Waiting for José

The Minutemen's Pursuit of America

Harel Shapira

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400888450
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

A revealing look inside a controversial movement They live in the suburbs of Tennessee and Indiana. They fought in Vietnam and Desert Storm. They speak about an older, better America, an America that once was, and is no more. And for the past decade, they have come to the U.S. / Mexico border to hunt for illegal immigrants. Who are the Minutemen? Patriots? Racists? Vigilantes?Harel Shapira lived with the Minutemen and patrolled the border with them, seeking neither to condemn nor praise them, but to understand who they are and what they do. Challenging simplistic depictions of these men as right-wing fanatics with loose triggers, Shapira discovers a group of men who long for community and embrace the principles of civic engagement. Yet these desires and convictions have led them to a troubling place. Shapira takes you to that place—a stretch of desert in southern Arizona, where he reveals that what draws these men to the border is not simply racism or anti-immigrant sentiments, but a chance to relive a sense of meaning and purpose rooted in an older life of soldiering. They come to the border not only in search of illegal immigrants, but of lost identities and experiences.Now with a new afterword by the author, Waiting for José brings understanding to a group of people in search of lost identities and experiences.

ANDREA DYLEWSKI

CHAPTER 1

American Dreams

ASK A MINUTEMAN TO TELL YOU ABOUT HIS LIFE, and he will tell you about how America used to be a better place.

Ask Wade, a self-described “loner” and avid outdoorsman, to tell you about the trips he made during his childhood to the Rocky Mountains of his native Colorado and he will tell you, “Over the years it’s all changed. It used to be untouched. Back then nature was really nature. Cleanest air you could imagine. Now it’s overrun with people and trash.… Used to be you could just camp out anywhere. It was all free, open. Now it’s all become private, pay campgrounds.… Of course back then you also didn’t have to be afraid of just pitching a tent out in the open. It’s really sad to see what’s happened to our country over time, but I want to save whatever good bit of it is left for future generations.”

Wade wears a leather cowboy hat, which he incessantly cleans, and is something of a philosopher, quoting Tocqueville and Twain with unpretentious ease. He makes statements like “Law is not the same as justice” and “Generalizations are correct but not true.”

Wade is a man of routine. Each morning he makes himself a breakfast consisting of beans and eggs on a portable burner in front of his tent. Before eating he bows his head while seated over a tiny, makeshift table, says a silent prayer, and crosses himself. After eating, he carefully rolls himself twenty impeccable cigarettes for the day. More religious than most others at the camp, on Sundays he goes to the nearby shooting range to take a proper shower and have a proper shave, and then he makes a one-hour drive to the nearest church.

For Wade, a narrative of the self does not exist without a narrative of the nation, and the telling of one involves the telling of the other. Both are filled with nostalgia, telling of change and decline, recalling memories of a better past and a foreboding future.

There are many themes in these stories. The ruin of nature is one. In his laments about the Rocky Mountains the ruin comes through pollution, in the form of not just trash and smog but also people. And it’s not illegal immigrants he is talking about, but people in a very general sense. And then there is privatization and the transformation of what he says was once free public space into “pay campgrounds.” And finally, there is the account of increased crime and the fear for personal safety.

As he continues to tell me about those Rocky Mountains, Wade longingly recalls the time when he and his dad, having spent a day hiking, took to collecting some fallen branches and building themselves a lean-to for shelter. “Of course, these days, the folks at the Sierra Club,” he angrily says, invoking America’s oldest and most influential environmental group, “would be at your throat if you did that, coming after you with their lawyers.”

But ruined nature is only one small part of the story. Wade also talks of ruined cities. He describes urban streetscapes littered with “signs in Spanish,” shopping malls with stores selling people “nothing that makes their life better,” and too many highways with too many cars.

For Wade the ruin is everywhere, and so too are the enemies. Illegal immigrants are a central enemy, and Wade talks often about how “Mexicans don’t assimilate” and compares “today’s immigrants” with those from previous generations, claiming that “immigrants were better in the past.” “Back then you had Czechs, Poles, Italians,” he tells me. “Sure they moved into their own neighborhoods, but they moved to America, to the new country, they understood they were going somewhere new and were going to change their way of life, they wanted to belong to it, they maintained their heritage, and they wanted to become American. Today’s immigrants don’t want to become American.”

But at the same time that he condemns them, Wade tells me that “The Mexicans are hard workers. I’ll give them that. They work more than their fair share. And it’s not easy trades. Hard work. They bust their butts for their money. Wish more of our young people these days had that kind of work ethic.”

