteenth century with Chinese exclusion laws. Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 8. The 1917 law also instituted restrictions for those deemed ideologically dangerous, such as anarchists. 9. Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 156. 10. Admission of Mexican Agricultural Laborers: Hearings on S.J. Res. 66, 66th Cong., 2nd Sess. (1920), 12–13. 11. Admission of Mexican Agricultural Laborers, 11. Another line of questioning revealed the ways in which Mexican workers were always being implicitly (or explicitly) compared to African American workers. Questioned by Senator Sterling of North Dakota about who were better workers, African Americans or Mexicans, Fred Roberts, a cotton grower and the president of the South Texas Cotton Growers Association, said he would “take my chances with the Mexican,” because though he judged that an African American “will do more work than a Mexican while he works,” he thought perhaps Mexicans were more reliable. In the following passage from the transcript, Senator Sterling pressed, “But he [the African American worker] is not as reliable in sticking to the job? Mr. Roberts: No sir; there was a time when the Negroes were more reliable than they are now.” Making an oblique reference to slavery, along with its attendant images of violence and coercion, Mr. Roberts employed worn stereotypes about the work rate of African Americans. This passage demonstrates the implicit and explicit comparisons growers frequently made between African American and Mexican agricultural workers. 12. George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 19.

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N o t e s to Pag e s 8 6 – 8 7 13. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern

America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 23. The Naturalization Act of 1790 held that only “free white persons” of good moral character could become naturalized citizens. Congress expanded the category of people eligible for naturalization to include people of African descent in 1870, after the Fourteenth Amendment made African Americans citizens. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 37–38. Citizenship was extended to all Native Americans born in the United States in 1924 by the Indian Citizenship Act. T. Alexander Aleinikoff, Semblances of Sovereignty: The Constitution, the State, and American Citizenship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 19–25. This law did not mean, however, that indigenous people born outside the United States were now eligible for naturalization. 14. Immigration Border Patrol, 70th Cong., 1st Sess. (March 5, 1928), 20–21. 15. The established precedent had consistently allowed for the naturalization of Mexicans, first by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, whereby all Mexican citizens residing in what had become, through war, US territory, would automatically be US citizens unless they petitioned to keep their Mexican nationality. Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990). One court case, In re Rodriguez, attempted to raise the question of Mexicans’ eligibility for citizenship based on their racial makeup, as neither white nor black, and was defeated in district court in San Antonio in 1897. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 53–54. See also Arnoldo De León, “In Re Ricardo Rodriguez: An Attempt at Chicano Disenfranchisement in San Antonio, 1896–1897,” in En Aquel Entonces / In Years Gone By: Readings in Mexican American History, ed. Manuel Gonzales and Cynthia Gonzales (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 57–63. For the most in-depth account of the trial, including the social context of Populist politics that brought about the trial as an attempt to disenfranchise Mexicans, see Martha Menchaca, Naturalizing Mexican Immigrants: A Texas History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 109–159. 16. Deportation of Aliens, 76th Cong., 1st Sess. (March 21–23, 1940), 175. 17. Deportation of Aliens. 18. US Department of Justice, Annual Report of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, table 4, “Immigration by Country: For Decades 1820–1948” (Washington, DC: 1948). 19. Deportation of Aliens, 175. 20. Abraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929–1939 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974), 30–33. 21. Hoffman, Unwanted Mexicans; see also R. Reynolds McKay, “Texas Mexican Repatriation during the Great Depression” (PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 1982); and Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New

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Mexico Press, 1995). While the exact numbers of repatriated Mexicans during the 1930s is not known, the most common estimate claims 500,000 Mexicans and Mexican Americans left the United States for Mexico between 1929 and 1939. Half of those, or 250,000 ethnic Mexicans, might have been repatriated from Texas. McKay, “Texas Mexican Repatriation,” v. 22. Deportation of Aliens, 175. 23. US Department of Justice, Annual Report of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, table 4, “Immigration by Country: For Decades 1820–1950” (Washington, DC: 1950). 24. Kanstroom, Deportation Nation, 13; Aleinikoff, Semblances of Sovereignty. 25. Act of February 27, 1925, Stat. 1049–1050, 8 USC 110. 26. Immigration Border Patrol, 70th Cong., 1st Sess. (March 5, 1928), 11. Both Mae Ngai and Kelly Lytle Hernández have noted the importance of Lew Moy in dramatically expanding the territorial authority of the Border Patrol, highlighting the spatial dimension of Border Patrol powers. I will deal with the spatiality of Lew Moy later in the section. See Mae M. Ngai, “The Strange Career of the Illegal Alien: Immigration Restriction and Deportation Policy in the United States, 1921–1965,” Law and History Review 21, no. 1 (April 2003). See also Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 35. 27. Kanstroom, Deportation Nation, 13. The entire quote reads, “Those who are caught near the border, however, face a regime of law that is in many respects the same as they could encounter were they apprehended outside US territory. In effect, they experience government power largely unmediated by constitutional or significant legal constraint.” 28. Wickersham Commission (US National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement), Report on the Enforcement of the Deportation Laws of the United States, vol. 5 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1931). Kanstroom notes, however, that the Administrative Procedures Act, passed in 1946, attempted to address this problem and legislated some separation and independence for judicial oversight in administrative procedures. Just as the question of whether immigration proceedings were subject to this law was making its way through the courts, Congress passed important new immigration legislation, the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which limited judicial review and due process. Kanstroom, Deportation Nation, 170–178. 29. Kanstroom, Deportation Nation, 148. 30. During these two interrogations, officers could offer migrants the option of voluntary departure in lieu of formal deportation, which meant that the deportable migrant would agree to leave the country. Voluntary departure as a form of expulsion was commonly used along the US-Mexico border, becoming even more significant during the 1940s. I will treat this issue in greater depth later in this chapter. 31. Oppenheimer warned of the danger of combining these functions in one agency,

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and in one office. Most often the investigative officer also presented the evidence at the hearing before an official who was also a colleague. Such intermixing meant that impartial justice for the migrant was practically impossible. Wickersham Commission, Report on Deportation Laws, 81–84. 32. Wickersham Commission, Report on Deportation Laws, 85. 33. Wickersham Commission, Report on Deportation Laws. 34. Wickersham Commission, Report on Deportation Laws, 96. 35. Wickersham Commission, Report on Deportation Laws. This review board acted on behalf of the supervisory secretary, which at the time of the issuance of the Wickersham report was the secretary of labor. The INS was under the supervision of the Department of Labor from 1913–1939, until the Reorganization Act of 1939 transferred the agency to the Department of Justice in 1940. US Department of Justice, Laws Applicable to Immigration and Nationality (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1953), xv–xvi. 36. For an explanation of the criminal versus administrative distinction, see commission member Kenneth Mackintosh’s dissent, Wickersham Commission, Report on Deportation Laws, 12. 37. Kanstroom, Deportation Nation, 4. 38. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 60. 39. Immigration Border Patrol, 3. 40. Ngai, “Strange Career of the Illegal Alien.” 41. In Migra!, Lytle Hernández discusses the spatiality of the border zone and its social and political import, pointing out that “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.” Lytle Hernández, Migra!, 50. 42. Lytle Hernández, Migra!, 46. 43. Voluntary departure already had been in use, predominantly at the US southern and northern land borders, since the late 1920s, but it functioned as part of the nonstatutory powers that the INS employed to sidestep rigid and cumbersome deportation laws. This authority became codified in law in 1940 as part of the Alien Registration Act. Richard Cameron Blake, “Nkacoang v. INS: A Complementary Theory for Denying Reinstatement of Voluntary Departure,” Brigham Young University Law Review, no. 1 (1997): 171. 44. Wickersham Commission, Report on Deportation Laws, 56. 45. For an excellent explanation of the procedure of preexamination as a form of administrative discretion first used by Secretary of Labor Perkins during the 1930s, see Mae Ngai’s “Strange Career of the Illegal Alien,” 100–103. 46. Ngai, “Strange Career of the Illegal Alien,” 103. 47. Although the process of preexamination seems to have some similarities to the INS practice of legalizing undocumented agricultural workers at the southern border between 1947 and 1951, one major difference existed between these two

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practices. Preexamination was a method by which European migrants became legal, permanent residents who could eventually become naturalized US citizens. The process at work on the US-Mexico border turned undocumented Mexican migrants into legal nonimmigrant braceros whose legal tenure in the United States was short and temporary, restricted to the length of an agricultural season. For more about the program to legalize workers already in the United States illegally, see Scruggs, Braceros, “Wetbacks,” and Farm Labor, 323–337 and ch. 12, “Mexican Nationals in American Agriculture, 1948–1954, Pt.1,” 385–453. 48. US Department of Justice, Annual Report of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (1950), 56. 49. US Department of Justice, Annual Report of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (1949), 28. 50. US Department of Justice, Annual Report of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (1949). 51. Wickersham Commission, Report on Deportation Laws, 66. 52. Immigration Border Patrol, 10. 53. Report from Charles Lonergan to William A. Whalen, August 15, 1950, file 56286/203, box 3161, RG 85, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC (hereafter National Archives). 54. Report from Lonergan to Whalen, August 15, 1950. 55. “Wetback Claims He Was Struck by US Official,” Valley Morning Express, August 15, 1950. 56. “Wetback Claims He Was Struck.” 57. “Wetback Claims He Was Struck.” 58. Report from Lonergan to Whalen, August 17, 1950, file 56286/203, box 3161, RG 85, National Archives. 59. Report from Lonergan to Whalen, August 17, 1950. 60. Report from Lonergan to Whalen, August 17, 1950. 61. While the 1925 Powers of the Border Patrol Act did allow for warrantless searches and seizures of people found in the act of illegal entrance who otherwise would have escaped apprehension if warrants were sought, the act of August 7, 1946, added to that earlier authority the power to arrest without warrant those the Border Patrol believed had violated crimes related to immigration. It was not until 1952, in the act of March 20, 1952, that the law specifically granted the Border Patrol the power to search “private lands but not dwellings” for undocumented immigrants. Cited in United States of America v. John J. Brennan, 538 F.2d 711 (5th Cir. 1976). 62. In a memorandum dated May 31, 1949, Grover C. Wilmoth refers to an earlier circular he had sent to the officers of his district, on April 12, 1948, outlining operating policies. I do not have this earlier circular. 63. Grover Wilmoth to officers under his charge, May 31, 1949, file 56246/339-F, RG 85, National Archives. 64. Wilmoth to officers, May 31, 1949.

