Description
The answers MUST thoroughly answer and define the term (this includes all relevant material associated with the term.) Use complete sentences. USE YOUR OWN WORDS! DO NOT CUT AND PASTE FROM THE INTERNET, ESPECIALLY WIKIPEDIA! CITE YOUR SOURCES!! AVOID ONLINE CHAT ROOMS, ESPECIALLY DISCORD.
1.DEFINE and EXPLAIN THE SIGNIFICANCE…What is Mary Beltran’s argument for…:
Image Analysis and Televisual Latinos
2. DEFINE and EXPLAIN THE SIGNIFICANCE:
The Carceral State
3.DEFINE and EXPLAIN THE SIGNIFICANCE:
Caged Birds (Do Not Look on the Internet for this Term!)
4.DEFINE and EXPLAIN THE SIGNIFICANCE:
Loving v. Commonwealth of Virginia
5. DEFINE and EXPLAIN THE SIGNIFICANCE:
Understanding the Occurrence of Interracial Marriage in the US
6. DEFINE and EXPLAIN THE SIGNIFICANCE:Stonewall Riots…Why was the term riot used?6.
7. DEFINE and EXPLAIN THE SIGNIFICANCE:
Harvey Milk
8. DEFINE and EXPLAIN THE SIGNIFICANCE:The Brown Berets
9. DEFINE and EXPLAIN THE SIGNIFICANCE:
The Black Panther Party
10. DEFINE and EXPLAIN THE SIGNIFICANCE: Immigrants of Angel Island
11. What area did members of the American Indian Movement occupy for 19 months?
Unformatted Attachment Preview
University of North Carolina Press
Chapter Title: Caged Birds
Book Title: City of Inmates
Book Subtitle: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles,
1771–1965
Book Author(s): Kelly Lytle Hernández
Published by: University of North Carolina Press. (2017)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469631196_hernandez.8
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
University of North Carolina Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to City of Inmates
This content downloaded from 104.53.40.62 on Tue, 06 Nov 2018 00:37:52 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
5
Caged Birds
We, gentlemen, are just as anxious as you are not to build the civilization
of California or any other western district upon a Mexican foundation.
—S. Parker Frisselle’s testimony in the U.S. Congress, 1926
B
y 1930, when Mexicans woke for work in the borderlands, they flipped on their radios and tuned in to
hear Pedro J. González and his band, Los Madrugadores (The Early Risers). A popular radio host
and bandleader who broadcast in the early morning hours from Los Angeles, California, Pedro belted out corridos, Mexican folk songs, that chronicled the rhythms of Mexican life in the United
States. Recounting gritty tales of labor but also singing songs of love, disappointment, family, ambition, fear, and hope, Pedro serenaded Mexicans rising for work with the full register of their lives. For this reason,
for rousing every element of Mexican life in the United States, Pedro was
caged—incarcerated—in the City of Inmates.
Pedro’s fame made him unique, but his imprisonment was a sign of the
times. During the 1920s and 1930s, Mexican imprisonment steadily rose
in the United States. In part, the increasing number of Mexicans held in
U.S. jails and prisons reflected the larger number of Mexicans living in
the United States. But the rise in Mexican incarceration was staggeringly
disproportionate and deliberately steered by particular changes in U.S.
law and law enforcement, especially in the realm of immigration control.
This chapter explains how, at the federal and local levels, efforts to control
Mexican immigration to the United States prompted the rise of Mexican
incarceration within the United States. As with so many histories of the
policed and incarcerated, the ordinary people at the center of this tale are
largely unnamed in the official archives. But Pedro J. González, a determined chronicler of the Mexican experience in the United States, built an
archive of his own, documenting the rise of Mexican incarceration in Los
Angeles. Therefore, after chronicling how changes in U.S. immigration law
and local law enforcement practices sparked a rise in Mexican incarceration across the borderlands during the 1920s and 1930s, this chapter returns to González’s life and archive to see the story as it unfolded, from his
perspective, in the corridors of the L.A. County Jail.
