Established in 1972, the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) Institute of Oral History (IOH) holds the largest collection of border-related oral histories in the United States. Containing interviews dating back to the 1960s, the collection is particularly strong with themes related to labor, immigration, the Bracero Program, and the Mexican Revolution. This article explores the history of the U.S. Border Patrol as gleaned from UTEP oral histories. El Paso and the Border Patrol have a very long and complicated history. The first officers were stationed in El Paso and the first training academy was there. Today, the presence of the Border Patrol is ubiquitous. Using the collection, we investigate what oral histories can tell us that official government documents cannot. How did Border Patrol officers feel about their work and about the people they encountered trying to enter the United States? How did the day-to-day work of Border Patrol officers change over time while the mission of the agency “to detect and prevent the illegal entry of individuals into the United States” remained the same? The article also sheds light on the response of migrants and immigration advocates to the work of the Border Patrol.
In 1972, well-known El Paso historian and social activist Cleofas Calleros (Figure 1) was interviewed by Oscar J. Martínez, and his oral history was deposited in the newly created University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) Institute of Oral History. In the interview, the septuagenarian relates the story of a family’s journey from Zacatecas to El Paso. Calleros, who worked with the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC) from 1926 to 1968 as Mexican border representative and later as director of the NCWC Bureau of Immigration, describes the phone call he received from the American consul in Ciudad Juárez. Calleros recounts the consul saying that the family in distress was “comprised of a husband and wife and their eleven children.” The adults had gone to Mexico as infants in the early part of the 1930s, their families likely swept up in Depression-era “repatriation” campaigns. The husband had been born in San Angelo, Texas; his wife in Visalia, California. Both families had traveled on the same train and both “landed in Zacatecas,” recalls Calleros, with the children growing up in the same neighborhood. As adults, the couple married and started a family. Struggling financially, they decided to relocate to the United States, where they had been born. When they arrived Calleros instructed them to cross into El Paso, but immigration officers there stopped them, saying they needed to pay $200 for each child, reasoning that, although the parents were “American,” the children were “Mexican.” Calleros was certain that the officers were wrong, that the children were American citizens by virtue of their parents’ status as U.S. citizens. He therefore told the man to walk his family across the railroad bridge and he would meet them there. When Calleros arrived he found three Border Patrol officers arresting the family. He shouted:
You don’t dare arrest those! They are citizens of the United States, all thirteen of them. You damn fools, you got rid of two that you thought were Mexican. Now you’re getting thirteen American citizens.1
Cleofas Calleros, unknown photographer, ca. 1936, Special Collections, UTEP Library.
Courtesy of University of Texas at El Paso Library Special Collections Department
Cleofas Calleros, unknown photographer, ca. 1936, Special Collections, UTEP Library.
Courtesy of University of Texas at El Paso Library Special Collections Department
Calleros’s oral history is part of the UTEP collection, a rich source for anyone interested in the history of the U.S. Border Patrol from such perspectives as those of Border Patrol officers, braceros, immigration advocates, and undocumented migrants. Oral-history interviews provide something that other archival sources about the Border Patrol do not: the true day-to-day experiences of people, including the contradictions, the nuances, and the creativity of living on the border.
The UTEP Institute of Oral History (IOH) Collection
The IOH Collection houses dozens of interviews that remark on the Border Patrol. Created by the Labor Appropriation Act of 1924, Congress conceived of the Border Patrol as a federal, permanent policing presence along the nation’s borders, especially the southern border, as the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1917 spurred increased immigration to the United States.2 The history of the Border Patrol has long been intertwined with that of the El Paso/Juárez region, whose symbiotic relationship appears constantly in the multiple oral-history projects developed by the IOH. The interviews range from the stories of anonymous undocumented migrants to braceros, Border Patrol officers, and immigration advocates such as Cleofas Calleros. Representing the largest collection of border-related oral histories in the United States, the IOH is committed to documenting Mexican, Mexican American, Chicanx, transnational, and borderland histories through the experiential lens that only oral histories can bring to scholarly research.
The Institute of Oral History was founded in 1972 by Dr. John H. McNeely, who joined the College of Mines (now UTEP) in 1947. After he completed his dissertation on agrarian land reform during the Mexican Revolution at the University of Texas at Austin, McNeely was promoted from instructor to professor.3 The collection’s earliest interviews date to the 1960s, with library staff and students among the earliest interviewers. Since its establishment over half a century ago, the IOH has carried out oral-history projects related to the history of the border, including la historia laboral del la frontera, el Programa Bracero, and, more recently, a project titled “Seeking Refugee,” which gathers the stories of asylum-seekers coming to the U.S.–Mexico border from Central and South America. In this essay, we draw on the IOH collection to illustrate how oral history reveals history that has been silenced or hidden, the quotidian life and thoughts that are excluded in official documents, and the contradictions and nuances of life on la frontera.
As internationally renowned oral historian Alessandro Portelli writes, one of the most significant aspects of oral histories is that “they tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, what they now think they did.”4 This is especially evident in the oral histories of Border Patrol officers. How did Border Patrol officers perceive their jobs and their relationships with migrants? How did officers’ perceptions of their jobs and of border crossers change over time? Equally meaningful are the remembrances of border residents about their encounters with Border Patrol personnel.
While the focus of the Border Patrol has remained constant over the last century, the way its officers do their jobs and the language they use to describe migrants has shifted. The current Customs and Border Protection (CBP) website states:
While the Border Patrol has changed dramatically since its inception in 1924, its primary mission remains unchanged: to detect and prevent the illegal entry of individuals into the United States. Together with other law enforcement officers, the Border Patrol helps maintain borders that work—facilitating the flow of legal immigration and goods while preventing the illegal trafficking of people and contraband.5
In his 1978 interview, Joe Aubin describes the job this way: “The primary duty is to prevent the undocumented workers, as they are now called, from coming into the United States and to apprehend those guilty of violating the law.” For many years, “we referred to them as illegal aliens” and “as wetbacks. But with today’s civil rights,” Aubin concludes, “they are now undocumented persons.”6 As Aubin’s testimony reveals, oral history can provide insights into changing times, changing attitudes, and changing language.
