Abstract
This article traces how local, state, and federal officials in the United Sates weaponized morality against Mexican contract wage laborers in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The author argues that the sexual morals policing project targeting immigrant women suspected of prostitution and other immoral behaviors shaped the experiences of Mexican contract wage laborers as they sought entry into the United States and once they were admitted. By focusing on the racialized poverty of the Mexican, US immigration officials and employers created a stark binary of workers as “moral” law‐abiding/“immoral” vagrant criminals depending on laborers compliance and participation within a burgeoning transnational contract labor system.
The summer of 1910 was a tumultuous time for Frank W. Berkshire, an Immigrant Supervising Inspector for the United States, as he struggled with the challenge of enforcing border control at the US-Mexico border.1 US border agents were not always successful at preventing the unauthorized entry of a growing list of excludable immigrants. Berkshire and other bureau agents had few restrictionist tools at hand—before 1910, there were more laws against poverty and immorality than against specific racial groups.2 While border agents often moralized the poor as unwanted scourges and conflated the Likely to be a Public Charge (LPC) and immorality exclusions, the process varied, and many supposed undesirables entered the country. Among those entering the United States were the growing number of Mexican contracted wage laborers. Berkshire bemoaned how US-based employers’ insatiable desire for cheap labor often meant they “flagrantly and openly violated” the nation's immigration laws. Ostensibly, US immigration laws barred labor recruiters and employers from contracting Mexican laborers in Mexico with promises of guaranteed labor and higher wages to trigger their migration north. But the border reality was much different. Employers regularly enticed Mexicans north in clear violation of the ban on contract laborer importation. Even as Berkshire came to terms with the reality of a failed US border enforcement project, he also saw a path forward. The elasticity of the morals-based exclusions, including the discretionary tool of the LPC clause, provided a means to exclude Mexican wage laborers.3
As he realized the indispensable role Mexican laborers played in the United States, Berkshire shifted his attention from stopping the influx of migrants to the crucial matter of controlling their movement and more effectively policing them. In his view, it was imperative for Congress to enhance the bureau's capacity to police contract laborers who evaded border enforcement and operated outside the scope of government control and regulation. Berkshire suggested that the 1910 amendments to the Immigration Act of 1907 provided a viable blueprint for fortifying border enforcement and enacting post-entry control. Specifically, Berkshire drew attention to section 3 of the act, which made punishable the reentry of debarred aliens, including sexual commerce workers, those who profited from their earnings like pimps and procurers, and other morally dubious immigrants, with upward of a ten-year prison term and a $5,000 fine.4
Berkshire recommended that these morality-based exclusions be extended to include contract laborers, thus granting immigration agents the authority to deport and criminalize workers and, by extension, their kith and kin networks who benefited from their wages or provided them with support. The 1910 amendments expanded the Immigration Bureau's reach from the nation's borders to the interior of the country by extending its deportation powers and policing of post-entry immoral behavior.5 Berkshire contended that such measures would “immeasurably strengthen the hands of the immigration officials” along the US-Mexico border regarding Mexican contract laborers.6 In essence, Berkshire sought to repurpose the sexual morals policing project that had previously targeted sex workers and redirect it toward contract laborers.
Berkshire's challenge was how to make a law focused on morals transgression and sexual purity into one that racialized poor Mexicans. He never achieved his goal: his 1910 recommendations did not come to fruition, and the problem of Mexican contract laborers continued to vex the US Immigration Bureau in subsequent years. While Berkshire's recommendation initially met with failure, its principles gradually took hold, transforming the public perception of Mexican immigrants from temporary participants in immigration patterns to individuals stigmatized as immoral and criminal vagrants. The shift toward using morality as a veiled reference to poverty indicates a subtle yet profound transformation in how immigration policies and the attitudes of Border Patrol agents coalesced to exclude Mexicans based on racial and socioeconomic factors. This convergence signifies a significant modification in the legal frameworks and social attitudes that governed the United States’ shared border with Mexico. Prior to 1924, the focus of immigration enforcement largely centered on regulating sexual commerce and controlling contract laborers’ movements and served as the primary mechanism for border control until the passage of the National Origins Act.
Labor and immigration historians will hardly be surprised by Berkshire's desire in 1910 to police the US-Mexico border or that he wanted to weaponize morality to control immigrants. The legal measures of the early twentieth century, specifically the Immigration Acts of 1903 and 1907, initiated what Grace Peña Delgado astutely identifies as a “sexual morals policing project.” Delgado's work uncovers the gendered surveillance that focused disproportionately on immigrant women suspected of engaging in sex work before 1910. Such women found themselves entrapped in the scaffolding of these laws, which did not merely define illegal activities but also aimed to constitute what was deemed moral or immoral conduct.7
Despite the daunting specter of moral policing that loomed over immigrant women, immigration agents confronted substantial obstacles in substantiating claims of sexual commerce. Frustrated by the inadequate results in achieving timely deportations, these agents resorted to invoking the Likelihood of Public Charge clause. The LPC clause provided a lower legal threshold and thus facilitated the project of sexual morals policing. Immigration agents, in effect, used this clause to cement the relationship between perceived immorality and poverty. They did so by enforcing ideas predicated on domesticity, marriage, and traditional gender roles, which historians Pablo Mitchell and Deirdre Moloney have argued serve as proxies for racial categorization.8
The LPC clause operated not simply as a bureaucratic obstacle for Mexican immigrants but also as a racialized and class-inflected instrument of power that overshadowed all other dimensions of their identities.9 The LPC took on a particularly pernicious quality due to the paradoxical recruitment practices of employers. While ostensibly committed to abiding by immigration laws, many employers actively recruited Mexican labor in contravention of US contract labor laws, thereby setting the stage for the LPC clause to function as a post-entry control mechanism. Once Mexican immigrants crossed the border into the United States, they were caught in a treacherous socio-legal landscape beyond mere employment uncertainties. This precariousness was primarily fueled by the manipulative deployment of the LPC clause as a post-entry control mechanism. If Mexican immigrants left their jobs for any reason while in the United States, they could face being reclassified as economic burdens by immigration officials, which rendered them susceptible to legal actions ranging from fines and imprisonment to deportation.10
This layer of vulnerability was compounded by state-level vagrancy laws that served a similar function to the LPC clause but targeted individuals already residing in the interior of the United States. These laws frequently focused on controlling sexuality and criminalizing prostitution, effectively extending the boundaries of state control from immigration points to the everyday lives of Mexican immigrants. Much like the LPC clause, these vagrancy laws were not neutral statutes; they were shaped by and contributed to existing racial and class prejudices, marking certain behaviors and lifestyles—often associated with poverty and alternative forms of labor such as sex work—as socially and legally undesirable.