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N o t es to Pag e s 9 9 – 1 03 65. Wilmoth to officers, May 31, 1949. 66. “Six Farmers Await Labor Trials,” El Paso Herald-Post, October 4, 1947, p. 12. The

six farmers charged with alien smuggling were Roy Ingram, H. Victor Parker, Hugh Moutrey, Quintin Mendoza, and Guadalupe Padilla de Cassares, all of Artesia, New Mexico, and Wayne Dill of Doña Ana County, New Mexico. 67. Wilmoth to central office, June 6, 1949, file 56246/339-F, RG 85, National Archives. 68. Wilmoth to central office, June 6, 1949. 69. The San Antonio INS district accounted for almost the whole of Texas, with the exception of the Panhandle and the extreme western edge of Texas, which fell within the province of the El Paso INS district. In addition to those parts of Texas, the El Paso district had the whole of New Mexico and three-fourths of Arizona under its jurisdiction. Together, these two districts oversaw most of the US-Mexico border region. 70. Immigration Commissioner Watson B. Miller to southwestern districts, June 7, 1949, file 56246/339-F, RG 85, National Archives. 71. Miller to southwestern districts, June 7, 1949, p. 1. 72. Miller to southwestern districts, June 7, 1949, p. 1. 73. Miller to southwestern districts, June 7, 1949, p. 2. 74. Miller to southwestern districts, June 7, 1949, p. 4. 75. Miller to southwestern districts, June 7, 1949, p. 5. 76. Miller to southwestern districts, June 7, 1949, p. 5. Miller closed the memorandum by emphasizing again to officers that “it is proposed to carry out the duties of our Border Patrol imposed by laws in the most considerate manner, especially as to those whose attitude is not unreasonable or intentionally provocative.” 77. Miller to southwestern districts, June 7, 1949, p. 1. 78. Miller to southwestern districts, June 7, 1949. 79. Miller to southwestern districts, June 7, 1949, pp. 4–5. 80. Of course, the workers on the raided farms suffered the most immediate consequences from Wilmoth’s directives, by being deported, but Wilmoth might have hoped to effect lasting positive changes to workers’ conditions in the El Paso district through the efforts of his officers. 81. Wilmoth to INS Commissioner Miller, June 20, 1949, file 56246/339-F, RG 85, National Archives. Wilmoth went on to complain, “And you can guess who has been responsible for disseminating that information,” but did not name that person. Later in the memo he described another complaint by a farmer from Fort Stockton who had reported Border Patrol officers going onto his farm. Wilmoth attributed this complaint to the fact that “J. C. Wilson of Pecos is passing out the information that an ‘understanding’ was recently reached in Washington that our officers would not go upon the farm.” I do not know if this is the same man to whom Wilmoth referred earlier in the memorandum. 82. Report from Clyde Nichols to Grover C. Wilmoth, June 18, 1949, file 56246/339F, RG 85, National Archives.

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N o t es to Pag e s 1 03 – 1 08 83. Nichols to Wilmoth, June 18, 1949. 84. Nichols to Wilmoth, June 18, 1949. 85. Wilmoth to INS Commissioner Miller, June 20, 1949, file 56246/339-F, RG 85,

National Archives. 86. Paul Watson to Carson Morrow, July 5, 1949, file 56246/339-F, RG 85, National

Archives. 87. Watson to Morrow, July 5, 1949. 88. Carson Morrow to Grover C. Wilmoth, July 8, 1949, file 56246/339-F, RG 85,

National Archives. 89. Because I only have the investigators’ report of the case, and not the entire file

of the case, which would have included full transcripts of everyone interviewed during the investigation, some of the details of the Wroten case remain obscured, including the names of the investigating officers. The report they submitted, however, was quite detailed, listing all the charges, the evidence, and their conclusions about the validity of that evidence. An internal investigation would normally have been conducted by immigration investigators from outside the San Antonio district, and I assume this protocol was followed in this investigation as well. Investigators’ report relating to the case of Charles E. Wroten, file 56364/41.16, pt. 1, box 84, RG 85, National Archives. 90. Investigators’ report relating to Wroten. Special task forces were assigned to South Texas during 1951 to conduct mass deportations, often airlifting deportees back to Mexico in an attempt to disrupt the quick turnarounds in return migrations to the United States. 91. Investigators’ report relating to Wroten. Even though the investigators were pretty convinced Wroten played dominoes while on duty, and though his car was often seen parked near the domino hall, the domino hall’s close proximity to the immigration office, as well as the witnesses’ inability to pinpoint exact times, made it difficult to prove this charge conclusively, and investigators recommended that this charge be dropped. 92. Investigators’ report relating to Wroten, p. 4. 93. Investigators’ report relating to Wroten, pp. 2–3. 94. Investigators’ report relating to Wroten, p. 4. 95. Memorandum from District Director William A. Whalen to all employees, San Antonio District, July 15, 1949, file 56364/41.16, pt. 1, box 84, RG 85, National Archives. The memo was included as evidence in the misconduct case of Senior Patrol Inspector and Assistant Officer in Charge James L. Turner, McAllen, Texas, November 30, 1954, accused of hiring an undocumented migrant, fifteen-year-old Ramona Molina Carrera, to work as a housekeeper and nanny in his home. 96. Investigators’ report relating to Wroten, p. 5. 97. Memorandum from F. L. Cuneo, Director of Personnel, to W. F. Kelly, Assistant Commissioner, Enforcement Division, May 7, 1952, file 56364/41.16, pt. 1, box 84, RG 85, National Archives.

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N o t es to Pag e s 1 08 – 1 1 0 98. Memorandum to W. F. Kelly of a telephone call from Cuneo, June 20, 1952, file

56364/41.16, pt. 1, box 84, RG 85, National Archives. 99. For a detailed account of Operation Wetback, see Juan Ramon García, Operation

Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980). 100. Lytle Hernández described Albert Quillin as part of a “new generation” of Border Patrol officers not overly influenced by local power dynamics, and demonstrating the larger “delocalization of U.S. immigration law enforcement.” Lytle Hernández, Migra!, 152–156. 101. Lytle Hernández, Migra! 102. Exhibit C, sworn statement from Alan Murray, July 26, 1954, file 56364/41.16, pt.1, box 84, RG 85, National Archives. Alan Murray, an immigration patrol inspector stationed in Niagara Falls, New York, stated that the morale of the unit plunged shortly after their arrival in South Texas. “All the other units, you see, we felt were lesser as far as our own pride went, and they are all catching them and making good hits and here we supposedly had two guys who knew the area and the one who was leading us all the time—Quillin—took us to fields that had nothing or had citizens or braceros.” 103. Exhibit A, first sworn statement of Maurice Dixon, Senior Patrol Inspector, West Palm Beach, Florida, July 26, 1954, file 56364/41.16, pt.1, box 84, RG 85, National Archives. The Wells farm was located very near the Rio Grande. In response to a question by Investigator E. R. Decker about how many workers he saw across the river who had escaped, Dixon estimated them at 100 or 150. 104. First sworn statement of Maurice Dixon, July 26, 1954. 105. Maurice Dixon raised the former concern, claiming that Quillin’s men were aware that Valerie J. Trimble, the stenographer employed in the interrogation sessions, which first took place in Brownsville, Texas, was a friend of Quillin’s. Perhaps in response to this, the investigation was moved to McAllen, Texas, and another stenographer was used. Second sworn statement of Maurice Dixon, August 5, 1954, file 56364/41.16, pt.1, box 84, RG 85, National Archives. 106. Exhibit B, first sworn statement of Wally Baxter, Immigrant Patrol Inspector, San Benito, Texas, July 26, 1954, file 56364/41.16, pt.1, box 84, RG 85, National Archives. 107. Exhibit F, sworn statement of David Snow, Senior Patrol Inspector, Brownsville, Texas, July 26, 1954, file 56364/41.16, pt.1, box 84, RG 85, National Archives. 108. Sworn statement of David Snow, July 26, 1954, p. 3. 109. Sworn statement of David Snow, July 26, 1954. 110. Snow also recounted an instance in which he confronted Quillin, during the period of the 1951 airlift, about rumors that Quillin was going around warning farmers the night before that the task force would be in their area the following day. According to Snow, Quillin “was rather flustered and embarrassed,” giving some stories that Snow thought were “thin.”

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N o t es to Pag e s 1 1 0– 1 1 7 111. Exhibit X, sworn statement of Albert Quillin, Senior Patrol Inspector in Charge,

San Benito, Texas, August 2, 1954, file 56364/41.16, pt.1, box 84, RG 85, National Archives. 112. Sworn statement of Albert Quillin, August 2, 1954, p. 35. 113. Sworn statement of Albert Quillin, August 2, 1954, p. 36. 114. Exhibit K, sworn statement of John Brandenburg, Patrol Inspector at Brownsville, Texas, August 1, 1954; and Exhibit L, sworn statement of Donald Hansis, Patrol Inspector at Rouses Point, New York, formerly stationed in Brownsville, Texas, August 1, 1954, file 56364/41.16, pt.1, box 84, RG 85, National Archives. 115. Report of alleged misconduct of Senior Patrol Inspector Quillin, August 16, 1954, file 56364/41.16, pt.1, box 84, RG 85, National Archives. 116. Undated memorandum, “Separation from the Border Patrol,” file 56364/41.16, pt.1, box 84, RG 85, National Archives. The memorandum did show, however, that Maurice Dixon, the man who lodged the complaint against Quillin, resigned from the Border Patrol on September 24, 1954. Cha p ter 4 1. In the spirit of full disclosure, Armando Salinas is my grandfather. Previously

unaware of this history, I first came across a reference to this lawsuit in the newspaper. “High Tribunal Affirms Local Labor Case Rule,” Valley Evening Monitor, March 21, 1947. 2. Armando Salinas v. Mrs. Maureen Moore et al. (Tex. 92d Dist. Ct. 1946). 3. The term “coyote” was used to describe a person who smuggled migrants across the border for a fee. 4. Miriam Pawel, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 18, 78. 5. Carey McWilliams, Ill Fares the Land: Migrants and Migratory Labor in the United States (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942), 266. In “A Town Full of Dead Mexicans,” a chapter in her book, historian Lori Flores documented a gruesome crash in 1963 that killed twenty-eight workers and mobilized labor activists to help end the bracero program the following year. Lori A. Flores, Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 135–162. 6. For more about Texas state labor agencies’ attempts to organize agricultural labor markets, see José Guillermo Pastrano, “The Bureaucratic Origins of Migrant Poverty: The Texas Cotton Industry, 1910–1930,” Journal of Peasant Studies 35, no. 4 (October 2008): 688–719. 7. Salinas v. Moore. 8. Salinas v. Moore. 9. “High Tribunal Affirms Local Labor Case Rule.” 10. “High Tribunal Affirms Local Labor Case Rule.”