Indeed, the Minutemen often understand Mexicans as being exemplars of a work ethic that the new generation of Americans doesn’t have. It upsets Wade greatly when he hears that “young people are unemployed and they complain about how there are no good jobs out there. That’s not it; every job is a good job. Every job puts food on the table, doesn’t matter if you’re mopping floors. It’s not that there are no good jobs out there, they just think they are too good for the jobs.”

Far from criticizing Mexicans, when it comes to his sense of the economy, Wade criticizes Americans. Wade says that welfare is “good and important,” that “it’s important to help the poor.” But simultaneously he points to Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency in the 1960s, and specifically to the set of legislation known as the Great Society, which included programs to support low-income families, as a terrible moment in America’s history. “The Great Society was all a bunch of b.s. The way the welfare system there was set up was that it basically said to people, ‘you don’t need to work, go have a baby and we will support you.’ … It’s like that old thing about giving a man a fish and he won’t be hungry that day versus teaching a man to fish and he won’t ever go hungry again.”

Mexicans, then, are just one part of the story, a story that includes “youth without ‘values,’ ” a story in which Wade is just as just as likely to indict “big business” and the “government” as he is any particular ethnic group—a story in which he criticizes Americans for having lost their sense of responsibility and duty.

Old as he is, Wade still makes continuous reference to his father a source of guidance. “Back in the fifties my father was part of something called the CDC, that’s Civilian Defense Corps, and when he was off duty he would go and watch over a power plant. It wasn’t about money, it was about a sense of duty, and he taught me that at a young age.” It is this feeling of selfless duty that Wade believes is lacking in today’s America. “People are ignorant. They are ignorant about the world, about their own country. And when that happens that’s it, it’s over. And it burns me up. I have no respect for people like that. I mean how do you let the government go about doing as it pleases and just sit back and watch as your own country falls apart.”

And curiously, in this lack of civic engagement, Wade sees a similarity between America and Mexico, and it’s something he would want to help change there as well. Wade claims that just as things used to be better in America, they used to be better in Mexico, and that “the Mexican people are being sold out by their president.” “I would give every Mexican that gets caught a gun before we deport them,” Wade tells me, “and I’d say, ‘Here you go, and now go and start a revolution!’ ” Just as he speaks about America having civic traditions, so too does he speak about Mexican civic traditions. “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees,” Wade tells me. “You know who said that? It was Zapata, leader of the Mexican Revolution. And that’s what they need down there. People like Zapata, like Pancho Villa. But they don’t have them anymore.”

In his account of the decline of civic values, Wade also points to changes in the education system, “In the 1950s and 1960s when I went to school they had what’s called citizenship class. It was a class where you learned about American history, about how to be a good citizen, about ideas like duty and honor. But we don’t have that anymore.”

Wade also talks about the decline of “family values,” and about husbands who cheat on their wives and wives who don’t take care of their children. “When I was growing up,” he says to me, “the wife had an important role. Being a homemaker is an important thing which should be respected. People today think being a homemaker is a bad thing and if a woman is doing that it’s bad.”

To understand Wade’s narrative of America’s decline, you need to understand that his criticisms do not express support for this or that political party. Though he has, throughout his life, tended to vote for Republicans, Wade has done so as a “lesser of two evils” and for reasons that do not clearly fit the partitioned ideological geography of blue and red states. “I voted for Carter in the late seventies,” he recalls. “I thought he was humble. He was a farmer.” These days he talks about a hatred for George W. Bush. “That man needs to be impeached … he’s a traitor if ever there was one.” The last “good president this country had,” he tells me, “was elected in 1817. That was James Monroe, the last President who was a Founding Father.” Indeed, in Wade’s narrative of America’s decline, fellow Americans are as much at fault as José Sanchez, and the government as often the target of his frustrations. “They’ve forgotten that we are the ones in charge, and that they are meant to serve us, not the other way around.” Wade has spent the majority of his life serving America.

The Men They Once Were

As Wade puts it, “I’ve been a soldier since the day I was born.” Seventy-one years old, he was born at Elgin Air Force Base in Florida, where his father was a sergeant in the United States Air Force and served as a bombardier during World War II. “Growing up, my backyard was basically an airfield. Every morning I’d wake up to the sound of fighter jets taking off. I remember my dad leaving the house in his uniform, and just thinking he was the greatest person doing the greatest thing. And I knew I wanted to be like that when I grew up. I wanted to be like him, and like all the other soldiers I was surrounded by.”

This is not the first time Wade has been to Arizona. No more than a month after graduating from high school, he was in basic training at the Yuma military base in southwestern Arizona. “It was the normal course to take,” he tells me. “My father was in the military, his father was in the military, and I knew I wanted to follow in their footsteps.”