The LPC clause confluence with state-level vagrancy laws thus presented a two-pronged approach to social control. At the border, the LPC clause functioned as a gatekeeping device, racially and economically filtering those deemed worthy of entry into US society. Once past this initial hurdle, Mexican immigrants encountered a parallel system of legal controls in the form of vagrancy laws that policed their behavior and further constrained their economic and social mobility options. These laws, therefore, did more than merely regulate individual actions; they constructed a specific social reality that marginalized Mexican immigrants and confined them to a perpetual state of precarity.
The complex interplay between various legal frameworks, including the federal-level laws, the LPC clause, and state-level vagrancy laws, blurred the distinctions between immigration regulation, poverty management, and sexual conduct. These legal instruments created an expansive governance system that defined, controlled, and marginalized Mexican immigrants in moral, social, and economic dimensions. Understanding such a complex interplay of forces is central to understanding why and by what mechanism immigration agents excluded Mexicans through a discourse of morality and criminality. Understanding how the sexual morals policing project informed the policing and regulation of better-understood Mexican labor migration patterns further complicates the US-Mexico border as “porous” for Mexican migrants in the early years of the twentieth century. I contend that morals policing became the tool to achieve post-entry social control and a pliable, exploitable labor force.
Berkshire's twofold approach to labor and morality emerged clearly in his 1910 recommendation to amend section 3 of the 1907 Immigration Act. His proposal to regulate Mexican contract wage laborers also struck a calculated balance, designed to appease nativist organizations demanding more restrictive immigration policies while also accommodating the agricultural sectors in the US Southwest in their desire for an affordable and compliant labor force. In orchestrating this 1910 approach, Berkshire skillfully reconciled divergent agendas, ultimately forging a system of moral and immigration control that resonated with nativist sentiments and met the pragmatic labor needs of the agricultural industry.
Berkshire's policy recommendations came after he read a report written by Immigrant Inspector Frank Stone on Mexican labor conditions in the United States.11 After reading Stone's report, Berkshire claimed that 90 percent of Mexican contract wage laborers who entered the United States used the railroad lines to enter the country. If the bureau wanted to achieve stronger enforcement, Berkshire recommended that it accept this fact and use it to its advantage. He suggested that the Bureau of Immigration enter a beneficial relationship with the railroad industry to control incoming Mexicans’ movements. Confident in his suggestion to his superiors, Berkshire even expressed the willingness of the heads of the major railroad companies in the Southwest to “adopt any regulations which might be laid down by [the Immigration Bureau] with a view to controlling the handling of Mexican laborers after admission.”12 If the bureau implemented his plan, the government would, in practice and in law, control Mexican contract laborers’ mobility.
Berkshire next turned to worker compliance in his system. Berkshire knew, or was told, about Stone's previous experiences in South Texas, where he had deported several immigrant women for practicing sexual labor.13 The supervising inspector now suggested the 1910 amendments were a model for controlling the Mexican contract laborers. Berkshire specified section 3 of the act, making it a misdemeanor for debarred aliens—sexual commerce workers, pimps, procurers, and other immoral immigrants—to reenter the United States as the sort of legislation immigration agents needed. Section 3 targeted and debarred “any alien woman or girl [imported] for the purpose of prostitution, or any other immoral purpose” and those who kept, maintained, controlled, supported, employed, or harbored women for the purpose of prostitution. The act targeted pimps and procurers, the ones benefiting from sex worker wages, but its vagueness meant agents could potentially use it more capaciously, to target not only the women sex workers themselves but also “any alien . . . who shall receive, share in, or derive benefit from any part of the earnings of any prostitute”; all such immigrants “shall be deemed unlawfully within the United States and shall be deportable.”14 Berkshire's suggestion, if applied to contract laborers, meant agents could deport and criminalize workers and also their kith and kin networks who might benefit from their wages and lend them support through housing or perhaps even meals. In effect, if Berkshire's recommendations were implemented, agents could target family units as immoral. The link between the sexual morals policing project and the larger labor policing project at the borders was made explicit when Congress added the word employ in section 3 of the 1910 amendments. That term, which had not been in the law's language in the 1907 act, signaled the US government's recognition of sexual commerce as work, but only insofar as it expanded the categories of deportability for migrants.15 Sexual commerce was labor that immigration agents could now police, much like they policed contract labor, especially at the borderlands where vice tourism proliferated.