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N o t e s to Pag es 1 1 8 – 1 2 1 11. Salinas v. Moore. 12. Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story (Charlotte,

NC: McNally and Loftin, 1964), 214–215. 13. Texas State Bureau of Labor Statistics, Texas Employment and Labor Agency

Law (Austin: 1943), 3. 14. Texas State Bureau of Labor Statistics, Texas Employment and Labor Agency

Law, 5. 15. Texas State Bureau of Labor Statistics, Texas Employment and Labor Agency

Law. 16. Texas State Bureau of Labor Statistics, Texas Employment and Labor Agency

Law, 6. 17. For example, neither the Social Security Act of 1935, establishing a federal

pension system, nor the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, establishing a national minimum wage, applied to agricultural workers. Furthermore, growers employing domestic migrant farmworkers had no obligations to provide housing or address workplace injuries of any kind. 18. Texas State Bureau of Labor Statistics, Texas Employment and Labor Agency Law, 7. 19. David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 197–219. 20. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 210–212. 21. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 212. 22. Herbert Roback, “Legal Barriers to Interstate Migration,” Cornell Law Review 28, no. 3 (March 1943): 286–312. 23. The ten southern states with emigrant labor agency statutes were Texas, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Georgia. Herbert Roback, “Legal Barriers to Interstate Migration,” 286. 24. Jennifer Roback, “Southern Labor Law in the Jim Crow Era: Exploitative or Competitive?,” University of Chicago Law Review 51, no. 4 (1984): 1161–1192. 25. James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 44–50. 26. Theresa Jach, “Reform versus Reality in the Progressive Era Texas Prison,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 4, no. 1 (January 2005): 53–67. 27. Ethan Blue, “A Parody on the Law: Organized Labor, the Convict Lease, and Immigration in the Making of the Texas State Capitol,” Journal of Social History 43, no. 4 (Summer 2010): 1021–1044. 28. Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 29. Peck, Reinventing Free Labor, 84. The Foran Act, or the Alien Contract Labor Act, as it came to be called, remained on the books for most of the twentieth century. Because of this legislation, moreover, the Immigration and Naturalization

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Service was required to offer exemptions to Mexican agricultural workers receiving contracts as braceros before they entered the United States. 30. Linda Majka and Theo Majka, Farm Workers, Agribusiness, and the State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 120. 31. Majka and Majka, Farm Workers, 120. 32. Salinas vs. Moore. 33. Texas State Bureau of Labor Statistics, Texas Employment and Labor Agency Law, 14. 34. Texas State Bureau of Labor Statistics, Texas Employment and Labor Agency Law. 35. The same highway checkpoints that served as way stations to question migrant farmworkers about their destinations, as well as INS checkpoints to question travelers’ citizenship status, were also used by the US Department of Agriculture as quarantine stations to inspect cattle being transported north from the border region. 36. “Migratory Agricultural Workers to Start Northward Soon,” Sunday insert, Valley Morning Star,” April 20, 1947. 37. “Migratory Agricultural Workers to Start Northward Soon.” 38. For more information about the FSA’s federal labor camp program, see Verónica Martínez-Matsuda, “‘A Transformation for Migrants’: Mexican Farmworkers and Federal Health Reform during the New Deal Era,” in Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America, ed. Laurie B. Green, John McKiernan-Gonzalez, and Martin Summers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 185–210. 39. Martínez-Matsuda, “A Transformation for Migrants,” 206. 40. “Migratory Agricultural Workers to Start Northward Soon.” 41. “Migratory Agricultural Workers to Start Northward Soon.” 42. McWilliams, Ill Fares the Land, 269. 43. McWilliams, Ill Fares the Land, 233. 44. McWilliams, Ill Fares the Land, 232–234. 45. McWilliams, Ill Fares the Land, 233. 46. McWilliams, Ill Fares the Land, 232. 47. McWilliams, Ill Fares the Land, 250–251. 48. Because growers wished to harvest their crops as quickly as possible, they often overrecruited, creating a glut of workers who might harvest the crop in just a few days or a week. McWilliams, Ill Fares the Land, 224. 49. Alberto Magallan, interview by author, audio recording, Granjeno, Texas, December 29, 2009. 50. Alberto Magallan, interview. 51. Texas State Employment Service, Origins and Problems of Texas Migratory Farm Labor (Austin: 1940), 88–89. 52. Map insert, routes of migratory workers in Texas, “Migratory Workers to Start Northward Soon.”

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N o t e s to Pag es 1 2 7– 1 3 3 53. Texas State Employment Service, Origins and Problems, 32, 47. 54. Texas State Employment Service, Origins and Problems, 26. 55. Texas State Employment Service, Origins and Problems, 21. 56. Texas State Employment Service, Origins and Problems, 73. 57. Texas State Employment Service, Origins and Problems, 89. 58. In many communities, the Farm Security Administration had to overcome a

great deal of resistance from growers and other community members for their plans to build migrant labor camps. Martínez-Matsuda, “A Transformation for Migrants,” 67–76. 59. Ernesto Galarza and others have questioned whether a labor shortage in agriculture did indeed exist. As David Montejano and others have explained, because growers wanted a large number of laborers for the shortest possible period in order to rush crops to market and capitalize on the highest prices, they wanted a superabundance of workers. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 213–218. 60. At the beginning of the bracero program, the US government paid some of the costs of transportation. Growers began paying the entire transportation costs in 1948. Richard B. Craig, The Bracero Program: Interest Groups and Foreign Policy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), 54. 61. For more information about the domestic implications of the Good Neighbor Commission, see Emilio Zamora, Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009). See also Neil Foley, Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 22–53. 62. Otey Scruggs, Braceros, “Wetbacks,” and the Farm Labor Problem: Mexican Agricultural Labor in the United States (New York: Garland, 1988), 327. 63. “Valley Men Protest Alien Labor Plan,” Valley Morning Star, March 22, 1947. 64. Employment service agents were advised about prevailing wages by farm labor advisory councils made up of area farmers. 65. “Crackdown on Exploitation of Labor Pledged,” Valley Morning Star, April 8, 1947. 66. Lewis Carver, “Day of Fugitive Wetbacks, Alien-Harboring Nears End,” Valley Evening Monitor, April 20, 1947. 67. “Day of Fugitive Wetbacks, Alien-Harboring Nears End.” 68. “First Mexican Workers Sign Valley Contracts,” Valley Evening Monitor, April 21, 1947. 69. “‘Wetbacks’ to Be Processed First,” Valley Evening Monitor, April 8, 1947; and “First Mexican Workers Sign Valley Contracts.” 70. “First Mexican Workers Sign Valley Contracts.” 71. “U.S. May Referee Laborer Deposits,” Valley Evening Monitor, April 24, 1947. 72. After castigating predatory labor contractors for demanding a cut from workers’ pay for procuring work and providing transportation, the Mexican government virtually did the same thing with these deposits deducted from workers’ wages.

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Many braceros never received the money deposited in their names. Recently, elderly braceros and their families have started a social movement in Mexico to demand their lost wages from the bracero era. For more on the current movement to recover lost wages during the bracero era, see Mireya Loza, Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), especially the interludes. 73. “U.S. May Referee Laborer Deposits.” The Willacy and Hidalgo County farm labor advisory councils had set the prevailing wage at between twenty and twenty-five cents per hour, while the Cameron County farm labor advisory council had set the prevailing wage at between twenty and thirty-five cents. These councils were composed of area farmers and advised the employment service officials about wages. 74. List of attendees for labor conference, April 29–30, 1947, Engelman Gardens Collection, Museum of South Texas History, Edinburg, Texas. 75. “Report of Conferences Held the Afternoons of April 29 and 30, 1947, In The Office of the Valley Chamber of Commerce, Weslaco, Texas Between Representatives of the Mexican Government and the United States Immigration Service, As Well as Representatives of the Agriculture Industry in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, prepared by Allan Skinner, INS Officer-in-Charge, Hidalgo, TX” (hereafter called Allan Skinner’s Report of Labor Conference), Engelman Gardens Collection, Museum of South Texas History, Edinburg, Texas. 76. Allan Skinner’s Report of Labor Conference, p. 2. 77. Allan Skinner’s Report of Labor Conference, p. 2. Also see a report from April 29, 1947, p. 3. The latter report is from the same labor conference (hereafter Second Labor Conference Report). Both reports can be found in the Engelman Gardens Collection, Museum of South Texas History, Edinburg, Texas. 78. Allan Skinner’s Report of Labor Conference, p. 3. 79. Second Labor Conference Report, p. 6. 80. Allan Skinner’s Report of Labor Conference, p. 4. 81. Allan Skinner’s Report of Labor Conference, p. 5. 82. Allan Skinner’s Report of Labor Conference. 83. Allan Skinner’s Report of Labor Conference. 84. Allan Skinner’s Report of Labor Conference, p. 6. Cha p ter 5 1.

“Immigration Service Abandons Efforts to Halt Mexican Workers,” Sunday Star (Washington, DC), October 17, 1948, file 1, box 1453, Archivo Historico de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Mexico City (hereafter known as ASRE). 2. Raul Michel, Consul General, El Paso, Texas, to Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, no. 5402, October, 15, 1948, file 1, box 1453, ASRE. 3. Michel to Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, October 15, 1948.

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N o t e s to Pag es 1 3 9 – 1 45 4.

