Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez
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from the United States. Historian John Higham described the National Origins Act as a “Nordic Victory,” a triumph of the narrow racial nationalism of Anglo-American nativists during a decade he has characterized as the “tribal twenties.”48 Ironically, however, as Mae Ngai has deftly argued, the long-term impact of that triumph was the reconstitution of a “white American race, in which persons of European descent shared a common whiteness distinct from those deemed to not be white. In the construction of whiteness, the legal boundaries of both white and nonwhite acquired sharper distinction.”49 The National Origins Act, in other words, remapped and broadened the category of white to include previously “hyphenated” Europeans against the total exclusion of those defined as nonwhite, namely, Asians.
The powerful lobby of southwestern agribusinessmen tempered the nativists’ quest for a “whites-only” immigration policy by supporting an exemption from the national quota system for all immigrants from countries in the Western Hemisphere such as Canada, Cuba, and Mexico. Mexico’s immigrant workers, therefore, were allowed to continue entering the United States without any preset numerical limit. In agreeing to the Western Hemisphere exemption, the nativists capitulated to the growers’ lobby in 1924, but after the passage of the National Origins Act, a committed core of nativists continued to oppose Mexican immigration to the United States. As one congressmen complained during the 1924 hearings, “What is the use of closing the front door to keep out undesirables from Europe when you permit Mexicans to come in here by the back door by the thousands and thousands?”50 After the passage of the 1924 National Origins Act, the nativists campaigned to add Mexico’s migrant workers to the quota system. Mexico was a nation of mongrels, they argued. As such, Mexicans were inassimilable racial inferiors, and unrestricted Mexican immigration jeopardized the core objective of the National Origins Act. “The continuance of a desirable character of citizenship is the fundamental purpose of our immigration laws. Incidental to this are the avoidance of social and racial problems, the upholding of American standards of wages and living, and the maintenance of order. All of these purposes will be violated by increasing the Mexican population of the country,” explained Congressman John C. Box (Texas), who co-sponsored a 1926 bill to limit Mexican immigration to the United States.51 The growers defeated the 1926 Box Bill, but the nativists tried again in 1928, arguing that the exemption for Mexican workers needed to be terminated because, as they forebodingly warned, “Our great Southwest is rapidly creating for itself a new racial problem, as our old South did when it imported slave labor from Africa.”52
Throughout their debates with the nativists, southwestern growers fully agreed with the notion that Mexico’s immigrant workers presented a “racial problem” and thereby conceded the nativists’ point that Mexican immigration posed a threat to American society. As S. Parker Frisselle of the California Farm Bureau Federation explained during the 1926 hearings, “With the Mexican comes a social problem . . . . It is a serious one. It comes into our schools, it comes into our cities, and it comes into our whole civilization in California.”53 But after assuring the nativists that “we, gentlemen, are just as anxious as you are not to build the civilization of California or any other western district upon a Mexican foundation,” the growers countered the nativists’ call to place a numerical limit upon Mexican immigration to the United States by arguing that without unrestricted access to Mexican workers, the rising empire of agribusinesses in the American southwest would turn to ruin.54 Instead of ending Mexican immigration, they offered the nativists a promise. “We, in California,” vowed Frisselle, “think we can handle that social problem.”55 For, as another agribusinessman from Texas explained, “If we could not control the Mexicans and they would take this country it would be better to keep them out, but we can and do control them.”56
The pledge that “we can and do control them” referred to the social world of agribusiness in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Agribusinessmen and the demands of their enterprises dominated the political, social, and cultural life of borderland communities as the racialized organization of work refracted throughout community life. Whites held land or managed workers, while Mexicanos harvested, plowed, picked, tended, reaped, and migrated. As Devra Weber, Paul Schuster Taylor, and others have detailed, the racialized divisions in California were so crude that “the owners and top managers were white: foremen, contractors and workers were Mexican.”57 In Texas, one young white farmer explained that white landholders and tenants lived a life of leisure because “we have the Mexicans here and don’t work.”58 The hierarchy between Anglo-American landowners, white managers, and Mexicano workers reverberated throughout the region where highly racialized practices of social segregation, political repression, and community violence accompanied the patterns of economic exploitation that locked the region’s large Mexicano population into low-wage work. From Texas to California, white and Mexicano youth graduated from separate and unequal schools. Poll taxes and political bosses effectively disenfranchised Mexicano voters. Mexicans had limited employment options outside of agriculture. Police violence against Mexicanos was common. Labor organizing among Mexican workers prompted swift and violent community-wide responses. And, where such prejudice was most extensive, “No Negroes, Mexicans, or Dogs” signs were posted on restaurant doors.59
Agribusinessmen of the borderlands lobbied on behalf of their industry and held up the social world that they had built as evidence that unrestricted Mexican immigration would profit American businesses without infiltrating American society, culture, and politics. The hierarchy of race in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, they promised, provided barriers against Mexican incorporation. But in a nation most intimately versed in the black/white divide as the basic unit of racial control and social inequity, nervous onlookers worried about the place of Mexican immigrants—neither black nor white—in America. As Professor William Leonard explained, Mexicans “are not Negroes . . . they are not accepted as white men, and between the two, the white and the black, there seems to be no midway position.”60
The nativists’ concerns were not assuaged by the class-based flexibility of the borderlanders’ system of racialized social organization. For example, the assistant superintendent of schools in San Diego, California, described middle-class Mexican Americans as “Spanish” and argued that middle-class Mexican American children were “the equal of our white children.”61 According to Mexican scholar Manuel Gamio, a similar class- and complexion-based flexibility was accorded to Mexicanos by private proprietors. Although some Mexicans were denied entry to certain facilities, Gamio found that Mexican immigrants who were “white and even blue-eyed” were considered to be American and given “first place in everything.”62
The nativists hounded the borderlanders for a clear answer as to where Mexicans fit within the presumably crisp racial orders of eugenics, national origins, and the one-drop rule of the black/white divide. Texans typically referenced the logic of the black/white racial hierarchy to explain the place that they had assigned Mexican immigrants. For example, when asked about Anglo-Mexican relations by economist Paul Schuster Taylor in the late 1920s, one Texan stated that Mexicans were “not so bad as the Negroes,” while another elaborated that “The mexicans will eat in the restaurants and at the tables in the drug stores, but the niggers would not,” because even a “nigger with money couldn’t associate with white persons.”63
Californians often deployed a multirelational approach that positioned Mexicans against the Chinese, Japanese, Hindus, Filipinos, and others that had worked in the fields before Mexican immigrants began to dominate the agricultural workforce during the 1920s. In defense of Mexican immigration, Fred Bixby of Long Beach, California, explained during the 1928 hearings to restrict Mexican immigration that “we have no Chinamen; we have not the Japs. The Hindu is worthless; the Filipino is nothing, and the white man will not do the work.”64 But engaged in a debate with outsiders—namely, when battling the nativists who discussed the social threat of Mexican immigration by constantly evoking the “negro problem”—Bixby and the Californians proved capable of mapping Mexicans against the prevailing black/white divide. “I want to tell you that you people have no understanding at all of the Mexicans. They are loyal,” charged Bixby. “I have a family—three of them are girls,” he explained. “Ever since they were that high,” he indicated, “I have had them out on the range, riding the range with Mexicans