Labor agents who recruited Mexican workers similarly converged sexual morals and labor control to serve their needs. Labor recruiters often used vice or morality at the borderlands to their benefit to either create labor pools or help finance the transportation costs. Roman Gonzalez, a Mexican labor agent in El Paso on whom Stone focused much of his attention in his report, had been a police officer in Mexico and “used his discretionary powers over vagrancy laws to set up his labor agency.”16 Using vagrancy as a tool of policing would have important implications for migrant contract laborers in the United States, as Mexicans often had to “prove” they were not vagrants. Gonzalez's actions as a local police officer in the Mexico border region revealed that both the US and Mexican governments lent their support, or opposition, to a contract labor system's existence.17 In the Imperial-Mexicali Valley of the California–Baja California borderlands, labor recruiter Arnulfo Liera oversaw thousands of Mexicans’ transportation to the region and for a time acted as a government-sanctioned contractor. But Liera faced accusations that he financed such an expensive project from the profits of vice industries like bars and sexual commerce.18
Labor recruiters like Gonzalez and Liera who used moralized recruiting tactics and questionable finances to create a pool of prospective contract laborers were not unique. In fact, both opponents and proponents of stronger immigration laws in the United States targeting Mexican migrants often used the language of immorality and poverty, and the inherent racialized dangers that accompanied them, to support their positions. Southwestern agricultural interests who opposed stronger immigration measures used the trope of the “homing pigeon” and criminal vagrants to achieve a regulated border that served their interests. The Mexican “homing pigeon” was a migrant who did not settle in the United States and always returned to Mexico. The “homing pigeon” trope seemingly lessened the need for specific immigration regulations targeting Mexicans, since according to that rhetoric, Mexicans were in effect always temporary and never a permanent fixture of immigration.
The overriding goal of such tropes, and the system of labor recruitment that they propagated and supported, was the control of Mexicans’ laboring lives. Employers meant to keep control of Mexican migrants’ movement both across the international boundary and within the interior United States. A concurrent effect of the continual movement of Mexicans through this contract labor system was employers’ successful characterization of uncontrollable Mexican laborers as criminal vagrants who needed greater policing and threatened local communities. A stark binary of “good/bad Mexicans” that developed around the tropes was laced with moralized language. In employers’ eyes, the “good,” moral, law-abiding, obedient Mexican was a migrant who fulfilled the terms of their labor agreement and returned to Mexico. Conversely, the “bad,” immoral, criminal Mexican was one who did not fulfill their labor agreement, stayed permanently, or “fell” into vagrancy, searching for higher wages elsewhere.
But how did the homing pigeon / criminal dichotomy operate? What were the markers of a “good/bad Mexican”? The US Immigration Bureau, since the passage of the Alien Contract Labor Law in 1885, had consistently, if ineffectively, barred Chinese and European contract laborers from entering the United States. By the twentieth century, that system of exclusion targeted Mexicans as well. Jesus Guerrero, a single nineteen-year-old Mexican from Sonora, Mexico, entered the United States at Tucson, Arizona, in April 1911. He applied for admission, but US officials held him for questioning under concerns he had entered as a contract laborer. During his Bureau of Special Inquiry (BSI) interrogation, Guerrero revealed that a Mr. Perry Whitman of Tucson had written to him several times, hoping to entice him to come to the United States. Whitman promised “he could get work for [Guerrero] at [the] price” of $2.50 per day. But Guerrero would not work for Whitman. Instead, Guerrero stated, Whitman “obtained a position for me . . . with another person.” The two men first met and worked together in Mexico, where Whitman was Guerrero's supervisor. Before leaving Mexico, possibly to escape the growing violence of the Mexican Revolution, Whitman suggested that Guerrero go with him to Tucson, where he would secure work for him. Guerrero refused the offer, but Whitman did not relent. He wrote Guerrero at least two more letters before he eventually agreed to travel to the United States. When the BSI officials specifically asked Guerrero if he came to the United States because of Whitman's efforts, he answered yes. Unsurprisingly, the agents suspected he was a contract laborer and launched an investigation.19
Eight days later, the BSI debarred Guerrero for failing to report to the local immigration office. Within days, however, inspectors found him in Tucson and returned him to the station, where he reapplied for admission “in the proper manner.” Curiously, agents now claimed Guerrero was not a contract laborer. They explained away his discussion of Whitman as merely a foolhardy attempt to prove he was not Likely to be a Public Charge (LPC).20 Guerrero entered the United States, and local agents requested that officials destroy his debarred card.
While it is impossible to know what led to inspectors’ change of perspective on Guerrero, we can see how morality shaped their interactions. Guerrero maintained throughout his BSI questioning that he would return to Mexico. Further, he had no plans to come to the United States except for Whitman's constant attempts to bring him over. To inspectors, Guerrero's stay was temporary. He was a young man traveling alone, which helped strengthen his perceived temporariness, and he was not planning on searching for higher wages. Instead, Whitman would arrange it all as the informal “labor agent.” It is also noteworthy that Guerrero entered the United States without inspection after his initial questioning. When inspectors came across him in Tucson, the stain of criminality did not seem to affect Guerrero's status. There was no discussion in the record of his unauthorized entry beyond that it happened.
Jesus Guerrero's experiences in 1911 are perplexing but not unusual. His ability to both gain admittance and be excluded highlights the porous nature of US border enforcement, yet clearly Mexicans faced exclusion in certain situations. One such example was Apolinar Valadez, who, along with his family and members of a migrant party in 1919, experienced the opposite of Guerrero. In April 1919, US border agents excluded Apolinar, along with his wife Guadalupe, their children, and a small group who accompanied the family from entering the United States. Curiously, Apolinar, like Jesus Guerrero, had in the past regularly entered the United States either by himself or with his oldest son, yet now he faced exclusion. He had first come to the United States in 1910 and worked at the Phoenix Electric Railway Company until December 1918, when he left for Mexico. When Apolinar returned, now accompanied by his family, US immigration inspectors detained them and denied them entry. They debarred Apolinar under the LPC clause, while inspectors classified the other male members of his party as contract laborers and denied them entry. Inspectors’ use of the LPC exclusion was noteworthy: border agents used the charge most often against immigrant women, and because of its lower legal threshold, it often became a catch-all term deployed against suspected immoral individuals.21 In Apolinar's case, it is possible it was easier to debar him under the LPC label than prove he was a labor recruiter, but the use of the charge also signaled a moral/immoral dimension to his exclusion. His immorality came from what the LPC status signaled. Apolinar failed in his patriarchal duty as male provider of the family.