131
This content downloaded from 104.53.40.62 on Tue, 06 Nov 2018 00:37:52 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
MexAmerica
Mexican immigration to the United States boomed during the
1920s. Following the decline of white male itinerancy, the exclusion of
Chinese workers, and the nadir of California’s Indigenous population,
Mexicans emerged as the majority low-wage workforce in many western
industries. As the president of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce explained, “We are totally dependent . . . upon Mexico for agricultural and
industrial common or casual labor. It is our only source of supply.”1
But Mexican immigrants were more than common and casual laborers.
Living and working in the United States, Mexicans formed communities
and associations, built homes, raised families, joined labor unions, and
established everything from newspapers and businesses to bands and baseball teams. Building what has been described as MexAmerica and raising
the first generation of Mexican Americans, Mexican immigrants made
full and permanent lives for themselves and their children—an increasing
number of whom were U.S.-born citizens—in the United States.2
The rise of MexAmerica was a deeply divisive topic in the U.S. Congress
during the 1920s. In a decade now remembered as the “Tribal Twenties”—
a time when the Ku Klux Klan was reborn, Jim Crow came of age, and public intellectuals preached the science of eugenics—many representatives,
especially those popularly known as “Nativists,” hoped to restrict and even
end immigration to the United States from every region of the world other
than western Europe.3 In the past, they argued, slaveholders had made a
terrible mistake by importing Africans into the country in the blind pursuit of profit. Nothing could be done to undo the tragedy of slavery—the
introduction of Africans to the country, that is—but, they hoped, new immigration laws would limit the future peopling of the United States.
For them, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act had been just the beginning of an enduring effort to restrict immigration to the United States.
In the years that followed the 1882 law, Congress further restricted who
could legally enter the United States. By 1917, Congress had banned all
Asian immigration to the United States and also categorically prohibited
all prostitutes, convicts, anarchists, epileptics, “lunatics,” “idiots,” contract
laborers, and those “liable to become public charges” from entering the
United States. Moreover, Congress adopted a fee structure and literacy
test designed to keep the poor and illiterate from entering the country.
Many Nativists still wanted more. In particular, they demanded a comprehensive whites-only immigration system.4
In 1924, the Nativists scored a major legislative victory with the pas132 Ca g e d Bi r d s
This content downloaded from 104.53.40.62 on Tue, 06 Nov 2018 00:37:52 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
sage of the National Origins Act. The law affirmed all previous immigration restrictions, such as the total bans on contract laborers, epileptics, anarchists, polygamists, criminals, and all Asian immigrants. The 1924 law
also required all immigrants to submit to inspection at a U.S. immigration
station, where they would have to pass a literacy test and a health exam
and pay $18 in head taxes and visa fees before legally entering the country.
Only western Europeans, they believed, would be able to pass such exams
and pay the fees required for legal entry into the United States. Finally,
the 1924 National Origins Act also established a system of national quotas that limited the total number of immigrants allowed to enter the country each year. The quota system constituted what historian John Higham
has described as a “Nordic victory” by narrowing the pathways of legal
immigration to allow only a particular portion of the world’s population
to enter: 96 percent of all quota slots were reserved for European immigrants.5
The 1924 Immigration Act was passed at a key moment in the history
of the United States as a white settler society. Amid the immigration debates, Congress refused to extend federal protection to African American
lives by declining to pass antilynching legislation. The same Congress imposed U.S. citizenship on all Native peoples born within the boundaries of
the continental United States. Some Native peoples wanted U.S. citizenship, hoping that it would incorporate them into U.S. society and better
protect their rights, lives, and land. David Morales (Tongva) “fought” for
U.S. citizenship and the right to vote. Well into the twenty-first century, his
children and grandchildren never forgot his fight, using the franchise to
advocate for Tongva-Gabrielino communities in the Los Angeles Basin.6
Other Native peoples did not desire citizenship, seeing the imposition of
U.S. citizenship as another challenge to their sovereignty.7
Passing the 1924 Immigration Act while claiming Native peoples as citizens and refusing to protect black lives, Congress both consolidated and
thickened immigrant exclusion as a pillar of white settler dominance in