“Informe Concentrado de los Sucesos Registrados en Esta Frontera, Relacionado con Nuestros Braceros,” a report prepared by Raul Michel, October 19, 1948, file 1, box 1453, ASRE. 5. “Informe Concentrado de los Sucesos Registrados.” 6. John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3. 7. David FitzGerald, “Mexican Migration and the Law,” in Beyond la Frontera: The History of Mexico-U.S. Migration, ed. Mark Overmyer-Velázquez (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 180–182. A divergent view argues that official Mexican statements of dissuasion were only perfunctory, covering for a stronger Mexican agenda to maintain the status quo of migration as an economic and political safety valve. Alexandra Délano, Mexico and Its Diaspora in the United States: Policies of Emigration Since 1848 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 59–82. 8. FitzGerald, “Mexican Migration and the Law,” 180–181. 9. See the chapter on Manuel Gamio and Katherine Anne Porter in José Limón, American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 35–71. 10. Emilio Zamora, Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs: Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2009). 11. John Torpey has argued for a feminine reading of the state, arguing that the state was more interested in “embracing” or “surrounding” its members rather than “penetrating” society, as many theorists of the state have offered. Torpey, Invention of the Passport, 11. 12. The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the subsequent policies and procedures to document Chinese migration and enforce Chinese exclusion, provides ample evidence of this point. See Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 13. US Department of Justice, Laws Applicable to Immigration and Nationality (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1953), 495–507, 660–730. 14. Deborah Cohen has talked about how migrants appropriated the language of the Mexican state touting migration as the path toward Mexican modernization to justify their own movement, creating a political context for their migration. Deborah Cohen, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 15. Richard Craig, The Bracero Program: Interest Groups and Foreign Policy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), 54. 16. Spencer Rich, U.S. Agricultural Policy in the Postwar Years, 1945–1963 (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Service, 1963), 83.

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N o t es to Pag e s 1 45 – 1 49 17. US Embassy to State Department, August 30, 1948, Farm Labor Committee

Reports 1946–1954, Records of the US Employment Service, RG 183, National Archives and Records Administration II, College Park, Maryland (hereafter National Archives). 18. US Embassy to State Department, August 30, 1948. The US embassy characterized the issue in such a way as to depict growers wholly as consumers, in this case consumers of labor. The author of the memo put it this way: “In an effort to revive employer interest, the Mexican Intersecretarial Committee in Charge of Emigrant Workers’ Affairs, which by this time had come to a realization of the need for further encouragement . . .” 19. US Embassy to State Department, August 30, 1948. 20. US Embassy to State Department, August 30, 1948. Mexicali, Baja California, was located on the border just south of the lucrative Imperial Valley agricultural region in Southern California, but also served as the port of entry for the entire state of California. 21. G. C. Wilmoth, District Director, El Paso, to Central Office, February 9, 1943, file 55854/100-H, box 455, RG 85, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC (National Archives). 22. Wilmoth to Central Office, February 9, 1943. 23. As Deborah Cohen has argued, the Mexican “state-as-father” was “emasculated” by its failure to provide its citizens the necessary sustenance, through economic opportunity, within its own borders. Such scenes, therefore, represented the state’s failure as an effective patriarch. Cohen, “Caught in the Middle: The Mexican State’s Relationship with the United States and Its Own Citizen-Workers, 1942–1954,” Journal of American Ethnic History 20, no. 3 (Spring 2001): 14–15. 24. Emilio Zamora has argued that the Mexican government banned Texas from the program as a test case, to force the US federal and state governments to publicly acknowledge the existence of race discrimination and take action against the problem. Zamora, Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs, 15–16. 25. Circular no. 7607 from Manuel Tello to Mexican consuls in the United States, August 14, 1948, box 1452, file 8, ASRE. 26. A. W. Motley to Robert E. Wilson, September 3, 1948, Mexican File, July 1– December 31, 1948, United States Employment Service, Farm Labor Committee Reports 1946–1954, RG 183, National Archives. 27. Motley to Wilson, September 3, 1948, p. 1. 28. Motley to Wilson, September 3, 1948, p. 2. 29. Motley to Wilson, September 3, 1948. 30. Motley to Wilson, September 3, 1948. 31. Motley to Wilson, September 3, 1948, p. 3. 32. Torpey argues that many of the sovereignty rights observed by nations vis-à-vis one another were based in the recognition of documentary materials allowing or disallowing travel into and out of those countries. Torpey, Invention of the Passport.

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N o t es to Pag e s 1 49 – 1 5 4 33. Motley to Wilson, September 3, 1948, p. 3. 34. Paul J. Reveley, head of the Division of Mexican Affairs, State Department, to

Rafael de la Colina, Chargé d’Affaires, ad interim, Mexican Embassy, Washington, DC, September 4, 1948, box 1452, file 8, ASRE. 35. Reveley to Colina, September 4, 1948. 36. Manuel Tello to Rafael de la Colina, September 10, 1948, no. 31610, C/662, box 1452, file 8, ASRE. 37. Tello to Colina, September 10, 1948. 38. Tello to Colina, September 10, 1948. As timing was of the utmost importance, postponing the opening of a recruitment center until after the end of cotton harvest season in Chihuahua would negatively affect US growers, who would be well into, or past, their own harvesting seasons. The Mexican government’s argument in this instance recalls the kinds of arguments state officials in Texas made to justify the measures they took to stop the migration of Mexican American migrant farmworkers from the state’s borders to other agricultural regions in the United States. 39. Tello to Colina, September 10, 1948. 40. Tello to Colina, September 10, 1948. 41. Tello to Colina, September 10, 1948. 42. Tello to Colina, September 10, 1948. 43. Rafael de la Colina to Secretario de Relaciones Exteriores, October 7, 1948, box 1452, file 8, ASRE. For more information about the increased influence of Mexican consulates in the South during the late 1940s, see Julie Weise, Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 44. Colina to Secretario, October 7, 1948. 45. Colina to Secretario, October 7, 1948. 46. Colina to Secretario, October 7, 1948. 47. Colina to Secretario, October 7, 1948. 48. “Wetback Catch Now Totals 565,” El Paso Herald-Post, September 7, 1948, p. 2. 49. Walt Finley, “Sagging Economic Conditions Drive Mexican Workers to the U.S.,” El Paso Herald-Post, September 9, 1948, p. 15. 50. Other scholars have studied the essentialist imagery often used to describe Mexican migrant workers’ seasonal migration, which in effect compares them to animals, especially birds, in order to naturalize their movement. See Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900–1939 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994). 51. “Mexican Laborers Get Jobs after Rush to El Paso,” El Paso Herald-Post, October 14, 1948, p. 1. 52. Al Capp, The Short Life and Happy Times of the Shmoo (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2002), xiv. 53. Capp, Short Life and Happy Times, 11.

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N o t es to Pag e s 1 5 4 – 1 5 9 54. Capp, Short Life and Happy Times, xiv; and Tim Appelo, “Li’l Abner Draws to a

Close,” Entertainment Weekly, no. 248, November 11, 1994, p. 96. 55. See David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immi-

grants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 46–56. 56. “Truman, Dewey See Opinion Divided in Western Region,” El Paso Herald-Post, October 8, 1948, p. 1. 57. Marshall Hail, “El Pasoans Give Truman Warm Welcome, Silver Spurs,” El Paso Herald-Post, September 25, 1948, pp. 1–2. 58. “El Pasoans Give Truman Warm Welcome.” 59. “Jester Says Dewey Will Be Elected,” El Paso Herald-Post, October 7, 1948, p. 1. 60. Marshall Hail, “Plan to Obtain Mexican Farm Workers Started on President’s Train,” El Paso Herald-Post, October 20, 1948. 61. “Plan to Obtain Mexican Farm Workers.” 62. “Plan to Obtain Mexican Farm Workers.” 63. “Red Blockade at Border Discussed,” El Paso Herald-Post, September 29, 1948, p. 1. 64. “Red Blockade at Border Discussed.” 65. “Mexico to Resume Recruiting Farm Labor in Juarez,” El Paso Herald-Post, October 2, 1948, p. 1. 66. “Mexico to Resume Recruiting Farm Labor.” 67. “Laborers Seeking U.S. Jobs Storm Juarez Office,” El Paso Herald-Post, October 11, 1948. 68. “Mexico to Resume Recruiting Farm Labor.” 69. “Mexico to Resume Recruiting Farm Labor.” 70. Ken Regan to Watson Miller, October 6, 1948, file 56246/339-C, RG 185, National Archives. 71. Regan to Miller, October 6, 1948. 72. Ken Regan to Watson Miller, October 7, 1948, RG 185, National Archives. 73. Regan to Miller, October 7, 1948. 74. Raul Michel to Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (hereafter SRE), October 15, 1948, file 1, box 1453, ASRE. 75. “Informe,” October 19, 1948, ASRE. This most certainly would have been a mistaken assumption by Reyes Cortez, or perhaps a misunderstanding by Michel, who reported it to his superiors. Growers from Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi would have applied to the Monterrey center for braceros since it was farther east than Juárez, and thus closer to their region. 76. Michel to SRE, October 15, 1948. 77. Michel to SRE, October 15, 1948. 78. “Laborers Seeking U.S. Jobs Storm Juarez Office.” 79. Michel to SRE, October 15, 1948. 80. Michel to SRE, October 15, 1948. 81. Each cotton harvest goes through three pickings, with the first picking always yielding the most cotton, making it the most lucrative for workers.

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N o t e s to Pag es 1 5 9 – 1 6 3 82. The wage rate numbers are from Raul Michel’s report, “Informe,” October 19,

1948. 83. Michel to SRE, October 15, 1948. 84. Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story (Charlotte,

NC: McNally and Loftin, 1964). 85. Marshall Hail, “Border Opened to Mexico Laborers,” El Paso Herald-Post,

October 16, 1948, p. 1. 86. “Provisionalmente se pospone la contratación de braceros,” El Fronterizo,

October 15, 1948, file 1, box 1453, ASRE. 87. “Farmers Charge U.S. Officers Fix Cotton Wage,” El Paso Herald-Post, September

22, 1948, p. 1. 88. “Provisionalmente se pospone la contratación de braceros.” 89. “Provisionalmente se pospone la contratación de braceros.” 90. “Mexican Laborers Get Jobs after Rush to El Paso,” El Paso Herald-Post, October

14, 1948, p. 1. 91. “Mexican Laborers Get Jobs after Rush.” On the morning of the fifteenth,

Raul Michel contacted the Mexican consul in Denver, who confirmed that 500 Mexican workers had already disembarked in Denver and been sent on forward to northern Colorado and Wyoming. They were expecting another group of 250 workers later that day. Michel asked the consul to try to keep the workers from disembarking, but INS officials in Denver refused to act. Michel to SRE, October 15, 1948. See also telegram from Suarez to INS Office, October 15, 1948, file 1, box 1453, ASRE; and John Hamaker, INS Officer in Charge, Denver, Colorado, to Santiago Suarez, October 15, 1948, file 1, box 1453, ASRE. 92. Michel to SRE, October 15, 1948. 93. “Mexican Laborers Get Jobs after Rush,” p. 1. 94. According to the act of April 29, 1943, governing the “Admission of Certain Agricultural Workers Born in North, Central, and South America, workers “desiring to perform agricultural labor in the United States . . . shall be exempt from the payment of head tax required by section 2 of the Immigration Act of February 5, 1917, and from other admission charges.” The authority over these exceptions, however, was given to the “Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization, with the approval of the Attorney General.” US Department of Justice, Laws Applicable to Immigration and Nationality, 523. Also, the law required that these workers be issued identification cards, but according to Raul Michel’s reports, employers were loading workers immediately into vehicles upon their crossing and promised to send lists with names and relevant information to the INS at a later date. 95. “Mexican Laborers Get Jobs after Rush,” p. 1. 96. George Harrison to INS District Director at El Paso, January 4, 1949, file 56246/339-D, RG 85, National Archives. 97. Harrison to District Director at El Paso, January 4, 1949. 98. Harrison to District Director at El Paso, January 4, 1949.