During his initial questioning before the BSI, Apolinar explained how the party had formed and why they migrated to the United States. In 1918, when he left the United States, he intended to reunite his family. After learning of his plan, Apolinar's supervisor asked him to bring with him three or four men to work for the Phoenix Railroad Company, because “the men up there [in Phoenix] would not work on the track and he thought these men from Mexico would.”22 Apolinar explained the men in his party already had plans to come to the United States and were only awaiting their crops to come in before leaving Jalisco, Mexico, when he approached them. Each one paid for their own passage from Jalisco to Juarez, Mexico, although Apolinar admitted he would pay for the final leg of their journey to Phoenix. When inspectors asked the details of their supposed labor contracts, the male members of the party each knew the name of the company, their daily wages, and that they would work as track laborers. But they also expressed that they likely would eventually have come to the United States.
The differences in outcomes between Guerrero and the Valadez family were striking. In Guerrero's case, he admitted he was a contract laborer, but inspectors explained it away as nothing more than a short-sighted attempt to prove that he would not become a public charge; in other words, he was only trying to improve his chances of admission. Apolinar and his family admitted far less yet faced exclusion. The family's exclusion was even more surprising, as in 1919 the United States had temporarily lifted the ban on contract laborers importation from Mexico due to World War I labor demands. A critical difference between the Guerrero and Valadez experiences was how they came and how inspectors moralized them. Guerrero fit the homing pigeon trope; he came as a single male individual and always intended to return to Mexico. Apolinar and his party came as family units. Apolinar established early on that the reason he had returned to Mexico was to bring his family, signaling that they planned to remain in the United States. Bringing additional laborers had resulted from that decision. Inspectors’ questioning of another married couple who were part of the Valadez party proved telling. The BSI asked the husband, Policarpio, if he intended to take his wife and children with him “wherever [he] may go seeking employment.” They asked his wife, Refugia, the same question. Both answered yes.23
The difference in experience between Jesus Guerrero and the Valadez party was the family unit; it was a marker of permanence and immoral migration. Apolinar and his party intended to remain in the United States and not engage in circular migration like Guerrero did; they were not the preferred “moral” temporary migrants. Apolinar's exclusion as an LPC, then, can be read within the temporary moral / permanent immoral context. As Berkshire had stated in 1910, categories of exclusion were capacious and relied on inspectors’ effectively “selecting the ineligible.” For the Valadez party, the malleable category of “temporary vs. permanent” resulted in their exclusion on moral grounds.
US border agents’ focus on the male members of the Valadez party also highlights the erasure that women agricultural migrants experienced. Agents asked Guadalupe leading questions in their efforts to force her into a particular gendered identity—the immoral promiscuous immigrant woman. During her questioning, when Guadalupe responded that she had been married in both a church and a civil ceremony, inspectors asked which had occurred first, then asked the names of the godparents in the church service, and the name and title of the civil official who had married the couple, all to uncover a discrepancy that “proved” their suspicion she was morally deviant. As Celeste Menchaca has argued, the BSI officials upheld heteropatriarchal marital reproductions that constituted women like Guadalupe as sexually aberrant Mexican female migrants.24
Throughout all the women's interrogations, agents reified patriarchal familial relations where male members were the providers and female members their dependents, who lacked the means to provide for themselves. Such a patriarchal understanding of familial relations erased the labor identities of women, including Prisciliana, Apolinar and Guadalupe's eldest daughter. As with all other members of the party, agents interrogated Prisciliana and asked her who she depended on for her care and support. Agents then asked whether Prisciliana expected to work if they admitted her. Prisciliana answered that she expected to work at “whatever my father puts me at.”25 Had one of the male members of the party answered in the exact way Prisciliana did, agents would have seized on their response as evidence of a contract laborer status. In fact, when agents asked Prisiciliana's younger brother Andres what he expected to do if inspectors admitted him, Andres said he would work with his father. Agents followed up by asking what wages he would receive, whether his father had already arranged work for him, and the name of his potential foreman. But in Prisiciliana's case, agents dismissed her and moved on to the next interrogation without a single follow-up question. To inspectors, women like Prisciliana were immoral dependents but not workers who could earn their own wages; agents dismissed her ability to either support herself or contribute to the family.
The contract labor system of Texas, which was the context of both the Valadez party and Guerrero's experiences, functioned as a system where individual labor agents, or enganchadores, served as middlemen who enjoyed tremendous control over migrants’ laboring lives—men like Mr. Whitman and Roman Gonzalez—but one that declined in the 1920s.26 In California, where the contract labor system continued well into the 1930s, the middlemen were not individual labor recruiters but the Mexican and US governments. Yet the language of morality and criminality remained the same, even as the United States temporarily lifted the ban on contract laborers during and just after the World War I years (1917–21).
As government officials in Mexico City decried the exodus of Mexican families as a failure of the nation, there were vigorous recruitment efforts at the local level during the World War I years.27 In July 1918, the town council of the Mexican border town of Mexicali, Baja California, formed a local chamber of commerce. The chamber's stated purpose was to study Mexicali's economic state and develop plans to help ease the town's lack of industries, which had been a problem since the town's inception and one that entrepreneurs had tried to solve, in the 1910s, by promoting vice.28 Members of the chamber identified the lack of agricultural workers in the region as one of the most pressing and difficult problems they needed to address. Early on, the solution to the problem presented itself: bringing workers in from other regions. One member suggested writing to the Mexican consuls of Nogales, Tucson, and Phoenix, Arizona, to request information about the laborers in their regions and ask how feasible it would be to send workers to Mexicali.29
Chamber member Fernando Villaseñor offered a solution that would have lasting consequences. He proposed renting a boat and bringing in workers from the Southern District of Baja California, where the chamber knew workers were unemployed. The chamber placed Arnulfo Liera, a local Mexicali entrepreneur who had made some of his money from the local vice economy, in charge of implementing Villaseñor's plan. Liera was soon importing more than two thousand workers from Santa Rosalia, in the Southern District of Baja California Sur. By 1924, Liera owned two boats and advertised himself as “customs broker and agent,” transporting passengers and goods from Guaymas, Sonora, and Santa Rosalia, Baja California Sur, to Mexicali.30 In other words, Liera was a government-appointed labor recruiter.
