Line. Fence. Wall.

The U. S. - Mexico border, according to a video on the official White House website, is very quiet: nothing but tires crunching on gravel and the wind whistling around a high, solid-looking wall. But that's not the whole story. Today on the show, how that border went from a line in the sand, to a fence, to a wall. Guests: Rachel St. John, associate professor of history at U. C. Davis, and author of Line in the Sand: A History of the Western US Mexico Border Miguel Levario, associate professor of history at Texas Tech University and author of Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the Enemy Silvestre Reyes, former Congressman (D-TX), and former Border Patrol Sector Chief Eduardo Contreras, realtor in Brownsville, Texas To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from EasyCater, making it easy for organizations to order food for meetings and events from favorite restaurants, set up meal programs for their employees, and manage food spend all in one place at easycater.com.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Hey, everyone. Rand here. This week, as part of our ongoing immigration series, we're going to explore the origins of the US-Mexico border. Producers Christina Kim and Anya Steinberg take it from here.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  On whitehouse.gov, the official White House website, the Trump administration has posted a short video of the US-southern border.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  White vans patrol the border fence. There's no people anywhere in sight. All you can hear is the sound of wind and the slow crunch of tires on a gravel road.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  And then a caption flashes across the screen that says, "The Sound of a Secure Border: Courtesy of the One Big Beautiful Bill."

• 1:04Speaker 00

  The One Big Beautiful Bill will infuse more than $100 billion into immigration enforcement and border security. Almost half of those funds will go towards maintaining and building more of the border wall. Watch the video, and the wall looks totally solid. But go there in real life, and it can be a little different.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Hey, can you hear me?

• 1:26Speaker 02

  Can I hear you now?

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Hey, how are you?

• 1:28Speaker 02

  I'm good.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  This is Eduardo Contreras. He was born and raised in Brownsville, Texas, right on the US-Mexico border. And now he's a local Realtor.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm just turning on the lights real quick, and then I'll step outside.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  You're making the house look nice, like all Realtors do.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's part of the job.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  He's giving me an online tour of a home that's for sale in the southmost neighborhood.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  It's your typical, you know, blue collar, hard worker, American, and getting by.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Eduardo is showing me a house that's typical for the area, your standard three-bedroom, two-bath house.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  A lot of them have, you know, the nice tile.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. It's really beautiful. Everything looks really brand-new. That kitchen.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, look. Still has the record.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  But I'm not here for the tiles. Wow. Okay, and now I see we have got a kitchen door that leads to the backyard where my view is the US-Mexico border wall.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Yes, ma'am. It's huge, about 20-some feet high, that's for sure.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  And that's the backyard. This is the backyard of the house we're seeing today.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Yep. Buy this house and you can barbecue by the border wall. And that's not unheard of in this part of town.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  You have your typical border patrol agents, you know, circling around the area. And if there's areas around that have your sensors and your cameras on the fence, and that's how they, you know, protect the area.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Is this a hard house to sell because the fence is right there?

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Oh, I hope not.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  One thing that might make it easier is that the border wall here doesn't mark the actual border with Mexico. On the other side of the wall is US territory.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  The truth is, because Mexico is not literally on the other side, it's, to me, is just another big fence on the back.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  That's also pretty normal. It's not always possible to build a fence on the actual border. And what's more, the fence is full of gaps.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  There's parts of this fence that are open. It's not all, like, you know, closed. If you drive around this fence,

• 3:32Speaker 02

  there's areas where, like, it's open and there's traffic going in and out because, you know, there's people that live on those ranches or there's a small neighborhood that's on that side of that fence.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  While the wall isn't necessarily a selling point, according to Eduardo, it's partly why this newly-built house even exists.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  That wall that you see over there wasn't constructed by itself. It takes people, man-hours, money, you know, infrastructure. And look, that's why you have this beautiful new construction home. Like, somebody's gonna buy it.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  So, did you put down an offer?

• 4:09Speaker 01

  No, he and I both knew I wasn't really interested in buying. But I couldn't stop thinking about what he showed me. A border wall that isn't on the border. An enormous, intimidating fence that also has big gaps. It's way more porous than we might think. And contradictions like that have defined the border for hundreds of years.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  Right, since the first surveyors drew it. And that's where we're going to start today. Way back at that first line in the sand. To see how we could get to a place where a 20-foot-plus steel wall is going to be someone's backyard fence. I'm Anya Steinberg.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  And I'm Christina Kim. Today on Throughline, we're traveling back in time to three critical moments in the history of the border. From its origins... It wasn't a place in of itself.