Ben Parker, born in 1913 in Waelder, Texas, joined the Border Patrol in 1944. When the interviewer asked Parker if “a lot of groups” want “aliens to come across,” Parker answered “Why, sure…any of these Hispanic groups. They want members. And if a ‘wet’ stays over here long enough he’s going to be a number eventually. You know that.”7 Parker’s assertion that migrants would eventually be a “number,” or members of Hispanic organizations, points to some officers’ fears of a growing Mexican American population.
Oral histories reveal that some officers, including Parker, saw a difference between “the old-style wetback” and the migrants of the 1980s. “The old-style wetback,” remarks Parker, “that’s just like the old cowboy, you don’t find him anymore. I have to say that most of them were honest, reliable people. They were hungry and just wanted a job. When they told you something it was true.” According to Parker, though, “that isn’t true today.” He goes on to say:
I recall one time we apprehended a bunch, say 12, 15, that we couldn’t haul in the car at one time. So, we’d load up the car with 7 or 8 and tell the rest to wait until we got back. When we got back, there they’d be. But today, you turn your back on one and he’s gone. So, there’s a difference.8
“And another thing that I’ve observed,” Parker continues, is that migrants “claim that Mexico is poor over there.” But Parker is unconvinced:
Sure, they don’t have what we have over here, but today they dress better, they are healthier, and [there are] very few that can’t sign their name. Most of them can read and write. Back in 1944 there were many, many that couldn’t sign their names, they’d make a [X] mark. But you don’t see that anymore now. So, at our expense, Mexico has made progress.9
As Parker sees it, the ease of crossing the border and the fact that U.S. employers willingly hire migrants without papers allow migrants to send money home to Mexico, raising their own and their families’ standards of living. Earning dollars provides migrants with greater buying power and the ability to improve their material lives.
Oral history is as much about understanding how people make meaning of their lives, experiences, and actions as it is about historical facts. In their self-descriptions, some Border Patrol officers seemed to struggle between their feelings of empathy for the suffering people they encountered and their duty to protect the border. In his 1984 oral history, Ben Parker says, “I never let an illegal alien think that I was in any way trying to help him. But I’m just human, a heart specialist to a hungry person.” Over his thirty-one years on the border, Parker estimates that he “fed thousands. Made them a sandwich out of my lunch.”10 What meaning did Parker make of a job that did not require him to help someone in need, who nevertheless estimated sharing “thousands” of lunches?
Similarly, Joe Aubin recalls: “There’s always the hard-nosed Border Patrolman, but I’ve seen so many cases, either myself or many others” who will choose to feed “a truly hungry person. I’ve bought them food and I know other Border Patrolmen who bought them food. Kids, you know. We always have coffee and doughnuts in the write-up room for the convenience of the officer to come in and while writing up the aliens, processing them, you have a cup of coffee and a doughnut. I’ve seen doughnuts given to kids and hungry people.”11 It is within very personal oral histories like these that we hear the contradictions that can trouble Border Patrol officers torn between being human and protecting the border. Evidence of Border Patrol personnel making meaning of their work through spontaneous (not necessarily official) acts of human kindness continues, as reflected in former Border Patrol agent-turned-immigrant-rights-activist Jenn Budd’s recently published memoir.12
The Long History of the Border Patrol in El Paso
It is not surprising that the Border Patrol would appear in an oral history interview in 1972, the same year the Institute of Oral History was founded. As mentioned previously, the presence of the Border Patrol has been ubiquitous along the U.S.–Mexico border, especially at El Paso, Texas, part of the largest binational metroplex in the Americas. The Border Patrol began with only two stations in 1924: one in El Paso, the other in Detroit. In 1932, administration of the Border Patrol was officially divided between the El Paso station and that in Detroit. Two years later the first Border Patrol academy, Camp Chigas, opened in El Paso (Figure 2).13
Border Patrol officer Leon Bugh, photograph by Casasola Studio, date unknown. Bugh trained at Camp Chigas, El Paso, Texas, in the first Border Patrol Academy. The C. L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department, PH041-03-00052, UTEP Library.
Courtesy of University of Texas at El Paso Library Special Collections Department
Border Patrol officer Leon Bugh, photograph by Casasola Studio, date unknown. Bugh trained at Camp Chigas, El Paso, Texas, in the first Border Patrol Academy. The C. L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department, PH041-03-00052, UTEP Library.
Courtesy of University of Texas at El Paso Library Special Collections Department
The history and visibility of the Border Patrol in El Paso continued throughout the twentieth century. Historian Miguel Levario recalls a day in 1993 when he was driving to high school. It seemed like El Paso “was preparing for war,” he notes. “Perhaps war, not in the traditional sense, but a war nonetheless as a long line of Border Patrol trucks had positioned themselves side by side along the banks of the Rio Grande to guard against what some people along the border called an ‘immigrant invasion.’” Operation Blockade, later called Operation Hold the Line, would serve as a model for other such “operations” along the border (Figure 3).14
This gun-mounted vehicle was part of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Centennial National Parade in El Paso, Texas, May 25, 2024. Photograph by Yolanda Chávez Leyva.
Courtesy of the author
This gun-mounted vehicle was part of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Centennial National Parade in El Paso, Texas, May 25, 2024. Photograph by Yolanda Chávez Leyva.