Once endorsed as a government broker, Liera charged a transportation fee of 25 pesos per worker over the age of fifteen, but the Mexicali chamber would cover the cost. It planned to eventually recoup its costs by levying an export tax on local agriculturalists, but in the interim, the banks of Calexico, California, helped finance the project. By December 1919, Liera had imported 2,879 men, women, and children. The chamber then distributed workers to the agricultural fields that needed them.31 The project's objective was to solve Mexicali's labor shortage, and the chamber claimed it had succeeded. But in bringing the workers to the region the chamber incurred large transportation expenses that it was not able to recover as it had planned, since laborers did not remain there. The chamber's plan called for collecting $10.50 for each person over the age of fifteen and $5 for each child between twelve and fifteen years old from the imported laborers, but collecting workers’ contributions proved difficult. Many workers left to work on the railroad or “other points of their choosing.”32 In all, the chamber collected less than half of the expected worker reimbursements. Although the chamber claimed that workers remained in the Mexicali region, the failed collection of their transportation costs suggested that many did not stay in Mexico.
By September 1920, as Liera continued to import workers from across the Southern District of Baja California, many of the families he transported continued to cross into the United States.33 One caravan of 150 families entered the United States before Mexican authorities could even arrange proper transportation.34 Another group of 70 families would have entered the same way if not for the interventions of Manuel Cubillas, Mexican immigration agent in Mexicali, and Rafael C. Silver, inspector general of the district police, both of whom demanded compliance with Mexican laws. But neither Silver nor Cubillas opposed the families entering the United States. Instead, both men objected to the behavior of US-based labor recruiters. Silver and Cubillas insisted that recruiters needed contracts stipulating the type of work done, a minimum salary of $4 per day, the length of employment, and a promise to return the workers to Mexicali before they would allow laborers to leave.35
By the 1920s, California's burgeoning contract labor system was growing more organized and potentially more centralized. A symbiotic working relationship between government and the agricultural industry across the borderlands was on the cusp of developing in the region. Since Liera's contract importation program into Mexicali, California's Imperial Valley, which bordered the Mexican town, had enjoyed a migrant stream built on contract labor importation and in open violation of US laws. But that stream was not built by the natural migration of families into the region searching for higher wages. Rather, the Mexican government actively brought workers into the region with the intention they would work on both sides of the border. Responsible for importing thousands of Mexicans, Liera himself described it best: Mexicali, including the Mexicans living there, was the “ranch headquarters for Imperial Valley,” existing only to supply US grower needs.36 As such, employers opposed laborers’ freedom of mobility, which allowed them to search for higher wages if they left the region, particularly on the US side, since in their minds Mexicans only served local grower needs.
By the fall of 1925, employers attempted to manage worker mobility more tightly. In a familiar tactic that agricultural employers would come to rely on throughout the century to create a surplus labor force and drive down wages, Imperial Valley farmers declared they faced an acute labor crisis and partially blamed US immigration inspectors for the lack of workers, since they had begun to enforce the border restrictions more vigorously. Employers could not find workers even when offering higher wages, because many had left the region and moved inland. Growers claimed that unless they got four thousand laborers immediately, they faced the prospect of losing thousands of dollars in crops.37 But growers decried the exorbitantly high wages they were offering. Employers offered to pay Mexican workers $4 to $4.50 per day, whereas in the past they had paid $3. Lettuce growers who needed laborers to thin lettuce paid $9 per acre, compared to $6 in previous years. Cotton farmers were paying pickers $1.25 to $1.75 per hundred pounds.38 One contractor, highlighting the problem many valley employers faced, hired eighteen men to work for him, but none of the laborers showed up for work because they had found higher wages elsewhere.39
The issue was not a lack of workers but the high wages that Mexicans were extracting from local growers. Mexicans began using their mobility just as they had when Liera first imported many of them to Mexicali. Workers moved in search of higher wages, broke contracts, and essentially forced growers to offer higher wages. In response, valley employers manufactured a labor crisis to drive down wages and turned to the fears of immorality to help them solve it. By increasing fears of Mexican criminality and mobility, growers shaped the discussions of border officials over the rising numbers of Mexicans, whom they cast as immoral vagrants in California. Government officials drew a contrast between the immoral vagrants and the temporary Mexican who dutifully returned to Mexico after every harvest season.40
By the following year, two significant and interrelated events became the apex of the morals and labor policing project that Frank Berkshire had first tried to address sixteen years before when he suggested it could be a good model to regulate laborers more effectively. The first was the attempted organization of a government/ employer contract labor system throughout California. S. Parker Frisselle, the head of the Growers Association in Fresno, California, testified before the US House Immigration and Naturalization Committee on the seasonal Mexican agricultural labor force in his state. Frisselle insisted that “unrestricted immigration ought to be stopped” while also advocating for unrestricted access to Mexican laborers. To reconcile the contradiction, Frisselle advocated for a plan that harked back to Berkshire's 1910 suggestion of a working relationship between government and private industry. Frisselle proposed that to control workers’ movement, the federal government should create a formalized system that worked alongside the state's agricultural employment demands and interests. Under Frisselle's proposal, US agricultural growers would have access to many Mexican workers, but those workers would be locked into a continuous, transnational system of movement. Frisselle stated that growers across California hoped to form a statewide organization that would keep Mexican migrants constantly on the move, going from one job to another, never settling in one place until, eventually, work in the United States waned and they returned to Mexico.41
Unstated in Frisselle's description of the path forward in 1926 was how proponents of a state-sanctioned organized movement of Mexicans built the plan on their successful characterization of migrants as criminal, and immoral, people in need of regulation. In fact, the same year Frisselle testified, growers and immigration agents in the Imperial Valley started what he proposed, a grower-run immigration program that ensured a ready supply of workers whom employers funneled to lands across the valley. But the growers of the Imperial Valley also portrayed Mexican migrant farmworkers, and those who engaged in the practice of circular migration the owners did not control, as immoral criminal vagrants who exploited California's charities.
