"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best....They're sending people that have lots of problems....They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
"I will build a great, great wall on our southern border."
-GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, campaign launch speech, June 16, 2015
"Never seen a Mex that wouldn't sooner lie than eat....These goldbricks are no damn good. Lazy, lying agitators, every goddamn one."
"I had the same sort of job there [in South Korea] as I had here. Keeping undesirables out."
Carter smiled. "I hardly think wetbacks can be compared to Chinese Communists."
"What we need is a fence."
Thompson chuckled. "Couple of months ago the merchants in Brownsville came up with the same idea. They got all agitated and virtuous about Mexicans crossing over from Matamoras, stealing things and selling marijuana. Anyway, that was their excuse. So we got an engineer to design a fence. Big deal. It was going to be steel chain with a V arm on top, and a patrol road on the riverside....
"That should have done the trick."
"It didn't. They thought it over again, and changed their minds. Decided they wanted to keep the Mexicans coming over after all. There was a lot of yackety-yack about international trust and friendship...but the fact is that they were doing good business with the Mexicans and didn't want to lose their trade.
"'We need them and they need us'....I don't go for that kind of crap."
Wetback, William O'Farrell, 1956
Seventy-two years ago in the United States, the presidential administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower in June 1954 commenced "Operation Wetback" in the country's southern borderland in order to expel from the country undocumented Mexican immigrants, contemptuously dubbed "wetbacks" in an allusion to their allegedly having crossed over the wadeable Rio Grande River to get into the U.S. to find work.
Over a single year in 1954-55 about a quarter of a million Mexican nationals were "returned" from the United States to Mexico. Under the direction of Border Patrol head Harlon Carter, Border Patrol agents--Eisenhower had refused urgent requests to federalize the National Guard--were used to round up masses of Mexican agricultural workers and transfer them back to Mexico.
By the provisions of the Bracero Program, an agreement between the U. S. and Mexico, Mexican laborers were allowed legal, documented entry into the country; yet Texas farmers frequently objected to the guaranteed wages that they were required to pay to the braceros, parsimoniously preferring illegally to employ "wetbacks" to pick their cotton, okra, etc. at piddling wages. If the wetbacks got troublesome about it, an anonymous tip could conveniently be provided to Border Patrol agents and the Mexicans would be duly ejected from the country.
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| Hanlon Carter on horseback |
It was a corrupt system and ripe pickings for an author like liberal/left author like William O'Farrell, who tackled the timely subject in the penultimate novel published during his lifetime, Wetback. A Dell paperback original ("Dell First Edition"), O'Farrell's novel bears resemblance to provocative works published around this time by authors like Jim Thompson and Erskine Caldwell.
There's an oversexed, sluttish farmer's daughter by the name of Gloria Jean who goes after any handsome man on the scene (rural southern Texas between McAllen and Brownsville), her coarse father Elwood Hansen (one can almost see Burl Ives in this Big Daddy of a part), whose wife ran off with a handsome virile Mexican, and, with more than a brush of Jim Thompson, a good-looking, blond, sociopathic, racist rapist who is a rising member of the Border Patrol, one Rudolph Valentino Callahan. (His doting New Jersey mother was a great film fan.)
Unlike Jim Thompson, William O'Farrell, who was three years younger than Thompson, never lived in Texas, but before his birth in St. Louis, Missouri in 1904, his railroad executive father, along with his mother and his three older siblings, had lived, like Thompson later would, in Fort Worth, Texas. As an adult, however, O'Farrell enjoyed a much more cosmopolitan, if wayfaring, life, and resided in New York City and California, toured Europe and, on a mission with the marines, personally witnessed slayings of Haitians during the American military occupation of their country. Hence was a born a strong liberal/left consciousness that later found expression in his Forties and Fifties crime writing.
In Wetback the author's disgust as he casts his eyes upon Texas is blatantly evident. "If a man can't actually be from Texas, seems to me the next best thing he can do is pretend he is," announces the sluttish, racist Gloria Jean, a rich man's spoiled brat if ever there were one.
