Their focus on the particularities of border politics misses broader structural forces that make violence inevitable. Border policies are passed based on the perceived settler control over the “Mexican Other” in order to extract labor.

“The U.S.-Mexican border and border-states have been main battlegrounds where United States policies have fostered, encouraged, and even normalized the genocide and removal of Mexicans from the colonized land.” The United States was created out of settler colonialism, which is defined by permanent settlement in a territory by members of foreign group.[1] The first Anglo settlers came under British rule, creating sovereign colonial territories on lands that were taken from indigenous American communities. The creation of these colonies and later Western expansion reveals that settler colonialism is one of the structuring principles that birthed American society. Settler colonialism involves the displacement and removal of indigenous inhabitants instead of their assimilation or exploitation to the dominant culture; its main goal is to have control over land rather than human or natural resources.[2] As scholar Patrick Wolfe states, “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure, not an event”[3]. It is a system with no end, as there is always constant tension between the remaining indigenous groups and the colonizers and their descendants. By examining U.S. and Mexican historical relations through the settler-colonialism paradigm, we can see that settler colonialism did not stop after the removal and genocide campaigns against Native Americans; rather, it continued as the U.S. searched for land in the Southwest, with Mexicans becoming the new victims. As stated before, settler colonialism is never ending, and the structure under which it functions is always transforming. I will argue that despite the long history of labor programs involving the recruitment of Mexicans, there have historically been many efforts to rid Mexicans from their captured land or to control those who are on it. I will also argue that the U.S.-Mexican border and border-states have been main battlegrounds where United States policies have fostered, encouraged, and even normalized the genocide and removal of Mexicans from the colonized land. These actions have been taken in order to maintain and increase power over the conquered peoples and country and as a means to continuously lay claim to their ownership of the land. As part of Westward expansion and the idea of a manifest destiny, many believed it was the duty of Anglo-Americans to have claim to all of the North American land. This sentiment was reinforced and strengthened by the success that the United States had experienced in taking land from the indigenous North Americans. Since the early 1800s, many Anglo-Americans had settled in many northwestern areas of Mexico. During this time Texas and Mexico were still Mexican lands; however, in 1836, colonists in Texas fought a war and gained independence from Mexico.[4] President James Polk saw this an opportunity to retrieve more land and in 1846 sent troops to territories below Texas. This led to the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-48 in which the United States occupied Mexico City, and Mexico, which was unable to find the funds to continue the war, had to cede about 50 percent of its northern territory to the United States.[5] About 50,000 Mexicans died, in contrast to 13,000 Americans.[6] This mass killing and forced dispossession of land was the introduction to settler colonialist activities on this Southwestern territory. Though the U.S.-Mexican War ended with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave Mexicans living in the ceded territory the option of remaining and retaining their Mexican citizenship or becoming United States citizens, it did not mean that Mexicans would socially be accepted as welcome residents and citizens.[7] After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, the new border lines were not enforced and there were no border policies set in place, meaning that people could move freely between the two countries. This was an economic advantage to the United States, so it was allowed to happen.[8] Though there was migration, it was in relatively small numbers and the first mass migration into the new American territory did not occur until the 1880s, when there was a need for railroad workers, miners, and agricultural workers on that land. It must be clear that although Mexicans were being welcomed as workers, they were regarded as inferior within the social structure and were therefore rejected by the dominant order. Though some Mexicans gained citizenship through the terms of the 1848 treaty, under the Naturalization Act of 1790 (the first U.S. rules in granting citizenship), naturalization was only afforded to immigrants who were “free white people.” It was not until 1870 that the naturalization process was extended beyond white people and granted to “persons of African descent”; this revision was very limited though and continued to exclude other non-whites. [9] Mexicans were not considered “Americans” legally nor socially in the eyes of white-Americans. This pervading legal and social notion of associating whiteness with permanent residence and Mexican-ness with temporary labor was an institutionalized way of fostering an environment of displacement and racial othering that created the framework for future removal and discriminatory actions. Under the 1924 National Origins Act which placed great numerical limits on immigrants, Mexican immigrant workers were still allowed to come in without any limit, but they still had many other restraints and stresses placed on them. In Texas and California, Mexican students went to separate and unequal schools. Poll tax policies greatly inhibited Mexicans from voting, jobs outside of agriculture were hard to come by, and police violence was very common.[10] These actions can be classified as attrition through enforcement, a practice that intends to target immigrants through dimensions of everyday life in order to promote “self deportation.”