Imperial Valley growers’ characterization of Mexicans as criminal vagrants was the second significant event of 1926 that led border officials and employers to put Frisselle's plan in place. The new Imperial Valley scheme created by local Border Patrol officials and Imperial Valley agricultural employers, known as the Passbook Plan, placed Mexicans who worked in the valley's ranches and fields on a path to legalizing their status and exempted them from deportations. The Passbook Plan was seen as a “happy solution” to the increasing calls for stronger border enforcement and the local need for migratory labor that Frisselle had articulated. Under the plan, laborers—men, women, and children over the age of sixteen—provided proof of literacy and Mexican birthplace and supplied six photographs to the US consulate. Once laborers met these preliminary registration steps, they were required to make an initial monetary deposit toward their Passbook fees, which covered a $10 cost for a US visa and an $8 charge for the immigration head tax fee.42 For these efforts, the employers issued Mexicans a Passbook marking their participation in the plan.43 To remain current in the program, Passbook laborers made regular installments toward the fees. Once workers satisfied all the requirements, the US consulate at Mexicali verified the completed payments and issued visas legalizing participants’ immigration status in the United States, making them legal workers in the fields free of the threat of deportation.44 Historians who have discussed the plan often focus on its legality and how it represented a legal innovation and made employers de facto immigration agents.45 However, the plan's “legal innovation” built on the preexisting contract labor system that men like Arnulfo Liera had created across both sides of the US-Mexico borderlands. It was not a genuine innovation; rather, it formalized a system that already existed.
Not everyone celebrated the plan or its legal innovation. Carlos Ariza, Mexican consul in Calexico, California, disapproved of the plan; in doing so, he articulated how it sought to control the Mexican workers and their mobility and thereby exploit them. Ariza feared that the migratory patterns of Mexican families would mean they would move out of the valley, forget their payments, and lose any money they had paid into the program.46 If the laborer left the region, they might lose their deposits, since the plan only applied to the Imperial Valley and did not extend into the interior of California. The plan's payment system tied the Mexican laborer to the region. Border Patrol officials and local agricultural employers, he argued, wanted to block Mexican workers from moving into the interior of California. Ariza was not wrong. Imperial Valley officials’ focus on stopping Mexican movement into the interior was in line with the larger mission of the Border Patrol. In 1930, Commissioner General of Immigration Harry Hull described the Border Patrol as a “scouting organization” that operated not only “on the line” but also one hundred miles “back of the line.”47
Mexicans’ “voluntary” participation in the Passbook Plan was compulsory, and it controlled their movement and working options. Even when Mexicans did not agree to register with the plan, employers registered them and withheld their wages, or growers reported them to US immigration officials for deportation. If Mexican men, women, and children worked for growers who were not participating in the scheme, they risked being ensnared in immigration raids. Paradoxically, the strategy and rhetoric Border Patrol officials used to urge the plan's acceptance also reinscribed unregistered Mexicans as immoral criminals. Consul Ariza accused Imperial Valley's local Border Patrol office of “making a spectacle” of Mexicans and lining workers up in the street like criminals while registering them.48 When Mexican workers complained, local police officers, sheriffs, and employers threatened them with jail, firings, and deportations if they did not comply with the plan.49 Ariza argued that employers had created a “delicate situation” in which immigration officials and local police received anonymous tips about Mexicans who did not have a Passbook. Local officials would arrest the accused individuals, then jail and deport them.50 Ariza understood that both immigration agents and Imperial Valley agricultural stakeholders weaponized morality and used fears of vagrancy to their advantage. They described a roaming mass of destitute Mexican workers who would eventually “become inmates of our charitable and penal institutions” to their advantage. They argued that the plan was essential to protect the Imperial Valley from the criminal vagrants.51 Mexicans had two options: either be coerced to labor under conditions set by growers and hence be “moral, law-abiding migrants” or seek to improve their working conditions through their mobility and hence be “immoral, criminal vagrants.”
In arguing for the plan and articulating a rationale for controlling Mexicans’ mobility, local Border Patrol officials explained that migrants who left the Imperial Valley in search of higher wages turned to crime or immorality. Officials—and employers—stated that Mexicans were filling California's jails and abusing the charity wards, further exploiting the goodwill of the people of the state. According to their reasoning, the plan would help mitigate that exploitation and control the immoral criminals. Migrants who continued outside of the plan became stained with the burden of Mexican criminality and immorality, and Border agents could regulate them by removing them.52
Robe Carl White, assistant secretary of labor, echoed the local views of Mexican families. White reiterated the general opinion that Mexicans were crowding state prisons and filling up charity rolls across the United States. Robe thought Mexican families threatened not only the well-being of the Imperial Valley but the entire state of California and the nation. When the assistant secretary of labor defended the plan to Congress in 1926, he argued that immigration officials focused on deporting undesirable aliens, “particularly criminals [and] public charges.”53 By explaining the Border Patrol's purpose and its aim of deporting undesirables, White established the inherent morals policing of the plan and reinscribed the idea that Mexicans who registered were moral, “self-supporting, and law-abiding” migrants.54
Even state investigators like Louis Bloch, who traveled to the Imperial Valley after Mexicans filed complaints and who seemed to understand that growers had manufactured a labor shortage from 1925 to 1926 to drive down wages, conceived of Mexicans the same way Robe Carl White and the Border Patrol agents did. Bloch believed that what agricultural interests wanted was a plentiful labor supply at lower wages. He also warned that if growers kept all the Mexican workers in the region, they would create the problem of the dependent Mexican whom immigration agents would then need to deport. Bloch argued that problems of “dependency, disease, and crime . . . would be augmented to cause serious concern.”55 Even as he investigated Mexican workers’ claims of abuse and exploitation, Bloch reinscribed their inherent immoral criminality. Similarly, agricultural stakeholders created Mexicans who either complied with their plans or were criminal threats that immigration officials needed to remove. Bloch echoed that sentiment. He stated that Imperial Valley growers who favored the Passbook Plan and unrestricted immigration did not consider the consequences of large numbers of Mexicans in the region. Bloch believed Mexican families were already a burden on the local charities who cared for them, and Mexican laborers filled many of the region's jails.56
Not only were Mexicans criminals and dependents in the eyes of immigration officials; agents also believed immigrants exhibited sexually immoral behavior. During border agents’ initial investigation of conditions in the Imperial Valley, officials found eight of the ten workers they interrogated unlawfully living and working in the United States. Agents believed even the two individuals in the United States legally were immoral and criminal threats. Although the two men had not violated any laws, agents noted that they were living out of wedlock and that one of them had an illegitimate child, further proof of Mexicans’ incompatibility for inclusion within the United States. Agents contrasted Mexicans’ immorality and criminality with the Japanese workers in the region, who “have some respect for our law.”57 The Passbook Plan, then, seemed to solve all the problems of the Imperial Valley: it both filled the labor shortage and controlled the immoral Mexican criminal.
