Grandmothers on Guard: Gender, Aging, and the Minutemen at the US-Mexico Border 9781477322765

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Grandmothers on Guard

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Grandmothers on Guard Gender, Aging, and the Minutemen at the US-Mexico Border Jennifer L . Johnson

University of Texas Press Austin

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Copyright © 2021 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2021 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713–7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Libr a ry of Congr e ss C ata logi ng -i n-Pu bl ic at ion Data Names: Johnson, Jennifer L. (Jennifer Lynn), 1966– author. Title: Grandmothers on guard : gender, aging, and the Minutemen at the US-Mexico border / Jennifer L. Johnson. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020047099 ISBN 978-1-4773-2275-8 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4773-2276-5 (library ebook) ISBN 978-1-4773-2277-2 (non-library ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Minuteman Project. | Vigilantes—Mexican-American Border Region. | Grandmothers—Political activity—MexicanAmerican Border Region. | Older women—Political activity— Mexican-American Border Region. | Women conservatives—Political activity—Mexican-American Border Region. Classification: LCC HV7432.5.M58 J64 2021 | DDC 364.1/370973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047099 doi:10.7560/322758

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Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction. Border Politics and Invisible Women 1 Ch a p ter 1. Granny Brigades and Political Spectacle at the US-Mexico Border 38 Ch a p ter 2. Doing Old Womanhood at the Edge of the Nation-State 59 Ch a p ter 3. Grandma Grizzlies to the Rescue of Family and Nation 92 Ch a p ter 4. Misogyny Minuteman-Style and Women Tough Enough to Take It 122 Ch a p ter 5. Bringing the Border Back Home 146 Conclusion. From Republican Motherhood to Patriotic Grandmotherhood 173 Appendix. Walking the Line References

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Index 203

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Acknowledgments

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spent more years of my life working on this book than I care to count, but I did not do it by myself. I am very thankful that friends, family members, and colleagues rallied around me every step of the way, giving me the courage, clarity, and stamina to develop the ideas I lay out here and to bring them to light. I dedicate this book to all those people. To Mitzi Winks, whose spirit of adventure, sense of humor, and hospitality gave this project wings. To Jon A. Chun, whose Dr. Newton Chun Award at Kenyon College provided the seed money that funded the initial phases of fieldwork. To the faculty and staff at Kenyon College’s Institutional Review Board, especially Jami Peele, Jan Thomas, and Ric Sheffield, who afforded me the guidance-cumflexibility to make ethically sound and pragmatic decisions in the field. Thank you to the staff, students, and faculty colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Right-Wing Studies, for the many ways they facilitated my research and writing at a formative period in this project. Larry Rosenthal and Christine Trost made an academic home away from home for me in California, welcoming me to the center as a visiting scholar in 2012–2013. Larry’s warmth and intellectual passion for studying the Right, and Christine’s knack for moving organizational mountains and her dedication to mentoring younger scholars, have made the center into the vibrant hub that it is today. I am honored to have been part of this community. Thanks also to affi liated faculty members Paola Bacchetta, Corey Fields, Arlie Hochschild, Larry Rosenthal, Vesna Rodic, and Karen Trapenberg Frick, who cheered the project on and provided insightful feedback on the earliest chapter drafts. To Christine Trost, for her faith in this book project and her help in proposing it. To Deborah Freedman Lustig, David

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viii | Acknowledgments

Minkus, Charles Brown, Eva Seto, and Stefan Thomas, for good conversation and random acts of kindness that kept me connected during difficult times. Thanks go to my research assistants at Kenyon College. Wanufi Teshome meticulously transcribed recorded interviews, Amelia Li assembled and annotated secondary sources, Anika Massman factchecked, and Eliza Fairbrother, who has a mastery of NVivo, showed patience with my technological ineptitude, which proved invaluable for data analysis. Thank you to the students in my “Borders and Border Crossings” and qualitative methods seminars, especially Emily Birnbaum, whose intense intellectual curiosity and questioning of my project kept me on my toes. Thank you to other colleagues whose thoughtful remarks on conference papers, chapter drafts, abstracts, and outlines helped me formulate the arguments in this book. Comments from Jennifer Bickham Mendez, Judy Boruchoff, Patrisia Macías Rojas, Rocío Magaña, Shannan Mattiace, Julia McReynolds-Pérez, Nancy Naples, Justin Schupp, Jan Thomas, and Celso Villegas strengthened chapters 1, 2, 3, and 5. Elizabeth Yates and Alex DiBranco offered fresh perspectives on gender and the Right that reenergized my writing and inspired chapter 4. Thanks to Kerry Webb at the University of Texas Press, whose enthusiastic response to my book proposal renewed my confidence in this project at a critical juncture and inspired me to—at long last—bring it to fruition. My gratitude goes also to the friends and colleagues who carried me through the final push to complete this manuscript. If you need something done, ask a busy person, so I asked Nancy Powers and she never disappointed. Her perceptiveness, keen editorial eye, and kind words kept the writing going and my sanity intact. Judy Holdener, Renee Romano, Irene López, Patricia Richards, Anne Nurse, Anna Sun, and Gillian Gualtieri commiserated and encouraged me to keep going. Thanks to Chad Broughton and an anonymous reviewer for their close readings of the entire manuscript and their helpful suggestions for revision. And to Lynne Ferguson and Kip Keller for their superb editorial assistance, and Kerry Webb and her assistant, Andrew Hnatow, for their deftness at shepherding me and my manuscript through the publication process. I also thank the dozens of women and men whose stories are at the center of this book. Their politics are not my politics, but I am sincerely grateful for the gift of their time and their openness to my pres-

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Acknowledgments | ix

ence among them. As Jean Hardisty says of her twenty years studying the religious Right: “I have immersed myself in a political movement that exists to roll back everything I believe in. Yet I continue to believe that, within that movement, there are people who are decent and capable of great caring, who are creating community and finding coping strategies that are enabling them to lead functional lives in a cruel and uncaring late capitalist environment” (1999, 2). Amen. Of course, I reserve my most resolute and heartfelt thanks for my family, who, like me, lived with this project for more years than they signed on for. My mom, Abigail Johnson, never failed to ask how the book was coming along (sometimes much to my chagrin), and my sister, Linda Johnson, always listened. Thanks to my husband, Juan Pastor Román, for his unwavering love and support, and the constant reminder that if this book were easy to write, someone else would have written it already. And to our sons, Jonathan Macario Pastor and Daniel Stephen Pastor, who pulled up stakes and moved across country to make fieldwork for this book possible. May this book do their sacrifice justice and may the world they live in be a tiny bit better off for it.

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Grandmothers on Guard

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Introduction | Border Politics and Invisible Women

O

n January 25, 2017, just six days into his presidency, Donald Trump signed an executive order mandating the immediate construction of a wall along the US border with Mexico. “A nation without borders is not a nation,” he remarked as part of his public address following the private signing ceremony at Department of Homeland Security headquarters. C-SPAN cameras panning the DHS auditorium revealed row upon row of green-, tan-, and blue-uniformed individuals in the audience: cadets and career officers, almost exclusively men, from the Border Patrol, Air and Marine Interdiction, and Customs and Border Protection. “Beginning today, the United States of America gets back its borders,” Trump assured them and then repeated, “gets [pause] back [pause] its [pause] borders,” pumping his right arm with each word for dramatic effect. The on-camera crowd applauded enthusiastically. Off-camera, seated in the back and to the sides, a cadre of special guests waited their turn for recognition. Ten minutes into his speech, once he had detailed all the benefits a border wall would bring to the United States, the president acknowledged these guests, thanking them for the suffering they had endured in America’s war against illegal immigration. These were parents who had lost children to crimes committed by immigrants living in this country illegally, and who had worked actively to keep the memory of this injustice alive. “They’re called angel moms . . . because they are a voice to protect all of America’s children,” Trump explained before asking several to stand, one by one, in honor of the sacrifices they had made. “Laura Wilkerson, who lost her seventeen-year-old son, beautiful Josh. . . . Where’s Laura? Good . . . Thank you, Laura.” As Trump pointed into the audi-

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ence, presumably in Laura’s direction, the television cameras zoomed out in a vain attempt to capture images of these angel moms and their families. This book examines how women like Laura Wilkerson engage in the politics of border policing that has swept the globe in the past decade and taken on renewed significance in the United States with the election of Donald Trump. In the European Union, India, and Australia, as well as the United States, leaders of nation-states have vowed to “take back their borders” and have made good on these promises by fortifying the physical and symbolic dividing lines between their citizens and those deemed outsiders. The academic field of border studies has grown exponentially in recent years to account for this hardening of borders in what was not so long ago thought to be a borderless world, but it has had little to say about the gender and age dynamics of this politics. What role do women, especially aging women, play in these national dramas of border policing, and why is understanding who they are essential for making sense of the ethnonationalist bordering projects on the rise in the United States and elsewhere? Of course, contrary to Trump’s pitched claim that the work of fortifying America’s national borders “begins today,” politicized attempts to defend the southern border are not new. Nor is the tendency to typecast men in the role of defenders. Indeed, for at least three decades, political elites in the United States and elsewhere have made border policing central to a politics designed to shore up their legitimacy and project an image of strength onto the nation-state. And as Trump’s performance at DHS exemplifies, the public rituals that accompany this border politics place heroic men in uniform front and center, and women as suffering wives, mothers, and even angels, waiting in the wings. The only thing new under the sun seems to be the hyperbole and frenzied heights to which these theatrics have risen, and the tragically polarizing consequences this has yielded. Preceding and paving the way for these theatrics were the Minutemen. Dubbed vigilantes and nativist extremists by civil rights defenders like the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Minutemen mobilized citizen patrols—armed and extralegal—along the US-Mexico border for over a decade, between roughly 2004 and 2014. Minutemen rallied along the border each month, ostensibly to be the boots on the ground necessary to stop undocumented immigration. But they also proved to be performers par excellence (Chavez 2008; Dove 2010). Bombarding the American public with dramatic images of insecure borders and

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Introduction | 3

the extraordinary lengths to which some patriots would go to do the job that the government would not, the Minutemen brought unprecedented national attention to the US-Mexico border and articulated the hard-line position on immigration that Trump would soon resurrect. Drawing on three years and nine hundred hours of fieldwork with the Minutemen at the border and in the interior of the nation, this book paints a rich ethnographic portrait of these efforts. By way of background: the Minutemen debuted in November 2004 after a marine veteran named Jim Gilchrist and a former kindergarten teacher and aspiring actor (and, most recently, convicted sex offender) named Chris Simcox issued a nationwide call for armed volunteers to rally at predetermined places along the southern border. The stated purpose of this “muster” (“an act of assembling, specifically: formal military inspection,” according to Merriam-Webster) was to shame the federal government into action by showing how even run-of-the-mill citizens could halt unauthorized immigration from Mexico by gathering at the border, if only for a limited period of time. Planners expected this to be a one-off protest event, but—buoyed by the media frenzy it unleashed—Gilchrist and Simcox soon turned to cobbling together a network of individuals and organizations that could support a continuous presence at the border. What resulted was a highly decentralized and fractious network of organizations all claiming to be Minutemen. Minutemen run the gamut from the occasional loner setting up camp in a designated remote area, to small groups ranging over large areas and camping at will, to larger groups that train, equip, and coordinate volunteers for border patrol activities from well-established base camps. This diff usion is one reason why gauging the size of Minuteman membership has been difficult; critics claim that at their peak, the Minutemen never garnered more than a few hundred participants (ACLU 2006, 4); national leaders told me that they had registered 8,000; and Shapira estimates 12,000 card-carrying members, of whom one-fourth participate in border patrols (2013, xxiii). Thus, generalizing about the Minutemen warrants caution. It might seem odd to single out the Minutemen as the focus of a book on women, let alone older women. After all, from the outset, the Minutemen fashioned themselves as men, and manly men at that, and friends, foes, and scholars alike helped cement this image. Organizers like Simcox urged fellow Americans to join the Minutemen by exhorting them to “have some balls again,” contrasting them with “[government] officials [who] cower and risk American lives and sovereignty

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by not securing our borders” (Labash 2005). Immigrant-rights advocates and other adversaries, in turn, ridiculed these hypermasculine claims. Protestors held placards reading “Minutemen = Angry White Men with Nothing Better to Do” (Schleicher 2005), and journalists likened their camps to “Boy Scouts for older, angry white men” (Peterson 2005). Scholars reinforced this notion that Minutemen were strictly men. The first sociologist to describe the Minutemen in any ethnographic detail, for example, mentioned the presence of women at the camp he studied, but referred uncritically to the Minutemen as “these men” throughout his seminal text (Shapira 2013). No one seemed to notice or make more than a passing reference to the women. Yet there were Minutewomen.1 Indeed, at the California Minuteman camp that I call Camp Patriot, I met or heard about dozens of women who, daily for nearly a decade, sustained the work of the Minutemen at the US-Mexico border and in their hometowns.2 And strikingly, of the seventeen women who allowed me deep into their lives in my capacity as a researcher, virtually all had joined the Minutemen in older age, most as grandmothers. The number of grandmothers involved in the Minutemen was probably relatively small—hundreds rather than thousands—but their perspectives on immigration and the processes of meaning making they were engaged in impressed me as distinct from those of men and younger women. They did not, for instance, engage in militant anti-immigrant activism as a straightforward extension of their duties as mothers. A different and more complex set of identities and anxieties impelled these women to oppose immi-

1. The Minutemen I studied, male and female alike, referred to themselves and others involved in their movement as Minutemen, regardless of gender. That is, they typically did not use the term “Minutewomen” to distinguish female members from male counterparts. I deploy the term “Minutewomen” at points in the text to underscore that not all Minutemen are male, but I also use the blanket term “Minutemen” with the same understanding. 2. The Minuteman chapter that operated from Camp Patriot claimed around 250 members, approximately 50 of whom self-identified as women (or had names or titles that suggested to me that they identified as women). Thus, I calculated that a full fifth of Minutemen at my field site were actually women. Women also held high-profi le leadership positions in the national movement. Kristin Haltinner, for example, estimates that 19 out of 96 state and national leaders in the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, one of two major Minuteman branches, are women (2016).

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Introduction | 5

gration and to do so by literally and figuratively policing the border. I wanted to know more. As I would learn, the story of these women is partly a story of the gendered experience of aging in America, an America fraught with heightened political polarization and a widening generation gap, overlaid with racial and ethnic difference. It is the story of a small group of white working- and middle-class women growing old and seeking relevance in a society that makes old women irrelevant. And it is a story of how these aspirations take shape through mobilization as grandmothers at the US-Mexico border and in the crucible of America’s politics of border policing.

Nation and Nativism in the Making of the Minutemen

Why study the contemporary Minuteman movement, let alone focus on women in its ranks? This book suggests that the Minutemen exemplify the actors and processes engaged in a struggle to make and remake the nation in their own image, and the stakes of this struggle are high. In the balance is whether the boundaries of America’s national community will be narrowly redrawn, and if so, on what terms and by whom, and what place there will be for immigrants of color in an imagined US community of the future. The surprise of Donald Trump’s rise to power is a bellwether in this regard. As the sociologists Syed Ali and Philip N. Cohen wrote immediately following the 2016 election, we—“overeducated, largely liberal, largely urban or college-town dwellers cut off socially from Trumpland”—failed to see the Trump train coming (2016, 3). This was so, I argue, because we failed to anticipate the depth and breadth of the hostility toward immigrants that drove this train into the station. This animus did not emerge overnight or ex nihilo. Indeed, it took over three decades of sustained antiimmigrant lobbying and grassroots organizing to solidify the nativist base into which Trump tapped. The Minutemen figured prominently in the later phases of this movement. A close look into their world—the world of both Minutemen and Minutewomen—therefore, can deepen our understanding of contemporary opposition to immigration and its roots in the reimagining of the nation. My thesis that the Minutemen form part of a broader reimagining of the nation draws directly on Benedict Anderson’s understand-

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ing of nations as imagined communities. A nation, in this perspective, is a collectivity that envisions itself as comprising equals who share a cultural heritage, a history rooted in a homeland, and political values. This entity is knit together not by the personal relationships that bind other types of communities, but rather by a sense of commonality that, in Anderson’s words, lives “in the minds of each” ([1983] 1991, 6). Nations as imagined communities, like all socially constructed groups, have boundaries, and to make a nation is to draw these boundaries. Historically, nations, nationalism, and national identities evolved in tandem with modern state formation as political elites united and governed diverse populations dispersed across vast territories by inventing and evoking a deep sense of we-ness grounded in perceived cultural commonality. In the United States, however, the collective sense of who and what is American has also evolved hand in hand with immigration and immigration policy. Whereas “in the Old World the people came with the territory,” writes Aristide Zolberg of the exceptional mode of US nation building, “the self-constituted American nation . . . decided quite literally who would inhabit its land” (2006, 1). It did so, in large part, by managing in-migration. Indeed, even in the earliest years of the republic, the United States stood out from its peers in its attempts to draw the boundaries of the nation by welcoming those immigrant populations deemed desirable while excluding all others (Wong 2017; Zolberg 2006). Of course, the history of immigration and nation in the United States is also the history of conflict over whom to imagine as potential members of the national community, and over competing visions of how to integrate them and on what terms. In very broad strokes, two diametrically opposed ways of thinking about the difference that immigrants embody have contended for dominance over the centuries. One values the difference and distinctive identities that immigrants bring to the national community, and it advocates for including, on equal terms, immigrant groups that retain their distinctiveness. This vision imagines America as a robust collectivity with flexible boundaries that expand easily to accommodate and include. The other views racial, ethnic, religious, and linguistic difference with suspicion, and demands that minorities be admitted only on unequal terms or on the condition that they assimilate to a perceived white, Anglo-Saxon, Judeo-Christian majority culture (D. King 2006). This vision imagines America as a fragile entity with brittle boundaries that require constant vigilance and defense. It is the vision that animates the Minutemen and the new nativist movement that they help constitute.

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Introduction | 7

In his classic study Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, John Higham defines nativism as “intense opposition to an internal minority on the grounds of its foreign (i.e., ‘unAmerican’) connections” ([1955] 2002, 4). This “defensive nationalism” (Higham, cited in Galindo 1999) draws boundaries around who or what deserves to be American, and aggressively polices these boundaries from foreign-born minorities deemed threatening to the nation as an imagined community. In the United States, some small fraction of native-born Americans have always viewed certain immigrant populations with fear and hostility because of their alleged “unAmerican-ness” and have opposed immigration in these terms (Gibney and Hansen 2005). In the early 1990s, however, political entrepreneurs harnessed anxieties about unprecedented demographic shifts and economic instability to mobilize this opposition into a highly organized force that targeted immigrants of color, especially Latinos. As I have argued elsewhere, this phenomenon—America’s “new nativism” (Burghart, Ward, and Zeskind 2007; Jacobson 2008; Jaret 1999; Perea 1997; Zeskind 2005)—conforms closely to what scholars understand as a social movement (J. Johnson 2011). As Mario Diani proposes, a social movement is “a network of informal interaction between a plurality of individuals, groups and/or organizations, engaged in a political or cultural conflict, on the basis of a shared collective identity” (1992, 13). In this sense, the Minutemen are one of many elements that see themselves united in the struggle to stop the unauthorized entry of immigrants into the United States and to enact legal measures that punish immigrants currently in the country without authorization. Although I refer to the Minuteman movement in this book, the organizations and individuals that identify as Minutemen also belong to this larger, longer-standing network deemed the new nativist movement. Several demographic trends set the stage for the crystallization of the new nativist movement in the 1990s. These included growing numbers of first-generation immigrants in the United States and their settlement in cities, suburbs, and rural areas around the country that had yet to experience an influx of new immigrants (Marrow 2011; Singer 2013). Indeed, the last decades of the twentieth century witnessed levels of immigration unknown since the early twentieth century. After experiencing nearly a half century of diminishing proportions of immigrants in its midst, the United States was transformed quite suddenly into a country with a rapidly increasing immigrant presence. In 1970, less than 5 percent of people living in the United States had been born else-

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where. By 2010, however, the foreign-born portion of the population had reached nearly 13 percent (Radford 2019), with growth rates reaching an astounding 57 percent between 1990 and 2000 (Singer 2013, 79). The passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act set this trend in motion by removing country-of-origin quotas that had been in place since the 1920s, and by establishing legal mechanisms to reunite immigrant families and welcome skilled workers and refugees. These measures opened up new legal channels for immigrants and refugees from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, turning long-standing country-oforigin patterns on their head. Whereas in 1960 very few immigrants came from Latin America or Asia, by 2013 over one-half—a full 52 percent—originated from Latin America and nearly another third from Asia (Kohut [2015] 2019). Nowhere did these trends manifest as early, and have such widespread political ramifications, as in California. Immigration from the Global South has transformed the demographic makeup of the United States as a whole, setting it on course to become a majority-minority country by 2050 (Pastor 2018; Ramakrishnan 2018). This transformation occurred first and most dramatically, however, in California (Abrajano and Hajnal 2015; Pastor 2018). In 1980, for example, nonHispanic whites made up 67 percent of California’s total population, but this figure had dropped to 47 percent by 2000. In the United States overall, demographers predict that this percentage will fall from 69 in 2000 to 47 in 2050, making this national shift a “slow-motion and nearly exact repeat of California’s ethnic change between 1980 and 2000” (Pastor 2018, 6). During this same period, deindustrialization and federal cuts to the defense and aerospace industries devastated California’s manufacturing economy, and income inequality grew precipitously (Alvarez and Butterfield 2000; Jacobson 2008; Pastor 2018). These conditions created a perfect storm of anti-immigrant sentiment, and politicians seeking to capitalize on it would make California the center of the new nativist movement in the mid-1990s. California’s Proposition 187 (also known as “Save our State”) served as the catalyst. A 1994 ballot initiative to bar undocumented immigrants from public services like education and nonemergency health care, Proposition 187 united well-funded anti-immigration lobbies operating nationally with grassroots groups such as the California Coalition for Immigration Reform (CCIR), and brought the controversy over immigration into the full light of public debate. The measure passed with a hefty majority of the popular vote. In 1998, fol-

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Introduction | 9

lowing a protracted legal struggle that garnered national attention, the federal courts found Proposition 187 unconstitutional. But the momentum generated by its initial success stimulated other regressive ballot initiatives in California along with copycat legislation in other states. More to the point, resounding popular support for Proposition 187 spurred the federal government to draft legislation that ratcheted up immigration enforcement under the Clinton administration (Provine et al. 2016). By the time I had initiated my fieldwork, in 2010, the movement’s epicenter had shifted from California to Arizona. More than a decade had elapsed since the overturning of California’s Proposition 187 by the US Supreme Court. In the interim, progressive organizing and the blue tide that would sweep a Democratic supermajority into the California legislature by 2012 had blocked further anti-immigration inroads at the state level. In neighboring Arizona, however, legislators acted with increasing boldness to police immigration in their state. With California a lost cause in the eyes of my informants, they looked to Arizona as the last, best hope for the movement’s success. Nationally, 9/11 compounded fears of border insecurity and gave the nativist movement a new weapon: unfounded, Islamophobic fears of terrorists entering the county surreptitiously by land (Hauptman 2013; Jones 2012; Nguyen 2005; Woods and Arthur 2017). It also contributed to legislative deadlock over immigration reform. Angered by George W. Bush’s bipartisan overtures on comprehensive immigration reform and frustrated by the failure of more hard-line proposals, some factions within the new nativist movement grew disillusioned with the formal political process (Jacobson 2008; Ono and Sloop 2002). The Minutemen’s extralegal border patrols captured this populist disgruntlement. What had begun as a movement dominated by well-funded, professional lobbies shifted to accommodate more radical protest tactics. In the evolution of this social movement over time, the Minutemen came to epitomize the radical, the militant, and the extreme. Labeling the Minutemen as extremists, as some scholars and activists have done, however, obscures as much as it reveals. It also helps explain how the “we” of Ali and Cohen—“overeducated, largely liberal, largely urban or college-town dwellers cut off socially from Trumpland”—sorely underestimated the traction of the type of nativism that the Minutemen encapsulate. As the ethnographic portraits of Minutewomen (and men) in the following chapters suggest, painting with such a broad brush

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reduces them to a caricature that renders the groups and individuals that compose the Minutemen monolithic (they are not), and analytically cordons them off from “us” as exotic, anomalous, and exceptional (they are, lamentably, not). Critics of hate-group stereotyping in scholarship and advocacy have made a similar point. Justin Tetrault, for example, argues that labels such as “hate group” predominate in research on right-wing groups because they chime with deep-seated assumptions that prejudices like racism are “deviant,” a problem of “fringe ideologies, [rather than] issues of systemic and structural inequality” (2019, 1). These stereotypes persist not because they reflect methodologically and conceptually sound research on the Right, but because they stand in place of such research. They operate, in short, as “placeholders for missing knowledge” (12) on “emotions, motivation and meaning-making among right-wing actors” (1), precisely the kind of data my research yielded. (See the appendix for a detailed discussion of my research methods.)

An Ethnographic Interlude: Encountering “Extremism”

My introduction to the world of organized nativism in Southern California in 2010 suggests how deeply held these stereotypes can be and how they predispose us to think simplistically about the relationship between fringe and mainstream. As Kathleen Blee and Kimberly Creasap observe, ethnographers of rightist movements face unique challenges of entrée, in part because their biographical trajectories and personal networks rarely intersect with those they seek to study (2010). I was no exception. Born, raised, and educated on the East Coast and in the Midwest, married to a Mexican national and mothering two bicultural children in a liberal college town, I had zero firsthand exposure to the Minutemen when I decided to undertake this project. The first methodological challenge to my research, therefore, was to find a bridge between my world and the world of avid anti-immigration activists. The opportunity materialized as a serendipitous reunion with a friend and feisty Californian—I will call her “Greta” (her grandchildren call her “Grambo”)—who, upon hearing about my latest research endeavor, offered that she had once attended a public lecture by a Minuteman at her local chapter of the Federated Republican Women.

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Introduction | 11

Greta and I share many common values and experiences, but as a semiretired grandmother old enough to be my mother (sorry, Greta), with deep roots in the Southern California suburbs, she is the product of a generational and regional upbringing different from my own, and our politics on immigration diverge considerably. Greta tracked down the speaker (I will call him “Henry Mueller”) through his wife, Linda, who served as the Republican Women’s chapter president. Then, at the age of seventy-two, Greta overcame her aversion to rattlesnakes and heat, and the admonitions of her adult children, who were anxious for her safety, to join the Minutemen at my behest and escort me as her guest to my first of many musters. Linda answered the phone when I first called the Mueller residence. Thanks to Greta, she had been expecting my call, and we exchanged pleasantries until I mentioned the border. As if on cue, Linda passed the phone to Henry, who explained that I had caught him taking a break from yard work to follow breaking news. A federal judge had just struck down Arizona’s new immigration law, HB 1070, and he was watching events unfold live on Fox News. Could we talk instead that evening at the CCIR meeting that he and Linda would be attending? We could indeed! The woman who signed Greta and me into the meeting pointed him out. A large white man and a former marine with a ruddy face and a deep, rasping voice, Henry Mueller greeted us eff usively, then plied us with tales of his trips to the US-Mexico border—309 in total, he claimed—as we waited for the program to begin. On a recent trip, he and his grandson, who was now at marine boot camp, tracked a group of illegals (over the din of loud music playing in the background, I first thought he said “eagles”) for hours, Henry tells us. They finally managed to “bring them in” when the group ran out of water. Henry flipped open his cell phone to show us that the first phone number on his speed dial was for the Border Patrol, and then lamented that he had not brought the photograph of his grandson with the illegals they caught to show us tonight. The thrill of the hunt. The bravado of besting the Border Patrol at its own game. The male bonding. The trophy. I had finally met a living, breathing Minuteman, and he promised to be all the things I had feared he would be. But something wasn’t quite right. The California Coalition for Immigration Reform holds its monthly meetings in an assembly hall of the Women’s Civil Club, a cluster of low-lying nondescript buildings in Garden Grove, California, so non-

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descript that if we had not had the exact address, we might have driven right by. Greta, however, had called the office in advance to check the details (she spoke with the founder, Barbara Coe—“a nice lady over the phone”—Greta reported back), and I had seen publicity for the meeting in the events section of Greta’s local newspaper, the Orange County Register. This publicity appeared amid announcements for a cancer fundraiser, a free outdoor musical performance (a “Tribute to Neil Diamond . . . Families are encouraged to bring lawn chairs”), and the renaming of a strip of highway to honor veterans. The auditorium, which seats about a hundred, was filled with mostly well-dressed older white couples, couples like Linda (in a flowered silk blouse with matching pink lipstick, and neatly coiffed hair dyed a dull blond) and Henry (clean shaven, in a striped oxford shirt, dress pants, and understated black cowboy boots). And the program? A tribute to a former member, a wellknown African American radio show host who had recently passed; it was filled with tender eulogies, touching music, and tears. I had braced myself to come face-to-face with hard-core nativists, unabashed bigots prone to shocking displays of racial hatred, but what shocked me most was the aura of normality enveloping it all. I recount these events in some detail for two reasons. First, they foreshadowed how the ordinary and the extreme intertwine in some of the social networks and spaces of organized nativism that I describe in this book. In part, this is a world where Minutemen do yard work and wear Oxford shirts, where “that nice lady over the phone” is also, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “a vitriolic California racist” (2013); in short, a world where nativism is understated, unexceptional, unremarkable, woven into the fabric of daily life. In her research on the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, Kathleen Blee demonstrates how women, in particular, enable this type of crossover; indeed, she attributes the resurgence of the Klan in that period largely to women’s capacity to normalize racism in the mundane social spaces of family, friends, and neighborhood. “The political lesson of Klan history,” she deduces, “is the ease with which racism and intolerance appealed to ordinary people in ordinary places” (1991, 7). The historian Lisa McGirr also emphasizes that in places such as Orange County, California, the staying power of the Right depended on propagating ideas and building networks through ordinary activities and in unsuspecting social spaces such as “bridge clubs, coffee klatches and barbecues” (2001, 97). Precisely how women—Minutewomen, in this case—make the extraordinary ordinary in the context of today’s controversy surrounding immigrants is a recurrent theme in the chapters to come.

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Introduction | 13

Second, the anecdote above and its postscript below gesture toward the importance of specifying exactly whom this study is about and whom it is not. As it turns out, Henry was not our ticket to a Minuteman border camp, nor were any of the other Minutemen that Henry introduced to Greta and me that night. These Minutemen, Henry explained, were all “independents,” a euphemism, I would later learn, for rogue individuals and groups that consider themselves Minutemen but chafe at the rules and regulations imposed by the formal organization’s hierarchy and enforced (presumably) at the more permanent border camps such as Camp Patriot. Friendly as Henry might be, safety concerns precluded me from pursuing entrée to the field through him or any other independent Minuteman, so this book does not represent their views or experiences. Rather, it pieces together the meaning worlds of Minutemen belonging to a formally organized Minuteman chapter that prided itself on its transparency and openness to outsiders, conditioned perhaps by the steady stream of reporters, TV producers, documentarians, political opponents, and even graduate students that had eagerly flocked to its events in the early years. This chapter did not endorse the use of violence in its dealings with migrants, and members did not boast of hunting migrants. At least not openly.

The Politics of Border Policing in the T wenty-First Century

Given these caveats, what exactly do the Minutemen I studied represent? If not extremism, what are they a case of? As I suggested earlier, the Minutemen featured in this book exemplify the actors and processes engaged in a struggle to make and remake the nation in their own image. Nativism, conceptualized as a form of nationalism, animates this struggle. This struggle takes place against the backdrop of demographic change, but also in the face of economic crisis and profound uncertainty about the nation-state itself. The post-9/11 period raised fundamental questions about the future of the nation-state in general and of the United States in particular. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 cast doubt on the ability of the national government to insulate the country from upheavals abroad. So too did vulnerability to economic fluctuations and failed military attempts in foreign theaters: at the end of George W. Bush’s two terms in office, the United States found itself buffeted by the most severe economic downturn since the Great De-

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pression and mired in costly conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Could nation-states stand up to the destabilizing forces of globalization? Could the US government defend its sovereign territory and the American people? And if so, exactly who would those Americans be? In this context, therefore, border politics, though seemingly laser focused on physical barricading, is not just or even primarily about the physical space of geopolitical borderlands. Rather, this type of border politics is about “literal and figurative inclusion and exclusion” (Naples and Bickham Mendez 2015, 2; emphasis mine), and the Minutemen police the US-Mexico border in both senses. In this regard, they exemplify how the racialized construction of immigrants of color (especially those of Mexican origin) as outsiders to the nation works in and through the physical policing of the US southern border (see chapter 1 for greater historical context). Borders and border control have factored into the construction of national imaginaries historically, but today they have taken on greater symbolic significance than ever. A review of the vast border studies literature is beyond the scope of this book. However, one key insight is that as globalization erodes states’ control over national economies and societies, borderlands around the globe have become brightly lit stages on which nation-states perform their power, articulating and rearticulating the impression (if not the reality) of national sovereignty (Andreas 2000; C. Johnson and Jones 2011). And in recent decades, these performances have come increasingly to star populist strongmen (Bauman 2016; Carr 2012; Jones 2012; Reich 2015) who build walls (Brown 2010; H. Cunningham 2004; Jones 2012). To be clear about border walls in the United States: well before Donald Trump hit the campaign trail, hundreds of miles of fortified and highly militarized barriers—354 miles of walls to halt pedestrians, and 300 miles to obstruct vehicles—separated the United States from Mexico (Argueta 2016). Construction dates back to the early 1990s with the first of two concerted campaigns to wall the US-Mexico border. Premised on a paradigm shift in enforcement strategy known as prevention through deterrence, this first set of interventions blocked easy access into the United States from Mexico by erecting approximately 70 miles of fencing that to this day bisects the sister cities of San Diego– Tijuana, Nogales, Arizona–Nogales, Mexico, and El Paso–Juárez in a highly visible fashion. Subsequently, in response to post-9/11 fears of terrorism, the 2006 Secure Fence Act authorized a multibillion-dollar investment in border fencing, roads, illumination, and digital surveillance technology (US GAO 2009).

