The End of the Myth, page 17
Anglo capital faced no such limits.
2.
It’s a wonder Mexico survived the nineteenth century at all. Some in the United States had their sights on the territory even before Anglo settlers started arriving in its Tejano northern reaches, when it was still a colony of Spain. Aaron Burr, just after his successful duel with Alexander Hamilton, was accused in 1806 of trying to “establish an empire west of the Allegheny Mountains, of which he, Burr, was to be the Sovereign, and New Orleans the emporium, and to invade and revolutionize Mexico.”6 Burr was acting on behalf of planters, who in those early years of the republic—before Andrew Jackson’s presidency—felt the federal government wasn’t supportive enough of their slaving and real estate ventures (Jackson too was suspected of being involved in the scheme). Burr’s conspiracy collapsed, but Mexico, after breaking from Spain in the early 1820s, suffered one calamity after another, including a series of palace coups and civil wars. It lost Central America, which briefly after independence had been part of Mexico. It lost Texas in 1836. It almost, in 1847, lost the Yucatan, to a significant revolt of Mayan peasants. A year later, the United States took its northern territory, and then, soon after, in 1862, France’s Napoleon III used Mexico’s inability to pay its foreign debt as pretext to invade the country. After occupying Mexico City, Napoleon installed an Austrian archduke, Ferdinand Maximilian, and his wife, Carlota, as emperor and empress, with support from Mexican conservative Catholic elites. Mexicans fought back. This time, unlike their earlier failure to withstand the United States, liberal rebels waged a five-year-long guerrilla war that drove out the French, after which they executed Maximilian.
Maximilian’s short reign in Mexico crisscrossed in strange, opposing ways with the politics of slavery and empire in the United States. On the one hand, the war against French occupation was a southern front in the broader battle against New World servitude. The liberal forces who arrayed against Maximilian saw themselves as allies of Lincoln’s Union, fighting a shared campaign against the forces of reaction; Maximilian’s government, for his part, purchased southern cotton, sent supplies to southern troops, and even enlisted Confederate refugees into its military.* And if it weren’t for the liberal insurgents’ ability to keep the pressure on Maximilian’s government, the Catholic emperor might have provided even more active help to the Confederacy.
On the other hand, though, late in the U.S. Civil War, when it was clear the North was going to win, both Confederate and Union officials separately proposed a temporary armistice so the armies of the North and South could join together to invade Mexico. In February 1865, the Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Stephens, made the proposal directly to Abraham Lincoln himself, saying that with the issue of slavery out of the way (the South had by then accepted its impending defeat), both sides might come together in defense of “the Right of Self-Government of all Peoples” on “this Continent.” Lincoln demurred. The idea that foreign war might provide, as Stephens suggested, a “peaceful and harmonious” solution to domestic conflict was premature (it wouldn’t be until 1898 that North and South came together in a high-minded crusade to drive a monarchy out of the New World).7
The North did, on its own, supply aid to the Mexican liberals. New York, Boston, and Philadelphia banks extended loans to buy muskets, cannons, and other needed equipment, while New England weapons manufacturers advanced guns to anti-French forces on credit. Then, after the French were defeated, U.S. creditors began demanding payment. Mexico, bankrupted from its many wars, couldn’t pay. Over the next few years, businesses from nearly every sector of the United States’ fast-growing, post–Civil War economy made demands on Mexico City. Among them were financial houses recalling loans; arms dealers wanting payment; border ranchers complaining that Mexico City wasn’t doing enough to protect them from rustlers; merchants claiming to have lost goods in transit; shipping interests reporting damages during the war; real estate and mining companies insisting that Mexico recognize land grants issued by Emperor Maximilian.8 Caleb Cushing, himself a real estate speculator in Baja California, represented many of these plaintiffs before a special United States–Mexico General Claims Commission.9
The liberals in Mexico—in command of the government after having beaten the French—rejected most of these cases and refused to recognize debt incurred and concessions granted by Maximilian. But Ulysses S. Grant’s secretary of state, Hamilton Fish, pressed Mexico. Powerful voices demanded payment, calling on Washington to take Mexico “in hand” and establish a “protectorate” over the country, or seize the country entirely and lead it “to a higher plane of civilization.”10