Reflecting on his experience in the military, Wade tells me it gave him “everything.” “Friendship, dedication, a sense of duty … it let me travel the world, have experiences by the age of twenty-five that no one else can claim to have. It gave me a sense of brotherhood, a sense of commitment, dedication, and honor.”

Qualifying his comments, as he usually does, by saying, “It’s just my personal opinion,” Wade tells me that one of the worst things that ever happened in America was the end of the draft. Wade believes that the draft is a key aspect of creating unity—“creating unity from difference,” as he calls it: “You get thrown into a room with a bunch of strangers, you get your head shaved, you get a uniform, you are with people from different economic standings, different regions of the country, and you are forced to connect with each other, forced to engage in dialogue, to talk with each other.”

Like the other volunteers, Wade’s experience of the rest of the world came during his years as a soldier, traveling from military base to military base. For an extended period during the early 1970s he was stationed in Germany, and while moving his arms mechanically from side to side, Wade mentions how everyone believes that the Germans are like robots. He had that preconception when he went there. “The reality is,” he informs me, “they are big party people, they love to have fun. We would sit in coffee shops, bars, drinking schnapps, lemon vodka, people come up to you, talk with you, dance, sing, and you talk politics. Just like us right now, you talk politics. It’s not ‘oh he went with her, and she did this to him’ and so on. You have meaningful conversations. You talk about real life. That is what is missing in this country, that is what we have lost. People today drive in their cars, work in their cubicles, get on their computers, and never interact with one another.”

Wade was in military service for nearly thirty years. After leaving the military, he worked as a driver for a company specializing in the transport of munitions for the Department of Defense. He often talks with great enthusiasm about his days driving highly combustible materials with great care along treacherous roads. And although he was a mere driver, he speaks about the different kinds of explosives he transported with the knowledge of a chemist. But things have changed.

America has changed. And Wade’s family has changed. The military lineage has been broken, and it has been broken on Wade’s watch. “Most of the men in my family have served our nation in uniform, the ones I respect the most anyhow.” Wade adds this last qualification with a sense of remorse. I ask him about the members of his family that didn’t serve and am surprised to hear that it’s his own son. “He’s a pothead,” he tells me, his demeanor expressing a strained relationship. “He doesn’t have a job, he doesn’t do anything. He lives with his mother, and she doesn’t do anything to help him get his life together. I tried to convince him to join the military. But he said it’s not for him.… I know some of his friends have joined the military, and I tip my hat to them.”

As I think about whether I want to dig deeper into what is clearly a touchy subject, Wade continues, connecting his own son’s actions to a larger contempt he has for contemporary American youth. “What I don’t get is why it is that today we don’t see very many youth joining the military in a time of war. In World War II, citizens ran to the recruiting stations to join. Why is it different today?”

If he could, Wade would go to a recruiting station. But like other Minutemen, they won’t take him; he’s too old. And this is what the Minutemen camp provides for him; this is why it holds such an important place in his life. “That’s a big part of why I like coming down here. I get to protect this country, I get to continue to serve my country.”

For Wade, being a Minuteman is about reclaiming a part of his life that is extremely meaningful to him, but which he can no longer be a part of. It is about being engaged in practices that give him a sense of meaning and self-worth, grounded in the idea of being able to “protect this country.” Wade is looking for a way that he can continue to be our protector and, through that, reclaim the identity that he has lost.

Wade recently underwent triple bypass surgery, “I had to be in a small room for nine weeks, and I tell you something, you should never be stuck inside four walls for so much time.” During his stay in the hospital, he constantly longed for the outdoors. “I made a promise to myself that once I got out I would be sure to enjoy the freedom of the outdoors.” Reflecting on his participation with the Minutemen, he tells me, “In part, that’s why I was so eager to come down to Arizona. I had to miss the first week of the patrol because of a doctor’s appointment, but I’ll be staying on the whole month.”

When Wade interprets his time at the hospital, he does so not simply from the vantage point of a sick old man, but as a veteran, where the quality of care he received becomes a gauge for measuring the extent to which he, and what he believes he represents as a veteran, are valued in this country. Immigration policies, tax policies, and economic policies are all part of the way that Wade makes moral judgments about the government, but perhaps more than any of these, his diagnosis of government administration these days is based on his assessment of veterans’ hospitals. “Back in 1998 when Clinton was in office I can’t begin to tell you how much paperwork I had to fill out. It was a nightmare, and the service was god-awful. But in 2003 there was a big change under Bush. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big Bush supporter, but I will tell you this, he did a lot for the welfare of us veterans. You know I got a check back dated all the way to 1998?!”

Although he suffered greatly in the hospital, he also experienced his time there as an affirmation of his self-worth and dignity. “I was taken care of by this doctor from Stanford University,” Wade tells me with pride, “a real specialist. He was a professor at the university.”

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