Which is kind of weird, since two of the Minutewomen are Hispanic, presumptive fellow nonburners.
Here’s the story of how one of these women, Lupe Moreno, became a Minutewoman:
As a teenager, her son had a car accident and ended up partially paralyzed. In the next hospital bed was an illegal who’d broken his arm coming over the wall. Once treated, he ran away. After Lupe’s son was released, she started getting nagging letters from the hospital, demanding the hundred-dollar copay. She found this infuriating: This illegal gets thousands of dollars of treatment free, and they’re nagging her? To make matters worse, her son needed a wheelchair but could only have one free for the first week of his stay. Through her work in social services, Lupe was aware of a special program through which, had her son been illegal, he could have gotten a wheelchair free and kept it indefinitely.
“You mean ‘undocumented,’” I say.
“I call them illegals,” she says, “because that’s what they are.”
GENTLE DIGNIFIED MAN 1, MINUTEMEN 0
A cluster of Minutemen are shouting across the berm-defining shrub at a sixtysomething Mexican American in a VIETNAM baseball cap: If he DID fight for this country, as implied by his cap, why isn’t he willing to fight for it NOW, by protecting it from illegal in VADers?
He fires back: “I was fighting for this country when you were in Pampers, brother!”
This country kicked the black man around for hundreds of years, he shouts, and now that the black man has finally stood up for himself, the country’s looking for someone new to kick, and its eyes have fallen on the brown man, but the brown man built this country, always working cheap, and is not about to become the whipping boy, no sir, not at this late stage of the game.
The uncontrived passion in his voice is shutting the Minutemen down, but then the Unión de Trabajadores del Suroeste people start inadvertently drowning him out with their (“RACIST MINUTEMEN GOT TO—”) bullhorns.
A certain Writer, behaving unprofessionally, sneaks over, tells the bullhorn guys to hold off: This Vietnam guy is really kicking ass.
A Unión de Trabajadores del Suroeste guy rushes a bullhorn to the Vietnam guy, and soon the Minutemen, discouraged, have drifted away to a distant part of the berm.
“We’re farmers, you know?” a friend of the Vietnam guy tells me. “Born and raised here in Laredo. We’ve worked hard all our lives. All of this, all this anger, all this aggression…” And he waves his hand wearily at what’s left of the rally. “What I think is, we’re here on this earth to take care of one another.”
IN WHICH I AM CHOKED
I get a few minutes with Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project.
What I want to ask is, Why are you guys so mad about everything? Why so scared? Where’s the love?
Instead I say, “I’ve read that you’re a Christian. What’s the relation of this Minuteman ethic to your Christianity?”
“Charity is good,” he says. “Benevolence is good. But charity begins at home. And their home is Mexico.”
Gilchrist is a likable guy in his fifties who reminds me of the actor who played the mayor in Jaws. He speaks in meandering Stengelese paragraphs; your mind struggles to summarize them, but they will not yield. Strong passions, about something or other, keep emitting forth from him, in a sideways manner that makes you keep listening, in the same way that seeing a beginner skater fly by carrying a stack of dishes might make you keep watching. He’s always saying things like “I’ve got him in my crosshairs!” or “He’s OK for now, he hasn’t crossed me yet, he’s making all the right noises!” or (of the late Steve Irwin): “He was probably one of these open-border cranks, but I give him a pass — I liked his show,” or (of an African American Minuteman in Los Angeles, with admiring glee): “That guy just burned an effigy of Osama bin Laden — in front of a mosque!”
Gilchrist can be seen on YouTube, saying, of a crowd of chanting protesters at Ground Zero, “This is not the first time I’ve faced Satan…. This will not be the last time,” but in person he’s gentlemanly, timid almost. This is communicated via something in his listening posture: leaning slightly forward, a kind of wincing going on around the eyes.
After the rally, the Minutepeople convoy out to Eagle Pass, where the Op will begin in earnest. We stop at a convenience store to fuel up. Trying to engage Gilchrist, I roll down the van window, jocularly tell him smoking’s a nasty habit.
“Well,” he says, “I don’t do drugs, I don’t drink much…and I’ve recently given up ATTEMPTED MURDER!”
At the words attempted murder, putting a mock-crazy expression on his face, he reaches in through the van window and fake-throttles me around the neck.
I have no problem with this. I’m from Chicago. Chicago males often bond via fake kicks to the groin. So I feel I’m getting off easy.
Although I also think: (1) Wow, that was a pretty energetic fake-choke, and (2) Has this guy not undergone media training?
We drive two hours into the country, looking for illegals along the way — in particular, it would seem, for illegals too deaf or stupid to hide when they hear a twelve-car convoy approaching.
NO, TELL ME WHAT YOU REALLY THINK
Here are some facts about Minutepeople, or at least the eight I had dinner with that night, at Skillet’s Restaurant in Eagle Pass, Texas:
Minutepeople are fun. You can’t insult them. They’re willing to entertain any point of view. They like to debate. They look stern at first, do a lot of scowling, but behind their eyes, once you get them talking, there’s a hurt, docile quality, possibly related to past wrongs done them, a quality I associate with the thunked-as-kids: Long ago the world turned on them in some unexpected and unpleasant way, and they are, not unreasonably, expecting that it could happen again at any moment. The Barney-Fifish quality of their bluster recedes immediately upon challenge, and they go soft, and you somehow magically become Dad.
I announce myself as an Eastern Liberal, and am thereafter treated like a minicelebrity or lab specimen, a living example of a rare species they’ve heretofore only heard about on Fox. Paradoxically, my opinions seem to matter to them. They’re oddly deferential. They listen. When I argue that, despite our gun laws, Manhattan is safer than Houston, or assert that, yes, there are working-class people in New York City, they take me on faith, adjust their arguments accordingly, and seem happy for the correction, because it means I was taking their argument seriously in the first place.
I ask if Minutemen ever bring guns on their Ops.
“We all have guns,” someone says.
“We all have guns here,” says someone else.
“This is Texas,” says a third someone. “Totally legal.”
Their guns, in fact, are influencing their choice of hotels: They have to be able to bring their weapons inside.
“The thing about people from New York?” says Shannon, founder of the Texas Minutemen, who has been smiling at me in passing all day in a way that manages to be suspicious, deferential, and welcoming all at once. “Is they’re rude.”
“It’s the way they talk to you,” someone else says.
Has he, Shannon, ever been to New York?
“Haw haw! Yeah, right!” says Shannon. “Like I’m going to that crazy place without my guns.”
They honestly don’t go anywhere they can’t bring their guns?
Nope. The world is too insane. It would be irresponsible to put themselves at that kind of risk.