In February, before the Democrats swapped candidates, Joe Biden and Donald Trump separately visited Texas on the same day to present their respective plans for cracking down on border crossing. In Eagle Pass, Trump walked along a razor-wire fence, telling Border Patrol agents — and TV cameras — that the country was “being overrun” by “Biden migrant crime.” Biden, standing in front of another Border Patrol group a few hundred miles away in Brownsville, blamed Republicans in Congress for blocking the Senate compromise bill that originally included twenty billion dollars for border enforcement. “The bipartisan border security deal is a win for the American people,” he said. “That’s a win for the people of Texas. And it’s fair for those who legitimately have a right to come here to begin with.” 

Republicans never took the deal: the sections on border security were removed from the bill, and the issue remained a liability for Kamala Harris when she took Biden’s place on the Democratic ticket. Trump’s first line of attack was to slam the new nominee as the so-called “border czar” who had allowed migrants to flood the country — a refrain he repeated at the candidates’ September debate. Harris, who had never been given such a title, had been tasked with addressing what the White House called the “root causes” of migration, like food insecurity and job scarcity. Still, she responded to her right-wing critics with an ad boasting that she had “backed the toughest border control bill in decades” — referring to the failed compromise bill, which she pledged to revive — and promising that she would hire “thousands more border agents.” Only a few years earlier, Harris had called Trump’s proposed border wall “a complete waste of taxpayer money” and a “medieval vanity project.” But now, following Biden’s lead, she was supporting a bill that would allocate hundreds of millions of dollars to extend the wall. Like Biden, Harris carved out a rhetorical exception for what Biden had framed as “legitimate” arrival; at the Democratic National Convention in August, she affirmed her intention to simultaneously “create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border.” 

Harris’s attempt to sound tough without verging into outright Trumpian xenophobia speaks to the Democratic Party’s anxiety about losing once-dependable Latino voters, especially those in border communities. Since the 1960s, Mexican Americans have largely supported Democrats in national elections, and South Texas counties, where the population is 85 percent Latino, have been reliably blue. But in 2020, Trump picked up significant support in the heavily Mexican American Rio Grande Valley, a shift that disoriented political analysts. In 2021, Texas Monthly warned that Democrats had “a deep problem” in South Texas. After the 2022 midterms, in which Republicans made further inroads, the Texas Tribune announced a new electoral reality in the region: “Gone are the days of unquestioned Democratic control.” This election, South Texas races are highly competitive, and an October New York Times/Siena College poll found Harris “underperforming the last three Democratic candidates for the White House” among Latino voters nationwide. 

In response, some commentators have cautioned that Mexican American communities in Texas have always been fundamentally conservative. Earlier this year, a New Republic piece warned that voters in the Rio Grande Valley have “views closely aligned with the Republican Party, especially on immigration and border control.” To refer to “South Texas Democrats,” the Texas Observer wrote, “is to say, conservatives on issues ranging from guns to fossil fuels to abortion.” The same assumption seems to be guiding the Biden-Harris administration’s shift to the right on immigration and border politics. 

In adopting this strategy, however, Harris is following a decades-old playbook — one I know firsthand from growing up in El Paso, where my dad was involved with the Democratic Party’s Mexican American caucus. Historically, when Democrats have moved right, it has not only failed to garner support among border communities, it has backfired. Latinos in this region are conservative today in large part because they have been made conservative — with help from the Democratic Party. In the late 1960s, South Texas was a stronghold of the left-wing Chicano movement, which gave rise in the following decade to the briefly influential Raza Unida Party (RUP). Members of the RUP advocated for Mexican American equality and political representation, labor rights and protections, affordable childcare, rural health clinics, accessible bilingual education, and solidarity with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist third world movements. Democratic politicians reacted to the party’s ascent by alternately ignoring, repressing, and co-opting Chicano tactics, disempowering a generation of leftist leaders who could otherwise have served as a counterweight to conservative forces in the region. Since then, Democratic leaders have been running a race to the right that only Republicans can win. 

In the mid-twentieth century, Mexican Americans held demographic majorities in South Texas border towns, but were segregated under an Anglo elite that dominated agriculture, manufacturing, and government. A state poll tax made it difficult for low-income people to vote, disenfranchising many Mexican Americans. Those who could afford the tax were often stymied by the reigning Texas Democratic Party’s habits of purging voters from registration lists and gerrymandering districts. In other areas of life, Mexican Americans were treated like second-class citizens: public schools banned Spanish-speaking and excluded Mexican American students from honors programs. By the 1960s, when these young people were drafted to fight in Vietnam (where they were killed in disproportionate numbers), some began to reclaim the once pejorative term “Chicano” as a symbol of their cultural pride and desire to challenge the racial economic status quo in the Southwest.

