In the late twentieth-century, border enforcement emerged as the primary method of migration control along the U.S.-Mexico border. Fences, officers, and electronic sensors strategically located along the border function as a virtual wall designed to prevent and police unsanctioned border crossings. Scholars attribute the escalation of border enforcement to new funds provided for drug interdiction in the 1970s and anxieties regarding the increasing number of Mexican migrant laborers entering the United States without sanction since the collapse of the Mexican economy in the early 1980s. Gender remains an under-recognized factor in the rise of border enforcement as a primary strategy of migration control along the U.S.-Mexico border.

During World War II, U.S. agribusinessmen wanted access to Mexican workers. Many Mexican workers, however, were unable to fulfill the administrative requirements for legal migration to the United States. Hoping to prevent a rise in unsanctioned Mexican labor migration, the U.S. and Mexican governments established the Bracero Program (1942 to 1964) to facilitate the legal migration of Mexican agricultural workers into the United States. Between 1942 and 1964, over two million Mexican nationals entered the United States as legal contract workers known as braceros. Still, the establishment of the Bracero Program did not prevent unsanctioned migration. During the course of the program, more Mexican nationals were apprehended for illegal entry than were contracted as legal bracero workers. What the Bracero Program had effectively created was a two-tier system of labor migration to the United States; legal bracero migration and illegal non-bracero migration. These tiers were implicitly gendered by the exclusion of women and families from the Bracero Program. The Bracero era, therefore, was a crucial moment when two million husbands and fathers were lifted into legal streams of migration while women laborers, mothers, sisters, children, and families were left to cross the border without sanction.

Alongside the legal bracero workers, a large number of Mexican women and children entered the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. Some came to join their husbands and fathers who were working as legal braceros. Others came to work. Most, however, entered illegally. Often, women and children represented one-third to two-thirds of the persons apprehended for the crime of illegal entry.  The unsanctioned migrations of Mexican women and children during the mid-twentieth-century forced the officers of the U.S. Border Patrol to reconsider how they deployed the violences invested in them as law enforcement officers.

Since the establishment of the U.S. Border Patrol in 1924, the organization had depended primarily upon direct physical violence to enforce federal immigration restrictions. The subjects of Border Patrol work, however, had been overwhelmingly male. Physical coercion and occasional brutality by U.S. immigration law enforcement officers against Mexican males fit comfortably within the gendered and racial norms of police violence in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. When unsanctioned female and family migration increased during the Bracero era, Border Patrol officers struggled to devise methods of migration control to address the new gender dynamics of unsanctioned migration. Officers reported feelings of shame and discomfort when attempting to arrest women and children and border communities actively opposed the “spectacle” of publicly subjecting women and children to police violence. As early as the 1940s, the U.S. Border Patrol began to build fences along the U.S.-Mexico border to force women and children to cross in remote regions and, thereby, diminish the spectacle of U.S. migration control. In part, therefore, the development of the fences to push unsanctioned Mexican immigrants to the dangerous backlands of the U.S.-Mexico border region emerged as a process of resolving the gendered problems posed to the deployment of state violence when women, children, and families cross the border without sanction. Modern border enforcement practices, in other words, drew some of their first breaths from the gendered tensions of state violence along the U.S.-Mexico border. Recognizing the importance of gender in the rise of border enforcement in the mid twentieth-century opens new opportunities to examine the gendered escalation of border enforcement in the late twentieth-century when migrant women comprise an increasingly critical component of the international
labor force.