New Mexicans once cast as those to be kept on other side of border
increased dramatically this year, and plans to erect a wall at the Mexico border in an effort to keep out unauthorized immigrants, a centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s campaign, are moving forward, even as Trump has pulled back his threat to shut down the government if no funds are set aside for the project.
The Johnson ordeal is a reminder, too, of a time when many Americans regarded New Mexicans not as fellow citizens but as foreigners.
While the Pueblo Chieftain described Johnson’s blockade as halting a “parasite parade” at the New Mexico state line, the Rocky Mountain News characterized it as “an embargo on penniless humanity.”
Ultimately, deep roots in Southwestern communities or recent arrival in the country would not matter as much as money in deciding who could pass into Colorado.
“We’re going to count their money,” Johnson told reporters.
“Our main object is to head off destitute people from other states who will come here, perhaps work in the beet fields for a few weeks and go on relief,” the governor said, referring to welfare programs he accused outsiders of bilking. “If we catch a few aliens among them, so much the better.”
The state’s newspapers carried stories of soldiers stopping
buses, trucks and cars on the roads into Colorado and turning back entire families.
The New Mexican reported soldiers halted trains, too, and marched riders out of Colorado.
One edition of the Santa Fe newspaper recounted how troops forced 18 Spanish-speaking men from Dixon, Peñasco and Abiquiú off rail cars near Antonito, Colo. New Mexicans all, the men were en route to jobs in Utah and Wyoming but ended up stranded in the desert, the front-page story said.
Some travelers stopped at the checkpoint near Trinidad, Colo., had to count up the coins in their pockets in front of guardsmen.
“Have you any money?” a lieutenant asked Joe and Lawrence Rhonish, two brothers in their early 20s from Maxwell, N.M.
“A little,” they replied, telling troops they were headed north in search of a place to farm.
But when the brothers could only cough up $3.50, the guardsmen sent them back to New Mexico.
A reporter from the Rocky Mountain News who watched the strange scene playing out at the checkpoint noted troops waved through a car carrying William H. Saunders, the new football coach for the University of Denver.
Troops fanned out along the 370-mile border, setting up roadblocks near the Colorado communities of Branson, Antonito, Cortez and Durango.
Guardsmen patrolled the border by air, too.
The Rocky Mountain News reported that the state even dispatched spies to New Mexico.
“A number of Spanish-speaking guardsmen, dressed in faded overalls and carrying the few necessities of the hitchhiker, have been sent secretly over the border into New Mexico and Oklahoma to mingle with itinerant laborers and learn as much as possible about reported plans for breaking thru the blockade,” the newspaper reported.
While Johnson maintained the blockade was all about economics and protecting the jobs of Coloradans, New Mexicans heard something else in his rhetoric.
“His whole thing was ‘aliens, aliens, aliens,’ ” said Arturo Aldama, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and editor of the book Enduring Legacies: Colorado Ethnic Histories and Cultures.
Colorado’s governor seemed to be questioning whether New Mexicans were really Americans at all.
“You would think New Mexico had been cut off from the United States and was a foreign country,” New Mexico Gov. Clyde Tingley said in the Rocky Mountain News. “These people are not aliens any more than the people of Colorado are aliens. They are descendants of people who settled this country when Colorado was still a part of Mexico.”
Johnson had not blockaded Colorado’s borders with Kansas, Wyoming or Utah, and plenty of Coloradans heard a racist message in his pronouncements.
One family wrote to the governor: “We are right behind you, in your move to keep the Mexican race out of our state.”
While a substantial portion of the migrant workers laboring in the Centennial State’s farm fields were from Mexico, most Coloradans saw little difference between them and citizens from New Mexico, said Steven Leonard, a professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
“I don’t think people were talking about New Mexicans as a group. They were painted with a broader brush,” Leonard said. “… The general population just saw all people of Hispanic and Latino ancestry as pretty much the same.”
So, while some Hispanic Coloradans had supported Johnson’s tough approach to immigration, viewing Mexicans as stealing jobs, many frowned on the blockade as troops swept up not just foreigners but Hispanic citizens, too.
The blockade would not last long.
Tingley threatened to respond in kind with a statewide boycott of products from Colorado.
“We’ll stop every truck bringing shipments into New Mexico and force truckers to unload New Mexico bound shipments before they enter the state,” Tingley said.
Meanwhile, farmers around the Mountain West complained that they could not find enough laborers to work the fields.
And New Mexico leaders charged that the blockade was unconstitutional, raising the prospect of a legal battle that Johnson would probably lose.
On April 29, less than two weeks after he dispatched the National Guard to the state line, Johnson had his troops stand down.
Johnson offered little explanation aside from “unforeseen complications of a serious nature.”
In a sharp change in tone, he added that Colorado “must not alienate the friendship of our sister states.”
The episode did not dent Johnson’s political career.
The Democrat won a seat in the U.S. Senate later that year and served on Capitol Hill for two decades. He returned to serve as Colorado’s governor again from 1955-57.
“Race-baiting and trying to find a scapegoat drove the careers of a lot of politicians,” Aldama said.
And scholars view the episode as just one of several during the Great Depression in which politicians sought to play Hispanics in the American Southwest against recent immigrants from Mexico while also appealing to nationalist sentiments among other voters.
Aldama argues that many of the same sentiments endure as Trump pledges to wall at the Mexican border and cut immigration.
“This whole idea of the wall — keeping the ‘other’ out,” he said, “still carries so much weight.”