• 4:57Speaker 00

  It was a place that people moved through.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  To the first fences...

• 5:01Speaker 03

  The fences were really just fences, like the way we imagined fences in our house.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  To walls of law enforcement...

• 5:07Speaker 04

  They're gonna see a wall of border patrol vehicles and agents.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  And steel.

• 5:18Speaker 05

  This is Carone de Mars calling from San Antonio, Texas. I listen to NPR's Throughline. In fact, it is the only podcast that I have a paid subscription to because it's that valuable.

• 5:34Speaker 00

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• 7:04Speaker 00

  Part One.

• 7:07Speaker 00

  Wild, barren, and worthless.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  We're somewhere in the desert between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. It's a place of extremes.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Temperatures can climb to 118 degrees under the beating sun.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  In the summer, rolling clouds bring dramatic monsoon storms, and the rivers and arroyos swell. Otherwise, it's dry.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  Partly for that reason, it was sparsely settled in the 19th century. It's a place that many indigenous people passed through.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Dozens of tribes called this area home for centuries, including the Yaki, the Tana Autumn, and the Kumiai.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  But they wouldn't have thought of the border as a specific and distinct place.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  In 1850, the US-Mexico border didn't exist yet, but it was about to.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  Hundreds of miles away, a man named John Russell Bartlett was busy packing up his things to head south. He had just been hired as the new US Boundary Commissioner, the head of a team of men in charge of marking the US-Mexico border for the first time. It's not quite what he imagined for himself.

• 8:41Speaker 05

  Bookseller from Rhode Island.

• 8:43Speaker 00

  A bookseller with big dreams. He'd gone to Washington DC hoping to become something glamorous, like a US diplomat to Denmark. Instead, he landed this job. To cross a wilderness from the Rio Grande to the Pacific Ocean, a distance of more than 800 miles, would at any time be a labor of difficulty.

• 9:07Speaker 05

  He had no experience in surveying.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  This is Rachel St. John. I'm Associate Professor of History at UC Davis. She also wrote a book called Line in the Sand: A History of the Western US-Mexico Border. The work is one for the near completion, of which we could not be too thankful. When Bartlet joined the survey, it had already been going on for over a year. And let's just say, the US Boundary Commission was not known for its outstanding workplace culture.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Bartlet was the fifth US Commissioner to be hired. One of his predecessors had left the job after being shot by his lead surveyor during a drunken argument.

• 9:51Speaker 00

  Quick pause for context here. The whole reason this survey was happening was to wrap up a war the US and Mexico had fought, a war that was primarily about expanding US territory. And the US had won.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  In February 1848, the two countries signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mexico ceded a huge amount of land, what makes up Nevada, Utah, and California, plus parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  They had agreed on the border in the treaty. Now, they needed to mark that border out on the land.

• 10:29Speaker 05

  If you read the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, it looks like a clear blueprint, right? They say, what you need to do is you need to look at this map and these few places, and just draw straight lines between them, and then follow rivers. It'll be no problem.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Famous last words.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  When the survey began, both nations sent their own team of men to meet at the border. And while American commissioners came and went, Mexico's commissioner, a man named Pedro García Conde, trudged on.

• 11:02Speaker 05

  His demonstrated talent, his scientific knowledge, specific to the material at hand, but also his true patriotism and important service he has lent to the nation.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  García Conde was grizzled. He was an experienced surveyor. And right from the start, he watched the American team fall into disarray.

• 11:32Speaker 05

  Without any real means and surrounded by the greatest misery and exposed to every danger imaginable, we are advancing the work as much as possible, given the disorganization of the American Commission.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Which wasn't to say the Mexicans had it easy. Both sides were contending with forces outside their control.

• 11:52Speaker 05

  One of the problems they run into is that the California gold rush starts.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  The American Commission couldn't find enough boats to take them to San Diego, where the survey was supposed to start.

• 12:02Speaker 05

  And so they end up getting stalled in Panama for a long time.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  When they finally got going, it was slow and hard.