the United States.8 In particular, as Mae Ngai has powerfully argued, the
Immigration Act drew a new line around all of Europe, making Europe
the only legitimate source of immigration to the United States and, in
turn, “construct[ing] a white American race, in which persons of European descent shared a common whiteness distinct from those deemed to
be not white and nonwhite acquired sharper definition.”9 In other words,
the law swelled the white settler community by broadening the state’s
definition of a white racial identity to include all Anglo-Americans and
European immigrants but hardened distinctions between whites and nonCa g e d Bi r d s 133
This content downloaded from 104.53.40.62 on Tue, 06 Nov 2018 00:37:52 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
whites. Several days after passing the new law, Congress established the
U.S. Border Patrol to enforce U.S. immigration law and the boundaries it
erected between white and nonwhite within the United States, especially
in the borderlands.10
However, to pass the National Origins Act, the Nativists in Congress
made a painful compromise. Employers across the southwestern United
States vehemently opposed the quota system. At a time when U.S. immigration authorities counted 100,000 Mexicans crossing the border each
year, the quota system would limit Mexican immigration to a few hundred border crossers annually. The quota system threatened to cut the
surge of Mexican immigration to a trickle. But industries in the West had
become “dependent” on Mexican labor, explained employers, who voiced
their opposition to the new law. Under pressure from these employers, a
bloc of congressmen from western states refused to vote for a comprehensive quota system, forcing the Nativists in Congress to choose between accepting a Mexican quota exemption or passing no immigration law at all.
The westerners won. Therefore, the 1924 National Origins Act exempted
all immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, including Mexican immigrants, from the quota system. So long as Mexican immigrants complied
with the administrative requirements for legal entry—submitted to inspection at an official port of entry, passed the literacy test and health
exam, and paid the $18 head tax—an unlimited number of them could
enter the United States each year.
Nativists chafed at the Western Hemisphere exemption. While the
quota system reduced immigration from most corners of the world, Mexican immigration soared. In fact, by the end of the 1920s, Mexico became
one of the leading sources of immigration to the United States. This unnerved the Nativists. Mexicans, they hollered, were “peons,” “mongrels,”
and “racially unfit for [U.S.] citizenship.” 11 Mexican immigration, they believed, threatened to degrade the nation’s “Aryan” stock. It needed to be
stopped. But according to the 1924 Immigration Act, an unlimited number of Mexicans would be allowed to enter the United States every year.
All Mexicans had to do was travel to an official port of entry anywhere
along the U.S.-Mexico border, submit to inspection, pass the literacy test
and health exam, and pay—or have paid by their employers—the $18 entrance fee. Mexicans did this 1 million times during the 1920s. On top
of this, many Mexicans crossed the border without officially registering
for legal entry. They evaded the expense and inconvenience of legal entry
and, instead, surreptitiously crossed the border along its many desolate
stretches between ports of entry. The U.S. Immigration Service estimated
134 Ca g e d Bi r d s
This content downloaded from 104.53.40.62 on Tue, 06 Nov 2018 00:37:52 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
that Mexicans made a half-million unauthorized border crossings during
the 1920s. With western industries continuing to expand, every indicator
suggested that Mexican immigration, both authorized and unauthorized,
would only increase in the years ahead. The continued threat of Mexico’s
“mongrels” migrating into the United States undermined the Nativists’
Nordic victory of 1924.
But the Nativists in Congress did not give up. After the passage of the
1924 Immigration Act, they proposed bill after bill attempting to add
Mexico to the quota system. Between 1926 and 1930, Congress repeatedly debated the future of Mexican immigration into the United States.
Each time, employers—namely those in the business of industrial agriculture in the U.S. West—protested. S. Parker Frisselle was the first person to testify before Congress when the Mexican quota hearings began in
January 1926. An influential farmer and lobbyist from California, Frisselle was a leading voice among the dozens of agribusiness owners who
journeyed to Congress to support unrestricted Mexican immigration to
the United States. Immigration control, Frisselle conceded, was one of
Congress’s most sacred duties. Immigrants, he explained, were permanent
residents who, in time, became U.S. citizens. Congress, therefore, rightly
passed laws to restrict, limit, and filter immigration to the United States.
Thus Frisselle supported the Nativists’ pursuit of immigration restriction.