Courtesy of the author
El Paso has frequently been a testing ground for border policy and procedures, often involving the Border Patrol. At this writing in 2024, the presence of the Border Patrol is increasingly visible in El Paso as officers are sent to patrol the border in the wake of immigrant “surges” from Central and South America as well as other locales around the globe.
El Paso is home to the only Border Patrol Museum in the nation, as historian Gabriela E. Moreno notes.15 U.S. Border Patrol retirees, men and women who had devoted their lives to protecting the nation’s borders on a daily basis, created the Border Patrol Museum in 1981. The former agents understand their position as “in-betweens,” as acting between national and local interests, between upholding the law and dealing humanely with migrations across borders in all its dimensions. The Border Patrol Museum memorializes the lived experiences from agents’ perspectives, recovering both the professional and the human aspects of that work.16 The museum’s many goals include humanizing the job and illustrating within a public history setting the challenges agents face as daily decision-makers in a specific location acting within a context of shifting national and international trends.
Border Patrol and Racialization
After El Paso opened its first Border Patrol station in 1924, the Mexican Revolution shaped the history of the Border Patrol and that of the El Paso/Juárez region (Figure 4). This symbiotic relationship appears as a constant trend in the IOH oral-history collection. As Levario suggests, the Mexican Revolution and the massive migration of Mexicans that followed is intimately linked to the cultural nativism of the United States’ Progressive Era.17 The founding of the Border Patrol was a turning point in U.S. efforts to control the entry of migrants to the country. Ironically, this measure to secure the nation’s boundaries also opened the window to prosecuting American citizens for a variety of alleged infractions. Efforts to regulate the border proceeded along racial lines, affecting ethnic Mexicans, Europeans, and Chinese entering the country, those entering with or without required documentation, and individuals whom authorities deemed threatening to established policies—from prostitutes, bandits, and alcohol smugglers in the Prohibition era (1919–1933)18 to opium and heroin smugglers following World War II,19 and so on.20
U.S. Immigration Service Border Patrol in front of the El Paso Sector Office, August 21, 1927.
Source: https://www.cbp.gov/about/history/timeline/timeline-date/may-28-1924.
Courtesy of U.S. Customs and Border Protection
U.S. Immigration Service Border Patrol in front of the El Paso Sector Office, August 21, 1927.
Source: https://www.cbp.gov/about/history/timeline/timeline-date/may-28-1924.
Courtesy of U.S. Customs and Border Protection
The rapid growth of agro-industry in the Southwest and the desire for increasing profit made agricultural employers dependent on temporary Mexican laborers, available when needed, dispensable when not. The founding of the Border Patrol provided growers with a valuable tool for maintaining Mexican workers as temporary, dispensable labor.21 To the same degree, the vulnerability of migratory Mexican workers increased as the mechanisms of the Border Patrol grew. The growth of the Border Patrol, in turn, increased the vulnerability of Mexican Americans everywhere, including north of the border. Sharing physical features with migrant, temporary Mexican laborers, U.S.-born Mexican American citizens thus became targets of Border Patrol attention. Agents extended their policing strategies into Mexican American communities, identifying by racial characteristics anyone of Mexican origin who might be in the United States illegally. El Pasoan and U.S.-born Fred Morales, for example, recalls crossing the river from Juárez to El Paso as a teenage alcohol smuggler. The Border Patrol stopped him near his home in Chihuahuita near the Rio Grande. When the interviewer asked if the Border Patrol ever stopped him, he replied: “Yes. And they still do, simply because I have the same features that a lot of my Mexican friends do. But I always have some identification to provide, and they let me go, with the exception of that one time that I related to you about [what happened] in the Chihuahuita area.”22 Morales’s testimony speaks to what historian Natalia Molina calls a racialized group, a concept that explains the tendency of Border Patrol agents in El Paso’s Mexican neighborhoods to target Mexican Americans as undocumented. In this way, the Border Patrol maintains the structures that link national notions about race to immigration status.23 As Molina argues, and as Fred Morales has personally experienced, “racial profiling guided who was and who was not asked to show their papers,” a practice that racializes Mexican Americans “along with Mexican immigrants as inherently unsuitable for U.S. citizenship.”24
Border Patrol officers describe how they recognize undocumented persons. Officer Joe Aubin told his interviewer in 1978: “I can walk downtown El Paso and walk by a lot of people and know they are legal. All of a sudden, one will be by me or passing in front of me, that I just know doesn’t have documents. A lot of it is the way they look, the material things. They may have Mexican shoes, clothes.” Anxiety is another indicator. “A lot of times,” Aubin continues, “it is their fear of the Border Patrol” that gives the undocumented away.
