TY - JOUR
AU - Alvarez, C, J
AB - Abstract This article examines four major building projects on the U.S.-Mexico border: the straightening of the Rio Grande around El Paso–Ciudad Juárez, the assemblage of the first large-scale border fence, the fabrication of early Border Patrol watchtowers, and the construction of Falcon Dam. These were the first major efforts to transform the international divide through the built environment. By putting these seemingly dissimilar initiatives into conversation with one another, we can better understand the connections between the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the little-known International Boundary and Water Commission; rethink how the political and social construction of the border was achieved through literal, physical construction; and generate new ways of linking border and environmental history. The three decades between 1924 and 1954 were critical for the development of U.S.-side federal border policing and the development of binational waterworks on the international divide. Within that span of time the U.S. Border Patrol was established as a relatively small organization with uncertain enforcement authority and only the bare minimum of resources. By the 1950s it had evolved into to a much more powerful organization run by Joseph Swing, a battle-hardened former army general who orchestrated “Operation Wetback,” one of the largest single deportation drives in American history. Similarly, the International Boundary Commission (IBC), renamed the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) in 1944, transformed from a bureaucracy dedicated primarily to small land claims arbitration along the border rivers. Over the course of a single generation, it grew to become an engineering agency that executed massive reconfigurations of the physical shape and flow capacity of the Rio Grande. It also built the first major border fence, 237 miles long. This article examines this evolution by focusing on the built environment the Border Patrol and the IBWC left behind. The history of law enforcement and the history of hydraulic engineering during those years were united in multiple ways on the international divide. Most importantly, both organizations were border builders. The Border Patrol advocated for fences and lookout towers, the IBC/IBWC straightened part of the Rio Grande and dammed it. Both agencies were also united by a common aspiration: control. The border police wanted to gain control over the passage of people, animals, and contraband across the line, while the water engineers sought to control nature itself.1 The extent to which they succeeded in achieving this objective varied. What matters here is that in both cases officials often looked to physical construction as a solution to an array of perceived problems. The two organizations worked with one another hand in glove, linked by construction projects on the international divide. Border police and water engineers were not necessarily fused in their missions, but they were implicated in each other’s activities because they shared the same spaces along the borderline. Since the IBC/IBWC was charged with managing the land around the line, the construction of police infrastructure often had to be negotiated with the IBC/IBWC despite the fact that the boundary commission had no official role in policing. This is all the more provocative because the IBC/IBWC was a binational agency.2 The Mexican section, called the Comisión Internacional de Límites (CIL), renamed the Comisión Internacional de Límites y Aguas (CILA) in 1944, shared joint responsibility for all projects on the Rio Grande. This article presents an argument for how to think about the international divide as a construction site. The border region is a unique cultural zone in both the United States and Mexico. Populated predominately by people of Mexican descent, border communities are often rooted in a deep sense of place tied to the specific agricultural, environmental, or linguistic characteristics of specific localities. Human societies around the line have also often been influenced by federal-level policies, however. To better understand this, I focus here on physical building projects that reveal bureaucratic connections that are otherwise invisible. The history of border building can also help us understand more familiar border phenomena in new ways, law enforcement activity in particular. Finally, conceiving of the border as a construction zone offers a new perspective on how to link environmental factors to border history. To carry out their work, I demonstrate that border builders were attentive to the varied topography and hydrology of the region, not out of a sense of ecological stewardship, but out of engineering necessity, and how much of the early fence construction was directed toward containing animal-borne pathogens in Mexican territory. Many historians have focused on various aspects of the built environment of the border region, including mining and smelting infrastructure, commercial agriculture and irrigation works, and urban expansion in border towns, though few have analyzed the history of construction on the borderline itself. The term “Borderlands” is often deployed widely, sometimes as a semi-abstract geographic context for structural inequalities produced by cross-border trade and labor exploitation. Other times scholars use it as a metaphor for liminal spaces and identities more generally, or as a foregone conclusion in the background of broader discussions of immigration or ethnic history.3 These studies typically concentrate on how the border has been socially and politically constructed. The lens I adopt here augments these perspectives by examining the process of designing and implementing physical structures on border land and border water—how the border has been literally constructed. In this way, we can develop a better understanding of how laws, policies, and prejudices have shaped the spaces and societies around the international divide.4 This article introduces readers to four episodes of border history that are undeservedly obscure: the straightening of the Rio Grande around El Paso–Ciudad Juárez, the assembling of the first large-scale border fence, the fabrication of early Border Patrol watchtowers, and the construction of Falcon Dam. References to the “rectification” of the Rio Grande in the 1930s are almost nonexistent outside highly specialized monographs.5 Much more attention has been paid to the larger irrigated landscapes of the Colorado and Rio Grande deltas and how they helped establish and maintain social and racial stratification.6 The rectification project is instructive for different reasons. It was the first major construction project on the border itself, and it was not a water “reclamation” project. It was a flood control project, and though it spared many people on both sides of the border from the calamity of flooding, it also interrupted the precarious livelihood of small farmers on communally held land on the Mexican side. The “Western Boundary Fence Project,” as it was called in IBWC documents, is virtually unknown.7 When I first encountered documents relating to it in the Fort Worth branch of the National Archives, they were still filed away in the unopened box originally transferred from the IBWC. Despite differences in design, materials, and political context, this fence is the clearest historical precedent to the barrier system megaproject authorized by the Secure Fence Act in 2006. Histories of law enforcement along the international divide have also been fairly silent on other kinds of physical tools border police used to do their jobs in the first half of the twentieth century. Scholars have often centered their research on the cultural and political formation of the Border Patrol as well as the legal mechanisms through which the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) expanded its enforcement authority.8 In examining the construction and uses of border watchtowers, this article sheds light on the concrete means by which border guards enacted what power they had. Finally, Falcon Dam also goes almost unmentioned in the vast literature on damming rivers in the arid lands of the American West and Mexican North.9 It did not provide much electricity, nor did it help irrigate large expanses of drylands, but it did, as I show, constitute the most significant hydrological transformation of the border at the time. And, like the rectification project farther upstream on the Rio Grande, it produced uneven results. The dam saved many people in both countries from catastrophic flooding, though the residents of two