“We, gentlemen,” he testified, “are just as anxious as you are not to build
the civilization of California or any other western district upon a Mexican
foundation.”12
However, argued Frisselle, Mexicans were not immigrants. “There is . . .
in the minds of many the thought that the Mexican is an immigrant,” explained Frisselle. That thought was wrong, he assured. “The Mexican,” he
testified, “does not remain.” “He always goes back,” promised Frisselle.13
“The Mexican,” continued Frisselle, “is a ‘homer.’ Like the pigeon he goes
home to roost.”14 On this promise that Mexicans were “bird[s] of passage”
who would, at the end of each season, return to Mexico, never settling
north of the border and never becoming Mexican American, the western
lobby defeated the 1926 bill to cap Mexican immigration to the United
States.
Two years later, as Congress continued to debate Mexican immigration, George P. Clements, a lobbyist from Los Angeles, emerged as a leader
among the western agribusinessmen. As the director of the Agricultural
Bureau of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, Clements’s full-time
occupation was the protection and advancement of the interests of agribusiness. An evangelist for unrestricted Mexican immigration, he travCa g e d Bi r d s 135
This content downloaded from 104.53.40.62 on Tue, 06 Nov 2018 00:37:52 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
eled around Los Angeles and throughout the southwest lecturing on the
topic. He also provided research to congressional committees, consulted
with California’s governors, organized industrywide meetings, and vigorously confronted all challenges to the organization of agriculture in the
West. When Mexican workers attempted to form labor unions, Clements
planted spies among them and coordinated with local police to arrest
picketers. When liberal academics challenged the inequities of agribusiness, Clements picked apart their claims in counterstudies and editorials.
Indefatigable, Clements was a driving force behind the western lobby for
unrestricted Mexican immigration.
According to Clements, just one fact mattered in the Mexican immigration debate. The fact, as Clements put it, was that Mexican immigrants were “swallows”: like migrating birds, they would never permanently settle within the United States. Mexicans, he explained, “have no
intention of becoming citizens within the United States.” 15 A Mexican
would not settle in the United States because “his homing instincts take
him back to Mexico.” But if the homing instinct of Mexico’s swallows were
ever to falter, “we need not be burdened with his keep.” Estimating that
80 percent of California’s Mexican working population had entered the
country without authorization, Clements assured worried Nativists that
Mexicans could be forcibly removed from the country. “He is deportable,”
Clements wrote, lectured, and testified. Mexican deportability, argued
Clements, was a social fact that Congress could depend on when voting to
leave Mexican immigration unrestricted.16
Clements also asked the opponents of unrestricted Mexican immigration to carefully consider one question before voting against it. That
question, according to Clements, had nothing to do with Mexicans. It had
to do with blacks. “The one problem which should give us pause is the
negro problem,” explained Clements. “I warn you. American business has
no conscience. If the Mexican is denied us, the [Puerto Rican] negro will
come,” he cautioned.17 Knowing his adversary well, Clements baited the
nervous Nativists of the Tribal Twenties. “Which do you choose,” he asked,
Mexico’s deportable birds of passage or Puerto Rican Negroes who, as citizens, would leave the edge of U.S. empire to settle within the final frontier
of Anglo-America? “When once here always here,” warned Clements; the
Puerto Rican Negro would pose “a continual social problem and a growing
menace. You can not deport him.” The only real question, therefore, was
whether Congress would open the Anglo-American West to permanent
black settlement or make its peace with Mexico’s birds of passage. Itiner136 Ca g e d Bi r d s
This content downloaded from 104.53.40.62 on Tue, 06 Nov 2018 00:37:52 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
ant, impermanent, and disposable Mexican labor migration, he offered,
was the only real solution for the development of the Anglo-American
West.
But by 1929, the western promises of Mexican impermanence had worn
thin. Ten percent of the Mexican population already lived north of the
border. Los Angeles was home to the second-largest Mexican community
anywhere in the world, and small Mexican communities were developing
as far north as Detroit. How many more Mexicans would cross the border
to settle in the United States? Nativists in Congress pounded the western
employers for answers, charging them with recklessly courting the nation’s
racial doom with unrestricted migration from Mexico. Western employers
refused to budge.