They become extremely nervous, or they have this invisible look: “if I don’t look at him then he won’t look at me.” This has been demonstrated many times here. Like in a cotton field, they run and hide. As you walk up on one, you can literally kick the bottom of his feet and tell him to stand up and he won’t do it because he has his head buried under a bush. He goes by that theory, “if I can’t see him, then he can’t see me.” He’ll stay there until you reach down and pull him up. He realizes then he’s been caught. It’s little things like that you look for as you pass people.25
Another narrator, agricultural worker Bill Stone, relates that when the Border Patrol came to the farm where he worked, agents looked at the Mexican workers and quickly made judgments about who they were. “I didn’t understand it” when they zeroed in on one man. “The Border Patrol said he was just a communist.…They could tell. They walked up into 24–25 Mexicans and they could pick him out, the Border Patrol.”26 The Border Patrol has a long history of claiming to be able to identify problematic border crossers by their looks. As historian Eithne Luibhéid explains, agents detained Sara Harb Quiroz at the border because she had short hair and thus “looked like a lesbian.”27 Racial profiling (or, in the case of Quiroz, sexual profiling) is endemic. The Ohio-based American Immigration Council and Advocates for Basic Legal Equality (ABLE) systematically investigated Border Patrol documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act and reported in 2024 that Ohio Border Patrol agents targeted “males, classified as laborers of Latin American origin between the ages of 23 and 40, deemed to have darker skin.”28
Camp Chigas and Border Patrol Training
Oral histories are also key to understanding the evolution of the Border Patrol. During the first years of the agency, without clear guidelines, the Border Patrol started to detain people entering the country illegally or caught breaking immigration laws.29 A 1986 interview with eighty-eight-year-old Wesley E. Stiles, who joined the Border Patrol shortly after it was founded in 1924, reveals the lack of guidelines and training. Stiles recalled that when he reported to work for the first time:
No one knew what we were supposed to do or how we were supposed to do it. Five other men reported for duty. They were a day or two ahead of me because they said they didn’t have anything to do but to come on. So, we just walked around and looked wise. Nobody knew what to do, how to do it, or when to do it. This was rather amusing in a way.30
Intriguingly, Stiles’s previously rootless existence provided him with unexpected insights into his new job. “I had previously done a lot of hoboing and I knew my way around railroad yards. I could get around pretty well.” But another newcomer, “this Mr. Corbin, who was appointed chief patrol-inspector at that time,” had “no horse sense at all.” He “was a good man; he was knowledgeable,” but he didn’t know “what to do. He was an Immigrant Inspector purely. He didn’t know very much about handling the men. We didn’t have any transportation. All we could do was just walk around.”31 Stiles’s reminiscences support historian Deborah Kang’s observations regarding early Bureau of Immigration operations. In the late 1910s, immigration inspectors, including, perhaps, Corbin himself, simply staffed ports of entry. They granted or denied admission to those who passed through; they did not rove beyond the ports to search for smugglers, lawbreakers, or individuals attempting to enter without documentation.32
Agents began receiving specific training in October 1934, when the first Border Patrol academy, Camp Chigas, was founded in El Paso. According to former Border Patrol officer Arthur L. Adams, Camp Chigas was located by “the old Santa Fe Bridge, as it was years ago when they had the old red building with the big tower down there.”33 Basic Spanish, martial arts, firearms, borderline patrolling, and the basics of immigration laws, among other things, were taught in this school. The final horsemanship test was riding up Mount Cristo Rey, a steep, rugged trail up the mountain dividing El Paso, New Mexico, and Juárez (Figure 5).34
“Men on horseback,” possibly Border Patrol, El Paso, Texas, photograph by Oscar C. Bernard, ca. 1900–1950. The C. L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department, PH047-003, UTEP Library.
Courtesy of University of Texas at El Paso Library Special Collections Department
“Men on horseback,” possibly Border Patrol, El Paso, Texas, photograph by Oscar C. Bernard, ca. 1900–1950. The C. L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department, PH047-003, UTEP Library.
Courtesy of University of Texas at El Paso Library Special Collections Department
In addition to serving as a training school, Camp Chigas housed a fingerprinting unit. Migrants apprehended by the Border Patrol were taken there for processing. The camp’s location, roughly 100 feet from the river separating the United States from Mexico, proved challenging for agents. Adams remembered one incident when they picked up a group of migrants, called “wets” in this oral history, and took them to Camp Chigas.
I opened the door to take the alien out of the back, but he was between me and the river, and he booked it. And I could see myself losing my job as a young probationer if that guy escaped. He went into the river, I went into the river. And when I got about the middle of the river, my partner, who was an old timer, called a halt. And I remember standing in there threatening that guy with everything imaginable if I ever caught him again or laid hands on him, and he just laughed and gave me the finger. (Laughter) Went his way. Had to go home and change clothes and worry about my job. But I didn’t get fired.35
Oral histories also describe the day-to-day life in the training schools. According to former immigration officer Harold D. Frakes, who entered the Border Patrol in 1954, his training took place at Fort Bliss, Texas.
Well, if I remember, it was about six weeks is all that we stayed. And we had physical education. I remember that there was a lot of sand burrs there. I got sand burrs in my tennis shoes, and I remember that. We had to do a lot of running and the air was so dry that it burnt my lungs from breathing the air. As far as the other training, about the two basic things that we had was immigration law and Spanish. That was the two basic things. And of course, firearms. And we were taught to shoot machine guns then, submachine guns, Thompson and Rising, which we don’t even have anymore. They’ve completely eliminated those.36
Technology, the oral histories reveal, can be much more basic. Joe Aubin told the interviewer:”
Here in El Paso, I’ve had people throw rocks and bricks at me from the Mexican side. I was hit in the head about two years ago with rocks. It all started when they took slingshots away from the Border Patrol. It was declared an unprofessional weapon. Prior to that time, we had some control of the river area but since that time we have lost it. Now they have slingshots, David and Goliath slings, and we are bombarded with rocks and bricks on a daily basis. I imagine within a year’s time here in El Paso we are losing at least one window a week in our vehicles. It’s that bad.37