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N o t es to Pag e s 1 6 4 – 1 7 1 99. Harrison to District Director at El Paso, January 4, 1949. 100. Harrison to District Director at El Paso, January 4, 1949. 101. Alton Hughes to Grover Wilmoth, December 29, 1948, file 56246/339-D, RG 85,

National Archives. 102. Hughes to Wilmoth, December 29, 1948. 103. Press bulletin, transmitted by telephone from Manuel Tello to Rafael de la

Colina, October 17, 1948, ASRE. 104. Press bulletin, October 17, 1948. 105. Press bulletin, October 17, 1948. 106. Memorandum, from telephone conversation between Undersecretary of Foreign

Relations Tello and Interim Chargé d’Affaires in Washington, DC, Rafael de la Colina, October 20, 1948, ASRE. 107. Robert Lovett to Rafael de la Colina, October 22, 1948, ASRE. 108. Robert H. Robinson to John F. Mucahey, February 23, 1949, file 56246/339-D, RG 85, National Archives. 109. State Department memorandum, December 20, 1948, file 56246/339-D, RG 85, National Archives. 110. State Department memorandum, December 20, 1948. 111. Memorandum from Mexican embassy, January 5, 1949, RG 85, National Archives. 112. Memorandum from Mexican embassy, January 5, 1949. 113. State Department memorandum, December 20, 1948; Memorandum from Mexican embassy, January 5, 1949; Memorandum to INS district directors from A. R. Mackey, January 14, 1949, file 56246/339-D, RG 85, National Archives. 114. US embassy in Mexico City to Secretary of State, January 4, 1949, file 56246/339-D, RG 85, National Archives. 115. INS Commissioner Watson Miller to Mr. Tom, January 31, 1949, file 56246/339D, RG 85, National Archives. 116. Miller to Mr. Tom, January 31, 1949. 117. Miller to Mr. Tom, January 31, 1949. 118. Jacob Potofsky to Attorney General Tom Clark, January 20, 1949, file 56246/339-D, RG 85, National Archives. 119. Memorandum, H. L. Mitchell to Watson Miller, Commissioner INS, January 10, 1949, file 56246/339-D, RG 85, National Archives. 120. Telegram, US embassy in Mexico City to Secretary of State, February 7, 1949, RG 85, National Archives. 121. Acheson to Wheeler at US embassy in Mexico City, February 25, 1949, RG 85, National Archives. 122. Paul J. Reveley to Watson Miller, April 29, 1949, file 56246/339-E, RG 85, National Archives. 123. Acheson to US embassy in Mexico City, April 30, 1949, file 56246/339-E, RG 85, National Archives. 124. Jorge Lopez del Castillo to Raul Michel, October 26, 1948, ASRE.

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N o t e s to Pag es 1 7 1 – 1 8 2 125. Jorge Lopez del Castillo to Raul Michel, November 2, 1948, ASRE. 126. “Lamentable accidente occurío ayer a un bracero que pretendió cruzar,”

El Continental, October 19, 1948, file 1, box 1453, ASRE. 127. Michel to SRE, October 15, 1948.

Cha p ter 6 1.

During the middle of the 1950s, South Texas experienced its worst period of drought in the twentieth century. South Central Climate Science Center, “Drought History for South Texas” (May 2013), p. 9, http://www.southcentralclimate .org/content/documents/factsheets/Drought_History_TXCD09.pdf. 2. For more on the formation of liberal coalitional politics during the midtwentieth century in Texas, see Max Krochmal, Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 3. Carlos Kevin Blanton, George I. Sánchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 147. On the Mexican government’s position on undocumented emigration, see chapter 5 of this book; and Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 113–114. 4. Emilio Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993), 61. 5. Zamora, World of the Mexican Worker, 174. 6. American GI Forum and Texas State Federation of Labor (TSFL), What Price, Wetbacks? (Austin, TX: The Forum, 1954), 3. 7. American GI Forum and TSFL, What Price, 3. 8. Dispatches from Panama, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, box 5, folder 16, and box 6, folder 8, Serafino Romualdi Papers, Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University Library. In his capacity as liaison between the AFL-CIO and Central American labor unions, McLellan might have also been colluding with the CIA. Krochmal, Blue Texas, 466n4. 9. American GI Forum and TSFL, What Price, 5. 10. American GI Forum and TSFL, What Price, 5. 11. American GI Forum and TSFL, What Price, 5. 12. For works that trace public health officials’ contact with, and attempts to contain, “dangerous” immigrant populations in West Coast cities, see Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). For work on public health officials at the US-Mexico border, see John McKiernan-González, Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 13. For works on pachuco/a zoot-suiters and the Zoot Suit Riots, see Luis Alvarez,

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N o t es to Pag e s 1 8 2– 1 8 5

The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); and Mauricio Mazón, The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984). 14. American GI Forum and TSFL, What Price, 6. 15. In addition to the implication of document falsifiers facilitating subversive agents’ false identities, anti-Communist rhetoric directly tied nonheteronormative sexual activity to questions of national security, and to overall questions of secrecy and living double lives. David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1–14; Robert J. Corber, In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). 16. American GI Forum and TSFL, What Price, 14. 17. American GI Forum and TSFL, What Price, 30. 18. American GI Forum and TSFL, What Price, 6–7. 19. Gladwin Hill, “Million a Year Flee Mexico Only to Find Peonage Here,” New York Times, March 25, 1951. 20. McLellan to Holleman, November 22, 1953, folder 110-7-2-1, Texas AFL-CIO, University of Texas at Arlington Special Collections (hereafter McLellan Folder). 21. Benjamin Gitlow, The Whole of Their Lives: Communism in America—A Personal History and Intimate Portrayal of Its Leaders (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), 151. Once an avowed Communist who ran for national office on the Communist Party ticket in 1928, Gitlow left the Communist Party and became an outspoken critic during the Cold War era, along with other formerly prominent Communists such as Sidney Hook, Max Eastman, and Louis Budenz. Michael Nash, “Schism on the Left: The Anti-Communism of V. F. Calverton and His ‘Modern Quarterly,’” Science and Society 45, no. 4 (Winter 1981): 437–452. 22. Eastin Nelson and Frederic Meyers, Labor Requirements and Labor Resources in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, Inter-American Education Occasional Papers 6 (Austin, University of Texas, 1950); Lyle Saunders and Olen Earl Leonard, The Wet-Back in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, Inter-American Education Occasional Papers 7 (Austin: University of Texas, 1951). 23. For an in-depth biography of George I. Sánchez that also broadly explores Mexican American civil rights activism during the mid-twentieth century, see Blanton, George I. Sánchez. 24. Blanton, George I. Sánchez, 91. 25. Blanton, George I. Sánchez, 91. 26. Gladwin Hill, “Peons in the West Lowering Culture,” New York Times, March 27, 1951. 27. Carlos Kevin Blanton, “The Citizenship Sacrifice: Mexican Americans, the Saunders-Leonard Report, and the Politics of Immigration, 1951–1952,” Western Historical Quarterly 40, no. 3 (Autumn 2009): 308–310.

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N o t e s to Pag es 1 8 5 – 1 9 1 28. Saunders and Leonard, Wet-Back in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, 90–92. 29. Gladwin Hill, “Interests Conflict on ‘Wetback’ Cure,” New York Times, March 29,

1951. 30. American GI Forum and TSFL, What Price, 38. 31. “Million a Year Flee Mexico,” p. 1. 32. American GI Forum and TSFL, What Price, 1. 33. Kitty Calavita, Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the

I.N.S. (New Orleans, LA: Quid Pro Books, 2010), 53. 34. Calavita, Inside the State. 35. McLellan to Holleman, March 20, 1954, McLellan Folder. Serafino Romualdi

was the Latin American representative for the AFL. 36. Holleman to McLellan, March 30, 1954, McLellan Folder. For a work that details

conservative Texas Democratic politicians’ attacks on labor unions in the state, see George Norris Green, The Establishment in Texas Politics: The Primitive Years, 1938–1957 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979). 37. Krochmal, Blue Texas, 94–95. 38. Address by Ed Idar Jr. to TSFL State Convention, 1954, box 216.1, Hector P. García Papers, Mary and Jeff Bell Library Special Collections, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi (hereafter Hector García Papers). 39. Address by Ed Idar Jr., p. 6. 40. Krochmal, Blue Texas, 91–93. 41. Address by Ed Idar Jr., p. 3. He even read a resolution adopted at the American GI Forum’s annual convention in 1953, in which the members resolved to “ever be alert against the menace of Communism,” and to “be among the first to volunteer their blood and lives,” if it became necessary, “against the despicable forces of Communism.” 42. Ed Idar Jr. to Hector P. García, May 19, 1954, box 216.12, Hector García Papers. 43. McLellan to Holleman, April 19, 1954, McLellan Folder. 44. Ed Idar Jr. to Hector P. García, January 2, 1954, box 217.1, Letters GI Forum January 1954, Hector García Papers. 45. Based on American GI Forum letterhead from mid-1954, which listed their office address in the Nalle Building, the same as before, it seems that García rejected Idar’s proposal to move to the Littlefield Building. 46. Ed Idar Jr. to Hector P. García, May 19, 1954, box 216.2, Hector García Papers. 47. Idar to García, May 19, 1954. 48. This does not mean that Idar could always be counted upon to represent the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in Texas. Carlos Blanton has recounted a stormy meeting between Mexican American leaders George Sánchez, Ed Idar Jr., and Hector García over Idar and García’s support of conservative Price Daniel for reelection during the gubernatorial primary campaign in 1962. Sánchez, on the other hand, favored backing liberal Ralph Yarborough. Blanton, George I. Sánchez, 219–220.