[11] By using policies that encouraged discrimination, the government could create an unpleasant environment for Mexicans in order to encourage them to leave the United States, and to facilitate the exploitation of those Mexican-Americans who were citizens. However, nativists did not believe the prejudiced regulations were enough and they were very upset with the lack of limitations in the National Origins Act. This caused nativists to vow to control the Mexican peoples that were “causing a social problem,” a “problem [that] comes into our schools… comes into our cities, and… comes into our whole civilization in California,” as stated by a member of the California Farm Bureau stated during a 1926 hearing intended to put limits on Mexican migrants.[12] This type of narrative exemplifies how historical notions of the land had been reworked and recreated in a way that gave white-Americans more legitimacy over the land than people of Mexican origin. Tensions ran high as nativists on the border-states felt threatened by the increasing presence of Mexican inhabitants and workers. This stipulated a higher level of policing , leading to the 1925 Border Act. This Act “gave border patrol officers broad authority to interrogate, detain, and arrest any person they believe to be engaged in the act of illegal entry, a violation whose boundary extended from the moment unauthorized immigrants crossed the border until they reached their interior destination.[13]” Prior to this act, the Border Patrol had very little power. In fact, it had no more power than the ordinary citizen. However, the 1925 Act gave Border Patrol officers the power of arrest without warrant and defined a mass jurisdiction for their work, thus giving them governmental policing power and creating a new and powerful force to be used against Mexicans at the border and in the neighboring states.[14] This was the start of a new era of Border Patrol policies created to support the settler-colonialist system and to keep out and regulate those deemed unwanted by the nation. The anti-Mexican sentiment increased exponentially in 1929 after the stock market crash, when the economic depression resulted in an intensification of xenophobic behavior. Though the Border Patrol was using its new powers to round up and deport Mexicans that they identified as undocumented, this was not sufficient for anti-Mexican forces. Exclusionists rallied and organized public and private agencies at both the local and state levels agencies in order to institute repatriation programs that would expedite the removal of Mexican people from the United States. They sought to “return indigent nationals to their own country,” “to save welfare agencies money,” and to “create jobs for real Americans.”[15] This repatriation programs did not make a distinction between undocumented Mexicans and U.S. citizens of Mexican descent; instead it aimed to remove all Mexicans. Unlike the Border Patrol, repatriation campaigns did not usually involve the government (with the exception of welfare offices), instead they involved the power of individuals. By using the power of physical violence, the people involved in these initiatives forced Mexicans to leave their jobs and homes throughout the country[16]. Copious amounts of people who had lived their whole lives in the United States and were obligated to abandon everything they had in order to move to a country they may have never been to before. According to the U.S. Labor Department, in only a fifteen-moth period over two million people were forcibly reallocated to Mexico, a large percentage of these people being United States citizens. During a five-month period in 1931 in Los Angeles 50,000 Mexicans were violently and unwillingly deported.[17] Under the conditions of settler colonialism, land owners and the government aimed to control Mexican life and labor; as an agribusiness man from Texas said in the 1920s: “if we could not control the Mexicans and they would take this country it would be better to keep them out, but we can and do control them.[18]” When this perception of control was broken, Mexicans would no longer be accepted as workers or inhabitants of the United States. Mexicans and United States citizens of Mexican descent were subject to warrantless searches and arrests. They were victims of violent and invasive repatriation campaigns and were being exploited for their labor. The policies and laws in place encouraged these activities and served as the foundation and infrastructure for these exclusionary practices and xenophobic systems. Mexican people were systematically dehumanized and abused, a type of treatment that was well accepted by the majority of the American public and strengthened by government sanctions. This desire for control of the Mexican population in the United States is further noted by the initiation of the bracero program created in 1942. This program comprised a wartime agreement between the Mexican and American governments that provided for the use of Mexicans as temporary agricultural workers during a time where the U.S. was desperate for cheap labor.[19] This program aimed to bring in a limited number of expendable workers that would not become permanent residents and that would be under the authority and management of their supervisors at all times. This plan failed, however: smuggling of undocumented workers became commonplace from the beginning of the program and there was a great upsurge in undocumented workers coming into the states.[20] The program lasted until 1964 and employed about five million Mexican workers.[21] A dramatic increase of Mexican workers and inhabitants, both braceros and undocumented, created a national hysteria that led to the creation of Operation Wetback, another program that would lead to a numerous amount of Mexicans being forcibly removed, Operation Wetback was created in 1952 and was a paramilitary law enforcement campaign that used the threat of violence in order to detain and deport undocumented Mexican immigrants, although in reality it also induced the forced removal of thousands of documented Mexicans and Mexican Americans.[22] Officers searched Mexican American barrios throughout the border-states, and raided Mexican communities, migrant camps, ranches, farms, parks, and leisure spots.[23] The object of this intense militarization of border enforcement was to detain “illegal aliens,” but in practice the program focused on all “Mexican-looking” people in general. It was also not uncommon for American-born children to be deported along with their “illegal” parents. Many Mexicans were so fearful of the potential violence of this initiative that they went to Mexico in order to avoid the Border Patrol officials.[24] To have enough space for the detainees, officers turned public spaces into temporary detention facilities.[25] The United States forcibly removed over one million to Mexico during this short time period.