Over the years, media reports describe people throwing rocks at Border Patrol agents from across the river. These encounters can be deadly, especially for rock throwers. In 2010, Border Patrol officer Jesus Mesa Jr. shot and killed unarmed fifteen-year-old Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca. According to Mesa, a group of young people were playing in the dry riverbed when they began throwing rocks. He fired and shot Hernandez Guereca in the face as he hid beneath a train trestle.38 The case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the court ruled that the youth’s parents could not sue the officer because their son was on Mexican soil.39 In 2012, a Border Patrol officer shot sixteen-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodríguez, across the border between Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, allegedly for throwing rocks.40 Historian Jenn Budd has documented the Border Patrol’s practice of covering up agents’ illegal practices, including shooting across the border, harassment and sexual assault, as well as racist and sexist practices within the agency.41
Immigrant Voices
The voices of migrants that emerge from the IOH collection tell a nuanced story of their relations with the Border Patrol. Some are stories of fear, while others reveal fairly positive encounters. In her 2016 oral history, Alicia Marentes, cofounder of the Centro de Trabajadores Agrícolas (Border Farmworkers Center) and a long-time organizer of agricultural workers, tells the story of her encounter with la migra (agents of U.S. Immigration & Customs) in the 1970s when she was a teenager. “When I was pregnant,” she recalls, “the Border Patrol got me.” Born in Juárez, Marentes had married at seventeen. She and her husband crossed the river to El Paso, making their way to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to live with his family. Because she didn’t have a job, Marentes stayed home and helped her mother-in-law look after the family’s eleven children. Marentes remembers that it was October when the Border Patrol showed up; her baby was due in February. “I was with my neighbor,” also from Mexico, whom she’d invited over to “have a gordita (snack) and a coffee.…And we were drinking [our coffee], and the migra knocks. Yes, yes, yes. Good morning, good morning.” The two officers were looking for Marentes’s brother-in-law, Antonio, following a raid on the meatpacking plant where he worked. They questioned Marentes and her in-laws and, in the process, determined that she was undocumented. However, because she was so young and so pregnant, the officers decided not to take her in. “We are afraid that something might happen to you,” they told her. “But when you give birth, go fix your papers.” Marentes had her baby in Albuquerque and then, after a brief visit to Juárez, she and her husband returned to El Paso and “fixed their papers.”42
Marentes was fortunate in her Border Patrol encounter. In April 2023, 180 organizations and individuals signed a letter to the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which oversees the Border Patrol, demanding fair treatment of pregnant persons in CBP custody. Citing cases of neglect or abuse, the letter highlights the case of Ana, “who in February 2020 was denied basic medical care while in CBP custody and forced to give birth in the Chula Vista Border Patrol Station in San Diego Sector while holding onto a garbage can for support.” Taken to an offsite hospital following the birth, Ana “was forced to return to the station for a night of postpartum detention with her newborn U.S.-citizen baby.”43
Hiding from the Border Patrol is a theme in migrants’ oral histories. Refugio Pérez Lolla was able to laugh about his Border Patrol experience in his 2023 recorded interview at the Institute of Oral History. Pérez Lolla was born in the state of Chihuahua in 1944. He took charge of the family’s land at age nine, while his father was working as a bracero in the United States. Despite being comfortable in Mexico, Pérez Lolla decided to come to the United States “since I saw that others had money” after they “went to the other side.” He hoped to prosper economically like others who had gone to the United States. “Well, we’ll see,” he thought, “but no, it wasn’t like that.” Unfortunately, he says, “I didn’t have that good luck. In the first place, well, I was a wetback and bad at knowing how to hide from la migra.”44 Pérez Lolla blamed himself for his ineptitude in escaping the Border Patrol.
Other oral histories detail the creative strategies that allowed migrants to go unnoticed. For example, Jose Gamez, born in Coahuila in 1927, recalls working in the United States as both an undocumented worker and as a bracero. When “we entered as wetbacks,” he recalls, “there were times that we slept in the bales of alfalfa because la migra was coming and they took us at night.…We made like caves and we slept there, in the bales of alfalfa.” Gamez admits they were afraid of animals while they slept outside, but they were more afraid of la migra. “We had to sleep there because la migra was coming.” His sleeping arrangements improved only marginally once Gamez became a bracero. “When we fixed our bracero card,” he recalls, “I came here to the Henderson ranch and we slept with many people. It was a big warehouse…around 50 of us slept there, on top of the bales and others below.”45 Gamez still slept on alfalfa, but his fear of the Border Patrol was gone.
Further evidence of migrants’ creativity in eluding the Border Patrol is evident in Apolonio Venegas’s 2006 IOH interview, when he was seventy-six years old. One day while working in Santa Rosa, California, someone said, “Here comes la migra.” “The workers who had papers ran so that the Border Patrol would follow them, thinking they were undocumented. When the officers caught up to them, they showed them their papers. They acted dumb. ‘Well, what do I know, what do I know about the Border Patrol,’” they’d say. “But we knew,” says Venegas. “We acted dumb…to save the others. Yes. That’s how we did it and they took some, but others stayed very quiet and they did not take those (laughter).”46
Seeking Refuge
In recent years, increasing numbers of people have come to the U.S.–Mexico border seeking asylum. A surge of unaccompanied children reaching the border in fiscal year 2014 (October 1, 2013 to September 30, 2014) drew attention to the border. The Border Patrol apprehended 70,000 unaccompanied children that year, an increase of 77 percent over the previous year.47 Families came to the border in larger numbers than ever seen before, traveling in caravans of 6,000 or more people for what they hoped was safety in numbers. Thousands of migrants appearing together at the border represented a serious challenge to Border Patrol operations.48 This trend continues: in December 2023, the Border Patrol reported 250,000 encounters, both apprehensions and expulsions, the highest number ever recorded. Most were Central Americans, but the number of Venezuelans has grown exponentially since 2023: today they represent about half of all encounters.49 Instead of Mexican families entering the country to work in the fields, as often happened in the early twentieth century, or mostly males entering as temporary bracero labor, migration patterns are clearly changing.
