Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the Enemy

Introduction

1 Introduction This explains why the character of the movement is both desperate and redemptive . . . they mean that the people refuse all outside help, every imported scheme, every idea lacking some profound relationship to their intimate feelings, and that instead they turn to themselves. This desperation, this refusal to be saved by an alien project, is characteristic of the person who rejects all consolidation and shuts himself up in his private world: he is alone. At the same moment, however, his solitude becomes an effort at communion. Once again, despair and solitude, redemption and communion are equivalent terms. —Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad I remember the daily twenty-mile drive to school from Anthony, Texas, to El Paso. My brothers and I attended a small allmale Catholic high school nestled near the downtown district. One morning , as we approached the stretch of highway that hugs the University of Texas at El Paso, I noticed that the city was preparing for war. Perhaps war, not in the traditional sense, but a war nonetheless as a long line of Border Patrol trucks had positioned themselves side by side along the banks of the Rio Grande to guard against what some people along the border called an “immigrant invasion.” It was 1993, the El Paso Border Patrol chief, Silvestre Reyes, had initiated Operation Blockade, later renamed Operation Hold the Line. The strategy called for border agents to stand watch at the boundary line to deter immigrants from crossing illegally into the country.1 I was confused , incensed, indignant, but I dismissed those feelings as we found our usual parking spot in front of the Stanton Street entrance of Cathedral High School. I have never forgotten the sight of that standoff as we made our daily journey to school that morning. This project began on that day in 1993. Since then I have tried to discern as much as I could about militarization and migration from Mexico, its causes and explanations. Now that I have the opportunity to systematically expand this understanding, I have chosen to address the history of the West Texas region, in particular its early formative history of racial and international conflict, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when US officials sought to pacify the area and incorporate it into the larger national socioeconomic framework. A review of this time period will explain how militarization during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries informed enduring relations between Mexicans and Anglos and, to a lesser degree , the relations between the United States and Mexico.2 A timely study, as twenty-first-century political and social debates once again center on border security and immigration from Mexico. A variety of parallels can be drawn by reviewing early militarization and social relations along the US-Mexico borderlands, which at the turn of the twentieth century reflected broader concerns such as national security, illicit smuggling of goods and people, and citizenship. Militarization in the early twentieth century broadened the introduction 2 scope by which ethnic Mexicans could be categorized and marginalized from the main fabric of the nation.3 Militarization and the Mexican Enemy Border scholar Timothy Dunn broadly defines militarization as the use of military rhetoric and ideology as well as military tactics, strategy, and forces.4 A more concrete definition of militarization that focuses on the specific US military doctrine of low-intensity conflict will be utilized. According to Dunn, the doctrine orders for integrated and coordinated efforts of police, paramilitary, and military forces to establish and maintain social control over a targeted civilian population.5 However, a historical overview of militarization along the US-Mexico international boundary line suggests that law enforcement agencies made up only part of the militarization paradigm . Organized and vigilante citizens often partook in low-intensity con- flict and responded to perceived threats to their immediate communities and the state as a whole. This expanded prototype of militarization that includes mobilized civilians demonstrates that militarization went far beyond policing and into aggressive acts of war. Militarization at the turn of the twentieth century contributed to a historical construction of ethnic Mexicans as an “enemy other” rather than simply as a racialized other.6 The introduction of civilian, local, state, and federal authoritative institutions in West Texas was not only a response to regional and international circumstances that called for vigilant policing of the US-Mexico border, it also evolved into protection of the American homogenous society from...