The Passbook Plan provided a way for border agents and local employers to regulate Mexicans in the Imperial Valley. By July 1926, employers had registered 6,500 Mexicans into the plan and ensured the Imperial Valley's crop harvesting.58 Border agents and the growers considered the plan a resounding success. But some went even further and advocated the scheme as a blueprint to solving “serious labor shortages . . . from San Joaquin Valley and other parts of the Southwest.”59 Once growers in the Imperial Valley showed that the Passbook Plan worked, they expected US immigration officials and business interests to put the plan in place throughout California and eventually the nation.60 Agricultural interests like the San Joaquin Valley Growers Bureau, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, and the Farm Bureau Federation of California all asked about the plan. Throughout 1926, they argued in favor of it. Texas agricultural interests closely followed events in California, hoping to replicate the state's system.61 Throughout California and Texas, interested parties used the same arguments Imperial Valley growers had. There was an acute labor shortage, and farmers desperately needed workers. Mexican families, agricultural stakeholders argued, were the best suited for the labor; they had the experience and the resilience to complete the work. Always looming in the background of their arguments was an uncontrollable immoral Mexican vagrant who threatened the well-being of local communities.
In the summer of 1926, Imperial Valley employers and local border agents did not sway Congress with their threats of the immoral Mexican migrant. Critics of the Passbook Plan undermined the scheme by pressuring Robe White and the Commissioner General of Immigration to abandon it—not because the critics were concerned for Mexican migrants and their well-being but by arguing that these officials did not have the power to authorize the plan. But it was not all for naught. What had begun as an informal contract labor system throughout the 1910s and 1920s had transformed into a more centralized system. Mexicans’ “participation”—that is, their willingness to let employers and the state control their mobility—moving forward became a defining feature between their legal or criminal status. But that change had sprung from a question of morals policing.
In 1929, three years after the failed Passbook Plan, Congress signed into law the Registry Act and the Undesirable Aliens Act, a mere two days apart. Under the Registry Act, unauthorized immigrants who entered the United States before June 3, 1921, and had continually lived within its boundaries, were not currently subject to deportation, and were of good moral character (accompanied by two signed affidavits from US citizens attesting to such character) could apply, after paying the requisite monetary fee, to become permanent residents and gain legal standing.62 The Undesirable Aliens Act criminalized unauthorized border crossing, making it a felony crime that carried sentences of up to two years in prison and a $1,000 fine. The act also made it a crime to return to the US after deportation.63 Together, both acts closed and opened the border for unauthorized entry on the eve of the Great Depression, yet they represented almost thirty years’ worth of efforts to control Mexican migrant mobility. The two acts achieved the very thing F. W. Berkshire suggested in June 1910. Border agents could now more strongly regulate migrants’ mobility. The government could, if it so wished, control their movements and laboring options, and if Mexicans resisted, they were immoral criminals. The onset of the Great Depression by the end of 1929 doomed the institutionalized contract labor system as the United States soon scapegoated Mexicans. But the moralized language of the Mexican criminal dependent lived on. In the subsequent decades, the image of Mexicans vacillated between desired low-wage laborers and dangerous immigrants who threatened US society. Mexican were at once productive workers—for example, as bracero laborers during the World War II years and beyond—and unproductive exploiters of US social services whom government officials and US society dismissed with pejoratives like “wetbacks.” Often, the differentiation between productive/exploiter occurred through a discourse of morality to cast Mexicans as fundamentally unfit for inclusion in US society.
Notes
F. W. Berkshire to the Commissioner-General of Immigration, June 30, 1910, folder 001733-002-0429, Records of the Immigration Services, Series A: Subject Correspondence Files, part 2: Mexican Immigration, 1906–1930, National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter NARA DC), accessed via History Vault Database.
Beginning with the 1875 Page Act, Chinese immigrants had been excluded on racial grounds culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Laws. Hirata, “Free, Indentured, Enslaved”; Lee, At America's Gates.
F. W. Berkshire to the Commissioner-General of Immigration, June 30, 1910, NARA DC.
“An Act: To amend an act entitled ‘An act to regulate the immigration of aliens into the United States’ approved February 20, 1907,” Public Law 61-107, Chapter 128, 61st Cong., 2nd sess., approved March 26, 1910.
Berkshire to Commissioner-General of Immigration, June 30, 1910, folder 001733-002-0429, NARA DC, accessed via History Vault Database.
Mitchell, West of Sex, 62; Moloney, National Insecurities, 4; Gardner, Qualities of a Citizen, 89; Bredbenner, Nationality of Her Own.
Weber, From South Texas to the Nation, 102–23; Hester, Deportation, 141–69; Fox, Three Worlds of Relief, 73–94.
Frank Stone to Supervising Inspector, June 23, 1910, folder 001733-002-0429, NARA DC, accessed via History Vault Database.
Berkshire to Commissioner-General of Immigration, June 30, 1910, folder 001733-002-0429, NARA DC, accessed via History Vault Database.
