In Borderland

Contextual Essay

Introduction

In the aftermath of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the U.S. annexed a third of Mexico’s territories into its sovereignty. This annexation included the areas that are now California, Nevada, Utah, most of New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado, and parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. On this basis, the U.S. incorporated and turned more than 80,000 Mexicans living in those areas into U.S. nationals. 1 New territory led to the construction of new boundaries. In fact, after the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, the U.S. had created a 3,200-kilometer border between it and Mexico. 2 The boundaries between the two countries were shaped by multidimensional factors, ranging from socioeconomic to political circumstances. Some political events that shaped the two nations’ borderlands were the U.S.’s nineteenth-century annexation and colonization projects in northern Mexico and the Mexican Revolution in 1910; the latter would plunge the two countries into a series of disputes and tensions along their borderline. 3 Additionally, economic-driven factors also played critical roles in shaping the creation of communities in the border frontiers of the two countries.  These economic ties reflect dynamic and intricate cross-border linkages that the U.S. and Mexico share. This essay studies how different economic and sociopolitical circumstances in different periods incentivized migrants from Mexico to resettle in different border cities along the U.S. and Mexico border. As Connie Chancla aptly points out how borderlands are not only connoting abstract political demarcation of countries or academic paradigms to encapsulate cultural hybridity. On this basis, boundaries also contain memories, “the wounded borderlands,” that remind us how immigrants, many of whom were working-class women workers, suffered the violence and suppression of contemporary immigration policy. 4 The essay also introduces how different Chicana artist groups and writers seek to put women at the epicenter of the historical processes that constructed the borderlands. Through their works, they empower and make visible their and other women’s mistreatments, revealing and challenging the systematic structures that have oppressed generations of migrant women workers in the border areas between the U.S and Mexico. 5

An Imagined Border

On paper, the U.S-Mexico border came into being when Mexico declared independence from Spain in 1821. However, as Douglas Massey points out, the border areas between the two nations at the time were elusive; American, coming from southern and border states of the U.S., often entered and settled in lands that were still under Mexico’s jurisdiction. 6 Through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the direct aftermath of the U.S-Mexico War between 1846 and 1848, and later on the Garden Purchase in 1853, the U.S. successfully incorporated Mexico’s northernmost provinces into its sovereignty, in return for $15 million and, later on, an additional $10 million compensation package for Mexico.7 Starting from the nineteenth-century, the U.S finalized its borderline with its southern neighbor as Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California became the country new border states. Similarly, Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, and Baja California became the new border states on the Mexican side. 8 In the 1990s, roughly 9 million people, lived along the border areas between the two countries. While 3.8 million people were living in the Mexican municipios, 5.1 million resided in different border counties on the U. S’s side. 9 Three most prominent groups of the population living along the border areas in the U.S side are Anglo American, Mexican American, and other groups (African Americans, Native Americans, etc.).9 Comparing the census data from 1980 to 1990, there was a noticeable demographic shift along the U.S. borderlands: the number of Hispanics communities increased more rapidly than that of the Anglos. In some border counties, the number of Anglos even dropped. This demographic shift reflects Mexican Americans’ high birth rates, the increase of arrived immigrants from Mexico, and the relocation of some Anglo communities in several border counties. 10 Although multidimensional circumstances were at play that led to the rise of Mexican workers migrating and resettling in the U.S. border areas, economic factors were by far one the most common reasons that incentivized waves of workers, especially low-wage workers from Mexico to the U.S.

