“The reality of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border was that it was often cyclical…Authorities tasked with enforcing immigration laws used their power to manage the cyclical movement of agricultural workers within a linearly constructed immigration system through the mechanism of informal deportations.”

Fronteras: Congratulations on winning the 2020 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) Book Award for your recent book Managed Migrations: Growers, Farmworkers, and Border Enforcement in the Twentieth Century, published by The University of Texas Press. You reframe discussions about the experiences of Mexican agricultural workers in the South Texas through an exploration of “a politics of mobility,” which you describe as being shaped by linear time and by circular or cyclical time. Can you tell us more about this argument?

Dr. Cristina Salinas: Yes. In my book, I argue that the underlying assumptions that have structured immigration law were (and continue to be) linear—that a migrant came to the United States with the intention to settle and then eventually became a naturalized citizen. The provisions of immigration law were also structured in that linear, teleological fashion. However, that linear notion of time and migrants’ progression through the immigration system clashed with another formulation of time that patterned migration at the U.S.-Mexico border for much of the twentieth century, and that was the cyclical nature of the agricultural calendar. The reality of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border was that it was often cyclical, and based on the various agricultural harvests in U.S. fields. For example, every summer, Texas growers hired thousands of workers to harvest the cotton crop. Authorities tasked with enforcing immigration laws then used their power to manage the cyclical movement of agricultural workers within a linearly constructed immigration system through the mechanism of informal deportations.

Fronteras: Throughout your book you trouble the idea that Mexican workers in South Texas were simple pawns to be manipulated by the U.S. or Mexican governments and their proxies. You argue for acknowledging their agency without overstating their ability to maintain their independence and freedom in harsh and oppressive circumstances. Can you tell us more about this idea that migrant workers were historical actors that could impact, in some way, the power dynamic in the Borderlands?

Dr. Cristina Salinas: In the book, I write about how each nation, the United States and Mexico, tried to control the migration of Mexicans across the U.S.-Mexico border to assert national authority at the U.S-Mexico border and as leverage in power dynamics between the two nation-states. During the middle of the twentieth-century, in the period I study, the Mexican government outwardly expressed more concern about Mexicans’ undocumented migration, because of its effect in undermining the Mexican government’s negotiating position in the bracero program. The United States, on the other hand, understood that their lax enforcement of immigration laws benefited the many growing industries in the Southwest. Yet, despite the goals of both countries, migrants made decisions based on their needs and the needs of their families. The Mexican government might decry workers’ decisions to migrate illegally, but there was little they could do to stop this movement. By the same token, U.S. immigration authorities might believe they could deport migrants after the completion of the harvest season, but migrants often evaded such attempts at border policing. Though each nation attempted to assert their power over the border—either by withholding migrant labor, or by permitting migrant labor—workers themselves often frustrated these plans.

Fronteras: One of the most fascinating parts of your book is how you contrast the white, paternalistic and racist view of undocumented workers with the actual experiences and identity of those workers. You do this by contrasting the attitudes of Texas grower Carrol Norquest in comparison to the memories and experiences of the Magallan family, which worked his lands for many years. How did you discover the Magallan family members and how do their memories undermine racist tropes used by Texas growers?

Dr. Cristina Salinas: I interviewed Carrol Norquest’s son, Kelly, who generously shared his father’s unpublished manuscript as well as his memories about growing up on the Norquest farm. He was no longer in contact with any of the workers that used to work for his father, but he remembered their last name and where they were from. The Magallan family had members in two small communities on either side of the Rio Grande: Rancho Grande in Tamaulipas on the outskirts of Reynosa, and in Granjeno, in Hidalgo County in South Texas. Through friends and contacts, I secured an interview with a member of the Magallan family in Granjeno and through him I met several members of the Magallan family who had worked on the Norquest farm.

Carrol Norquest published a book in 1972 called Rio Grande Wetbacks. In that book, Norquest shared stories of his time as a farmer in South Texas, and many of those stories centered on his relationship between himself and his workers. In those stories, he fashioned himself a paterfamilias, not just to his own family members, but also to the many people who worked for him, whom he characterized as childlike and dependent.

In my interviews with members of the Magallan family who worked on the Norquest farm, or whose relatives worked there, they also described a family-like set up, with multiple members of the extended Magallan family working there on a yearly basis. However, rather than reading it solely as a patriarchal demesne controlled by Norquest, one can see that the Magallanes used the familiarity of their relationship with him to find jobs for cousins, brothers, and other kin. In that way, they were able to re-create family in their working environment on the Norquest farm, and keep more of their money within their family circles.

To push this analysis further, the Magallanes were in some ways able to bring Norquest into their own conceptions of familial boss-worker relationships. For example, Norquest recounted a story in which one of his workers requested a loan from him to help him buy a wedding dress for his intended bride. Norquest was bewildered by this request, but after some encouragement by another trusted employee, Norquest went ahead and lent him the money. It could have been a simple request for money, but another way to read this is that through the enactment of traditional patron-peon relationships, the worker was trying to reinforce the bonds of familiarity between them and bring Norquest into their social and cultural world.  

“The labor situation in Texas demonstrated the limits of the Mexican government’s power to improve the working and living conditions of Mexican workers in the United States.”

Fronteras: In Chapter 4 of Managed Migrations, you talk about the vexed relationship between the Mexican government and the state of Texas over the binational, wartime bracero program, through which U.S. employers brought Mexican agricultural workers to the United States. The Mexican government at first excluded Texas from the program because of the state’s long history of mistreating its Mexican residents and workers but ultimately agreed in 1947 to allow braceros into Texas. Working conditions did not improve, and fell short of what the Mexican government had originally intended. How did that happen? 

Dr. Cristina Salinas: The labor situation in Texas demonstrated the limits of the Mexican government’s power to improve the working and living conditions of Mexican workers in the United States. The blacklist did not keep Mexicans workers out of Texas fields. On the contrary, Texas growers continued to benefit from the labor of Mexican workers, but Mexican migrants were laboring without even the rather flimsy protections the bracero program offered. Mexican officials decided that Texas’s continued access to undocumented labor would undermine the entire program, so they decided to open the state to braceros, though at wages that were far lower than neighboring states, much to the officials’ dismay.

And attempts to withhold Mexican workers from certain areas of the country often failed, sometimes through the direct intervention of the Border Patrol, as I show in chapter five. In that chapter, I describe how stalled bracero negotiations in Ciudad Juárez led to the Border Patrol taking the extraordinary step of allowing thousands of undocumented migrants to cross the Rio Grande, instantly detaining them and paroling them to waiting growers, so that the growers would not have to give in to Mexican officials’ demands for higher wages. Many of those workers ended up in Texas fields, which at that moment had been outside of the parameters of the bracero program.

Fronteras: Now that Managed Migrations is out, and an award-winner (!), what future projects are you interested in pursuing?

Dr. Cristina Salinas: In my current research, I am tracing the emergence of the coyote, or migrant smuggler, in immigration law and enforcement (and non-enforcement). In the middle of the twentieth century, the United States increased the penalties for those accused of bringing in, concealing, and transporting undocumented immigrants into the United States, making such actions a felony. This same legislation contained a proviso, however, noting that employment did not constitute harboring. Known as the Texas Proviso, this clarification illustrated the paradox of immigration law, which defined the activity performed by smugglers as criminal while shielding employers from harm even if they also performed the same acts. Since that time, migrants continued to be criminalized, with ever increasing penalties for violating immigration laws, and have shouldered much of the burden of engaging within a transnational labor system. As for smugglers, they have become the figures of villainy and cruelty, taking the moral brunt of the same transnational system of migration and labor.

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