In 1963, five Mexican American men known as Los Cinco Candidatos — all first-time political candidates, whose professions ranged from car salesman to photographer — harnessed rising opposition to racial discrimination to win City Council seats in Crystal City, a South Texas town near the border. The backlash was swift: the Texas Rangers put Crystal City under martial law, implemented a curfew only for Mexican Americans, detained and beat young activists, and blocked Los Cinco Candidatos from accessing government buildings; white politicians quickly mounted a successful recall campaign. Still, the brief triumph and violent response politicized a generation of local youth. 

José Angel Gutiérrez, who was brutalized by a Texas Ranger captain during this skirmish, went on to help form the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) in 1967. Explicitly Chicano, MAYO was simultaneously in dialogue with other ’60s social justice movements, particularly the Black Freedom Movement. While celebrating Mexican culture and calling for people of Mexican descent “to become masters of their destiny, owners of their resources, both human and natural, and a culturally and spiritually separate people from the gringo,” MAYO also deployed confrontational tactics like walkouts and occupations of buildings, led voter registration drives in barrios, and organized students in high schools and universities throughout Texas. 

In January 1970, MAYO activists started the Raza Unida Party ahead of school board and City Council elections. Chicana organizer and prominent RUP leader Rosie Castro — better known today as the mother of erstwhile presidential hopeful Julián Castro and his twin, Representative Joaquin Castro — recalled that the group saw the need for an alternative to the Democratic Party, which, she said in an interview, dominated the state but “absolutely did not articulate any priorities or public policy priorities that in any way benefited our people or lifted our people out of the incredible poverty.” 

When RUP candidates won seats in the towns of Crystal City, Carrizo Springs, and Cotulla, Texas, newspapers filled with panicked reports of a “Brown Power Surge.” The party’s bilingual outreach had proved as important as its message. Organizers had canvassed extensively in Spanish as well as English, reaching people in Mexican American households who had never before participated in local politics. Once elected, RUP legislators went on to introduce bilingual education, courses on Mexican history, and Mexican food in local schools. White teachers who quit in protest were often replaced with Chicano teachers. The Chicano movement and the RUP were successfully dismantling decades of Anglo American political rule. More importantly, they were doing so independently of the Democratic Party. 

For Texas Democrats, the Chicano electoral victory in the borderlands was only one of several troubling shifts in the 1970s. By 1972, it was clear that a political realignment was underway in the state. In the wake of the civil rights movement, conservative Democrats were defecting to the Republican Party, and Democrats hoped to replace them with recently registered Mexican Americans. Blue victories, the rhetoric went, would empower Chicano communities. But the party could barely empower Chicanos within its own campaign offices. As organizer Bert Corona complained at the time, white Democrats had relegated Chicano activists to “meaningless” positions in the party. Fed up, the RUP ran its own candidate for governor that year: the young and charismatic Ramsey Muñiz, who won roughly 219,127 votes. “For the first time,” a campaign volunteer said, “the Democratic Party candidate failed to get the majority of the votes cast.” A magazine put out by a Republican think tank Ripon Society agreed: “Although Muniz failed to attract wide support in southern Texas, he won enough votes to demonstrate that no political party can ignore the independence of Chicano voters.”

The RUP’s unexpected success raised its profile, but also exposed some of its internal divisions. While many saw the RUP as a means for improving Mexican American representation within the existing political system, others had a more separatist vision that included the possibility of seceding from the U.S. altogether. For decades, radical Mexican Americans had been agitating to reclaim territory annexed after the U.S. War with Mexico. In 1969, Chicano nationalism crescendoed with the publication of the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, a manifesto that demanded the creation of a Chicano nation in the Southwest. Burgeoning interest in Chicano self-determination put organizers in conversation with Black, Puerto Rican, and Palestinian liberation movements, and the RUP began to splinter. Mainstream Mexican American Democrats tended to view radical or socialist ties with skepticism. While they often shared Chicano concerns about racial discrimination, they took a hardline stance on immigration, frequently accusing Mexican workers of strikebreaking. Some also advocated for a more secure border because they thought the Border Patrol would stop harassing barrio residents if the agency stayed focused on the international boundary. 