Even though migration patterns change over time, the presence of the Border Patrol remains constant, along with its law enforcement modus operandi of detaining and deporting as tools of intimidation and control. As Victor Talavera, Guillermina Gina Núñez-Mchiri, and Josiah Heyman suggest in their study of El Paso, Texas, Border Patrol is omnipresent in urban as well as rural communities. Border Patrol agents’ aggressive strategies provoke anxiety, fear, stigma, loss, and trauma. This trauma is experienced by nonimmigrants and others legally present in the United States.50
In the twentieth century, migration to the U.S.–Mexico border was mostly of Mexican nationals, usually based on kinship networks. In the twenty-first century, border towns have been increasingly impacted by U.S. efforts to control undocumented circulation patterns. Operation “Hold the Line” in El Paso, “Gatekeeper” in San Diego, and “Safeguard” in Arizona are good examples of U.S. efforts to suppress migration. These policies take material form in the miles and miles of walls and barbed wire fences. The barriers force undocumented migrants into deserts and mountains, a negative use of the natural landscape that exposes people to dangerous conditions.51 The direct consequences of such policies and their enforcement are the rising numbers of deportations and of deaths among those trying to reach el otro lado (the other side).
Along with shifting migrant demographics, border policies have been in flux since 2017, with extremely detrimental impacts on migrants. The Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy of separating parents from their children was implemented as a pilot program in El Paso in 2017, becoming border-wide from 2018 to 2021. Beginning in 2018, Health and Human Services created emergency influx centers to house children whom officials had separated from their families as well as children arriving alone. Most harmful were the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), in effect from 2019 to 2021, referred to informally as the “stay in Mexico policy.” Migrants who successfully navigated the “credible fear” interview, demonstrating their case for asylum, were sent back to Mexico to await their U.S. court dates. MPP meant that Mexican border cities like Ciudad Juárez were flooded with thousands of migrants without resources or family, many of whom ended up in inexpensive hotels, under-resourced shelters, or on the street. Under this inhumane system, migrants became prime targets for organized crime, many experiencing extortion, kidnapping, sexual assault, and human trafficking.52 As in the mid-twentieth century, political binational agreements between Mexico and the United States can make this type of policy feasible.53
Forced migration is another current trend. For example, Rosangela, a Venezuelan mother of two children aged nine and seventeen, was threatened by her country’s government: “We never thought we would leave the country. It is so hard…and we had to leave. We searched for a place in another country, and we left for Chile. We traveled by land for the fear [of being discovered]. Thinking that we would be good in Chile, everything was well [until] they came and threatened us…they had found us in Chile.”54 Like Rosangela and her family, many migrants had never before imagined migrating before they became migrants. Still, the United States represents “the only safe place,” says Blanca, a Salvadorian persecuted by gangs for over two years.55
Many migrants we interviewed told us that the ordeals that pushed them from their countries of origin were only the beginning. La entrega (migrants voluntarily surrendering to the Border Patrol) is also traumatic, as migrants experience extortion, physical abuse, sexual assault, being used as “mules” to smuggle drugs, and more. While waiting in Ciudad Juárez for her MPP court date, an anonymous interviewee from El Salvador shared:
When they [the coyotes] told me to cross, they told me that they [the migration agents from Mexico] shouldńt get me, that I had to be caught by the U.S. ones. And I remember I ran, it was all mud all the way to my knees, and I fell three times. I can’t forget my [two-year-old] son’s face, I was holding him and he said “Mami, tengo miedo” (“Mommy, I’m scared”), he said, holding me tight […] I crossed, there was a patrol, they let me through, and after a while one Border Patrol stopped me and started questioning.56
Like many of the migrants we interviewed, this interviewee hoped to be caught by the Border Patrol. But MPP meant that she could not stay. “I did not know,” she says, that “I would be returned to Mexico.”57
The Border Patrol, as the institution charged with observing, monitoring, controlling, and detaining migrants, executes laws derived from political anxieties emanating from centers of power, especially Washington, DC. Since the 1950s, the Border Patrol’s function has shifted. Where once the Border Patrol’s role was enforcing immigration laws, now some believe that the main task of the agency at the southern border is to guard the nation from criminals.58 Policies and practices at federal, state, and local levels have shaped the borderlands environment for years, making border control a significant historical phenomenon and, therefore, a topic for historians and other scholars.
As previously mentioned, when journalists reported record numbers of asylum-seekers at the El Paso border, the Institute of Oral History launched a project to document their experiences. In January 2019, we launched “Seeking Refuge,” a collection of oral histories that encompassed not only migrants but also their attorneys and other advocates. Understanding this historical moment is complicated by the diversity of nationalities involved, the numbers of organizations engaged, continuing shifts in migration patterns, and new social configurations emerging in host communities. Changing policies in Mexico and the United States have added new layers of complexity. The Border Patrol has had no choice but to adapt its role and its methods in a rapidly changing scenario. As historians we adapt too. We may not find sources to write this history through the lens of our discipline, but we are committed to documenting what is happening on the border and to creating an ever-growing oral history collection that may work as primary sources for others.
Conclusion
The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol marked the Patrol’s 100-year anniversary in El Paso on Saturday, May 25, 2024, with the Centennial National Parade (Figure 6). The parade began at the El Paso Convention Center and circled San Jacinto Plaza.59 It was “quite a show of militarized might,” says coauthor Yolanda Chávez Leyva, director of the Institute for Oral History at UTEP. Representing the Border Patrol were agents mounted on horses, all-terrain vehicles, and tank-like transports with rooftop gun placements. Helicopters surveilled the festivities from the sky as well (Figure 7). “Being right under the helicopter was traumatizing,” says Leyva. “I see them / hear them every day because UTEP is on the border, but to be right under it was horrifying.”
Border Patrol officers march and drill in formation for U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Centennial National Parade in El Paso, Texas, May 25, 2024. Photograph by Yolanda Chávez Leyva.
Courtesy of the author
Border Patrol officers march and drill in formation for U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Centennial National Parade in El Paso, Texas, May 25, 2024. Photograph by Yolanda Chávez Leyva.
Courtesy of the author
Helicopter surveilled U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Centennial National Parade in El Paso, Texas, May 25, 2024. Photograph by Yolanda Chávez Leyva.