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Introduction | 15

There is little if any evidence, however, that existing barriers deter unauthorized attempts to enter the country by land, and there is ample evidence that they have caused migrants to attempt crossings in remote desert areas, provoking an unconscionable spike in the number of migrant deaths in the desert (De León 2015; Heyman 2011). Peter Andreas, among other scholars, unpacks this paradox by demonstrating that draconian and highly visible border-policing measures aimed largely at migrants crossing the southern border respond more to the need for the appearance of border control than to the imperative of actual deterrence. They are, in short, smoke and mirrors, more valuable for their symbolic import to politicians than for their effectiveness at stopping unauthorized migration (2000). Building on these insights, earlier studies of the Minutemen theorized their extralegal border patrols through the lens of performativity. Roxanne Doty, for example, conceptualizes the Minutemen as complementing official efforts to shore up the appearance of robust national sovereignty (2009; see also Elcioglu 2015). Through their rhetoric and rituals, the Minutemen engage in state-making from below, she contends, socially constructing undocumented border crossers as the ultimate enemy of the state, and citizens (like themselves) as rightfully exercising popular sovereignty. Leo Chavez, too, singles out the ritualistic aspects of the Minutemen for analysis, arguing that their borderland spectacle of surveillance has virtually transformed the terms of debate about immigration in the United States today (2008). The Minutemen set the spectacles of their patrols on a borderland stage evoking the Wild West, and against the backdrop of a border fence cobbled together from barbed wire and the remnants of corrugated-steel landing mats leftover from Vietnam. In doing so, these patrols dramatize the lawlessness of the land, the dereliction of the federal government in its duty to secure the border, and the urgent need for ordinary citizens to lay down the law if the government will not. These performances are not gender neutral, though mainstream scholars of border enforcement rarely dwell on the gendered aspects. Moreover, when scholars and pundits do pay attention to the gendered aspects of dramatic calls to barricade the border or to police the immigrants in our midst, they tend to see only the work that men do. The work that women do to police the nation remains invisible in plain sight. Our difficulty in discerning this work may have to do with the peculiar function that women, as compared with men, take on in ethnonationalist projects more broadly. According to feminist theorists of

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nationalism, “it is women who reproduce nations—biologically, culturally and symbolically” (Yuval Davis 1998, 23), yet it is men who are understood to be the actors, agents, and achievers of nationhood (A. McClintock 1993; Wilford 1998). Paraphrasing Anne McClintock, Jackie Hogan characterizes this gendered division of labor in the making and defense of nations thus: “Men create the nation, while women simply symbolize the nation” (2009, 7; original emphasis). Women are understood to reproduce nations biologically as the bearers of children; they reproduce nations culturally as guardians and intergenerational transmitters of tradition; and they reproduce nations symbolically as embodied representations of this collectivity (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1989; Yuval-Davis 1998). They do not, presumably, preserve nations by building walls or physically patrolling borderlands. Consistent with these theories of nationalism, some organizations within the new nativist movement emphasize the connection between family and nation by positioning the feminine subject as mother. As mothers, women symbolically police the borders of a nation by representing the threats of danger, death, and cultural suicide that immigrants allegedly pose to family, nation, and the nation as family. Mothers Against Illegal Aliens (MAIA) urges women to do their patriotic duty by protecting their children—America’s children—from both the material threats (e.g., disease, overpopulation, stress on public safety nets and services) and the assaults on culture they associate with an influx of poorer immigrants of color from Mexico and Central America (Romero 2008). In doing so, MAIA taps into a broader antiimmigrant narrative that singles out immigrant women as unfit mothers and so-called breeding machines whose runaway reproductive capacities are turning the racial and cultural tide against white America (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1999; Jacobson 2008; Lindsley 2002; Perry 2016). The group Angel Moms also uses white women’s association with motherhood to reproduce the nation culturally and symbolically, but in a slightly different fashion. An offshoot of the Remembrance Project, founded in 2009 to memorialize the lives of children and spouses “stolen” by “illegal immigration” (Blitzer 2017; Noriega 2015), Angel Moms positions the white feminine subject as grieving mother and the Latino male as victimizer in order to represent immigrants as threats to the American family and nation. Incidentally, Angel Moms operated in obscurity until Trump spotlighted them late in his campaign, channeling the personal tragedy and suffering of grieving mothers into political capital (Goldberg 2016).

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Introduction | 17

The two published studies of Minutewomen that I know of emphasize how the symbolism of the feminine figure policing the border turns on its association with the masculine power to protect rather than its association with motherhood (Haltinner 2016; Oliviero 2011). For Kristin Haltinner, for example, Minutewomen bend gendered expectations by claiming the status of competent colleagues to their male counterparts, as well as protectors of mothers who choose not to get involved. For Katie Oliviero, this form of feminism—a “nativist feminism”—equalizes men and women, but only in their obligation and ability to exercise violence to preserve the ethnoracially pure nation. The highly sexualized, armed femininity that Oliviero describes does not invoke the mother figure at all—quite the contrary. At Camp Patriot and in their hometowns, the Minutewomen of the California chapter whom I studied guarded the nation metaphorically and physically, and they bent gendered norms in the process.3 But as I detail in chapter 3, the older Minutewomen in my sample did embrace the master status and symbolic capital of motherhood, though not straightforwardly. Motherhood remained in play, but this was a motherhood inflected by age and generation. This might not be surprising, given the Minutewomen’s demographics.4 Ranging between the ages 3. To be clear, the women at the center of this research took on a variety of roles and tasks, some gendered in quite conventional ways. In parts of the state far from the border region—Sacramento, the Bay Area, the Central Coast, and the High Desert, for example—they served as chapter presidents, treasurers, and secretaries. Some populated city council meetings and wrote serial letters to the editor in their local newspapers in order to bring to a head controversy surrounding the growing presence of Mexican migrants in their hometowns. Others promoted the Minuteman cause online by hosting weekly internet radio talkshow programs critical of undocumented immigration. Still others spearheaded petition drives to repeal pro-immigrant state legislation such as the California Dream Act, all the while making regular trips to the border for Minuteman musters. And in the context of more recent events at the US-Mexico border, they helped orchestrate roadblocks to prevent the settlement of undocumented immigrant minors in communities throughout Southern California. 4. The women I interviewed ranged in age from forty-nine to seventy-five, and over half were sixty-five or older. All had been married at least once, and most had both adult children and grandchildren by the time they joined the Minutemen. Thirteen, however, had lost their initial spouses through death or divorce, and seven found themselves currently living without a spouse, either alone or with extended family. Although virtually all these women openly en-

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of forty-nine and seventy-five (and half of these over the age of sixtyfive), virtually all had joined the Minutemen late in life, well after their children had matured and often as grandmothers. In 2005, for example, the youngest of my seventeen female interviewees had turned fortytwo, and all but five had moved well into their fifties and sixties. Many of these women had borne children at a relatively young age—in their late teens or early twenties—so for even the youngest of them, political engagement with the Minutemen occurred during their transition to grandmotherhood. Below I describe my theoretical framework for interrogating Minutewomen’s embrace of their identity as grandmothers, and how that identity exposes the deeply gendered, age-related, and generational differences inflecting defensive nationalism today.

Grandma Gets into the Act: Gender, Age, and Generation in Defense of the Nation

In the following chapters, I examine how women’s motives for joining the Minutemen and their experiences as Minutemen differ from the motives and experiences of men, and trace these differences back to their biographies as mothers and grandmothers. In this sense, this book is at core a book about gender, but not just gender. It is about gender as it operates in a particular social setting and at a specific intersection with age and generation. My theoretical baseline for this exploration is Candace West and Don Zimmerman’s conceptualization of gender as a status achieved in social interaction and as a mechanism that produces difference and sustains inequality. First proposed in 1987, the concept of “doing gender” countered dominant understandings of gender as bidorsed the importance of stay-at-home motherhood, very few had achieved that ideal in their own lives, most having held paid employment outside the home while their children were young, in order to help make ends meet. Only one resided with and cared full-time for grandchildren. All had completed high school, and several had some college education. The majority considered themselves white, but one self-identified as Native American, and another as Asian American from an immigrant family. About a third of the women in this sample joined the Minutemen with their spouses, and these women typically supported activities at Camp Patriot from a distance or on special occasions only. Nearly two-thirds, however, joined independently and attended musters at Camp Patriot regularly or had done so in the past.

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Introduction | 19

ologically determined or as a static, socially ascribed role that individuals passively receive and perform. In later years, proponents of doing gender adopted an intersectional perspective that insisted on analytical attention to how power works through difference, and how multiple dimensions of power interact simultaneously to create inequality and oppression. Specifically, West and Sarah Fenstermaker argued for a “doing difference” approach that considered race and class comparable to gender as mechanisms for producing difference (1995). Inspired by these theoretical developments, this book, at its most abstract, attends to how power operates in and through the experiences of one subset of nativist activists: aging white working- and middle-class women. In the male-dominated setting of the Minuteman border camp and in American society more broadly, these women occupy a complex social location. In an unanticipated twist, I learned in the course of my research that their experiences of power derive simultaneously from the privilege that their whiteness and country of birth confer and the dis-privilege associated with the age and gender categories they inhabit. That is, I observed that even as these women sought to reaffirm their racially grounded privilege through their activism with the Minutemen, they confronted systems of gender and age discrimination that diminished their own agency in relation to men and younger women of their own race and ethnicity within the movement. Existing scholarship focused on race, class, and gender gave me the conceptual tools to see white women doing race and gender; it did not, however, prepare me to see them doing race and gender in this particular fashion, and it did not prepare me to see them doing age at all. In principle, intersectional theorists and adherents of the “doing difference” perspective acknowledge that power can operate through any number of axes of difference. These include ability, age, sexual orientation, and nationality. In practice, however, most scholarship in this tradition continues to focus solely on race, class, and gender, despite several feminist scholars having advocated, since the mid-1990s, for bringing age, especially old age, into gender studies (Arber and Ginn 1995; Calasanti, Slevin, and King 2006; Gibson 1996; Krekula 2007). This book helps fill the gap by foregrounding how age interacts with other forms of difference through a microlevel analysis of aging white working- and middle-class women in organized opposition to immigration. I call this process “doing old womanhood,” and describe it empirically in chapter 2. Some important theorists of intersectionality have objected to

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studying oppression and inequality at the microlevel, arguing that this move depoliticizes difference by relegating the study of power to the realm of representation (Collins et al. 1995). That is, by centering human interaction, social constructivist approaches purportedly divert scholars and activists from analyzing and attacking the “real” sources of inequality, namely, macrolevel institutional arrangements. Intergroup inequality undoubtedly has political and economic bases, but it is also true that inequality is sustained in daily interactions with others in ways that connect back to the macrolevel. Intersectionality’s “principled inattention to mundane, observable behavior” (N. King 2006, 59) and “discomfort with [microanalytical] attention to muddy details” (62) has inhibited thorough consideration of these dynamics. In a modest attempt to address this lacuna, I conducted a finegrained ethnographic analysis of how Minutewomen interact with men (young and old) at camp and with family members of various ages in their homes, and showed how the identities they forge in these interactions have political consequences. Far from being divorced from macrolevel structures, these processes of identity construction take cues from and feed back into broader political shifts such as the realignment of partisan forces in the United States that opened the door to Trump’s presidency. More generally, scholars know very little about how gendered experiences of old age and aging shape collective identity and political participation, even though we live in a rapidly graying society. In 2011, the first of 76 million baby boomers—one of the largest age cohorts in US history—officially entered old age, according to the US Census (Werner 2011), and many of the Minutewomen I studied were among them.5 This book explores their political coming-out as it relates to gender, age, and, as I explain below, generation. Sociologically, then, age can function like race, class, and gender, but it also differs from them in that it is inevitably subject to change over time. That is, whereas one’s race, class, and gender status might 5. The US Census classifies individuals ages sixty-five and above as old, and much of the sociological and gerontological literature on aging adopts this convention. As Calasanti and Slevin (2001) note, this practice reifies “old” as a social category and denies the fluidity inherent in the experience of aging, but monikers we commonly use to designate race, gender, and so forth similarly distort matters. The ethnographic accounts in this book highlight the fluidity of old-ness, even as the demographic overview here relies on the standard definition.

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Introduction | 21

change in the course of one’s lifetime, one’s age status most certainly will. As chapters 2 and 3 delineate, growing old entails a process of bodily decline as well as a social process whereby individuals, in interaction with others, work out what it means to be old (Cruikshank 2003). It also entails negotiating new relationships, roles, and responsibilities within social institutions such as the family. For the majority of the Minutewomen I studied, this generational move tied to aging corresponded to their transition to grandmotherhood. Thus, at the microlevel, I define “generation” as one’s position within a multitiered kinship structure (Riley and Riley 1993) and incorporate it into my analysis to illuminate how key life-course transitions shaped Minutewomen’s personal and political identity formation. These key transitions occurred during particular points in history, however, and in this sense the idea of generation being synonymous with one’s birth cohort factors into my analysis, too. From this macrolevel perspective on generation, my research subjects belonged to the Silent Generation of men and women born just before or during World War II, or to the first wave of baby boomers born in the earliest years of the Cold War. As such, they moved from childhood through young womanhood at a time when traditional understandings of the gendered division of labor in society and politics reigned supreme. Symbolized by popular icons like Betty Crocker, the feminine ideal dominant in white middle-class America revolved around caregiving, overlaid by a wartime and postwartime ethos that equated homemaking with selfsacrifice and patriotism (Marks 2005). As my interviewees told the story, each strove to achieve this ideal of putting family first, and each rejected feminist notions of women’s empowerment outside the home. None, however, had the economic luxury of becoming full-time homemakers, let alone of being active in politics, despite their growing concern over the cultural onslaught on social conservatism that they witnessed in the 1960s. In other words, with one partial exception (see Bella’s story in chapter 5), none of these women entered political life through the door of the kitchen-table activism that buoyed the New Right in the 1970s (Hardisty 1998; McGirr 2001). As Rebecca Klatch notes in her seminal work on women of the New Right, second-wave feminism integrated women into the political mainstream for the first time in American history in large part by spurring conservative women into the public sphere to oppose core feminist values (1987, 3). Although socialized by the same historical events and holding similar conservative views,

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my interviewees did not become politically active until nearly three decades later, at the height of post-9/11 alarmism about border security and at the debut of the Minuteman border patrols. This book tells the story of these women; born in the late 1930s and 1940s, forming families and raising children in the 1950s and 1960s, coping with empty nests in the 1980s and 1990s, and making meaning of themselves as aging white women and political subjects through border politics in the new millennium.

Where Is Race?

How does race operate in the new nativist movement, in the Minuteman branch of this movement, and in the lives of Minutewomen? How, from a macrolevel perspective, has racial politics on the right shaped these phenomena? And why, from the microlevel, social constructivist perspective, did I choose not to treat race as an analytical category on par with gender and age? In short, where is race in this analysis of nation, nativism, and the policing of the US-Mexico border? As I discuss in the appendix, the research that informs this book began as an extension of my earlier scholarship on extralegal justice movements. Archival research and initial field visits that revealed the active participation of women in the hypermasculine Minuteman movement presented an anomaly that subsequently shifted the theoretical grounding of this project from citizenship to gender. Theorization of my empirical findings ultimately led me in the direction of intersectionality, but this project was never intended to interrogate either the racial dynamics at work within the Minutemen or the convergence of racial politics on the right that empowered the new nativist movement, of which it is a part (Jacobson 2008). Therefore, this section foregrounds what some readers may find understated in the pages to come, by situating the Minutemen and the broader movement in relation to the post-civil-rights racial terrain and the distinct strands of conservatism that intersect on this terrain. Since the 1960s, white racial identity in the United States has been undergoing a fundamental transformation that frames the rise of the Minutemen and the current moment of racial polarization. As scholars of whiteness have argued, the civil rights gains of blacks in the 1960s and the affirmative action policies that followed in the 1970s shook to the core the meaning of whiteness for whites, for the first time in

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Introduction | 23

US history (Swain 2002; Walters 2003; Winant 1997). Civil rights advances fell short of leveling the playing field for racial and ethnic minority groups, but they occurred at a time when economic stagnation, deindustrialization, de-unionization, and governmental downsizing created job losses and downward mobility for the white working class. They also coincided with the beginning of the continuing demographic decline of whites relative to people of color (described earlier in this chapter). In the 1950s and 1960s, non-Hispanic whites constituted nearly 90 percent of the total US population (US Census Bureau 1961). By 2020, this figure had fallen to just over 60 percent (US Census Bureau 2019), and is on track to dip to 47 percent by 2050 (Pastor 2018). In this context, the United States witnessed heightened racial consciousness and racial resentment, and the ascendance of a belief in whiteness as a disadvantage among whites (Swain 2002; Winant 1997). As Howard Winant wrote in 1997, “This imaginary white disadvantage—for which there is almost no empirical evidence—has achieved widespread cultural credence, and provides the cultural and political glue that holds together a wide variety of reactionary racial politics” (75). It was through this lens of whiteness as disadvantage that white Californians at the forefront of the new nativist movement interpreted the influx of large numbers of immigrants of color into their nation and their state. In tandem with these changes, a new and powerful racial ideology emerged to explain deep-seated inequalities across racial groups, an ideology or system of beliefs that Eduardo Bonilla-Silva famously called racism without racists or color-blind racism ([2003] 2014). Colorblind racism denies the existence of racism and the import of race in determining life chances in post-civil-rights America. Instead, it attributes different outcomes along racial lines to individual traits such as intelligence, talent, and work ethic. Unlike white-supremacist ideologies premised on the belief in the biologically determined inferiority of people of color, color-blind racism blames the victim in subtler and, arguably, more insidious ways. And unlike white supremacism that asserts bigotry overtly, color-blind racism operates subtextually, through racially coded language and logic (Bonilla-Silva [2003] 2014; Winant 1997). Within the universe of conservative political forces and social movements, this fracturing and reconfiguration of racial ideologies maps onto the transition from Old Right to New Right, which began

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in the 1950s and 1960s. The New Right drew strength from its fusion of libertarianism and traditionalism and the vitality of its grassroots organizing, and flourished among suburbanites in the Sun Belt states of California and Arizona (S. Cunningham 2016; Hardisty 1999; Himmelstein 1990; Klatch 1987; McGirr 2001). These characteristics distinguish the New Right from the Old Right, but so too does its embrace of color-blind racial ideology and its capacity to mobilize white backlash and racial resentment in these terms (Berlet 2007; Hardisty 1999; Winant 1997). How these diverse political projects and racial ideologies are manifested in the new nativist movement is complex, but Higham reminds us that nativism is not the same as racism or xenophobia (a hatred of everything foreign) ([1955] 2002, 1999; see also Knobel 1996). Drawing this analytical distinction allows him to identify elements of nativism irreducible to race, such as—in the historical period he studied— anti-Catholicism and antiradicalism, and I have found this distinction useful to maintain as well. That said, ample evidence found both in my own data and in extant scholarship suggests that color-blind racism permeates the new nativist movement (Feagin 1997; Jacobson 2008; Ono and Sloop 2002; Sánchez 1999). In the California controversy that catalyzed the movement, for example, most organizations and individuals avoided explicitly invoking race. Instead, they deployed arguments that singled out Latinos, especially Mexicans, and used seemingly race-neutral frames to portray this minority as a threat to the white majority (Chavez 2008; Hogan and Haltinner 2015; Jacobson 2008; Perry 2016; Sánchez 1999). Chief among these frames was a focus on legality that seized on certain demographic realities while eliding others, conflated undocumented status with criminality, and purveyed the unspoken assumption that all Mexicans were undocumented immigrants and all undocumented immigrants, Mexican. They highlighted, for instance, how much higher a proportion of foreign-born people living in the United States lacked legal status today than in earlier periods (Jaret 1999).6 But they downplayed that the vast majority of immigrants in the United States, then and now, resided here legally, including large numbers of Mexicans. Moreover, the flow of undocu-

6. Between 1990 and 2007, the total figure climbed from 3.5 million to 12.2 million; by 2007, one-quarter of all foreign-born people living in the United States were out of status (López and Radford 2017).

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mented immigrants into the United States reflected the country’s persistent demand for low-wage labor, coupled with a failure to reform immigration policy to accommodate this demand legally. Far from emphasizing this reality, the nativist narrative construed undocumented (read: Mexican) immigrants as a threat to the jobs, social services, culture, and even lives of native-born (read: Anglo) Americans. The Minutemen and Minutewomen I studied objected to immigrants from Mexico and Central America in strikingly similar terms, giving proof of the traction of this color-blind logic. They insisted that they did not resent all immigrants, just those who didn’t come to this country legally. To support their claim, they pointed to Mexican friends, coworkers, and employees here legally whom they respected and who agreed with them. They insisted that illegal immigration was galling because it cheated the system and gave cheaters an unfair advantage over citizens and legal immigrants, who played by the rules. And they insisted that illegal immigrants were dangerous criminals that menaced American lives, even if liberals came up with euphemisms like “undocumented” to hide this fact. As a saying tacked to the wall at Camp Patriot put it, “Calling illegal aliens ‘undocumented immigrants,’ is like calling drug dealers ‘unlicensed pharmacists.’” At times, however, my research subjects’ exasperation with Mexicans and Central Americans living in the United States illegally seemed to pale in comparison with their fears that undocumented immigrants might turn out to be terrorists, and these fears took the shape of raw, unalloyed, and unguarded Islamophobia, not euphemistic, color-blind concerns about legality. They insisted that US national security depended on cracking down on illegal immigration and closing borders, but so too did the country’s cultural survival as a Western, Christian nation. Some, quoting public intellectuals such as Samuel Huntington and Far Right ideologues such as Dinesh D’Souza, insisted that left unchecked, Muslims would invade America, annihilate all Christians as infidels, impose Sharia law, oppress women, and commit atrocities like female circumcision on little girls. One Minuteman at Camp Patriot sported a T-shirt with “Infidel” printed across the front to telegraph that he, for one, had accepted this gauntlet and was engaged in a fight to the death to keep America free. These differences in how the Minutemen think and talk about distinct ethnoracial groups underscore why it is problematic to paint this organization and the people in it in overly broad strokes. In particular, it suggests that unreflexively labeling the Minutemen as white suprem-

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acists, as some scholars and activist scholars have done, misrepresents how whiteness operates in the movement and collapses important distinctions between movements on the Far Right and other conservative movements (Blee and Yates 2015; Blee and Creasap 2010). Far Right or right-wing movements typically “focus specifically on race/ethnicity and/or . . . promote violence as a primary tactic or goal,” whereas conservative movements “support patriotism, free enterprise capitalism and/or a traditional moral order and for which violence is not a frequent tactic or goal” (Blee and Creasap 2010, 270–271). In my research, most (but not all) Minutemen openly rejected the use of violence against immigrants, and most (but not all) denied that racial or ethnic prejudice is a motivating factor in their opposition to immigration. This messy empirical reality does not negate that traces of whitesupremacist ideology circulate within the Minutemen. But it does point to the severe limitations of using the term “white supremacist” as a descriptor rather than as a Weberian ideal-type to reveal the nuances and complexities of empirical reality. With the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, the racial and political terrain of the post-civil-rights United States seemed to shift once again, this time toward a truly postracial society. For people of color and progressives, the first black US president, who was the son of an immigrant, embodied the promise of eradicating race and immigrant background as barriers to acceptance and success. Moreover, Obama’s inclusive rhetoric (Jenkins and Cos 2010) and early promises to push for immigration reform, including a path to legalization for some undocumented immigrants, conveyed a powerful message about the desirability of immigrants and broadening bases of inclusion (Barker 2016; Lind 2014). Wide margins of support from Latino and Asian voters, coupled with a strong backing from whites, especially young whites, suggested the nation was at last turning a corner on its Anglocentric, nativist past. In hindsight, of course, the Obama era did not usher in a postracial society—far from it—nor did the administration succeed in significantly changing course on immigration policy. Indeed, Obama’s meager progress on immigration disillusioned progressives even as it angered conservatives, thus polarizing the issue in advance of the 2016 presidential race (Woods and Arthur 2017). On the one hand, to appease conservatives, Obama’s administration doubled down on immigration enforcement, deporting more people than under any prior administration. These efforts failed to mollify conservatives, but earned

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Obama the ire of progressives and the title “Deporter-In-Chief” among immigrant-rights advocates (Block and Cornish 2014). On the other hand, to appease progressives, Obama issued executive orders that provided needed relief from deportation for so-called DREAMERS, undocumented youth brought to this country as small children by their parents. Progressives criticized these measures for providing only temporary relief for a small proportion of undocumented immigrants, and Obama’s invocation of executive privilege incensed conservatives. It was during this impasse and prelude to further polarization that I initiated my fieldwork with the Minutemen in 2010. By then, Obama had held office for two years, and the racial resentment his election rekindled had sparked Tea Party mobilizations. In a historical turn reminiscent of the ascent of the New Right following civil rights advances of the 1960s, right-wing populism rose once again in response to the promise of change. Moving from a bird’s-eye view to the ground level, the following section brings into focus what these threats and promises looked like from the vantage point of the Camp Patriot Minutemen.

An Ethnographic Coda: Passing Through Camp Patriot

The Minutewomen’s paths to politicization did not necessarily begin and certainly did not end here, but all the Minutewomen described in this book passed through Camp Patriot, and what happened there mattered.7 Concretely, Camp Patriot was the venue where the Minutemen of the California branch that I studied assembled for a long weekend each month, plus two full summer months annually, to stage border patrols. Chosen by organizers for its proximity to the US-Mexico border but also to highlight the remote and allegedly ungovernable quality of large portions of the nation’s borderlands, this site was difficult to access. Located in a patchwork of sparsely populated, privately owned ranches, Native American reservations, and uninhabited land 7. At one time or another in the course of Camp Patriot’s decade-long existence, virtually every California Minuteman and scores of Minutemen from other parts of the country passed through its gates. In 2014, however, the camp closed, the number of monthly muster attendees and the dollar amount of donations having dwindled below quantities necessary to cover its rent and operating costs.

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protected by the Bureau of Land Management, it sat on private property, gated from the gravel road that ran past it. From this site, to reach the US-Mexico border fence that threads through the area—in and of itself a patchwork built of used military landing mats (the old wall), modern tubular metal fencing (the new wall, pre-Trump), and barbedwire cattle fencing—required a four-wheel-drive vehicle but as little as fifteen minutes’ driving time. Although the Minutemen at Camp Patriot had some ties to local residents sympathetic to their cause, the camp served primarily as a hub of activity for outsiders who did not know or interact with one another otherwise, and it had a distinctly insular feel. To gain admittance to the group, individuals had to agree to a formal, bureaucratic vetting that included a background check, a written application, and the signing of a liability waiver and a code of conduct that prohibited, among other things, Confederate flags, long guns, and camouflage attire at camp. Once accepted, new members could attend monthly musters, where they spent several consecutive days and nights in close quarters and constant interaction with one another. They typically formed tight bonds through the emotionally intense and allegedly dangerous acts entailed in their version of border policing. By day, they drove rutted back roads or combed trails on foot for evidence of recent smuggling activity (“gathering intel”). By night, they watched segments of the border fence through night-vision goggles to detect possible unauthorized crossings (“going out on ops”). They also shopped for and prepared camp meals, and, on off hours, shot targets at a makeshift range or socialized at a nearby Indian casino over dinner, drinks, and gambling. Camp Patriot shuttered its doors in 2014, but my research suggests that the social networks that crystallized, and the political socialization that occurred, in this space left a lasting imprint on those who spent time there. More than one Minutewoman whom I encountered formed friendships and even kin-like relationships at Camp Patriot that outlasted regular attendance at musters. Several claimed that comrades at Camp Patriot convinced them of the need to buy a handgun for selfdefense and helped them learn to shoot it. And many, many spoke of their experiences there in terms of civic-religious conversion, a baptism by fire into the nativist belief in the imminent danger of immigration to the integrity of American society. The ethnographic vignette below, therefore, welcomes you to Camp Patriot. In advance of the deep dive into their lives taken by

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the rest of the book, it introduces you to the men and women of the Minutemen, people who—at close range—appear almost ordinary even as they espouse seemingly extraordinary points of view. And it introduces you to them on the physical and social terrain that profoundly shaped and perhaps even produced the political sensibilities that undergird the Minutemen’s militant opposition to immigration. Except for the enormous American flag hoisted high at its entrance when camp is open, nothing much sets Camp Patriot apart from the AAA-approved, Family Motor Coach Association–rated campground it forms a part of. Take the second left off the rutted back road just past signs for bocci ball, swimming, and stargazing, though, and you will find yourself in a small forest of RVs and tents arrayed around the building from which the pulse of the Minuteman Corps of California, Inc., emanates, a historic stagecoach depot refitted to function as a bunkhouse, mess tent, and common room all rolled into one. Survey the terrain before parking in front of the depot, and the bright yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag with the rattlesnake, flying from Tony’s pop tent, will catch your eye. If you happen to be around when Tony (chapters 1, 3, and 4) pulls in in his brand-new Toyota SUV, the one he could afford only through Obama’s cash-for-clunkers program, you will hear him catch flak for driving “the Obamamobile” to camp. You might also see Harry’s popup parked next to his pickup truck with a “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” bumper sticker, and Chuck’s teardrop trailer. You know Chuck has arrived because there is an American flag planted in front of his trailer, but Chuck spends most of his time during musters tending to the shrubs and replacing faded flags out at the memorial to a recently fallen Border Patrol agent, so you might not meet him during this visit. Marge (chapter 3) hasn’t been to camp since she started cancer treatment a year ago, but you see her trailer as well. It is the now shabby-looking one that everyone at camp fears mice have taken over for good. Cora, who suffers from a series of failed hip and knee replacements (Liz will tell you the story in excruciating detail), may or may not make it to camp for this muster. If she does, she will stay with Liz (chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4) in one of the half dozen or so fi fth wheels and luxury motor homes with electrical hookups lined up in a row on one side of camp. Peeking out in the distance from behind the most luxurious motor home are two large metal doors wedged into an embankment that, if this were the setting of a spaghetti western, you would peg as the entrance

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to an old mine shaft. If you carpool to camp with Millie (chapters 1 and 2), as I do for my first muster, she will explain to you that this is a storage unit that contains “survival supplies.” Millie doesn’t store her own supplies here, she tells you matter-of-factly, because her sister, who lives relatively near her, has plenty of guns, chickens, and wild game on her property. Later, Liz opens the rusty padlock that secures the container’s heavy doors, and you wander inside with others as they inventory the MREs (meals ready to eat), bottled water, disaster kits, and camouflage radiation suits stashed here for an emergency. It is cool, dark, and dry inside, and a bare energy-saving bulb hangs from the ceiling to light the way as you make your way to the far end. You pass boxes of blankets, a stack of blue metal stovepipes, and a generator before you reach the locked metal cage intended to safeguard guns and ammunition. At the moment, only a single plastic milk crate filled with lead bars, which can be melted down to make bullets, sits inside, but Shaun (chapter 2) admires the quality of the welding on the cage and talks of filling it with ammunition he will bring from home. Eventually, you make your way to the stagecoach depot, as every arriving volunteer does once they settle in. In fact, you may end up spending most of your time here, shooting the breeze with other volunteers on the front porch or gathered around the stone hearth and big-screen TV that anchor the common room. Harry (chapter 4) has already staked out a camp chair on the porch. A copy of the fi ftieth-anniversary edition of Whittaker Chambers’s biography lies face down on his lap; Andy (chapter 4) plies him with details of his discovery that Gillespie Field in San Diego has an upright Atlas missile on display. You learn (Harry already knows the details) that this is the missile Andy worked on when he was in the service in Chugwater, Wyoming, the kind equipped to carry a nuclear warhead to intercept Nikita Khrushchev’s Russian Bears. (“Bear” was the name given to the Tu-95 strategic bomber.) It is the reason you aren’t speaking Russian today, Andy editorializes, looking straight at you. We won that war because Khrushchev knew we would push the button. Harry nods sadly in agreement as Andy adds that we wouldn’t win it today, not with our current culture of compromise. In the early morning, you might find Eve (chapter 4) and Phyllis (chapter 4) on the porch instead, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee out of mismatched mugs that have accreted, like much of the stuff at Camp Patriot, as small-time donations made by small-time people doing what they can for their country. Phyllis, a petite Asian American woman with straight black hair and gray roots, wears a T-shirt with the

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text of the Constitution printed on the front and “NRA” in block letters on the back; Eve, a white woman of similar build with silver hair, sports a tank top that reveals her bald eagle and banner “tats,” which read “God Bless America” on one shoulder and “One Nation under God” on the other. They are passing Phyllis’s iPhone back and forth, perusing a website purveying mugs, T-shirts, and other apparel with funny sayings. They laugh about their personal favorites—sayings such as “I don’t need sex. My government fucks me every day” and “Spay and neuter liberals”—but the only item Phyllis seriously considers ordering is a pair of red, white, and blue elephant-shaped flip-flops. Inside the stagecoach depot, more evidence of donations to Camp Patriot abounds. Pallets of bottled water that Herb brought are stacked against the wall, and various and sundry snacks fill the long row of tables covered in red-and-white-checked oilcloth. At the moment, the goodies include the remains of a birthday cake that would have spoiled had Jeff (chapter 4) left it at home over the weekend, and a Tupperware container full of cookies that Millie baked. Millie likes to bake (the guys who take you out later on patrol rave about her baking) and she likes to talk about baking, too. She lives alone, so when she finds someone at camp to talk to about her baking, she is especially content. Just ask: she will gladly share the recipe for her famous pumpkin bars with the cream cheese frosting, the ones that she makes in large quantities on the industrial-size sheet pans in the camp kitchen. Even Millie admits, though, that the kitchen is mostly Liz’s turf. Since two full-cooked meals are served daily at Camp Patriot when musters are on, however, Liz sometimes accepts help. She has been known, for example, to put Harry to work clearing mouse droppings from pantry shelves. Out of earshot of Liz, Andy swears that men are perfectly capable of preparing their own meals at camp, and he rolls his eyes when she insists on cooking eggs to order for everyone. Given her extensive volunteer experience in running Red Cross shelters in her younger years, Liz prides herself on efficiently cooking for crowds. When she misses a muster (a rare occasion), Jeff makes his baby back ribs or pulls together meals that, in his own words, require little thought (chili from a can, salad out of a bag, potato salad out of a container, carrot cake from Costco). And if someone else shops for the ingredients, Enzo (chapter 4) will prepare marinara sauce and meatballs from his secret family recipe. No one can accuse the Camp Patriot Minutemen of not eating well. It will take the better part of the day to assemble enough volunteers to go out on ops, so you scan the common room for reading material. For

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the taking on folding tables are stacks of the latest issue of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform’s newsletter, with the headline “The Staggering Cost of Illegal Immigration,” and a booklet by the California Rifle and Pistol Association with updates on state gun laws and basic safety rules. Books line the mantelpiece just below the mounted deer horns decorated with a stars-and-stripes bow, hardbacks such as The Truth about Hillary and The Liberal Mind: Understanding the Psychological Causes of Political Madness. Mixed in are a few titles that you suspect Andy, with his interest in science fiction and flying, must have left behind: Light Years: An Investigation into the Extraterrestrial Experiences of Eduard Meier and Forever Flying: Fifty Years of Highflying Adventures, from Barnstorming in Prop Planes to Dogfighting Germans to Testing Supersonic Jets, an autobiography by someone you have never heard of. The noise level in the room starts rising exponentially. Pete (chapters 1 and 4), who wears a T-shirt that reads “Coexist” spelled out in guns and gun scopes, is trying to tell Larry (chapters 2 and 4) a joke (“What does the bartender say when a black guy, a Muslim and a communist walk into the bar? ‘Hello, Mr. President’”), and raises his voice to be heard over Fox News playing in the background. Jeff turns up the volume on the TV to follow a story about Hostess plant closures and then declares that unions have ruined this great country. Reagan knew how to put unions in their place—where is a Reagan when you need one? Ryan, a small-business owner, runs with the theme of businesses going out of business and turns the conversation to Obamacare. He heard on the news that Denny’s will be raising its prices by 5 percent and cutting employee hours down to twenty-eight per week thanks to Obama. He also worries that the Israeli-Gaza conflict will push gas prices sky high. At the mention of Obama, Liz swears and slams her fists on the table in front of her. She has it from a reliable source that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been purchasing millions of rounds in case Obama decides to declare martial law. But before anyone can concur or commiserate (and before you can ask, “Why NOAA?” and “Why martial law?”), Tony enters to announce that it is time to get ops off the ground and go put some heat on the bad guys. Since you are new to Camp Patriot, you will not be asked along on ops this time round, but you can make yourself useful in the comms (short for “communications”) center. Jim (chapter 1) will teach you how to do hourly radio checks with the “teams in the field” in order to make sure everyone is safe, and to monitor the radio for reports of sightings that need to be called in to Border Patrol headquarters. He escorts you

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to the nondescript windowless mobile unit (someone has donated it, too) a short distance from the stagecoach depot. You are not allowed to take photographs inside, Jim informs you, and then punches a code into a keypad to open the door with the No Trespassing sign (“No Trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again”). You surmise that this is Camp Patriot’s war room when you spy the aerial map of the region pinned to one wall, the white board propped next to it with lists of the “handles” of the teams out on ops, the two-way radio, the office phone with multiple lines, and the large black safe from which Jim extracts a dozen radio handsets and night-vision scopes. Less functional items adorn the walls: a photograph of a Minuteman parade float draped with a banner that reads, “Does my American flag offend you? Call 1–800-LEAVE-THE-USA,” a framed photocopy of the saying “Calling illegal aliens ‘undocumented immigrants’ is like calling drug dealers ‘unlicensed pharmacists,’” and a fake Obama three-dollar bill (as in the saying “queer as a three dollar bill”) tacked to the bulletin board above the telephone. But remember, no photographs. When you retire that evening, you unroll your sleeping bag on a cot in the storage room that doubles as the ladies’ bunkroom when the women who don’t have their own tents or motor homes can’t all squeeze into Liz’s fi fth wheel. Boxes of stars-and-stripes bunting, plastic tablecloths, and flags, along with a large-print Bible and a stack of programs, gather dust on a card table to one side. The program was printed up for the Second Annual 4th of July “Secure America Now” Celebration in 2009. You flip through it until visions of the festivities dance in your head—speeches by political candidates, a musical tribute to “all our veterans and soldiers,” classes on the Constitution, border tours, a choreographed balloon release—and then doze off to the warm feeling that patriotism is still alive after all. When you wake up the next morning, surrounded by the paraphernalia of patriotism, the smell of fresh coffee, and the sound of Fox News wafting in from the common room next door, you thank God for Camp Patriot. Because Camp Patriot is a place where you can learn what is really wrong with this country and then do something about it. It is a place where your new friends will teach you why Obamacare is bad, tip you off about the government’s gun grab, and show you where to store your guns for safety in the meantime. And it is a place where you can fly the flag, talk about the greatness of our country, exercise your constitutional rights to bear arms and speak your mind, and not be accused of being a redneck or a racist or of wearing a tinfoil hat. But if you’re an aging woman, Camp Patriot is also a place where

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you can make sense of a world you can no longer control, a world that has decimated your nuclear family, spawned a generation of young people heedless of the fate of their country, and dismissed what women like you—politically and socially conservative, and economically obsolete— can offer for the future. Passing through Camp Patriot, you can become a new person in old age with the help of the people you meet, the friendships you forge, the skills you acquire, the tasks you accomplish, the sacrifices you make. And you can leave with a newfound sense of purpose, having remade yourself in the image of patriotic grandmotherhood.