• 12:10Speaker 00

  There was no GPS, no satellite imaging. Surveying was done using tools that have names I can barely pronounce, like sextants, theodolites, and circumferenters.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  And to make matters worse, the Mexican government didn't have much money after the war to finance their boundary commission. García Conde had to draw on his personal line of credit to fund the expedition. So by the time Bartlet showed up, García Conde had been through it.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  When he meets Bartlett for the first time in Paso del Norte, present-day El Paso, Texas, he's not impressed.

• 12:53Speaker 05

  El señor Bartlett, que la preside, es un bello sujeto, pero sin ideas de los trabajos que tenemos que hacer. Trajo 120 ingenieros. Mr. Bartlett, who presides over it, is a fine fellow, but without any idea of the work we have to do. We wrote 120 engineers, and except for two or three very average ones among them, the rest don't know a single word, nor do they obey the commissioner.

• 13:17Speaker 00

  But there's nothing he can do about it. This is the man he has to work with.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  And right away, the two of them run into a problem.

• 13:26Speaker 05

  They have where Paso del Norte actually is, where they're standing, and then they have where it was drawn on the map.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  They look at the treaty map, and they realize it's wrong. Paso del Norte is a good 30 miles south of what the map says. And Paso del Norte is supposed to be their starting reference point for marking the border.

• 13:50Speaker 05

  But it is actually very tricky, because depending on where they drew it, hundreds of miles were at stake. If they drew it from one place, they would shift to Mexico. If they drew it to another place, they'd shift to the United States.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  It wasn't just land at stake. People lived in this area, too. Depending on where the line landed, those people would either be Mexicans or Americans.

• 14:13Speaker 05

  These two boundary commissioners came up with a compromise, where they decided to sort of split the difference.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  We won't bore you with the details, but Mexico got a little more land to the north, and the US got a little more land to the west.

• 14:27Speaker 05

  They then went on their way.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  Bartlett kept a detailed journal of the expedition. April 19, 1851.

• 14:50Speaker 05

  A wild and barren region lay before us.

• 14:58Speaker 05

  We toiled across these sterile plains, the sun glowing fiercely and the wind hot from the parched earth, cracking the lips and burning the eyes.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  He's constantly complaining.

• 15:15Speaker 05

  The country passed over in the last three days is uninteresting and the extreme. One becomes disgusted with the ever-reoccurring sameness of plain and mountain, plant and living thing.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  They were traveling with mules and huge wagons, sometimes where there weren't roads or even trails.

• 15:36Speaker 05

  We found ourselves, all at once, surrounded by steep hills, steeper mountains, ravines, gullies, and frightful canyons.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  They were plagued by breakdowns.

• 15:48Speaker 05

  The wagon turned bottom upwards, rolling down the ravine.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  By unreliable team members.

• 15:54Speaker 05

  My cook took the opportunity to get drunk during the night.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  And by a lack of food.

• 16:00Speaker 05

  We had not tasted a potato for a year, nor any other vegetables, except a little wild asparagus.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  Most people on the commission are unexcited about this place, and Bartlett in particular, at one point writes-

• 16:14Speaker 05

  Is this the land which we have purchased and are to survey and keep at such a cost? As far as the eye can reach stretches one unbroken waist, barren, wild, and worthless.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  For both commissions, this survey was supposed to be about staking a claim on this land on behalf of their nations. It was about marking out what belonged to Mexico and what belonged to the US. And what the boundary commissioners find, in fact, is that, no, this space is mostly inhabited by, and in fact, controlled by indigenous peoples still. Many of the tribes that lived there, like the Pima and Maricopa, aided the boundary survey. They served as guides, provided food and information. But the survey also ran into bans- of Apache and Comanche people who saw the survey as an intrusion. Time after time, Native people proved to the boundary commissioners that they do not

• 17:12Speaker 00

  actually control this landscape.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Throughout the survey, the commissions are constantly splitting up to survey different pieces of the border and then meeting up again. On one of his detours, Bartlet receives bad news.

• 17:30Speaker 05

  December 24, 1851.

• 17:34Speaker 05

  Dr. Vas Binder arrived today, bringing the painful news that General Garcia Conde, the Mexican commissioner, had died.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Garcia Conde had fallen ill days after Bartlet had last seen him.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Bartlet is shaken.

• 17:54Speaker 05

  He had ever shown himself ready to aid the American commission in any way that lay in his power.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Bartlet is ready for this grueling journey to come to an end. And the end was near, or so he thought.