At this moment, amid the escalating conflict between Anglo-American
employers in the West and anxious Nativists in Congress, a senator from
Dixie proposed a compromise.
“A Negro-p hobia That Knew No Bounds”
A proud and unreconstructed white supremacist, Coleman Livingston Blease hailed from the hills of South Carolina. When Blease was
elected to the state assembly in 1889, his first legislative proposal was a
bill to racially segregate all railroad cars in South Carolina. The bill failed,
but in the years ahead, Blease successfully rode a rising wave of rabid antiblack racism to the South Carolina governorship and then, in 1925, to the
U.S. Senate. The self-appointed “political heir” to “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman,
Senator Blease was, according to one biographer, touched by a strain of
“Negro-phobia that knew no bounds.” 18
When Blease marched into Congress in 1925, he was prepared to battle
any perceived threat to white supremacy. He was against the idea of a
world court because he opposed any “court where we [Anglo-Americans]
are to sit side by side with a full blooded ‘nigger.’” In this case, Blease referred to the possibility of a Haitian judge being appointed to the world
court.19 In terms of immigration control, Blease campaigned on 100 percent Americanism, and once in Congress, he feverishly opposed any attempt to roll back immigration restriction and pushed Congress to prohibit the U.S. government from hiring noncitizens. The bill was rejected
three times. He also proposed limiting the voting rights of naturalized
citizens. This, too, Congress rejected. But in early 1929, as Congress was
locked in an unending debate over the rise of Mexican immigration to
Ca g e d Bi r d s 137
This content downloaded from 104.53.40.62 on Tue, 06 Nov 2018 00:37:52 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
the United States, it was Senator Coleman Livingston Blease from South
Carolina who negotiated a settlement between the congressional Nativists
and western agribusinessmen during the Tribal Twenties.20
Blease shifted the conversation to controlling unauthorized Mexican
migration rather than capping authorized migration. Citing the large
number of unauthorized border crossings made by Mexicans each year,
Senator Blease proposed criminalizing unlawful entry into the United
States. Mexicans certainly regularly crossed the border without authorization, making them particularly vulnerable to prosecution and incarceration according to Blease’s bill. But Blease’s proposal was more than racially
targeted. It was also a sly legal maneuver, sidestepping the U.S. Supreme
Court’s rulings in Fong Yue Ting and Wong Wing, which decriminalized
“unlawfully residing” within the United States, by targeting “unlawfully
entering” the United States instead. According to Senator Blease’s proposal, “unlawfully entering the country” would be a misdemeanor punishable by a $1,000 fine and/or up to one year in prison, while unlawfully
returning to the United States after deportation would be a felony punishable by a $1,000 fine and/or up to two years in prison.21 As written, the
new law would affect any immigrant who unlawfully entered the United
States, but it was introduced into Congress as a measure to control and
punish unlawful Mexican immigrants, in particular. To this, the western
agribusinessmen registered no protest. Mexican deportability, after all,
was an asset to agribusinessmen in search of a temporary labor force. As
Frisselle put it in 1926, “We, in California, would greatly prefer some set
up in which our peak labor demands might be met and upon the completion of our harvest these laborers returned to their country.” 22 Like
deportation, the criminalization of unauthorized entry only strengthened
the position of agribusiness owners.23 On March 4, 1929, Congress passed
Blease’s bill. Within one year, Blease’s law dramatically altered the story of
race and imprisonment in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
Caged Birds
With stunning precision, the criminalization of unlawful entry
caged thousands of Mexico’s proverbial birds of passage. Within one year
of enforcement, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 7,001 cases of unlawful entry.24
By 1939, they had prosecuted more than 44,000 cases. In no year did the
U.S. attorneys’ conviction rate fall below 93 percent of all immigration
cases. Taking custody of individuals convicted on federal immigration
138 Ca g e d Bi r d s
This content downloaded from 104.53.40.62 on Tue, 06 Nov 2018 00:37:52 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
charges, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons reported that Mexicans never comprised less than 84.6 percent of all imprisoned immigrants.25 Some years,
Mexicans comprised 99 percent of immigration offenders. Therefore, by
the end of the 1930s, tens of thousands of Mexicans had been arrested,
charged, prosecuted, and imprisoned for unlawfully entering the United
States. With 71 percent of all Mexican federal prisoners charged with immigration crimes, no other federal legislation—not prohibition, not drug
laws, and neither laws against prostitution nor the Mann Act—sent more
Mexicans to federal prison during these years.26
Mexican authorities protested the imprisonment of Mexico’s unauthorized border crossers. Led by Enrique Santibañez, the Mexican consul
in San Antonio, Mexican consuls in the borderlands visited county jails,
taking an informal census of the number of Mexicans behind bars. They
reported stories of cells crammed with Mexicans charged with or convicted for unlawful entry. Before even a single year of the new law’s implementation had passed, Santibañez was predicting that to cage Mexico’s
unlawful border crossers, the U.S. government would have to “build special jails.”27 He was correct.