Overview of the Book: From Public Image to Private Worlds to Politics

From its inception, the Minuteman movement placed great importance on the use of political spectacle and media attention (Chavez 2008; Doty 2009). Indeed, to the extent that populist anti-immigration forces gained traction in debates on the issue in the first decade of the twenty-first century, scholars have attributed this influence to the Minutemen’s masterful manipulation of patriotic symbols and rituals, along with their use of the border fence and surrounding landscape as a stage from which to project their message. Leo Chavez (2008) goes as far as to suggest that through extensive media coverage amplifying the theatrics of brave citizen-soldiers protecting the American frontier, the masculine figure of the Minuteman has become ensconced in public culture as a means by which Americans can make sense of the threat of Latino immigration today. But where do Minutewomen fit in this symbolic terrain? Chapter 1 addresses this question by examining the Minutemen’s public face and its members’ painstaking efforts to put a positive spin on its anti-immigration agenda and activities, which engaged women in unexpected ways. Via internet archives and interviews, it reconstructs one of the many colorful campaigns and gimmicky events that the Minutemen launched to capture media attention and expand membership, a special muster held at multiple Minuteman camps simultaneously in the fall of 2007, a time when efforts to improve the national organization’s public image were in full throttle. Dubbed Operation Granny Brigade (but remembered as “Ladies Day” at the California camp I studied), the weekend event encouraged women searching for ways to “do something” about the crisis of illegal immigration to come

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to the border to participate in all-woman patrols, or “granny brigades.” Singling out aging women for recruitment into special brigades on special occasions seems to be the exception that proves the rule that, under normal circumstances, it is men’s work to police the border. But internet messages exchanged during the planning stages and interviews with participants afterward suggest that much more was at stake. Almost intuitively, organizers understood the power of the symbolism of grandmotherhood for the media, and so made grandmothers and grandmotherhood part of the Minuteman political spectacle at the USMexico border. Chapter 2 turns from the public performance of grandmotherhood to Minutewomen’s private lives and lived experiences of old womanhood, as these took shape through participation in Minuteman border patrols and other events occurring at the Minutemen’s border camp. Although all-woman patrols originated as a publicity stunt, interviews and participant observation revealed that over time, Minutewomen claimed them—and the borderlands more broadly—as a key site for nurturing their sense of agency as old women. Harel Shapira and others have written compellingly about how Minuteman border patrols and camp life enabled white men to reclaim a sense of purpose in old age by providing them with the setting and props for reliving former lives as soldiers. By and large, however, aging Minutewomen had not served in the military in their youth, nor did they attempt to recycle former selves or lifestyles in order to make meaning out of the gendered aging process. Indeed, the stories they told of their prior lives were stories of loss, regret, and deprivation. They spoke of letting go of life dreams and illusions—dreams of being picture-perfect mothers who had raised children with the proper values and political sensibilities, and of having faith in a political system accountable to hardworking citizens like themselves. More figuratively, they alluded to the loss of an entire generation of young people whose apathy and narcissism aided and abetted the political corruption they believed to be the downfall of this great nation. Intertwining tales of personal loss with laments of generational and partisan betrayal, these women narrated how and why border politics had become central to their biographies in late life. By factoring age into an intersectional understanding of how human beings construct identity by “doing difference” (West and Fenstermaker 1995; West and Zimmerman 1987), this chapter illustrates how white working- and middle-class Minutewomen “did old woman-

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hood” at the border in their interactions with Minutemen, young and old. Against the backdrop of lack and loss experienced in their middle age and youth, these women invented new selves in old age that transgressed norms of white middle-class respectability, norms that required old women to age gracefully and passively accept their newfound status as demure and dependent. In contrast, the Minutewomen featured in this chapter did old womanhood by subtly asserting their independence and emphasizing how—as old women—they were uniquely poised to further the war on immigration in the borderlands. Leaning into larger-than-life personas as, for example, border grannies, they gained a sense of personal and political agency denied them in the past. Chapter 3 returns to the theme of grandmotherhood and how its politicization contributed to aging white women’s anti-immigrant militancy. Social scientists from multiple disciplines have shown how, in distinct times and places, motherhood motivates political activism by serving as a template for carving out a niche in the political realm (Brennan 2008; Jetter, Orleck, and Taylor 1997; Kerber 1980; Koven and Michel 1993; Morgan 2005; Nickerson 2012). The historian Linda Kerber (1980), for instance, credits the emergence of republican motherhood—that is, the understanding of motherly duties as entailing the civic education of sons—with opening up a place for women in the US public sphere following the Revolutionary War. Like Kerber’s republican motherhood in the colonial era, a peculiar conception of women’s duties as entailing the salvation and patriotic resocialization of grandchildren served as the bridge by which Minutewomen entered into the public sphere through anti-immigrant activism that included, but was not limited to, border policing. Like Sarah Palin’s metaphorical mama grizzlies, these women reared up and charged into political action when they sensed danger from an unholy alliance between big government, liberal values, and undeserving immigrant newcomers, a coalition that threatened the economic survival and cultural integrity of the one-wage-earning Christian heterosexual family (Deckman 2012). Unlike mama grizzlies, however, they saw themselves as assuming the extraordinary responsibility of reaching across generations to give life-sustaining first aid to nuclear families wounded by pressures attributed to illegal immigration. No longer at liberty to live a life of leisure in retirement, these grandmothers went to the border to save grandchildren and the nation in one fell swoop. The final two chapters examine in broader strokes the relation-

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ship between the gendered dynamics of the Minutemen and the success of the radical Right in American politics today. From his racialized rallying cry to “build the wall” through his defense of Klan-like demonstrations in Charlottesville and beyond, Donald Trump has openly appealed to white nationalism to sustain his meteoric rise to political power, and the media have commented amply on this convergence. Much less attention, however, has focused on how Trump mobilizes misogyny to fill his electoral sails, or why conservative women continue to support him in spite of or because of his overt misogynistic tendencies. Chapter 4 sheds light on conservative women’s relationship to misogyny by examining the diverse gender ideologies at play in the Minuteman movement. It widens the lens to examine in greater depth men’s perspectives on gender relations, and delineates a distinctive way of thinking among Minutewomen—a feminist gender ideology of sorts—one that paradoxically reproduces misogyny by exhorting women to be tough enough to endure gender-based mistreatment or assaults on their dignity as proof of their equality with men. Chapter 5 continues an analysis of how the Minutemen foreshadowed the current political moment, describing how women become politically engaged after they exit the Minutemen. As watchdog groups and some scholars of the Right have acknowledged, the fragmentation and gradual decline of the border-policing movement gave impetus to the Tea Party as former Minutemen flocked to this fledgling expression of populism. This chapter follows that shift through the stories of women who renounced their border activism but returned to their hometowns to become active in Tea Party politics. The Tea Party did not appeal to the newfound political sensibilities of all Minutewomen, however. Minutewomen enjoying a higher class status distanced themselves from what they perceived as the coarse tactics and unrefined political philosophy of the Tea Party. These women gravitated instead toward the GOP, throwing their time and money into campaigns for tough-on-immigration candidates such as California’s Tim Donnelly. Together, these efforts helped mobilize the populist base both within and outside the Republican Party that would ultimately sweep Donald Trump into power.

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1 | Granny Brigades and Political Spectacle at the US -Mexico Border

O

n a bright October day in the desert, a dozen ladies arrayed themselves to be photographed along the skeleton of a fence that demarcates the sovereign territory of the United States of Mexico from that of the United States of America. Dressed uniformly in pink camouflage T-shirts and tennis shoes, they call themselves the Granny Brigade, and they came to this place at the behest of Minuteman organizers. They linked their arms, twisted their hips, and raised their legs to strike a classic chorus-line pose for the photographer. This chapter examines how the Minutemen, through publicity stunts like this one, attempted to make a political spectacle of grandmotherhood in service of the new nativist movement. Like the photograph, this chapter makes visible what remained largely invisible to scholars and activists concerned with the US-Mexico border, namely, how the work of women, especially older women, sustained this project to police the geopolitical, legal, and cultural boundaries of the nation. I came across this framed photograph on my first visit to Camp Patriot, the Minuteman border camp where I did much of the research for this book, and I puzzled over the anomalies it presented. Why had a movement known for its hypermasculinity—and proudly so—chosen to memorialize the women in its midst? Who were these women, and what had possessed them to step onto the borderland stage in this fashion? And what might this performance, frozen in a still life of old women in pink camo at the border fence, tell us about the Minutemen more broadly and the ethnonationalist project the movement enabled? My use of the term “ethnonationalist project” refers to the effort to tightly control or police membership in the national community that is evident especially, but not exclusively, in societal angst over the place of immigrants of color in America today. Although it has reached new,

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dramatic heights with Trump, this ethnonationalist impulse is not new, nor is it limited to the United States. Scholars of globalization, for example, have long theorized that as state boundaries in many parts of the world have become extraordinarily permeable to capital, goods, and information flows, governing elites have crafted new forms of control and sovereignty over national territories and populations (Ong 2006; Sassen 1996). Immigration policy that criminalizes unauthorized border crossers but not the employers and consumers that benefit from the cheap labor they supply constitutes one way that these projects sustain economic globalization, even as they intensify control over and selectively exclude certain populations. The metaphoric and literal policing of the nation as described in this book exemplifies how private citizens participate in these exclusionary projects by helping discursively delineate the line between those newcomers who presumably merit permanent inclusion in the national community and those who do not. In the United States, this project has deep historical roots dating back at least to the acquisition by force of large swaths of Mexico in the nineteenth century and subsequent attempts to “Americanize” this territory. Indeed, it spans the nearly two hundred years since Anglo settlers, motivated by a belief in Manifest Destiny and the intent to perpetuate slaveholding, began colonizing the Mexican territory that would become the states of Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Kansas (Perea 2003). As data on the lynching of Mexicans and the violence perpetrated by militia-like agents of justice such as the Texas Rangers indicate, these settlers policed the racial boundaries of an incipient national community well before and after the stroke of a pen marked the official boundary separating the United States from Mexico on the map (Acuña 2000; Carrigan 2004; Gordon 1999; Yoxall 2006). By the 1920s, however, the dominant expression of anxiety surrounding the place of Mexicans in the body politic had shifted from vigilante violence in western states to a fi xation on immigration on the southern border and borderlands. In part, this concern responded to an uptick of border crossings from the south, prompted by the turmoil of the 1910 Mexican Revolution and the earlier Chinese Exclusion Act, which had rerouted Chinese immigration from Ellis Island to surreptitious entry by land. It also reflected, however, profoundly racist ideas fostered by the turn-of-the-century eugenics movement, which associated Mexicans (and other immigrants of color) with dirt, disease, and genetic degeneration (Stern 2004, 2005). The link between these ideas and the imagining of Mexicans as

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outsiders to the nation strengthened with the passage of laws that both legitimated national origin, construed in racial terms, as the legal basis for determining immigration and citizenship eligibility and assigned those who violated these statutes to the category of illegal alien (Chavez 2008; Nevins 2010; Ngai 2004). The creation of the Border Patrol in 1924 and the unprecedented policing of Mexican border crossers through draconian measures such as quarantines and mass deportation reinforced this association between alleged racial inferiority, illegality, and Mexican national origin, even though Mexicans were technically exempt from the national-origin quotas of the day. This history paved the way for the conflation of “Mexican” and “illegal” that is central to US border politics today and that lends plausibility to nativist claims that opposition to Mexican immigration is race blind, motivated solely by a desire to “uphold the law.” Moreover, these early developments established the physical space of the borderlands as a privileged site for the production and reproduction of meaning surrounding the place of Mexicans in the body politic. This is evident today in the way that social movements on both sides of the immigration debate embrace this space as a stage on which to enact competing visions of who belongs (or should belong) to the national community and on what basis. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (2008) has documented, for instance, how religiously inspired immigrant-rights activists mobilize annual vigils at the border fence to dramatize family separations caused by restrictive immigration policies and to challenge notions of national inclusion and exclusion pinned to arbitrary distinctions such as country of birth. Similarly, but for different ideological purposes, the Minutemen rallied at the border fence to enact rituals drawing on historically fraught images of an embattled frontier that frame Mexicans as intruders and perpetual outsiders, and private citizens—largely white, working class, and male—as the legitimate gatekeepers of nation. Circulated widely by mass media, images of these rituals contribute to what Leo Chavez calls a “spectacle of surveillance” that has very real consequences for how we as a nation construct the boundaries of belonging (2008). Studies of the Minuteman movement highlight how these performances were inflected by race, class, and gender, focusing primarily on the actions, bodies, and sensibilities of men engaged in the quasimilitaristic activities associated with patrolling the border (Castro 2007/2008; Chavez 2008; Doty 2009; Shapira 2013). Although the precise line of argument varies, these studies share the assumption—

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sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit—that the Minuteman movement responded to twin imperatives that have gained urgency in post9/11 America: to bolster national security against a foreign enemy and to shore up white working- and middle-class masculinities threatened by economic globalization, multiculturalism, and the advances of feminism in the late twentieth century. Fewer studies have analyzed the actions, bodies, and sensibilities of Minutewomen. Katie Oliviero, however, has begun the task of interrogating how femininity factored into the Minutemen’s show of militarized masculinity by examining the role of guns in the construction of what she calls “armed femininity” (2011). Citing recruitment materials posted to the Minuteman Project’s website that portrayed women wielding firearms, she argues that “the gun becomes the symbol through which these women can access normatively masculine spheres of power, allowing them to transgress gendered boundaries enough to participate in militarized imaginings of nation” (696). This book explores how a different symbol—grandmotherhood— and the identity it connotes enabled women to participate in the nationalist project promoted by the Minutemen. Other social movements have united women around the experience of grandmotherhood to protest the disappearance of family members by repressive authoritarian regimes (Arditti 1999) or to wage antiwar campaigns (KutzFlamenbaum 2007; Narushima 2004; Roy 2007; Wile 2008). In these cases, grandmotherhood operated as a frame that inspired collective action by drawing on the moral authority that women claim as mothers but also on assumptions about the complacency and apolitical nature of old age. The politicized enactment of grandmotherhood, situated at this particular intersection of age and gender, introduces an element of surprise into collective action that differentiates it from movements that mobilize around motherhood. Rachel Kutz-Flamenbaum describes this dynamic in the following terms: “Ageism and dominant gender norms construct the grandmother as a nice old lady content with the domesticity of baking cookies and spoiling her grandchildren[,] dismissing the knowledge, wisdom, and skills that come with many years of living. We do not expect grannies to be out protesting” (2007, 97). Nor, I would add, to be policing the US-Mexico border. The intersectionality of grandmotherhood, however, extends beyond its age and gender dimensions to include race and class, though these remain largely unmarked in the predominantly white middleclass movements cited above and in the Minutemen’s deployment of

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grandmotherhood analyzed below. To the extent that the image put into play by these movements relies on connotations of full-time stayat-home grandmotherhood dedicated to the unthreatening tasks of “baking cookies” and “spoiling children,” it ignores the experiences of working-class grandmothers and grandmothers of color who are burdened with providing for the essential material needs of their families well into old age, often through sustained employment outside the home. Mary Romero (2008) has shown how the US nativist movement, through organizations like the Arizona-based Mothers Against Illegal Aliens, capitalizes on these unmarked differences by framing opposition to immigration as a native-born mother’s duty to protect her family from the myriad threats posed by dark-skinned immigrants, especially the dangers presented by unfit mothers. The rhetorical move she identifies hinges on impugning immigrant women by measuring them against impossible standards of “ideal motherhood” grounded in the privileged experience of white middle-class women. But the Minutemen and Minutewomen I studied deployed grandmotherhood as symbolic capital differently. To elucidate their tactic, this chapter describes two performances that the Minutemen put on in the theater that is the borderlands, one a frontstage performance meticulously scripted for a national audience, and the other an improvisation enacted backstage during a routine monthly muster at Camp Patriot. The first transpired in the context of Operation Granny Brigade 2007, an event orchestrated by the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC) simultaneously in border camps in Arizona and California, and promoted online by a Minutewoman with the screen name “Border Granny.” Organizers issued press releases and placed ads with speaker bureaus to drum up interest. And after the long weekend had drawn to a close, participants posted photographs and commentary on the MCDC website, prompting members who had not attended to editorialize about the event. I mine these archival materials, along with ethnographic observations made years later, to reconstruct this type of public performance of grandmotherhood and its meaning to the Minutewomen cast in the leading roles. I then turn to scenes from Camp Patriot during regular monthly border gatherings in order to trace the backstage performances put on by Minutemen, and the ways that these performances assigned women very different parts from the heroine roles afforded them during public spectacles. These vignettes of camp life also contrast the glorification of border grannies in public with the ordinary and understated work

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that they took on at camp. It is only against the backdrop of these relatively invisible performances and routines that the hypervisibility of the granny brigades can be fully understood.

Frontstage: When “Border Granny Wants You!”

“If you want to do something about the illegal alien crisis, diseases that affect our children and grandchildren, food that is unsafe and on and on and on,” ran a post that caught my eye in 2007, “volunteer to come to the border in October. We will be running a line just for grannies on a yet to be determined Saturday afternoon. We will train you and give you a free T-shirt to boot.” I had been combing the “Border Granny—On the Border” discussion board on the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps website when a thread entitled “Border Granny Wants You!,” initiated by none other than Border Granny herself, scrolled across my screen. Appeals for volunteers to put in time at the border appeared frequently on the MCDC site, as did the image of Uncle Sam beckoning, “i want you as a minuteman volunteer to secure the us border,” so Border Granny’s use of this trope was not unusual. Still, I wondered, why grandmothers? And why “grannies” at that? The internet archive of running commentary posted to this discussion board helped answer this question. MCDC organizers officially announced Operation Granny Brigade on the main website, where they confirmed that the outfit would indeed run “lines just for grannies” in multiple border states on the weekend of October 6. In addition to providing practical advice for first timers (bring “sunblock, snacks and good sturdy shoes”) and disclaimers about firearms (“many of the ladies have concealed weapons permits [but] not all volunteers carry firearms”), the announcement promised “a day you will remember for the rest of your life.” It was, after all, “your opportunity to let our government and the American people who are sitting on the sidelines know you will secure our country if they will not.” From the perspective of the planners at MCDC headquarters, Operation Granny Brigade would be the opportunity of a lifetime to perform patriotism not only for an apathetic American citizenry but also for Uncle Sam himself. Publicity aimed at a wider audience took a more alarmist tack. “betty crocker ‘granny brigade’ deters sex at border” screamed

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the first line of the listing that introduced the Minutewoman Marie Coates as a potential talk-show interviewee, and the blurb that followed continued in equally incendiary terms: “The women of the MCDC will stand watch at the U.S.-Mexico border the weekend of October 5 in order to curtail the horrendous amount of sex trafficking, sexual abuse and rapes notorious for occurring along portions of the southern border.” MCDC publicists had placed this announcement on Specialguests.com, an online clearinghouse that boasted of matching speakers to nationally syndicated television and radio talk shows such as those hosted by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and even Oprah Winfrey. Text wrapped around a headshot of Marie, shown with soft, smiling features and windswept hair. Marie, the announcement asserted, is “a legal German immigrant-turned-U.S.-Citizen” who will soon lead “an organized group of women from the Betty Crocker generation [to] stand guard on this nation’s border to do the job our government refuses to do for its citizens.” “In order to help Americans protect and defend the flag, mom, and apple pie, staples of American culture,” Marie herself added, “we must first secure our borders.” Several paragraphs laid out the details of the Minuteman agenda for securing the border, and then a morally outraged Marie wrenched readers’ attention back to the “sex” that her grannies intend to deter: “The trees in the desert [at the border] should be growing leaves, not being used to hang the undergarments of women assaulted by violent ‘coyotes’ [human smugglers] who promised them visions of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness but who exploited them and sexually brutalized them instead. Our presence on the border will help to emphasize that we as Americans will not tolerate sex trafficking, sexual abuse or rape on our borders.” A jumble of incongruous and tragic images set a strange scene in my mind’s eye. Betty Crocker, spatula raised high, crusading against shadowy figures crouched behind barren trees strewn with panties and bras. Battered migrant women abandoned in the desert, lured there by these evildoers and the promise of the American Dream, dangled in front of them like a carrot just across the border. Matronly white women cut striking figures as they extended helping hands and soothing words to weak brown women broken by the barbarism and brutality of the human traffickers to whom they naively entrusted their welfare. Seemingly out of nowhere, my brain dredged up a post-9/11 memory of the kindly librarian and former first lady Laura Bush advocating for war in order to save Afghani women from the terrors of the Taliban. Fast-

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forward to the Sonoran Desert six years later, and it was purportedly ordinary American women—and old women at that—taking the moral high ground to rescue exploited developing-world women from the clutches of their own countrymen. But something more than the life and liberty of foreign female innocents or even America’s reputation as the guardian of all that is good and right around the globe seemed to be at stake in this image of grannies policing the border. Just below the surface of a moral panic over sex trafficking and sisterly solidarity with its victims lurked a palpable fear of losing America itself. Steeped in the nostalgia evoked by Betty Crocker, this was an America remembered and cherished for its alleged simplicity, in contrast with the complicated nature of modern times—an imaginary America of peace, prosperity, and domestic bliss where all immigrants were Anglo-Saxon, all women were stay-at-home moms, and all Americans were middle class. At stake, in other words, was nothing less than “the flag, mom and apple pie, staples of American culture,” endangered by the barbarity perceived to be pressing on America from abroad and manifesting in rampant “sex trafficking, sexual abuse and rape on our borders.” As preparations for the event proceeded, some behind-the-scenes objections bubbled to the surface in discussion-board exchanges. One participant questioned the use of the label “granny” and pink camouflage T-shirts. Border Granny, the mastermind of Operation Granny Brigade and the most authoritative voice in these exchanges, countered, “The object is to get women to the border and to promote the issue of securing the border with women when the government refuses to do it.” To the Minuteman who had conveyed his wife’s concerns to the discussion board on her behalf, Border Granny went on to explain: “I am an old hard core feminist also and appreciate your wife’s opinions but I am also proudly a grandmother and feel it is my duty to protect my family.” She ended her rebuttal with a rhetorical question that in the original post tellingly lacked a question mark. “The family issue overrides the feminist issue, doesn’t it.” Other discussion participants, such as one who self-identified as a “patriotic army mom,” weighed in on the debate: “I agree with you, Border Granny! If I didn’t have an 11 and 12 year old, this old lady would be there all the time.” Ultimately, this voice of dissent was deleted from the internet record by its author with a simple note marking its place: “removed by poster, missed the point.” From the perspective of Border Granny, the point that this poster had missed was that women who were proudly grandmothers

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had to put family first. Family, after all, trumped feminism. This was so even, or perhaps especially, when protecting one’s family required acts that violated women’s claims to equality or provoked a loss of dignity. Plausibly, parading along the border fence in pink camouflage for the media constituted one such humiliating, thus sacrificial act. In all of my after-the-fact internet searches, I never came across a single reference to Operation Granny Brigade in the national print media, or evidence that the grannies had scored a high-profile speaking engagement on any major radio or television talk show. One local news source however, covered the event in terms remarkably similar to the blurb that appeared on specialguests.com. “A group of grandmothers opposed to illegal immigration will stand guard on the ArizonaMexico border southwest of Tucson this weekend. Minuteman Civil Defense Corps [member] . . . Marie Coates says the ‘granny brigade’ is the Betty Crocker generation doing the government’s job—defending the border.” The coverage did not escape the notice of the grannies themselves—and indeed, sparked a lively debate on the MCDC’s discussion board. “There was a great article . . . about the Minute Men (Women) at the border,” one participant wrote. “They mentioned Betty Crocker. I’m so happy. . . . It has opened the door for what we do and what we stand for!” Once again, Border Granny dared to disagree. “I would not call these women Betty Crocker types,” she objected, “but they are wonderful mothers and grandmothers. I think they would resent being compared to Betty Crocker. Maybe Davy Crockett would be a better comparison” [laughing smiley face emoticon]. If Operation Granny Brigade failed to garner much media coverage, this fact did not deter the virtual trail of photographs and congratulatory remarks that materialized in its wake. The same Minuteman who had voiced his wife’s reservations during the planning stages trumpeted the success of Operation Granny Brigade. “Here are some pictures from our outing to Anderson Valley,” he wrote in a post uploaded the day after the festivities wound down. “We shut down the entire valley . . . from illegal traffic . . . !” he continued. “And who did it? This bunch of wild women!” He ended his post in a bigger and bolder font: “Hey Mr. Bush, even our grannies can do it, why can’t you?” The photographs posted included a portrait of border grannies in pink posed against a larger-than-life American flag. Another discussion-board participant quipped that they had “‘dressed’ up the neighborhood quite a bit” (though none of the women in the photos I glimpsed wore dresses). Even skeptics lauded the grannies for be-

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ing at the border. “I may disagree with some people at MCDC,” Hellon-Wheels from New Mexico commented, “but the Granny Brigade is just too cool. . . . I can just imagine some macho type or better yet a Muslim male getting busted by ladies in pink camo.” Why grandmothers, then? This commentary suggested that Minutemen positioned grandmothers—nay, “grannies”—on the border because the flaunting of their presumed powerlessness made a spectacle of the cowardliness of their enemies—“macho types” conspiring to subvert the sovereignty of the United States by violating its territorial borders, “Muslim males,” and even, perhaps especially, “Mr.  Bush.” Counting on hypervisibility rather than stealth, in the context of events staged for the public, these grannies policed the nation symbolically, not tactically. In stark contrast to the covert nightly border patrols that I observed during fieldwork, border grannies donned pink camo in broad daylight for a single afternoon to perform the moral strength but physical frailty of grandmothers. This exception to what policing the border constituted for Minutemen under ordinary circumstances worked to manufacture a symbolic exception that proved the rule: those who could and should protect America’s border—the government—were derelict in their duty. Indeed, the granny brigades took to its logical extreme the Minutemen’s broader strategy of illustrating how “ordinary” citizens could and would do the job the government wouldn’t do, by demonstrating that even the presumably weakest of the weak were up to the task: “Hey Mr. Bush, even our grannies can do it, why can’t you?” Of the several women cast in the role of border granny in 2007, I met two nearly three years later—Liz and Millie—at Camp Patriot. At first blush, neither fit the stereotypical image that the term “granny” congers up. Indeed, neither was a grandmother in the strictest sense of the word, having borne no biological children of their own. Liz, a widowed retiree in her seventies, explained that she had adopted children early in life so that she “could be a grandmother,” and now had eight grandchildren, though she rarely referred to them in our informal conversations at camp. Millie, a divorced clerical worker for a municipal water treatment facility, had no children of her own but—in contrast to Liz—spoke often and at length of her nieces and nephews and their children and proudly considered herself to be “the favorite aunt.” Below I contrast the Minutemen’s flamboyant display of grandmothers at the border for outside audiences with backstage events and interactions that consigned these same women to invisibility in the day-

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to-day operations of camp life. I begin by detailing how Minutemen— especially male Minutemen—marked the borderlands as exceptionally dangerous and as “no place for women,” and then describe how women like Liz and Millie negotiated this highly gendered terrain. Ultimately, I argue, the division of labor constructed in the course of these behindthe-scenes gendered performances rendered women’s work both invisible and indispensable, an exact mirror image of the hypervisible and seemingly frivolous grannies posing in pink camo in broad daylight.

Backstage: Performing the Perils of the Border

“Welcome to BFE.” When I arrived at camp the first time, I found Jim lounging on the back patio of the low-lying building that served as the camp’s common area, a cigarette dangling between his fingers. As the contact who vetted my request to visit on this occasion, Jim was in charge of initiating me into the ways of Minuteman musters. He had laid down some of the rules during the phone calls and e-mail exchanges that preceded this visit: Tan, olive, or beige clothes only, no colors that would “attract attention.” No camouflage, long guns, or Confederate flags. Beware of rattlesnakes. As I approached Jim in person, he greeted me with a handshake, a few pleasantries, and “welcome to BFE.” Smiling wryly, he added, “Butt-fucking Egypt.” Although not every Minuteman I came to know employed such colorful language, most welcomed me into their world by warning me, in so many words, that I had ventured far beyond the bounds of civilization, into a desolate and dangerous no-man’s-land that they were fighting to reclaim. “Hostile territory” was the term Tony preferred and invoked repeatedly as he and Pete introduced me to the contours of this desert wasteland later that afternoon from the safety of Pete’s air-conditioned four-wheel-drive jeep. The jeep wound up a rutted dirt road that would be inaccessible to a less intrepid driver. We reached a lookout point that revealed a great expanse of the border. Miles of new and formidable-looking border fencing snaked across the landscape below for as far as the eye could see. We disembarked at the summit, and Pete beckoned me to follow as he started up and then down a steeply inclined trail that veered away from the paved road. I concentrated on staying upright as the gravelly path gave way under my feet, but Pete—an aging Vietnam veteran with a heart condition—scaled the slope effortlessly. As he did, he lectured me on the dangers of tra-

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versing this terrain. There were the very real risks of dehydration and heat exhaustion, of course, not to mention rattlesnakes. And then there were coyotes—“the two-legged kind,” he clarified. As if to illustrate the power of this uniquely human predator, when we returned to the jeep, Pete headed straight to a place in the valley below where the border fence ended abruptly. Makeshift fencing—barbed wire, boulders, and a low-lying barrier of railroad ties and metal tubing to obstruct vehicular traffic—took its place. Here the sandy road running along the modern fence turned to rock and scrub, so we were free to roam this area on foot without disturbing Border Patrol efforts to “cut sign” in detecting unauthorized border crossers in the sand.1 Lest the hostility of the borderlands be lost on me, Pete led me to a stick planted in front of the auto barrier. On this stick, he claimed, Minutemen had found a pair of bloodied underwear belonging to a coyote’s rape victim. Coyotes—slang for guides paid large sums to lead unauthorized people across the border—collect and display these “trophies” on “rape trees” all along the border, Pete alleged. He added that Minutemen had found backpacks full of these trophies. Pete ended this cautionary tale by pointing to the hills in front of us and recounting how one Minuteman patrol had listened at night as a woman on the other side of the border was being raped. They had wanted to intervene, but Border Patrol forbade them. My blood ran cold at the thought. While Pete and Tony escorted me through this borderland house of horrors, other Minutemen that afternoon teamed up to conduct “reconnaissance missions” for signs of recent smuggling activity. When we returned to camp, we learned that in addition to the usual fresh footprints, broken brush, and trash of obviously recent vintage, a recon team had come across a shrine to Jesús Malverde, a Robin Hood– type folk hero who was the patron saint of drug dealers, replete with candles and offerings of water that had not yet evaporated. The camp buzzed with excitement, and a few volunteers planned to return to the site to take photographs, even though it was located a short distance into Mexico. When I asked to go along, Jim vehemently vetoed the idea, growing red-faced and visibly agitated. “No woman is going to be raped on my watch,” he exclaimed. At the end of the day, both literally and figuratively, I began to won-

1. A “sign” is any trace of a movement made by an animal, person, or object; “cutting sign” means searching for and analyzing such traces.