If the RUP was ascendant in 1972, two years later, when Muñiz earned fewer than a hundred thousand votes in the gubernatorial race, the party was losing steam. And two years after that, federal law enforcement — which was targeting Chicano activists at the time — charged Muñiz with felony drug smuggling and sent him to prison. After members of the RUP traveled to Cuba on a 1975 official tour, they praised the country’s experiment in collective farming and promised to use federal grants to establish cooperatives in South Texas. Governor Dolph Briscoe, a Democrat, accused the RUP of trying to “establish a little Cuba in Texas” to “promote socialism” and “destroy the free enterprise system.” Texas Democrats smelled blood in the water, and Mexican American liberals saw opportunity. The voters whom the RUP had mobilized were now registered — it was time to scoop them up. 

As a kid in the ’90s, I spent many nights playing my Game Boy in the corner of convention halls in El Paso, waiting for my dad to finish singing Vicente Fernández songs and strategizing with his political buddies. He was part of a generation of students who were routinely beaten by Anglo teachers for speaking Spanish, but he believed that ethno-racial divisions could be overcome through dialogue, local outreach, and the election of Mexican Americans to higher office. In his view, the Democratic Party was the best vehicle for improving the lives of Mexican Americans in border communities. 

He became active in the Mexican American Democrats (MAD), an organization formed by the Democratic Party in 1975. Unlike the RUP, MAD did not call for “Brown Power,” Chicano national self-determination, or a global anti-imperialist program. It opted for the terms “Hispanic” or “Latino” over “Chicano.” Some saw this development as part of an effort to build greater political unity with other Spanish-speaking diasporas in the United States. For those who continued to identify as Chicanos, though, the pivot to “Hispanic” was representative of a rightward turn away from the national question, from anti-imperialism, and from claims to indigeneity rather than Europeanness. The term also distanced Mexican Americans from Mexicans south of the border, bringing forth a shift in attitudes about assimilation, bilingualism, and border policy. (For these same reasons, I myself don’t use it.) But MAD drew heavily on Chicano tactics and messaging, emphasizing bilingual outreach, intensive door-knocking, and rhetoric about empowering Spanish-speaking communities. MAD also hosted massive events geared toward celebrating Mexican culture and registering voters. My dad helped organize MAD’s annual Menudo Festival (which drew up to ten thousand attendees), named for a spicy tripe soup offered to visitors along with mariachi music and information about the Democratic Party. 

Over the years, this strategy has proven highly effective. In part through MAD’s efforts, Jimmy Carter — who did not “spend enough time in the barrio,” per the New York Times — secured 87 percent of Texas’s “Hispanic vote” in the 1976 presidential election. In return, Carter appointed Houston City Controller Leonel Castillo to head the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). A bilingual Texan from a working-class background, Castillo was the first Mexican American in the post, and Texas Monthly hailed his nomination as a “return by minority politicians to the political mainstream.” But the move was largely symbolic. Castillo’s approach was better captured by a headline in the Austin American-Statesman, which called him a “Shepherd-Policeman for New Americans.” Castillo believed that “enforcement and humanity are both parts of the same coin.” But by adding bilingual guards and recreation rooms to migrant detention centers, he merely gave border militarism a human, “Hispanic” face. It was under Castillo’s watch that Carter called for more fencing — what organizers lambasted as “Carter’s curtain.” But the political tide had already shifted; in the late ’70s, a new bipartisan consensus emerged in favor of coercive immigration policy — one that still holds.

Today, politicians on both sides of the aisle often speak as though the thin strip of land cleaving the United States from its southern neighbor is a lawless, ungoverned place. But in the 47 years since Castillo’s appointment, the border has transformed into one of the most militarized spaces in North America, thanks to policy decisions made by both Democrats and Republicans. The Border Patrol has evolved into a heavily armed paramilitary force, equipped with helicopters, assault rifles, and special tactical units. Annual spending on border policing has skyrocketed. In 1977, the INS budget was $244.5 million. This past year, the budget for Customs and Border Protection (CBP), one of the agencies that replaced the INS, was $19.6 billion — spending that has changed the border from a policed, yet still fluid, boundary between culturally entwined communities into a region dominated and physically divided by military and security forces. 