small border towns, one on each side of the line, had to be forcibly evicted to accommodate the construction. Although large-scale irrigation projects were instrumental to the settlement of many arid places throughout the border region, the rectification project and Falcon Dam functioned mainly outside that logic. They are legible primarily as border-building projects—the products of bilateral collaboration, but also implicated in the activities of border guards on the U.S. side. By setting these four little-known projects into conversation with one another, I tell a story about early transformations of the border’s built world, on both land and water. The story of the border is often cast as an ongoing “hardening” through more police, more punitive immigration and smuggling prohibitions, and more invasive surveillance technologies. The accumulation of structures on the international divide during the period this article covers did not necessarily translate into a harder border, however; or at least this accumulation complicates the notion of what a harder border might mean. Rather, the changing built environment on the line speaks to how those who wanted a harder border turned to physical construction to achieve it, however incompletely actual control was realized. And the most successful aspects of border building during these years were not directly tied to immigration policing. The hundreds of miles of barbed wire fencing were most effective at preventing foot-and-mouth disease from spreading into U.S. cattle populations, and many border dwellers on both sides of the Rio Grande were delivered from the scourge of flooding by river engineering projects. The first major construction project on the border was the “Rio Grande Rectification Project,” an initiative designed to control floodwaters that had plagued urban settlement and agricultural production in and around El Paso–Ciudad Juárez. Up until the 1930s, the governments of the United States and Mexico permitted the river to “meander” through the alluvial flats of the border region. The waterway had dozens of bends and twists that would be completely unrecognizable to anyone familiar with the border today. The Rio Grande’s winding, wayward route posed two problems for the boundary commission. Its shifting course created uncertainty as to the exact location of the international divide and, perhaps more importantly to the residents of both El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, it had a tendency to flood. The rectification plan was also designed to protect irrigated agriculture. By 1930, there were already seventy thousand acres under cultivation on the U.S. side of the border, served by both irrigation and drainage works and top-quality roads. The Mexican side had about half that under cultivation with far less developed infrastructure for irrigation and transport.10 This financial imbalance was taken into consideration when assessing the overall cost of the project. Upon its completion in 1938 the United States had expended $5,080,573 and Mexico only $692,805.11 In this border construction project, although the work was supervised by a binational commission, the United States exerted disproportionate influence. The rectification was mainly an earthwork project. The work was carried out by draglines with hundred-foot booms equipped with buckets that held between two and three cubic yards in capacity. The idea was to cut out the bends in the riverbed. By the end of the project, workers had actually shortened the length of the river. In the construction zone—the stretch of river between “Cordova Island” in El Paso and Ft. Quitman—67 miles of river were simply removed. The long-boom dragline excavators moved over 6 million cubic yards of material, reducing 155 miles of winding, silt-carrying water to 88. IBC surveyors mapped the entire area to ensure that there was no change in the amount of territory possessed by either the United States or Mexico. The areas in the bends that were cut off during the rectification were called “parcels.” There were 178 parcels: 85 were ceded to the United States, 69 to Mexico, and 24 that remained in the floodway channel. In the final calculation, 5,121 acres had been ceded back and forth between the two countries. A once-winding river cut a straighter path through the El Paso–Ciudad Juárez border region.12 Looking back many years later, IBWC commissioner Joseph Friedkin remembered the straightening of the Rio Grande fondly. “We call this one of the most peaceful land boundary settlements,” he stated proudly. It was carried out because people in the area “needed the protection,” a bilateral project that was able to “provide a service, provide a benefit, for both countries.”13 Pedro Martínez, however, the president of the Jesús Carranza ejido, as well as his fellow ejidatarios, did not see it this way. The ejido, or communally-held agricultural land, was a key component of land reform after the Mexican Revolution. In early August of 1933, as news circulated about the rectification project, the inhabitants of Jesús Carranza, located on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, became nervous. They wrote a letter to the Secretaría de Agricultura y Fomento (Ministry of Agriculture and Development) asking for more information. “They told us it was a project of defense,” the petition explains, “but… we don’t understand what it is that’s being defended against.” From their perspective, the straightening of the Rio Grande cut away parts of their cotton fields, compromising their livelihood. They declared, to no avail, “we do not comply with this work because we have not had any say-so.”14 For their part, officials in Mexico City such as Enrique Jiménez D. in the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (Ministry of Foreign Relations) and Luis Garibay Jr. in Ciudad Juárez, engineer for Agricultura y Fomento, set about clarifying the legal authority for expropriation of ejidal lands in the Juárez Valley. This expropriation included not only the settlement of Jesús Carranza, but also another ejido called San Isidro de Río Grande which had to be reshaped to accommodate the Acequia Madre de Juárez (the mother ditch) so it could feed the San Agustín and Guadalupe canals. They established that the Comisión Nacional de Irrigación (National Irrigation Commission) considered these communal lands “indispensable” for the continuation of the rectification project and mandated that those affected be compensated and compelled to move. National ejido policy dictated that when communal lands were expropriated for the public good, an equal amount of land had to be made available to those who lived there, though for the residents of the Ejido de Jesús Carranza, this policy likely did not assuage their sense of powerlessness over the transformed landscape.15 As the Mexican government fine-tuned its expropriation policies for border dwellers, the leadership of the U.S. Border Patrol was trying to figure out ways to expand its enforcement authority. In 1937, as the rectification project was nearing completion, Scientific American took an interest in the engineering feat it required. L.M. Lawson, the American commissioner of the IBC, wrote an article for the magazine. He described for the popular science readers the nature of the site, the ingenuity of the engineers who masterminded the straightening of the river, and the general goodwill between the United States and Mexico during the project. He also enumerated the benefits of the rectification. Chief among the benefits was the elimination of the flooding threat that plagued the region for decades. From a diplomatic point of view, he explained how the river project would prevent future channel changes, thereby defusing potential controversy over the exact location of the border. And finally, crucially, he pointed out that the rectification would lead to “more satisfactory enforcement of the immigration and customs laws of both countries.”16 A straightened river produced a new landscape that was easier to patrol and surveil. Lawson cast border policing and hydraulic engineering as mutually constitutive, even if coincidentally. Even though the rectification was designed to benefit those living on both sides of the river, the new, simplified border worked to the benefit of Border Patrol surveillance. The most explicit collaboration between the IBC/IBWC and the INS took place not on the river, however, but on the western land border. ** The Rio Grande straightening was a significant event in the history of border building, the first big border-building project. Hydraulic engineering more generally, however, was also