Until the 1930s, the U.S. federal penal system was relatively small.
The U.S. government operated just three federal prisons: McNeill Island
Prison in Washington State, Leavenworth Prison in Kansas, and the U.S.
Penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. In addition to these prisons, the federal
government operated several jails, reformatories, and road camps, none of
which were located west of the Mississippi River. The federal government
operated no facilities in the U.S.-Mexico border region, and the total federal penal capacity was just 13,000.
Enforcement of the Immigration Act of March 4, 1929, taxed the federal prison system. For nearly a decade, prohibition had filled federal prisons and jails with inmates. As the director of the Bureau of Prisons explained, “Everywhere there has been overcrowding . . . and overtaxing of
facilities. . . . The breaking point has been reached.”28 Imprisoning immigration offenders only made matters worse. Within one year of the law’s
passage, convictions on immigration charges surpassed all other federal
crimes but liquor charges. Immigration offenders, in other words, quickly
emerged as the second-largest population within the already overcrowded
federal prison system. Citing overcrowding in general, compounded by the
new demands of imprisoning immigration offenders in border regions,
federal prison officials urged Congress to provide funding to expand the
federal prison system.29 In May 1930, Congress complied, and the U.S. BuCa g e d Bi r d s 139
This content downloaded from 104.53.40.62 on Tue, 06 Nov 2018 00:37:52 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
A photo of La Tuna Detention Farm when it first opened in 1932 near El Paso, Texas.
(Folder 59, box 8, RG 129-G, NARA II)
reau of Prisons began establishing new jails and prisons across the country. Among the first of the new facilities to be built was La Tuna, a federal
prison farm established just north of El Paso, Texas, in April 1932.
From La Tuna (El Paso)
to Terminal Island (Los Angeles)
La Tuna was a sprawling prison farm with a maximum capacity
of 420. A few of the men confined at La Tuna were convicted in the El
Paso region on nonimmigration charges, such as liquor smuggling or car
theft. But more than 90 percent of all men sent to La Tuna were Mexicans
convicted on immigration charges.30 As intended, La Tuna was a large
borderland prison established to cage Mexico’s “birds of passage” for unlawfully entering the United States.
Within just three months of opening, La Tuna was overcrowded. To
“tak[e] on a little more than capacity,” the warden at La Tuna, T. B. White,
transformed the chapel into a dormitory, upping capacity to 500.31 Still, by
the beginning of 1933, La Tuna averaged more than 500 men daily. When
140 Ca g e d Bi r d s
This content downloaded from 104.53.40.62 on Tue, 06 Nov 2018 00:37:52 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Warden White informed his supervisors within the U.S. Bureau of Prisons
that La Tuna had breached its capacity in early 1933, the assistant director
of the bureau, James V. Bennett, was charged with finding a way to handle
La Tuna’s overflow.
Promising Warden White that he would find a “sufficiently isolated
place to camp some of your Mexican friends,” Bennett traveled to Arizona
and rode a donkey into the desert in March 1933.32 On a twenty-five-mile
trek that wound across the desert and up into the Santa Catalina Mountains, Bennett searched for a new place to imprison Mexicans in the region. At the base of the mountains, Bennett found a spot where Mexicans convicted of unlawful entry could be housed in tents and put to work
building a new road. He named the site after the nearest town, calling the
roughshod convict labor facility Tucson Prison Camp #10.