• 18:13Speaker 05

  Everything required to ensure the speedy completion of the work was at hand. But all of my plans were frustrated by dispatches from Washington.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  Congress decides that they don't want to approve the boundary line.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  And they'd suspended the commission.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Bartlet was in big trouble.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Remember when he and Garcia Conde compromised over where to start the survey?

• 18:38Speaker 00

  Turns out, Congress was not happy with Bartlet for the deal he'd struck. They thought he gave too much land to Mexico. The ultimate outcome of this is the two countries decide to renegotiate the boundary line. Congress forked over $10 million to buy a chunk of southern Arizona and New Mexico from Mexico. And so the borderline moved again. By the time Bartlet got the news, it had been nearly two years since he and Garcia Conde had made their initial compromise. Now it would have to be redone. The US and Mexico sent out a new survey team, and they replaced Bartlet with another commissioner.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  The survey was finally finished in October 1855. It ended up taking six years.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  The finished product was a nearly 2,000-mile-long line that followed the Rio Grande River, then stretched into the desert until it reached the Colorado River, and continued across land until it reached the Pacific Ocean. In many places, the only sign that it existed was the occasional boundary monument, these short obelisks made of stone.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  But it was still a border, a line that both nations could begin to define themselves against as they grew and changed.

• 20:10Speaker 00

  And soon, the land that Bartlet called wild, barren, and worthless would start to fill up. That's coming up.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  Hi, it's John V. from Dallas, Texas, and I love Throughline because I love stories. And without further ado, you're listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 20:44Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 20:48Speaker 00

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• 22:07Speaker 00

  Part Two. Good fences make good neighbors.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  We're at a saloon in southern Arizona, known as The Exchange.

• 22:26Speaker 00

  There's men, sitting around, drinking and gabbing, just like any old-timey western saloon.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  The saloon is in a town called Amboz Nogales. Well, actually, it's two towns: Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Mexico. That's why it's called Amboz Nogales. It means "both nogales."

• 22:47Speaker 00

  And the owner of this saloon, John Brickwood, has purposefully built it right on the border.

• 22:56Speaker 00

  So he could sell American liquor without any duty on it from inside the bar. And then he had a little box on the outside that was actually in Mexican territory. And so he could sell Mexican cigars from the box without having to pay the duties on them there as well.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  It's been a few decades since the US-Mexico border was drawn. And in places like Amos Nogales, it's still pretty theoretical. In the town's early days, you could basically only tell the difference between the Mexican and US sides because the Mexican buildings were made of adobe, while the Americans preferred to build with wood.

• 23:32Speaker 00

  For most of the 1800s, there wasn't much going on here. The town was mostly railroad workers and the gambling saloons and brothels that served them. They were building a train stop in Amos Nogales. And... The cities really take off when a railroad connects across the US-Mexico border.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  The railroad was finished in 1882, and it ran right through Amos Nogales. It brought merchants and traders to the town. The ability to move between the US and Mexico was actually a huge economic draw. And I think it's important to recognize that these government agencies and the border towns around them are initially made to support transborder movement. And things were pretty friendly between Mexico and the US along the border in these early years. They would have parades and celebrations that would bring both sides of the community together. One of the things about Amos Nogales is lots of buildings and streets are called international.

• 24:34Speaker 00

  There's a celebration of people being together, Mexicans and Americans, in a shared vision of development.

• 24:43Speaker 00

  They took pride in their interdependence. A Nogales, Arizona, newspaper wrote: "We speak of the two towns as one, for they are really such." Being divided by imaginary line only.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  As those towns get more heavily developed, as lots of buildings cluster close to the border, it becomes hard at times, particularly for government agents, but also for regular people, to distinguish between when they're in Mexico and when they're in the United States.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  One of the only signs that there was a border was a marker outside of Brickwood's saloon.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  The boundary marker that the surveyors had put in was just a big pile of rocks.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  And as things got busier in Ambos Nogales, that pile of rocks wasn't quite cutting it.

• 25:33Speaker 00

  Customs officers start saying, you know, this is impossible for us to police this space if people can just walk through John Brickwood's saloon and we can't see if they're entering the US or Mexico.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  So a new survey team came to town to mark the border more clearly.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  They put a new boundary monument, and they build it on the porch.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  A giant white obelisk, the new boundary marker, smack dab on the porch of the saloon.

• 26:01Speaker 00

  In a picture taken from that time, it's taller than the men around it. And it was just the first step towards something much larger.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  In 1897, then-US President William McKinley issued a proclamation to clear a strip of land 60 feet wide and 2 miles long, right through Ambos Nogales.

