| Drawn up the belly of the Rio Grande and across the deserts to the Pacific Ocean, the U.S.-Mexico border is America's longest color line. As a political boundary, the border is a physical space that twists in the river and turns in the sands along specific points of longitude and latitude. This is the line that Congress assigned the U.S. Border Patrol to police when it founded the organization in 1924. Although the U.S.-Mexico border was fixed upon the land, the racial divides it represented were inscribed upon bodies that lived north, south, and despite the political boundary.; This dissertation is a history of the United States Border Patrol that focuses upon the tangle of patrolling national borders and policing racial divides in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands where Border Patrol officers have consistently substituted policing Mexicano people for patrolling the Mexican border. Through a social history of the U.S. Border Patrol, constructed primarily from Border Patrol correspondence files and oral histories, this study traces the social and political evolution of the Border Patrol's concentration upon Mexicanos, or racial profiling, between 1924 and 1955.; Racial profiling is a strategy of policing that couples racially defined human bodies to particular criminal acts and then pursues law enforcement work by using race as evidence for suspicion of criminal activity. It is a practice that unevenly distributes rule by coercive force by racially predicating who will be subjected to and who will be exempted from state violence. Therefore, by placing racial profiling under historical surveillance, this dissertation examines one site in which racially differentiated systems of state rule were created, sustained, challenged, and renewed over time. This dissertation makes the simple argument that Border Patrol racial profiling practices developed and evolved according to the social and political context of immigration law enforcement. But, by coming to this simple finding through a historical analysis of U.S. Border Patrol, this dissertation holds transnational lessons for racial formation theory and provides a new lens for analyzing the reincarnation of racial domination in the post-Jim Crow era. |