Section 3 of “An Act: To amend an act entitled ‘An act to regulate the immigration of aliens into the United States’ approved February 20, 1907,” Public Law 61-107, Chapter 128, 61st Cong., 2nd sess., approved March 26, 1910.
Section 3 of the 1910 amendment read, in part:
Whoever shall keep, maintain, control, support, employ, or harbor in any house or other place, for the purpose of prostitution . . . shall, in every such case be deemed guilty of a felony. . . . Any alien who shall be found an inmate of or connected with the management of a house of prostitution . . . or who shall receive, share in, or derive benefit from any part of the earnings of any prostitute; or who is employed by . . . any house of prostitution, or who in any way assists, protects, or promises to protect from arrest . . . shall be deemed to be unlawfully within the United States and shall be deported.
Gómez-Quiñones, “Piedras contra la luna, México en Aztlán y Aztlán en México”; Cardoso, Mexican Emigration to the United States.
“Dos cantinas mas,” El Heraldo de Mexico (Los Angeles), April 12, 1919; “La inicua labor realizada por los enganchadores,” El Heraldo de Mexico (Mexico City), October 28, 1920.
Jesus Guerrero Board of Special Inquiry Interrogation, folder 5020/2, box 1, Record Group (RG) 85, US Immigration and Naturalization Services, El Paso District Investigative Case Files, National Archives and Records Administration, Fort Worth, Texas (hereafter NARA FW).
Inspector in Charge A. J. Milliken to the Supervising Inspector of El Paso, Texas, April 25, 1911, folder 5020/2, box 1, RG 85, NARA FW.
Menchaca, “Staging Crossings,” 17; Moloney, “Women, Sexual Morality, and Economic Dependency,” 98.
Board of Special Inquiry, March 3, 1919, folder 5020/210, box 10, RG 85, NARA FW.
Throughout the case file Refugia's name is spelled “Refugio.” Board of Special Inquiry, March 3, 1919, folder 5020/210, box 10, RG 85, NARA FW.
BSI Interrogation of Prisciliana Valadez, March 3, 1919, folder 5020/210, box 10, RG 85, NARA FW.
Larisa Veloz has argued that migrants during the World War I years faced a barrage of mixed messages in Mexico. Veloz, Even the Women Are Leaving, 36–42.
Advertisement in El Monitor (Mexicali, Mexico), May 8, 1924.
“La Cámara Agricola Nacional de Mexicali BC,” La Revista Agrícola, 391–94. The total of 2,879 workers comprised the following: 1,099 men over the age of fifteen, 849 women over the age of fifteen, 110 boys between the ages of twelve and fifteen, 117 girls between the ages of twelve and fifteen, and 704 children under the age of twelve.
“La Cámara Agricola Nacional de Mexicali BC,” Revista Agrícola, 393.
“Mexican Laborers Arrive from Far below Boundary,” Calexico Chronicle, September 27, 1920.
“Se despuebla el Distrito Sur de La B. California,” La Prensa, October 8, 1920.
“3000 familias del Distrito Sur de La Baja California vienen a EU,” El Heraldo de Mexico (Los Angeles), September 30, 1920.
California State Department of Agriculture, “Report on Conditions in Lower California,” 251.
“Imperial Farmers Need Laborers,” Calexico Chronicle, November 2, 1925.
Bloch, “Report on the Mexican Labor Situation in the Imperial Valley,” 115; “Imperial Farmers Need Laborers,” Calexico Chronicle, November 2, 1925.
“Imperial Farmers Need Laborers,” Calexico Chronicle, November 2, 1925.
I. F. Wixon to Commissioner General of Immigration, January 19, 1926, folder 001733-015-0762, NARA DC, accessed through History Vault Database.
US House of Representatives, Seasonal Agricultural Laborers from Mexico.
For newspaper reporting of the wage deductions, see Los Angeles Times, February 3, 1926. Spanish-language newspapers like La Prensa and El Heraldo de Mexico (Los Angeles) discussed the wage deductions in much of their coverage about the plan.
“To the Mexican Laborer,” folder 001733-015-0762, NARA DC, accessed through History Vault Database.
Mark Reisler's work on Mexican immigrant labor remains the most extensive discussion of the Passbook Plan. Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 60–66; Ettinger, Imaginary Lines, 163; Andres, Power and Control in the Imperial Valley, 110–11; St. John, Line in the Sand, 186–87; Kang, INS on the Line, 56.
“Hay que cumplir con la ley de migración,” El Heraldo de México (Los Angeles), August 24, 1926.
I. F. Wixon to Commissioner General of Immigration, January 19, 1926, folder 001733-015-0762, NARA DC, accessed through History Vault Database.
I. F. Wixon to Commissioner General of Immigration, January 19, 1926, folder 001733-015-0762, NARA DC, accessed through History Vault Database.
Robe Carl White to Congressman Cyrenus Cole, July 1, 1926, in Congressional Record, 69th Cong., 1st sess. (1926), vol. 67, pt. 11, 12562.
Robe Carl White to Congressman Cyrenus Cole, July 1, 1926, in Congressional Record, 69th Cong., 1st sess. (1926), vol. 67, pt. 11, 12562.
I. F. Wixon to Harry E. Hull, January 13, 1926, folder 001733-015-0762, NARA DC, accessed through History Vault Database.
“Relief in Labor Shortage,” Los Angeles Times, February 3, 1926.
“Enter Protests in Move to Save Labor Troubles,” Los Angeles Times, September 5, 1926.
“Hay que cumplir con la ley de migración,” El Heraldo de México (Los Angeles), August 24, 1926.
“An Act to Supplement the Naturalization Laws, and for Other Purposes,” Public Law 70-962, Chapter 536, 70th Congress, 2nd sess., approved March 2, 1929.
“An Act: Making It a Felony with Penalty for Certain Aliens to Enter the United States of America under Certain Conditions in Violation of Law,” Public Law 70-108, Chapter 690, 70th Congress, 2nd sess., approved March 4, 1929.