In the end, though, it wasn’t annexation or war but the leverage provided by debt, along with the promise of more loans and investments to build railroads, that brought Mexico to heel. With no other options, Mexico’s leaders practically handed over the national economy to foreign investors. Led by some of the most storied names in U.S. corporate history—including J. P. Morgan, John Rockefeller and Standard Oil, Edward Harriman, the Astors, the Guggenheims, Joseph Headley Dulles (John Foster Dulles’s great-grandfather), William Randolph Hearst, Phelps Dodge, Union Pacific, and Cargill—U.S. capital radically transformed Mexico. “To revolutionize” became a popular phrase during this period in the U.S. press (much like the verb “to disrupt” today signals the creation of new markets by breaking up old production practices). U.S. agricultural firms were, as one report noted in 1899, moving “across the border into Mexico” and were “revolutionizing and will continue to revolutionize the farming methods of the country.”11 Within half a century, the United States’ interests would come to control, nearly absolutely, oil production, railroads, utilities, livestock, agriculture, and ports. Almost all of Mexico’s exports—wheat, beef, henequen, minerals, and petroleum—went to the United States, and a good percentage of U.S. manufactured goods went to Mexico. Everything from artificial limbs to surgical supplies, from paints, pianos, and preserves to safes, stoves, and sewer pipes, from heavy machinery to acids and oils, and every finished product in between, was exported south.12
Investment led to a dramatic transformation of the border region, where, starting in about 1870, corporations and individuals dispossessed long-term inhabitants of a massive amount of property. North of the border, in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, miners, ranchers, and railroad companies used “litigation, chicanery, robbery, fraud, and threat” to take millions of acres from indigenous communities and former Mexican citizens (former in the sense that, prior to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, they or their families lived within the border of Mexico).13 With Washington hosting its “great barbecue”—Vernon Parrington’s term for the post–Civil War giveaway of public resources—Congress passed a number of new “homestead” acts (such as 1873’s Timber Culture Act and 1877’s Desert Land Act), facilitating the transfer of property from Mexicans and Native Americans who didn’t have title to land or who held land collectively. The dispossessed appealed to U.S. courts. But in nearly all cases judges ruled against them. In upholding the takings, courts cited as precedent decades-old rulings issued in support of Jackson’s removal policy, including judgments that upheld the doctrine of discovery: “Conquest gives a title which the courts of the conqueror cannot deny.”14
Below the border, the rapid expansion of export agriculture took millions more acres. In an expulsion that rivaled the brutality of Jackson’s removal policy, tens of thousands of Yaqui were driven from their homes in Sonora and deported south, to the Yucatan and Oaxaca. There, they were put to work on sugar, tobacco, and henequen plantations (though Mexico had long abolished chattel slavery, the post–Civil War spread of export-led capitalism intensified various mechanisms of forced labor, including those based on peonage and vagrancy laws). Tens of thousands more died in the assault. Women and children were forced into servitude. Confiscated Yaqui property in Sonora went to large firms, including Hearst, Phelps Dodge, and Cargill, who transformed the stolen land into export plantations, turning Sonora into the second most profitable Mexican state for U.S. investment (after Veracruz, which had oil).15
Decades earlier, Jacksonians justified removal in the name of settler sovereignty.16 Now, though, it was mostly capital, and only a few settlers, advancing forward.
3.
In 1910, the model of economic development the United States had been promoting in Mexico for over half a century gave way. The country was thoroughly “revolutionized,” though not in the way U.S. financial and business interests had been using that word, as peasants, students, the middle class, and national capitalists launched what turned out to be a violent, wild, multi-fronted insurgency. Campesinos arrayed against planters, secularists against Catholics, and workers against the owners. Fields were burned, factories sacked, mines flooded, and railroads requisitioned. Oil rigs and plantations were nationalized. Running through many different phases as it raged for many years, the Mexican Revolution was, as the historian John Mason Hart describes, the “first great third world uprising against American economic, cultural, and political expansion.”