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N o t e s to Pag es 1 9 1 – 1 9 8 49. Allan Shivers married Marialice Shary, the heir to John Shary’s massive citrus

operation in South Texas, one of the agricultural enterprises explored in chapter 1. 50. Texas State Federation of Labor, “Down in the Valley: A Supplementary Report

on Developments in the Wetback and Bracero Situation of the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas since Publication of ‘What Price, Wetbacks?’” (Austin, TX: 1955). 51. As Blanton has argued, in addition to organized labor groups, organizations such as the Bishop’s Committee for the Spanish Speaking, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Congress of American Indians, the National Consumers League, and the National Education Association also held similar positions against the bracero program and undocumented migration. Blanton, “Citizenship Sacrifice,” 308. 52. John Holland to Hector García, August 16, 1951, box 224.1, Hector García Papers. 53. Andrew McLellan to Jerry Holleman, December 29, 1953, McLellan Folder. 54. McLellan to Holleman, December 29, 1953. 55. Ed Idar Jr. to Price Daniel, October 23, 1953, box 216.1, Hector García Papers. 56. Idar to Daniel, October 23, 1953. 57. Andrew McLellan to Jerry Holleman, March 3, 1954, McLellan Folder. 58. McLellan to Holleman, March 3, 1954. 59. A. C. McLellan to Jerry Holleman, June 25, 1954, McLellan Folder. 60. McLellan to Holleman, June 25, 1954. 61. McLellan to Holleman, June 25, 1954. 62. McLellan to Holleman, June 25, 1954. 63. A. C. McLellan to Jerry Holleman, July 5, 1954, McLellan Folder. 64. McLellan to Holleman, July 5, 1954. 65. McLellan to Holleman, June 25, 1954. 66. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Waves of Opposition: Labor and Struggle for Democratic Radio (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). 67. McLellan to Holleman, June 25, 1954. 68. “Paper Bares Shivers-Bentsen Land Deals” and “Wetbacks Called ‘Out of Control,’” McAllen Evening Monitor, June 24, 1954, p. 1. 69. Quoted in Juan Ramon García, Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 210. 70. Juan Ramon García, Operation Wetback, 210. 71. Juan Ramon García, Operation Wetback, 218. 72. Philip S. Foner, U.S. Labor Movement and Latin America, 1846–1919 (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1988); Beth Sims, Workers of the World Undermined: American Labor’s Role in U.S. Foreign Policy (Boston: South End Press, 1992); Robert Alexander, “Labor and Inter-American Relations,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 334, no. 1 (March 1961): 41–53.

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N o t e s to Pag es 1 9 8 –2 04 73. Serafino Romualdi, Presidents and Peons: Recollections of a Labor Ambassador

in Latin America (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1967), 5–6. 74. Romualdi, Presidents and Peons, 17. At the tail end of the war, Romualdi went to

Italy under the auspices of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, to organize against Communist forces. 75. Alexander, “Labor and Inter-American Relations.” ORIT was an effort sponsored by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. 76. Dana Frank, Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 22–24. 77. Robert Alexander dates the decline of influence of ORIT to the Cuban Revolution. ORIT had allowed for its allied organization in Cuba to collude with and support the Batista government and its brutal policies. When Castro successfully overthrew Batista, he formed his own hemispheric labor confederation that excluded American and Canadian labor unions and was able to have some success attracting labor unions from other nations. In general, there was increased anti-American sentiment in Latin America by the late 1950s. 78. Jerry Holleman to Paul Sparks, Executive Secretary of the TSFL, n.d., McLellan Folder. 79. The full name of the organization was La Alianza de Braceros Nacionales de Mexico en los Estados Unidos (the Alliance of Mexican Braceros in the United States). Mireya Loza explores the Alianza in her book Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), esp. ch. 3, 97–133. 80. Loza, Defiant Braceros, 106–107. 81. Loza, Defiant Braceros, 127. 82. Romualdi, Presidents and Peons, 135–136, 351. Ep i log ue 1. Ignacio M. García, Hector P. García: In Relentless Pursuit of Justice (Houston,

TX: Arte Publico Press, 2002), 201–202. 2. Ignacio García, Hector P. García, 201. 3. David Gutiérrez, “‘Sin Fronteras?’: Chicanos, Mexican Americans, and the

Emergence of the Contemporary Immigration Debate, 1968–1978,” Journal of American Ethnic History 10, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 5–37. 4. Gutiérrez, “Sin Fronteras?,” 17. 5. Gutiérrez, “Sin Fronteras?” 6. Hiroshi Motomura, Immigration Outside the Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2–3. 7. Motomura, Immigration Outside the Law, 5. 8. Norma Stoltz Chinchilla, Nora Hamilton, and James Loucky, “The Sanctuary

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Index

Note: Numbers in italics refer to images and tables. Acheson, Dean, 169–170 Acosta, Macario, 171–173 Administrative Procedures Act (1946), 229n28 advertising industry, 19, 43–44 AFL-CIO. See American Federation of Labor (AFL) African Americans, 120, 128, 130, 221n26, 227n11. See also slavery agriculture industry: and conflation of agricultural and domestic workers, 56; government’s role in labor relations of, 9, 59–60; growth of, in South Texas, 18, 20, 57; reliance on undocumented workers of, 49, 50. See also growers; Mexican migrant farmworkers, undocumented Aguirre, Stephen, 158 Alamía, Joe V., 117 Alamo Land and Sugar Company, 44 Alemán, Miguel, 169 Alien Contract Labor Act. See Foran Act (1885) Alien Registration Act (1940), 143, 230n43 Alin, F. O., 42

American Federation of Labor (AFL), 177, 187, 188–189, 198–200 American GI Forum, 174, 176; alliance of, with TSFL, 187–191, 200; and Communism, 189, 248n41; criticisms of, 202; and Inter-American Education Series, 184–185; and support of Border Patrol, 191–196, 197–198 American Revolution, 221n28 Anderson, Clinton P., 156 Anzalduas Bridge, 205–206 Anzalduas Park, 208 Arizona, 143, 160, 167, 204 Arkansas, 158, 160, 243n75 Armando Salinas v. Mrs. Maureen Moore et al., 114, 117 Associated Advertising Clubs of America, 19 Associated Advertising Clubs of the World, 43 Baxter, Wally, 109 bracero program: agreement to transfer undocumented workers into, 131, 226–227n5; certification process for, 132–133; as competitor of undocumented labor, 51; and consistency of work location, 222n35; creation of, 9–10, 129; dissolution

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and renegotiation of, 165–170; effect of, on undocumented immigration, 141, 148, 176; end of, 235n5; growers’ response to, 133, 134, 145, 165; and Immigration Act of 1917, 84; importance of INS in administering, 149–150, 151; inclusion of Texas in, 50, 130–131, 147, 169, 241n24; and labor contractors/crew leaders, 115, 131; and labor unions/advocacy organizations, 168–169, 200, 249n51; media response to, 131–132; Mexican government’s deduction of wages from, 133, 238–239n72; Mexican government’s view of, 10, 129, 141–143, 167; phases of, 10; and recruitment center conditions, 146–147; and recruitment center location negotiations, 144–152, 146, 167, 168–170; requirements and rules of, 72, 129–130; and transportation of workers, 145, 169, 238n60; US undermining of, 157–158, 165–166; wage negotiations for, 131, 133–136, 140, 159–161, 212–213n37. See also El Paso Incident Brewster, D. W., 62, 65 Brownell, Jennie A., 38 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 116, 122 California: and bracero program, 9, 134, 167; comparisons of South Texas to, 27; and legislation to protect farmworkers, 121; Spanish imagery in promotions for, 30 Cameron County, Texas, 108–109 Canada, 86, 93 capitalism, 18, 56–57, 136, 154, 206, 211n23 cattle ranching, 22 Caucasian Race Resolution, 130 Centro Acción Social Autónomo (CASA), 203

Chicano Movement, 203, 220n16 Chihuahua, Chihuahua, 145, 148, 150, 242n38 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 5, 227n7, 240n12 C. H. Swallow Land Company, 44 citizenship, 5, 53, 143, 179, 181–182, 228n15. See also visas citrus, 51, 220n4 Ciudad Juárez, 138; bracero recruitment center in, 152, 157–159, 161, 171 Clark, Tom, 156 Cold War: effect of, on immigration, 143, 152, 176–177; former Communists who spoke out against party during, 247n21; and politics of citizenship, 202; rhetoric of, 182, 247n15 Colorado, 139, 143, 160, 244n91 Communism: as barrier to coalition building, 189; Mexican Americans’ supposed vulnerability to, 184; and US fears of infiltration, 182–183, 186–187. See also Cold War Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos (CTM), 198–200 Congress of Industrial Organizations, 168, 198 Cornell, Gordon, 146 cotton: amount produced of, 51; and braceros, 157; and crew leaders, 125; harvests of, 243n81; season for, 127, 150, 242n38; and transition of industry to seasonal system, 57 coyotes, 115, 235n3 Cramer, A. L., 68, 132, 133–135 Creager, R. B., 44–45 crew leaders: and bracero program, 135; definitions of, 115, 118; distinction of, from labor contractors, 124–126, 128; economic stability of, 126 Crossett, E. N., 81–83, 98 Culiacán, Sinaloa, 145

