North of the Border
With the Minutemen on the Mexican border.
by Matt Labash
The Weekly Standard - 08/29/2005, Volume 010, Issue 46
Tombstone, Arizona
THEY DON'T TEACH IT in journalism school, but that doesn't make it any less true: If you're going to go native with a subject, you need proper headwear. Such was my object, standing at the hat-rack of the Quik Pic convenience store between Tucson and Tombstone where I'd stopped en route to visit the Minutemen, the rag-tag band of private citizens determined to end illegal immigration in spite of government apathy.
The loosely organized, all-volunteer Minutemen have captured headlines and imaginations since their month-long stand on the Arizona/Mexican border in April. Make that their month-long sit, since much of their activity requires taking a load off in their best lawn chairs. They plant themselves on the border in everything from those old metal-tube jobs with vinyl webbing to the Wilderness Recliner with durable padded seat and insulated beverage holder, there to serve as reporting agents and visible deterrents against the gusher of illegal aliens our government seems unable, or unwilling, to stop. Their very logo is an advertisement for proactive passivity. It depicts a Revolutionary-era Minuteman holding a cell phone and binoculars, as opposed to the more forthright musket.
Even in school plays, however, I could never pull off the tricorn hat. It made my face look angular. And with the Sonora Desert sun hot enough to tan you through your clothes and turn your ear cartilage into crispy rinds, picking the appropriate lid warranted careful weighing of the evidence.
Some proponents cast these lawn-chair warriors, whose median age is near 60, as devout patriots conducting a high-stakes neighborhood watch, the "neighborhood" consisting of our lawless 1,900-mile southern border, large parts of which aren't even marked, let alone fenced. The Minutemen, they say, are just as likely to offer sun-baked illegals life-sustaining water as they are to hit speed-dial on their cell phones, ratting them out to the U.S. Border Patrol, which gives them an air-conditioned escort back to Mexico. According to boosters, they are watchdogs and humanitarians, having over the last three years rescued some 160 aliens who'd nearly perished in the desert.
It would seem, then, I couldn't go wrong with a straw grape-picker's hat in the Steinbeck mode. It sits atop the crown as a testament to American solidarity with oppressed-peoples-of-the-world. Made in China, probably in a sweatshop, it was a real steal at $2.50.
On the other hand, there are the Minutemen's legions of detractors. Mexican president Vicente Fox called them "migrant hunters," while George W. Bush denounced them as "vigilantes." The Minutemen do tote guns (though they encourage their ranks to secure concealed-weapon permits, the better, organizers say, to put the government to work weeding out potential wackos through criminal background checks). Yet the entire month of April, the heaviest thing that went down was the censuring of a new volunteer who gave a weary illegal water and Wheaties (along with 20 bucks), then photographed him wearing a T-shirt that said "Bryan Barton Caught Me Crossing the Border And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt." Barton was summarily dismissed.
Whatever policing of their ranks they'd done, the Minutemen had been macheted in the press. Every sour-tempered hack and alternative-weekly assassin had turned up to call them extremists and xenophobes and depict them as backwoods mouth-breathers, just as happy to hunt Mexicans as to loll on the redwood decks of their double-wides. They were dismissed as "red-faced pudge-tubs in full camo," and their campaign disparaged as "Granddad's Last Stand." Journalists had it both ways, hinting at impending violence, then being dismissive when it didn't materialize: "These Minutemen are to real vigilantes . . . what the Disney Jungle Boat Ride is to Amazon exploration," sniffed one scribe.
It was a confusing picture. Often portrayed as feckless rather than cautiously law-abiding, the Minutemen still came off in the media as some sort of super-spawn of Bernhard Goetz and the Michigan militia circa 1995. So back at the hat rack, having not yet met a single Minuteman, I doubled down, selecting a black, militia-style "Try-to-Burn-This-Flag" Stars'n'Bars number. Just to be safe.
TOMBSTONE IS A TOWN that was carved out of Apache country. The prospector who named it, claiming that he traveled among the fierce Indians in the surrounding hills to "collect rocks," was warned that if he persisted in his folly the only rock he'd find was a tombstone. The town was welcoming that way.
Its Boothill Graveyard boasts of the gentle ends met by its inhabitants: struck in the head with fire pokers, stoned to death by Apaches, skulls crushed under wagon wheels. Nearly going tits-up after a mining bust, Tombstone was repackaged as a tourist trap, feeding off past glories such as Wyatt Earp's Gunfight at the OK Corral. The gunfights that still break out with regularity in its streets are fought with blanks by reenactors. In fact, before meeting Chris Simcox, the Minuteman leader and co-founder who doubles as the town's newspaper owner/editor, I make an afternoon of surveying these tourist wranglers, who, like the nation, seem divided on whether the Minutemen are a force for good or ill.
Outside the dust-caked OK Corral, a reenactor called "Ol' Joe" applauds the Minutemen's efforts since they help "keep illegals out," though he also calls them "bad" because they "keep the illegals from doing work us white guys don't want to do"--things like picking lettuce and busing tables, as opposed to pumping lead into the gentleman who plays Billy Clanton.