The Moving

It is worth noting that long-distance migration from Mexico to the southwestern U.S. only began at the beginning of the twentieth century. 11 In 1907, the U.S. and Japanese governments passed the Gentlemen Agreement; under the agreement, the U.S. government agreed to accept the entry of Japanese immigrants in exchange for the Japanese government’s commitment not to allow these immigrants to depart from Japan to the U.S. in the first place.12 States like California have relied heavily on cheap migratory labor from Japan or China (Chinese labor forces were also cut off due to the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882) for land clearing and cultivation since the nineteenth century. 13 Not surprisingly, the ascent agreement and the popular anti-Asian sentiment at the time led to worker shortages throughout the southwestern states of the U.S., especially in agriculture. One notable example is sugar beet. Because of the massive demand for sugar from sugar beet, sugar beet acreage increased more rapidly than any other crop since the 1900s. The total number of lands planted for sugar beets increased from 110,170 acres in 1899 to 364,093 in 1909. 14 To combat the labor shortages that resulted from the Gentlemen Agreement, employers throughout the southwestern U.S. started to recruit Mexican migrant workers to fill in the vacuum left by Japanese workers. White American nativists at the turn of the century viewed Mexican foreign workers as benign threats to the United States and its homogeneity. Such a response greatly contrasts with how these nativists viewed the Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian communities as existential threats to the American way of living and its cultural homogeneity. 15 Nevertheless, in the white American imagination, the Mexicans were viewed as a regressive group that remained inferior to the whites. 16 The Senate’s Dillingham Commission report of 1911 described the Mexicans as “notoriously indolent and unprogressive in all matters of education and culture” and that they were only fit for “the lowest grade of non-assimilable native-born races.17 In 1929, with the advent of the Great Depression, Mexican foreign workers were seen as competitors that took jobs away from the Anglo-Americans. On this basis, from 1929 to 1937, around 458,000 Mexicans were forcefully deported to the nearest border city on the Mexican side. 18 This paradigm quickly shifted in the 1940s when the U.S. entered World War II. Once again, when the military draft and war mobilization created labor shortages throughout the nation, the U.S. saw itself trying to attract new waves of migrant workers from Mexican. This time was through the Bracero Program, the bilateral labor-contract agreement that the U.S. passed into law in 1942. Under the program, millions of Mexican migrant workers were allowed to come to the U.S. as short-term agricultural labor contractors. On that note, the Bracero Program and the initiative that followed it, the Border Industrialization Program (BIP), fueled large-scale waves of low-wage workers, many of whom came from Mexico to border cities along the U.S. and Mexico. These workers were attracted to these areas because of their broad range of opportunities to make a living; additionally, employers in these locations also paid these migrant workers higher wages than their home country. Through the BIP, starting in 1965, the U.S. and other foreign companies were allowed to open low-wage assembly plants, or maquiladoras, along the Mexican border frontier. 19 It is worth knowing that U.S. corporations owned about 90% of these maquiladoras, whose primary labor force was primarily young women.20 Women working in maquiladoras or other low-wage industries were exposed to toxic and abusive working environments. Many Chicana artists in recent years attempted to make visible and empower these women’s struggles and oppression through different graphic expressions such as posters and prints. These prints are introduced as primary sources for this research project. Some works that I mention include Yolanda Lopez’s Woman Work is Never Done: Dolores Huerta, Alma Lopez’s California Fashions Slaves, Alma Lopez’s Ixta, etc. Together, these works challenge the systemic oppression that marginalized groups such as migrant women workers endured over the years.

Conclusion

The presence of Mexican migrant workers in the U.S. only began at the beginning of the twentieth century. Though various factors were at play to incentivize these workers ‘migration to border cities along the U.S-Mexico borderline, higher wages and social advancement opportunities were among two of the most popular reasons. Different U.S-led economic programs and initiatives, such as the Bracero Program or the BIP, led to new waves of migrant workers arriving in maquiladora or other low-wage industries along the U.S. and Mexico borderlands. In recent years, notable Chicana artists used different visual representations, such as prints and posters, to portray the struggles and oppression women migrant workers faced while working in these low-wage industries.        

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  2. Romo, 217.
  3. Martínez, Oscar J, “THE U.S.-MEXICO BORDERLANDS,” In Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, (University of Arizona Press, 1994), 34. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1qwwj6s.9.
  4. Gaitán, María Elena, The Adventures of Connie Chancla, 1999.
  5. Huacuja, L. Judith, “Borderlands Critical Subjectivity in Recent Chicana Art,” in Gender on the Borderlands, ed. Castañeda, Antonia (Frontiers Publishing, 2007), 105.
  6. Massey, Douglas S, “The Mexico-U.S. Border in the American Imagination,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 160, no. 2 (2016): 160–77. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26159208.
  7. Massey, 162.
  8. Martínez, 33.
  9. Mexico, X censo general de polación, 1980; Mexico, XI censo general de población y Vivienda, 1990: Resultados preliminaries; U.S., Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1991; U.S., Immigration and Naturalization Service, Statistical Yearbook, 1989.
  10. Martínez, 44.
  11. Cardoso, L. A., Mexican Emigration to the United States, 1897-1931: Socio-Economic Patterns (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 18)
  12. Massey, 163.
  13. Cardoso, 20.
  14. Cardoso, 19.
  15. Cardoso, 21.
  16. Cardoso, 22.
  17. U.S. Immigration Commission, Immigrants in Industries: Part 25: Japanese and Other Immigrant Races in the Pacific Coast and Rocky Mountain States: Agriculture (Washington, D.C., USA: Government Printing Office, 1911), pp. 50, 59, 94
  18. Massey, 164.
  19. Martínez, 39.
  20. Kopinak, Kathryn M.,“Gender as a Vehicle for the Subordination of Women Maquiladora Workers in Mexico,” Latin American Perspectives 22 (1995): 32.
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