The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

by Greg Grandin

Having lost the national debate when it came to restricting Mexicans, and fearing they were losing the larger struggle in defense of Anglo-Saxonism, white supremacists took control of the newly established U.S. Border Patrol and turned it into a vanguard of race vigilantism. The patrol’s first recruits were white men one or two generations removed from farm life, often with military experience or with a police or ranger background. Their politics stood in opposition to the big borderland farmers and ranchers who wanted cheap labor.34 Unlike the Chamber of Commerce, they didn’t think that Texas—or Arizona, New Mexico, and California—needed Mexican immigrants. Earlier, in the mid-1800s, the Mexican–American War had unleashed a broad, generalized racism against Mexicans throughout the nation. That racism, in the years after 1924, distilled and concentrated along an increasingly focused line. Whatever the specific provisions of national immigration law, it was the agents who worked for the border patrol, along with customs inspectors, who decided who could legally enter the country from Mexico. They had the power to turn what had been a routine daily or seasonal event—crossing the border—into a ritual of abuse. Hygienic inspections became more widespread and even more degrading. Migrants had their heads shaved, and they were subjected to an ever-more-arbitrary set of requirements and to the discretion of patrollers, including literacy tests and entrance fees.