Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the 'Illegal Alien' and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary

296 Pages·2001·2.43 MB·English

by  Joseph Nevins

OPERATION GATEKEEPER
OPERATION
GATEKEEPER
THE RISE OF THE “ILLEGAL
ALIEN” AND THE MAKING OF
THE U.S.-MEXICO BOUNDARY
JOSEPH NEVINS

ROUTLEDGE
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Published in 2002 by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nevins, Joseph.
Operation Gatekeeper : the rise of the “illegal alien” and the making of the U.S.-
Mexico
boundary/by Joseph Nevins.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-93104-5 (hb)—ISBN 0-415-93105-3 (pb)
1. Illegal aliens—Government policy—United States. 2. Operation Gatekeeper
(U.S.)
3. Border patrols—Mexican-American Border Region. 4. United States.
Immigration Border
Patrol. I. Title.
JV6483 .N47 2001
363.28′5′0973–dc21
2001034989
Design and typography: Jack Donner
ISBN 0-203-90509-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-90602-0 (Adobe e-Reader Format)
ISBN 0-415-93105-3 (Print Edition)
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vi
FOREWORD viii
1. INTRODUCTION 1
2. THE CREATION OF THE U.S.-MEXICO BOUNDARY
AND THE REMAKING OF THE UNITED STATES
AND MEXICO IN THE BORDER REGION 12
3. LOCAL CONTEXT AND THE CREATION OF

DIFFERENCE IN THE BORDER REGION 32
4. THE BOUNDING OF THE UNITED STATES AND

THE EMERGENCE OF OPERATION GATEKEEPER 50
5. THE IDEOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE “ILLEGAL”:
THE “OTHER” AS THREAT AND THE RISE OF THE
BOUNDARY AS THE SYMBOL OF PROTECTION 78
6. THE EFFECTS AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE

BOUNDING OF THE UNITED STATES 102
7. NATIONALISM, THE TERRITORIAL STATE, AND
THE CONSTRUCTION OF BOUNDARY-RELATED
IDENTITIES 125
8. CONCLUSION: SEARCHING FOR SECURITY IN AN

AGE OF INTENSIFYING GLOBALIZATION 137
APPENDIX A Map: The U.S.-Mexico Borderlands in Southern

California 157
APPENDIX B Map: Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands 158
APPENDIX C Map: The Territorial Expansion of the United States 159
APPENDIX D Map: The Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary 160
APPENDIX E Chronology of Selected U.S. Immigration-and Boundary-

Related Legislation and Developments 161
APPENDIX F Number of Border Patrol Agents Nationally, Fiscal Years

1925–2000 164
Change in Number of Border Patrol Agents Nationally, 166
FiscalYears1925 2000
Fiscal Years 1925–2000
APPENDIX G Cover from December 1974 Issue of The American

