The Guerrilla War Against Cheap Lettuce

By Ben Ehrenreich, The Believer. Posted December 16, 2005.

If you drive far enough south in Douglas, Arizona, you eventually hit the wall. You'll pass through tidy avenues lined with new ranch homes and the stately old brick houses built for mining officials back when Douglas was a company town, when there were jobs here besides those offered by the Border Patrol, Wal-Mart, and the prison up the road. But this is the Sonoran desert, despite the lawns, and minitornadoes of red dust keep whipping themselves up in the streets and just as quickly dissolving. Then the avenues give way to a long, straight unpaved road, then a drainage ditch, and then the wall.

Constructed of adjoining rectangles of corrugated steel built to serve as landing strips for American planes in Vietnam, the wall climbs at least ten feet high for miles to the east and west, a rust-colored scar on the surface of the desert. When it passes through a wash, the landing mats are replaced by tall rectangular steel girders filled with cement, spaced just widely enough that water can pass between them, but not human limbs. Through those spaces, you can see into Mexico--more red dirt and skinny ocotillos, a thirsty-looking cow, a makeshift grave of piled stones and plastic orange flowers, the same blue sky.

If you linger here for more than a moment, the lenses on the Border Patrol camera towers will spot you, or you'll trip a magnetic sensor or a seismic one, and one of the nearly 10,000 Border Patrol agents stationed along the 2,000-mile southern boundary will roll up behind you in a Jeep, lights flashing. If you are allowed to drive on, big-eared desert hares will leap in front of your tires, and more dust devils will rise and twirl to the right and to the left. Then the wall will block your view again until, without warning, about five miles east of town, it comes to an abrupt end, and nothing but a few sad strands of torn barbed wire remain to bisect the enormity of the desert.

It's hard not to laugh out loud: all this mad fuss over so much nothingness. What are we so afraid of?

How it all began

Jim Gilchrist's home is a good nine-hour drive from the barren stretch of Arizona desert about which he has become so insistently concerned. Despite this distance, Gilchrist has for months now been planning to erect a human fence along the imaginary line separating the United States from Mexico, to station volunteers armed with binoculars, radios, and often pistols at quarter-mile intervals in an effort to protect what they and Gilchrist understand to be America from all that it is not. Gilchrist is a retired CPA, and lives with his wife and two aging Chihuahuas in a modest yellow stucco town house behind the walls of a gated subdivision in Orange County, California. Nearly all of the surrounding streets have Spanish names (Calle Cortez is not far), and even the car washes have Mexican-tiled roofs.

It is late March, and the Minuteman Project won't begin for another week, but Gilchrist's phone is already ringing every few minutes with calls from ABC News or Congressman Tom Tancredo's office. One of the Chihuahuas dozes on the couch in a mauve-and-cream-themed living room cluttered with ceramic angels, artificial roses, and framed New Testament verses. (His wife, Gilchrist explains, is the religious one.) A small man with hooded gray-green eyes, a quick smile, and a nervous laugh, he strokes the dog beside him and talks about being wounded in Vietnam on a dirt road just south of Khe San.

"I think about that place every single day," he says. A bullet struck his rifle, sending fragments into his face, head, shoulder, elbow, and arm. "We had nineteen men in our company killed that day. Their bodies were just laying in the trail."

The thread of Gilchrist's ramblings is loose and somewhat frayed, and before long he moves on to the last time he was in Arizona, about twenty miles west of Douglas, patrolling the border road with Chris Simcox, then the editor of the Tombstone (Ariz.) Tumbleweed, and, with Gilchrist, the co-founder of the Minuteman Project. On the other side of the barbed-wire fence, they came across three coyotes, as the guides who smuggle migrants across the border are called. "One of the guys must've been only seventeen," Gilchrist says. "He needed braces; I remember that. They were friendly and everything, but they knew what we were there for. Our interpreter told them, 'We're not here to hurt you.'" The coyote answered, "Well, I got ninety-five people back there, and we're coming in tonight.'"

"He even told us," Gilchrist muses with a laugh. "It was funny. It was somehow silly. Here we are on the other side of the barbed wire, and we're giving them a gallon of water. We did everything but shake their hands. He said, 'We need agua.' So we gave them the gallon of water and they said thank you.

I said, "De nada." And the young one, he was about seventeen, he seemed to be so sincere."

Gilchrist shakes his head in amazement at it, this simple interaction, stripped briefly of any shielding rhetoric. He doesn't seem to know what to do with it, so he quickly returns to the comforts of rhetoric. Gilchrist's colleagues along the Arizona border will later repeat and repeat again the same arguments and many of the same phrases ("economic invasion," "a nation of laws"). The degree of rationality, nostalgia, and overt or implicit racism will fluctuate from Minuteman to Minuteman, but the basics will remain the same. By taking American jobs and bringing down wages, immigrants are destroying the American middle class. By taking advantage of government services, they are draining our wealth. They will bring us all down. They are criminals and terrorists. Most of this is demonstrably untrue, but it offers a tidy enough account to explain most of the dislocations brought about by the current state of global capitalism.

Ben Ehrenreich lives in Los Angeles. His first novel, The Suitors, will be published next spring by Counterpoint Press.

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