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der about the meaning of these interactions with Jim, Pete, and Tony. It occurred to me that these men had not simply given me a tour of the US-Mexico border during my first field experience with the Minutemen. They had schooled me—visually, verbally, and emotionally—in the dangers that they confronted as Minutemen, the extraordinary vulnerability of women’s bodies to these dangers, and the burdens they shouldered in protecting women—their own and, ostensibly, others’— from these threats. My submission to Jim’s emotionally charged prohibition against returning to the border revealed that I had experienced in a small but visceral way how confronting the perils at the border disciplined even privileged women like me by circumscribing our movement in both physical space and the social space of anti-immigration activism. I returned home to the Midwest, still speculating about the rhetoric and reality of rape trees. Genuinely disturbed about the possibility that they existed, but also intellectually curious about the power of this discourse to structure Minuteman activism in highly gendered ways, I searched for more information. My search turned up a pair of scholarly articles on the rape of female border crossers by US Border Patrol agents and “racist vigilantes” (Falcón 2001; 2006, 119), but I did not locate a single academic reference to rape trees. An essay circulating in the conservative blogosphere, however, shed further light on the rape tree discourse and its articulation within the broader nationalist project in which the Minutemen are implicated. In “The Botany of Illegal Immigration,” Mike Vanderboegh (2005) writes: There is a new kind of tree growing out west. . . . In an era of free trade agreements . . . they represent a new Mexican export to the United States. They are called “rape trees” and they bear a strange kind of fruit. Panties. Yes, panties.  .  .  . After the coyotes get the women across the border, safely on U.S. soil, they gang rape them to show they have total control over them. They hang their panties in the trees as signs of conquest. . . . George W. Bush, an otherwise decent man, has done nothing about these evil arboretums because he would have to offend . . . all the fat-cat American businessmen who kick in to the GOP party coffers a portion of the profits they glean from an eminently exploitable illegal workforce. Watered by the blood of innocents, fertilized with crazed machismo and Yanqui political indifference, the rape trees continue to blossom along our border. . . . For any decent, law-abiding American, to see a rape tree is to gaze upon the face of the enemy of civilization.

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It was precisely because of rape trees, Mr. Vanderboegh claimed, that he would be participating in the “next big Minuteman vigil.” Thus, rape tree discourse marked violence in the borderlands as distinctly male and Mexican, the product of economic globalization left unchecked by corrupted political leaders—the very same leaders that had ostensibly delegated border security to grandmothers. It also framed all women—even unauthorized Mexican migrant women—as innocents in need of protection and elevated Minutemen to the status of the guardians of civilization. My thoughts turned to Liz and Millie. What place had these women carved out for themselves on the front lines of this epic battle?

Border Grannies in Real Life: From Hypervisible to Invisible in Plain Sight

Staked out at the edge of the private campground the Minutemen rented from a local entrepreneur, Liz and I prepared to do “site security.” Music from an adjacent campsite wafted in through my rolleddown window, and the porch lights from a home perched just above the main highway that runs parallel to the Minuteman site came on as dusk fell. Located in a relatively populated area miles from the border proper, the spot we would be watching lay well off the beaten paths that coyotes used to smuggle their cargo—human and otherwise—into the United States. The Minutemen told me that border crossers separated from their coyotes, however, had wandered into camp in search of aid, which they gladly provided in the form of water, granola bars, and a call to the Border Patrol. Other stragglers sometimes traversed the campsite at night as they made their way to the nearby Indian casino, rumored to be a pickup point for their journeys inland, the one with the lights that shone like a beacon on a hill in the distance. Liz and I—with Millie and Greta parked in another vehicle just a few hundred feet away—were to “secure the perimeter” of the Minuteman campground from these unwanted guests. The four of us—the only women present at this month’s muster— had been assigned to “camp security” during the strategy meeting held after dinner, when Pete and Tony divvied up tasks for this evening’s patrols. During the weeks leading up to this field visit, I had worried about how I would cope with walking the border at night in the company of Minutemen—how would I keep up? what would I do if we encountered border crossers? would I speak up if I objected to their treat-

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ment of defenseless migrants?—but this turned out to be a moot point because “border ops” were apparently not the domain of women. Liz did not even attend the meeting at which volunteers were slotted into teams to take four-hour shifts patrolling clandestine spots at the border and to man the two-way radio system back at base. Before the meeting, though, she offered to take me to do site security if I wanted to get “out in the field” before my visit ended. We found ourselves taking turns peering through Liz’s nightvision scope in search of movement in the surrounding brush. To pass the time, Liz recounted how she had spent her entire career as an expert tracker for mountain search-and-rescue missions, including a stint in Antarctica. Most recently, she was employed by the sheriff ’s office of a large metropolitan county. Unhappily married for most of her life to a man whom she described as mean and miserly, Liz was now happily widowed with eight grandchildren from two adopted children she raised. She shared her home in the northern part of the state with a sister and a disabled nephew, but spent two weeks every month at her home away from home with the Minutemen. I had begun to get to know Liz earlier that day as she cooked breakfast (then dinner) for the eighteen Minutemen and two guests at this month’s muster. When I volunteered to help, she set me to work opening cans, washing produce, and stirring scrambled eggs as she fretted over the quality and quantity of the food she was preparing. Would the eggs be overcooked? Should she add more milk? Would there be enough? Too much? In the evening as she made dinner, she carried on a running commentary about grocery shopping that afternoon—where she had gone, what was on sale, what she couldn’t find that she needed, and what she would substitute in its stead. Single-handedly responsible for grocery shopping, cooking, and cleaning up after meals, Liz clearly had a lot on her mind. Now, in the front seat of her sea-green SUV, which blended perfectly into the desertscape at dusk, the irony began to sink in. With her extensive background in law enforcement, Liz struck me as one of the best trained yet least used volunteers that this group of Minutemen could mobilize for border ops. But as ostensibly less qualified men—an air-purification systems salesman, a retired magazine editor, an enfeebled World War II veteran—took up their positions on the front lines of the Minutemen’s battle at the border, Liz found herself playing hostess to me. I recalled how she had met me at the door to the Minuteman lodge upon my arrival, directed me to sign in, and collected fees for room and board. She then planted herself in front of a laptop to con-

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tinue working on the organization’s monthly newsletter, which needed to be sent out pronto, but not before offering me hot coffee and snacks. Tomorrow, she noted, she would need to update the organization’s volunteer database to include me and the girlfriend who accompanied me. With Liz’s mental and physical energies channeled continually into keeping campers well fed, guests feeling welcomed, and the organizational apparatus humming along, it was no wonder that she was ready to turn in well before our shift ended at one o’clock. My head ached from the unaccustomed strain of using the night-vision scope, so I was happy to oblige. We returned to base by ten thirty, having spotted nothing more out of the ordinary than jackrabbits foraging in the brush. Of the eighteen card-carrying Minutemen who turned up for that monthly muster, Liz and Millie were the only women, and they were not wives of Minutemen. Most of the male Minutemen I spoke with were married but had left their wives at home for the weekend, and they seemed surprised that I found this unusual. Mitch stated bluntly that “the wife” had stayed home to shampoo the carpets, and Jim explained that his wife no longer came, because of health concerns. For the rest, the question didn’t seem to register. Liz and Millie had their own ideas about why Minutemen wives avoided the border. After a lifetime of service in law enforcement, Liz was used to being “the only woman” among many men, but she surmised that most women were not. Millie was less charitable. Though she personally liked many of the wives of the Minutemen whom she volunteered with, she disdained their letting their men “play soldier” by themselves at camp on the weekends. And Operation Granny Brigade 2007? Try as I might to prod Liz and Millie into reminiscing about that momentous occasion and opportunity of a lifetime to prove a political point, neither recalled more than having a good time with family and friends. Liz, perhaps predictably, wondered what had happened to the rest of those pink camouflage T-shirts and vowed to look for them when she could find a free moment, in case I wanted one as a souvenir. Framed photographs of the event on the walls of the lodge testified to the fact that a good time had indeed been had by all, including the men. Next to the photo of the Minutewomen in pink camouflage described at the beginning of this chapter, I gazed at a photo of the men—minus the pink camouflage, of course—posing in a chorus line against the border fence as well. Apparently, these Minutemen had a better sense of humor than the event planners at MCDC headquarters had anticipated. I met many other Minutewomen over the years, some of whom had more vivid memories and stronger opinions about Operation Granny

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Brigade than Liz or Millie. There was Border Granny herself, for instance, long since retired from the Minutemen but with plenty to say about her erstwhile involvement. Perhaps predictably, given her likening of border grannies to Davy Crockett, Border Granny was, in real life, about as far removed from the Betty Crocker stereotype as I could imagine. I learned this when I interviewed her in her home in Nevada. A tomboy of sorts from a poor Irish Catholic family, she fondly recalled childhood memories filled with hunting and fishing on her own and with her father, not baking cookies with her mother. She had graduated from high school and earned a small college scholarship, but what she had really wanted was to make a career in the military. And if her father had not adamantly opposed it—“No daughter of mine . . . !”—she imagined she would have done so. A talented quilter, she explained that she only took it up after serious injuries prevented her from doing other things she loved, like driving ATVs and riding horses. And though she was clearly a devoted grandmother, she wondered out loud whether she really ever was cut out to be a mother. But in the same breath that Border Granny told me all these things about herself, she related how she had worked hard to promote Operation Granny Brigade in order to put a new, more feminine face on the Minutemen. Aware of the strategic importance of debunking damaging stereotypes of a Minuteman as “a pot-bellied thug with a .45 on his hip,” she took pride in the pink camouflage T-shirts with “Granny Brigade” printed across the back, which she designed, and in the media attention, she asserted, that the event attracted. She appreciated, in short, the value of projecting hyperfeminine, cultured, Betty Crocker grandmotherhood as symbolic capital for the Minuteman movement, even as she rejected it as a meaningful image of herself. Bella, a divorcee in Southern California, held a similar perspective, though she was grateful to have missed out on Operation Granny Brigade. She searched carefully for the words to describe her uneasiness with the whole event, settling on “condescending” and “diminishing our roles.” “Women were out there in the middle of the night in dangerous situations every bit as much as the guys,” she explained. “We weren’t just there in pink, looking nice around the camp.” And, she pointed out, “the guys didn’t all have pictures in baby blue or something.” Yet Bella, like the woman who called herself Border Granny, was quite proud of her ability to represent the Minutemen in a positive light, an ability that, she acknowledged, hinged on her status as a grandmother. When we first met, for instance, Bella recounted how CNN’s Anderson Cooper had taken an interest in her during one of his

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visits to the border to cover Minuteman activity. “As curious as anybody about females being down there,” he had asked her point-blank if she were a vigilante. “And I said, ‘Do I look like a vigilante? I have five grandchildren!’ And I laughed, you know, right? I tried to help give the impression that we were just normal people.” Thus, the Minutemen and Minutewomen who masterminded the most overt displays of grandmotherhood knew that women made good PR agents for their cause. The Operation Granny Brigade organizers intended these displays to attract media attention, and participants expressed no shame in playing that game. Even Minutewomen like Bella, who opposed the stereotyping and campiness of pink camo and chorus lines, understood that grandmotherhood put a kinder, gentler face on the movement, and worked the press accordingly. But in their meaning worlds, these displays were not a form of trickery to conceal the Minutemen’s true agenda, as some scholars have suggested (Oliviero 2011). Rather, they construed these frontstage performances as a necessary corrective to entrenched media bias and liberal stereotyping. These moments of high drama and hypervisibility stood in tension with the invisibility in plain sight of Minutewomen as cooks, clerical workers, hostesses, and friends—that is, of the women who shouldered the mundane tasks that ensured the physical, psychological, and organizational reproduction of the movement. Minutemen did not parade women onstage in a way that emphasized this very real contribution, let alone publicly acknowledge that women did anything more than, in Bella’s words, sit around “in pink looking nice around the camp.” As described in the next chapter, Minutewomen who self-identified as border grannies took great pride in engaging in the dangerous work of patrolling the border “just like men,” yet Minutemen only grudgingly conceded this fact to me in private and certainly did not broadcast it publicly. To have done so, I contend, would have risked disrupting the ideological reproduction of Minutemen, and men more generally, as guardians of female innocents and as the properly masculine protectors of the nation, an image they carefully constructed through both front- and backstage performances.

From Political Spectacle to Personal Transformation

In a seminal work, the political scientist Murray Edelman defines political spectacle as being “constituted by news reporting [that] con-

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tinuously constructs and reconstructs social problems, crises, enemies and leaders. . . . These constructed problems and personalities . . . play a central role in winning support and opposition for political causes and politics” (1988, 1). The Minutemen’s debut in 2005 and the media coverage it generated put into wide public circulation a plethora of images that riveted national attention on the US-Mexico border. In the historical ebb and flow of America’s focus on immigration, this media coverage and the political spectacle it constituted were a game changer. Within the year, populist support for severe measures restricting immigration and policing immigrants already here had mobilized, as had immigrant-rights advocates, who marched through the streets of major cities across the country in a highly theatrical counterprotest. In the end, in this larger and very public morality play, grandmothers in the ranks of the Minutemen served, at best, as bit actors. If the scant media coverage is any indication, the border grannies who starred in Operation Granny Brigade played to a very limited audience for a short run, with no repeat performance. So why did the Minutemen choose to write grandmothers into the script? For one, as I suggest above, the Minutemen proffered stylized images of grandmotherhood for public consumption because they believed in the power of this symbol to soften the rough edges of their reputation. It is also likely that the Minutemen drew inspiration from similar publicity stunts staged contemporaneously by the peace and justice movement, though none of the Operation Granny Brigade organizers I interviewed mentioned this. In 2006, groups with names like the Granny Peace Brigades and the Raging Grannies staged “we insist, we enlist” campaigns that protested the Iraq War through the spectacle of grannies handcuffed, jailed, and tried in criminal courts for attempting to sign up for a tour of duty in exchange for the return of their enlisted grandchildren (Roy 2007). Like the spectacle of grandmothers policing the US-Mexico border to protest federal immigration policy, these performances drew on long-standing stereotypes of older women as maternal and wise but physically defenseless, in order to impugn the moral authority of national leaders and denounce military policy, and to highlight how these threatened the integrity of the family. Also like the Minutemen, antiwar organizers represented themselves as grandmothers because they recognized the power of that image to shield the movement from accusations of radicalism. “Suddenly the word grandmother popped into my head,” writes one movement founder in her book Grandmothers against the War: Getting Off Our Fannies and

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Standing Up for Peace. “‘Wow,’ I thought, ‘that’s a magical word. It connotes wisdom, love, nurturing, maturity, good common sense. People will take us seriously. They won’t dismiss us as a bunch of druginfused young radical kooks like they often did in the beginnings of the Vietnam resistance movement” (Wile 2008, 2). Studies of the peace and social justice movement praise these organizations for their ability to turn stereotypes about grandmothers to their strategic advantage, empowering older women in societies that regard them as politically ineffectual and obsolete. They do not characterize the strategic use of grandmotherhood as a moral alibi or an attempt to cover up the movement’s real agenda (Kutz-Flamenbaum 2007; Narushima 2004; Roy 2007; Sawchuk 2009). These parallels point to how contemporary social movements across the political spectrum deploy grandmotherhood to achieve radically different ends, especially when the causes they advocate risk striking an unreceptive chord with the American public. Through participation in highly scripted media events, women perform grandmotherhood to claim the moral authority and unassailability that grandmotherhood confers, and to defuse gendered stereotypes that prevent audiences from taking them seriously. In short, grandmotherhood serves as symbolic capital wittingly deployed to sway public opinion in favor of a well-defined political agenda, whether or not such action achieves its intended purpose. The analysis here also suggests, however, that beyond its use for immediate strategic ends, the performance of grandmotherhood operates more expressively, giving form to a collective fantasy about the society that participants would will into being. In the case of the new nativist movement, this fantasy, which has deep roots in the history of conquest described at the beginning of this chapter, imagines Mexicans as properly situated on the other side of the boundary that marks “our” territory as “American.” Similarly, this fantasy pines for an ostensibly less complicated era when immigrants to this country were properly white, European, Christian, and law-abiding. Put differently, if, as Benedict Anderson famously argues, a nation is an imaginary community, then the stuff of grandmothers at the border in the context of the Minuteman movement was the stuff of imagining this national community in their own racial and ethnic likeness. These imaginings of the nation also embody inchoate and contradictory ideas about the place of old women in the post-9/11 world. As chapter 3 elucidates, allusions to putting “family before feminism” and

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references to a Betty Crocker generation express a longing to restore a world ordered by traditional gender norms and family life in which mothers rededicate themselves to hearth and home. From this perspective, the Minutemen’s hypermasculine show of military-style musters and hyperfeminine sideshow of chorus lines and pink camo make sense as backward-looking impulses to secure territorial, national, and gendered borders at a time when all of those are in unprecedented flux. As the following chapter reveals, however, performing grandmotherhood in the borderlands also set in motion something more subversive. Far from simply reclaiming their place in yesteryear’s gendered spheres of influence, Minutewomen tried on roles and tested out selves that transgressed traditional gender norms. They experimented, for example, with ways of becoming political agents in the public sphere by embracing the visibility that the granny brigades afforded them. Their stories suggest that, as one astute observer of the Raging Grannies notes, “for older women who are expected to be silent, sweet and mildly irrelevant, to be seen is the first step to occupying public space” (Roy 2007, 154).

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2 | Doing Old Womanhood at the Edge of the Nation-State

T

he Minutewomen I came to know had complex motives for joining the Minutemen, only one of which was to condemn the US government’s lax enforcement of immigration policy. Although few would likely have articulated it exactly this way, for these women, the movement provided a collective space for working out a dual project of political and personal transformation that entailed making old womanhood meaningful. This chapter provides thick description of how the political and personal converged through the activist trajectories of women who carved out leadership roles for themselves within the Minutemen and used the social spaces and interactions afforded by this activism to gain a sense of purpose and forge positive identities as old women. Confronted with the personal losses and social stigma that accompany aging, these women embraced the Minutemen’s unique brand of border politics in order to empower themselves interpersonally even as their politics collectively disempowered others more vulnerable than themselves. Conceptually, the analysis here draws on insights from multiple areas of social science inquiry—aging, gender, identity construction and social movements, and geopolitical borders—that rarely speak to one another. Although sweeping, this synthesis brings into relief how power operates through the intersection of aging and gender, and provides an example of how more sustained attention to this power dynamic might benefit mainstream social science disciplines. Because of the age of the research subjects in this study, I analyzed the portion of the aging process that is synonymous with growing old. Since at least the mid-1990s, feminist scholars have advocated bringing considerations of old age and growing old into gender studies (Arber and

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Ginn 1995; Calasanti, Slevin, and King 2006; Gibson 1996; Krekula 2007), but with limited success (Holstein 2015; Whelehan and Gwynne 2014). Increasingly, gender scholars have acknowledged that age, along with class and race, is a form of difference that belongs on what Neal King calls “the lengthening list of oppressions” that, in theory, intersect with gender to sustain inequality (2006). In practice, however, few scholars have investigated how age operates in this nexus, perhaps because few scholars remain in the academy long enough to experience the full effects of ageism firsthand. This chapter applies the social constructivist concept of doing difference developed by Candace West, Don Zimmerman, and Sarah Fenstermaker (West and Fenstermaker 1995; West and Zimmerman 1987) to explore how Minutewomen did a specific form of difference— old womanhood—as they navigated age and gender relations in the context of the new nativist movement. According to West and Fenstermaker, race, class, and gender are not fi xed identity categories, but rather the fault lines of difference constructed in human interaction. That is, the meaning of racial, class, and gender differences is “an ongoing interactional accomplishment” achieved through “a complex of perceptual, interactional and micropolitical activities” (West and Fenstermaker 1995, 8, 9). This process occurs at the microlevel, but it engages—by reproducing, resisting, or refashioning—dominant ideas about difference in a given society. From this perspective, besides being a biological process of bodily decline, growing old is a social process whereby individuals, in interaction with others, learn to be old as they grapple with the social norms, expectations, and ideologies of old age dominant in the society they live in (Cruikshank 2003). The social aspects of growing old differ for men and women, however, in part because Western societies have historically tied women’s worth more tightly to their physical appearance than they have men’s (Clarke 2010; Hatch 2005). Combined, these insights point to the need for fine-grained empirical work that illuminates how people construct gendered variations of old age in specific social settings. Although not in direct conversation with the theoretical perspective articulated above, social movement scholarship offers additional insights that help frame the issue of identity construction explored here. In recent years, scholars have taken an interest in how social movements serve as spaces for doing identity work, questioning assumptions about the a priori nature and stability of identities that, if

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properly tapped into or “bridged,” seamlessly motivate people to join. Pointing instead to the fluidity and malleability of the categories of belonging through which people construe their place and agency in society, these scholars advocate paying closer attention to the identity work that transpires within the context of movements and to ways that activists construct identity in the process (Bernstein 2008; Polleta and Jasper 2001; Reger, Myers, and Einwohner 2008). Harel Shapira’s ethnography of an Arizona branch of the Minutemen (2013) describes these dynamics in the case of working-class white men coping with growing old in a changing America. According to Shapira, the movement’s armed patrols and framing of the borderlands as a theater of war attracted older men, mainly veterans, because they provided tools for reclaiming a youthful masculinity threatened by retirement and aging more generally. These men grappled with aging, in essence, by denying it, harking back to their youths rather than fashioning new selves suited to the realities of the stage of life they had entered. They did so by replaying or reinventing a time when they had successfully enacted the role of soldier and the masculine qualities associated with it—courage, stamina, and physical strength. The older women in my sample, however, did not have military experience under their belts, nor did the identity work they engaged in aim to reclaim youth by re-creating feminine selves they imagined themselves to have once been. The intersection between the movement and their gendered transition to old age was more complex, open-ended, and indeterminate. Overall, social movement scholarship has paid very little attention to the relationship between old age and activism, especially when compared with the wealth of studies that focus on youth (Earl, Maher, and Elliott 2017; Valiente 2015). Indeed, a tacit assumption in much of this research is that the relationship between old age and political mobilization is negative—that is, that the propensity of people to participate in protests or join social movement organizations decreases as they transition into mid- and late life. For example, a robust literature examines the relationship between age and activism by using the concept of biographical availability. This scholarship posits that in middle age, constraints such as full-time employment and marriage dampen opportunities for and an inclination toward participating in high-risk or time-intensive activism (McAdam 1986, 1988; Petrie 2004; Schussman and Soule 2005). But few studies consider whether losses and life changes associated with growing old might operate similarly. The only

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research that I know of that explores this possibility is Celia Valiente’s case study of the women’s movement in Franco’s Spain (2015). In this case, old age enhanced rather than diminished movement participation because over the life course, old women accumulated time, money, organizing experience, and even grievances that strengthened rather than attenuated their engagement with the movement. Consistent with these findings, my research showed that the Minutemen become a focal point in members’ lives in concert with important life events associated with growing old, such as retirement or the death of a spouse. Freed from the full-time professional and personal responsibilities that occupied them in the prime of their lives, men and women found themselves more biographically available than ever to make the intense time, social, and emotional investments required for being a committed Minuteman. Once committed, however, old women confronted challenges to movement participation that required carefully navigating a minefield of unstated gendered and agerelated expectations that held them to standards different from those that applied to their male counterparts, both old and young. As the stories of Tammy Hoffman and Liz Jenkins illustrate, doing difference in interactions with those men in that setting entailed doing a form of old womanhood that asserted agency and independence without threatening the outward appearance of male dominance. The cultural contexts that prevailed as Tammy and Liz came of age helped explain why they did old womanhood in this particular fashion. Born in the late 1930s and 1940s, these working- and middleclass white women came of age in the 1950s and 1960s. The 1950s witnessed a retrenchment of traditional understandings of women’s proper role as caregivers in the domestic sphere, and grassroots organizing among conservatives arose in the 1960s to defend the traditional family against the potential gains of feminism. Across the board, the older women in my sample embraced these norms and opposed egalitarian patterns of family formation, yet they also desired to live independent, active, and adventurous lives in their old age. These desires, in turn, reflected ideals of agency and self-actualizing in old age promoted by what is known as the new old age, young old age, or successful aging movement (Gullette 2004; Jacoby 2011; Lamb 2014; Segal 2014). The tendency to value youth and denigrate old age in the United States has deep historical roots, but the idea that one could and should choose to remain active and ageless gained momentum in the 1980s with backing from the lucrative self-help industry and marketing

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efforts targeted largely at women. The Minutewomen I studied moved into old age against the backdrop of this “dominant biomedical, psychological, public health and cultural narrative [that posits that] we each have the potential—indeed, the moral and political obligation—to make our own aging ‘successful’” (Lamb 2014, 41). In this chapter and the next, I argue that taking up arms and traveling to the wilds of the US-Mexico border, while implausible, allowed Minutewomen to satisfy these competing demands of traditional family life and successful aging. But why the border? How might the border proper and border politics more generally have enabled Minutewomen to do old womanhood as they did? The notion of the borderlands as spaces of exception and exceptionality suggest one possibility. Giorgio Agamben’s (2005) theorization of states of exception posits that in certain zones or spaces, such as Nazi prison camps, states exercise sovereignty by, paradoxically, suspending the very rule of law that lends the state legitimacy. Justified as necessary in times and places of emergency, this mode of governing strips citizens of basic rights and legal protections against the excesses of state power. Scholars have applied this concept to explain current trends toward securitization that are evident at the edges of the United States, Canada, and the European Union (Doty 2009; Jones 2012; Mountz 2010; Rosas 2006). They argue that geopolitical borders and the racialized discourses of crisis surrounding them have become primary sites for governing through a politics of exceptionalism that legitimates the deployment of unprecedented levels of statesponsored surveillance, militarization, and violence. This conceptualization was developed to complicate conventional understandings of how states exercise power, but my fieldwork suggests that the construction of borderlands as exceptional has the potential to permeate and reshape other types of power relations as well. Could it be that the no-holds-barred ethos that has come to characterize the US-Mexico border and that gives exceptional license to states also gives license to experimentation with unprecedented, extraordinary, or unusual ways of exercising power in the realm of gender and age relations? Just as the ties that bind states to the accountability of citizens come loose in these spaces, might the social norms that tether aging women to dominant scripts for doing old womanhood loosen as well? The remainder of this chapter explores this possibility by analyzing the stories of Tammy and Liz. Both women became politically ac-

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tive for the first time in late life as Minutewomen at the US-Mexico border, and both used the movement’s infrastructure—the organization of border patrols and camp life—to gain power within it. As they rose through the ranks of the Minutemen, both confronted distinct expressions of ageism and sexism, often in combination, in their encounters with men of their own race and class, some men of their own age, and some men significantly younger. And in these encounters, both women embraced the danger, exceptionalism, and frontier ethos associated with the border in order to fashion identities as old women that flew in the face of stereotypes sustaining the interlocking forces of ageism and sexism. In this way, both cases illustrate what I refer to as doing old womanhood at the margins of the nation-state. Although similar at the core, these cases differ in ways that bring into sharper focus how the biological decline and social losses entailed in growing old relate to political activism. Tammy and Liz joined the Minutemen in retirement, but at different ages and stages in their postemployment lives, with different social support systems in place, and while experiencing different degrees of aging-related social isolation. These factors help explain differences in the styles, degrees of publicness, and length of Tammy’s and Liz’s individual activist trajectories. Ten years younger than Liz and widowed, but recently remarried to Ted, Tammy attended her first Minuteman event in 2004 at the age of fifty-eight. She told me of discovering the border crisis when she moved to southern Arizona with Ted early in their life together as retirees. From her involvement in the local Minuteman chapter, which ran musters at a site near her new home, she rose to national leadership, traveling to other states to help set up new chapters and train members. By the time I meet her in person, in 2013, she had resigned from the Minutemen, but she had channeled the political momentum and experience she gained at the border into leadership in her local Tea Party. As her story illustrates, Tammy’s activist trajectory proceeded through formal organizations and very public political venues where men doubted her deservingness and attempted to render her invisible. In these interactions, Tammy did old womanhood by outing herself as an old woman, claiming her worth by fashioning an assertive and at times aggressive persona that refused to fade into the background. Like Tammy, Liz joined the Minutemen during the organization’s fledgling years, but later in her own semiretirement at the age of sixtyeight. Unlike Tammy, Liz drove long distances by herself to attend musters at the border each month, and it was in the quasi-private set-

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ting of Camp Patriot that her activist trajectory began and likely ended. Also unlike Tammy, Liz saw herself as alone in life: widowed, alienated from former friends, and forced to move in with extended family she disliked in order to eke out a living. At Camp Patriot, however, Liz found the organizational infrastructure, social networks, sources of prestige, and symbols she needed to claim her worth as an old woman.

Tammy Hoffman: Proving the Worth of Old Women at the Border and Beyond

Tammy Hoffman was retired and in her late fifties when she left her grown children and grandchildren behind in Wyoming to homestead four acres in southeastern Arizona just five miles from the USMexico border. Attracted by the stunning beauty of the high Sonoran Desert, the temperate climate, and the open spaces resembling the horse country she called home, Tammy moved to Arizona to build a new house and new life with Ted just ten years after the tragic death of her first husband of twenty-nine years. She and Ted ended up staying only a few years in Arizona, but what they learned there left a lasting impression. Far from the quiet ranching community they had envisioned their new place of residence to be, they found themselves living smack dab in the middle of a major corridor for trafficking human beings and drugs from Mexico to destinations farther north. Tammy began to tell me the story on the drive to the casino hotel, where she had reserved a room for me during my stay in the Nevada resort town and where she and Ted had reluctantly resettled when life at the border became too complicated. They were regulars at the casino, and the room was on the house, as were the drinks that Tammy and I lingered over in the smoke-filled lounge that first evening. When Tammy met me at the airport, she was wearing a long-sleeve denim blouse over a white shell, jeans, and plain black canvas flats. She was sixty-six years old and, by her own estimation, four feet eight and shrinking. What Tammy presumably lacked in physical stature, however, she saw herself as making up for in her boldness and determination to tell things like they are. The Bill O’Reilly–inspired doormat to Ted and Tammy’s townhouse intimated as much. “Caution!” it advised guests in big red block letters, “You are entering a no spin zone.” From the outside, Ted and Tammy’s one-story two-bedroom unit was indistinguishable from others in the Roadrunner Ridge de-

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velopment, but the interior was singularly decorated, and the mountain view from the sliding glass doors that led to the back patio and golf course beyond was spectacular. Antique farm implements, family heirlooms, and artwork that evoked her western upbringing mingled on the walls, and each artifact bore a story that Tammy gladly shared at the slightest provocation. There was a pair of beaded ceremonial moccasins, a gift from her Native American daughter-inlaw and Tammy’s oldest son, who live back in Wyoming on the reservation, a place, Tammy quipped, that looked and felt every bit like the stereotypical “rez,” with its barking dogs and junk piles, poverty and unemployment. If there was any minority that the United States should protect, she editorialized, it was Native Americans. She also recounted how her oldest daughter, who lived briefly out of state, had almost married a black man, but Tammy hadn’t known what to think about that possibility because she had never met any black people back in Wyoming. A cluster of lariats, horseshoes, and cowboy hats hanging on another wall commemorated Ted’s and Tammy’s fathers’ and grandfathers’ ranching heritage. On the topic of her father and his accomplishments, Tammy told me he was a veteran of World War II and that she had inherited his casket flag when he died. In fact, when they lived in Arizona, she and Ted had made a special trip to the flagpole that the Minutemen erected overlooking the border fence, to fly it there in his honor. Within a week, however, “they” had ripped it to the ground, shredded it to pieces, and defecated on it. They, Tammy clarified in her characteristically matter-of-fact manner, were the people who make their fortunes by helping illegal aliens get across the border from Mexico. Ted and Tammy shared their modest home with two rescue cats and a grizzled dog, Gus, that they had acquired years earlier from the pound to guard their property in Arizona. As Gus settled at her feet under the table that dominated their kitchen and dinette, Tammy chided herself for being so naive about the border before moving there in 2004. Like the vast majority of Americans her age, she surmised, she had lived a sheltered life as a baby boomer in the resource-rich heartland, where the world was big, government was small, and one person could make a difference. She had married straight out of high school and hadn’t needed a college education to start her own small business from scratch or to establish a successful career in law enforcement. She and her first husband had worked hard, paid into the system, and given their four children everything they had ever wanted—

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horses, cars, new skis every Christmas. And when their son needed special education classes that the schools didn’t offer, Tammy ran for the school board and got what she had wanted. She had campaigned for Dick Cheney when he was just a congressman, had adored Ronald Reagan, and had faith in the integrity of the country’s leaders. And so as she entered her golden years, Tammy believed that all was more or less well with the nation her father had fought for and her children and grandchildren would inherit. What she experienced in Arizona disabused her of that illusion. When Ted and Tammy first moved to Arizona, they were so clueless that they mistook the backpacks abandoned by illegal aliens at pickup points along the highway for knapsacks forgotten by careless schoolchildren. But then they noticed groups of people walking along backcountry roads with packs on their backs at all hours of the day and night. Closer to home, they found the garden hose they had put away the night before unwound in the morning, presumably by wayward travelers filling water jugs. And then there were the knocks at their door, the requests for food, water, and a telephone. They had seen Border Patrol agents patrolling the area, but the foot traffic stayed constant. And their neighbors were tired, really tired, of being on guard against intruders 24/7. Home invasions were so common, Tammy and Ted learned, that it was standard for people to install locks on the inside of their closets in order to have a secure place to retreat when illegal aliens broke in to steal food and other supplies. One woman whom Tammy knew had gotten out of her shower one morning to find an illegal alien in her bedroom. He ran away without hurting her, but imagine! “And I thought to myself, ‘Man, this is just wrong.’ . . . I couldn’t believe our government would let people live this way.” Back then, Tammy told me, there was no national media coverage of this situation, or else, she reckoned, she would surely have known about it long before she moved there. A bit of a conservative news junkie, she had heard Bill O’Reilly mention border security once or twice after 9/11, but there had been no in-depth reporting, and certainly, no one had bothered to go to the border to check it out. Then the Minutemen began announcing plans for their first muster, in 2005, an event that would bring eight hundred people from all over the country to Tammy and Ted’s neck of the woods in Arizona to spotlight precisely this issue. Tammy heard of the upcoming affair on Sean Hannity’s nationally syndicated radio talk show, but two days before the kickoff she drove

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the forty miles from her home to Tombstone—the Minuteman center of operations in Arizona—to get the real scoop. And before she knew what had happened, she had thrown herself into the frenetic preparations for the event and roped Ted in as well. From that point until she resigned from her post in the national MCDC leadership years later, Tammy’s life would become synonymous with the Minutemen. And the granny brigades? “I love my granny brigade . . . but initially, I kind of went, ‘Well, we’ll see how it goes,’” Tammy recalled. Operation Granny Brigade had been Chris Simcox’s idea, and there was a lot about Chris Simcox that Tammy objected to. The MCDC’s most flamboyant founder, Simcox was, in Tammy’s book, an opportunist and a narcissist who ultimately ruined the movement by turning it into a “big dick contest.” But he knew how to get media attention and had cooked up Operation Granny Brigade for the press. And wasn’t that the point, after all? To let the silent majority of Americans know that there were true patriots willing to speak out against illegal immigration and that they weren’t just angry white men? “You know, the image of the Minutemen is a bearded, pot-bellied thug with a .45 on his hip and a bad cowboy hat,” Tammy quipped. Even she would have believed it, Tammy claimed, if she hadn’t been on the inside. So Tammy talked to the ladies she knew to be loyal Minutewomen and they agreed: Operation Granny Brigade would be a perfect opportunity “to educate the general public that there were women out there, too,” and “that grandmothers are willing to go out there and put their lives on the line.” Because any time the Minutemen went out on the line, they were risking their lives, and these ladies were no exception. Tammy did not know of a single woman on her granny brigade who would not give her life for her country. Tammy requested a cigarette break, and we relocated to her back patio. We gazed lazily at golf carts cruising by and geese gathering along the banks of the manmade pond just a stone’s throw from her house. She took a deep drag and then continued: “The thing of it is . . . you’re kind of in a war. A funny little war, but a war.” And there were Minutewomen who insisted on being part of it. Admittedly, the first gathering of the granny brigade was mostly for the press, Tammy told me, but they decided to keep it up. Not all of the ladies, but a few, and these women sat lines alone. Alone? Tammy paused to compose her words carefully. “How do I put it?” she began, and then smiled with a hint of mischief in her eyes. “We didn’t have, like, guys behind the bushes protecting us. We were out there alone. And they didn’t like that we were going alone, but we went alone. Okay?”

