Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez
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1939, Presidio County Sheriff Joe Bunton delivered the body of Gregorio Alanis to his relatives living near Presidio, Texas. The delivery finished a battle that had begun eight years earlier between Alanis, a Mexican American, and officers of the U.S. Border Patrol. During a daybreak raid upon his father’s property, Gregorio shot Patrol Inspector James McCraw just below the left clavicle and then fled to Mexico. Immediately after the shooting, Senior Patrol Inspector Earl Fallis secured a felony warrant against Alanis from the county sheriff “in the event it should become necessary to shoot Gregorio Alaniz, for in all probability he will resist arrest.”63 Time did not distract the officers, and on the evening of January 20, 1939, Patrol Inspector Dorn assigned all his men to a remote trail outside of Presidio, Texas. At 9:30 P.M., in an abandoned house along the trail, Dorn shot and killed Gregorio Alanis.
At the inquest, Justice of the Peace W. G. Young of Presidio County found that “Gregorio Alaniz came to death at the hands of Patrol Inspector Edwin Dorn, who while in the line of duty, commanded Gregorio Alaniz to halt and hold up his hands, Gregorio having refused and put up fight with a razor, the said Edwin Dorn shot him with a shotgun, in self-defence.”64 The other man who had crossed with Alanis that night and who had witnessed the shooting “offered no resistance, but while being conveyed to the patrol car which was some distance from the scene of the encounter by Inspectors Dorn and Temple, succeeded in escaping from them.”65 Eight years after the shooting of Patrol Inspector McCraw, Gregorio Alanis was dead, the witness was missing, and a brotherhood of law enforcement exonerated Dorn without any further investigation.
The composition of the Border Patrol (an ensemble of white men, including the Spanish or Mexican Americans who fought for whiteness by enforcing U.S. immigration laws against Mexican Browns) and the composition of its subjects (poor, male, brown-skinned Mexicans) structured the vengeance campaigns as struggles between white men and brown men of the borderlands. In the case of Jack Cottingham, Jack headed to the border to exact revenge for the shooting of his brother. With the gunman already dead, Jack’s vengeance followed the Texas Rangers’ tradition of “revenge by proxy.” Jack shot Mexicans, any Mexicans, for the offense of one, and his outburst was implicitly gendered as he randomly subjected Mexicans to a highly masculine and public form of violence, pistol shooting. In the case of Gregorio Alanis, the officers of the patrol pursued a more slow, patient, and temperate approach: they waited eight years to avenge the shooting of Patrol Inspector James McCraw and took their vengeance at the often violent intersection of migration control and liquor interdiction.
In the case of Lon Parker, the murder of a fellow officer sparked years of violence as men who were both kin and colleague to Parker sought vengeance for their losses. Lon Parker was born in Arizona in 1892 and grew up in southern Arizona. In 1924, both Lon and his brother, George W. Parker Jr., joined the United States Border Patrol. By any measure, Lon was popular and epitomized the early Border Patrol officer as a man who was familiar with local customs and highly integrated into local communities. “It was said that if one met a strange man anywhere within a wide radius of the Huachucas, one could say “Good morning, Mr. Parker,’ and be right four fifths of the time,” explained Mary Kidder Rak.66
On a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1926, Lon left a family picnic to follow the tracks of two liquor smugglers into the mountains. The smugglers, however, found Lon before he found them, and they shot him when he came into range. Seriously wounded, according to the stories told to Mary Kidder Rak, Lon drew his gun and killed one of the smugglers and his horse. The other smuggler fled, and Lon slowly rode to the nearest ranch for help. Lon barely made it to the ranch, where he fell off of his horse and collapsed against a fence; but nobody was home to help him, and within hours Lon was dead.67
A few days later, when Washington, D.C., transplant Alvin Edward Moore reported for duty in Patagonia, Arizona, he was handed the badge of the recently slain Lon Parker and told the story of the smuggler who got away. After Lon’s body was discovered, brother Border Patrol officers followed his trail back into the mountains and found the dead smuggler. It was Narciso Ochoa, a noted liquor smuggler in the area. The officers presumed that it was his brother Domitilio Ochoa who had left the tracks fleeing the area.68 Soon after Moore arrived in Arizona, Senior Patrol Inspector Albert Gatlin got a tip that Ochoa was going to try to return to Mexico that night. Gatlin told Moore to find Patrol Inspector Lawrence Sipe (Gatlin’s brother-in-law), Deputy Sheriff Jim Kane (raised with Lon on the same ranch and “ate out of the same beanpot”) and “anybody else he can get” and meet at Campaña Pass along the border. When Moore, Sipe, and Kane arrived, they were met by Gatlin and a “posse of officers from Douglas County.” According to Moore, ranchers were “turning out of bed to patrol the line that night . . . stalking off in the moonlight, rifles ready, prepared to shoot and be shot at.”69 During such vengeance campaigns, the line between officers and community members disappeared. Together, they took to the night to avenge the murder of Lon Parker.