transforming the wider geography of the American West and the Mexican North. Beginning in the first decades of the twentieth century, groundwater pumping technology and surface water diversion infrastructure helped capitalist agriculture flourish in places like the San Joaquin and Imperial Valleys of California, South Texas, the Salt River and Casa Grande Valleys in Arizona, and elsewhere.17 These expansions, in turn, created a sustained demand for cross-border migrant labor. Between 1939 and 1951, the IBC/IBWC completed 237 miles of border fences across 674 miles of land between the Pacific Coast and El Paso–Ciudad Juárez, where the river becomes the border. Most of this construction took place after 1948, however, propelled by concerns about a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in Mexico 1947. The IBC/IBWC collaborated with the INS and the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI), as well as the National Park Service, and at least six private contractors. Called the “Western Boundary Fence Project,” this border-building endeavor was the first major construction project on the line geared explicitly toward the regulation of both human and animal movement. In that regard, the different agencies that advocated for border fencing in those years were driven by different conceptions of geography. The INS and the Border Patrol, on one hand, primarily advocated for fencing around ports of entry. To them, the border was a constellation of ports, discrete points within a larger landscape where immigration and contraband inspection could take place. The BAI, on the other hand, understood the border in terms of the sprawling, remote spaces in between the ports of entry. Bolstered by the massive quarantine measures taken after the foot-and-mouth disease epizootic, the BAI lobbied for fencing in the hinterland grazing country where potentially infected animals could wander. There were two general types of fence: ranch fences and chain-link fences. Ranch fencing constituted the overwhelming majority a fence construction during these years. As the name suggests, this type of barrier was made of barbed wire and primarily designed to keep animals from moving back and forth across the border. This aspect was particularly important to the Bureau of Animal Industry, the agency tasked with enforcing the foot-and-mouth disease quarantine at the border. This particular type of fencing has the longest history in the border region; the historian Rachel St. John has traced its origins back to 1909 in Southern California. In that instance, the BAI was also the principal agency promoting fence construction, though then they were primarily concerned with Texas fever ticks.18 In both cases, however, remotely located fencing initiatives were primarily the purview of federal agencies interested in managing rangeland and protecting capitalist husbandry.19 Chain-link fences, on the other hand, were divided into two types, and were primarily intended to thwart the movement of human beings. “Class 2” was designed for areas just outside of towns but near ports of entry. These fences were eight feet high and made of 2”×2” mesh of No. 9 gauge wire. On top were three strands of barbed wire on overhanging arms, adding an extra foot to the total fence height. They were set in concrete, and held up by steel line posts. They were meant to be both difficult and dangerous to climb. “Class 1,” on the other hand, was the most robust anti-human barrier system yet to exist on the border. These fences were meant for densely populated areas immediately surrounding ports of entry. They were ten feet tall, with the same 2”×2” mesh, though of No. 6 gauge wire, harder to cut with shears. Again, three strands of barbed wire were strung atop on overhanging arms, designed to cut, maim, or otherwise entangle human flesh. The concrete curb into which the fence was sunk extended eighteen inches underground to guard against tunneling. Perhaps the most significant distinction between Class 1 and Class 2 chain-link fencing, however, was the fact that Class 1 fencing was artificially illuminated. Running alongside the steel line posts that supported the mesh were a series of wooden poles that carried a three-phase, 2,300-volt primary circuit and a 6.6 ampere series for lighting. Lights and reflectors were mounted on the same poles and placed between 150 to 200 feet apart.20 The Immigration and Naturalization Service was the biggest proponent of chain-link fencing. Border Patrol officers between 1924 and 1954 were often focused on the built environment of roads and ports as the backbones of their policing activities rather than remote areas in between. By the late 1940s, Border Patrol officers and other immigration officials had become thoroughly dissatisfied with the condition of the existing fencing around the ports of entry. Complaints about flimsy or nonexistent fencing echoed through the major western bordertowns. For instance, W.A. Carmichael, the district director for the INS in Los Angeles, was a strong proponent of police building on the border, especially around Calexico, the gateway to the mega agricultural growing region of the Imperial Valley. For him, the kind of construction that was best for border law enforcement involved a constellation of features that included not only fencing, but also lighting systems, patrol roads, and watchtowers. All this infrastructure was designed to enhance the tactical advantage of police by increasing visibility. A crucial component of achieving visibility was not only the built environment, but the way that the built environment interacted with local flora. In a memo to the commissioner of the INS, he made sure to point out that “no vegetation or other obstruction should be permitted between the road and the fence.”21 These ideas were similar to those of Commissioner Lawson when he pointed out why the straightening of the Rio Grande would be a boon to law enforcement. The artificial illumination of the line was important to the Border Patrol. Outside the port of entry at El Centro, California, patrol officers felt that they were at a disadvantage at night. They wanted electric lights on the border, complete with tamperproof wire circuits embedded in conduits encased in concrete, heavy glass shields over the bulbs to deflect rocks thrown at them, and even reflective paint on the fence itself. As one officer mused, “as I visualize such a completed fence, it would appear at night as a ribbon of light, on which any dark object such as a man would stand out conspicuously.”22 In Southern California, both the natural environment and waterworks factored into designs for police building on the border. In some cases, such as the All-American Canal, they were actually enlisted into the service of policing. The canal is an eighty-mile-long aqueduct that runs parallel and very close to the international divide. It was built by the Bureau of Reclamation in the 1930s and is one of the largest irrigation canals in the world. It diverts water from the Colorado River to the arid Imperial Valley. It was therefore instrumental to the staggering rise of both commercial agriculture in the region as well as cross-border agricultural labor migration. In an official memorandum from 1948, a patrol inspector in Southern California pointed out how a canal could be incorporated into the built environment of policing. He speculated that when the border fence was constructed it would divert “prospective line jumpers” around it. “Fortunately,” he wrote, “we have the All-American Canal to assist us at the point where the fence ends.” Pointing out that the channel was a minimum of 200 feet wide with a 100 foot waterway, he concluded that it was a “very satisfactory barrier.” To ensure that it was not traversed at night, however, he also advocated searchlights mounted on watchtowers in the vicinity.23 The idea of enlisting hydraulic infrastructure into the project of border policing fits well within the context of commercial agriculture, that, as historian Benny Andrés Jr. has shown, was already dependent upon racial stratification among not only Mexicans, but also Japanese, South Asians, and Filipinos.24 Again, border policing was not the purpose for which the ditch was designed, but border law enforcement enlisted it into the project of interdiction nonetheless. The Calexico office of the INS took photographs to demonstrate what they saw as the deplorable condition of existing border fencing in 1948. In one of these images (fig. 1), three men sit on top of a crumpled fence, seemingly unconcerned by the fact that a federal official is photographing them. Another man looks directly at the camera while two others are caught mid step. This picture is only one of a series that the INS took as evidence that, to their minds, more durable barriers were necessary on the line.25 Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Calexico Fence, 1948. Whether this photograph was staged by the INS to drive home the point that the pedestrian fence in Calexico, California, was useless, or whether it captures the candid and blasé disregard border people had for fencing, its rhetorical purpose is clear: border police wanted more durable barriers to deter unauthorized crossing. Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85. Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Calexico Fence, 1948. Whether this photograph was staged by the INS to drive home the point that the pedestrian fence in Calexico, California, was useless, or whether it captures the candid and blasé disregard border people had for fencing, its rhetorical purpose is clear: border police wanted more durable barriers to deter unauthorized crossing. Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85. INS officers in Arizona took a similar set of photographs around the same time. Immigration officials there bemoaned the fact that people could dig under the existing fence. One image (fig. 2) depicts a Border Patrol officer intentionally prying apart strands of barbed wire to demonstrate the inefficacy of such fencing to disrupt unauthorized crossing. On the back of the photograph, handwritten, it says “fence full of holes.” They advocated for the chain-link set in concrete design to prevent it being pried apart. H.D. Nice, the officer in charge in Nogales, specifically referenced the heavy gauge woven mesh fence manufactured by the Cyclone Fence Company and the Continental Steel Corporation. He found their products attractive for border fencing because they had previously been used to guard industrial plants.26 Figure 2. View largeDownload slide Nogales Fence, 1947. In Arizona, too, border police took pictures of existing sections of border fencing to demonstrate its inefficacy. Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85. Figure 2. View largeDownload slide Nogales Fence, 1947. In Arizona, too, border police took pictures of existing sections of border fencing to demonstrate its inefficacy. Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85. G.J. McBee, the Chief Patrol Inspector in El Paso in 1947, wrote that “aliens operating in this section are not the common ‘wetback’ encountered along other parts of the border; but are predominantly of the criminal classes, engaged in the smuggling of aliens and contraband to enter for the purpose of theft and depredation.” To his mind, a solution to this problem could be found in construction. He found the lack of “obstruction” on the border an egregious omission, and like his counterparts on the western border, he disliked the night. They had no powerful lights to illuminate the border and were rendered weaker for it. So, like his colleagues, McBee advocated for a constellation of building projects in El Paso to help him and his men better take control of movement across the line.27 All of these proposals by various federal policing officials along the border were taken seriously by the IBWC, and nearly all aspects of their plans were executed as part of the Western Boundary Fence Project. Chain-link fence construction around the ports of entry was vastly more expensive then the ranch-type fencing in remote areas. On average, chain-link fencing cost $26,647 per mile to build, while ranch fencing cost an average of $2,773 per mile. When the final costs were tabulated from the 1948–1950 construction, the U.S. federal government spent $320,446 on 115 miles of ranch fencing, and $348,366 on a mere 13 miles of chain-link. Much of this discrepancy in price had to do with the fact that the chain-link fencing systems required more materials and a more elaborate installation process.28 Another part of the variance in costs had to do with the difficulty involved in accessing the border construction sites. In 1948, the IBWC organized a series of flights over the western land border. The planes flew about 1,000 feet above the ground in order to take oblique angle photographs from the air. The purpose was to survey the landscape in order to ascertain how difficult it would be to construct fencing in remote areas. Based on these photographic series, as well as reports from field engineers on the ground, the IBWC generated a classification system that described how easy or hard it would be to build border fences. They took four factors into consideration: topography, the characteristics of the ground, proximity to railroads, and proximity to roads, in keeping with a longstanding history of connections between the natural and built environments of the border region. The easiest places to build were on level areas, within 20 miles of a railroad, and on ground of neither rock nor deep sand. The trains were critical to moving building materials, and pliable earth made driving posts easier. Worksites between 20 to 50 miles of railroads were that much harder to build on, and some sections of the boundary fence were located over 50 miles from the nearest track. Rolling ground was typical, though semi-mountainous and mountainous areas posed serious challenges due to more rocky soil and numerous arroyos. In the best cases, there were good roads leading to worksites to move the laborers out into the field. In other cases, there were only bad roads. Sometimes there were no roads at all, but the construction sites could be reached by all-terrain trucks. In the worst cases workers still had to use pack trains to get to federal border fence construction zones.29 Despite the extent to which this fence geography was orchestrated by government agencies, the overwhelming majority of construction was carried out by regional or local private contractors. The only government agency directly tasked with building border fencing was the National Park Service, but its construction, too, was also quite local, 14.58 miles of ranch fencing within Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.30 In 1951, Congress halted appropriations for fence building based on the conviction that no additional barriers were necessary, especially with respect to ranch fencing. The foot-and-mouth epizootic had been contained in central Mexico, and it had been the major driver of border fence construction. Nevertheless, immigration police took advantage of the congressional appropriations and willing collaboration of the IBWC to get more pedestrian fencing. The IBWC produced a map in 1953 to document the total extent of fencing on the western boundary at the time (figs. 3, 4, and 5 are details of this map). From this vantage, the distinct geographies of immigration policing and animal management are clear—human barriers surround the ports, especially Calexico, and barbed wire marks the border in remote regions. Figure 3. View largeDownload slide Western Land Boundary Fence Project, California (detail), 1953. Pedestrian fencing, especially around Calexico, the gateway to the Imperial Valley, was paramount in California. Records of the International Boundary and Water Commission, Record Group 76. Figure 3. View largeDownload slide Western Land Boundary Fence Project, California (detail), 1953. Pedestrian fencing, especially around Calexico, the gateway to the Imperial Valley, was paramount in California. Records of the International Boundary and Water Commission, Record Group 76. Figure 4. View largeDownload slide Western Land Boundary Fence Project, Arizona (detail), 1953. Unlike in California, fencing in Arizona was dominated by “ranch-style” barbed wire. Records of the International Boundary and Water Commission, Record Group 76. Figure 4. View largeDownload slide Western Land Boundary Fence Project, Arizona (detail), 1953. Unlike in California, fencing in Arizona was dominated by “ranch-style” barbed wire. Records of the International Boundary and Water Commission, Record Group 76. Figure 5. View largeDownload slide Western Land Boundary Fence Project, New Mexico (detail), 1953. With the exception of the Bootheel, the southern border of New Mexico was left largely unfenced. No fences were constructed along the Rio Grande river border, so the map ends at El Paso. Records of the International Boundary and Water Commission, Record Group 76. Figure 5. View largeDownload slide Western Land Boundary Fence Project, New Mexico (detail), 1953. With the exception of the Bootheel, the southern border of New Mexico was left largely unfenced. No fences were constructed along the Rio