[26] After Operation Wetback, the Border Patrol continued the militarization, racialization, and regionalization of the their practices.[27] In 1956, a new initiative to criminalize Mexican migrants and people soon surfaced. At this time, chief law enforcement officers instructed officers to delete wetback from their vocabulary and instead to use the words “criminal alien” or “deportable alien” in order to create a “psychological effect on the public and courts that [would] benefit the Service.”[28] Through these policies and initiatives the United States created a narrative that legitimized the white-American claim to the Southwest, while actively marginalizing and othering the Chicanos and Mexicans in the area. Mexicans were considered aliens on their own land. Part of the settler-colonialist paradigm is that the forced removal of indigenous people of the land becomes hegemonically accepted and adopted into everyday life. These hegemonic forces were incredibly successful at normalizing these exploitative and colonist measures. The impact of the U.S. government’s policies and initiatives even prompted Mexicans and Mexican descendants to become invested in the militarization and enhancement of the Border Patrol. A significant amount of support for the U.S. Border Patrol came from the Mexican-American middle class and Mexican-American political leaders. Many of them believed that migrants from Mexico, particularly those that came unauthorized, thwarted their assimilation.[29] The government also received support from much of the Mexican-American working class. As agricultural worker Drineo González explained in a letter to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1952, “the legal residents can not live under the wetback wages and [compete] with them.”[30] The Border Patrol soon started working with the FBI on drug and crime related policies; this created a new association between Mexicans and drugs and violent crimes, and provided the BP with ample federal funding and backing. In 1956 the Criminal, Immoral, and Narcotics Program (CIN) was launched, which was a Southwestern Region program whose objective was to find United States immigrants that were excludable under the Immigration and Nationality Act policies regarding criminal records and drug possession. Through CIN the U.S. Border Patrol became a partner in law-enforcement institutions and initiatives and not only policed migration, but also policed criminals and drug related crimes.[31] This program targeted Mexican nationals already living in the United States, thus creating an association in the public conscience between Mexicans and criminals.[32] It also linked the underfunded efforts of U.S. Immigration control with the FBI, “the institutional heart of the U.S. federal law enforcement.”[33] As scholar Nicholas P. De Genova writes: “undocumented migrant labor has been criminalized as ‘illegal’ and subjected to excessive and extraordinary forms of policing.”[34] The legal powers the Border Patrol gained during the 1950s combined with the increase in racialized criminalization allowed for a political atmosphere that supported more force and militarization on the border than ever before. Although discriminatory and militant practices against Mexicans had already historically been used and implemented, these new measures allowed the government to employ them on a much larger scale and with the support of federal agencies. These new formal and democratic legal processes that were created under the country’s duty to “protect the state” legitimized extreme violence by the Border Patrol against Mexican immigrants and people of Mexican descent.[35] It must be recognized that Border Patrol policies also created conditions under which genocide could take place. When Border Patrol officials deported Mexican people and families, they were sending them into environments where they could possibly die. These deportees were sent back to a country they had fled from and had lost connections to. When returning to Mexico under these circumstances, they were often met with conditions of extreme poverty and economic persecution, which could lead to suffering and death. Not only this, but by gaining more armed guards for the border and creating fences, the Border Patrol forced those attempting to cross the border to cross miles and miles of desert and suffer from starvation, dehydration, sexual violence, and other human rights violations. They created a strategy in which they used the environment as a deterrent, thereby engendering the death of thousands of Mexican people over the course of history without directly being the cause of it.[36] The U.S. Border transformed into a militarized base where Mexican people suffered genocide and human rights violations. A study by the Center for Immigration Research at the University of Houston determined that “in the late 1980s, the number of foreign transient deaths usually exceeded 300, and peaked in 1988 at 355.”[37] Rodolfo Acuña a Professor Emeritus of Chicano Studies at California State University also stated that “Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported 117 cases of human rights abuses by US officials against migrants from 1988 to 1990, including fourteen deaths. During the 1980s, Border Patrol agents shot dozens of people, killing eleven and permanently disabling ten.”[38] These numbers do not account for the human rights violations and deaths of those that went unreported or for vigilante killing, so we can only assume the real numbers would be exponentially higher. The U.S.-Mexican Border served as a government-sponsored battleground where Mexican migrants had to fight for their right to live. There is no doubt that settler colonialism has been a structuring principle of American culture and society which has had great effects on U.S.-Mexican relations and the lived experience of the Mexicans and Chicanos that live in the United States. U.S. border and immigration policies have been highly influential in shaping the settler-colonial paradigm and have themselves been largely shaped by it. Settler colonialism is a system that is always transforming, and in order to change and shift these paradigms away from becoming more aggressive, controlling and deadly, we must first realize they exist. In the words of Cesar Chavez: “We need to help students and parents cherish and preserve the ethnic and cultural diversity that nourishes and strengthens this community – and this nation.”