• 26:22Speaker 00

  They say, you know, in order to make clear where Mexican space stops and where American space begins, we need to move some of these buildings out of the way. We can't just have buildings right up and onto the border. John Brickwood's saloon and a slew of homes, businesses, and barns were given 90 days to vacate.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  They knocked it all down, and the saloon was no more.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  In its place was a clear strip of land.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Still, in Ambos Nogales and all along the border, there weren't many fences. The ones that were there were actually built to control the movement of cows, not people. But that was about to change.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  The Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  Border towns became particularly important because they had ports of entry, where people pay their customs duties. So if someone can take over a border town, they can take that money. Different Mexican revolutionary factions would raid American towns along the border. And as Mexico became increasingly unstable, more Mexicans started emigrating to the US.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Violence along the border increased.

• 27:42Speaker 00

  And then, in the middle of the Mexican Revolution, World War I began. That brought a whole new set of anxieties.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  The US feared that German spies could infiltrate through the border. All of a sudden, people who had long been neighbors were suspicious of each other.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  The US started to send all kinds of people to the border to address these different threats. The US government deploys the military to the border to protect people on the US side. You also have, you know, intelligence officers operating on the border, looking out for spies. More customs agents coming out, trying to watch for smuggling of guns and money. And then you have immigration officials who are trying to manage the flow of refugees.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Those big changes on the border were coming to Amboz Nogales, too. The mayor of Nogales, Mexico, ordered construction of a wire fence on the Mexican side to make it easier to manage the flow of crossings. But Amboz Nogales had already become a powder keg.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  And on August 27, 1918, the fuse was lit.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  You might hear different versions of this story, depending on who you ask. But any way you tell it, the story ends in violence.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  It was just after 4 o'clock in the afternoon.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  A Mexican carpenter named Zeferino Gil La Madrid was leaving the US after finishing work. He was carrying a bulky package under his arm as he approached Mexico.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  He was ordered to halt by American officials.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  They wanted to inspect the package.

• 29:26Speaker 00

  Mexican officials told him he should keep coming.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  The US Customs official raised his rifle to force Gil La Madrid to come back for an inspection. What happened next is still disputed today.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  Someone from either side of the border, it's unclear who, fired the first shot.

• 29:51Speaker 00

  And violence broke out actually between the two sides of the border. It was chaos.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  Mexican civilians grabbed guns and joined the fight.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  It's immortalized in this Mexican song, "El Corrido de Nogales," tells the Mexican version of the battle.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  The song goes, "When a Mexican crossed the borderline, a gringo fired a shot at him." That was the beginning of the story. "El Corrido" is all about the bravery of the Nogaleses. It says...

• 31:03Speaker 01

  There were 1,500 gringos. All were federal troops. And the people of Nogales did not let them advance.

• 31:16Speaker 00

  But things were escalating. At some point, a Mexican consul tried to negotiate with an American soldier. If they both raised a white flag, it could all be over. The American replied,

• 31:29Speaker 04

  "Go to hell. American troops don't carry white flags and don't use them. If the Mexicans don't hoist a white flag within 10 minutes, US soldiers will march in and burn Nogales Sonora."

• 31:43Speaker 00

  The Mexican side raised a white flag.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  The battle lasted more than two hours.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  As many as four Americans and 129 Mexicans were dead, including the mayor of Mexico's Nogales. And hundreds of people were wounded.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  After the Battle of Amboz Nogales, people on both sides expressed regret.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  The shooting was an unfortunate affair, started by irresponsible persons under undue stress of excitement.

• 32:26Speaker 00

  But the damage was done. And that leads a lot of government officials along the border to say, "We need a fence. We need to be really clear about marking this space."

• 32:36Speaker 01

  And so, one of the first US-built fences meant to divide people was built through Amboz Nogales.

• 32:43Speaker 00

  Whenever I think about this, I think of the Robert Frost poem, where he talks about how good fences make good neighbors. Right? That these fences are built in a very different mindset than... The border wall of today. This is not seen as an imposition by the US government on Mexico, but rather a joint effort to better demarcate where Mexican and American space end.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  The fence wasn't about keeping Mexican people out of the US.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  Mexican people in general are not seen as an immigration problem. No one cared about immigration at all on the US-Mexico border until the very late part of the 19th century.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  And if people were concerned about who was coming through the southern border, that concern was mostly about Chinese immigrants. Which isn't to say immigration wasn't a big issue in the US. It was.