Over at the Helldorado Town gunfight theater, I spy a photograph of actor Bad Bob Waco, whose shaved head looks like a damaged baseball with its seams and stitches. The new, improved Bad Bob, in a black hat and red sash like the ones the Earps' cowboy nemeses used to wear, pulls a pre-show Dr. Pepper out of the cooler. He explains that the photo is of him after he did a "flip-off" from a second story and missed the mattress during a show. "Hit my head off the concrete," he says, knocking it with his fingers. "Now it's a metal plate."
"I reckon they're all right. I didn't think there was gonna be trouble like people thought there was," says Bad Bob, and his office manager Vikki, dressed in moccasins and a Geronimo shirt, concurs. Vikki details how Tombstone's been adversely affected by illegal traffic: how the migrants hide in the washes outside of town, littering them with drug needles and plastic Circle K bags. They bust pipes, pollute the water supply, break into houses, and cut down fences. The Minutemen's efforts mark the first time she's seen alien traffic go down in forever (rates of illegal entry were estimated to drop by as much as 50 percent along the 20-mile stretch of border that the several hundred Minutemen patrolled). Somebody needed to do something to bring attention to the issue, she says. Washington certainly wasn't paying any.
But a white-haired "No Toes Blake," who wears a marshal's badge, takes a less charitable view of Simcox and Co. Though he likes Simcox and used to work with him when Simcox was a "goofy sidekick" in the Helldorado show before taking over the paper, Blake doesn't buy his strategy. "If you wanna change something," Blake says, "you should vote the right people in. We don't need vigilantes around here." (He would say that. He's a law dog.)
Another Miss-Kitty type employee expresses the same concern as plenty in the tourist sector, fearful that their gunfights might be interrupted by actual bullets. She says Chris Simcox is just like all the other eccentric end-of-the-liners that the town attracts, putting her in mind of the drifter who thinks he really is Doc Holliday, down to the tubercular cough. She says Simcox is "really not liked around here. He carries a gun everywhere, and for good reason."
While Simcox is revered by plenty--including the Russian immigrant waitress who serves me a buffalo burger at the OK Café--he doesn't dispute that he has to look over his shoulder. He wears a bullet-proof vest most places and takes a coterie of heat-packing volunteers he sometimes calls "bodyguards" with him to speaking engagements. Many of them are retired military or law enforcement. Death threats have come from open-border types on both sides of the line, and he's been fired at by drug smugglers while on patrol. When I suggest we go out for dinner, he declines, saying he doesn't eat in restaurants since someone might poison him. He's joking. But when I ask to go to his house to take some notes on it, his good humor fades. "Nobody sees my house. I don't want you to know where I live."
Instead, I catch up with him at the joint office of the Tombstone Tumbleweed/Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, a fall-down frathouse-style adobe structure on Toughnut Street. Here, Simcox does everything from edit and write stories on lifeguard shortages, arts-and-crafts fairs, and immigration abuses (his favorite topic) to answer phones and sweep the floors. His paper enjoys something close to 100 percent penetration, but the town's only got 1,500 people. Apart from some stringers, he's close to a one-man band.
SIMCOX, 44, is boyish, with the wiry athletic build of a professional shortstop, which he dreamed of becoming after being drafted by the Cincinnati Reds and before washing out when a tumor was found in his lung. (He lost part of his lung, but is healthy now.) When the often stubbled Simcox is clean-shaven, he looks like Jimmy Olsen. But unlike the cub reporter, he showily puffs Macanudos as though he'd read about it being protocol in the Newspaper Publisher's Handbook. When I arrive, he's on the phone with a Houston radio show, putting out fires after a report that the Minutemen are coming to Texas. Many local pundits and political types are aghast. "The sky is falling," he says to me mockingly, exhaling a cloud of cigar smoke while on hold.
They'd better get used to it. Since the Minutemen's Arizona campaign dominated front pages in April, and a similar month-long stint in every state along the Mexican border was announced for October, eager volunteers have been hitting Simcox up to open chapters everywhere--in scores of inland states and every border state except Maine. Even Canadians, our lethargic neighbors to the north, want in on the action.
It seems the Minutemen are surfing a tidal wave of dissatisfaction. As a recent CNN poll confirmed, 96 percent of respondents felt illegal immigration should be a major issue in next year's election, perhaps because some three million aliens made it in last year, mostly through Mexico. Estimates of how many illegals our Border Patrol manages to intercept range from one in three to one in twenty. So it's small wonder that even unlikely politicians--such as Hillary Clinton and New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, who just declared a state of emergency in four border counties and who's requested a meeting with Simcox--are making border security the new black.
THE HEADQUARTERS SCENE is less hectic than it was in April, when 800 or so volunteers from around the country flocked to Tombstone, each with a couple of reporters in a back-pocket. Today, it's just me and a Belgian documentary crew making in-person demands on his time. But the phone brings a nonstop string of requests from talk-radio hosts, supplicants, and aspiring franchisees. Some don't bother seeking Simcox's imprimatur: There are now enough copycat organizations that even the splinter groups have splinters.
