Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Over the next two years, Simcox managed to calm down. With his newspaper and Web site, he tweaked his passion into savvy sound bites, gave the movement an epic banner, and began to drum up volunteers. The Minuteman Project, he bragged, was named after the militia of average men who fought the war that birthed this country.
On a hot afternoon, a week into the Minuteman Project, Simcox goes up and down the borderline near the Arizona town of Naco, cheering the troops. Observers with the American Civil Liberties Union are camped close by, on their own lawn chairs, watching the watchers. Simcox taunts the ACLU observers. He says he captured on film a group of them smoking marijuana. "Stoners! We're gonna get that video to Sean Hannity," Simcox says. The ACLUers conclude that the Minutemen are ignorant xenophobes.
Through the scrub, I spy Xavier Zaragoza, a Mexican-American reporter with the Douglas Daily Dispatch, a regional newspaper in southeastern Arizona. Zaragoza has been toiling on a documentary film about border politics for four years. With an impish smile, he says, "Every time I walk up to the Minutemen they say, 'You a citizen?' What are they judging me on? Skin color? 'You speak 'merican?' I hear it over and over. 'It's an invasion! Stealing our land! You bring leprosy! You speak 'merican?' It's pretty sad."
Zaragoza had gathered footage of dead migrants, of living migrants dashing to the border, of infants captured by Border Patrol, and of Ranch Rescue imploding in alcohol and idiocy. Now with his camera he was getting inside the Minuteman Project. He was sick of the border. "This place is a fucking nightmare," he says.
I have the good luck of finding a few articulate Minutemen. Like Simcox, they feel that migrants are victims of greedy American companies that exploit the pool of cheap labor. Mike Gaddy from Farmington, N.M., a retired Army paratrooper, walks to his truck to show me a biography of U.S. Marine Maj. Smedley Butler, a populist hero in the 1920s and '30s. "War is a racket," Butler famously observed in 1935. Gaddy, like Butler, spent over 30 years of active duty in the services. He recites his litany of service: "'64 to '94: 'Nam, Grenada, Beirut, Panama, Desert Storm," he says. He taps his hands on a page in the Butler biography and tells me to read: "I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism." Gaddy nods, his red beard shining. "When I read Smedley Butler, it was like the sun came out," he says. "It explained my whole life."
I bump into Johnny Petrello, a 33-year-old electrician from Arizona and one of the original members of Simcox's Civilian Homeland Defense. Petrello had assisted enough citizen arrests of migrants that a $10,000 bounty was placed on his head by Mexican gangsters operating out of Naco. Or so he claims. He laughs about it; he is sympathetic to migrants. "If I was a Mexican, a Guatemalan, Haitian or Colombian, you bet your ass I'd be trying to get into the United States, by any means necessary," he says. It's just that illegal migration, he says, is "a slap in the face" to his grandfather, who arrived on Ellis Island from Palermo, Italy.
He seems genuinely anguished and confused. Mexicans who work for cheap wages, he says, are ruining his own livelihood. "In 1990, I was making $15 to $20 an hour on construction sites. Now I make $8 an hour. The issue is not the Mexicans: they're good workers, they show up on time, work all day and go home." He pauses. "The more I look for answers, the more questions I have. And for this I've been called a Nazi, a fascist, a white supremacist, a racist, a redneck. A CNN reporter asked me, cameras rolling, 'John, how many Mexicans have you murdered on the border?' I nearly threw up. What a sucker punch. How could you even answer that without legitimizing it?"
Like Petrello, many Minutemen feel the need to impress on reporters that they are "not racists." This is only truly compelling when offered by the dozen or so Mexican-Americans who stand guard, such as Ruben Medina, of the San Fernando Valley in California. Medina says his father and mother are first- and second-generation Americans, the sons and daughters of legal Mexican immigrants. "I proudly speak Spanish when I go to see my cousins in Chihuahua," he says.
But he is also outraged that the services of six emergency rooms at hospitals in the San Fernando Valley have been slashed due to the systemic pressures from illegal aliens. This was his breaking point, and when Medina heard the Minuteman call, he took a week off from work to come to the border. "I hope one day that poor people in Mexico can enjoy an economic and political change so that both sides of the border can benefit," he tells me.
Other Minutemen complain that they are sick of paying taxes for social services like hospitals that are abused by immigrants. They also protest that because many of the private companies in their communities get tax breaks, and because those companies hire migrants, they are effectively subsidizing illegal immigration. Barbara and Jack Fagan, who had driven from Spokane, Wash., bitterly complain about the tax issues. A wind kicks up and blows dust in their eyes and mouths, but the couple, both retired, appear to enjoy themselves. I ask if they are wearing guns. Barbara Fagan says, "I'm wearing a crochet needle and thread."
Of course, some of the Minutemen fit the stereotype of the know-nothing. In Palominas, I talk to an 18-year-old girl named Ashley Miller, who is pregnant and whose 3-year-old stepson plays in the dust. Miller has lived on the border all her life and watched migrants cross her land without trouble. She is not happy with the Minutemen, nor is her family, who grow hay in irrigated fields nearby.
"These people come here for a minute and they think they're men," Miller says. "They don't live on the border, they don't know the border, they know hearsay, what they've read. They'll get some ego boost from saying they've defended the border." Then, she says, they will depart, and nothing will change, except that migrants crossing her land will now expect her father and uncle and grandfather to be armed and hostile. "These Minutemen are putting the children, the people waiting at a bus stop, the people in their homes in danger," she says.
At that point, a Minuteman with watery eyes and yellow teeth approaches, cursing Miller and me. "So," he says, drawing close. "Anti-Minuteman, eh, little girl? A l'il bit iffy about the situation, little girl?" He leers and sways and Miller recoils. "And you -- New York reporters! I've never been east of Jackson, Wyoming. So I say fuck y'all!"
"People like you make us feel ashamed," Miller says quietly.
"I'm trying to help you," he screams.
"Help me with what?"
"Freedom!" There is more screaming. Miller, near tears, picks up her 3-year-old and walks across the road to her home.
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