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4. Creating a Schizophrenic Border: Migration and Perception, 1920–1925
- Texas A&M University Press
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ChaPTeR 4 Creating a schizophrenic Border Migration and Perception, 1920–1925 Linda B. Hall When Álvaro Obregón came to the presidency of Mexico on December 1, 1920, Mexico was just emerging from the devastation of a ten-year civil war, and disorders continued in the countryside. As a Sonoran from northern Mexico, he was intensely aware of the significance of the United States, and he wanted its respect for his citizens there, as well as respect and respectability for his country and administration. His highest internal priorities as chief executive were a complete pacification of his war-torn country and its economic recovery. Three months later, on March 4, 1921, Warren Harding was inaugurated as president of the United States. Also emerging from a war, World War I, and facing economic problems, circumstances in the United States differed greatly.The economic difficulties would be short lived, the country had attained the status of a world power, and its long-term prospects were strong. Unlike Mexico, its fight had not occurred on its own soil. Yet the world war itself and the Russian Revolution, though at more of a distance, had been profoundly disturbing, and the very nature of the United States seemed to be changing. One of the most important factors in this transformation had been huge numbers of persons arriving from other countries, some to return but many to remain. In the decade before World War I, immigration, though only a fraction of it from Mexico, had been averaging about one million annually. These figures had begun to seem overwhelming, and the economic devastation in Europe, as well as the political changes and economic problems there, promised to keep people coming, leading to a racist debate about just who would be most appropriate as residents and as citizens of the polity. Just to the south, Mexico, with its devastating decade of violence, had had an impact on the Southwest and beyond as more than 1.5 million Mexican workers and 90 • linda b. hall refugees poured in. The late 1910s had witnessed the xenophobia of the “Red scare” and its heavy crackdown against labor; Senator Albert Fall’s 1919–1920 investigation of Mexican affairs, which emphasized Mexico’s violence on the one hand and its indigenous racial character on the other; and prohibition of alcoholic beverages—which continued to come in illegally from Mexico (and elsewhere). All of these factors worked against Obregón’s objectives and made friendly relations and mutual understanding difficult. The border between the two countries had been porous and flexible during the previous decade. Workers and refugees went north, while businesspeople and their workers, particularly in mining and the suddenly booming oil industry, journeyed south. By the early 1920s, many in theUnited States had come to view this openness with alarm. World War I, as Mae M. Ngai points out, “marked the consolidation of the international nation-state system, based onWestphalian sovereignty, hardened borders, state citizenship, and passport controls.”1 The world war itself had strengthened attitudes in the United States against foreign lands and foreign peoples, leading to nostalgia for a homogeneous past that was largely a fantasy, but a comforting one. Furthermore, the Russian Revolution, much more than the Mexican Revolution, had shaken any previous faith that had existed in the United States that monarchies or dictatorships would yield inevitably to democracies, and signs of social change in Mexico made citizens jittery about “Reds” and “Bolsheviks.” Simultaneously, Obregón, although dealing with his own economic problems, was eager to diminish Mexico’s reputation for disorder so as to facilitate trade with and investment from the nations of the world, particularly from his neighbor to the north. Though the United States finally recognized his administration, in 1923, this acknowledgment did little to help his citizens abroad or diminish the United States’ fears of the border. Instead, Mexicans, who were not targeted in the new immigration laws that were passed in 1921 and 1924, had emerged by the time he left office as what Ngai terms the “iconic illegal aliens.”2 Mexicans, for the many reasons described later, faced increasingly negative attitudes and more severe restrictions and enforcement in crossing the border and working in the United States. While Mexicans remained essential to certain kinds of employers north of the border, attitudes toward Mexicans themselves became more overtly racist. Continual reports about Mexico in the mainstream press portrayed it as unstable, radical politically, and still violent, as well as a refuge for criminals...