• 33:50Speaker 00

  In 1924, Congress passed one of the most restrictive immigration laws in its history, setting strict quotas for who can enter the US. Congress also established the Border Patrol to control immigration, though it mainly ended up enforcing prohibition.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  By the mid 1920s, the infrastructure of the border, the fences, the manpower, and the law enforcement, the tools that we use today, were all in place.

• 34:19Speaker 04

  I walked the border, and I saw example after example of a border that was totally out of control. We have to gain control.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  That's coming up.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  This is Rachel from San Diego, California. You're listening to Throughline, my TV on. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 34:52Speaker 00

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• 35:35Speaker 03

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• 36:09Speaker 01

  Part Three: The Border Is Everywhere.

• 36:14Speaker 04

  I was born and raised on a farm here in El Paso. We grew cotton, alfalfa, stuff like that.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  This is Silvestre Reyes. He was born in 1944.

• 36:27Speaker 04

  As a young boy, I was a lookout against the Border Patrol. It was simple, just play on the truck. And when you see the Jeeps coming, because we could see the Jeeps coming from far away. So when you first see them, start blowing the horn. And if the Border Patrolman asks you what you're doing, tell them you're playing. I was thoroughly briefed.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  When Silvestre was a kid, a federal initiative called the Bracero Program gave work visas to Mexicans who came to the US for short-term contracts, mostly in agriculture and on railroads. But some workers still crossed without papers.

• 37:07Speaker 04

  On the farm, the undocumented ones. They're the ones that would run and hide. The other Braceros, they had their ID cards, so they were OK. Although I will tell you, sometimes they would run just to be decoys. It was fun times.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  It was fun. You remember?

• 37:21Speaker 04

  For that as a fun memory. Yeah, oh, yeah. They were trying to catch people that were undocumented. But the only thing they would do is catch them, process them. And then we would see the same guys back a couple of days later.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  Then, as now, the agricultural economy relied on immigrant labor. The attitude towards Mexican immigration in the 20th century United States is that workers from Mexico are necessary,

• 37:50Speaker 00

  but that they are not people who necessarily are going to become part of the United States. Because there's a long history of anti-Mexican sentiment within the United States. And it comes up in these different flashpoint moments. Moments like Mexican repatriation during the Great Depression, or Operation Wetback in the 1950s, when the federal government led massive deportation campaigns targeting Mexicans and, at times, US citizens of Mexican descent. But Rachel says even those efforts weren't meant to halt immigration. They're never trying to close the border. They're trying to control the border in such a way that it will allow the seamless entry as much as possible

• 38:33Speaker 00

  of things that they deem good, valuable and desirable in the country, and to block as seamlessly as possible those things that they deem bad, that need to be kept out of the country. By the late 1980s and 90s, immigration had become a big political issue.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  And by that time, Silvestre, who grew up moving back and forth across the border.

• 38:54Speaker 04

  I used to go with my grandpa to buy groceries in Juarez.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  Had joined the Border Patrol.

• 39:00Speaker 04

  Oh, I was excited and my family was excited. I remember my grandpa was so proud. I guess it was part of the American story.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Silvestre served on the patrol for more than 25 years. He became the first Latino Border Patrol Sector Chief, serving first in McAllen and then in his hometown of El Paso, Texas.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  I attended an all-boys Catholic high school right there.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  Downtown El Paso, so we were maybe a mile, if not less, from the border line itself. This is Miguel Levario. He wrote Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the Enemy. And he grew up on the outskirts of El Paso, just like Silvestre Reyes had some 40 years before. So we had to drive into downtown El Paso every morning. September 20, 1993, started off like any other Monday. Miguel was on his way to school with friends when... My friend who was driving was like, "What is going on?" And we all look up and we see, you know, the Border Patrol trucks.

• 40:11Speaker 04

  They were lined up every 100 yards, like, you know, they were about to face off with somebody. And I remember vividly thinking like, "Oh, my gosh, what is happening?" So I briefed every single agent. And I said, "When people wake up, they're going to see a wall of Border Patrol vehicles and agents all across this 20-mile area that we want to control."

• 40:35Speaker 00

  What Miguel saw on his way to school that day was Silvestre Reyes's idea, a big show of Border Patrol strength called Operation: Hold the Line.