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When she recovered from the fit of laughter that gripped her after this story, Tammy explained that it wasn’t that the men of the Minutemen were sexist, but it did take a lot for a woman to prove herself in their world. Like the time when she went to Texas to train a Minuteman outfit that turned out to be all men. She had driven to their camp from Arizona with her “nineteen-foot camping trailer” and her “foofoo dog,” and she knew the minute she pulled in that if she couldn’t back her trailer into the parking pad by herself, she would lose all respect before they even started. “And they’re coming out of their tents and campers and everything, [but] I backed it right in there, and the guys are like, ‘Whoa.’ .  .  . So then, when I went to the first meeting there, and they’re sitting around, all Texans, I just looked at ’em and said, ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, ‘What does this old woman got to offer me? What can she do?’” Tammy responded that they would find out, and, she assured me, they did. For the rest of the event, they treated her beautifully. “They were a great bunch of people, and I made great friends.” But eight years out from the heady days of the Minutemen’s first muster, Tammy no longer belonged to the Minutemen. She walked away disgruntled with the disorganization and mismanagement that plagued the MCDC in its final days, but also because it just wasn’t safe to be out there anymore. In the beginning, more illegal aliens than drugs were coming across the border, Tammy explained. The economy was good, there were jobs to be had, and the cartels hadn’t taken over the drug smuggling. But times changed, and the cartels now ruled the border regions. By the time she left the Arizona Minutemen, Tammy was the person in charge of organizing volunteers into “lines” to watch the border and of keeping everybody safe. “I got to a point at the end that I would not put anybody on the border because it was that dangerous,” she lamented. “We’re talking people that in their private lives golf or they work, they’re schoolteachers or they’re whatever. And we’re gonna put them out there against the cartel? Are you kidding me?” And then, to boot, Shawna Forde came onto the scene. Forde would later murder a local Hispanic and his daughter in a home invasion in order to get guns and money for border watches. Tammy never met her, but rumors had gotten back to Tammy that Forde wanted to take her place as the leader of Minuteman operations. After that, Tammy felt she really had to watch her back, so she and Ted pulled up stakes, moved far from the border, and cut ties with the Minutemen. When she left Arizona, Tammy told me, she swore she would never go back. In the next breath, though, she recounted how just last

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month she had been to Tucson to organize a rally to protest the death of a Border Patrol agent killed in the line of duty. After all the Minutemen had done to bring it to light, the federal government was still desperate to hide the gravity of the border situation from the American public, because “there’s lots of money to be made on open borders,” Tammy asserted. That was why Homeland Security had tried to sweep this agent’s death under the rug by attributing it to friendly fire, but Tammy and other border activists knew better and rallied to pressure for a more thorough investigation. For Tammy, then, the Minuteman’s moment had come and gone. The US-Mexico border and the borderlands, however, had exerted a lasting influence on her and continued to figure prominently in her political imaginary as the site of her political awakening, exhibit A of governmental corruption and cover-up, and a place of activist pilgrimage to which she occasionally returned. But in Tammy’s iconography, the borderlands were also the mythical birthplace of the Tea Party and the portal through which she entered a new, all-encompassing, and increasingly public activist life. I had gotten a taste of the frenetic pace of this next phase in Tammy’s political trajectory even before we met. When I phoned her to ask for an interview, Ted picked up and told me she wasn’t home; she was in Las Vegas at a weeklong symposium on voter identification convened by Nevada’s secretary of state. When I reached her days later, Tammy confirmed that she would be happy to help, but that getting me on her calendar might be a problem. As the newly elected president of the local Tea Party, she had been busy figuring out the lay of the land in Nevada state politics and coming up with ways to energize her local chapter. She had taken the reins from a man—a nice man, but a man nonetheless—who had run the organization into the ground with his disorganization and desire for control. Never in her wildest dreams had Tammy anticipated taking on the Tea Party presidency. She and Ted hadn’t even known there was a Tea Party group in the area until they read about it in the local newspaper. In Tucson, though, she had seen the Tea Party pull together six thousand people for an event, lots of whom were Minutemen. Now, with the experience and energy she had gained at the border, Tammy dreamed of breathing new life into the local Tea Party. To get the ball rolling, her chapter was planning a big public event, with out-of-town speakers, at the local VFW. Once this was off her plate, Tammy would find time for my visit.

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That time arrived, and as Tammy drove me from the airport to her home on a two-lane highway that snaked through canyons and along river valleys, she told me more. Conservatives’ dismal showing in the November elections (of 2012) had disheartened folks around here, so Tammy and the Tea Party had their work cut out for them. The event they had pulled off last weekend—the Great American Constitutional Revival, she called it—was a moderate success. The speakers included a PhD in constitutional law and the filmmaker who produced the documentary George Washington: America’s Authentic Superhero, and Tammy was pleased with the turnout. Tammy’s secret fantasy, though, was to fill a football stadium, not just the VFW, with Americans like herself, who would fight for freedom in this country. She knew it could be done because she had seen it happen in Tucson, where the Minutemen had given rise to the Tea Party. The Minutemen’s drive to make a difference at the grassroots had inspired her to pull her political weight in life, and Tammy believed that in the same way, it had inspired many others to join the Tea Party movement. “That [object lesson],” she later asserted in a recorded session with me, “was the birth of the Tea Party. I believe that in my heart.” It wasn’t until I was about to leave Ted and Tammy that I glimpsed what this fight for freedom looked like on the ground, and who and what it was pitched against. The day before I departed, Tammy apologized, but she wouldn’t be able to spend the evening with me; Tea Party duty called again, unexpectedly. She had just read in the newspaper that the local Democratic caucus had called a town hall meeting about a proposed power hike, and Tammy needed to listen in. The mayor would be there, and so would representatives from the company that had held a monopoly on the power supply for the county for years. Tammy thought I would be bored stiff at the meeting. I asked to tag along anyway. The Holiday Inn Express where the meeting convened sat up on the ridge, a part of town that Tammy rarely frequented. The well-lit smoke-free lobby, replete with the fax machine, computer terminal, and printer that made up a do-it-yourself business center, seemed a world away from the casino hotel that was Tammy and Ted’s stomping grounds. We slid into back-row seats in the first-floor conference room. Two or three dozen meticulously dressed and well-coiffed aging white couples sat in front of us, listening attentively to the proceedings, as did the mayor, an imposing white woman in a tailored suit jacket, miniskirt, chunky jewelry, and high heels. The company repre-

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sentative wrapped up his PowerPoint presentation shortly after we arrived, though, and Tammy whispered, in tones that suggested a conspiracy, that the meeting must have started much earlier than publicly announced. A reporter grilled the rep on the transparency of company board meetings, and the owner of a small assembly plant insisted that rate hikes would threaten his business. The mayor, however, moved quickly to put an end to the back-and-forth. She brushed off her constituents’ complaints, reminding them that a seat on the newly created power-district oversight committee had remained vacant after the last elections. She then ceded the floor to the next speaker. Tammy leaned over to say that she would be certain a Tea Party candidate ran for that seat next time around, mark her word. Keith Middlebury, a middle-aged white man wearing khaki pants and a hunter-green polo took the podium. His shirt had a small stitched logo of a solar energy company on one side, and he had come with an urgent announcement about governmental programs for renewable energy. Keith gave example after example of small towns like this one that had availed themselves of these subsidies to meet their energy needs. What began as a public service announcement soon morphed into a sales pitch for his services, though, when Keith suggested he could leverage this legislation for their town and then produced a plastic solar panel sample. With this product, he told the audience, his company could build a facility that would power their district practically for free. The audience nodded appreciatively. Everyone, it seemed, except Tammy, who fidgeted in her seat before breaking her disciplined silence with a litany of polite questions. How many years would that material last? How many acres would be needed? What exactly would a facility like that look like? All good questions, Keith conceded, but not to worry. He and the mayor had already met several times to work out these details. For the time being, Tammy ceased and desisted, and the meeting ended with a whimper, not a bang. The next morning, however, the other shoe dropped when—as fate in a small town would have it— we crossed paths with Keith at the casino restaurant over breakfast. Tammy caught sight of Keith deep in conversation at a table in the distance, and Ted watched apprehensively as she set off to confront him. Minutes later, Tammy hurried back in an agitated state to report that Keith had blown her off again, but this time she had given him a piece of her mind. She fumbled in her purse for a cigarette, so angry that she was momentarily speechless. There was plenty of time after breakfast before my flight, so Ted

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took the back roads to the airport. As we cruised through desert dotted with Joshua trees, past a small Paiute Indian reservation set against red plateaus with snowcapped mountains, Tammy regained her composure and recounted the details of her narrowly averted fisticuffs with Keith. She had pressed him about how much his project would cost the town, and he had repeated that it could be had for practically nothing because other taxpayers had already paid millions into the system for it. In Tammy’s book, there was no such thing as a free lunch, and she told him so. Taxpayers like her were sick and tired of paying for people who didn’t want to pay their own way. Keith had simply waved her away from his table, and Tammy left, but not before slapping him hard on the back and hurling an obscenity or two in his direction. As we rode the rest of the way to the airport, I had time to ponder the day’s events in the context of the longer arc of Tammy’s activism. From the stories she told and the interactions I witnessed, it was clear that Tammy derived some of the greatest satisfaction in her life from asserting a presence—making herself visible, voicing an opinion, publicly championing a cause she believed in—when she suspected that the odds of age and gender were against her. The Minutemen afforded an opportunity for Tammy and her “grannies” to go against the grain of the gendered and aged expectations that older women, in the words of Carole Roy, should remain “silent, sweet and mildly irrelevant” in public space, especially those spaces dominated by men. Fashioning herself as the antithesis of silent, sweet, and mildly irrelevant, Tammy boasted of marching into the ranks of an all-male Minuteman outfit in Texas to show Minutemen what old women could offer a man’s world and prove their assumptions about women’s irrelevance wrong. She expressed skepticism about posing in pink camouflage for Operation Granny Brigade, but turned that one-off media event into regular all-grandmother border patrols that created social and emotional spaces for old women to be Minutemen on something other than strictly hypermasculine terms. As an aging working-class woman with little formal education, she became a proud Tea Party president and self-appointed watchdog for transparency in local and state politics, against the unspoken expectation that a woman of her age and class background should have little to say about government, local or otherwise. And as the disproportionate number of women taking leadership roles in the Tea Party movement indicated, Tammy was not the only aging working-class white woman staking a claim to political relevance in this fashion. Yet the flip side of deriving deep satisfaction from her newfound

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voice and visibility in the political spaces afforded by the Minutemen and the Tea Party was the bitter disappointment Tammy experienced when men—and younger men at that—negated her agency in these interstices of power. Dismissed, discounted, “waved away” by people like Keith and all that they represented—corruption, collusion, big government, living by the sweat of someone else’s brow—Tammy bristled emotionally and perhaps even existentially. In the narrative she crafted about her days as a Minutewoman and in her bold presentation of self in public venues like town hall meetings, Tammy did old womanhood by embodying agency and negating the existence of difference grounded in gender, class, and age. The uncurated moments of failure, frustration, and rage that I glimpsed, however, revealed that at times, this way of doing old womanhood foundered on the shoals of persistent ageism and sexism.

Liz Jenkins: Making a New Home in a Place Apart

At seventy-five years of age and with minor health issues that slowed her down, going out on patrol was no longer part of Liz’s daily routine at Camp Patriot. She could, however, still be persuaded to take newcomers out to do site security, and she volunteered to do just that when I attended my first muster, in the summer of 2010. Although I had been at camp only a few days, I had already learned that she had a well-earned reputation for intrepid driving, taking her SUV just about anywhere at the border, even though doing so sometimes resulted in calling a tow truck to extricate her vehicle from a rut or retrieve it from a precipitous incline. These thoughts crossed my mind as we started out along the deeply furrowed dirt road that bisected the private campground Camp Patriot occupies. But no need to fear: we were only traveling the short distance to the camp’s outer edge for our stakeout, and we had nearly arrived. We were caravanning with Millie and Greta, who, under strict orders from Liz, peeled off the road before we did so that they would be well positioned to catch first sight of anyone coming up the trail and to radio that information in. The trail we would be surveilling led from the international border to the Lucky Lizard casino a few miles off, a beacon for “illegals” traveling under the cover of night on foot; in the casino parking lot, they caught prearranged rides to more populated

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parts of the state. As night fell, Liz parked her vehicle farther along the path, turned her headlights off, covered the lights on her dashboard so they wouldn’t give away our position in the dark, locked the car doors, and loaded her gun. Our job would be to wait for Millie and Greta’s signal and then “light them up,” that is, stall any passersby by shining our headlights on them until the Border Patrol could get to the scene. I worried that headlights wouldn’t be much of a match against the drug runners and human traffickers I had heard so much about from folks back at camp. Liz, perhaps reading my mind, assured me that drug traffickers were easily identifiable by the bulky loads they carried on their backs, and that we wouldn’t bother them if we saw them. Besides, she told me, she had her gun and knew how to use it. When I got to know her a bit better, Liz told me more about her guns. On tape, she swore that she owned only one, the semiautomatic handgun that she bought from the sheriff ’s office and that she kept locked and loaded within a foot of her bed in the RV she overnighted in at Camp Patriot. “And it’s registered, okay?” In more candid conversations, however, she referred to guns in the plural and worried about the government coming to her home upstate to take them away. “People could come by and start banging on doors and saying they want your guns, and where am I gonna go? Who am I gonna rely on to back me up?” That wasn’t a problem at the border, though, she insisted. Locals never went anywhere unarmed, and no self-respecting Minuteman would ever go there without one. At Camp Patriot, she would have plenty of backup. Liz knew the drill tonight—stay alert, keep quiet, and radio back to Camp Patriot headquarters periodically to let them know that you were okay—and handed me her pair of night-vision goggles to scan the skyline and surrounding brush for movement. We would also need to keep an eye on the rearview mirror to avoid surprises, she told me, just in case a group approached from a different direction. She checked in with headquarters on cue and whispered our location and status report in a voice so low that the Minuteman dispatcher back at base barked that he couldn’t hear her. As we settled in for the evening, though, our focus drifted and we struck up a conversation. Liz was hard of hearing in one ear, so whispering was not much of an option. Our loud exchange, a clear violation of Minuteman standard operating procedures, surely blew our cover, but we were alone in the stillness of a pitch-black evening. The occasional jackrabbit rustling in the underbrush was the only obvious witness to our transgression.

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When I commented on it, Liz told me she didn’t mind being one of a handful of women at Camp Patriot this month. After all, she had spent most of her adult life after high school working as a secretary at construction companies where she was the only woman around, so she was accustomed to working with men and knew how to hold her own among them. With growing animation, she related how a company that built installations for scientific exploration once sent her to Antarctica for six months to keep an inventory of supplies. There, where glaciers stretched flat for miles on end and facilities were scarce, even going to the bathroom was a challenge. Liz’s eyes sparkled as she relived her adventures in Antarctica, but then she added that while she was gone, her husband used her earnings—direct-deposited into their account— to buy himself a new car. With that remark, our conversation turned to darker subjects as Liz recounted painful memories of life with her now-dead husband, of the older brother that she witnessed slide into senility, and of a difficult childhood spent helping her single mom make ends meet, the same mother who whipped Liz and her siblings with the cord of an iron when they misbehaved. Liz would say more about her abusive husband and childhood on future occasions, but tonight she lingered on the loss of her brother. The helplessness she felt as he declined was palpable in her voice as she recalled how her niece, a junkie, dumped him in a senior living facility. By the time Liz discovered him there, he had deteriorated to the point of not remembering how to use a toaster or microwave. He had always loved dunking toast in hot chocolate, Liz told me, but toward the end, they found him dipping untoasted bread in cold water instead. Liz placed him in a nursing home, but he died while she was busy caring for her bedridden husband, who passed away around the same time. That was eight years ago. We had only just met, and I was surprised at how freely Liz shared bits of her life story with me, as if we were already friends or at least not complete strangers. Over the next few years, I would learn that this was part of the alchemy of the Minuteman border patrol movement for Minutewomen, the magic of converting acquaintances into confidants virtually overnight. Liz’s memories of Operation Granny Brigade had faded some, and she didn’t talk about her granny brigade with the same passion as Tammy did. Indeed, back at the bunkhouse, when I inquired about the framed photo of Liz with other white-haired women in pink camouflage, she couldn’t quite recall the point, though she did remember that it was fun and wished the T-shirt still fit her.

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Liz’s story of how she came to be a Minutewoman, like Tammy’s, included tales of making friends on the line with women she had not known before, women of the same age, with similar experiences, values, and anxieties about growing old. When I finally pinned Liz down for a formal interview years later, for example, she spent much of it reminiscing about her adventures with Louise back in the day. She and Louise, a hog farmer who often came to camp without her husband, learned the ropes of going on patrol together; they called in their first sighting of a group of “illegals” and generally “got into all sorts of trouble together.” Liz missed Louise— cancer kept Louise from coming to musters very often anymore—but she still admired Louise’s toughness and tenacious hold on life. The language of granny brigades might have been alien to Liz, but finding friends like Louise on the line was clearly close at heart. Just how important this companionship was for Liz came into sharper relief the longer I knew her. In August 2012, two years after our stakeout at Camp Patriot, Liz pulled up curbside at the airport and loaded my suitcase into the back of her SUV. She was en route to the border from the small agricultural town at the northernmost tip of the San Joaquin Valley, where she now resided, and as she had done for many months, she picked me up in San Diego for the last leg of the journey. Liz was not from the San Joaquin Valley originally. In fact, she had been there for only a few years, having grown up and raised her family in Orange County in Southern California. When Liz’s husband died and money got tight, though, she and her sister Linda bought a house together near Linda’s in-laws, where they could care for Linda’s disabled ex-husband and son. Between their combined social security, disability, and pension checks, and income that Liz brought in from doing odd jobs in graphic design and copyediting, they were able to pay the mortgage. But that was not the retirement of personal and financial freedom that Liz had hoped for. To make matters worse, her neighbors in town—like most people in the great state of “Mexifornia,” as Liz called it—were hostile to Liz’s way of thinking. That meant that she had to keep her membership in the Minutemen on the down low, and was even reluctant to put “Romney-Ryan” signs in her front yard for fear that someone might retaliate against her family. Her sister Linda, for example, dismissed as nonsense much of what Liz believed, and could be downright rude about it, rolling her eyes and turning up the car radio when Liz tried to explain. Now, at the airport, as Liz closed the hatchback to her SUV and climbed into the driver’s seat, I

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imagined she was relieved to soon be in the company of like-minded people. It was a long trip from Liz’s new home to the border—seven hours and forty-eight minutes to be exact, if you can trust Google Maps—so she usually broke it up by stopping for a day or two in Orange County. She had a son, one set of grandchildren, and most of her adult friends— what remained of them—there, though her son never picked up the phone, and her eighteen- and twenty-two-year-old grandsons were usually busy doing their own thing, working and surfing. “Grandma and a gun shop?” Liz asked me rhetorically. “No, they’re not interested.” More and more, it seemed, her children called or picked up the phone only when they needed money. In Orange County, then, she mostly sought out childhood friends and the girlfriends she had made through a lifetime of volunteer service at the Red Cross. Everyday conversation with Liz was peppered with references to her Red Cross work with Dale and Kitty, distributing blankets and food in the aftermath of the 1987 Whittier earthquake near where they grew up, or running emergency shelters in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But the Red Cross didn’t call them up as often anymore, and when it did, it was to do paperwork, which Liz found boring. She preferred to be where the action was, commandeering supplies or cooking for thousands. Worse still, Dale and Kitty did not share Liz’s conservative views, especially not her hatred of Obama. They were “liberal idiots,” she told me pointblank, and accused Dale and Kitty of having drunk so much liberal Kool-Aid that they believed anything Obama said. Like his claims that the border was now closed. “We know it’s not,” Liz countered, “so we just don’t bring it up.” CJ, the only conservative of the lot, appreciated what Liz did at the border, but as we barreled down I-5, Liz vented her frustration with CJ as well. She had come straight from CJ’s house, and complained about her refusal to drive or to spend money out anymore. Liz added that what was really driving her crazy about CJ was that she acted helpless. All of a sudden she expected Liz to take her places in a wheelchair. “That,” Liz swore, “ain’t gonna happen.” Liz had had her fill of taking care of people as their health deteriorated, and she was not going to take care of CJ too. In fact, Liz was determined not to grow weak and dependent like CJ, or to die alone and without dignity as her older brother had done. She refused to remain trapped in a life of boredom, irrelevance, and routine, ignored or unappreciated by friends and family. In Liz’s mind’s eye, there were no wheelchairs or whiners, naysayers or liberal

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idiots, at Camp Patriot. There were just patriots making a difference by defending their country from Mexicans, Muslims, and the politicians who give them free rein. And it was at Camp Patriot where Liz could lean most fully into that vocation by escaping to a world that was separate from what she had left back home—more exciting and alluringly less complicated. We pulled into the dusty turnaround at the center of Camp Patriot in the late afternoon. Hardly a soul was in sight, so we headed up to the Lucky Lizard for drinks and dinner. When we emerged from the casino hours later, it was dark, and as we wound down the highway toward camp, Liz spotted the glow of a fire spreading across the horizon. On constant alert for any portent of disaster, natural or otherwise, Liz pulled over, searched in vain for her binoculars and then whipped her vehicle around and headed back to the casino. She would notify the authorities there, she announced with a sense of urgency, and then return quickly to camp to prepare folks to evacuate and to mobilize Minuteman volunteers to help fight the fire. It had been an unusually dry summer, and evidence all around us showed that a major fire had swept the area last month, acres of charred chaparral that paralleled the highway and crept perilously close to the casino. Back at the casino, a security guard who accompanied us into the parking lot to take a look informed us that this fire had been burning for two days already and that it was on the Mexican side. Liz sighed with disappointment at the realization that this was a false alarm. This muster would last four more days, and each one turned out to be as uneventful as the first. Many teams struck out on patrol to search for “illegals,” but there were no sightings, at least not of human beings. Larry’s team, though, came across a place where humanitarian organizations had left drinking water to aid migrants on their trek through the desert. Liz had hung back from this outing—the heat was unbearable, and she had lots to do back at headquarters—but I had joined Larry, Sam, and Nick on this quest for “fresh sign.” From where Larry parked along the shoulder of the highway, a blue flag extending high into the air became visible. Sam took a distant lead into the bush toward the water drop, and when we caught up to him, he was knifing the gallon jugs he had discovered, one by one. Larry tried to dissuade him (“Aw, come on, Sam, don’t do that”) but did not intervene, and my heart sank as a pool of water stained the ground. We resumed our hike into the desert in search of footprints, but ultimately returned to camp with no new “intel” about migrant movement through the desert.

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Except for the disturbing image of Sam’s destruction of water supplies for migrants, I didn’t give the day’s events much additional thought until the next morning, when Larry and Nick headed out again and declined my request to join them. No room, Larry claimed, as the two piled into Nick’s truck and drove off. As I learned later, someone had ratted on Sam for slashing water jugs in my presence, and now no one wanted to risk having me accompany them. Liz, however, insisted that they let me in on the action. When Larry returned to camp to retrieve a forgotten item, she strong-armed them into taking me after all. And not only that. Larry and Nick had not logged in their intended destination, not marked their vehicle with a call sign that identified them as bona fide Minutemen, and not taken camp radios with them. Standard operating procedures, Liz reminded them as she bustled about remedying the situation. Larry rolled his eyes. He thought this was a waste of time—they wouldn’t be gone long, so what was the big deal?—but Liz wouldn’t budge. She had no patience for cowboys or rogue operators, and no one at Camp Patriot crossed Liz, at least not openly. Men like Larry, Nick, and Sam derided Minutemen who tried to enforce the rules by calling them “old grandmas,” but this insult didn’t undercut Liz’s authority. After all, she embraced the fact that she was “old as dirt” (her words, not mine) and enjoyed bringing the men at camp back into line. And although she was careful not to throw it in their faces, Liz knew that it was her know-how and attention to detail—not Nick’s, Larry’s, or Sam’s—that would one day save the day. With her tracking skills, Liz could find and rescue someone lost in the desert. But the guys? “They couldn’t track people in wet sand,” Liz complained angrily to me one day. Take yesterday, for example. No serious tracker would be out looking for footprints at noon, because the midday sun erased the shadows that footprints’ ridges cast, and you needed those shadows to detect the footprints. And it was Liz who could prepare Camp Patriot for when—not if—disaster struck. Did I know that she had written a book on surviving disasters? Sure enough, she handed me the paperback she wrote and self-published on what to do before, during, and after fires, floods, earthquakes, nuclear accidents, and bomb explosions. This knowledge and experience would save lives in the desperate place and time that was the US-Mexico border. And it was Liz who brought it to the Minuteman outfit. Indeed, overlooked and underappreciated in her ordinary life as an aging widow, Liz found a sense of purpose and control at Camp Pa-

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triot that had been lacking in her life back at home. At home, she was at a loss as to how to contain the demographic changes sweeping California, to stave off economic insecurity in retirement, or even to get the time of day from young people “off doing their own thing.” But the border was a place apart. There she was not helpless or isolated or obsolete, but poised to make a difference. The dangers distilled at the very edges of the nation—drug mules hauling marijuana packs under the cover of night or brush fires fanning out on the horizon—were precisely the ones that she could confront, and by doing so, claim the power of old womanhood.

Showdown at Camp Patriot

Liz picked me up once again at the San Diego airport on her way to camp. It was now December, and December musters hardly ever drew a crowd. The holiday hustle and bustle and added expense, plus the bone-chilling cold, kept most out-of-towners from coming, but Liz had decided to open camp anyway. She had heard that the younger guys “who like to go out shooting” might be there, and she didn’t want to let them down. We stopped at Costco for supplies, and as Liz sorted through the whole hams to find the perfect cut and size, she described the special holiday dinner she would be hosting when we got to camp. She would have to chip in from her own pocket to cover the extra expense, she told me, but it would be worth it in order to make them feel special. Liz was often cantankerous, and unusually so that day. Events in the news had put her in an especially foul mood, and as we headed out of the Costco parking lot and onto the highway, she let fly. Did I know that Obama was taking his family on a seventeen-day holiday vacation to Hawaii and had chartered a separate plane for his dog because Muslims wouldn’t travel with animals? All at the expense of the taxpayers! And what about the mosque being built at Ground Zero in New York City? A Catholic church destroyed on 9/11 couldn’t get a permit to rebuild, but we were allowing mosques to be built there? If they tried to build a mosque in her neighborhood, Liz alleged, she would blow the place up, and no one would even suspect her. “I’m just an old grandma,” she added, copping a fake smile. As she did, the phrase “kamikaze grandma” flitted through my mind. As we neared our final destination, Liz called ahead to announce

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our pending arrival. By the time we pulled into camp, a hefty contingent of locals had assembled at the bunkhouse. Among them was a small-time rancher who dabbled in electronics and helped maintain the Minutemen’s radio towers; a retired sheriff; a hired hand at the campground who drove a truck with a bumper sticker that read, “My horse is smarter than your president”; and Jon. Jon, an off-duty police officer, was one of the few locals who took going out on patrol with the Minutemen very seriously. Even though he had a lengthy commute to his day job, and a preadolescent son, stepson, and new wife at home, Jon moonlighted with the Minutemen whenever he could. Indeed, except when the National Guard called him up for duty or he took a contingent of his buddies to Arizona to do more hard-core border patrolling, Jon rarely missed a muster. He told me he proudly served in Operation Iraqi Freedom and wanted to return to combat—as he put it, he was “like a dog who’s tasted blood” and was “chomping at the bit to go back”—but couldn’t get medical clearance from his doctor because of back injuries he sustained as a beat cop. So he settled for doing border missions. Liz liked all the locals who gathered to keep her company, but she adored Jon. Tonight he greeted her with a hug and “Liz, you’re my girl!” as she slid a slice of pie onto the table in front of him. Later, she put on coffee as the mess hall filled with cigarette smoke and uncensored rants about the world going to hell in a handbasket thanks to the “n—— and Mexicans” getting “the man” to pay for everything. Compared with the Minutemen I knew from other parts, the local contingent was unabashedly bigoted, and conversation soon proceeded to talk of eliminating “the N——,” shorthand for President Obama. Ominously, two holstered guns lay on the table in front of us. Liz didn’t use the most egregious racial slurs, but she did indulge with abandon in minority bashing. That night, she raged about Obama being Muslim and his appointment of judges with a secret agenda to impose Sharia law on an unsuspecting America. With an air of authority, she cited evidence that his birth certificate was fake, expert analysis revealing that the document contained various fonts. Being in the freelance copyediting and self-publishing business herself, she crowed, she could vouch for the credibility of that analysis. For the moment, Liz basked in the attention of friends who admired who she was and what she knew. But not for long. It was past midnight before the locals dispersed and Liz turned in, but we got up early the next morning to rustle up a hearty breakfast

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for everyone. Matt and Shaun, the out-of-towners whose reputation as the guys who liked to shoot preceded them, had rolled into camp at three-thirty in the morning. I hadn’t yet met them, so we made introductions and small talk over breakfast. Matt was a white male in his early forties with piercing blue eyes, a wiry beard and dark hair, and tattoos on both upper arms, including a black armband encircling one. He was quick to tell me that he had served eleven months in Iraq with the navy, spent time in the police academy, and trained as a firefighter. He was also a self-avowed “adrenaline junkie” who loved motorcycles and rifles and who claimed to come to California’s southern border each month (and to Arizona’s twice a year) with a bunch of buddies to “find action” and “go head-to-head with the cartels.” After breakfast, Matt beckoned me over to the open backseat passenger door of his jeep (the one with off-road floodlights and a spare tire mounted on top) to “look at this,” a rifle hanging from the ceiling. He then popped open the back to reveal a mass of bags, boxes, and pouches of all sizes and a firefighter’s helmet stuffed behind the back seat. Shaun, Matt’s buddy, was a white male with close-cropped strawberry-blond hair who appeared to be in his mid-twenties. Shaun told me he was an “urban survivalist” and a member of his hometown’s disaster and relief team. As someone who stockpiled ammunition, he lamented that people like him, who actually had use for ammunition, couldn’t afford to buy it at gun shows anymore because other folks were hoarding. Matt and Shaun, I began to surmise, were not like the other Minutemen I had met so far, those who saw themselves as coming to the border to save lives or to simply observe and report undocumented crossings. These guys were on a different sort of mission, and proud of it. Liz joined the mix as conversation turned to the topic of how to keep Camp Patriot running while the economy was in a downturn. Matt thought that what the Minutemen needed were young people with spunk, and Jon agreed. Old-timers still had the heart to be Minutemen, but their “tickers” couldn’t take it. Matt bragged that he knew several guys he could get to come down, and he could remake camp to attract them, starting with work on the survival unit buried on Camp Patriot’s property. And just like that, Matt fired the opening shots in what would become a weeklong skirmish with Liz across gender and generational lines. Liz returned fire, countering feistily that older men had more income and time than young single guys just getting started in life. With-

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out them and their contributions, paying the rent and utility bills each month would be impossible. Matt muttered angrily that he was neither single nor just getting started in life, but Liz forged on. What the Camp Patriot Minutemen really needed were new ways to raise money, and she had the perfect idea. With her experience, she could hold tracking courses at the border and donate all the proceeds to the organization. Of course, she would be the supervising instructor, but could train others with less experience, like Matt and Shaun, to lead students through exercises. Dumbstruck, but only for a split second, Matt protested that he had buddies who had done this for a living for over twenty-five years. In a thinly veiled assault on Liz’s expertise and authority, he added that it was important that the organization be as professional as possible in everything it did and not fuel Border Patrol agents’ impressions that the Minutemen were “wannabes.” Crossfire continued, but luckily, there were no casualties. This time, at least, the showdown between Liz and Matt ended in a draw. The tension in the air was thick enough to cut, but had mostly dissipated by midmorning, when Matt and Shaun asked to take a look at the survival unit. Liz obliged, but not before puttering about the bunkhouse, fiddling with the TV, chattering about current events, and checking her e-mail intermittently. For the better part of an hour, she deftly dodged their repeated requests to locate the key, until Matt burst out impatiently, “Focus, Liz. The key!” The survival unit consisted of a metal shipping container—the kind loaded onto barges and trains for transporting goods—that the Minutemen had purchased secondhand and buried in an embankment at Camp Patriot. A rusty padlock secured two heavy sheet-metal doors that rose out of the ground. Liz, the keeper of the key, opened the padlock, and the guys pried the doors open with some difficulty. It had been a while since she last took inventory of supplies stashed down here—MREs, bottled water, disaster kits, and camouflage radiation suits, all donated or purchased with shares that members had bought to guarantee access to supplies on doomsday. It was cool, dark, and dry inside, and a bare energy-saving bulb hanging from the ceiling lit the long corridor running the length of the unit. Matt and Shaun sauntered down the aisle slowly, eyeing the items stored there with an air of indifference. When we reached the locked metal cage built to safeguard guns and ammunition, though, their boredom turned to anticipation. Except for a stray copper-tipped bullet on the floor and a plastic milk crate filled with small lead bars, the cage was empty, but Matt

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and Shaun grew giddy as they made plans to restock it. Shaun claimed to have thousands of rounds of ammunition at home that he could store here, and Matt talked excitedly about melting the lead bars to make bullets. On our way out, Matt spied two canvas army bags on the floor and dragged them outdoors. He grimaced as he extracted gas masks and a collection of canisters and small plastic packages (Israeli-made filters that screwed onto the masks, he informed me), all thoroughly coated with dirt, dust, and debris from mice that had shredded a few of the filters. If he were in charge of the survival unit, Matt sniffed, it would be state-of-the-art, not in the sorry shape it was in today. Matt, Shaun, and Jon disappeared from camp for the rest of the day, but returned for dinner and then kicked into action at ten. As I would learn, they were on a quest to beat the Border Patrol at its own game. To Liz’s delight, however, they would fail miserably. I rode shotgun with Jon in his shiny black pickup with tinted windows, jackedup wheels, and stickers with slogans such as “Doesn’t play well with others” and “These colors don’t run.” We drove for miles along a twoway highway and then turned onto an unpaved Forest Service access road. Throughout, Matt and Jon bantered with each other over handheld radios issued to them to check in with Liz back at base (they never did). Matt asked Jon whether he was packing, and Jon replied that he was, with a .45 “and some.” Matt boasted about his new “I love explosives” bumper sticker, and Jon laughed and quipped that it would be sure to get him on the FBI’s watch list. Matt dared the FBI to “watch all they want.” The spot where we first set up shop was far removed from the border proper, on a hill overlooking a Border Patrol station. Jon claimed that an active migrant-traffic corridor ran right behind the station, and he relished the prospect of catching the Border Patrol with IAs (“illegal aliens”) cutting through its backyard. But there was no action there. Even with their special infrared camera scanning the terrain for telltale heat signals, the guys came up empty. It was a frigid evening, but the cold didn’t deter this crew. By midnight we were on our way to the iconic monument of border enforcement, the border wall. If there was any action to be had, we would find it there. The rutted road, which wound through thickets of creosote and piñon pines, suddenly crested to reveal the shadowy contours of the border fence below, extending right and left as far as the eye could see. Straight ahead, on the Mexican side, small clusters of lights dotted the darkened landscape. In the nearer distance, on the US side, a green-

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and-white Border Patrol truck with a sidelight crawled along the base of the corrugated metal fencing, inspecting the newly swept sand for prints. We pulled over for Matt to make the customary call to the Border Patrol sector whose jurisdiction we were about to enter, to alert them of our presence, and then proceeded down the uneven incline until we, too, were cruising along on the flat road parallel to the wall. We soon passed a Border Patrol vehicle coming in the opposite direction. In a friendly encounter, the young white male agent at the wheel rolled down his window to chat and then waved us on. But the second agent we passed, an older white male in a parked vehicle, didn’t greet us. Within seconds, Matt and Shaun burst onto the radio to ridicule him. The “old fart” had opened his door as they drove by, they recounted raucously. They had startled him so badly that he looked like someone had pissed in his Cheerios! Matt and Shaun finished mocking the older agent, and the radio went dead for a short while, but in a few minutes Matt called again to say that two Border Patrol units were pursuing us. The bend in the road ahead opened onto a large circular plateau, and as we turned the corner, we found ourselves pinned between agents who had set up a blockade there and the cars behind us, their lights flashing. As Jon slid out of the driver’s side to speak with the agents, I caught sight of a rifle next to his seat, angled down at the gas pedal (his “and some”). The agents took their time questioning Jon and searching Matt and Shaun’s jeep, but they didn’t draw their weapons on us. Still, when we departed, Matt and Shaun were livid. The radio crackled angrily to life again as Matt blurted into the handheld that he had never before been “rolled so hot and heavy”; that Border Patrol agents had no right; that they must have been bored, since they spent their lives “chasing monkeys”; that they were jealous because they knew the Minutemen could do their job, only better. Jon agreed. These agents couldn’t hold their own in any serious confrontation. They were too poorly trained— “That’s why they’re always getting killed.” After a long while, the ranting ran its course, the adrenaline began to subside, and we rode the rest of the way home in silence. The muster ground on for another day or two, and Matt, Shaun, and Jon stuck around until the end. They no longer strode through camp with bravado and bluster, though, and they definitely did not brag about their exploits out on patrol. Instead, they slipped in and out with minimal fanfare, avoiding company and eye contact. Liz

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would eventually learn of the encounter with Border Patrol, through the grapevine, but when she did, she didn’t gloat or rub it in. She did, however, go about her business at camp with a sly smile on her face. Back at home after the muster, I opened my e-mail account reserved for correspondence with the Camp Patriot Minutemen. It was the usual mix of Minuteman announcements, patriotic salutes, inspirational sayings and stories, and off-color jokes, as well as an electronic greeting card from Liz, wishing me a “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays” in order to “prevent one more American tradition from being lost in the sea of ‘Political Correctness.’” And at the bottom of my virtual mail pile was a message with the heading “Why I Love Old Women.” “Even if you’ve seen this before,” Liz had written by way of introduction, “doesn’t hurt for a reminder—don’t mess with older women.” I scrolled down to find the following: Why I Love Old Women

She walked up and tied her old mule to the hitch rail. As she stood there brushing some of the dust from her face and clothes, a young gunslinger stepped out of the saloon with a gun in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other. The young gunslinger looked at the old woman and laughed, saying, “Hey, old woman, have you ever danced?” The old woman looked up at the gunslinger and said, “No, I never did dance. . . . Never really wanted to.” A crowd had gathered as the gunslinger grinned and said, “Well, you old bag, you’re gonna dance now,” and started shooting at the old woman’s feet. The woman prospector—not wanting to get her toe blown off—started hopping around. Everybody was laughing. When his last bullet had been fired, the young gunslinger, still laughing, holstered his gun and turned around to go back into the saloon. The old woman turned to her pack mule, pulled out a double-barreled shotgun, and cocked both hammers. The loud clicks carried clearly through the desert air. The crowd stopped laughing immediately. The young gunslinger heard the sounds, too, and he turned around very slowly. The silence was almost deafening. The crowd watched as the young gunman stared at the old woman and the large gaping holes of those twin barrels. The barrels of the shotgun never wavered in the old woman’s hands as she quietly said, “Son, have you ever licked a mule’s butt?”

