History’s shadow at the Arizona border
The Arizona borderlands may be the site today of a high-profile immigration battle ostensibly ignited by inaction from Washington, but the territory is no stranger to taking matters into its owns hands when the federal government is perceived to balk. As Katherine Benton-Cohen, an assistant professor of history at Georgetown University, chronicles in “Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands,” President Woodrow Wilson failed to respond to Arizona's border troubles in 1917, unleashing a strong local move.
By Katherine Benton-Cohen
When the federal government ignores Arizona’s cries for help at the border, the consequences are ugly. In 1881, Arizonans sent petitions to Washington complaining that the Chiricahua Apaches used the unprotected border to flee capture. Later that year, Arizona’s territorial governor asked for a “mounted border patrol,” and blamed the feds in part for the Shootout at the OK Corral, which he saw as part of a local attempt to stop American “Cowboys” whose raids and murders of Mexican citizens were straining commercial ties with its southern neighbor.
Then came the explosive summer of 1917. For three years Sheriff Harry Wheeler of Cochise County (recently the site of the murder of rancher Robert Krentz), had sent unanswered pleas to President Woodrow Wilson for help with violence spilling over from the Mexican Revolution.
In June of 1917, a strike by the notorious Industrial Workers of the World broke out in the copper mines of Bisbee, Arizona, eight miles from the border. Wheeler requested National Guard troops. Nada. The sheriff, aided by powerful copper-mining executives, appointed 2,200 temporary “deputies.” On the morning of July 12, they stormed through town, shotguns in hand, and rounded up over a thousand suspected strikers. The captives were piled into 23 boxcars belonging to a mining-company railroad, shipped nearly 200 miles east, and dumped into the middle of the New Mexico desert.
At last, the feds appeared. An Army camp rescued the “Bisbee deportees,” as they came to be known, and housed and fed them for up to two months. President Wilson appointed a federal mediation commission, with a young Felix Frankfurter as general counsel, to come to Arizona to investigate.
The sheriff claimed he had rounded up men based on their involvement in the strike, but he also admitted to federal investigators, “How could you separate one Mexican from another?” Bisbee had long been known as a “white man’s camp,” where no Chinese could live and the mines’ printed wage scales listed two columns, for “white” and “Mexican” (the latter earning as little as half what the former made, which was one of the reasons Mexicans went on strike in 1917).
The deportees were a diverse lot. Nine out of ten were immigrants, from at least 34 nations. But the Mexicans incited the most fears. “You eastern people haven’t had much experience with Mexicans,” the sheriff told investigators, “but…we figured they might do anything.” The feds clucked their tongues, but nothing happened to Wheeler.
In 1924, the federal government finally created the Border Patrol. It was tiny, but it began to enforce long-ignored requirements for head taxes, visas, and literacy tests. Some of its members belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. Illegal immigration from Mexico, unnecessary before these rules, now grew.
The border as a racial line grew more distinct. During the Depression, Mexican Americans received smaller welfare benefits than did “whites,” and some who could not prove their citizenship were sent to Mexico. But Mexican Americans fought back, using federal anti-discrimination laws and union organizing. Bit by bit they dismantled the explicit racial wage differences.
Today, many Arizonans complain again of Mexicans who lower wages and threaten public safety. They say the federal government has ignored their cries, even though there are more Border Patrol agents than ever, undocumented migrant crossings have declined, and Mexico’s drug violence has, with rare exceptions, stayed south of the border.
In 1917, Sheriff Wheeler told federal investigators it had come down to “Are you an American, or are you not?” They condemned him for a question Arizona law-enforcement officers can now ask with impunity, according to the new state law. Maybe Sheriff Wheeler’s ghost is smiling. But no one else should be.
Steven E. Levingston
May 10, 2010; 5:30 AM ET
Categories: Guest Blogger | Tags: Illegal immigration, arizona immigration law, u.s. immigration
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