The irony is clear, as we see all the abuses heaped daily by the privileged whites upon the powerless Mexicans, even when they need Mexicans--preferably ones with just Spanish blood, like Hansen's foreman Armando Castro, who are deemed "technically white"--to run their farms for them and speak Spanish to the humble laborers. When Armando vanishes for a time, Hansen has to get his cook Conchita to address his "wetback" workers for him.
Like Jim Thompson, O'Farrell came to specialize in the depiction of embittered, envious sociopathic men, losers in the capitalist game determined to get ahead at any costs. In Wetback this toxic male is the aforementioned Rudolph Valentino Callaghan, a handsome but vicious and venal racist and rapist. (He had been much spoiled by his doting mama, who let him get away with anything.)
When Rudy becomes a member of the Border Patrol it's ripe pickings for beating up insolent "wetback" men and forcing his unwelcome attentions upon a vexingly virtuous married local Mexican-American woman, Rosa Mayorga.
After he commits his rape--his first rape--Rudy thinks to himself:
Sometimes...a guy who is fundamentally a right guy is pushed into doing things that, to people who don't know him well, make him look as though he's acting like a heel. You'd think a guy would be forgiven an occasional mistake.
I'm guessing Rudy with his pathologically oblivious self-pitying self-justification for abusing women would be a big hit on the manosphere today!
At one point in the novel the rich farmer, Hansen, scowls when thinking
of the airs some of these greasers--the ones who somehow got hold of citizenship papers--had got the habit of giving themselves these past few years....Insisted they were Americans: Latin Americans, if you please. Wetbacks swim the river, and one way or another find good jobs. They have kids, and the kids are Latin Americans. They go to school with white kids, and when they grow up they're allowed to vote. They own farms and businesses, and their wives and daughters get their pictures on the society page of the Valley Sentinel [the local liberal paper which runs editorials against the "stormtrooper" tactics of the Border Patrol]. They'd call themselves Texans, by God, given a chance.
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| Mexicans en route to deportation |
In the novel William O'Farrell allows Christine Peters, the wife of his relatively liberal Border Patrol character, Bill Peters, to voice some liberal sentiments concerning Mexican farm laborers which he himself surely shared:
"They've got so little; it wouldn't be natural if they didn't think we had too much....How can you arrest those poor people?"
Were she alive today perhaps Christine might have dared to protest an ICE operation in Minneapolis--and been shot for her pains.
Postscript
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| Hanlon Carter in later years a half-century after a youthful murder |
Later during the Seventies then Border Patrol chief Harlon Carter became a big wheel, Executive Vice President, at the NRA--National Rifle Association--and in that office he was instrumental in shaping the organization's stance toward political opposition to all forms of restrictions on gun rights during the Carter and first Reagan administration. When in 1981 when he was running for reelection it was revealed that Carter, then 17, shot and killed Ramon Casiano, a 15-year-old Mexican boy whom he suspected of knowing something about the theft of his family's car. He pointed a gun at the youth and demanded that he return with him to the Carter home for questioning. When Casiano refused, Carter shot and killed him.
At his trial Carter was convicted of murder, but the Texas Court of Appeals overturned the conviction based on self defense grounds. In 1981 Carter refused to talk about the case, except to say that he had nothing to apologize for about it. Not long before he died, nearly eighty years old, in 1991, Carter wrote an article in the wake of the Rodney King riots condemning people (black people) taking the law into their own hands.
What a truly American success story: a white man murders a Mexican boy and grows up, as the dead boy molders forgotten in his grave, to head the border patrol and serve as Executive Vice President of the NRA, preaching all the while about law and order.
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| President Reagan shows off his piece before beaming Hanlon Carter (third from left) |
Ramon Casiano was memorialized in the timely 2016 song of the name by the Drive-By Truckers. Pictures of his much honored murderer, Hanlon Carter, illustrate this review. Old Hanlon certainly liked his guns and his uniform. So did William O'Farrell's Rudy Callahan, of whom the author writes on the first page of Wetback:
He was a young man, tall and blond, with regular, strong features and a tanned skin which stretched tightly over high cheekbones. Small green eyes set a little too close together and not precisely on a level did not, at first glance, detract materially from his good looks. He wore his olive-green uniform as though he had never known civilian clothes. He looked like a man who had everything under control, which was what he intended--and which was almost one hundred percent untrue.
How like Donald Trump and his courtiers.
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