Courtesy of the author
Helicopter surveilled U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Centennial National Parade in El Paso, Texas, May 25, 2024. Photograph by Yolanda Chávez Leyva.
Courtesy of the author
As 2024 marks the centennial of the Border Patrol, we can turn to oral histories to understand the complex relationship of the agency and its officers to border crossers. The IOH collection represents a rich archive that documents the experiences of Border Patrol officers going back to 1924. Just as significantly, the collection reveals the diversity of experiences and encounters between Border Patrol personnel and border crossers. In oral histories, we find evidence of how people thought about themselves. In some oral histories, Border Patrol officers speak candidly about the tension between being part of a bureaucracy aimed at stopping people from entering the country, on the one hand, and being human beings with empathy for people in desperate straits, on the other. As officers speak about their jobs, we can trace how the agency’s policies and practices have changed over the past century, from the first recruits with no idea what to do, to recent officers describing in detail their training for the work. We read the perceptions and experiences of migrants whose temporary labor is much desired by agricultural employers, yet whose temporary status makes them targets for the Border Patrol and for criminal organizations. Ultimately, these oral histories are about memory and meaning.
Notes
Interview with Cleofas Calleros by Oscar J. Martinez, 1972, “Interview no. 157,” Institute of Oral History, University of Texas at El Paso. Calleros worked with over one million immigration cases during his long tenure with the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC). Special Collections at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) Library houses a large collection of immigration files from that organization. National Catholic Welfare Conference Case Files, 1904–1958, MS 173, C. L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department, The University of Texas at El Paso Library. The finding aid is available here: https://www.utep.edu/library/_files/docs/special-collections/finding-aids/ms173_ncwc.pdf.
Even though Oscar Martínez focused his research on the U.S–Mexico border, his concept of border can be applied to all “symbiotic urban complexes.” Of course, this is relevant because understood as symbiotic, border towns are intertwined in all senses: economically, socially, politically, and more. Oscar Martínez, Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), xviii.
El Paso County Historical Society, “Hall of Honor 2007: John Hamilton McNeely,” Password (El Paso Historical Society: 2020), at https://www.elpasohistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/john-mcneely.pdf.
Alessandro Portelli, “The Peculiarities of Oral History,” History Workshop, no. 12 (Autumn 1981): 96–107, at https://www.jstor.org/stable/4288379.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “Border Patrol Overview,” at https://www.cbp.gov/border-security/along-us-borders/overview.
Interview with Joe Aubin by Leslie J. Pyatt, 1978, “Interview no. 700,” Institute of Oral History (IOH), UTEP.
Interview with Ben A. Parker by Douglas V. Meed, 1984, “Interview no. 661,” IOH, UTEP.
Parker interview.
Parker interview.
Parker interview.
Aubin interview.
Jenn Budd, Against the Wall: My Journey from Border Patrol Agent to Immigrant Rights Activist (New York: Heliotrope Books, 2022).
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “Border Patrol History,” https://www.cbp.gov/border-security/along-us-borders/history.
Miguel Levario, Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the Enemy (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2012), 1.
Gabriela E. Moreno, Mean Green: Nation Building in the National Border Patrol Museum (New York: Peter Lang Inc., 2017).
Border Patrol Museum website, https://borderpatrolmuseum.com.
Levario, Militarizing the Border, 88.
This act boosted border interaction by tempting Americans to cross the border to consume alcohol, especially in such border communities as Ciudad Juárez or Tijuana. Martínez, Border People, 38. Many U.S. policies have direct consequences for border history; in this case, as Rachel St. John suggests, “drug smuggling was born on the border” after the 1909 Act to Prohibit the Importation and Use of Opium for Other Than Medical Purposes, the Harrison Narcotic Law of 1914, and, of course, the Volstead Act. Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 162.
During World War II, social configurations at the border also changed due to the increased presence of U.S. soldiers, most of whom were white men unconnected to the region. The El Paso/Juárez region, site of Fort Bliss, was particularly impacted. Fort Bliss is also relevant to this history, since the first U.S. military post was established nearby in 1848, following execution of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, to secure the border from the “enemy other”—namely, Mexicans and Natives. Texas State Historical Association, “Fort Bliss,” https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/fort-bliss.
According to Martínez, twentieth-century migration from Mexico to the United States is central to political problems between the two nations regarding “the property rights of foreigners in México, protectionism, drug trafficking, and undocumented immigration,” from which only the first one “has been eliminated as an active source of tension.” Martínez, Border People, 37.
Martínez, Border People, 22. Particularly in the first half of the twentieth century, the Border Patrol equated Mexican migration with labor migration. This perception changed over time, according to Jenn Budd.
Interview with Fred Morales by Oscar J. Martínez, 1975, “Interview no. 211,” IOH, UTEP.
The term “Mexican” encompasses intertwined aspects of race, ethnicity, nationality, and even immigration status, which complicates the narrative in each particular case. Natalia Molina, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Script (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 6–8.
Molina, How Race Is Made, 116.
Aubin interview.
Interview with Bill Stone by Brady Banta, 2008, “Interview no. 1589,” IOH, UTEP.
Eithne Lubèid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 79.
Elyssa Pachico and Emily Desmond, “Records Shed Light on Border Patrol’s Racial Profiling of Immigrants in Ohio” (Washington, DC: American Immigration Council, March 19, 2024), https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/news/foia-records-border-patrol-racial-profiling-immigrants-ohio-report.