It was Lon’s partner, Albert Gatlin, who led the posse. “Lon had been as near to Gatlin as his own brother, and his murder had all but turned him from an impartial officer into an avenging nemesis,” remarked Moore.70 Before he stationed the posse at posts along the border, Gatlin gave the officers, ranchers, and farmers who had been deputized for the evening some advice: “All I’ve got to say, men, is if you see anybody comin’ toward the line tonight, yell at ’em in English. And if he don’t answer you in English, shoot!”71 With that advice, the men took to their posts for the night.
Several hours later, Moore saw a figure move in the dark. When a bullet blasted through his car window, Moore took aim and shot back. After the figure dropped, Moore ran over. It was Ochoa, and he had been shot in the chest. As daylight broke, Moore proudly displayed the wounded Ochoa to Gatlin, who moaned, “It’s too bad you didn’t kill the son-of-a-bitch,” but “you qualify for the Border Patrol.”72 Moore was not a local, but in the blood of Domitilio Ochoa, he was baptized as a Border Patrol officer. Ochoa survived the shooting but was sentenced to death by hanging soon after—at least, this was Moore’s tale of Lon Parker.
Ralph Williams joined the Border Patrol long after Lon had died, but he was related to Lon by marriage and had heard the legends from family and from brother officers. Williams knew that Lon was an uncle to Sheriff Jim Hathaway of Cochise County. Jim grew up with Officers Jean Pyeatt and D’Alibini and had been with them when they fought the Mexicans during recess. When Lon lost his final fight on that mountain trail, Jim vowed, “That smuggler will never die a natural death.”73 Two years later, Jim found the man he believed had killed Lon, and “in the middle of the night with that boy, he eliminated him. Him and that guy who was riding shot-gun for him.”74 According to Williams, two men were dead for the murder of Lon Parker, when only one was accused of fleeing the scene. Still, according to the legend of Lon Parker, the pursuit of justice in the name of their brother officer did not stop.
Patrol Inspector Robert Moss had his own version of the story to tell. According to Martin, three men were involved in the murder of Lon Parker. Two of the men were later found “hanging from a tree, right where they had killed him. I don’t know how they got back there, but they were found dead, hanging from a tree.”75 Moss believed that he later caught a third accomplice in downtown El Paso. When the man saw Moss and his partner coming, he began to run and “started screaming in English ‘Don’t let them kill me.’ ” The man must have known that Patrol Inspector Gatlin had long ago set English as the code for not getting shot by the Border Patrol for the murder of Lon Parker. He too was sent to jail.
All together, the legends of Lon Parker tell of seven men dead and one in jail after a Sunday afternoon in 1926. Lon and Narciso were the first to die. Then, after one man fled the scene, a posse shooting and jury hanging, a dual nighttime elimination, two mountain lynchings, and a final El Paso apprehension followed. The legend tells of violence that was dispersed but not random. Patrolmen serving as officers of the state, brothers of the deceased, and men of the community exacted compensation from Mexicano men for the murder of Lon Parker. The legends suggest that in many ways and on many nights, Border Patrol violence was used to exact personal vengeance and defend community interests. In the battles that ensued between Border Patrol officers and Mexicanos, schoolyard clashes were replayed between grown men, but