Legion Magazine 168
NOTES 169
BIBLIOGRAPHY 221
INDEX 257
Acknowledgments
Despite the single author listed on the cover, a work such as this is never an individual
endeavor. It is the outgrowth of countless conversations with friends, colleagues, and
critics, the mining of other people’s works, and the support—material as well as moral—
of many individuals. In this regard, I must thank and acknowledge many, only a small
number of whom I can mention here—not least because of the limits of my memory.
Much of this book originated from my doctoral dissertation at the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In this regard, I wish to acknowledge and thank the
members of my dissertation committee: Mark Ellis; Gerry Hale; Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda;
Michael Mann; and Joshua Muldavin. I have learned much from all of them. On
numerous occasions, they constructively challenged my ideas and provided me with
valuable feedback and helpful advice.
I would like to express my indebtedness especially to the two co-chairs of my
committee: Mark Ellis, for his innumerable conversations, critical insights, extremely
helpful comments, and bountiful moral support; and Gerry Hale, for his careful editing
and, more important, for his many years of guidance and moral and political support. The
dissertation was far better than it would have been without them.
The office staff of the UCLA Department of Geography—Jason Corbett, Susan
Glines, and Tina Schroeter—generously put up with my myriad requests for assistance
over the years. I thank them from the bottom of my heart.
I am highly appreciative of my former colleagues in the UCLA Department of
Geography for helping to make my graduate career a rich experience. In this regard, I
also want to recognize my fellow academic student employees at UCLA, especially those
active in SAGE (the Student Association of Graduate Employees), the trade union of
academic student employees.
Numerous friends helped me through the research and writing process in countless
ways. They include: Kathy Beckett, Chris Brown, Clare Campbell, Nigel Chalk, Ben
Forest, Lynn Fredriksson, Don Gauthier, Steve Herbert, Scott Kessler and Cheryl Lindley
and their three children (Sade, Sophie, and Shane), Dave Runsten, Fred Seavey, Ben
Terrall, Lisa Tsui, and Konstantin von Krusenstiern.
One of the joys of undertaking the research and writing was having the opportunity to
meet a number of people who share both many of my academic interests and political
concerns. In this regard, I thank Peter Andreas, Tim Dunn, Larry Herzog, Michael
Huspek, and José Palafox. At various times, they all provided me with resources,
valuable criticisms, and comradeship.
A number of people helped me in Washington, D.C., while I was there conducting
interviews and doing archival work. I am indebted to Kate Doyle at the National Security
Archive, Robert Ellis at the National Archives, Marian Smith, the Historian of the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, and Marcus Stern of Copley News Service.
In terms of my fieldwork in San Diego and Tijuana, I am most grateful to Roberto
Martinez of the American Friends Service Committee, Raul Ramirez, formerly of El
Centro de Apoyo al Migrante, Claudia Smith of the California Rural Legal Assistance
Foundation, and all the friends at Casa del Migrante. I also want to thank the numerous
representatives of the United States Border Patrol who provided me with documentation
and helped to arrange or took me on “line tours” and “ride-alongs” on several occasions.
A postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of International Studies (IIS) at the
University of California, Berkeley during 2000–2001 provided with the space and time to
put the finishing touches on the manuscript. In this regard, I want to thank Michael Watts,
the head of IIS, and Susana Kaiser, my colleague in the Rockefeller Foundation-funded
“Communities in Crisis” program.
While living here in Berkeley, José Palafox was of invaluable assistance on many
occasions. I also want to thank Sasha Kokha of the National Network of Immigrant and
Refugee Rights in Oakland for her assistance. During that time, Connie Razza provided
very helpful edits and comments on some of the chapters, help for which I am very
grateful.
The UCLA Graduate Division, the UCLA Latin American Center, the Comparative
Immigration and Integration Program of the Center for German and European Studies at
the University of California, Berkeley, the UC MEXUS (the University of California
Institute for Mexico and the United States), and the Rockefeller Foundation all provided
me with generous financial assistance during the course of my research and writing. I am
most appreciative.
Zoltán Grossman of the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison made the maps contained herein. I thank him for lending his cartographic skills
and for doing such a fine job on the maps.
Anonymous reviewers of the original book manuscript were most helpful in pointing
out weaknesses and suggesting constructive changes. I thank them. I also want to extend
my gratitude to Eric Nelson of Routledge for his suggestions for reworking the
manuscript, to production editor Jeanne Shu, and to copy editor Brian Bendlin for all
their help.
Finally, I thank my family for their love and support, and express my infinite gratitude
to Mizue—in addition for having read and commented on many sections of the book—
for her love, patience, and generosity, as well as her inspiring example.
Foreword
Mike Davis
1.
First, there are ghosts.
Long ago, in my Cold War childhood, my father and I would regularly join the gypsy
army of rock hounds who, with burlap water bags hanging from their fenders, scoured
California’s deserts in search of uranium deposits and Lost Dutchman mines, as well as
more modest treasures like geodes and petrified wood. Our favorite oasis was the gas
station/cafe that constituted Ocotillo Wells, 90 miles east of San Diego. The proprietor
