Supporting the Northern Wall

Tancredo says we should build the wall north of the city. If a wall is to be built, maybe we should. Tancredo and his ilk can be dangerous.

Tancredo went to Miami and declared it a Third World Country. He compared his reception to that he would have received in Havana and talked about the "thugs" who opposed him.

So Brownsville got off light in the Tancredo mauling. Tancredo's level of viciousness is unusual for someone holding public office, but it is certainly not new to the American scene.

I remember undisguised fear, hatred and bigotry even as a child in McAllen. It was just OK to tell the Jewish kids that they had to answer for killing Jesus. It was also OK to speak openly about the laziness and tendency to steal that was part of the Mexican character. Racist jokes and skits were part of Church entertainment. We did not see any African-Americans, but where they fit in this scheme was clear.

I had little trouble assuming that I was most likely superior to a Mexican or a Jew. I heard this in polite society. Some of the kid's parents talked about these things. Not usually when a Mexican or a Jew was around, but when it was just us, then it was fine. It would not have been wrong if we were not among ourselves, just impolite.

This was not universally true. A visiting preacher talked about the song, "Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world." He had been a missionary where there were children red or yellow or black or brown and he didn't like this racism. The parents were polite to him too, but there was discussion that he had "gone a little native" with all the time he had spent in other countries.

It would also turn ugly. We had fights based on race. The older students bragged about driving into the Mexican part of town with a blank pistol to shoot at people point blank out of the car window just to enjoy their fear.

There is no reason to believe Tancredo himself would ever be a vigilante. He has the mantle of respectability and at a certain level of power, it is easy to keep your hands clean.

But the vigilante man is fixture of the American landscape. Modern so-called "minutemen" organizations guarding the border in their lawn chairs and coolers are not yet particularly menacing, but they can get there. Tancredo went out and told the forming minutemen organization that they were "genuine American heroes."

Writer and historian Mike Davis in his collection of essays, In Praise of Barbarians:

The vigilantes are back. In the 1850's they lynched Irishmen; in the 1870's they terrorized the Chinese; in the 1910's they murdered striking Wobblies; in the 1920's they organized "Bash a Jap" campaigns; and in the 1930's they welcomed Dust Bowl refugees with tear gas and buckshot. Vigilantes have been to the American West what the Ku Klux Kan has been to the South: vicious and cowardly bigotry organized as a self-righteous mob.

Davis describes Tancredo's genuine American heroes:

In any event, they turned out 150 sorry-ass gun freaks and sociopaths who spent a few days in lawn chairs cleaning their rifles, jabbering to the press, and peering through binoculars at the cactus-covered mountains where several hundred immigrants perish each year from heatstroke and thirst.... Confronted with the Minutemen and the hundreds of extra border patrol sent to keep them out of trouble, campesinos simply waited patiently on the Sonora side for the vigilantes to get sunburned and go home.

The Minutemen had apparently imported themselves for their show. The greater danger arises when the local interests get riled. Steinbeck describes the process like this:

Men who had never been hungry saw the eyes of the hungry....They said, "These goddamned Okies are dirty and ignorant. They're degenerate, sexual maniacs. These goddamned Okies are thieves. They'll steal anything. They've got no sense of property rights."

And then:

The local people whipped themselves into a mould of cruelty. Then they formed unites, squads, and armed them--armed them with clubs, with gas, with guns. We own the country. We can't let these Okies get out of hand.

Perhaps the story that King Christian X of Denmark donned the Star of David to protect the Jews of Denmark is apocryphal. But the idea is solid. If the City of Brownsville were to build even a short and inexpensive wall north of the city, we could give a concrete repudiation to Tancredo.