Opened in the summer of 1933, Tucson Prison Camp #10 was a
minimum-security convict labor camp quickly assembled in a small desert
clearing at the base of the Santa Catalina Mountains. From a basecamp
filled with canvas tents and work tools, men imprisoned at the camp were
to build a road up, through, and across the mountains to a little town
named Oracle, where local residents had hopes of building a health resort. As James Bennett explained after his survey of the area, “The chief
purpose of the road is to open up a recreational area for the residents of
Tucson so they can escape the heat of the lower country during the hot
summer months.”33
The first warden assigned to Tucson was James Gaffney, who had worked
at a prison in Alabama prior to his appointment in the Arizona borderlands. With Gaffney worked five to six guards. Sent hundreds of imprisoned immigrants from La Tuna and across the Arizona and New Mexico
borderlands, Warden Gaffney and the guards supervised the men as they
blasted a road into the rocky mountainside bursting from the boiling landscape of the Arizona borderlands. The work slowly progressed at Tucson,
but Gaffney soon described Mexican immigration offenders as a “thorn
in our side.”34 As he and others acknowledged, a “considerable” number
of Mexican immigration offenders escaped from the Tucson prison camp.
More than forty incarcerated men, almost all of them Mexican deportees,
fled the camp in the summer of 1933.35 According to Gaffney, the escapes
from the Tucson prison camp “ruined my escape record of which I was
very proud over in Alabama.”36 Trying to explain the camp’s high escape
rate, Warden Gaffney described the escapees as “young Mexicans, with
very few brains, if any.”37 Sanford Bates, the director of the U.S. Bureau of
Prisons, concurred, describing escapees from Tucson as “ignorant MexiCa g e d Bi r d s 141
This content downloaded from 104.53.40.62 on Tue, 06 Nov 2018 00:37:52 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The U.S. Bureau of Prisons archives contain envelopes stuffed with the “$50 Reward”
cards issued during the 1930s to incentivize the recapture of the many men who
escaped from Tucson Prison Camp #10. (File 4-31-3-11-0, box 177, Class 4 Files, RG 129,
NARA II)
cans.”38 But the archival record suggests that an intelligent assessment of
camp conditions prompted imprisoned Mexicans to escape from Tucson
Prison Camp #10.
Within the camp’s first year of operation, there were multiple injuries
and even deaths. For example, two inmates died when a truck they had
been riding in rolled off a mountainside road and landed roof-first some
300 feet below. “This job is extremely dangerous and let no one tell you
differently,” explained Warden Gaffney, even as he took few safety precautions. “Always jump, and jump quick,” he advised the men, when vehicles
begin to roll.39 Although escapees from Tucson Prison Camp #10 left no
traces of their motives, it is easy to believe that the camp’s dangerous labor
142 Ca g e d Bi r d s
This content downloaded from 104.53.40.62 on Tue, 06 Nov 2018 00:37:52 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
An image of the housing quarters at Tucson Prison Camp #10, 1933.
(File 4-31-3-25, box 924, entry 9, Class 4 Files, RG 129, NARA II)
conditions influenced their decisions to leave. Moreover, unlike the Alabama prisons where Warden Gaffney had previously worked, the Tucson
facility was a minimum-security camp. The guards did not carry guns, and
this significantly reduced the immediate danger to escapees.
But escapees still faced considerable consequences if captured. Judges
sentenced them to serve additional time after the completion of their
original term. For example, Francisco Valdez was originally sentenced to
serve fourteen months for unlawful reentry. After Francisco’s failed escape from the Tucson camp, a judge sentenced him to serve ten additional
months. By the time Francisco was released, he had served more than two
years in prison for breaking Blease’s law.40
Warden Gaffney, a man with experience in the southern penal system,
devised harsh punishments to be meted out to escapees and any recalcitrant men imprisoned at Tucson Prison Camp #10. For as little as attempting to mail what Gaffney described as “trifling” and “unjustified”
complaints to the bureau’s director, Gaffney had prisoners placed in “the
hole.”41 As described by one reviewer of the Tucson prison camp, the hole
was a solid box covered by a one-foot-by-four-foot steel grate. “To be confined in