Grande river border, so the map ends at El Paso. Records of the International Boundary and Water Commission, Record Group 76. In a 1947 letter between L.M. Lawson, the commissioner of the IBWC and overseer of the Rio Grande rectification project, and T.B. Shoemaker, the acting director of the INS, Lawson articulated the material connections between the IBWC and other federal bureaucracies. He wrote plainly that the fence building section of the Boundary and Water Commission functioned “primarily as the construction and maintenance agency for the other agencies of the government interested in the fence projects as an aid in the performance of their respective functions.” He pointed out the extent to which the plans for the fence had been adapted to serve the needs of the Department of Agriculture in response to the foot-and-mouth quarantine, and expressed his sympathy and attentiveness to the desires of the Border Patrol for chain-link fencing around the ports of entry. To that end, he suggested another avenue for potential collaboration: he gladly offered to make use of surplus fencing at the Crystal City internment camp by giving it a second life on the border.31 Fences were not the only type of construction that border police used to interdict unauthorized crossing. As the IBWC was building fences at the Border Patrol’s behest on the western boundary, the Border Patrol was also constructing and operating a string of watchtowers at strategic points along the international border. A photograph tucked within the internal memoranda and interagency correspondence of the INS depicts a typical design (fig. 6), meant to be seen by agency employees to help them understand the technical specifications of the towers.32 The photograph notes the exact dimensions of the concrete footing and angle iron necessary for construction. What appear to be high-powered lights are mounted to the roof of the observation tower, and a wooden utility pole is included in the frame of the photograph, possibly to demonstrate the connectivity between the surveillance infrastructure and communications infrastructure. Figure 6. View largeDownload slide Border Patrol Tower, ca. 1949. Elevated views conferred a tactical advantage to US border guards. Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85. Figure 6. View largeDownload slide Border Patrol Tower, ca. 1949. Elevated views conferred a tactical advantage to US border guards. Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85. Oral histories give us a good sense of how these towers were used. Edwin Reeves joined the Border Patrol in 1925, a year after its creation. He was born in Beaumont, Texas, and was posted at various stages in his thirty-year career in all the major border towns along the Rio Grande: Brownsville, Laredo, and El Paso. Before joining, he worked for the railroad in Texas during the Mexican Revolution, went to France and Belgium to work with naval aviation units there, then came back to the railroads until he became a border guard.33 In the very early years, Border Patrol officers were poorly outfitted. No badges, uniforms, nor even, at the very beginning, lodging; some early patrolmen reported sleeping in the county jail in Bracketville, Texas.34 Reeves seemed to relish recalling the cat-and-mouse games between border agents and alcohol smugglers during Prohibition, especially in Cordova Island. “They’d come over at the neck, a little outfit, and after they got in there they could just spread everywhere,” he said. Lookout towers helped. He fondly recalled the tactical advantage they provided. One man posted on top with binoculars looked down and could see anyone trying to enter the “island.” Fellow officers gathered at the base of the tower, and the man with the binoculars relayed the positions of the unauthorized crossers. The men gathered at the base, hidden a few blocks back from the line, were invisible to people on the Mexican side. In the early days, they had no electric lighting; the system only worked in daylight and by the light of the moon.35 Arthur Adams got a job with the Border Patrol in 1949. He had spent six years in the navy during the war and afterward worked the graveyard shift at General Motors testing diesel locomotive engines in his native Chicago. His nocturnal work with heavy machines cost him his hearing; fifteen engines roaring through the night on the test floor damaged his inner ears. He saw a Civil Service advertisement for Border Patrol jobs, and at $3,051 a year it paid better than anything else he could find. He applied, interviewed, got in, and was posted to El Paso. He headed to the border from the industrial North, and took up work that privileged sight over sound.36 He spent a lot of time in lookout towers on the line. When he arrived on the border there were at least five of these structures punctuating the low-rise skyline of El Paso and the agricultural land to the southeast where the Rio Grande was straightened. Sometimes Adams got nervous climbing up the tall ladders to reach the top of the border lookout towers. “It was a fair piece up that ladder,” he said. He sat up there for hours, looking down on the border and on the roads on both sides of the line. He worked at night. At dusk, he ascended to the perch. He could see buses in Mexico, packed full of workers, brought in groups to work menial jobs in El Paso and the surrounding fields. The towers served to enhance the ability of a single border guard to surveil a broad landscape and heightened the Border Patrol’s ability to anticipate where an unauthorized crossing might take place. Then the officers would climb down, and as he put it, “lay in up a nearby crossing and sack ’em up.”37 Suspicion, surveillance, and distrust had all been built into the immigration police infrastructure of the border by the early 1950s. By the 1950s, dam-building in U.S.-Mexico watersheds was far from new. In 1916, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation completed construction on Elephant Butte Dam on the Rio Grande in central New Mexico. At the same time, work was underway on the Boquilla Dam on the Conchos River in Chihuahua, a major tributary of the Rio Grande. Boquilla was built with Canadian investment, and at the time was one of the largest dams in the world. Its construction continued through the fighting of the Mexican Revolution, though in 1913 its one thousand workers and twenty engineers had to suspend work because of difficulties receiving shipments of materials via the railroad.38 Then, in the depths of the Great Depression, the Bureau of Reclamation completed Boulder Dam on the Colorado River in 1936. Unlike Boulder Dam, Falcon Dam, situated in the southern Rio Grande valley near the mouth of the river, was not a source of diplomatic controversy over water rights. Neither did it rank among the most ambitious feats of hydraulic engineering. Grand Coulee Dam, for instance, on the massive Columbia River in Washington state, operated at 125,000 kilowatts throughout World War II to supply power to the insatiable aluminum industry used to manufacture war planes.39 The American and Mexican generators at Falcon combined could only produce about half that. What set Falcon apart, however, was that it was the first major dam project directly on the international border. That location necessitated a joint construction project between the U.S. and Mexican governments, authorized by the terms of the 1944 treaty, “Utilization of Waters of the Colorado and Tijuana Rivers and of the Rio Grande.” The earthen dam took nearly four years to build, and when it was done it was almost five miles long. The dam was designed for flood control, irrigation, and electrical production. When completed, the rolled earth-fill embankment dam stood 150 feet above the riverbed.40 It retained a reservoir that, at its maximum capacity, retained 3.98 million acre-feet of water, inundating the banks of the Rio Grande for miles upriver.41 By then, Joseph Friedkin had risen in the ranks of the IBWC and had become commissioner of the agency. He oversaw the dam construction project. In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower came to Texas to meet his Mexican counterpart, Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, at the newly constructed Falcon Dam in the south Rio Grande valley. Friedkin liked to quote Eisenhower’s words on the occasion. Friedkin reports the president saying: “More than a mute monument to the ingenuity of engineers, the Falcon Dam is living testimony to the understanding and the cooperation binding our two peoples.” The dam was the kind of infrastructure project, because it had been jointly built by both American