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The gunslinger swallowed hard and said, “No, ma’am . . . but . . . I’ve always wanted to.” There are a few lessons for us all here: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Never be arrogant. Don’t waste ammunition. Whiskey makes you think you’re smarter than you are. Always make sure you know who has the power. Don’t mess with old women; they didn’t get old by being stupid.

In the moment, the poetic justice of the young gunslinger’s fate at the hands of the old woman prospector and her double-barreled shotgun amused me. Later, though, I was struck by the uncanny resemblance between this narrative and the showdown I had just witnessed at Camp Patriot. Embracing the subversive cultural script of the old woman prospector, Liz avenged ageism in her dealings with Matt, Shaun, and Jon, young gunslingers intoxicated with the heady promises and overblown pretensions of masculinity at its prime. Seemingly physically frail and grandmotherly in demeanor as she lavished guests with hometown hospitality and tended to camp affairs, Liz appeared the epitome of weakness and an easy target for the predations of the young and strong. But when insulted by the dismissal of old people as bodily incapacitated (their “tickers can’t take it”), mentally feeble (“Focus, Liz!”), financially inadequate, and superfluous in the border war against undocumented immigration, this old woman prospector rose to the challenge. She did so by marshaling wisdom (“they didn’t get old by being stupid”) and a certain wizened forbearance in defense of her cohort. In real life, Liz did not publicly outsmart or shame her tormentors (make them “lick a mule’s butt”), but in the end it was Liz who had the last laugh. With a little help from fate and the Border Patrol, she bested the young gunslingers by simply outlasting them. Matt, Shaun, and Jon might have been physically stronger and more outspoken than Liz, but they failed in their mission to fill the ranks of the Minutemen with fresh young recruits and to turn Camp Patriot and its survival unit into a militarized bulkhead. In fact, Matt and Shaun would never return to Camp Patriot after their humiliation at the hands of the Border Patrol, and Jon came around less often, too. Liz and Minutemen her age would remain at the helm of Camp Patriot until it closed, in 2014, and Liz took no small measure of pride in that outcome.

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But my observations at Camp Patriot and the tales that Liz and Tammy told suggested that they believed there was more to love about old women than their ability to stand their ground with young gunslingers. In showdowns with men their own age, like Larry, Nick, and Sam, these women faced a different but equally stubborn configuration of ageism and sexism, and there too the persona of the old woman prospector molded at the border came in handy. Fashioning themselves as tough as nails—as rough and ready as men but secretly smarter and shrewder and more disciplined—Minutewomen like Liz and Tammy saw themselves as putting cowboys of all ages in their place by tapping into virtues unique to their gender and stage in life. This identity work did not entail a radical upending of traditional age and gender norms. After all, the sources and symbols of power they claimed included the keys to the kitchen as well as guns and gumption. It did, however, restore a sense of agency and dignity to the gendered process of aging— of becoming old women—in a world that expected old women to be anything but powerful, independent, and self-respecting. Perversely, though, this interpersonal project to prove the worth of women to men, and of old to young, also colored Liz’s and Tammy’s search to vindicate their political selves and infused their politics with a hard, ugly, anti-immigrant, and Islamophobic edge. Liz, angry at being the butt of a cruel societal joke in which Barack Obama, liberals more generally, and the Muslims and new immigrants they conspired to protect had thrown America under the bus, summoned her “don’t mess with old women” self-image and prepared for a showdown with the world at large. Like the old woman prospector, she imagined herself taking the politically powerful by surprise and teaching them a lesson, guarding against a Muslim takeover countenanced by the government, in part by waging guerrilla warfare to foil mosque building and deploying old womanhood (“I’m just an old grandma!”) as a decoy while doing so. And it was no accident that it was at the Minutemen’s Camp Patriot, deep in the borderlands, where Liz did old womanhood in such an unusual way. There, in a seemingly exceptionally dangerous place with exceptionally paranoid people, she could indulge her fears of fires, floods, earthquakes, foreigners, and governmental conspiracies out to destroy America, and could perform constant vigilance against them. There, in a place apart, she could think and say things that she could not at home, express unpopular views, and spin outrageous fantasies. And there she could construct a world where old women like

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her became stronger rather than weaker as they outsmarted both the political establishment and the gendered process of aging in one fell swoop. Once viewed as distant from the heart of national power and influence, geopolitical borders and borderlands have today become key sites for asserting state sovereignty. But who, precisely, produces, performs, or executes sovereignty in these spaces, and how? And with what consequences, intended or otherwise? For border scholars inspired by Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy, discourses that stoke fears of terrorism have converted border regions around the world into perpetual states of exception (Jones 2009; Salter 2008). In these zones, casting terrorism as a threat against the very existence of the sovereign state empowers an array of public and private actors to govern in ways exempt from or superseding the rule of law. Reece Jones denotes the actors that deploy this power as “agents of exception.” In his research on South Asia, he elucidates how border-security officials do this work by deploying extraordinary discretion in singling out ethnically and religiously distinct borderland subjects for exceptional scrutiny and repression. Other scholars have pointed out, however, that civilians may likewise function as agents of exception in border regions. In fact, Roxanne Doty’s study of the Minutemen in the early 2000s posits that by patrolling the border, the Minutemen staked a claim to the right to exercise popular sovereignty. For Doty, the Minutemen are an example par excellence of how “citizens can engage in a politics of exceptionalism that feeds into official government action, in which the sovereignty of the state and popular sovereignty become inextricably linked to one another” (2009, 10). From this perspective, the Minutewomen highlighted in this chapter participated in a politics of exceptionalism in the US-Mexico borderlands, acting to correct the state’s alleged failure to, paradoxically, produce and perform state sovereignty. Like Jones’s agents of exception, they wielded discretionary power while on patrol, sidestepping or superseding the law by deeming certain but not all borderland bodies as threats to national scrutiny. But, I suggest, these women acted as “agents of exception” in another sense as well—they were, perhaps, double agents of exception—by turning the power they claimed as popular sovereigns of sorts not only outward to police brown immigrant bodies but also inward on the ranks of their own racial group.

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In the peculiar space that is the borderlands, these women insisted on their own exceptionality regarding the dominant gender and age hierarchies, which constrained their ways of being in other places and times. Tammy’s running all-woman border patrols in the face of disapproval from her male counterparts, like Liz’s war of attrition against the young gunslingers at Camp Patriot, did not invert or topple these hierarchies. They did, however, contest ageism and sexism in fleeting and place-bound ways and, in the process, made old womanhood personally meaningful. Of course, the primary differences that Minutemen focused on at the US-Mexico border revolved around race and ethnonationality, and Tammy and Liz participated in this broader project as well. In this chapter, they did racial and ethnonational difference by portraying African Americans as a singularly undeserving minority whose claims to be real Americans were fraudulent and who cheated Native Americans, among other “native” Americans, out of their national patrimony. They embraced the US-Mexico border and the western ethos it evoked as their birthright, and did racial and ethnonational difference by describing it as being under siege by Mexicans who passed through and paused only to desecrate the American flag of a World War II veteran. And as the following chapter illustrates, they did racial and ethnonational difference by staking a claim in the defense of this birthright in the name of family and nation.

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3 | Grandma Grizzlies to the Rescue of Family and Nation

I

n early 2016, stunned by the polls leading up to the Republican presidential primaries, political pundits scrambled to make sense of the new reality called Donald Trump. One connected the dots back to Sarah Palin. “Like no one else before Trump,” wrote Molly Ball in an article entitled “How Sarah Palin Created Donald Trump,” “Palin saw a constituency on the right for . . . a populist, antiestablishment politics of white working-class cultural resentment” (2016). Palin, Ball argued, paved the way for the politicization of the white working class by planting the seeds of a classic right-wing populist mindset that casts corrupt government and cronyism as the enemy of real, hardworking Americans. This chapter explores how Palin and the Tea Party movement she represented did so by mobilizing motherhood, and how this politicization of motherhood played out in unique ways in the lives of the Minutewomen I studied. During my time in the field, no one put motherhood on political display quite like Sarah Palin, the feisty small-town Alaska mayor whom the presidential hopeful John McCain unpredictably chose as his running mate (Deckman 2012, 2016; McCabe 2012; Rosen 2012). As the first Republican woman to run on a presidential ticket, as well as a folksy mother of five, Palin brought together the ideals of conservative motherhood and populist political engagement in one mesmerizing package (McCabe 2012). On the campaign trail and beyond, she embodied these ideals through the highly publicized example of her motherhood and pro-life choices, but also through a colorful rhetoric that framed big government as a threat to the family. Ball (2016) rightly observed that Palin’s Tea Party populism drew whites anxious over their declining class status and racial privilege into politics by de-

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picting the federal government as a thief that steals from the middle and working classes to give to the undeserving poor (see also Berlet 2011; Fraser and Freeman 2010; Hochschild 2016; Parker and Barreto 2013; Skocpol and Williamson 2012). In the battle against governmental usurpation, however, Palin carved out a special role for mothers by framing governmental spending and liberal social policies as a direct attack on children and by mobilizing maternal anger in the fight to protect the family (Rosen 2012; Sparks 2015). Anti-elitist, populist ideology that pits family against government motivated conservative women to mobilize politically in earlier historical periods. For example, a deep distrust of government coupled with fears that communism would tear apart the nuclear family drove millions of women to crusade against communism in the 1950s (Brennan 2008; Nickerson 2012; Nielsen 2001). In the 1970s and 1980s, a sense of threat to the traditional family and the very meaning of motherhood mobilized conservative women against abortion and into the ranks of the New Right (Conover and Gray 1983; Klatch 1987; Luker 1984; Schreiber 2008). Melissa Deckman (2012) has shown, however, that Tea Party populism distinguished itself from these earlier expressions by directly linking the fate of the family and future generations with fiscal conservatism. Outlining this logic in bold terms during an iconic 2010 speech, Palin named the object of her ire “generational theft.” “We’re stealing opportunities from the future of America,” she explained to the prolife women’s organization she was addressing. “That’s when we rise up, and as moms we say, ‘Come on now. That’s enough . . .’” Putting political insiders like the newly elected Obama administration on notice, she warned, “And Washington, let me tell you: you don’t want to mess with moms who are rising up. There in Alaska, I always think of the mama grizzly bears that rise up on their hind legs when somebody’s coming to attack their cubs. . . . You don’t want to mess with the mama grizzlies” (Palin 2010). Drawing on the stories of some of the oldest women in my sample, in this chapter I ask whether and how this notion of moms rising up in defense of their families drove the activism of the Minutewomen I studied. In doing so, I view this phenomenon through the lens of generation in order to expand scholarly understandings of how motherhood motivates political action on the right. For these purposes, I define generation in two analytically distinct ways. First, I refer to generation at the microlevel of family formation as a relational concept that indi-

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cates a person’s position within a kin network (Riley and Riley 1993). Thinking about generation in this way offers a new perspective on how aging and motherhood relate to activism. As the previous chapter demonstrates, growing old means coping with bodily decline, social losses, and ageism, and Minutewomen confronted these by doing old womanhood in the context of the movement. As this chapter highlights, however, aging also entails a transition from one generation to the next, a transition that requires renegotiating relationships with family members and establishing new roles and responsibilities within the family. Key to this process is finding ways to identify as grandmothers, but women who are mothers do not cease to be mothers during this transition. Rather, as they age and become the older generation, their relationship with their adult children—the middle generation—changes even as they develop new roles and identities in relation to the younger generation, their grandchildren. The stories in this chapter illustrate how motherhood operates in this complex, layered fashion over multiple generations, a possibility that—to my knowledge—scholarship on conservative motherhood and social movements has yet to consider. Not every woman active in the Minutemen had become a grandmother by the time she joined the movement, but a hefty majority had. Thirteen out of seventeen reported having adult children and grandchildren by then, and two others were mothers with adolescent children likely to bear children of their own in the not-too-distant future. All had married at least once, meaning that even those who later found themselves alone, widowed, or divorced had been a wife to someone at some point along their lengthy life trajectories. How, I wondered, might these women’s identities as wives, mothers, and grandmothers have shaped their border politics? How might their lived experience of family and their vision of the family as a social institution have inspired (or failed to inspire) their commitment to the Minutemen’s brand of nativist activism? And how might their politics and activism as Minutewomen, in turn, have shaped their identities as wives, mothers, and grandmothers? The sociological literature on grandmotherhood is not as robust as its counterpart on motherhood. But several studies suggest that in times of crisis, grandparents—particularly grandmothers—assume  a special role in shoring up the family unit and saving or defending younger generations (Szinovacz 1998). In the first such analysis, published in the journal Social Forces in 1946, Hans Von Hentig declares, “As long as the family is intact in structure and function, grandparents

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live on the fringes of group activity [but] stand ready to intervene as first and last aid as the framework of the group is flagging or breaking up” (389). Since then, scholars have coined other metaphors to convey the idea that grandparents rescue or hold families together when threatened by outside forces. In addition to Von Hentig’s first and last aid, these include the images of grandparents as “family watchdogs” (Troll 1983), “family National Guard” (Hagestad 1985), “family reserve army” (Hagestad 2006), and “child-savers” (Arber and Timonen 2012). But what grandparents construe as crises and what they believe needs to be done to protect the family have varied by historical period. I capture this variation by conceptualizing generation at the macrolevel as a cohort or group of people born at the time who move from one life stage to the next during a historically specific slice of time (Kertzer 1983). Defining generation in this second sense underscores the fact that cohort effects tied to one’s birth year matter for understanding how women perceive the relationship between family life and activism. The birth years of the women in my sample ranged from 1937 to 1963, spanning two distinct generations as defined by the US Census Bureau, the Silent Generation (born between 1925 and 1945) and the baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964). There is nothing “mathematically precise or magically consistent” about these categorical divisions (E. Carlson 2008, 115), but they do tend to correspond to common experiences and shared outlooks that are unique to a specific age cohort and that differentiate it from others. For example, as I illustrate in chapter 4, the youngest Minutewomen I researched—baby boomers who came of age in the 1970s—did not embrace the border granny figure that the older women did, and they strongly opposed the hyperfeminine ideal associated with it. I suggest that these differences reflect differences in the gender norms dominant during the socialization of each generation. Born in the late 1930s, the two Minutewomen foregrounded in this chapter belong to the Silent Generation, an age cohort known for its deep desire for a return to the political and social stability that followed World War II. “Born just too late to be war heroes and just too early to be New Age firebrands,” writes Neil Howe, “they tiptoed cautiously in a post-crisis social order that no one wanted to disturb” (2014). This conservatism pervaded family life as well, instilling a longing to restore traditional norms of domesticity that the prolonged absence, death, and disability of fathers during the war had turned on its head. Importantly, the end of the Depression and the postwar eco-

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nomic boom created the high-wage jobs with benefits that allowed millions of white Americans to achieve the domestic ideal of a male breadwinner and a stay-at-home mother (Carlson 2008; Howe 2014). This experience of economic prosperity and the glorification of traditionalism stand in stark contrast to the economic struggles and radical social change that shaped future generations of Americans. It is through this lens that Minutewomen such as Marge Cooper and Liz Jenkins viewed the middle generation and “wonder[ed] why success has become so much harder for them” (Howe 2014). In many respects, Marge and Liz epitomized Sarah Palin’s vision of politically engaged mothers. Like Palin’s mama grizzlies, they denounced the government for stealing opportunities from future generations, in both senses of the term, by accommodating immigrants, tolerating diversity, and sapping the nuclear family’s capacity to sustain and protect itself. They espoused traditional family values and perceived their activism as fulfilling their motherly duty to protect this family ideal and what it represented. And in true grizzly fashion, they claimed aggression as their maternal birthright in defense of their young. For all these similarities, however, they differed from Palin’s mythical mama grizzly in their ambivalent and often antagonistic relationships with their adult children. Indeed, many of the women I studied believed this middle generation to be partly at fault for the generational theft occurring today, because they don’t understand or don’t want to understand the gravity of the threat that immigration and liberal government pose to the family and the nation. Some, such as Bella (whose story I relate in chapter 5), characterized this middle generation as too self-absorbed to care about the fate of the world their children will inherit. Others, such as Liz (whose story continues in this chapter), accused their adult children of being misguided citizens and parents because they had fallen for the lies and deception peddled by the mainstream media and politicians. Yet others, such as Marge (whose story begins in this chapter), chalked their children’s political indifference up to the stresses and strains they faced as blue-collar workers and parents in a world hostile to the white working class. With their own adult children a lost cause, the Minutewomen I studied had set their sights on saving their grandchildren instead. The remainder of this chapter elucidates how Marge’s and Liz’s involvement in the Minutemen responded to this complicated intergenerational dynamic, and how they saw this involvement as a means to rescue the family and, by extension, the nation. White-haired, bespectacled, widowed, and invariably feisty grandmothers, they both

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joined the Minutemen in retirement and at one point attended musters at Camp Patriot so frequently that each kept her camper on-site. Even as their health deteriorated, both channeled tremendous emotional and physical energy into the Minutemen, because they believed it was their last best hope for saving something that they feared their grandchildren would lose. For Marge, this was a nation guided by Christian principles and politicians that put God at the center of public life and that upheld the God-fearing, hardworking nuclear family by excluding unbelieving and undeserving immigrants. For Liz, this legacy was a secular nation that treaded lightly on the individual liberties of its citizens but firmly secured its border with Mexico against imported social ills that imperiled the well-being of her grandchildren. As scholars have observed, the New Right coalesced in the 1970s in part by fusing the Christian Right’s opposition to liberal social policies with libertarian fears of big government dating back to the New Deal (Berlet 2007; Diamond 1995; Klatch 1987). These competing strains—what Rebecca Klatch dubs social conservatism and laissez-faire conservatism—exist in tension on the right even today and manifest in the distinct worldviews that conservative women like Marge and Liz hold. The first vignette below introduces Marge in the context of the three-generation family she lived with, assumed responsibilities for, and at times struggled to find independence from. Unlike Liz, who drank, gambled, and swore like a sailor, Marge strove to live a godly life, and she understood her Minuteman activism and her quest to save her grandchildren through the lens of her fundamentalist Christian worldview. She reminisced about her days as a counselor for Billy Graham’s crusades and told of going to the border for the first time to pray—“do spiritual battle”—for the Minutemen and for Mexicans victimized by human traffickers and drug cartels. Her grand plan in life was to bring everyone she met to Jesus (even me). But Marge crusaded with equal fervor for the Minutemen and their anti-immigrant agenda. She did so because she believed that her grandchildren’s future—their jobs, college education, social security, safety from gun violence, and even their souls—hung in the balance. The next vignette reintroduces Liz, a central figure in earlier chapters. Liz was a strictly long-distance grandmother, with a strained relationship to both of her adult children and their spouses, and a handsoff relationship with her grandchildren. In contrast to Marge, who chafed at the constraints of her live-in situation and her adult children, who doted on her, Liz agonized over ways to bridge the geographic, psychological, and generational gulf that separated her from her grand-

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children. She sent cards and money, sometimes lots of it, to bail her grandchildren out of trouble when trouble arose. Above all, though, Liz fancied herself as reaching across this gap through her dedication to keeping the Minuteman border patrols up and running. Liz seethed at the hypocrisy of a federal government that trampled on the civil liberties of aging white Americans like herself but turned a blind eye to the evils of crime, drugs, and terrorism that Mexicans and Muslims allegedly carried across the border into this country. A pragmatist if there ever was one, Liz stepped into this void to keep her grandchildren quite literally away from the brink of disaster and addiction. Metaphorically, she administered first aid to a wounded world and her family within it. The final two vignettes shift gears by rounding out the stories of Marge and Tammy (whose story begins in chapter 1 and continues in chapter 2) with ethnographic material that illustrates the meaning that grandma grizzlies attach to gun ownership. To my knowledge, very few of the older women in the California Minuteman outfit I studied ever carried a gun in my presence, even at the border. But many talked incessantly about going to gun shows, buying guns, owning guns, storing guns, and stockpiling guns, and they swore to defend the right to do all those things to the bitter end. As the vignette that features Marge demonstrates, this relationship to guns revolved around reaffirming her membership and privileged status within a nation that Minutewomen desperately sought to save for their grandchildren. As the vignette that focuses on Tammy suggests, however, Minutewomen’s guns also symbolized what set them apart from the middle generation, which they spurned, and what bonded them with the younger generation. Born in 1946, Tammy was nearly ten years younger than Marge, but her complicated relationship with her family and with guns mirrored Marge’s. Unlike Marge, however, Tammy talked of guns as a mark of distinction that made her both different from her adult children and worthy of admiration and emulation by her grandchildren, who would inherit the world she had fought tirelessly to save.

Marge Cooper: Crusading for God and Grandchildren

Although we had never met, Marge invited me to visit her for a long weekend in December 2012 in the small town near Sacramento where

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she had lived with her daughter, son-in-law, and two grandsons for the last thirteen years. Until her cancer came out of remission, Marge faithfully attended Minuteman musters at the border, and her escapades at Camp Patriot had become legendary. But as Marge’s health problems worsened, she had to keep to activities closer to home, such as those sponsored by the local Northern California, or NorCal, Minuteman branch. This weekend, the NorCal Minutemen would set up a booth to recruit new members at a traveling gun show in town. Marge never missed church, but since she would be volunteering at the gun show on Sunday morning, she arranged for us to attend church on Friday night instead. She had planned quite the busy weekend for us indeed. Marge picked me up at the Laurel Heights Amtrak station on Friday at close to noon, in a ’93 Chevy Cavalier with vanity plates that read JC♥VSU—Jesus Christ Loves You. A folded-up walker and a child’s car seat were in the back, and a keychain with a plastic baseball hung from the faux-alligator-skin purse at her side. One of her grandsons played baseball on a traveling team, and Marge was his biggest fan. So much so, she told me, that she was repurposing the camper she kept at the border so that the whole family could travel with him to cheer him on. I would soon learn that Marge’s driving was the subject of a running family controversy. For the moment, though, I simply listened as she apologized for having to drive me around in a beater. Her kids didn’t want her to buy a new car after she totaled the last one, so they got this one for her on eBay for $750. She told me this as we moved at a crawl through the renovated business park where the station was located, searching for an exit. Later, when she mounted the curb of a concrete divider at a major intersection, it became apparent that Marge’s eyesight and driving skills weren’t what they used to be, but Marge chalked up her driving troubles to the fact that she sat too low in this “new” car. She admitted that didn’t like to drive at night anymore, but boasted that she drove her grandsons to school each morning. So that they didn’t have to walk through the “crime-ridden” apartment complex that lay between their home and the school, she added. Marge wanted to take me to the hotel where I was staying and then to Denny’s for lunch. She was unfamiliar with this side of Laurel Heights, though, so we spent the better part of an hour trying to read a Google Maps printout and driving in circles. By the time we got to Denny’s, it was late, and Marge called her daughter Joanne to let her know everything was all right. When she hung up, she gri-

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maced. Marge hated how overprotective her daughters were, especially this one, worrying about whom she was with and how she was getting around and when she was coming home. Although it had been over a decade since Marge retired and relocated from Colorado to live with Joanne, she still referred to California as her “daughters’ territory.” Her two sons lived out of state, but all three daughters lived here—a hairdresser, an RN, and Joanne, who worked as a lab tech for a soft drink manufacturer—and Marge hadn’t yet adjusted to having them treat her like a child after raising five children as a single mom. “They don’t think I have learned anything in the last seventy-five years. They don’t think that I know anything. And they especially don’t think I can drive.” At times, though, Marge’s good nature broke through her exasperation and she could see the humor in the situation. As when she related how her daughters had made a fuss when she announced she was heading to Camp Patriot with George, a Minuteman who lived just north of Laurel Heights. George was, by Marge’s account, young enough to be her son. “They were just horrified . . . ‘Mom’s going away for the weekend with a man!’ . . . And they complained and they nagged about it and they did not want me to go down there at all . . . ‘Did you check his driver’s license, Mom?’ ’Cause that’s what I used to do with them on their first dates.” Marge laughed at the irony. She also conceded that her daughters meant well and really just didn’t want her to be in danger. She partly blamed their misplaced concerns about her going to the border on the media. Like the rest of their generation, her kids believed everything they saw on TV, and that included the images they were fed of the Minutemen: skinheads that were down there to kill Mexicans, with bounties on their heads placed by the drug cartels. But Marge had been there and knew differently. The setting sun reminded us that we needed to get back to Marge’s place so that she could change clothes in time for church. Marge shared a home with Joanne, Joanne’s husband, Eddie, and their two sons in an even smaller satellite of Sacramento than Laurel Heights. It was two exits away on the freeway, and Marge knew this neck of the woods, so we got there in no time flat. Marge pulled up in front of a plain 1980sstyle ranch house set in a development of equally plain residences. As she labored to parallel park, she editorialized that Joanne and Eddie would still be throwing their money away on rent if she hadn’t forced them to buy. They depended on Marge for everything: financial advice, child care, moral support, and a little extra income now and then.

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Marge sighed as she admitted that she really should cut the umbilical cord already. In the gray light of dusk, the façade of the house blended into the bleakness of the rest of the neighborhood, except for a small Christmas tree with multicolored lights that peeked through the curtains of the picture window. Across the street, a white man in his twenties or thirties was busy plugging in strings of lights that covered every square inch of his house and lawn. Marge commented that her neighbors were mostly Russian, but that was okay because the Russians were clean, kept their property up, and disciplined their children. And above all, they believed in Jesus. Marge cast a furtive glance down the street and then confided that there was a Muslim family in the neighborhood, but luckily they kept to themselves. Muslims killed infidels, Marge stated matter-of-factly. Did I know what an infidel was? A person who believed in Jesus! The JC♥VSU vanity plates had tipped me off to Marge’s fundamentalist commitment to Christ, but this passionate and personalized fear of Muslim immigrants killing her faith and fellow Christians caught me off guard. The night was young, though, and I had plenty of time to get my bearings. Marge let us into the house and led me past a small hallway table where the day’s mail and a set of keys resided. The large rectangular mirror hanging above the table had a picture of Jesus the size of a baseball card tucked into one corner. Joanne, a petite blond with dark highlights, was in the kitchen, straight ahead, pouring batter into a bread pan with the wall-oven door open beside her. Like the living room where we were standing, the kitchen was small, and the linoleum floor and cabinets were worn but brimming with light, warmth, and activity. Marge introduced us, and I apologized for dropping in at such a busy time—it was, after all, dinnertime for a family of four-plusone at the end of the workweek, and during the holidays to boot—but Joanne didn’t seem bothered at all. To our left, Ben, Marge’s youngest grandson, played Wii football on a flat-screen TV that occupied the better part of one living room wall while his dad watched. Eddie looked tired but greeted me with a good-natured, “How do you like her driving?” as I got comfortable on the sofa opposite them. He had an olive complexion and wore a black ski cap, jeans, work boots, and a short-sleeved T-shirt that displayed portions of his upper-arm tattoos. With their dark hair and eyes, Eddie and Ben could pass as Mexican, but Marge told me that Eddie was Italian, and that her own family was a quarter Blackfoot Indian. The rest had emigrated from Europe “the

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right way”—through Ellis Island “with a pocket full of money and a trade.” Marge excused herself to change clothes, and Ben engaged me in conversation. He was in first grade and told me excitedly that he would be playing his first basketball game tomorrow morning. For Upward, Eddie explained, a Christian sports league for kids. Bryan, Ben’s older brother, poked his head into the room, and Eddie reminded him that if he wanted to go to the gym with him later, he needed to get ready. Bryan was lifting weights in preparation for the wrestling season at his middle school, but his grades had been slipping, Marge informed me in private, and she had threatened to stop paying for Bryan’s gym membership if he didn’t bring them back up soon. The odor of something burning wafted into the room, and Joanne, who had joined us for a moment, speculated that it was remnants of last night’s pizza that had slopped onto the heating element. Ben announced that he was hungry, so Joanne headed back to the kitchen and returned with a plate that she placed on a TV table in front of him. Ben prayed silently before eating and then the conversation resumed. Tomorrow was the church’s big Christmas party for kids. They would be trucking in twenty tons of snow, enough for sledding even, and Joanne and Eddie discussed how they would get the boys there and to a birthday party at the Cheesecake Factory, the basketball game, and a sleepover that Bryan had been invited to. Marge could help with the driving—she wasn’t volunteering at the gun show until Sunday—but before the adults had all the details worked out, Eddie got up to take Bryan to the gym. With Eddie and Bryan gone, talk turned to the topic of adolescent boys and sleepovers, and Joanne related the stunts her own boys had pulled during sleepovers in the past. Marge and I nodded sympathetically and then prepared to hit the road again. Marge announced that since it was the only Friday service at the Laurel Heights Church of the Nazarene, we would be attending the Riderz service, part of Pastor Mike’s motorcycle ministry. Joanne raised an eyebrow at this prospect, but Marge ignored her. Later, Marge explained that she converted from “Catholic by marriage” to born-again Christian in the late 1960s. As she told the story, she left the farm her grandparents had homesteaded in Illinois, recently divorced and with three young children in tow, to find work in Colorado. She found Jesus there, too, on the three-hour bus commute to her job as a billing clerk at a trucking company. She was nearly forty years old when she let Christ into her life, but she had never looked back or for-

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saken churchgoing since then, even when it meant communing with Christians from a much younger generation and a cultural universe far, far away. Marge mistakenly thought the Riderz service began at six instead of six-thirty, so when we arrived, the lot in front was nearly empty, except for two choppers parked on the sidewalk near the main entrance. The cavernous auditorium where worship took place was mostly empty, too, but Marge made a beeline to the place where she sat on Sunday mornings, smack dab in the middle, and settled in. She pulled a twenty-dollar check from her purse and then reached into the pocket on the back of the padded chair in front of her for an offering envelope. A child’s doodle of a dog pooping on a stick-figure person adorned the first envelope Marge slid out, and she informed me, with a mix of disapproval and amusement, that that was why there were no pens in the pockets. There wouldn’t be many children or seniors in attendance that night, though, and Marge and I were already attracting the attention of regulars, mostly white (but also a few African American and Latino) men and women in their twenties and thirties, who stopped to welcome us and ask how we had found our way there. Eventually, Pastor Mike took the stage, behind his trademark pulpit built from motorcycle parts, the one with the decorative Harley front piece with hot-rod flames radiating out from the center. He wore his flannel shirt unbuttoned just far enough to expose traces of a tattoo and the metallic glint of a silver chain; his long graying hair was in a ponytail. Behind him, Christmas-card-esque tableaus of snowdrifts, burning candles, and glistening tree ornaments floated across the enormous canvas screen that spanned the width of the stage. He opened the service with a word about that morning’s shooting. That was not God’s will, he told his flock. The only explanation for Sandy Hook and the other countless acts of violence that were snatching innocent lives from our midst was that we had turned our back on God. We must, Pastor Mike exhorted us, put God back into our communities, our families, and our nation. We prayed for the survivors, and then the worship team—a drummer in athletic attire, two electric guitarists, a harmonica player, and three female vocalists dressed in sequined tops, tight pants, and spiked heels—whipped the congregation into a frenzy with upbeat inspirational songs with titles such as “Another One Beats the Dust” and “Deep Cries Out.” A singer on stage swung her hips in an exaggerated stirring motion to the refrain “we’re stirring up deep deep wells” as worshippers gyrated, jumped up and down, and danced in the aisles.