While Simcox gets held over on the phone by a greedy talk-show host, I make the acquaintance of the headquarters staff. They aren't exactly the nest of racist snipers and vipers I've been reading about on the plane. As I brush past Simcox's husky-lab mix lounging on the floor (he found the dog on the border while patrolling), I meet Lucy Garza, his able assistant who doubles as a screener. If Lucy hears any aspiring Minutemen disparaging Hispanics (a naturalized citizen, she's 100 percent Mexican), they are shown the door, although Lucy herself, when it comes to illegal immigration, is a bit of a fire-breather. "They come over. They reap all the benefits. They rape our country, our system, and they send all the money back home," she says, tearing up as she describes how the deserts are ravaged by waste. "It makes me ashamed of my heritage."
In a back room of the newspaper, under a "Homeland Security" poster that depicts the bumbling Beverly Hillbillies, sit a pair of mild-mannered husband-and-wife retirees named Jack and Brenda. Jack wears an earring and sandals. Brenda snacks from a Kirkland Fruit & Nut medley bag while logging phone calls from concerned citizens. She is so meek that she allows me to mistakenly call her "Betty" for 15 minutes before finally correcting me. "We're not a bunch of militiamen," says Jack, stating the obvious.
Attracted to the cause, the couple arrived in Tombstone in their RV last May and expect to stay through the October campaign. Like many Minutemen and Minutewomen, they are hard to place politically and seem pretty moderate across the board. Unlike many militia types, they don't count black helicopters in their sleep. In fact, they're not actually antigovernment at all, in the sense of wanting there to be less of it. Rather, as Simcox says, "We must force our government to do their job by threatening to do it for them." As some of their T-shirts attest, they're not vigilantes, they're undocumented Border Patrol agents.
I ask Jack what possesses a man to while away 10 or 12 hours of his day for free in what many have regarded as a hopeless cause, and he responds with a long list of grievances. When he gets a full head of steam, his "s"s tend to whistle. Having once worked for a "little bitty company called Xerox" that moved jobs to Mexico, he resents illegal aliens for depressing wages for the working class and for failing to assimilate. When he was in the Army and traveled anywhere for longer than two weeks, he'd at least make an attempt to pick up the language. He resents illegals' demanding rights they shouldn't have. (In Iowa recently, hundreds of them openly demonstrated to be issued driver's licenses, and no one was arrested.) "An illegal has more rights than I've got. Plus, the ACLU will defend him, they won't defend me," grouses Jack. In fact, when the Southern New Mexico chapter of the ACLU was found to have a board member who'd joined the Minutemen, the state director suspended the whole chapter.
Jack is sick of all the shoulder-shrugging capitulation. He's tired of his bank accepting matricula cards, issued by the Mexican consulate, so that undocumented immigrants can get home loans (no federal law prohibits it). He's tired of illegals' being "treated as super-citizens--free medical care, food stamps, housing assistance, paid schooling in their own language, everything immediately. Americans don't have universal health care. If you're not among the richest or poorest, you don't get it. The middle class is S.O.L." (s--out of luck).
His kettle on full-whistle now, Jack adds blackly, "I used to live in the greatest country in the world!"
Brenda shakes her head, indicating her husband's gone too far. "You still do. You live with me!"
But Brenda, too, feels the bite every day. She logs calls in her color-coded notebook, talking irate border-inhabitants off a ledge, frustrated beyond comprehension at the lapses in security. Sometimes they just need an understanding ear.
Simcox himself is quick to point out that Mexicans and other illegal immigrants are forced by hardship to pursue this course, and are as victimized by their corrupt governments as we are ignored by ours. "We don't blame the people coming across," he says, "I don't blame the victims. Man, I'd be doing the same thing. Actually, I'd be leading the revolution in Mexico." So I ask Brenda how she can begrudge these people a better existence, even if they're gaming our system, when she won the lottery by being born in America.
Brenda, who is Cherokee Indian, makes a distinction I hear repeatedly from the Minutepeople: that unlike many other groups of their stripe, they are not anti-immigration, they are anti-illegal-immigration. They even support increased legal immigration from Mexico and a beefed-up guest worker program, fully funded by the employers who elect to exploit cheap labor at the expense of Americans. In reassuring tones, Brenda frames it thus: "Everybody is thirsty. They're standing in line down the sidewalk to drink at the water fountain." The people she objects to, she says, are those cutting across the grass. "I don't care who I stand in line with, but everybody ought to stand in line."
Grandmotherly Brenda doesn't seem the type who'd be itching to dive into activism's mosh pit, but her breed is multiplying. Mostly, this is because whether one's reasons for concern about illegal immigration are economic, cultural, or related to national security, anyone who's bothered to examine the subject for a second knows that "border security" is an oxymoron on a par with "Senate inte |
