“Grab your night-vision goggles and your thermal scopes, and join Shapira as he sits with the Minutemen along the jagged Arizona-Mexico border. As the men wait for a José that might never come and yearn together for an America that is long gone–or perhaps, never was–we learn about the dispositions and desires of a group of people that has been consistently misunderstood and misrepresented. A captivating, theoretically inspired narrative in a refreshingly new sociological voice. This is ethnography at its best.”–Javier Auyero, author of Patients of the State

“Waiting for José is an empathetic and beautifully written ethnography. It brings into sociological focus the stories of Americans whose patriotism and search for meaningful lives brings them to mount voluntary patrols against illegal immigrants on the U.S. / Mexico border. Media portrayals of these Minutemen are often mere cartoons; Harel Shapira fills out both the human picture and its larger social implications.”–Craig Calhoun, director of the London School of Economics and Political Science

“This is a courageous book. Harel Shapira put himself in danger to dig out the story of the Minutemen; he shows a kind of ethical courage as well, by probing sympathetically their thoughts and feelings. His book reveals an ‘Other America’ whose disappointments and anger the rest of us need to understand. He helps us do this in prose worthy of George Orwell.”–Richard Sennett, author of The Corrosion of Character

“Waiting for José is a haunting and important book about the activists who patrol the border between Mexico and the United States, hoping to save their country and redeem their own lives, too. Harel Shapira resists the urge to praise or blame the Minutemen for their campaign against ‘illegal immigrants.’ Instead he aims to understand how and why they’ve mobilized, and to explain what their movement means. Every page of this deeply affecting ethnography is on the mark.”–Eric Klinenberg, author of Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone

“Waiting for José critically explores the lifeworlds of the Minuteman Project with care, subtlety, and charm. Shapira demythologizes the Minutemen, poking holes in depictions of them as angry xenophobes with loose triggers, and shows them as vulnerable, ageing men in search of meaning. This portrait of the Minutemen is ultimately a portrait of social isolation and alienation.”–Shehzad Nadeem, author of Dead Ringers: How Outsourcing is Changing the Way Indians Understand Themselves

“Shapira has crafted a very readable, entertaining, and highly articulate work. He has a novelist’s ability to describe situations, the physical environment, and the individuals in them, and a sociologist’s training to be able to place his subjects in a broader sociohistorical landscape.”–David C. Brotherton, coauthor of Banished to the Homeland: Dominican Deportees and Their Stories of Exile

Harel Shapira is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Texas, Austin.

Waiting for Jos

THE MINUTEMEN’S PURSUIT OF AMERICA

By HAREL SHAPIRA

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15215-8

Contents

The Minutemen Chain of Command………………………………………viiiAcknowledgments……………………………………………………xiPreface: A Place on the Border………………………………………xvINTRODUCTION All Quiet on the Southern Front…………………………1CHAPTER 1 American Dreams………………………………………….27CHAPTER 2 Camp Vigilance…………………………………………..39CHAPTER 3 Gordon and His Guns………………………………………73CHAPTER 4 Scenes from the Border……………………………………97CHAPTER 5 Encounters………………………………………………125CONCLUSION Belonging in America…………………………………….145Appendix: A Note on Methodology……………………………………..153Notes…………………………………………………………….163Works Cited……………………………………………………….171Index…………………………………………………………….175

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

American Dreams

Ask a Minuteman to tell you about his life, and he will tell youabout how America used to be a better place.

Ask Wade, a self-described “loner” and avid outdoorsman, to tell youabout the trips he made during his childhood to the Rocky Mountains ofhis 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. Cleanestair you could imagine. Now it’s overrun with people and trash…. Usedto be you could just camp out anywhere. It was all free, open. Now it’sall become private, pay campgrounds…. Of course back then you alsodidn’t have to be afraid of just pitching a tent out in the open. It’s reallysad to see what’s happened to our country over time, but I want to savewhatever good bit of it is left for future generations.”

Wade wears a leather cowboy hat, which he incessantly cleans, and issomething of a philosopher, quoting Tocqueville and Twain with unpretentiousease. 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 breakfastconsisting 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 rollshimself twenty impeccable cigarettes for the day. More religious thanmost others at the camp, on Sundays he goes to the nearby shootingrange to take a proper shower and have a proper shave, and then hemakes a one-hour drive to the nearest church.

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

There are many themes in these stories. The ruin of nature is one. Inhis 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 notillegal immigrants he is talking about, but people in a very general sense.And then there is privatization and the transformation of what he sayswas once free public space into “pay campgrounds.” And finally, there isthe account of increased crime and the fear for personal safety.

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

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

For Wade the ruin is everywhere, and so too are the enemies. Illegalimmigrants are a central enemy, and Wade talks often about how “Mexicansdon’t assimilate” and compares “today’s immigrants” with thosefrom previous generations, claiming that “immigrants were better inthe past.” “Back then you had Czechs, Poles, Italians,” he tells me. “Surethey moved into their own neighborhoods, but they moved to America,to the new country, they understood they were going somewhere newand 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 “TheMexicans are hard workers. I’ll give them that. They work more thantheir fair share. And it’s not easy trades. Hard work. They bust their buttsfor their money. Wish more of our young people these days had thatkind of work ethic.”