As Patrick Ettinger argues, immigration laws exist to create an “artificial barrier” and started in the United States with the Immigration Act of 1903, which targeted immigrants for their appearance and potential to become public charges. The barrier gathered additional weight in the 1920s with passage of the Volstead (Prohibition) Act and the introduction of visas as an entry requirement, both of which encouraged officials to identify aliens as “legal” or “illegal.” The creation of the Border Patrol in 1924 was a response to expanding complexity of laws passed to secure U.S. borders. Overall, increases in migration led to hardening of immigration laws that, in turn, led to greater creativity in smuggling and undocumented migration, leading to greater efforts to control migration. Patrick W. Ettinger, Imaginary Lines: Border Enforcement and the Origins of Undocumented Immigration, 1882–1930 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 151–58. In the last years of the 1910s, U.S. officials worked to develop procedures for enforcing such new immigration laws as the 1917 Immigration Act and 1918 Passport Act. At the U.S.–Mexico border, local enforcement ignored certain aspects of the law, such as the literacy test, to which Mexican laborers were exempt. As Deborah Kang argues, negotiating enforcement of immigration policies was critical for daily life and local economies in the borderlands. Deborah Kang, “Implementation: How the Borderlands Redefined Federal Immigration Law and Policy, 1917–1924,” California Legal History: Journal of the California Supreme Court Historical Society, vol. 7 (2012), 265–68.
Interview with Wesley E. Stiles by Wesley C. Shaw, 1986, “Interview no. 756,” IOH, UTEP.
Stiles interview.
Kang, “Implementation,” 283.
Interview with Arthur Adams by Jim Marchant and Oscar J. Martínez, 1977, “Interview no. 646,” IOH, UTEP.
Immigration and Naturalization Services, I&NS Reporter (Summer 1974), 10.
Adams interview.
Interview with Harold D. Frakes by Oscar J. Martínez, 1978, “Interview no. 698,” IOH, UTEP. The weapons Frakes mentions were multi-round-firing semi-automatic weapons sold as Thompson Submachine Guns in World War I, later popularized in the U.S. media as “Tommy guns.”
Aubin interview.
Tracy Wilkinson and Richard A. Serrano, “Mexico Protests Shooting Death of Teen at Texas Border,” Los Angeles Times, June 9, 2010, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-jun-09-la-fg-border-shooting-20100610-story.html.
Richard Wolf, “Court Denies Mexican Family’s Claim in Border Patrol Killing of Son,” El Paso Times, February 25, 2020, https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/2020/02/25/cross-border-shooting-supreme-court-clears-border-patrol/4867523002.
Melissa del Bosque, “Are U.S. Agents Who Shoot Mexicans across the Border above the Law?” Texas Observer, October 22, 2012, https://www.texasobserver.org/lawsuit-could-grant-constitutional-protections-to-mexicans-shot-on-mexican-side-of-the-border-fence.
Budd, Against the Wall.
Interview with Alicia Marentes by Yolanda Chávez Leyva, 2016, “Interview no. 1706,” IOH, UTEP. Translation by Yolanda Chávez Leyva.
Letter from UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy, et al., to Acting Commissioner Troy Miller, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, April 25, 2023, https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/new-evidence-of-horrific-treatment-of-pregnant-people-in-cbp-custody-reignites-demands-for-change.
Interview with Refugio Pérez Lolla by Myrna Parra-Mantilla, 2003, “Interview no. 985,” IOH, UTEP.
Interview with Jose Gamez by Myrna Parra-Mantilla, 2003, “Interview no. 1128,” IOH, UTEP. Translation by Yolanda Chávez Leyva.
Interview with Apolonio Venegas by Anais Acosta, 2006, “Interview no. 1163,” IOH, UTEP. Translation by Yolanda Chávez Leyva.
Janna Ataiants, Chari Cohen, Amy Henderson Riley, Jamile Tellez Lieberman, Mary Clare Reidy, and Mariana Chilton, “Unaccompanied Children at the United States Border, a Human Rights Crisis That Can Be Addressed with Policy Change,” Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, 20, no. 4 (August 20, 2018):1000–10.
Bruno Miranda and Aída Silva, “Gestión Desbordada: Solicitudes de Asilo en Estados Unidos y los Mecanismos de Espera Allende sus Fronteras,” Migraciones Internacionales 13 (2022): 11, http://doi.org/10.33679/rmi.vlil.2385.
John Gramlich, “Migrant Encounters at the U.S.-Mexico Border Hit a Record High at the End of 2023,” Pew Research Center, February 15, 2024, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/15/migrant-encounters-at-the-us-mexico-border-hit-a-record-high-at-the-end-of-2023.
Victor Talavera, Guillermina Gina Nuñez-Mrchiri, and Josiah Heyman, “Deportation in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Anticipation, Experience, and Memory,” in Deportation in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Anticipation, Experience, and Memory, eds. Nicolas De Genova and Natalie Peutz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 166–95.
Jorge Antonio Breceda and Wendolyne Nava, “Contexto y Flujos Migratorios en Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua-El Paso, Texas,” Nóesis 22, no. 43 (2013): 263.
Miranda and Silva, “Gestión Desbordada,” 5. See also Human Rights Watch, “Remain in Mexico: Overview and Resources,” February 7, 2022, https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/02/07/remain-mexico-overview-and-resources.
See Chapter 5, “The Corridors of Migration Control,” in Kelly Lytle-Hernández, Migra: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 125–50.
Interview of Rosangela by Yolanda Leyva, 2019, in process for IOH collection. Translation by Kimberly Sumano.
Interview of Blanca by Kimberly Sumano, 2020, in process for IOH collection. Translation by Kimberly Sumano.
Interview of an anonymous woman from El Salvador by Ligia Arguilez, 2020, in process for IOH collection. Translation by Kimberly Sumano.
Anonymous woman from El Salvador.
Kelly Lytle-Hernández, Migra, 205–13.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “U.S. Border Patrol Celebrates 100th Anniversary,” release date May 17, 2024, at https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/us-border-patrol-celebrates-100th-anniversary.
University of California Press