The 1990s were a pivotal decade in accelerating that shift. In 1993, Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which aimed to stimulate intracontinental business by removing tariffs and ended up crushing manufacturing in cities like El Paso. Textile and clothing companies abandoned the area to establish assembly plants in Mexico or Southeast Asia. These losses devastated El Paso’s south-side barrios, and by 1995 the city’s unemployment rate hovered between ten and twelve percent. Workers found jobs in the service sector, in logistical support for Mexico’s maquiladoras (foreign-owned export-assembly plants) — and in the booming defense and border security industries. The U.S. Army base Fort Bliss, “home of America’s Tank Division,” emerged as the city’s largest employer. Over the next thirty years, border enforcement became the bedrock of economic life. When everyone has a tío, a primo, or a sister’s boyfriend who works for CBP or the Army, and later for ICE or the Department of Homeland Security, it’s harder to rally Mexican Americans against U.S. empire. 

But Mexican Americans within the Democratic Party were fundamental to the self-sabotaging trend of border militarization. Chief among them was Silvestre Reyes. Born in Canutillo — a rural community northwest of El Paso — Reyes eventually became the first Mexican American chief for the Border Patrol in McAllen and, later, in El Paso. Beginning in 1993, he deployed a swarm of agents to “secure” the border in Operation Blockade, later renamed Operation Hold the Line — a campaign that initiated helicopter patrols, physical barriers, and more checkpoints while expanding migrant detention. The Clinton administration deemed Reyes’s campaign a political success and used it as a blueprint for policing the border with newfound intensity. The president of the El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce said the blockade would “help NAFTA” and promised his organization’s unanimous support. But the new restrictions further depressed the region’s economy, as local communities were accustomed to a more fluid relationship between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. The two cities suffered from a drop in commerce, and thousands of workers who had previously commuted easily across the border lost out on job opportunities.

During the Trump years, it was customary for liberals to decry the administration’s inhumane treatment of immigrants at the border. But as horrific as that treatment was, Trump largely colored between the lines drawn by decades of bipartisan policies that had created an elaborate apparatus for migrant detention and mass deportations. At a rally in El Paso in 2011, Barack Obama boasted that his administration had “gone above and beyond” what Republicans had requested in return for passing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which offered protections to over eight hundred thousand undocumented youth — and claimed that the border fence was “now basically complete.” His administration oversaw the construction of over a hundred miles of fencing and the transfer of tactical weaponry, repurposed from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the border.  

Even after the liberal outcry about border militarization under Trump, Kamala Harris is far from the only Democrat who has embraced his vision. Mexican American electeds, and members of the South Texas congressional delegation in particular, are keen to propose quid pro quos in the Obama mold. Veronica Escobar, the congresswoman who represents the El Paso area, has been pushing a bipartisan bill that promises new pathways to citizenship, such as military service, in exchange for increased border militarization, including more funding for the Border Patrol, and a requirement that DHS extend physical barriers and detection technology. Representative Henry Cuellar, whose district spans from San Antonio to Laredo, created the Democrats for Border Security Task Force, a group that seeks to emphasize Democrats’ commitment to border security in future immigration reform bills. Defending the new task force, Cuellar said, “it doesn’t matter if we’re Hispanics. We want to see order. We want to see security.” These prominent Mexican American Democrats seem to have accepted that conservative border politics are necessary to appeal to border communities, Anglo and Latino alike — a premise that’s not only false, but self-defeating.

The long history of the Chicano movement shows us that progressive, even radical politics can thrive in the borderlands. But by marginalizing those politics in the vain hope of winning over anti-immigration hardliners, Democrats have inadvertently helped foster a right-wing political environment at the border. To rebuild the social base of Mexican American radicalism — and demolish the infrastructure of militarism that supplanted it — will take time, but there are signs that this tradition is still alive. In 2020, students in El Paso joined radicals across the country to protest George Floyd’s murder, taking cues from Black radical traditions, much as Chicano activists did before them. More recently, students at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, less than fifty miles from El Paso, joined the national student movement to support Palestinian liberation, organizing an encampment and a sit-in at an administrative building. In many ways, this new surge of regional activism for Palestine continues decades of internationalist support among border people for global freedom struggles. Chicano organizers in the 1970s may have overestimated the electoral potential for a third party, but they were right in their assessment that Democrats are no allies of border liberation; similarly, the party will not rally behind the cause of Palestinian liberation, or of oppressed people’s right to self-determination in the U.S. and around the world. Today, as in the 1970s, Democrats are more inclined to build walls than tear them down.