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The lyrics appeared on the screen in front of us, and Marge sang along politely for a bit before sitting down. As the music moved from the wildly ecstatic to the contemplative, arms stretched upward and outward, and cries of “Yes, Lord!,” “Yes, Jesus!,” and “Sweet Jesus!” echoed through the crowd, but Marge remained stiff and staid. Finally, the music wound down, and we proceeded from Pastor Mike’s sermon to announcements to communion in relatively quick succession until the service wrapped up, clocking in at just under two hours. Marge maintained her composure during the emotional highs of the worship service, defying my preconceived notions of what to expect from an evangelical Christian like her. But I began to surmise that if she remained unmoved in the midst of religious ecstasy, it might have been because she reserved her most passionate emotional outbursts— of fire-and-brimstone outrage, indignation, and condemnation—for the evils of the secular world. Looking back, Marge had already given me the first clue to what pushed her emotional buttons, in our conversation about the horrific shooting at Sandy Hook earlier that day. Until she had needed to leave home to pick me up at the train station that morning, Marge had been glued to the TV, watching the aftermath of the tragedy in Connecticut unfold live, and when we finally met up, she relayed the details to me. The son of an elementary school teacher had entered a kindergarten class and shot all the children dead and then killed more people in the main office while the rest of the school listened over the PA system. Marge told me that when she first heard the news, she had hoped that the shooter was an illegal immigrant, to drive home to Americans how dangerous illegal immigrants really were. It turned out, though, that he was just a troubled young person who wanted to take away everything his mother cared about, including her life, evidence that we had turned away from God and were “acting more like animals every day!” In our marathon interview sessions over the following days, Marge told me more about the tragedy of school violence and America turning away from God, and why Islam, working through the guise of separation of church and state, was to blame. Her voice rose in pitch as she informed me that the public schools taught children all about Islam but you couldn’t find the words “God” or “Jesus” anywhere in the history books. She knew, Marge insisted, because she had done the research, reading through Bryan’s eighth-grade textbook. When she was in school, they sang “God Bless America” every morning and had the Lord’s Prayer up on the wall, and they were taught to love one another.

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But now they—the Islamics [sic], Marge clarified when I asked—had taken God out of the schools. Marge wanted to see “God Bless America,” the Pledge of Allegiance, and a curriculum that honored our nation’s Christian foundations back in the schools again, because not until God was back would we get the guns out of these same schools. Gun violence in schools was Satan’s work, not God’s, she exclaimed. Marge knew that in these dire times, educating her grandsons— and protecting them from brainwashing and gun violence—fell to the family. And with Eddie and Joanne consumed with the day-to-day responsibilities of making ends meet, family meant Marge. Lately, she had been busy teaching Ben and Bryan the essentials of self-reliance and survival. What if something attacked our satellites or an EMP knocked out our electricity, she asked rhetorically, and then paused to explain that “EMP” stood for “electromagnetic pulse.” And what if the food supply ran out? Thanks to Marge, Ben and Bryan could tell you the dry goods with the longest shelf life, the way to keep certain foods from going moldy by adding dry rice to them to absorb moisture, the necessity of filling your bathtub with water at the first sign of a crisis, and the importance of planting a garden. Of course, in the case of a true emergency, Marge had a backup plan: she had purchased one share each for Joanne, Eddie, Bryan, Ben, and herself in the Minutemen’s Lazarus Project, the underground emergency shelter stocked with survival supplies at Camp Patriot. But self-reliance wasn’t just practical: it was also a matter of morality, Marge claimed, turning the conversation squarely to immigration. “I grew up in an era [when] you couldn’t just walk into Germany or Russia or another country and they’d give you food stamps and welfare,” she started off, and then repeated the mantra “Like my grandpa said, ‘You have to have a pocket full of money and a trade,’” using a singsong voice for added emphasis. A cobbler, he brought his family here to escape religious persecution, and then built a life from nothing through his blood, sweat, and tears, pulling up stumps and planting fields. Her ancestors, unlike immigrants today, didn’t depend on anyone except themselves and God. To do otherwise, Marge asserted, her voice rising in pitch once again, went against everything God wanted for us: to work hard, to help oneself, and to depend on no one but him. Jesus set the example when he traveled to other lands with nothing but a pair of sandals, a cloak, and God’s word in his heart. “And he instructed his disciples to do the same: ‘Don’t ask anybody for anything. I’ll provide it.’” But, Marge continued, shifting back to the present,

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“these people come into this county and expect us to hand ’em everything.” Now all the safety nets that she had paid into all her life “are being eaten up by these illegal aliens who aren’t even citizens,” because the government gave them freebies like food stamps, welfare, and a college education. The free college education especially irked Marge, since as a single mom, she had spent every penny she could get her hands on to educate her children. Working herself into a state of indignation, Marge went on to say that, adding insult to injury, “our children” could no longer find work, thanks to illegal aliens “who work for five dollars or less an hour.” Marge’s children had worked their way through college by taking whatever jobs they could find. Her grandsons, though, wouldn’t be able to scrape that kind of money together because there just weren’t any jobs. When I ventured that some people believed American youth no longer wanted to do the kind of work that immigrants were willing to do, Marge hit the roof. “Oh, oh, my kids would!” she sputtered in exasperation. “I don’t believe it!” With talk of immigrants working jobs that American young people would not, I had scratched the glassy surface of Marge’s equanimity, and her impassioned response indicated the fear that lay just below. Marge might have feared the wages of sin and death, and crusaded for God in a spiritual battle against Satan, but she sensed more imminent danger as well. Marge sensed danger from Muslims, immigrants, and a misguided government intent on stealing opportunities from the future of America, from the very generation she had vowed to protect. And these fears, I would realize as I watched her work the gun-show floor on Sunday, had set her in motion on a crusade for grandchildren.

Liz Jenkins: Administering First Aid to the Family

“Shut up, Nader!” Liz snapped as the beeping of an unbuckled seat belt became intolerable. Seat belt laws and safety mechanisms imposed on workaday Americans like her, by elitist liberals like Ralph Nader, did not always find their way to the top of the long list of governmental regulations that Liz considered “friggin’ unconstitutional.” Today, however, they seemed uppermost on her mind as she fumbled with the contents of the front seat to make room for me. For days, Liz had been preparing for the five-hundred-mile road trip she made

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each month from her residence in the northernmost tip of California’s breadbasket to the state’s southernmost extreme, where she would spend the better part of the next two weeks at Camp Patriot. Yesterday, she had made the rounds—Jiff y Lube for an oil change, the Ford dealer to check on her vehicle warranty, and a CVS pharmacy to pick up prescription meds—and then devoted hours to packing. Since our first meeting, a few years back, Liz had been in charge of opening and closing the camp; of reserving campsites, RV spaces, and bunk beds for members and guests; and of stocking the communal kitchen and preparing meals, so she needed to be well provisioned. Boxes of canned goods, snack foods, cleaning products and paper towels, a large mesh sack of oranges, a laptop computer, a first aid kit, the lockbox with her guns and ammunition, piles of clothing and blankets, a replacement water hose for the RV she kept at camp, dozens of paperback books, and a boxed set of books on tape accompanied us as Liz pulled her SUV out of the driveway en route to the US-Mexico border. Somehow, I doubted we would want for anything while we were there. On the outskirts of town, Liz pulled up to the drive-through window at her favorite McDonald’s and ordered two senior coffees. With her snowy white hair, wire-rimmed glasses, practical shoes, and a foam ornament dangling from her rearview mirror that read, in a child’s handwriting, “Jesus loves you,” Liz could pass for just about any white working-class grandmother from the American heartland. During the holiday season, she wore a green sweatshirt with poinsettias that read “Love blossoms in grandma’s heart,” that, when I asked about it, she admitted she had bought for herself. And she fretted, like other longdistance grandmas I knew, about forgetting one of her eight grandchildren’s birthdays or not mailing their cards on time. But Liz worried about some unusual things as well. Such as where she would take refuge when the next terrorist attack targeted California, or what she would do when the government knocked on her door to take away her guns and gold. She also worried about what would become of her grandchildren with the Muslim invasion ruining the country and the onslaught of illegal drugs, all because the government didn’t give a damn about securing the border. And about how she would keep her adult children, like her blue-collar son who had been hoodwinked by the unions, from drinking Obama’s Kool-Aid, which was the undoing of our great nation. Perhaps Liz was not just any old grandmother from the American heartland after all. Liz had made this trip dozens of times since joining the Minute-

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men in 2006 at the age of sixty-eight. David, her oldest grandson, who was twenty-one back then, had been struggling with drug addiction for almost a decade, and Liz had spent a good chunk of her savings helping her daughter foot expensive bills for rehab. So when she heard on the news about the Minutemen’s work, Liz explained to me in a recorded interview, she thought to herself, “I can do that and help stop the drugs.” She had never cared for politics, nor even really been aware of what was going on in the world, but when she got down to the border, she learned about “the illegals and the problems they cause.” She stated, for the record, that she “got a lot more convicted,” and then paused to correct herself. “‘Converted,’ I guess, is the right word.” Although Liz frequently offered me rides to and from the camp, on this occasion she had invited me to her home beforehand, and when I arrived on Amtrak two days earlier, she made a point of showing me around. Driving into town from the nearest train station, we sped past corrals filled with beef cattle, orchards of almond and peach trees, and a sprawling industrial site that had belonged to a major candy corporation but now lay largely abandoned. The company, a mainstay of the local economy since the 1960s, had used 9/11 as an excuse to move four hundred jobs to Mexico, claiming it feared for the security of its operations, Liz alleged. She decelerated as we crossed train tracks that serviced the Conagra food-processing plant around the corner from the modest ranch-style home she shared with her sister, her brotherin-law, and an adult nephew, and then, as we cruised by, pointed out the house where her grown niece lived. Having grown up and raised her children in Southern California, Liz had not anticipated growing old in this place. But when her husband died and her sister needed financial assistance (her husband and son were on disability), she downsized and moved north—despite having always dreamed of spending her golden years surrounded by her grandchildren. In a way, this commitment had been the story of Liz’s life from young adulthood through her newfound vocation with the Minutemen. More than anything else, Liz prided herself on bringing and holding her family together in the face of acute pressures threatening to pull it apart, even (or especially) when doing so entailed self-sacrifice. One evening at camp, as we surveyed the darkened desertscape through night-vision goggles for what seemed like hours, Liz told me of her philandering and deadbeat father and of the long afternoons after school spent helping her mother make ends meet. Of her siblings, Liz said her sister had always had the good looks and boyfriends, but she had had the brains. She had even managed to attend college, though she

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dropped out after two years to work full-time as a secretary. Though Liz saw herself as very capable, she had not chosen to work outside the home because she wanted a career. In fact, what Liz had wanted desperately was to have a family of her own, so much so that she married a mean-spirited man twelve years her senior who had been married before but had a lucrative job at IBM that paid a family wage. And when he refused to start a new family with Liz, she adopted two children against his wishes. She raised their son and daughter during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, and when her nest emptied in the 1980s, Liz channeled her high-energy, adrenaline-driven personality and need to be needed into a late-life career in emergency rescue and law enforcement as a Red Cross volunteer and reserve deputy sheriff for a large metropolitan county in Southern California. Finally, after many miserable years of nursing her ingrate of a husband through a series of incapacitating illnesses until his death by cancer in 2002, Liz found herself a happy widow. In fact, retired from the sheriff ’s department and with one set of grandchildren living out of state and the others too old and too busy to hang out with grandma, Liz had more time on her hands than she had ever expected, and she spent lots of it at Camp Patriot. Eleven hours after our marathon road trip from Northern California began, Liz halted her SUV at the camp’s front gate. We were the first to arrive for the five-day muster, and the grounds—a few lowlying buildings that Liz’s Minuteman chapter rented from a commercial campground—were dark except for the oversized American flag illuminated by a floodlight and mounted on a telephone pole. Liz produced a set of keys on a Stars and Stripes–themed lanyard. She was, after all, a member of the chapter’s board of directors, though she had practically had to beg the guys to let her serve in that capacity; she had had the time and the money to commit, but they had kept putting her off until they got desperate for volunteers. Her legs were numb now from so much driving, and as we unpacked her belongings, she had trouble catching her breath. She swore this would be the last time she made the trip without overnighting. And she wouldn’t fly, of course. Had I heard the recent story about the eighty-five-year-old grandma that TSA harassed? They made her remove her Depends underwear to make sure she wasn’t concealing anything, and she had to travel without them, even though she was incontinent. What was this country coming to, Liz fumed, when we patted down white-haired grandmas but let Arabs with burkas and unidentified bulges go scot-free because racial profiling was a no-no? Over the next day or so, card-carrying Minutemen and a few guests

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trickled into camp. It eventually became time to send teams “into the field” for “border ops,” sitting four-hour stakeouts in clandestine spots near the border fence in the hope of detecting “bodies” attempting to cross surreptitiously. As was her custom, Liz hung back, even though she had had plenty of training with firearms (no right-minded Minuteman would go into the field unarmed) and extensive outdoor survival and tracking skills, thanks to her service as a reserve deputy sheriff. There was simply too much to do back at “base.” At night, she kept the coffee fresh and the Border Patrol informed of the whereabouts of the Minuteman teams, sometimes with only Fox News blaring on the TV in the background to keep her company. In the morning, she set me to work opening cans, washing produce, and stirring scrambled eggs as she fretted over the quality and quantity of food she was rustling up for breakfast. In the afternoon, she busied herself with special projects, such as piecing together the organization’s monthly newsletter, updating the member database and mailing lists, and taking inventory of the dry goods stored up for a catastrophe in the survival unit the Minuteman buried on the property. In the evening, she prepared yet another meal. And throughout it all, she greeted new arrivals and directed them to sign in, collected membership dues and fees for room and board, and offered everyone in sight hot coffee and snacks. There was, indeed, a lot do back at base. But even with her mental and physical energies consumed by keeping campers well fed, guests feeling welcome, and the organizational apparatus humming along, Liz found time to escape, usually to one of the local Indian casinos. One evening after cooking, cleaning, inviting, cajoling, and organizing, Liz headed to the Lucky Lizard for her usual two glasses of white zinfandel and a full evening of slots and video poker. As she fed another hundred-dollar bill into the Queen of Atlantis machine, she quipped that she used to think she needed to save up for old age, but at seventy-four, this was her old age. With her husband’s pension, dividends from IBM stock he acquired while employed there, and income from the odd typesetting and editing jobs she still picked up on occasion, Liz didn’t worry much about finances, even though the house she owned with her sister had nearly halved in value thanks to all the “trash,” like “illegals,” moving into their neighborhood. But the next generation wouldn’t have the same luxury. She didn’t get to see her son and daughter very often, but she sent them money. And more of it than ever lately. She had tried to warn her son not to vote for Obama last November, because Obama was kill-

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ing the country, but he was pro-union, even though his union rep had screwed him out of many jobs and he just couldn’t seem to scrape together enough cash to pay the bills. And her daughter, who had moved to Washington State with her five children, including David, had had to go back to work to help support the family because the economy was in the crapper. Liz took a bathroom break from her game of deuces, and when she returned, she told me that her daughter, David’s mother, had just texted her. Toughened, perhaps, by the hard knocks she had endured in her own hard-knock life, Liz barely flinched as she said she didn’t think David would be alive much longer. He was addicted to black tar heroin again. For a while, it looked as if he would beat his addiction, but his mom had just found him at home nearly comatose, with needles sticking out of his arms. To protect his younger siblings, she had kicked him out of her house, and he was living in his car, the very car that Liz had recently lent him money to buy. Six years earlier, Liz had joined the Minutemen to save David from the dangers that had been unleashed on the world, the Minutemen had taught her, by the cataclysm of 9/11 and elite conspiracies that had pried America open to evils from abroad. Now David was slipping through her fingers, along with what seemed to be an entire generation—her grandchildren’s generation—and Liz was temporarily powerless to do anything about it. Although I did not share her hatred of Muslims, scapegoating of undocumented immigrants, and unquestioned loathing of liberals, in that moment I saw Liz falter—if only for a second—in her determination to make life meaningful as she was nearing its end, and I felt sad. But there was no time for sentimentality or self-pity, Liz reminded me in the next moment with her body language as she abruptly stashed her cell phone in her purse, whipped out the keys on the Stars and Stripes lanyard, and made a beeline for the exit. She was, after all, very much needed back at camp.

Marge Cooper: Grandma Got Her Gun

At seventy-five years of age, short and plump, with metal-rimmed glasses that magnified her blue eyes, Marge, who used a walker to get around, was perhaps the last person in a crowd that you would expect to be packing. But Marge swore by her guns. “You know,” she informed me during our recorded interview, “like I’ve told many peo-

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ple, my blood will soak the soil before they take my gun away from me, because that’s my right.” Marge hadn’t always appreciated the value of gun ownership, and she credited the Minutemen for that realization. “I wasn’t about to use any gun, you know,” Marge said of her first days at Camp Patriot. Back in the days when she went hunting with her dad, she had fired a shotgun, but she had never carried a handgun. At camp, though, Tony pressed the point. A former merchant marine and NRA trainer who organized shooting practice at the abandoned Border Patrol gun range on Sundays during each muster, he insisted that every Camp Patriot Minuteman know how to defend himself or herself and their loved ones at gunpoint. And Marge was no exception. “It was Tony who said, ‘Well, what would you do if somebody was kidnapping your daughters and murdering your sons?’” Marge recounted before re-creating their back-and-forth in detail for my benefit. “And I said, ‘Nothing, you know. . . . I would depend on God.’ And he says, ‘Well, if you had a gun, what would you do?’ And I said, ‘I’d shoot ’im!’ . . . And he says, ‘Would you know how?’ And I said, ‘No.’” Marge giggled at the punchline and then added, “And they taught me. And then I took the test and bought a gun.” Marge talked about using a gun to defend herself and her family, but she also believed that bearing arms was crucial to civil defense. And civil defense was, as Marge put it, her God-given right and duty. Marge had always wanted to be part of civil defense efforts, she told me, first as a child during World War II and later as an adult when she realized that immigrants were invading the country. Like Eddie and Joanne were today, though, she had been too busy working and raising five children singlehandedly to do anything about it. But when the Minutemen came along in the early 2000s, she found her opportunity. Marge believed that the contemporary Minutemen were doing the very same work as the original freedom fighters had done—such as Paul Revere, who had watched the coast to alert the population that the British were coming. Except now it was illegal aliens. When I wondered how this stance squared with Christian turnthe-other-cheek principles, Marge reminded me of the Old Testament. God used armies to defeat people attacking his nation. He didn’t sit by idly. In fact, she regretted that as a Christian, she had sat back in apathy for many years and turned the other cheek. Since Marge wasn’t able to make it to the first day of the gun show, I took the hotel shuttle to the county fairgrounds, where Code of the West Productions had set up the show for the weekend. The grounds

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were windswept and deserted except for Jake’s Chuck Wagon, the lone food truck that supplied vittles to showgoers. Inside the exhibition hall, signs in a lobby area warned that loaded guns and photographs were prohibited and that all weapons had to be inspected. Two middle-aged white women stamped the back of entrants’ hands with a blue rifle in exchange for the ten-dollar entrance fee. When I said that I was with the Minutemen, one remarked that the Minutemen “always have lots of people,” and let me in for free as an exhibitor. The hall was the size of a grade-school auditorium, with four long rows of vendor booths running perpendicular to the raised stage area at the far end, where the NorCal Minuteman had claimed their spot. When I arrived, George was putting together the booth, a rectangular table with a flag stand (an army-green metal ammunition box filled with spent bullet casings) on either side, one flying the Stars and Stripes and the other the State of California flag. With my help, George stretched the vinyl banner with the Minuteman Corps of California’s logo across the front of the table. The banner was the red, white, and green-striped California flag but with the grizzly in the center, chasing a fleeing silhouetted family. He then arranged piles of Tshirts and pamphlets on the floor in front, at eye level and within reach of passers-by below. One fact sheet was titled “why amnesty should not be a reward for illegal aliens,” and another was labeled “the costs of illegal immigration.” Other material, all free for the taking, included a flier outlining the purported dangers of sanctuary cities, a website printout with an excerpt from the California Constitution stating that English was the official language of the state, and a stack of pocket Constitutions. George put the finishing touches on the booth, taping a handwritten “All T-Shirts $5.00” sign to the banner. He then propped a yellow corrugated octagonal sign that read “Stop Illegal Immigration”—the kind Minutemen carried at rallies—against the table and took a seat next to Tom, a high school PE and history teacher from the next town over, who had also volunteered for this morning’s shift. Below us, a small but steady flow of customers milled about, surveying the dazzling array of goods on offer. A few vendors displayed handguns under glass, and two or three hawked what looked like used low-powered rifles out in the open. Working-class folks who had hit hard times were trying to sell off their collections, George editorialized. Most sellers, though, were not selling guns. Some offered other sorts of weapons, such as daggers, swords, knives, and Tasers. One vendor displayed a row of smartphone cases with an attachment for

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pepper spray on the side; yet others peddled ammunition and accessories—gun and ammo boxes, holsters, tripods, and a million other gadgets to help one load quicker, fire faster, and aim better. One table, run by women, offered all-pink accessories, and at two others, exhibitors raffled off guns. A volunteer from a local chapter of the NRA, sitting at the table next to the Minutemen, worked hard (but unsuccessfully) to persuade me to purchase a twenty-dollar raffle ticket for a gun by assuring me that only fifty total would be sold, so my chances of winning were good. A smattering of tables sold items completely unrelated to guns—barbecue sauce, scented candles, jewelry, and stuffed animals. Mickey, a Minuteman who worked the booth in the afternoon, conjectured that most of those were “for the wives” and told me about the last gun show he had attended, which ran concurrently with a fine-doll show. In the course of the weekend, a few Minutemen would take breaks from their volunteer shifts to do a bit of holiday shopping. Will planned to buy a Taser for his wife or daughter (he hadn’t decided which) and a speed loader for his revolver, and Mickey picked up a bottle of barbecue sauce as a stocking stuffer. No one, except Marge, purchased a gun. I settled in at the booth with George and Tom, the first team of volunteers on duty that day. Their job was to recruit new members, but by the end of the shift, the bunch of blank applications crammed into the upright plastic holder in front of us remained virtually untouched. Deep in conversation among themselves about weighty matters like Sandy Hook, they rarely made eye contact with passersby, and no one in the crowd took the initiative to interrupt them. George worried that the Democrats would exploit yesterday’s tragedy to push for even more restrictive gun laws. Tom countered that bad as Sandy Hook was, it paled in comparison with the mass murder of Americans by illegal aliens, on the order of thirty every day. I gathered that Tom’s declaration was mostly for my benefit when he spun the tabletop display featuring the photo of a white woman and her two children around for me to see. The Minutemen were raising funds for her family because, Tom alleged, illegal aliens had chopped her arm off. As morning turned into afternoon, fresh volunteers relieved George and Tom, but they, too, remained oblivious of the general public. Business was so abysmal that when I got to the fairgrounds the next morning and no one else was at the booth, I was convinced there was no way the Minutemen could break even on this event, much less make a profit, as George claimed they almost always did. Within the hour,

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though, Marge shuffled down one of the exhibition hall aisles toward us, using her blue chrome walker, and the Minutemen’s tide began to turn. With her “Secure the Border” T-shirt on backward over her sweatshirt, in order to display a large American flag in the shape of the United States, her baseball hat with BPAUX (Border Patrol Auxiliary) stitched across the front, and just a touch of lipstick, she was ready to take on nonbelievers. First, though, she paused to straighten the stacks of T-shirts on stage, discreetly hanging one over the banner’s bearchasing-family logo. Later, Marge would laugh long and hard when she confided to me that she did that at every show, and none of the guys had yet caught on. She considered herself the organization’s unofficial public relations person, and—at least by Marge’s standards—grizzlies chasing women and children were not a good look for the Minutemen. Marge planted herself on the floor in front of and below the Minuteman booth with a colorful eight-by-ten-inch cardboard sign that depicted Uncle Sam beckoning—“The Minutemen Want YOU!”—and worked the crowd for the better part of the day. No one except a pair of squirrelly teenage boys escaped her Minuteman evangelism, and in a matter of hours, she had distributed all the blank applications in stock and sold several T-shirts. From up on stage, her exchanges with strangers were out of earshot, but one encounter caught my eye. After a lengthy conversation, Marge held several T-shirts up to the shoulders of an older African American man, measuring them for size, and then returned to the stage and handed me five dollars for a T-shirt. She explained that this gentleman, a Vietnam vet, was so distraught by what was happening to the country today that he had broken down in tears while talking with her. Touched by his story and convinced that their shared vocation to defend this great nation made them kindred spirits, Marge bought him a T-shirt. Later, she purchased T-shirts that read, “Home of the Free Because of the Brave” for Ben and Bryan. Once the afternoon shift of volunteers was in place, Marge set off to do her shopping, and I dutifully accompanied her. She was on a mission to find the dealer she had done business with before, in order to buy a semiautomatic handgun that she could load from the top, for easier handling. The vendor in question displayed a dozen or more handguns spread out between two locked cases, and Marge inspected every one before choosing a Smith & Wesson .32 long revolver for $299, plus a $45 transfer fee. The dealer, a kindly middle-aged white woman, explained that the weapon required special ammunition that she did not carry and was difficult to find, but that hurdle didn’t deter Marge.

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A white man in his sixties observed Marge’s deliberations and asked her derisively what she wanted the gun for. “Shooting rabbits in your backyard?” Marge turned the slight into an opportunity to proselytize, and before he could object, the kibitzer was her captive audience. Actually, Marge explained politely, she was a Minuteman and went to the border. Did he know about the Minutemen . . . ? The clerk prepared the reams of required paperwork for Marge’s signature, and as we waited, Marge planned the rest of her shopping spree. She wondered aloud where the vendor who sold gun cases that looked like Bibles might be, and then pondered which vendors she would check out to find her new ammunition. I could hardly imagine Marge firing this weapon, let alone beating a burglar to the faux Bible in her house in the middle of the night, but owning a gun without ammunition didn’t sit well with Marge’s idea of exercising her Second Amendment rights. And besides, she loved to shop. When the clerk asked to see Marge’s state-issued ID and permit to carry a handgun, Marge flipped past merchant discount cards and her Sunday-school teacher certification in her wallet until she located them, and then turned her attention to the voluminous Department of Justice form she had to fill out. She read each of the questions aloud for my benefit (“Are you under indictment for a felony?” “Are you a fugitive from justice?”), but stopped short for dramatic effect when she got to “Have you ever renounced your United States citizenship?” and “Are you an alien illegally in the United States?” It offended Marge that anyone who had willingly renounced their US citizenship, not to mention an illegal alien, would dare apply to purchase a gun. This right was, after all, reserved for patriots like herself. We returned to the Minuteman booth for the rest of the afternoon. A clean-cut teenage boy who looked Latino approached the booth and inquired in unaccented English whether the octagonal signs with “Stop Illegal Immigration” were for sale. George offered him one for free, but the teen asked whether they were flammable and then turned and walked away. He joined a young Latina-looking woman a few yards away who snapped a picture of the booth with her phone. When Marge registered what had just happened, she consoled herself by telling me not to worry, that “they” were brave only in groups. By late afternoon, Marge’s work was done; she had spread the gospel of the Minutemen to dozens of potential neophytes and acquired a new gun. We left the floor, but not before Marge pointed out two vendors who looked Latino, evidence, Marge claimed, that “more illegal aliens than Americans” attended the show.

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Safely ensconced in my hotel room that evening, I pondered the paradox of Marge and her guns. During my time with Marge, I had heard terrifying tales of families victimized by violence at the hands of undocumented immigrants, tales that warned mothers to lock and load lest their daughters be kidnapped, their sons murdered, or their own arms lopped off. I had witnessed a miracle oddly reminiscent of the loaves and fishes: Marge multiplying two Latino-looking individuals into a mass of illegal aliens swarming gun shows, presumably arming themselves in far greater numbers than Americans were doing. These fantastic claims, cut from the same cloth as the spurious allegation that Mexico was sending us its rapists and murderers, might be the stuff of politically powerful rhetoric. They did not, however, square with the rest of what I had seen and heard in Laurel Heights. Marge did not strike me as cowering in fear of violent crime, and I was not convinced that she believed she would ever need to—or, nearsighted and gripping a walker, ever could—draw a handgun in self-defense or defense of her family. Rather, Marge bought a gun she would likely never discharge, or even load, because in this small act, she publicly exercised her Second Amendment right and, by doing so, affirmed her inclusion in American society. In this small act, she inscribed the boundary between deserving and undeserving, insider and outsider, citizen and alien. And in this small act, she marked herself as a patriot and metaphorical protector of a family and a nation in crisis.

Tammy Hoffman: Googling Grandma and Her Gun

More than any other Minutewoman I met, Tammy Hoffman talked the talk of intergenerational theft as if straight from Sarah Palin’s playbook. She was, of course, an active member of a local Tea Party chapter in Nevada, so that helped explain it, but Tammy began her story with the Minutemen and her granny brigade when I interviewed her on a warm but gusty winter’s day on the small flagstone esplanade in front of her home. The ladies from her granny brigade were women she could really talk to, she told me, women who wanted the same things in life as she did. And “the biggest deal” of all, for all of them, was a future for their grandchildren. Tammy claimed that when she first got involved with the Minutemen, the economy wasn’t as bad as it was now, but the schools were overcrowded and her grandchildren weren’t learning enough. Everything had to be taught once in English

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and again in Spanish, thanks to families who popped out a baby a year but couldn’t speak English. It was the same thing with hospitals shutting down right and left because illegals used emergency rooms like doctors’ offices, she added. Tammy paused to light her first cigarette of the day and then announced that we were taking on another society, and we couldn’t afford to. And it was going to drag America down. “They come from the worst, and yet they’re going to suck us down into the worst,” she said of the 18 million to 20 million illegal aliens she thought lived in the United States, some of whom had surely come into this country through her own backyard when she and her husband, Ted, lived in Arizona. She wouldn’t mind if they came legally, she asserted, but they wanted it all immediately and didn’t want to stand in line to get it. And it was not just immigrants. “There’s all kinds of trash out there,” Tammy advised me, “and white trash is one of the biggest.” Worst of all, though, her own children—the ones still living sheltered lives back in Wyoming—really didn’t get it. They simply didn’t understand why life was so hard for them these days. Her kids weren’t bad kids, Tammy insisted, but she wouldn’t call herself a success as a parent. In fact, her oldest daughter, the one with the drinking problem, was on “Obama unemployment and vote[d] for stuff.” Her poor father would roll over in his grave if he knew. And to add insult to injury, while that generation was busy throwing money into free education and medical care for illegal aliens, they blamed baby boomers like her for sucking the government dry! They didn’t understand what was happening to this country, but Tammy did, because she saw it happening at the border with her own two eyes. Thankfully, though, she still had her grandchildren. Later that evening, as the sun set on a full day of interviewing, Tammy poured us glasses of wine—her favorite is rosé from a box, she laughed—and told me a bit about them. There was Daniel, the oldest grandson, the one who converted to Judaism, she informed me, rolling her eyes. She could talk politics with Daniel. Tammy recounted how she had taken him to Hoover Dam last spring and they had talked about Herbert Hoover and his politics. “We don’t always agree, but he listens and learns, and I have great hope for him, for Daniel.” Tammy also mentioned Abigail. Abby lived in Cheyenne, where she would start college in the fall. She was very liberal, but Tammy thought she would wise up once she was earning her own money and paying taxes. At least, Tammy planned to give Abby a shot at becoming more conservative before cutting her out of the will. Tammy broke into another fit of

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laughter at the thought of her own audacity, but then became more serious as she pondered her path to conservatism as a young person. “I was liberal when I was young. I mean, weren’t you? Isn’t everybody, you know?” she began. “I had a serious side to me, but I also had empathy. I haven’t lost that empathy, but I’ve come to what I think of as a growth, a greater understanding that you’re not helping people by giving them things.” Tammy confessed that her Minuteman activism had cost her valuable family relationships over the years, like the one with her sister-inlaw, with whom Tammy was no longer on speaking terms. “She flat out wrote me and told me she thought I was a lunatic. . . . And that really bothered me, because she’s known me for forty-some years. I was married to her brother, for God’s sake.” And except for her second son, who is conservative and “a simple man” working in lumber mills in Wyoming, her children have been distinctly unsupportive. Her grandson, however, was different. “Grandma!” Tammy exclaimed while imitating the breathlessness of a teenage Daniel upon learning of her armed involvement in the Minutemen. “I Googled your name and you were on there and you had a gun on!” Tammy laughed her characteristically uncontrollable laugh and then sobered up once again. The chill that came with nightfall soon brought our interview to a close. Before we headed inside, though, Tammy paused and then drove her point home: “He’s quite proud of me, my grandson,” she concluded. Like Marge, Tammy bemoaned the moral and economic bankruptcy of the world that Washington would bequeath to her grandchildren, and in the story she told about why this was so, she cast immigrants as culprits. In Tammy’s story, though, the plot thickened when it traced the roots of tragedy and triumph back to her own family. Like others born into the economic prosperity and solid conservative values of the post–World War II period, Tammy struggled to understand her children’s failure to thrive, and blamed them for bringing trouble on themselves. Immigrants might be bleeding the system dry, but not without the help of the liberal sympathies and laziness that had corrupted her adult children and their generation. Tammy stopped short of calling her own daughter white trash, but just barely. She chastised her for dependency on alcohol and unemployment benefits and dismissed her loyalty to Obama as unalloyed opportunism. But as long as there were grandchildren who Googled grandma and admired her guns and gumption, there was hope for the future. In her research on gun ownership in the contemporary United

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States, the sociologist Jennifer Carlson (2015) demonstrates how guns take on special symbolic import for working- and middle-class men in the context of socioeconomic decline. No longer able to perform masculinity by fulfilling the role of sole breadwinner at the head of a singlewage-earning family, these men embrace guns as symbols that allow them to claim the masculinist power of protector. As noted in Chapter 1, Katie Oliviero (2011) has argued that in the context of the Minutemen, the display of guns enables women as well as men to access this masculinist realm of power. Marge purchased a gun and intimated that she would hide it in a hollow Bible at home. Tammy posed for a photograph with a gun holstered on her hip, and beamed with pride at the thought of her grandson finding it in cyberspace. These gestures unlocked the masculinist power that allowed these women to position themselves as protectors of family and nation. Viewing these gestures from a generational perspective, however, reveals that guns did other symbolic work as well. For older Minutewomen such as Marge and Tammy, guns symbolized their relevance in three-generational family life, the first and last aid that grandmothers could provide, and their hope for a generation and nation that still listened and learned. What, then, do the stories of the oldest Minutewomen in my sample reveal about the relationship between motherhood and political action? At the most basic level, these stories suggest that the mobilizing power of motherhood persists in some form across multiple generations. Social movement theorists note that women’s status as mothers can lead them directly to engage politically as they mobilize to defend their children from harm. Motherhood can also motivate political action indirectly, by “connect[ing] women’s responsibilities to feed and protect their families to women’s rights to make claims on the state and society for the means to do so” (Ferree and Mueller 2004, 588). The women described in this chapter joined the Minutemen to defend their families directly (as in Liz’s case of battling the cartels) and indirectly, by exerting political pressure on governments to reduce immigration and eliminate public benefits for immigrants. More specifically, like Sarah Palin’s mama grizzlies, older Minutewomen who were mothers saw the specter of generational theft around every corner, in immigrants who allegedly stole jobs, college educations, social security, Judeo-Christianity, and even health and sobriety from the youngest Americans. Marge conjured up this ghost in the ethnic Otherness of people on the gun-show floor who—regardless of

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their actual legal status as citizens, permanent legal residents, or undocumented immigrants—stood in for undeserving immigrants taking away the entitlements of white Americans. Liz conjured up this ghost in the shadowy figures of drug mules crossing the border clandestinely at night to feed her dying grandson’s drug habit. And Tammy conjured up this ghost in her imagined 18 million to 20 million undocumented immigrants—a wildly exaggerated figure compared with official estimates of 11.5 million—having babies and burdening schools and hospitals in the United States. These ghosts, not threats to their own physical safety or the safety of their loved ones, were the fears that kept grandma grizzlies like Marge, Liz, and Tammy awake at night. For women such as Marge, Liz, and Tammy, however, the political apathy and unreliability of the middle generation, their own adult children, compounded these fears. Grandmothers’ tense and at times antagonistic relationships with the middle generation accounted for the distinction between the grievances that motivated their activism and those of mothers. Indeed, this relationship might help explain why these Minutewomen defied social movement scholars’ expectations that people become less inclined to participate in collective action when they grow old (see chapter 2). That is, disillusionment with the middle generation may have acted as a lever that overcame other obstacles presumably standing in the way of acting collectively in old age. In a world of uncertain prospects and threats to the privileged place that white Americans have enjoyed for centuries, someone needed to step up and be on guard for the future of the children, but these children’s parents had failed to live up to the task. Faced with this unmet responsibility and disappointed in their adult children’s inaction, Liz, Marge, and Tammy stepped up and stepped in in their stead. More than simply rescuing the family, however, older Minutewomen saw themselves as restoring the family to its proper place in the nation and, I argue, as rescuing the nation itself. Feminist theorists have observed that nations are frequently conceived of metaphorically as traditional patriarchal families (A. McClintock 1993) in which men are the architects of the nation and heads of the national family, and women “occupy an important symbolic place as the mothers of the nation” (Nagel 1998, 254). Viewed through this theoretical lens and in light of the findings presented above, Von Hentig’s proposition cited at the outset of this chapter takes on new meaning. Grandmothers like Marge and Liz lent first and last aid to their extended families but also to the racially and ethnically exclusive national family they perceived to be breaking up.