and Mexican engineers and laborers, that lent itself to proclamations of solidarity and community. Friedkin relished these lines and these sentiments and was proud of how the dam project had conquered the river. And as for complaints that the dam had negatively affected wildlife and vegetation, he easily dismissed them, saying “I think, environmentally it has greatly enhanced the area.” He noted the ballooning fish population and recreational facilities on the reservoir to make his case.42 For him, environmental improvement was synonymous with engineers’ ability to harness natural resources for human use, echoing the historian Mark Fiege’s point that irrigators in the arid West saw habitat destruction as inevitable but were often very interested in the new environments that emerged from remodeled relationships between the built and natural worlds.43 The year after it was built, a torrential rain fell in the border region. The Rio Grande and two of its tributaries, the Pecos and the Devils Rivers, filled to capacity. Measurements taken above Falcon Dam by boundary commission workers recorded the greatest flow yet recorded. The newly constructed dam held back the waters and prevented what would have been devastation in the towns of Harlingen, McAllen, Brownsville, and Hidalgo, as well as the agricultural lands around them. The areas above the dam, however, were not so lucky. The border towns of Del Rio, Ciudad Acuña, Eagle Pass, Piedras Negras, Laredo, and Nuevo Laredo flooded, and all communications in and out of the towns were lost. Friedkin and other IBCW workers flew a small plane over the border to survey the damage and saw that all the bridges joining the United States to Mexico had been destroyed by the floodwaters. Below the reservoir, however, he marveled at the dam’s capacity to overcome the might of nature. He was happy to report that the river below the reservoir was nothing more than a “small, quiet stream,” despite the carnage upriver.44 Aside from flood control, the dam was also designed to expand irrigated agriculture in the south Rio Grande valley. It succeeded in this, too. Stabilizing the water supply allowed growers in South Texas to double the acreage under production; by the 1980s, cultivated agricultural land had reached 800,000 acres, and in Tamaulipas on the Mexican side the expansion was even more dramatic from pre-dam levels, eventually reaching close to 600,000 acres under irrigation with river water.45 The grandeur and fanfare of the first major dam on the U.S.-Mexico border, the presidential ceremony, the pride in engineers’ ability to dominate a river system, and the expansion of capitalist agriculture all obscured the experience of the people from the small towns of Zapata, Texas and Ciudad Guerrero, Tamaulipas. There were probably only about one thousand people in Zapata, and they all shared the bad luck of living in an area that would be inundated after the reservoir was built. Like most towns along the international divide, the population was predominately of Mexican descent. Some had spent their whole lives living in the village, as had their parents and their grandparents before them. Some even had Spanish land grants that predated the American attack on Mexico in 1846 and Mexican independence. Despite this multi-generational claim to the area, they were forced to give up their land and move away from their homes. Zapata’s twin, a village named Ciudad Guerrero, was situated just across the river in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. That town was also moved, but by the Mexican government. According to the Secretaría de Recursos Hidráulicos (Ministry of Hydraulic Resources), there were a total of 440 homes in Guerrero, 291 of which were owned with clear legal title while another 63 were either of indeterminate ownership, renters, or informal settlements, casos irregulares. A total of 86 houses, a substantial share of the town, were used by federal employees, mainly the Comisión Federal de Electricidad (Federal Electricity Commission, 39 houses) and, of course, the Secretaría de Recursos Hidráulicos (40 houses). The remaining structures were occupied by officials from the CILA, the Secretaría de Marina Nacional (Ministry of the Marines), and the Secretaría de Salubridad y Asistencia Pública (Ministry of Health and Public Assistance).46 By the end of the year 1955, Recursos Hidráulicos had paid just over 3 million pesos in indemnities for both the destruction of the houses as well as agricultural land that surrounded the town.47 This process was at times a contested one. Eustolio González Treviño, for instance, filed a complaint with Recursos Hidráulicos claiming damage to his property when it was “invaded by reservoir water.” Unlike the ejidatarios who protested the destruction of their cotton fields during the Rio Grande Rectification Project twenty years earlier, González was a private landholder of fields and pastures totaling over 117 hectares. He wrote in formal Spanish, claiming he was not given any notice, and as a result lost land, some outbuildings on his property, as well as farm machinery and equipment. His property line was not extended to compensate for the underwater portions, and as a result he was unable to plant a cotton crop in the first mild season after a five-year drought.48 His request for $162,607 pesos in compensation was rejected; officials maintained that he should have taken the proper precautions and any loss of property was due to his own imprudence, not the malpractice of the dam project.49 From Friedkin’s perspective on the U.S. side, echoing a well-worn colonial and technocratic mantra, the people were better off afterward. The IBWC built an entirely new town for the displaced people of Zapata. They built a new city hall, new schools, and a new water system, both for fresh water and wastewater. Residents drew lots for which plot they would receive in the new Zapata, and for those who lived in stick frame houses, the IBCW moved the houses themselves to the new site. Some people lived in adobe houses, however, and those dwellings could not be moved. They had to be abandoned, left to dissolve, submerged. Like most traditional towns, space was shared in Zapata by both the living and the dead. The cemetery was as much a part of the town as the civic buildings, schools, and houses. The dead, too, had to be moved. For this work the IBCW brought in a Louisiana man, a specialist in negotiating disinterment, water tables, and public relations. According to Friedkin, he visited every family, brought them candy and flowers, and explained the care that would be used in handling the remains of their ancestors. Having never seen a building project of this magnitude on the river before, some people doubted that the water could possibly rise is high as the engineers said it would. Despite the promises of a new and improved town, some residents refused to leave. Friedkin reported that they stood fast in their doorways, remembering the courses their lives had taken in that very place. They stood there until the rising waters reached their feet, and, in tears, retreated.50 One thing Friedkin did not mention in his recollections of the Falcon Dam project and the relocation of Zapata was the Border Patrol. Perhaps he omitted this topic in an effort to underline what he saw as the more positive outcomes of a rebuilt city hall, schools, and houses. Or maybe, as someone who had worked closely with the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol on other construction sites, he simply took their presence for granted. In any event, Zapata was rebuilt to incorporate the presence of federal police in its midst. An IBWC plat map of Zapata in 1953 depicts the new settlement from the point of view of the boundary commission (fig. 7). A notation on the map indicates the town limit, laid out on a grid, which was the “area to be served by streets, water and sewer lines developed by I.B.