was a jocular oldtimer who liked to brag that he would be reincarnated as a Gila Monster
in his next life. While he and my father argued about baseball (this was the pre-Dodger
golden age of the old Pacific Coast League), I would explore his collection of desert
relics and cryptic detritus. In addition to ultra-violet medicine bottles, bullet-holed 1920s
highway signs, and rusted mining gear, he also collected gruesome souvenirs.
On one bulletin board he had tacked up photographs of seven or eight cadavers: all of
them young Mexican men he had discovered in the arroyos between Ocotillo Wells and
the nearby Border. Like most eight-year-olds I was both horrified and mesmerized by the
images, as well as embarrassed by my inability to stop staring at them. “It must be
horrible to slowly die of thirst,” I ventured. “Oh, them wetbacks didn’t die of thirst,” the
Gila Monster laughed. “They was all shot. In the back.” He pointed to unmistakable gore
in several of the photos. He had some compelling reason to believe that, in fact, they had
been executed by the Border Patrol.
These dead men, whom I now know to be compañeros, have haunted me for almost a
lifetime. I don’t have the slightest idea, of course, whether they were actually victims of a
Border Patrol death squad, although the mere possibility was an earthquake in my moral
universe. Indisputably, however, they died in a singular, sinister place of which I had no
previous inkling.
I refer, of course, not to the Borrego Desert but to the Border.
Tourists and politicians often equate the Border with the steel wall (formerly a fence)
that guillotines so many communities and family ties between Brownsville/Matamoros
and San Diego/Tijuana. But this is to confuse the synecdoche—what Mexican-Spanish
more correctly identifies as la Linea—with its subject. The Border is also used as a
synonym for la Frontera, the zone of intensified daily interaction between Norteno,
Chicano, and U.S. cultures which some theorists consider to be an emergent sociocultural
galaxy in its own right. This conflation of Border and Frontera, however, fudges the
institutional specificity of the repressive apparatus (es) that leave bodies in the desert
(even if they later become the bitter theme of a corrido).
As I discovered at the end of my innocence in 1955, the Border, strictu senso, is a
state-sanctioned system of violence: physical, environmental, economic, and cultural. Its
principal historical function, I learned later, has been the reproduction of agricultural and
industrial peonage in the American Southwest (and, more lately, in border maquiladoras
as well as more distant U.S. labor markets). It penetrates deeply into millions of lives far
from the actual demarcation of national real-estate. It shapes but is manifestly distinct
from La Frontera as cultural formation.
The Border is often compared to a dam: defending the fat suburbs of the American
Dream from a deluge of Third World misery. This, of course, misunderstands the role of
a dam, which is not to prevent the flow of water but to control and ration its supply. To
the despair of pundits on both sides, who would prefer to see a more orderly system of
gastarbeiter migration strictly controlled by economic demand, the Border is a heavy
investment in the laws of Chaos: the Brownian motion of hundreds of thousands of job-
and-dignity seekers modulated by nocturnal pursuit and detention camps. Realists, of
course, understand that a cheap labor flux without the necessary quotient of fear and
uncertainty imposed by illegality might cease to be cheap labor.
The Orwellian hypocrisy of a free-trade utopia cum police state, not surprisingly,
favors epic corruption and transnational crime. How ironic that the Border, this now
massive, militarized display of bounded national identity, everywhere seems to leak
sovereignty: allowing the Arellano-Felix and other drug cartels to function as shadow
regional governments. In more than one way, we are recalled to Pynchon’s description of
“The Zone” in Gravity’s Rainbow and its lucrative symbiosis of warfare, nomadism, and
noir capitalism.
2.
The Border, as Joseph Nevins constantly reminds us in this exemplary book, is also a
permanent construction site. Not only walls and fences, but national identities and
exclusivities are frenetic works in progress. Here also politicians and bureaucrats
manufacture the self-serving myths that advance the interests of the “border control
industry.”
Indeed Nevins’ chief thesis is that the state has not so much responded to a “crisis of
illegality” as created it. “Operation Gatekeeper,” for instance, is a solution to a problem
that it, in fact, has largely created: the spectre of a Mexican invasion of California. To
fully understand the significance (and absurdity) of this latest apotheosis of sovereignty,
Nevins takes us on a tour of Border history. “Sovereignty,” it turns out, is as Sovereignty
does. For most of the nineteenth century, for instance, Manifest Destiny preferred an
informally open border that abetted the U.S. economic penetration of northern Mexico.
“Aliens” only appeared late in the day, when the Mexican Revolution threatened to cross
the Rio Grande and ignite the discontents of south Texas.
This was the first “Mexican scare” and the starting-point for the Modern cycle of
border control initiatives. Nevins has a superb sense for the ever deepening
irony/hypocrisy of U.S. policies and the crucial role that political dramaturgy has played
in their creation. At one moment, employers are pining for Mexican immigrants; at the
next, they are demanding their deportation. The Eisenhower administration likes
braceros, but abhors “wetbacks.” Later, local politicians like San Diego mayor Pete
Wilson, discover that the “brown peril” plays well in the same spoiled suburbs where
luxury lifestyles would not survive for a day without Mexican gardeners, housecleaners
and nannies. The CIA’s Bill Colby and the INS’s General Chapman imaginatively torque
up the Second Cold War with hysterical images of the Sandinistas at the gates of Laredo.