Anglo vigilantes had already, over the half century that preceded the revolution, lynched an unknown number of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the Southwest. Conservative estimates put the number in the thousands.17 The court system in the United States supplemented mob violence, with southwestern judges ordering, and marshals and sheriffs carrying out, the execution of more than two hundred Mexicans and Mexican Americans during this period. Borderland repression was conducted equally by law officers and night-riding groups such as the Mounted Rifles, the White Owls, and the Wolf Hunters. They enforced the subordinated position of Mexican Americans, disenfranchising them at the ballot box, terrorizing them in their homes, breaking strikes, and helping to reinforce a segregated labor market with at least three pay grades: white, Mexican, and migrant.18
But violence increased even more as a result of the revolution. As refugees from the fighting came north—into, for instance, the border city of Juárez, and then over the border into El Paso, with as many as forty thousand arriving there, nearly twice the city’s Anglo population—so too came rumors that subversives were organizing a “Liberating Army of Races and Peoples” to reconquer the Southwest and establish a “social republic.”19 In response, the Texas Rangers, which had been turned into an official branch of state law enforcement in 1902, and their sheriff adjuncts carried out “mass executions.” They lynched scores of Mexicans and Mexican Americans and drove many more from their homes. A stunning counter-memory project, “Refusing to Forget,” put together recently by the scholars Trinidad O. Gonzales, John Morán González, Sonia Hernández, Benjamin Johnson, and Monica Muñoz Martinez, documents the reign of terror Mexican Americans lived under during this period:
The dead included women and men, the aged and the young, long-time residents and recent arrivals. They were killed by strangers, by neighbors, by vigilantes and at the hands of local law enforcement officers or Texas Rangers. Some were summarily executed after being taken captive, or shot under the flimsy pretext of trying to escape. Some were left in the open to rot, others desecrated by being burnt, decapitated, or tortured by means such as having beer bottles rammed into their mouths.20
Bodies of Mexicans and Mexican Americans piled up, victims of a killing spree that “was welcomed,” as the project notes, “and even instigated at the highest levels of society and government.” Similar to earlier calls in support of Indian removal, one Texas paper described “a serious surplus population that needs eliminating.” The authors of “Refusing to Forget” write that high-level politicians “proposed putting all those of Mexican descent into ‘concentration camps’—and killing any who refused. For a decade, people would come across skeletons in the south Texas brush, marked with execution-style bullet holes in the backs of their skulls.”
The mobilization that preceded entrance into World War I worsened matters. On the border itself, Woodrow Wilson encouraged a crackdown in the name of national security, dispatching the cavalry to cities like El Paso. The fight against the Germans created in the minds of many U.S. politicians and intellectuals the idea that their country faced a single enemy, over there in the Rhineland and over here at the border (Frederick Jackson Turner felt that Wilson, despite his dispatch of troops, wasn’t taking the threat of German influence in Mexico seriously enough). New Mexico’s senator warned that the United States might lose access to strategically vital coal and copper and worried about an overreliance on migrants to run southern rail lines: “For 800 miles from the border back into the States the railroads are entirely in the hands of Mexicans of old Mexico,” a “majority of such Mexicans were ex-bandits.”21
The Texas Rangers—now led by an elite wartime core of “Loyalty Rangers”—policed anti-war activity, as did private citizen vigilante groups, such as El Paso’s County Council of Defense and Home Defense League. Rangers defined their mandate liberally, identifying “anti-war activity” as anything from trying to organize a union to trying to vote. In 1918, according to “Refusing to Forget,” the Rangers radically reduced the number of Mexican American voters across south Texas, humiliating and disarming Mexican American politicians and terrorizing their families: “A new, more brutal white supremacy had come to the border.” Radicals associated with the Industrial Workers of the World, who proposed an alternative to this supremacy, were targeted. Labor conflicts were common on the border, but miners and ranchers could count on their vigilante and law enforcement allies to intervene. Strikers were rounded up by the thousands and deported, as law officials, including the sheriff’s office in Maricopa County (later famous as the headquarters of Joe Arpaio), ransacked IWW offices across the border states.
4.