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Daniel, Price, 194, 248n48 Davis, Gates, 64 Deerman, John Jr., 104 de la Colina, Rafael, 150 deportation: cruelties and humiliations of, 95–96; high-volume, 3, 98, 105, 108, 233n90; to inland locations in Mexico, 79; persistent threat of, to migrant workers, 1–3, 61, 71–72, 74, 83, 92; process of, 88–91, 219n2, 226n99, 229–230n31; rates of, 94, 97, 112, 170–171; as solution to undocumented immigration, 176, 193. See also Operation Wetback; voluntary departure Díaz, Porfirio, 21, 22 Dicke, Adolf, 17 Dixon, Maurice, 108–109, 234n105, 235n116 documentation, 166, 205, 241n32, 251nn9–10. See also citizenship; deportation; visas Donaldson, J. M., 17–18, 42, 44–45 “Down in the Valley,” 195 drought, 246n1 Edinburg, Texas, 48, 49, 52 Edwards, Frank, 197 Elks Clubs, 28 El Paso: Border Patrol enforcement practices in, 98–100, 102–104, 212n28; jurisdiction of INS district of, 232n69; resistance of growers to Border Patrol in, 99–100, 103–104; Truman’s campaign stop at, 155–156; use of undocumented farmworkers in, 63; and voluntary departure, 94. See also El Paso Incident; Wilmoth, Grover El Paso Herald-Post, 153, 156, 157 El Paso Incident, 138–141, 153, 156, 160–161, 166, 172 emigrant agency laws, 119–121, 236n23

Engelman Gardens, 41, 67, 132 exploitation. See Mexican migrant farmworkers, undocumented: abuse and exploitation of Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), 236n17 farmers. See growers Farm Security Administration (FSA), 9, 123, 129, 225n88 farmworkers. See bracero program; Mexican migrant farmworkers, undocumented Ferguson, Bryce, 117–118, 119 Fernández, Antonio Manuel, 82, 226n2 filibusters, 22 Foran Act (1885), 121, 236–237n29 Fourteenth Amendment, 5, 143, 228n13 Galarza, Ernesto, 199 García, Hector, 181, 185, 191, 248n45, 248n48 Garza, Carlos, 126 Gitlow, Ben, 183, 247n21 Good Neighbor Commission, 130 Grant, W. C., 218n65 Great Depression: effect of, on immigration, 87, 93, 129; effect of, on land companies, 43; and Farm Security Administration, 123; US repatriation campaigns during, 142, 210n11 Great Western Sugar Company, 157, 161 growers: and bracero program, 133, 134, 145, 165; collusion of, with Border Patrol, 50, 60–61, 104–105, 163–165; contestations of, with Border Patrol, 82–83, 97–98, 104, 192; labor needs of, 51–52, 127–128, 220n8, 238n59; obligations regarding working conditions of farmworkers, 65–66, 72–74, 236n17; paternalism and familial rhetoric of, 49, 53–59, 69, 73–74, 80, 192–193; political influence of, 2, 80, 84–85, 121, 145, 169

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of Border Patrol’s powers, 82–83; and voluntary departure, 92–94. See also US Border Patrol; US immigration policy Indian Citizenship Act (1924), 228n13 In re Rodriguez, 228n15 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (2004), 205, 251n9 Inter-American Education Series (University of Texas), 184 Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers (ORIT), 199, 250n75, 250n77 Inter-American Relations Committee, 184 Internal Security Act (1950), 143 irrigation systems, 39, 47, 51

Guerra, Alfonso, 151 Gulf Cartel, 208 haciendas, 23, 54, 221n24 Harding, William, 45 Harrison, George, 163–165 Hatch, Carl, 82 Hidalgo County, 24, 35, 41, 51, 52; and bracero program, 132–133 highway checkpoints, 13, 237n35 Hill, Gladwin, 183–186 Holland, John, 193–194, 195, 197 Holleman, Jerry, 187–188, 199 Hoot, Thad, 114–115, 116, 117 housing, 10, 66–67, 72, 119, 121, 130 Hughes, Alton, 165 Humphrey, Hubert, 186–187 Hunt Corporation, 206 Idar, Ed, Jr., 174, 175; background of, 177; as conduit between Mexican American left and other liberal groups, 190–191, 248n48; keynote of, at TSFL conference, 188–189, 248n41; support of, for INS and Border Patrol, 191–196, 197. See also American GI Forum; What Price, Wetbacks? Idar, Nicasio, 177 illegal immigration. See Mexican migrant farmworkers, undocumented; US immigration policy Immigration Act (1917), 57–58, 84–85, 86–87 Immigration and Nationality Act (1952), 229n28 Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS): and the El Paso Incident, 139, 162–163; evolution of enforcement strategies of, 98, 105; grower complaints registered with, 224n78; investigation of, into South Texas hiring practices, 62–65; and negotiation

jacales, 32–33, 216–217n46 Jester, Beauford, 156 Jim Crow laws, 130, 215n33 Johnson, Lyndon, 191 Kansas City, 36 Kelly, Willard F., 82 Knights of Columbus, 28 La Alianza, 199–200, 250n79 labor activists, 176–177, 235n5 labor agencies, 122–124. See also individual agencies labor camps, 121, 123, 129, 225n88, 238n58 labor contractors: and bracero program negotiations, 131, 161; definitions of, 115, 118; distinction of, from crew leaders, 124–125; as method of achieving financial stability, 118; regulation of, 115–116, 121–122, 127; requirements to operate for, 119. See also labor laws labor importation program. See bracero program

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labor laws, 117–122. See also individual legislation labor unions: and accusations of Communism, 177, 189; alliance of, with Mexican American activists, 189–190; and bracero program, 168–169, 191; and farmworkers, 125; influence of, in immigration policy, 191–192. See also individual organizations La Migra. See US Border Patrol land companies: depiction of Mexico/ Mexican people in brochures of, 29–34, 29, 32, 41, 217n48; depiction of South Texas in brochures of, 20, 25–28, 35, 46; formation of, 24; fraudulent practices of, 17–18, 35–36, 42; headquarters of, 36, 217n59; investigation into practices of, 17–18, 43, 44–45; promotional campaigns of, to white migrants, 18–21, 25–28; regulation of, by advertising industry, 19, 43–44; sales agents’ job described for, 36. See also land company excursions; and individual companies land company excursions: communitybuilding of prospects during, 37–38; control of messaging to prospects during, 38–40; presentation of Mexican labor force during, 41; as primary sales tool of land companies, 20, 34–37 Latin American Workers’ Confederation, 198 Latin/Central America, 182–183, 198–200, 203–204, 250n77 League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), 185, 197 Leonard, Olen, 184–185 Lew Moy et al. v. United States, 89–91, 229n26 liberal reformers, 116, 176–177, 188, 190, 193 Li’l Abner, 153–154, 154

Lombardo Toledano, Vicente, 198 Lonergan, Charles, 96 Longan, John P., 81–83 Los Angeles, California, 94 Louisiana, 158, 160, 243n75 Lower Rio Grande Valley Land Men’s Association, 36, 43, 44 Lusk, Lee, 82, 226n2 Magallan, Alberto, 126, 205–208 Magallan, Angelica, 68, 224n71, 225n95 Magallan, Noe: on changes to Rancho Grande, 207–208; deportation of, 78–79, 226n99; experience of family of, 74–78; journey of, to Carrol Norquest’s farm, 48–49; perspective of, on Carrol Norquest, 68 Magallan, Tomás, 76 “Magic Valley.” See land companies: depiction of South Texas in brochures of Mandell, Mrs. H. C., 82 Manifest Destiny, 26, 215n28 Masons, 28 Matamoros, Tamaulipas, 96 McBee, Griffith, 153 McCarran, Pat, 187 McCarran Internal Security Act (1950), 189 McLellan, Andrew, 174; as AFL-CIO officer, 200; as bridge between American GI Forum and TSFL, 187, 189–190; career of, 177–178; and Communism, 183; support of, for INS and Border Patrol, 191–196. See also What Price, Wetbacks? media: coverage of Operation Wetback in, 196–197; portrayal of migrant farmworkers in, 152–155, 154; response to bracero program in, 131–132; and studies on undocumented migration, 175, 183–186. See also individual publications

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Mendez Leon, Abelino, 95–96 Mexicali, Baja California, 145, 241n19 Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, 203 Mexican Americans: characterizations of, vs. immigrants, 179–181, 186; and civil rights leaders, 176, 184–185, 189, 192; and community formation with migrants, 25, 210n11; as competitors of migrant farmworkers, 58, 186; cultural and political identity of, 210n11; effect of Operation Wetback on, 197–198; intimidation of, by labor officials, 116; marginalization of, 192; middle class dream for, 188–189, 202 Mexican-American War, 5, 21–22, 215n28 Mexican Intersecretarial Commission, 133, 145, 148, 158, 160 Mexican migrant farmworkers, undocumented: abuse and exploitation of, 2, 57, 70–71, 102–103, 131, 193; agency and decision-making of, 2, 75–76, 141, 155; characterizations of, vs. Mexican Americans, 179–181, 192; commodification of, 26, 30–31, 33, 215n28; and creation of labor force, 3, 23, 25; criminalization of, 181–182, 201; cyclical nature of work by, 11–12, 51–52; dependence on employer of, 69–71, 164–165; historical phases of migration of, 4; kinship networks of, 50, 57, 74–79; living conditions of, 65–68, 72–74, 102, 175, 223–224n66; migratory circuit of, 126–127; number of, in South Texas, 51–52, 63–65, 220n10; reasons of, for migrating, 147, 241n23; and state of permanent temporariness, 83, 91, 113, 227n6, 230–231n47f; US government’s regulation of conditions for, 73, 103, 115–116, 119, 225n88; wages of, 49, 64–65, 73, 102, 131, 134; “wetback”

descriptor for, 78, 175, 186; women who accompanied, 66, 76–77, 210n11. See also bracero program; crew leaders; labor contractors; Mexican nationals; Mexico; mobility Mexican nationals: characterizations of, as ideal domestic workers, 33, 34, 56–57, 154; discrimination and racism toward, 5, 130, 135; portrayal of, in land company campaigns, 29–34, 29, 32, 41, 217n48; racialization of, 11, 56–57, 141, 155, 192–193; stereotypes of, 58, 65, 154, 181–182, 186 Mexico: effect of transition to agricultural economy on, 24–25; growth of border towns due to Prohibition, 42; migration within, 23, 24, 214n23; modernization and industrialization of, 21, 22–23, 240n14; portrayal of, by land companies, 20; rates of legal immigration from, 86–88, 87; and sovereignty over emigrants, 8, 140, 141–142, 147, 240n7. See also bracero program Michel, Raul, 139, 159–162, 243n75, 244n91 Miller, Watson, 100–103, 156–157, 167–168 Mississippi, 158, 160, 243n75 Missouri Pacific Railroad, 25, 37, 215–216n34 Mitchell, H. L., 168 mobility: African American workers’, 120; Border Patrol’s restriction of migrants’, 3, 49, 59–60, 69–72, 74, 113; bracero program as means to control migrants’, 141–144, 147; labor legislation meant to control migrants’, 116, 118–122, 124, 128–129, 136–137; and public health rhetoric, 179–181. See also deportation; voluntary departure Montalvo, Alex, 68