• 40:46Speaker 04

  We're going to block people from coming into the country.

• 40:51Speaker 00

  Silvestre saw the border as a problem. At the time, he told reporters in Texas that he was trying to fix the, quote, "institutionalized undocumented entry through the Rio Grande" that people had gotten used to for decades.

• 41:05Speaker 04

  I walked the border. And I saw example after example after example of a border that was totally out of control. People congregating, ready to rush into El Paso.

• 41:19Speaker 00

  So his idea was simple. The Border Patrol would become a wall.

• 41:25Speaker 04

  We have to gain control. I put the agents right on the border where I didn't care if they apprehended anybody, as long as they deterred them from crossing.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Silvestre deployed 400 agents and their trucks and lined them up on the border over a stretch of 20 miles. They planned to stay out there, day and night. And that's what Miguel saw.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  I'll be honest with you, as a 16, 17-year-old...

• 41:53Speaker 04

  Or even younger, we didn't really get like, what was the whole point? Now, the maids can't get back. The gardeners and the riffraff can't cross. And that was the point, was to be intimidating, was to be a deterrent.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  The way Silvestre saw it, too many people were crossing back and forth without papers and with no regard to the official ports of entry. So he ordered the border patrol agents, under his command, to not back down.

• 42:27Speaker 04

  People are in uncharted territory.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  The line held for a week.

• 42:32Speaker 04

  There's never been an operation that's been kept in place for a week.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  People couldn't get to work. There were protests on both sides of the border. Still, the line held, and it would hold indefinitely.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  Right away, Silvestre Reyes claimed the operation was a victory.

• 42:52Speaker 04

  All of a sudden, the border patrol became heroes. Oh, my God. The crime rate in El Paso for stolen cars dropped 98%.

• 43:03Speaker 00

  That's an exaggeration.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  And Miguel says it's hard to assess the correlation between crime rates and the border blockade. Of course, as always, historically, we've done this.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  We associate those increases with immigrants. But Silvestre's narrative of success prevailed. It seemed like he'd done what decades of immigration reform had failed to do: limit the number of immigrants coming in.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  Money, on the other hand, started pouring in. And the strategy went national, in San Diego with Operation Gatekeeper and Arizona with Operation Safeguard. Over the course of five years, the number of border patrol agents on the southern border more than doubled.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  In the seven months since hundreds of federal immigration agents were deployed along the banks of the Rio Grande here, the traffic of illegal workers from Mexico has all but stopped. But the flow of politicians to the border here has surged.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  In the 1990s, the issue of illegal immigration and the need to solve it became a hot political issue. The politicians are prompted by polls showing that the issue is gaining in importance among voters who polls say...

• 44:17Speaker 00

  are increasingly worried about the economic impact of immigrants and their effect on American culture. The country was coming out of a recession. Unemployment remained high. People were on edge and they wanted change.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  This was also the era of tough-on-crime policies, the so-called welfare queen. And as the number of legal and unauthorized immigrants coming into the country rose in the 90s, illegal immigrants became another political target. They keep coming.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  Two million illegal immigrants in California. California's Republican governor Pete Wilson, who was running for reelection in 1994, made immigration the center of his campaign.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  And the word he used was illegal immigrant. And he had these commercials at the time where he showed immigrants running through traffic near the border. Governor Pete Wilson sent the National Guard to help the Border Patrol, but that's not all. For Californians who work hard, pay taxes, and obey the laws, I'm suing to force the federal government to control the border.

• 45:26Speaker 00

  It's associating migrants with the threat of invasion. And part of what played into Wilson's politics around that is that you do see increases in immigration over time across the border, particularly as the Mexican economy is destabilized in the 1970s and 1980s. That category of the illegal alien gets increasingly attached to Mexican people in a way that then the government can evoke at different times, either for political reasons or to manage labor. Pete Wilson won his reelection campaign, and other politicians followed suit.

• 46:05Speaker 04

  Immigration is basically a political ace card.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  And it wasn't just Republicans. Democrats also took up the issue.