Border policing, distinct from the vigilantism described above, evolved gradually over time but also in bursts, usually related to war and economic crises. The United States had started to regulate border migration in the late nineteenth century, expanding customs houses and setting up checkpoints, mostly aimed at preventing Chinese workers—targeted by a number of exclusion laws since 1882—from entering from Mexico. But it wasn’t until 1907 that the border line was even cleared of brush, after President Theodore Roosevelt ordered that a sixty-foot strip running its length be kept open to prevent smuggling.
Prior to World War I, the border was relatively free. As the historian Mae Ngai points out, before the war the United States “had virtually open borders,” with the exception of laws explicitly excluding Chinese migrants. “You didn’t need a passport,” says Ngai. “You didn’t need a visa. There was no such thing as a green card. If you showed up at Ellis Island, walked without a limp, had money in your pocket, and passed a very simple [IQ] test in your own language, you were admitted.”
The same was true in much of the world. Then, suddenly, “the frontiers seem to close in” until there was “scarcely room to breathe,” as a character in a Charles Isherwood novel describes the restrictions on mobility brought about in Europe by world war. In April 1917, the month the United States entered the war, Wilson signed into law a set of sweeping constraints on immigration, which included literacy tests, entrance taxes, and quota restrictions.
The legislation mostly applied to Europeans and Asians. Mexican migrant workers, who were needed to labor in the fields and mines of the Southwest and the West, were exempt from the quotas (“Western farmers were completely dependent on Mexican workers,” as the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández writes). They were, however, supposed to go through established checkpoints, where they were subjected to health inspections and delousing.* It was an odd system, half enforced, half not—half water, half metal. Border towns turned into waiting rooms, as thousands of Mexicans every day submitted to the new rituals.22 Nearly half a million Mexicans entered the country legally between 1920 and 1928, according to immigration records.23 But probably at least that many just quietly walked over Tijuana’s unguarded chaparral or ferried across the Rio Grande, going back and forth every day to jobs in smelters, mines, fields, and households. Others stayed longer, catching the Rock Island Line at El Paso north to Chicago.
The years after World War I witnessed booms and busts and, in the United States, labor shortages and gluts. Two distinct but interdependent opinions took shape during the 1920s within white society regarding Mexican migration. Political and economic elites, including the business community of border towns like El Paso and Laredo and southwestern and California farmers and northeastern industrialists, wanted Mexicans to remain exempt from entrance restrictions. At the same time, though, the deadly racism documented by the authors of “Refusing to Forget” increased. Hatred focused on Mexicans for depressing Anglo wages, even as that hatred ensured that wages remained depressed, shattering the solidarity that had allowed a common fight for better terms.
Anti-Mexican terror spiked in the early 1920s, as a revived Ku Klux Klan began to influence the national debate on immigration. With more than a million members by the early 1920s—including two hundred thousand in Texas—the Klan helped elect state officials from Arkansas to California; so influential was the Klan on the Democratic Party that one newspaper sardonically called its 1924 national convention a “Klanbake.”24 The “invisible empire,” as the Klan leaders referred to their organization, paralleled the rise of post–World War I European fascism, but with a particularly American sensibility.25
The Klan was frontier fascism, the return of the racism at the heart of settler colonialism that Frederick Jackson Turner three decades earlier had tried to suppress. El Paso’s chapter, established in 1921, called itself Frontier Klan Number 100. “Our pioneers were all Protestant” and “Nordic,” said the Klan’s Imperial Wizard, Hiram Wesley Evans, in the 1920s.26 “My people,” a Georgia Klan leader said, “are all plowmen.” Turner idealized the West. So did the Klan. Be they from Georgia’s upcountry, the Midwest, upstate New York, the Southwest, or the West, Ku Kluxers also tended to be members of fraternal societies, including faux frontier associations such as the Woodmen of the World, Foresters of America, and the Eleven Tribes of the Improved Order of Red Men. The new Klan, said one Oklahoma supporter, was born of the same compulsion that “made necessary on the western frontier the ‘vigilance committee’ that put a stop to crime by using a rope.” The Oklahoman expressed a kind of opposition to taxes that is common today among law-and-order racists, saying that the Klan provided a means for “taxed to the limit” citizens to protect themselves without adding to public expenditure.27