&W.C.” At its center was a park, and there were public spaces woven throughout the town site. In addition, as seen in the lower-right corner of the plat—the southernmost tip of the village—is a plot outlined in red on the original document. This was where officers of the Border Patrol lived after the relocation. Falcon Dam was not built to assist in border policing endeavors, though its builders exercised a different kind of coercive force in its construction. And the IBWC easily made a place for the Border Patrol in the rebuilt village of Zapata. Figure 7. View largeDownload slide Plat Map of Zapata (detail), 1953. The IBWC incorporated Border Patrol residences (the outlined lot in the lower right of the frame) into the plan of the relocated town of Zapata after the original site was inundated by the reservoir created by Falcon Dam. Records of the International Boundary and Water Commission, Record Group 76. Figure 7. View largeDownload slide Plat Map of Zapata (detail), 1953. The IBWC incorporated Border Patrol residences (the outlined lot in the lower right of the frame) into the plan of the relocated town of Zapata after the original site was inundated by the reservoir created by Falcon Dam. Records of the International Boundary and Water Commission, Record Group 76. The experiences of the people in Zapata and Ciudad Guerrero stood in stark contrast to Eisenhower’s proclamation of the dam as a testament to a smoothly functioning, joint venture between the United States and Mexico, and between the “two peoples” of both countries. Such a statement referred primarily to intangible things: the diplomatic, technocratic, and economic connections between two nation-states. In this binary, there was no room for the actual people who inhabited the border region—people whose families had been rooted in that one spot for generations, for so long, in fact, that their most distant ancestors antedated the nation-state itself as a form of political organization in North America. The construction of Falcon Dam, the transformation of the riverine ecosystem, and the inundation of Zapata and Guerrero, attest to a fundamental characteristic of border history: the tension between individual lives in specific places on the one hand, and massive federal works projects and high-level interstate relations on the other. This tension can often be read in the built environment of the border. Also standing in contrast to Eisenhower’s words were the hardline deportations of Mexican migrant laborers by Joseph Swing, Eisenhower’s old West Point classmate and his pick for INS commissioner. After all, Swing’s signal achievement as head of the immigration bureau was carrying out “Operation Wetback” in 1954, the same year construction on Falcon Dam was completed. In a single generation, the thirty years between 1924 and 1954, the built environment of the border changed radically to match the increasing authority of the Border Patrol and the IBWC. Hundreds of miles of fencing cut across the desert landscapes of the land border where before there was open rangeland. Police watchtowers punctuated the spaces around the big ports of entry. Two hydraulic engineering projects had remade important parts of the river border. The borderline had become a construction site. The built environment the Border Patrol and IBWC created in those years did not so much represent the hardening of the border, but concrete responses to increased connectivity between United States and Mexico. The premise, however, that physical construction could be a central means of effecting control over other people as well as the nonhuman world, would continue to evolve as one of the most definitive aspects of border history through the rest of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Footnotes 1 The Border Patrol emerged in the context of widespread professionalization campaigns in police departments across the country, the rapid expansion of federal policing more generally, and heightened nativism and xenophobia in United States. In these ways the agency participated not only in the rise of a much more complex administrative state, but also in the coercive practices of a dominant society that had become more uneasy about the incorporation of certain kinds of immigrants into its midst. In the context of water engineering and the ideology of control, the Bureau of Reclamation stands out. The IBWC was a much more diplomatic institution by necessity, but it shared similar convictions about the primacy of engineering expertise in the conquest of arid lands. This also translated into racial and social stratification by laying the groundwork for agricultural labor exploitation. In other words, hydraulic systems were not engaged like immigration police in projects of social engineering according to statute and treaty, but rather by the capital accumulation generated by reclamation that itself had made settlement and colonization in the border region by nonindigenous people possible in the first place. 2 The few studies that examine this agency tend to focus on its unique bureaucratic and legal aspects more than how the construction projects it managed reshaped the physical spaces of the border region as a whole. The focus is exclusively on water; how their projects overlapped with policing organizations is never discussed. See Douglas R. Littlefield, Conflict on the Rio Grande: Water and the Law, 1879–1939 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), Charles A. Timm, The International Boundary Commission, United States and Mexico (Austin: The University of Texas, 1941), Marco Antonio Samaniego López, Ríos internacionales entre México y Estados Unidos: los tratados de 1906 y 1944 (México: D.F.: El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Históricos, Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2006), Stephen P. Mumme, Innovation and Reform in Transboundary Resource Management: A Critical Look at the International Boundary and Water Commission, United States and Mexico (Albuquerque: International Transboundary Resources Center, 1993). 3 Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett, “On Borderlands,” The Journal of American History 98, no. 2 (September 2011): 350. 4 Here I follow the suggestion of anthropologist Brian Larkin who points out that studying infrastructure can offer insights into many other realms of society and culture. See Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 328. 5 Jerry E. Mueller, Restless River: International Law and the Behavior of the Rio Grande (El Paso: Texas Western Press, The University of Texas at El Paso, 1975), 77–98. 6 Benny J. Andrés Jr., Power and Control in the Imperial Valley: Nature, Agribusiness, and Workers on the California Borderland, 1900–1940 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2015); Eric Boime, “‘Beating Plowshares into Swords’: The Colorado River Delta, the Yellow Peril, and the Movement for Federal Reclamation, 1901–1928,” Pacific Historical Review 78, no. 1 (February 2009); Casey Walsh, Building the Borderlands: A Transnational History of Irrigated Cotton along the Mexico-Texas Border (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008). 7 Two important studies of early border fencing by Mary Mendoza and Rachel St. John make no mention of this fence project, though it was far more substantial in every way than the fences they researched. Mendoza anachronistically refers to a plan put forward in 1910 for forty-five miles of barbed wire fencing, all in Southern California, as border “fortification.” See Mary E. Mendoza, “Fencing the Line: Race, Environment, and the Changing Visual Landscape at the U.S.-Mexico Divide,” in Border Spaces: Visualizing in the U.S.-Mexico Frontera, ed. Katherine G. Morrissey and John-Michael H. Warner (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2018), 78, and Rachel St. John, “Divided Ranges: Trans-border Ranches and the Creation of National Space along the Western Mexico-U.S. Border,” in Bridging National Borders in North America, ed. Benjamin H. Johnson and Andrew R. Graybill (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 8 Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); S. Deborah Kang, The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917–1954 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 9 In the classic titles of water history it is either a brief footnote or nowhere to be found. See Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water (1986, repr., New York: Penguin Books, 1993); Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Donald J. Pisani, Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Luis Aboites Aguilar, La irrigación revolucionaria: historia del sistema nacional de riego del Río Conchos, Chihuahua, 1927–1938 (México: SEP/CIESAS, 1987). 10 Minute No. 129, “Report on the Rio Grande Rectification/Informe sobre rectificación del Río Bravo,” International Boundary Commission: United States and Mexico/Comisión Internacional de Límites: Entre México y los Estados Unidos, Mexico City, 31 July 1930, 5–6. 11 J.F. Friedkin, Commissioner, “Technical Summaries of Projects along the International Boundary between the United States and Mexico,” April 1979, revised January 1981, Box 1, TR 0076-15-0012, Series 902-01b (IBWC Project Planning, Design, and Construction Case Files), Records of the International Boundary and Water Commission; Record Group 76, National Archives, Fort Worth, Texas. 