Indeed, the Minutemen often understand Mexicans as being exemplarsof a work ethic that the new generation of Americans doesn’t have.It upsets Wade greatly when he hears that “young people are unemployedand 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 goodjobs 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 andimportant,” that “it’s important to help the poor.” But simultaneouslyhe points to Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency in the 1960s, and specificallyto the set of legislation known as the Great Society, which includedprograms to support low-income families, as a terrible moment inAmerica’s history. “The Great Society was all a bunch of b.s. The way thewelfare system there was set up was that it basically said to people, ‘youdon’t need to work, go have a baby and we will support you.’ … It’s likethat old thing about giving a man a fish and he won’t be hungry that dayversus 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 toindict “big business” and the “government” as he is any particular ethnicgroup—a story in which he criticizes Americans for having lost theirsense of responsibility and duty.

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

And curiously, in this lack of civic engagement, Wade sees a similaritybetween America and Mexico, and it’s something he would wantto help change there as well. Wade claims that just as things used to bebetter in America, they used to be better in Mexico, and that “the Mexicanpeople are being sold out by their president.” “I would give everyMexican 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 ashe speaks about America having civic traditions, so too does he speakabout Mexican civic traditions. “It is better to die on your feet than tolive on your knees,” Wade tells me. “You know who said that? It wasZapata, leader of the Mexican Revolution. And that’s what they needdown there. People like Zapata, like Pancho Villa. But they don’t havethem anymore.”

In his account of the decline of civic values, Wade also points tochanges in the education system, “In the 1950s and 1960s when I wentto school they had what’s called citizenship class. It was a class whereyou 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 husbandswho cheat on their wives and wives who don’t take care of theirchildren. “When I was growing up,” he says to me, “the wife had an importantrole. Being a homemaker is an important thing which should berespected. People today think being a homemaker is a bad thing and if awoman is doing that it’s bad.”

To understand Wade’s narrative of America’s decline, you need tounderstand that his criticisms do not express support for this or thatpolitical party. Though he has, throughout his life, tended to vote forRepublicans, Wade has done so as a “lesser of two evils” and for reasonsthat do not clearly fit the partitioned ideological geography of blue andred states. “I voted for Carter in the late seventies,” he recalls. “I thoughthe was humble. He was a farmer.” These days he talks about a hatred forGeorge W. Bush. “That man needs to be impeached … he’s a traitor ifever there was one.” The last “good president this country had,” he tellsme, “was elected in 1817. That was James Monroe, the last Presidentwho was a Founding Father.” Indeed, in Wade’s narrative of America’sdecline, fellow Americans are as much at fault as José Sanchez, and thegovernment as often the target of his frustrations. “They’ve forgottenthat we are the ones in charge, and that they are meant to serve us, notthe other way around.” Wade has spent the majority of his life servingAmerica.

The Men They Once Were

As Wade puts it, “I’ve been a soldier since the day I was born.” Seventy-oneyears old, he was born at Elgin Air Force Base in Florida, wherehis father was a sergeant in the United States Air Force and served as abombardier during World War II. “Growing up, my backyard was basicallyan airfield. Every morning I’d wake up to the sound of fighter jetstaking off. I remember my dad leaving the house in his uniform, andjust thinking he was the greatest person doing the greatest thing. And Iknew 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 amonth after graduating from high school, he was in basic training at theYuma military base in southwestern Arizona. “It was the normal courseto take,” he tells me. “My father was in the military, his father was in themilitary, 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 travelthe world, have experiences by the age of twenty-five that no one elsecan 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 mypersonal opinion,” Wade tells me that one of the worst things that everhappened in America was the end of the draft. Wade believes that thedraft 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 fromdifferent economic standings, different regions of the country, and youare forced to connect with each other, forced to engage in dialogue, totalk with each other.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wade recently underwent triple bypass surgery, “I had to be in a smallroom for nine weeks, and I tell you something, you should never bestuck 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 thatonce I got out I would be sure to enjoy the freedom of the outdoors.” Reflectingon 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 firstweek of the patrol because of a doctor’s appointment, but I’ll be stayingon the whole month.”

When Wade interprets his time at the hospital, he does so not simplyfrom the vantage point of a sick old man, but as a veteran, where thequality of care he received becomes a gauge for measuring the extent towhich he, and what he believes he represents as a veteran, are valued inthis country. Immigration policies, tax policies, and economic policiesare all part of the way that Wade makes moral judgments about the government,but perhaps more than any of these, his diagnosis of governmentadministration these days is based on his assessment of veterans’hospitals. “Back in 1998 when Clinton was in office I can’t begin to tellyou how much paperwork I had to fill out. It was a nightmare, and theservice 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 backdated all the way to 1998?!”

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

There is much that men like Wade miss from their days in the military.Yes, they miss the guns and the excitement. And the Minutemencamp offers the allure of that. But in the narrative of a transition froma life experienced on a military base in Germany to one experiencedin a VA hospital in California, one sees that the military meant muchmore to men like Wade, and it held many qualities beyond those focusedon violence. The military was also a place that promoted meaningfulconversation and sense of community. The military was a placewhere Wade experienced a sense of purpose, camaraderie, and, mostimportant, a sense of being a participant in defining and defendingAmerica.

(Continues…)
(Continues…)Excerpted from Waiting for José by HAREL SHAPIRA. Copyright © 2013 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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