The ritual used to be a lot easier on everyone. Until 1848, when the U.S. took most of what’s currently the Southwest away from Mexico, there was no border here at all. And until 1903, there wasn’t even a federal agency to screen or regulate immigrants coming into the U.S. When the border patrol, our only national police force, was first funded in 1924, there were only 75 agents to guard the whole 2000-mile southern border. A bunch of overwhelmingly anglo good ole boys who liked to think of themselves as Texas Rangers, they wore Smokey the Bear hats, rode horses, and took great pride in tramping through he desert for days, injun-style, following the tracks of lonesome smugglers. As far as wetback cotton pickers where concerned, they could pretty much hop over the border anywhere and anyhow they felt like.
Things aren’t so casual anymore though, especially since immigrants have lately expanded their geographic and economic horizons far beyond stoop labor. And since the mid-1960s, U.S. corporate investment has gotten pretty migratory, too, bidding adiós to the falling rate of profit in the sleepy, inflation-ridden world of capital-intensive industry like steel or autos. The Promised Land now lies over the border and across the seas. Or else it’s pizza huts, nursing homes, anything that’s young, union-free, low-skilled, labor-intensive, and minimum-wage. Not so good for uppity citizens watching their old, well-paid obs turn into labor history artifacts. But perfect for wetbacks who know their place.
Illegal aliens have always made great scapegoats during hard times and great people to ignore during good times. It used to be you could gauge the health of the economy by the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s arrest statistics: post-Korean War recession of 1954, 1.1 million wets busted. World War II prosperity of 1943, only 16,000. Agricultural-industrial boom of the 1920s, about 4,000 a year. Yet shortly afterward, in the first years of the Depression, hundreds o f thousand of Mexicans were encouraged to leave the U.S. “voluntarily” by welfare officials who threatened them with deportation and by railroads who kindly paid their way to Mexico. Ofelia Tapia, an El Pasoan who was in kindergarten then, remembers how the border patrol paid $5 bounty to people who reported illegals like her mother.
“The neighbors would turn her in. Sometimes the migra” — the INS — “would put her in jail. Sometimes they’d send her back to Juarez. I was an American citizen but I’d have to go, too. We’d just wade across the river again after awhile.”
What’s novel about the most recent wave of mojados is that for the first time in U.S. history, large numbers of Mexicans and other Third-Worlders are coming here not during boom times, but in the midst of economic stagnation. That should come as no surprise, though, since postcapitalism’s very efforts to jack up its falling profit rates have naturally fueled the global wanderings of people as well as money.
With immigration reform in the air, it’s popular in border circles to do the usual cyclical bitching about how the invading brown hordes are bankrupting the county hospitals and taking everybody’s jobs. But most people who’ve been here awhile know the border is one big bantustan dotted with a comfortable supply of Baskin-Robbinses and K-Marts. After all, if God hadn’t wanted us to have $1.50-an-hour maids, waitresses, and minimum-wage mechanics and onion pickers, He wouldn’t have created the border patrol. Chase them around in a swuad car, kick ’em back to Juarez every once in awhile, and they’ll work hard without demanding things like social security benefits or public health care.
But the good Lord only allocated a certain number of migras in the federal budget, and you won’t find too many of them in Kansas City, Chicago, or Boston. That’s why Reyna had her problems at the airport: “We’re concentrating our manpower in apprehending people bound for the U.S. interior,” an INS spokesperson said recently.
That effort has enveloped El Paso in a quiet state of siege the past few years. The Border Patrol’s got the Rio Grande planted with a dozen closed-circuit TV cameras that transmit to a central control room run by an agent who knows exactly who’s at the river at all times. Infrared body sensors and magnetic foot-fall detectors left over from the McNamara Line of the DMZ and from Cambodia and Laos are buried in the sandhills just outside the city. And the patrol’s helicopters mutter over the historic neighborhood rooftops at dawn, lending an apocalyptic cast to the early morning dreams of local yuppies. Then there are the checkpoints on every highway leading away from the border; and the plainclothesmen working the Trailways station, Greyhound, Amtrak, and the airport. For good measure, they’ve been parking lately near midwifery clinics where Juarez women come to give their babies the ultimate silver spoon: birth in El Paso and automatic U.S. citizenship.
Under the barrage of technology and manpower even the impossibly blond, the securely anglo, get a bit shell shocked. Midwife Cindi Cushing, for instance, flew home to the East Coast recently after spending a year in south El Paso: “My mother and I were just walking out of the airport in Connecticut when a state trooper passed by in a green van. Without even thinking, I clutched my mother. I didn’t even know I’d done it until she asked me what was wrong. Leaving El Paso too quickly is what it must have been like to on rest and recreation to Honolulu too fast from Vietnam.”
Then there are the people the El Paso border patrol actually gets its hands on: last year, for instance, the agency made 256,000 arrests. That’s more than a quarter of the 1.3 million made in the entire country in fiscal year 1985. The only other district that arrested more mojados than El Paso was the one that covers the Tijuana-San Diego area. If you want to arrest 256,000 people, you have to stop a lot of folks, and there are only about 600,000 living in the entire region covered by the El Paso district patrol. About a tenth are mojados who’ve been here for years, perhaps married legal residents, had Texan kids, and bought homes. There are also 275,000 Mexican-Americans, most of them not all that easy to tell from the illegals. There’s a lot of leeway for mistakes. They happen.
Border patrol agents are only supposed to stop you on the street if they can put into words why they think you act or look illegal — the color of your skin, your accent, even speaking Spanish aren’t supposed to count. But their decisions about who’s got the Look of acceptable citizenship can be pretty arbitrary. I know some superproteinizado grad students and university professor types who’ve been stopped in their neighborhoods and asked, “¿De donde eres?” A Chicano obgyn with a house in the ritzier part of town was watering his lawn once and they thought he was the yardboy.
If the protein people can’t always master the Look to the migra’s satisfaction, who can? The dilemma creates subtle self-doubt and image anxiety in mojados and citizens alike. After all, in the rest of America a person can do something legal or illegal, but on the border, being legal or illegal is a fact of daily existence. The INS and border patrol refer to this weird condition as your “status.” It’s even more bizarre to conceptualize dressing legally, and in El Paso, thanks to military and corporate chain department store aesthetics combined with limited disposable income, most people look like they take their fashion cues from the Cheryl Tiegs Collection at Sears.
That’s what happens when a whole community is trying to maintain its dignity, not to mention its livelihood. To look American on the border: it’s a style dictated by an agency that is now having internal discussions about calling down the armed forces to help secure the southern fringe, that blithers about Arab terrorists poised to swim across the river. It’s a look full of paranoia, but certainly devoid of fantasy or irony. Not to mention pleasure.
