Electric Eyes

Abstract

In 1977, U.S. Border Patrol Pilot George Watson praised the latest addition to the agency’s fleet in a photo-essay for INS Reporter. “A new dimension in enforcement capability began with the Hughes 500 helicopter,” he vowed. To illustrate the fruits of modernization, Watson included aerial shots of an arrest in the San Ysidro desert. “Before,” he explained, “aliens” would “sweep across” the border. Now, “Fox Trot’s light in the sky is bad news. Migrants hit the deck. They cannot escape.” Less than a decade later, the magazine admitted that, for the first time, one million “illegals” had been apprehended in a single year. Despite the slew of surveillance technologies at its disposal—helicopters, infrared scopes, night-vision goggles, low-light television systems, and “electric eye” ground sensors—the Border Patrol was outmatched. This article mines interviews, memoirs, promotional materials, and archival photographs from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) History Office and Library to flesh out the intimate links between visuality, surveillance, border policing, and xenophobic nationalism. Amid hysteria over unauthorized migration in the wake of the Bracero Program (1942–1964), the Border Patrol began to represent sovereignty on the U.S.–Mexico line as a visual project. It resurrected rudimentary tools (e.g. sign cutting) and adopted increasingly sophisticated optical devices. To advertise its vigilance, the agency turned to the camera. Via publicity and commemorative projects, the Border Patrol crafted an institutional iconography that showcased its prescient, scientific oversight even as it displayed the U.S.–Mexico boundary’s persistent insecurity. Throughout, it positioned the undocumented as invasive enemies. Ultimately, the Border Patrol leaned on a visual culture that glorified surveillance to justify the state’s sovereign right to police mobility. Insidiously, it fueled xenophobia by othering Mexican migrants. And it reimagined the U.S.–Mexico border as the site of a forever war: a perpetually vulnerable zone where perfected observation was a required—but never finished—pursuit.