December 1930: Americans stranded at border when fence gets fixed
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/jun/05/americans-str...
By Richard Crawford
June 5, 2010
Scores of Americans found themselves suddenly stranded in Mexico last night when the famous “hole in the fence” at the border was closed yesterday
afternoon without warning. … Protest was made to customs and immigration officials on duty, but the officers said they could do nothing about it.
San Diego Union
Dec. 20, 1930
It had been there for years: a narrow hole clipped from the barbed wire fence separating San Ysidro and Tijuana. Since the late 1920s, thousands of
American tourists returning from Mexico had squeezed through the opening at night, bypassing the big iron gates at the international border, which
closed promptly at 6 p.m. daily.
The fence had been built by the Federal Bureau of Animal Industry. It was not there to put the brakes on immigration; the U.S. government was
unconcerned about illegal immigrants. The wire fence was there to stop cattle. Mexican steer often wandered across the border, sometimes carrying
ticks, which infected American cattle.
Most visitors to Tijuana paid little attention to the fence as they walked or drove across the border each day through Gate 1. San Diego motor coach
operator Fred Sutherland did a booming business transporting people from downtown San Diego. Others came on trains from the San Diego & Arizona
Railway, which ran several times a day for round-trip fares of $1.
Prohibition had turned Tijuana — a town of fewer than 9,000 people at the time — into a mecca for Americans eager to visit the cantinas on Avenida
Revolución. Others were attracted to the Caliente Race Track or the casino gambling at Agua Caliente, “the most elaborate pleasure resort in North
America,” according to Time magazine.
But Tijuana was strictly a daytime adventure. San Diego area churches, PTA groups, women’s organizations and many politicians wanted an early-evening
closure to protect public morals from the “injurious effects of wide-open towns.” After Gate 1 closed at 6, no one was allowed to enter the United
States.
Officially, that is.
Only a few paces east of the gate, a hole in the fence provided easy passage back home. Federal officials occasionally glanced at the hole and
sometimes questioned the late-night entrants about their nationality or checked them for suspicious bulges in their clothing. For the most part,
however, public use of the hole was a matter of course.
But on Friday night, Dec. 19, 1930, scores of Americans were surprised to find the familiar gap in the cattle fence sealed up tight. A few scaled the
barrier and were grabbed for questioning by customs officials. Others retreated to Tijuana to look for hotel rooms. And some spent the night in the
open, waiting for the Gate 1 to reopen at 6 a.m. The San Diego Union reported that many of the stranded were frantic women “thinly clad and unprepared
for the cool night weather.”
The next day, Dr. Jan Madsen, head of the local office of the Bureau of Animal Industry, revealed that the fence had been repaired at his direction to
keep out stray Mexican livestock. “It is a government fence and it is my business to see that it is kept in repair at all places at all times.”
Stranded Americans were not Madsen’s concern.
By Saturday night, several new holes had appeared in the fence. Enterprising Mexican boys armed with flashlights earned tips by showing Americans
where to enter their native country. “Among those making use of the newly-discovered openings,” reported the Union, “were several fashionably dressed
men and women who were said to have passed the evening at Agua Caliente. In trying to squeeze through the small openings in the fence some of the
plump women and fat men became entangled in the barbed wire, but quickly were extricated by friends or their guides.”
In March, agriculture officials installed a turnstile in the original hole, seven feet east of the main auto gate. Made of pipes painted yellow, it
turned in only one direction — north, could not be locked and was meant to be used 24 hours a day. The new system was immediately tested by “scores of
pleased United States residents who formerly wiggled carefully through the ‘hole’ in the barb-wire fence.”
Others protested. Republican Rep. Philip Swing from the Imperial Valley howled that the turnstile “virtually nullified the 6 p.m. closing time,” which
he believed had been rightly established to control Americans “being attracted to Tijuana gambling dens at night.”
The turnstile lasted three weeks. “Mourners who had been in the habit of ‘making the hole at one’ (a.m.)” watched as the turnstile “was amputated at
its base and new strands of wire were stretched across the gap, thereby closing the famous hole in the fence.”
In the next several months, while the Bureau of Animal Industry fought a losing battle against new holes in its fence, San Diegans began to agitate
for a liberalized closing time at the border. Collector of Customs William Ellison pointed out that 1,423,751 people had crossed into Tijuana in the
first three months of 1931. Clearly, the early closure was not adequate for the busiest port of entry on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Extended hours finally arrived the following summer when border officials received orders from Washington to keep the gate open until midnight. On
Saturday night, July 9, 1932, officials counted approximately 4,000 cars crossing the line to Mexico after 6 p.m. Tijuana resorts were packed as
Americans had the right to cross the international border after dark, untroubled by the late-night prospect of the infamous hole in the fence.
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