• 46:20Speaker 00

  From California Senator Dianne Feinstein. The day when America could be the welfare system for Mexico is gone. We simply can't afford it. All the way to President Bill Clinton.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  Two years ago, when I took office, I was determined to do a better job of dealing with the problem.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  Illegal immigration. The Clinton administration steps in and really embraces a hard border policing model where they really focus on border control. One of the cornerstones of our fight against illegal immigration has been a get tough policy at our borders. They put up a bunch of new barriers, so you know, infrared cameras and all sorts of high-tech stuff. It's sort of, it's the 90s, I think, where we really see that the birth of that highly militarized border.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  And the irony here is that Clinton was securing the border at the very same time that he was opening it up.

• 47:25Speaker 04

  Good morning. This week, at a time when many Americans are hurting from the strains of the tough global economy, our country chose courageously to compete and not to retreat. With its vote Wednesday night for the North American Free Trade Agreement, the House of Representatives sent a message to the world. Yes, the Cold War is over, but America's leadership for prosperity, security, and freedom continues.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  NAFTA, or the North American Free Trade Agreement, went into effect in 1994, a year after Operation Hold the Line. And what it did was essentially open up the borders for the flow of goods between the US, Mexico, and Canada.

• 48:06Speaker 00

  There was a fair amount of anxiety around this.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Is it right to move your jobs to Mexico where people live in pop?

• 48:14Speaker 01

  So, right as manufactured goods were starting to flow in like never before across the border, the Clinton administration built some of the first metal border walls.

• 48:24Speaker 00

  They have these huge metal walls that go up outside Tijuana. And showing that in a very public way was a way to balance out the increased movement that was going to be going across the borders with NAFTA.

• 48:40Speaker 00

  One part of the San Diego wall was built on Imperial Beach and now extends some 300 feet into the ocean. The idea that we close off El Paso in San Diego, it would force migrants to consider entering through the Sonoran Desert, one of the harshest environmental landscapes in all of North America. And they thought, they're not

• 49:02Speaker 01

  They're not going to do it. It's too harsh, it's too difficult, and they won't do it. What we learned is that desperate people will do desperate things. And we learned that people did do it.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  What do you say to people that say all it does is it pushes migrants to areas outside of ports of entry, to deadlier parts of the desert? That it doesn't really stop undocumented immigration into this country, right? Like, it's not effective in that way. What do you, what do you say to that?

• 49:34Speaker 04

  Well, well, it, it, it, it depends what you think we were trying to prove.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Well, what were you trying to prove? You, you were there, you were the head of it.

• 49:45Speaker 04

  Well, that the border, the, the border can be managed. The border can be managed. People can be reeducated to understand that we're not, we no longer can tolerate that.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Silvestre eventually became a Democratic congressman. And in the 30-plus years since Operation Hold the Line, politicians of both parties have continued to support aggressive border policies.

• 50:18Speaker 00

  Today, there are over 700 miles of border wall. Why is this space that is so peripheral? By definition, it is the periphery of the nation. Why is it so important in American politics? It's a place where you can really see how government works, what government priorities are, how they try to enforce them in different ways, and how local people respond to and navigate that. The Trump administration is actually moving the dynamics of immigration into the country. They're extending this border politics away from the border. I think it remains to be seen whether what has been so politically effective when isolated to a border space, which is a space that most people don't inhabit and will never be to, you know, will never visit,

• 51:04Speaker 00

  if that can work on a national scale.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  This episode is part of our series on how immigration enforcement became political and profitable.

• 51:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  Next week.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  The idea that you can just basically have a detention footprint in every community in America is really, really intriguing.

• 51:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  The business of immigrant detention.

• 51:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 51:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by me.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  And me and...

• 51:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  Sarah Wyman. Amber Tsi.

• 51:56Speaker 00

  Casey Minor. Julie Kay. Lawrence Wu. Anya Steinberg.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Christina Kim.

• 52:01Speaker 05

  Devin Kadyama.

• 52:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  Irene Noguchi. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. It was mixed and mastered by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes...

• 52:17Speaker 02

  Navid Marvi. Cho Fujiwara.

• 52:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  Anya Mizani. Thank you to James Delahoussaye, Alison Silveira, Stephen McNally, Julian Niaviskig Diat Godoy, and Bruno Ramirez for their voiceover work. "El Corrido de Nogales" by Robert Lee Benton Jr. and Oscar Gonzalez is from the recording entitled "Heroes and Horses: Corridos from the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands 2002." It was used by permission courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Thanks also to Johannes Sturgie, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on this show, please write us at [email protected]. And make sure you follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode.

• 53:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thanks for listening.

• 53:21Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.