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Montalvo, Ida, 67 Monterrey, Nuevo León, 22–23, 79, 145 Moore, Maureen, 114, 117 Morrow, Carson, 104 Motley, A. W., 148–151 Murray, Alan, 234n102

Operation Wetback: execution of, 108, 109, 186, 192, 195, 225–226n98; media coverage of, 196–197 Oppenheimer, Rueben, 89–90, 93, 95, 229–230n31 Ortiz Hernan, Gustavo, 134–136

National Farm Labor Union, 168, 199–200 National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), 225n88 National Labor Relations Act, 56 National Origins Act (1924), 85, 154 Naturalization Act (1790), 228n13 New Deal, 56 New Mexico: and bracero program, 134, 157, 160–161; prosecution of growers in, 99, 232n66; Spanish colonial past in promotions for, 30 New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau, 82 New York Times, 183–184 Nichols, Clyde, 103–104 Norquest, Carrol: as author, 52–53; bilingual skills of, 224n75; farming operation of, 52; housing provided for migrant workers by, 66; relationship of, with migrant workers, 67–68; as typical employer of migrant farmworkers, 1–2, 49, 55. See also Rio Grande Wetbacks: Mexican Migrant Workers; “Swarming of the Wetbacks, The” Norquest, Kelly, 67 Norquest, Rikki, 1–2, 67 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 206 Nuevo León, Mexico, 23

pachuco, 181–182 padrone, 121 patrón, 53, 70, 224n72 Pecos, Texas, 163–165, 166, 232n81 Plan de San Diego uprising, 31, 216n42 Plumb, Milton, 196–197 Plyler v. Doe, 203 poll taxes, 24 Porfiriato. See Díaz, Porfirio postcards, 216–217n46 Potofsky, Jacob, 168 Powers of the Border Patrol Act (1925), 231n61 preexamination, 93, 230–231n47 Price, Theodore, 37, 38, 218n65 prison farms, 120 Program for Cooperation with SpanishSpeaking Minorities in the United States, 184 Progressive Era, 18, 26, 44, 210n11 progressives, 190, 215n33 Prohibition, 41–42 Public Law 78, 10

Obama administration, 204 Olguin, Senaido, 75, 76 Olson, Culbert, 121 Operation Hold the Line, 212n28

Quillin, Albert, 105, 108–112, 234nn100–110 railroads: as force of modernization, 21, 22; segregation in, 37, 38. See also individual railroads Rancho Grande, Tamaulipas, 48, 49, 75–77, 207 Rawls, Fletcher, 64, 110 Rayburn, Sam, 156 Regan, Ken, 156, 157–158, 163 Reorganization Act (1939), 230n35

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Reveley, Paul, 150, 170 Reyes Cortez, Francisco, 158, 159–161, 243n75 Reyes Nava, José, 131–132, 134 Reynosa, Tamaulipas, 41, 131, 137, 208 Rio Grande Valley. See South Texas Rio Grande Wetbacks: Mexican Migrant Workers (Norquest), 52–53, 77–78, 209n1, 220n19 Roberts, Fred, 57–58 Roel, Virgilio, 198 Rogers, Will, 162 Romualdi, Serafino, 178, 198–199, 200, 250n74 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 56 Roosevelt, Theodore, 4–5 Rotary Clubs, 29 Roubos, Dorr, 146 Russell, William E., 62, 64 Salinas, Armando, 114–115, 116–118, 129, 235n1 San Antonio, Texas, 94, 100–103, 232n69 San Benito, Texas, 109–110 Sánchez, George I., 184, 248n48 Sanchez, Robert “Bob,” 198 sanctuary movement, 203–204 Saunders, Lyle, 184–185 SB 1070 (Arizona), 204 search warrants, 82, 89–90, 98, 231n61 Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, 150, 151 Secure Fence Act (2006), 206 segregation, 24–25, 28, 34, 37, 38 Shivers, Allan, 181, 189, 191, 197 Shary, John, 35, 42, 218n65 Shary, Marialice, 181 Sharyland Business Park, 206 Sharyland Plantation, 206 “Sharyland Songbook,” 37–38 Skinner, Allan, 134, 135–136 slavery, 56, 58, 59, 121, 221n26, 222n42

Snow, David, 109–110, 234n110 Social Security Act (1935), 56, 225n88, 236n17 Southern Pacific Railroad, 25, 216n34 South Texas, 49; absentee landowners of, 45; agricultural success of, 51–52; composition of labor force in, 50–51, 63–65; demographic shifts in, 22, 24, 45; effect of railroads on, 23; farmworker wages in, 131, 134; land companies’ promotional campaigns for, 18–21, 25–28, 29, 32, 46; segregation in, 24–25, 28, 34; settlement in, by northern white farmers, 17–19, 24, 42; transition from ranching to agricultural economy of, 18, 21–25, 57; “Valley Spirit” of, 28. See also land company excursions; and individual regions South Texas Cotton Growers Association, 58 Southwestern Land Company, 35, 36, 37–40, 41 stereotypes, 58, 65, 154, 181–182, 186 Stevenson, Coke, 130 St. Louis, Brownsville, and Mexico Railway, 23, 215n34 Strom, Carl, 156 “Swarming of the Wetbacks, The” (Norquest), 53, 60–61, 68–69 Sweet, Jake, 99–100 Swing, Joseph, 192, 195–196 Talbert, Ernest, 110 Tamaulipas, Mexico, 23, 214n23 Tello, Manuel, 150–151 Texas Agricultural Extension Service, 116 Texas A&M College Extension Service, 123–124 Texas Employment and Labor Agency Law (1943), 116, 117–120, 122, 244n94 Texas Rangers, 22, 31

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Texas State Employment Service (TSES), 126–129, 162–163 Texas State Federation of Labor (TSFL), 174, 176, 187–191, 200, 191–196 Thompson, R. E., 182 Thorpe, W. P., 82 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), 228n15 Trimble, Valerie J., 234n105 Truman, Harry, 155–156 Trump administration, 204 truth in advertising movement. See advertising industry Turnbaugh, Myrtle, 42 Turner, James L., 233n95 undocumented immigrants. See Mexican migrant farmworkers, undocumented US Border Patrol: authority and reach of, 6, 82–83, 88–92, 98, 231n61; collusion with growers of, 3, 50, 60–61, 63–64, 101–105, 163–165; contestations with growers of, 82–83, 97–98, 104, 192; effect of, on agricultural labor relations, 59–60; history of, 6–7, 89; labor and Mexican American activists’ support of, 191–196, 197–198; militarization of, 6–7, 108, 192, 195, 203; policies of, for farmworker abuse, 102–103; policies of, for searches of growers’ property, 82, 89–90, 98, 100–104, 231n61; and portrayal of migrant workers, 153–155, 186; and restriction of migrant workers’ mobility, 49, 59–60, 69–72, 74, 113; reluctance of, to report on own misconduct, 110; social and economic ties to community of, 60–61, 107. See also deportation; Operation Wetback; voluntary departure; and individual officers US Employment Service (USES), 145, 148, 160

US immigration policy, 4; assimilationist model of, 4–5, 210n12; for Canadians, 86, 93; for Chinese, 5; contradictory nature of, 4, 6, 83; and creation of the illegal alien, 6; for Europeans, 4; and expectation of permanence, 11, 16; federal government’s control of, 8, 83, 88, 203, 204–205; influence of growers on, 84–85, 121, 145, 169; loopholes and exceptions to, 83, 84–85, 244n94; for Mexicans, 6, 84–88; and prosecution of growers, 99, 232n66. See also deportation; US Border Patrol; sanctuary movement; voluntary departure; and individual legislation US-Mexico border: creation of, 3; flexibility of, 83, 211n22; as a preconstitutional space, 89–92; proposal to close, 193; as site of state formation, 8, 141–142, 211nn21–23; social space of agriculture on, 3, 49–50, 55. See also US Border Patrol US Post Office, 17–18, 43, 44–45, 213n2 US State Department, 149–150, 170, 184 Valley Evening Monitor, 72–73, 132 Valley Federation of Women’s Clubs, 28 Valley Morning Star, 123, 124, 131 visas, 11, 84–88, 92, 213n44 voluntary departure: codification into law of, 92, 230n43; compared to formal deportation, 83–84, 92, 94, 219n2; documentation during, 97; as “humane” method of deportation, 94, 97; penalties associated with, 84, 97; as predominant method of deportation for Mexican farmworkers, 83–84, 92, 96–97; rates of, 93–94, 94. See also deportation wages: Border Patrol’s role in setting, 49; and bracero program negotiations,

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131, 133–136, 140, 159–161, 212– 213n37; and federal minimum wage, 185, 236n17; prevailing, of Mexican migrant farmworkers, 49, 64–65, 73, 102, 131, 134, 239n73; in South Texas compared to other regions, 131, 134 Warren, A. M., 86, 87 Weslaco, Texas, 105–106 W. E. Stewart Land Company, 35, 43, 44, 217–218n60 “wetbacks.” See Mexican migrant farmworkers, undocumented Whalen, William: Border Patrol strategies of, 100–103; and bracero program negotiations, 134, 135; and INS investigation into South Texas hiring practices, 62–65; and INS officers employing agricultural workers, 106–107, 233n95 What Price, Wetbacks?: characterization of undocumented migration in, 174–176, 178–183, 180, 183; lasting effects of, 202; solutions presented in, 185

Wheeler, Leslie, 168 white northern migrants. See South Texas: settlement in, by northern white farmers Whole of Their Lives, The (Gitlow), 183 Wickersham Commission, 88, 89–90 Wilmoth, Grover: on Border Patrol’s processes, 91, 95, 232n81; on El Paso’s use of undocumented farmworkers, 63, 64; and farmworker abuse, 71–72, 102–103, 232n80; strategies of, 98–100, 102–104 Wilson, Robert E., 148–149 World War II, 9, 94, 130, 144–145, 182, 199 Wroten, Charles, 105–108, 233n89, 233n91 Wyoming, 157, 244n91 Yzaguirre, Lauro, 134 Zetas, 208

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