12 Minute No. 129, “Report on the Rio Grande Rectification/Informe sobre rectificación del Río Bravo,” International Boundary Commission/Comisión Internacional de Límites, 31 July 1930, Mexico City, 21; L.M. Lawson, “Stabilizing the Rio Grande,” Scientific American 155, no. 2 (1936): 67–8; J.F. Friedkin, Commissioner, “Technical Summaries of Projects along the International Boundary between the United States and Mexico.” 13 Joseph F. Friedkin, interview by Oscar J. Martinez and Sarah E. John, 1977, “Interview no. 552,” Institute of Oral History, University of Texas at El Paso, 10, 12. 14 “nos dijeron que era una obra de defenza [sic], pero en el campo de los echos [sic] no compredimos [sic] que era lo que se defendia con esa hobra [sic].” “no estamos de conformidad con eso travajos [sic] porque no hemos tenido havizo [sic] de ninguna autoridad.” Ejido de Jesús Carranza a Ministro de la Secretaría de Agricultura y Fomento, México Dto. Federal, 9 Agosto 1933; Caja 572, Expediente 6345, Legajo 01, Fojas 14; Fondo Documental Aguas Nacionales, Comisión Nacional del Agua, Archivo Histórico y Biblioteca Central del Agua (CONAGUA), Mexico City, Mexico. 15 Informe sobre escrito de los ejidatarios de “Jesús Carranza,” México, D.F., a 9 de septiembre de 1933; Caja 572, Expediente 6345, Legajo 01, Fojas 14; CONAGUA, “Información General, Trabajos de la Comisión Internacional de Límites,” C. Juárez, Chih., 1 Diciembre 1933; Caja 572, Expediente 6345, Legajo 01, Fojas 14, CONAGUA. 16 Lawson, “Stabilizing the Rio Grande,” 67. 17 John Weber, From South Texas to the Nation: The Exploitation of Mexican Labor in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Eric V. Meeks, Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007). 18 St. John, “Divided Ranges,” 116. 19 Nathan F. Sayre, Ranching, Endangered Species, and Urbanization in the Southwest: Species of Capital (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2002); Nathan F. Sayre, The Politics of Scale: A History of Rangeland Science (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017). 20 Statement: Western Boundary Fence Project Estimated Cost of Remaining Construction, 27 July 1953; 901-01 Western Boundary Fence Project, Engineering Office Case File, Folder 12, Series 902-01b (IBWC Project Planning, Design, and Construction Case Files), Box 3, TR 076-2013-0020; Records of the International Boundary and Water Commission, Record Group 76, National Archives, Fort Worth, Texas. 21 W.A. Carmichael, District Director [USI&NS], Los Angeles 13, California to Commissioner, Washington 25, D.C., “Proposed fence at Calexico, California,” 24 August 1948; Folder 56084/946, Box 2864, Subject and Policy Files, 1893–1957, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service; Record Group 85; National Archives, Washington, DC. 22 District Director, USI&NS, Los Angeles, California, Chief Patrol Inspector, El Centro California, “Boundary Fence, Imperial Valley Area,” 19 August 1948, Folder 56084/946, Box 2864, Subject and Policy Files, 1893–1957; Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85, National Archives, Washington, DC. 23 Ibid. 24 Andrés, Power and Control in the Imperial Valley, 68–97. 25 District Director, Los Angeles 13, California, R. L. Williams, Assistant Officer in Charge, Calexico California, “International Boundary Fence,” 7 April 1948; Folder 56084/946, Box 2864, Subject and Policy Files, 1893–1957; Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85, National Archives, Washington, DC. 26 District Director, El Paso, Texas, H.D. Nice, Officer in Charge, Nogales, Arizona, “Boundary Fence,” 15 December 1947, Folder 56084/946, Box 2864, Subject and Policy Files, 1893–1957, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service; Record Group 85, National Archives, Washington, DC. 27 District Director, Imm. & Natzn. Service, El Paso, Texas, G.J. McBee, Chief Patrol Inspector, El Paso, Texas, “Boundary Fence,” December 16, 1947; Folder 56084/946, Box 2864, Subject and Policy Files, 1893–1957, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85, National Archives, Washington, DC. 28 Fence Construction by Fiscal Years 1948 through 1950, 901-01 Western Boundary Fence Project, Engineering Office Case File, Folder 12, Series 902-01b (IBWC Project Planning, Design, and Construction Case Files), Box 3, TR 076-2013-0020, Records of the International Boundary and Water Commission, Record Group 76; National Archives, Fort Worth. 29 Statement: Western Boundary Fence Project Estimated Cost of Remaining Construction, July 27, 1953; 901-01 Western Boundary Fence Project, Engineering Office Case File, Folder 12, Series 902-01b (IBWC Project Planning, Design, and Construction Case Files), Box 3, TR 076-2013-0020, Records of the International Boundary and Water Commission, Record Group 76, National Archives, Fort Worth. 30 Fence Construction by Fiscal Years 1948 through 1950, 901-01 Western Boundary Fence Project, Engineering Office Case File, Folder 12, Series 902-01b (IBWC Project Planning, Design, and Construction Case Files), Box 3, TR 076-2013-0020, Records of the International Boundary and Water Commission, Record Group 76; National Archives, Fort Worth. 31 [L.M. Lawson, Commissioner of IBWC to] The Honorable T.B. Shoemaker, Acting Commissioner, Immigration and Naturalization Service, 18 September 1947, Franklin Trust Building, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Folder 56084/946, Box 2864, Subject and Policy Files, 1893–1957, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service; Record Group 85, National Archives, Washington, DC. 32 [photographs of towers, 1949?], Folder 56084/946-B, Box 2864, Subject and Policy Files, 1893–1957, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85, National Archives, Washington, DC. 33 Wesley E. Stiles, interview by Wesley C. Shaw, January 1986, “Interview No. 756,” Institute of Oral History, University of Texas at El Paso, 1–2. 34 Ibid., 3–4. 35 Edwin M. Reeves, interview by Robert H. Novak, 1974, “Interview no. 135,” Institute of Oral History, University of Texas at El Paso, 14–5. 36 Ibid., 1–2. 37 Arthur L. Adams, interview by Jim Marchant and Oscar J. Martinez, 10 August 1977, “Interview No. 646,” Institute of Oral History, University of Texas at El Paso, 25, 26. 38 Luis Aboites, El agua de la nación: una historia política de México (1888–1946) (México: CIESAS, 1998), 60–1. 39 Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 163. 40 J.F. Friedkin, Commissioner, “Technical Summaries of Projects along the International Boundary between the United States and Mexico.” 41 Ibid. 42 Joseph F. Friedkin, interview by Oscar J. Martinez and Sarah E. John, 29, 36. 43 Mark Fiege, Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 45. 44 Joseph F. Friedkin, interview by Oscar J. Martinez and Sarah E. John, 30–1. 45 Ibid., 32. 46 “Ing. Carlos Molina R., gerente general de construcción, Secretaría de Recursos Hidráulicos, Hoja Núm. 3,” [1955]; Caja 3126, Expediente 43121, CONAGUA, Mexico City, Mexico. 47 “Dirección General de Aprovechamientos Hidráulicos, presa internacional ‘Falcon,’ indemnizaciones,” Nva. Cd. Guerrero, Tam., Diciembre 31 de 1955; Caja 3126, Expediente 43121, CONAGUA, Mexico City, Mexico. 48 “[various kinds of personal property was] invadidos por las aguas del vaso de la Presa Internacional de ‘FALCON,’” Eustolio González Treviño al C. Secretario de Recursos Hidráulicos, Nueva Ciudad Guerrero, Tamps., a 14 de junio de 1954; Caja 4693, Expediente 63165; CONAGUA, Mexico City, Mexico. 49 Lic. Javier Juárez V. al C. Director de Aprovechamientos Hidráulicos, México, D.F. a 28 de Agosto de 1954; Caja 4693, Expediente 63165, CONAGUA, Mexico City, Mexico. 50 Joseph F. Friedkin, interview by Oscar J. Martinez and Sarah E. John, 33–4. Author notes C.J. Alvarez is an assistant professor in the department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His first book, Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the U.S.-Mexico Divide, is forthcoming from the University of Texas Press in fall 2019. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Western History Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Police, Waterworks, and the Construction of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1924–1954
JO - Western Historical Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/whq/whz046
DA - 2019-07-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/police-waterworks-and-the-construction-of-the-u-s-mexico-border-1924-J38eB3q7Py
SP - 233
VL - 50
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
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