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O

ne month before the presidential election that brought Donald J. Trump into office, the Washington Post released a recording of Trump boasting about men’s license to kiss women and grab them by the genitals without their consent. “Grab ’em by the p——y. You can do anything,” the soon-to-be head of state said on tape. The GOP distanced itself from Trump following this “locker-room talk” leak, but his grassroots following—including a strong showing of women—rallied to his defense. The Virginia Women for Trump, for example, gathered within days in front of the GOP headquarters in Washington, DC, to protest the party’s moves and to reaffirm their loyalty to the candidate. Like Trump himself, these women excused his disparagement of women by invoking the normality of a “boys will be boys” mindset and arguing that the urgency of saving America paled in comparison. “Donald Trump is who he is [so] let’s move on with him . . . America needs him now more than ever,” reasoned one woman at the rally. Another, a real estate agent from Fredericksburg, accused the GOP of adopting a “holier than thou” attitude: “We need to get past that right now.” A man in the crowd of mostly women carried a sign that read “Better to Grab a P***y than to Be One” (“Pandemonium as Trump Supporters Protest the RNC”), and no one seemed bothered by it. In just a few weeks, Trump swept the election; 53 percent of the white women who voted cast their ballot for him, over and against the nation’s first female candidate for president (Jaffe 2018). In what world do women endorse men for high office who openly dismiss, degrade, objectify, and sexualize women? Years into Trump’s presidency, standard analyses of his surprise victory have yet to grapple head-on with this question. Political sociologists have mostly de-

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bated the merits of explanations that stress either economic factors (e.g., Trump’s populist appeal to working- and middle-class Americans under economic duress) or racial resentment and nativism in order to account for Trump’s electoral success (Manza and Crowley 2018). Fewer studies have explored how gender mattered for Trump’s win, and those that have done so tend to focus on his political traction with men. For example, some argue that white men voted Trump into office because his pledges to curb globalization and make American industry great again promised to restore a white masculinity beleaguered by economic and social losses attributed to foreigners, women, and people of color (Cassino 2018; Friedland 2019; Katz 2016; Kimmel 2017/2018). In a corollary to this argument, women supported Trump because they held a similarly sexist and traditionalist worldview, a worldview that venerated men’s authority and status as breadwinners and that blamed the undeserved gains of minorities and women for their loss (McVeigh and Estep 2019; Setzler and Yanus 2018). For angry white men and women like these, Trump’s “anti-immigrant statements, admissions of sexual assault, racist statements about Latinos, [and] coded racist statements about African Americans .  .  . only solidified the conviction . . . that this was someone who felt their pain” (Kimmel 2017/2018, 15). Alternately, white women may have voted for Trump in spite of his attitude toward women, rather than tacitly agreeing with it. The journalist Sarah Jaffe raises this possibility when she writes of women for whom “putting up with the same old sexism did not feel like that much of a price to pay” if voting for Trump meant ushering in change from the status quo in other arenas (2018, 20). The prospect of tax cuts, abortion bans, or tightened national security may have overridden concerns over Trump’s sexism, leading women voters who might otherwise have balked at supporting a misogynist to hold their noses and vote for one anyway. This chapter raises a third possibility, namely, that a subset of conservative women neither openly endorsed nor reluctantly excused the misogynistic expression of sexism evident in Trump’s persona and political performances. Rather, these women actively participated in the production of misogyny by embracing a distinctive way of thinking—a gender ideology—that exhorted women to be tough enough to take gender-based mistreatment or assaults on their dignity as proof of their equality with men. Sociologists have not fully incorporated the concept of misogyny into scholarship on sexism, but feminist journal-

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ists, scholar-activists, and #MeToo movement leaders have resurrected the term in recent years (Aron 2019). They argue that whereas in the past, “sexism” sufficed to name the derogatory treatment of women based on their gender, such treatment has become so seething and sexualized today that it merits the moniker “misogyny” (Klein 2017; Rethinking Schools 2012; Smith 2016; Ukockis 2019). Naomi Klein cites Trump’s successful deployment of antiwoman invective in politics as evidence that misogyny has become “a newly brutal form of political engagement” (2017, x). Other commentators note how anonymous online subcultures aid and abet misogyny (Press and Tripodi 2014), and they link this misogynistic manosphere with the alt-right movement, which threw its weight behind Trump (DiBranco 2017; Lyons 2017; Wendler 2018). Given this vibrant national conversation, it is incumbent upon scholars to learn more about how misogyny plays out on the ground and through the lives of conservative women. Following the feminist philosopher Kate Manne (2017), I define misogyny as actions and attitudes that enforce asymmetrical social roles grounded in sexism—actions and attitudes that police and punish women who fail to deliver the moral goods and resources (e.g., deference, gratitude, approval) to men as expected of them. Misogyny in these terms can and does manifest in physical violence directed at women—and Manne’s highly acclaimed treatise on the topic mostly marshals examples of this—but it also takes the form of shaming or verbally chastising women who overstep their boundaries and thus threaten male privilege. Manne’s conceptualization departs from the commonly held notion of misogyny as woman hating and opens up promising new avenues for sociological investigation and intervention. But as a recent review of her work suggests, it leaves the mechanisms by which such policing and punishment occur relatively unexplored (E. McClintock 2019). My research helps flesh out these mechanisms by training an ethnographic lens on gendered interactions at Camp Patriot and by capturing Minutewomen’s and Minutemen’s stories that revealed the gender ideologies that shaped these interactions. In short, it documents how and why Minutemen and Minutewomen manufactured misogyny in the microcosm that was their branch of the nativist movement. The thick description at the heart of this chapter begins with Harry, a seventy-five-year-old California native who was a longtime supporter of a variety of conservative organizations—the John Birch

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Society, Americans for Prosperity, the California Coalition for Immigration Reform—and one of the most dedicated Minutemen I knew. He had patrolled the border starting in 2005, served as a board member of the Minuteman Corps of California, Inc., and was a constant presence at Camp Patriot. More to the point, Harry subscribed lock, stock, and barrel to a classic separate-spheres ideology that attributed natural differences to men and women and treated as a moral value a gendered division of labor in which women dedicated themselves to the home, and men provided for and protected that home from external threats. In this, Harry resembled the average Minuteman at Camp Patriot as well as Minuteman spouses who rarely if ever came to camp. In other respects, however, Harry was exceptional. Free from the moderating influences of spouses and polite society back home (and usually out of my earshot), his peers had been known to behave in ways that would qualify as crasser forms of misogyny—to engage, for example, in ribald banter full of sexual innuendo that chided, ridiculed, disdained, and at times unapologetically disparaged women. But not Harry. With the gentle spirit, helping hand, and respect that he always extended to women, no one could accuse Harry of hating women. He killed them, instead, with kindness. The second ethnographic vignette introduces Eve in her element at Camp Patriot. At fifty-six years of age, Eve was nearly twenty years younger than Marge and Liz, and one of the youngest Minutewomen I interviewed. Like Liz, Eve epitomized a secular, laissez-faire conservatism, given her strong libertarian bent and uninterest in religion. Unlike Liz and the other older Minutewomen whom I studied, however, everything about Eve—her choice of a career in the military, her insistence that men and women were equal, her emotional distance from her children and grandchildren—flew in the face of a separate-spheres gender ideology. Indeed, in contrast with older Minutewomen’s categorical opposition to feminism, Eve flirted with the idea that she just might be a feminist herself. Combining conservative confidence in the power of individual effort and aversion to affirmative action, along with a progressive belief in the reality of gender discrimination, Eve stitched together an inchoate and contradictory gender ideology that constituted a peculiar form of conservative feminism. As scholars have noted, conservative political entrepreneurs have worked hard in recent decades to associate the Right with feminism in order to attract greater numbers of women, youth, and political moderates (DiBranco 2015;

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Scher 2009; Schrieber 2008). Eve’s hybrid gender ideology mirrored this manufactured convergence of conservatism and feminism. This second vignette also illustrates how misogyny works against those women who most openly refuse to conform to gender norms grounded in separate-spheres ideology. Although similar in their outspokenness and independence to older Minutewomen, Eve and other younger Minutewomen like her—Phyllis, Trish, and Shannon, to name a few—did not embrace grandmotherhood as meaningful in the context of their activism, and adamantly rejected the hyperfemininity that they associated with this figure. As a result, unlike self-proclaimed border grannies, these women incurred sharp sanctions from other movement members—both male and female—because they purportedly “acted like men.” By analyzing what happened when Minutewomen did not embrace identities as grandmothers, therefore, this section suggests that grandmotherhood buffered women from gendered critiques of their activism by conferring on them an age-inflected notion of femininity that was less threatening to hegemonic masculinity than unmitigated expressions of agency. The last descriptive section in this chapter follows Eve from Camp Patriot to her residence in a Southern California subdivision to illustrate how she enacted her alternative views about gender far from the border, in her home life with her husband, Bill. It draws on a lengthy recorded interview conducted there to elucidate Eve’s ambivalent embrace of feminism, and to show how the peculiar brand of feminism she fashioned underwrites misogyny. Finally, this glimpse into Eve’s ordinary, everyday world points to some of the unique struggles that career military women and mothers may face as they move back to civilian life after retirement. Women make up 16 percent of enlisted military personnel, and their numbers are growing (Reynolds and Shendruk 2018), but as the journalist Laura Katzenberg notes, their stories still “tend to be ignored in favor of legacies left by men who have shaped the narrative of service to country” (2019). In part, Eve’s story resonates with the stories of male veterans who joined the Minutemen to recoup a place in a society that no longer valued their service (Shapira 2013). Her search for meaning in a civilian world, however, was made more difficult because her staunch political conservatism fit uneasily with her rejection of the conventional gender norms espoused by the Right. Eve relinquished her master status as a soldier when she returned from the front lines, but in retirement she found no ready-made, socially acceptable role within her family awaiting her. As her story re-

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veals, it was in this void that Camp Patriot took on special significance as a lifeline that connected Eve with her professional past.

Harry and His Women

Harry was driving home to Orange County in his gray Toyota pickup with the “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” bumper sticker and a pocket copy of the US Constitution tucked into the breast pocket of his button-up shirt when, as had become customary, he inquired about my research. Had I decided what my book would be about? Had I made any headway in defining my thesis? With a college degree in English and having worked toward a PhD in comparative literature many years ago, Harry knew a fair bit about academia and the power of the written word. Though he had once had dreams of becoming a college professor, he told me, “life”—the need to support a family, coupled with departmental politics—intervened, and he settled instead into a career as a technical writer and editor in the scientific-computing industry. At camp, Harry was known as the voice of reason, a peacemaker who calmed tempers when they flared. He was quiet, accommodating, and kind, so accommodating that he could sometimes be found helping Liz in the kitchen, and so kind that he was frequently persuaded to give me a ride to and from the nearest metropolitan airport to the border camp. These were just some of the reasons why I liked Harry and found myself riding shotgun with him today. It was also why I had, over the two and a half years I had been coming to camp, entrusted him with my secret: I would like to write a book about the women, I reminded him. My project would be about gender. Harry sighed. As on other occasions, he countered that he didn’t see the value in that kind of project. In fact, he hated the word “gender” and all that it implied. I might think him old-fashioned, Harry explained, but he believed it was a man’s job to protect hearth and home, and any man who couldn’t do that was not worth his salt. As for women, he found it truly objectionable when they “acted like men,” and he brought up Trish, a chain-smoker with a foul mouth who was at camp this month, as an example. He might be old-fashioned, Harry reiterated, but he didn’t want “his women” exposed to that sort of behavior. Usually mild mannered, Harry was now agitated. Harry was agitated because he thought I had it all wrong. Camp Patriot was not a place to study women, at least not respectable women

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like his wife, Joy. Respectable women visited Camp Patriot from time to time but knew that their life’s work lay elsewhere. Joy visited on ladies’ day years ago to meet the other wives and to hang flags on the fence posts of the border barrier that the Minutemen had built. She remembered that weekend fondly but wouldn’t dream of attending camp regularly to go on ops with the men, she told me when I interviewed her back in the Orange County suburb where she and Harry resided. She led a full life there, working in the gift shop at her church to raise money for unwed mothers, helping out with the grandchildren, and swapping recipes with her daughter (who would be a stayat-home mom if she could, but couldn’t afford to, Joy told me). These were Harry’s women, women who, in his mind’s eye, kept the home fires burning. Of course, some women did come to camp regularly, but Harry seemed slightly embarrassed by them. Women such as Shannon, whom he called a “gung ho girl.” And Liz, the female powerhouse and force of nature who kept Camp Patriot running but clashed with everyone there, thanks to her short fuse and brash personality. “God bless Liz” was all that Harry offered when I mentioned her presence at camp. And Harry knew that I got it all wrong—that I singled out these women for special attention, that I thought gender mattered—because of what he called my “feminist antennas.” Like entire generations seduced by the siren song of second-wave feminism, I had grown antennas that tuned me into, and led me to disparage, the natural differences that distinguished men from women. This mindset dated back to the 1960s, a decade Harry recalled vividly as a time when women were encouraged to “throw off bourgeois constraints” and “become authentic,” he asserted with a generous serving of sarcasm. What we learned from feminism, he claimed, was that women should act like men and that the rest of us should praise them for it or at least pretend that we approved. Much to Harry’s chagrin, even the Minutemen had, from time to time, caved in to this way of thinking. As when the guys posed for a chorus-line photo at the border fence on ladies’ day, the photo was displayed prominently at Camp Patriot, adjacent to the one of border grannies in pink camo. The topic arose when I wondered aloud whether Harry was in the photo. Wasn’t he the guy on the end, looking down? He reluctantly conceded that it might be him, but declared that posing for that photo qualified as one of the stupider things he had

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done in life. Harry couldn’t say right off why he thought it was stupid, but pointed out that the women had posed to “show off their pulchritude.” So the men were showing off their pulchritude, I conjectured. Harry nixed this possibility. He had never heard that word—meaning “sex appeal,” he explained—applied to men. Upon further reflection, Harry branded the photo a “PC gesture” to demonstrate the supposed “equality of the sexes,” and when I asked, “Demonstrate for whom?” he brought the conversation to a close. He didn’t know; he was not in the business of deconstructing these things. That was my job. Smart, highly educated, and well meaning as Harry was, his intellect, vocabulary, and good intentions faltered in the face of the deepseated double standard he held. This double standard naturalized objectifying and sexualizing women, but made objectifying and sexualizing men repulsive, even if only in jest. Harry used his words and powers of reason to impugn men who could not protect their women, gung ho women who acted like men, and researchers who took gender seriously; as well, he used words and reasons to praise women who remained at a safe distance from Camp Patriot and comfortably within the bounds of domesticity. But he could not quite put into words or reason away his anger at being caught acting like a woman. And a lessthan-respectable woman at that. Of course, Harry was not the only Minuteman who believed women and men to be separate and not necessarily equal, though he happened to be one of the few men who would come right out and say so. There was also Tony, the former merchant marine and NRA instructor who taught Marge to use a handgun. The guys could always count on Tony to get away with saying what they wouldn’t dare to in mixed company, thanks to his wicked and often self-deprecating sense of humor. I knew Tony from camp, but interviewed him and his wife, Lisa, in the isolated canyon community in central California where they owned some property and could live off the grid, away from the prying eyes of tax collectors and governmental regulators. Unlike Harry and Joy’s comfortable split-level in a coastal town where the average single-family home listed for over a million dollars, Tony and Lisa’s residence was a windowless mobile home just down a dirt road from Tony’s “man cave,” a metal Quonset hut that looked like half a tin can on its side; there he reloaded and stockpiled ammunition. Lisa had been to Camp Patriot a few times, but when I asked her about her politics, she told me that she “just” raised kids. Tony interjected that “she’s the homemaker type” and quipped that she kept him “fat and

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fed” while he protected her and brought home the bacon. He then lamented that young people didn’t realize how important it was for wives to stay at home to care for the children. Times were changing, and not in a good way. Except for Harry and Tony, though, it was mostly the wives who surprised me with their outspoken defense of separate spheres and offered the harshest criticism of how and why times were changing. Women such as Joy and Janet and Pat, who worried out loud about their married children, daughters who didn’t stay at home and sons married to women with jobs out in the world; who lectured me about the evils of feminism and the nanny state; and who hinted at the moral dubiousness of my own professional and child-rearing choices. Some, such as Janet, took inspiration from the fundamentalist belief in women’s God-given duty to serve men. “The feminist movement wants to be so equal,” she told me at the dinner party in a tony suburb of San Bernardino where I met her and her husband, Mark, a founder of the Minuteman Corps of California, Inc. “But we weren’t created to be equal!” she exclaimed in exasperation. “We’re supposed to be that byyour-side person.” Pat, too, saw herself as a helpmate to her husband, Pete, though as a self-proclaimed recovering Catholic, she left out the bit about creation. It was just common sense that she would support Pete from the sidelines, for example, when he was active in the Minutemen, before they moved out of state last year. She laughed when she told me how she had become a border widow back then. Many wives did. “Believe it or not, those guys that come down every weekend .  .  . have wives at home,” she informed me as she described the supporting role that Minuteman wives played. They might have wanted their husbands to take them out that weekend or to mow the lawn, but they put up with the men’s absences to help the cause. Of course, wives dropped in at Camp Patriot on occasion. Pat reminisced, for example, about the times she took big pots of spaghetti and meatballs—macaroni and gravy, as her Italian American family called them—down to feed the troops. She liked feeding people, sitting by the campfire, and being with the guys. She drew the line, though, at following them out on patrol. Pat paused to clarify that there were women at Camp Patriot who were very—and here she screwed up her face in mock disgust and blurted out—“gung ho,” and then smiled knowingly. She didn’t elaborate because there was no need; I got the drift. Harry’s women and the border widows celebrated and supported their men, but wouldn’t be caught dead acting like them.

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Harry might have been old-fashioned, then, but he was not alone in his belief that men were men, women were women, and women who crossed the line were, well, gung ho. But you had to welcome the wife down every now and again so that she would have, as Obama liked to say, some “skin in the game.” Harry explained this latter point to me on a cold January morning when I interviewed him over steaming cups of coffee on the wooden front porch of the Camp Patriot lodge. He had been undergoing cancer treatment lately, so this might be one of the last times I would get to pick his brains, and one of his final opportunities to set me straight. Like Pat, Harry suspected that wives might give men static for the money and time they spent on the Minutemen. So why not invite them down for, say, a special event like ladies’ day, to get them to buy in? “To co-opt them,” he restated bluntly. When I countered that it sounded as though the Minutemen didn’t expect these women to become full-fledged Minutemen and go on patrol, Harry objected. “Women were always invited to go on ops,” he started off, but then hedged. “If they wanted. Yeah, nobody was ever, ever, ever discouraged or, yeah .  .  .” He didn’t get to finish that thought, though, since we were interrupted by a neighbor who popped in to say howdy, and I switched off the tape recorder. But not before it picked up Harry reminding me about my feminist antennas. What Harry was trying to tell me in so many words was that Camp Patriot wasn’t really a place for women, though some women—gung ho girls, in both Pat’s and Harry’s words—didn’t yet know better. When I got home and looked up the term, Google told me that “gung ho” meant “unthinkingly enthusiastic and eager, especially about taking part in fighting or warfare,” as in “the gung-ho soldier who wants all the big military toys.” I immediately thought of Eve. Eve was one of the most energetic Minutewomen I had met, and the only female veteran I crossed paths with at Camp Patriot. Harry would not get a chance to interact much with Eve, but I was certain he would agree that she was the epitome of gung ho. And although Harry would not be the one to put Eve in her place, plenty of Minutemen at Camp Patriot would rise to the occasion.

Gung Ho Women and the Wrath of the Minutemen

Eve ran her fingers through her short-cropped thick silver hair as she debated whether to allow me to take her picture in front of the

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Chávez memorial. Larry had driven the three of us to this place in the late afternoon to pass the time before the teams back at camp set out on night patrols, and Eve—in her striped tank top, cutoff shorts, and purple flip-flops—worried that her daytime attire gave the wrong impression. A veteran of the US Air Force with two tours of duty in the Gulf War under her belt, Eve told me she came to the border to patrol, not sightsee, and wondered aloud what her Facebook friends, like those she had met in chat rooms for veterans, would think if they saw her at the border in flip-flops. She ultimately obliged, though. As the American flag at the center of the memorial whipped in the desert wind behind her, and the Golden Eagle and American flag tattoos that covered her biceps on each arm glinted under the blazing sun, I snapped Eve’s photograph. We lingered to pay our respects to Eddie Chávez, the fallen Border Patrol agent this site commemorated, shot dead in this very spot, a stone’s throw from the border fence now facing us. A gravel path led up to the small but well-tended rock garden that encircled the flagpole, a wooden post with an oversized replica of the agent’s Border Patrol shield affi xed to it. Eve had wanted to join the Border Patrol when she retired from the air force, in 1995, but after a twenty-year career in the military, she was simply too old, she told me. Eve didn’t think of herself as sentimental, but she said that it moved her to come to this memorial. Perhaps because, like Border Patrol agents, she knew what it was like to face mortal danger for your country. She knew, for example, what it was like to have to make a split-second decision—“to take that risk and call the shots and act,” as she put it—even when it turned out not to be the right decision and ended badly. Of course, she wasn’t afraid down here at the border, just as she wasn’t afraid in combat, on the transport convoys through Saudi Arabia, where military personnel stuck out like sore thumbs in their motor vehicles, sun-bleached to what Eve affectionately called a Mary Kay pink. She wasn’t afraid, because the military had trained her to analyze, evaluate, and act in any situation, and she knew how to use force—her .40, a happy medium between 9 mils and .45s, she opined—when necessary. In fact, until I was willing to carry a gun and develop some serious tactical skills, Eve would steadfastly refuse to pair up with me for border ops. Last night, for example, she had headed off with the guys, but without me, to surveil a house of “unfriendlies,” suspected human traffickers, drug smugglers, or both, even though everyone at camp knew I wanted to tag along on every patrol. In her book, being unarmed and untrained didn’t cut it when someone else’s life and your own might be on the line.

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Eve stooped to inspect the objects arrayed at the foot of the flagpole in search of the pink and blue baby blocks she had seen the last time she was here, trinkets offered on behalf of the agent’s young and now fatherless children. In addition to being career military, Eve was a mother and a grandmother, but she didn’t advertise that fact, especially around the guys. Indeed, I learned almost incidentally that Eve had children, when she and Phyllis got to know each other for the first time. The three of us were bedding down at midnight in the fifth wheel that served as the bunkhouse for ladies who didn’t keep their own campers on the premises. I had so little in common with my bunkmates that I might as well have been a fly on the wall. Phyllis unpacked a T-shirt from her suitcase that read, “Don’t steal. The government doesn’t like competition” and held it up for Eve’s amusement. When Eve emerged from behind the curtain that shielded the loft from our view, she was wearing a purple camouflage sports bra and chocolate chip BDU patterned pajama pants. Later, when I asked, she explained that BDU stood for “battle dress uniform.” Her legs dangled over the edge as she checked in with Phyllis about where they would keep their holstered guns for easy access overnight, and then the two of them settled in to chat until the wee hours. Eve regaled Phyllis with tales of having to wear an abaya while off duty in Saudi Arabia and of being disciplined by the morals police with small whips on the streets of Riyadh and Jeddah when she didn’t. Thanks to having “been there,” Eve knew all about Sharia law, she claimed. They talked about their travels, trucks, and Phyllis’s teenage daughter (who texted her to ask whether she could borrow the truck while Phyllis was away), and Eve told us that she had met and married her husband, a chemical warfare specialist, in the air force and that they had had two children between deployments. I finally piped up to ask whether the children had ever deployed with them, and Eve responded with an emphatic no and then schooled me on the policy of leaving children in the care of others when their parents were deployed simultaneously. That separation must have been difficult for the children, I began to say, but Eve cut me off. That was simply the “military way,” she replied curtly, and it had made her kids strong and independent. End of conversation. She may have been tight-lipped about her family, but Eve talked freely at camp about her days in the military—her career in the military, she pointed out to me in private, contrasting herself with most of the Minutemen, who had had experience in the service but not a career. Men such as Larry and Nick, his best buddy around camp, born

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in the late 1930s and early 1940s, too young to have been drafted for Korea and too old for Vietnam, but who had each enlisted, for a time anyway. Before he went to work for a private contractor, Larry had spent time in the air force, and that much he had in common with Eve. I had learned this over lunch that day. Jeff had made ribs, and Larry, Eve, Jeff, and I ate at the picnic table on the flagstone patio behind the clubhouse while the rest of the crew took refuge indoors. The heat and the bees didn’t bother Eve, nor did the fact that she had BBQ sauce spread liberally across her face. Surveying her, Larry remarked dryly that Eve’s husband probably didn’t take her out much. Eve was unfazed—she didn’t go out for ribs, since they made their own at home, she replied matter-of-factly—but Larry’s comment struck me as uncharacteristically unkind. They swapped stories about how they had first learned about the Minutemen. When talk turned to life in the military, though, it was Larry who became tight-lipped. Eve reconstructed the list of bases she had served on stateside—in Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, and South Dakota—and laughed as she recalled getting her military convoy stuck in an unseasonal snowstorm in North Carolina. Larry started to look bored. He offered up little in return about his time in the service, and when Eve left, he looked at me, rolled his eyes, and changed the subject. Nick, Larry’s usual companion for afternoon outings to search for fresh tracks and an optimal spot for the night watch, was occupied until the USC-Stanford game finished, so Larry cast around camp for something to do after lunch. With few other opportunities for action, he agreed to drive Eve over to the Chávez memorial with me in tow. He took the route that included the dirt road that ran beside the border fence. We caught sight of a Border Patrol agent surveilling the terrain from a truck parked on a ridge, and as Larry pulled up alongside him, the agent scowled. Through his rolled-down window, he warned us that a chase was going on down below, and Larry promised him we would not interfere. After our visit to the memorial, we returned that way, and as Larry prepared to stop for an update on “the chase,” Eve announced that she wanted to get a picture of the Border Patrol agent to post on her blog. Most agents didn’t want their pictures taken, Larry declared authoritatively, bringing his vehicle to a halt. Powerless to stop her, short of exerting physical force, Larry issued a stern “Don’t embarrass me!” as Eve climbed out of the cab and approached the agent on foot. I never knew for sure what it was about Eve that might have em-

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barrassed Larry or whether she managed to actually embarrass him, because Larry did not refer to this incident or any others involving Eve for the remainder of my time at Camp Patriot. On this muster, he told me about his ex-wife and how she was dragging out their divorce, about the woman he was dating, who liked how he kept house (“for a guy, that is,” he assured me), about his struggle with alcohol and God’s intervention to help him quit, and about his campaigning for a local anti-immigration candidate back home. He declined my request for a formal interview (he didn’t have anything to add to what he had already told me, he claimed), but he took pains to photocopy the editorial on immigration he had published in his hometown newspaper and deliver it to me. And when I left the field for good, he gave me his contact information in a handwritten note that wished me good luck and God bless. In short, Larry didn’t feign indifference toward me or subtly snub and mildly rebuke me as he did Eve. He didn’t treat me like a nonentity or cancel me out of his life at Camp Patriot. He didn’t try to put me in my place or stew in silent rage at my stubborn insistence, disobedience, or lack of deference when he failed to teach me that lesson. He didn’t, because he didn’t have to. I already knew my place among the Minutemen. I was an impressionable guest eager to learn and always happy to follow directions. Larry wasn’t threatened by all women at camp—only women like Eve, who tried to move in on his turf for real. And it wasn’t just Eve. There was Shannon, too, whom Larry recalled as “crazy.” Shannon had moved to Arizona and didn’t come to musters in California anymore. Everyone around camp, though, had something to say about Shannon now that she was gone. Larry pointed her out in one of the framed photos that hung in the clubhouse, and when I asked whether she might also be in the kick-step photo of women in pink camo, he smirked. Shannon might wear camo, but not pink, he replied. Larry claimed that Shannon was a loose cannon on patrol. “I think she would just as soon shoot ’em,” he said, referring to her alleged undisciplined aggression toward immigrants she might encounter. Others who knew Shannon used words and phrases such as “unstable,” “off her meds,” “pissed a lot of people off,” and “just like a man” to describe her, and Andy recounted how she would shush anyone who talked while out on patrol with her. Keeping quiet on patrol, which made imminent sense to me, was standard Minuteman protocol. For some reason, though, Andy found it objectionable when enforced by Shannon.

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Sunday morning rolled around, and most of the Minutemen and women at this month’s muster prepared to return home. Eve had already announced that she was timing her departure so that she could make the kickoff of the NFL game that afternoon, but she wouldn’t leave before having a cigarette or two with Phyllis on the front porch. Phyllis showed Eve the website she had been perusing on her iPhone; it sold stuff adorned with clever conservative sayings—Phyllis’s favorites were “Spay and neuter liberals” and “I don’t need sex. My government fucks me every day.” Conversation then turned to the virtues of car magnets over bumper stickers, and Eve gestured to her new red double-cab Nissan Titan pickup parked nearby. She refused to take it out on patrol lest the desert brush scratch the paint, and she wouldn’t dream of putting a bumper sticker on it. Enzo joined the conversation, and as Eve packed her truck to go, they discussed each of the vehicle’s features. They also talked about purchasing types of high-powered rifles in Arizona that were not available in California, and Eve pleaded with Enzo to get hold of a particular rifle that she had been looking for and to resell it to her. Enzo, who lived near California’s border with Arizona, was a gun aficionado, but he protested that he needed to investigate California laws for arms sales and resales first. He needed be certain the sale wouldn’t come back to squeeze him. Eve, who wouldn’t take no for an answer, chided him for not knowing that in California you had to register handguns but not rifles, but Enzo didn’t budge. At the end of their exchange about trucks and guns, Enzo looked Eve in the eye and told her she wasn’t a woman. “You’re not a woman,” he repeated. “Last time I checked, I was,” Eve bantered back, adding, “I’m as straight as they come.” But Enzo got the last word: “In appearance only.” Eve smiled, disappeared into her truck, and bade us farewell with a good-natured “It was real.” As I helped Liz close up camp, I pondered how the wrath of the Minutemen against gung ho Minutewomen like Eve, Phyllis, and Shannon took many forms. Younger and cut from a different generational cloth than border grannies like Tammy, Liz, and Marge, these women unapologetically asserted their right to violate the norms of separate spheres. They refused to wear pink camo, practice good table manners, speak politely, or tread lightly around men. They refused to pay lip service to the satisfactions of being a stay-at-home wife and mother or a loving grandmother. They refused, literally and figuratively, to stay at home. But they paid for this privilege. Some men, like Larry, exacted their pound of flesh passive-aggressively. Others,

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like Enzo, did so outright. Together, though, men’s words and actions sought to stigmatize and exclude. Branded as overzealous (“unthinkingly enthusiastic”), overbearing, mentally unstable, and even freakish, some gung ho women, like Shannon, stopped going to Camp Patriot. Eve, however, went back for more, priding herself on being tough enough to take it.

Tough Enough to Take It

Bill wasn’t a Minuteman because, well, he wasn’t that type of person, Eve stated as she tried to convey to me exactly how different she and her husband were. The military wasn’t really his thing either, she claimed. Granted, he liked the jobs he did there, but he didn’t want to go into a war zone like those of Desert Storm. “Me?” she countered. “I couldn’t get there fast enough.” It was a balmy February midmorning out on the patio of Eve and Bill’s house in the Crystal Lake Country Club resort and golfing community, where they had lived since relocating to California a few years back. Eve blinked as her eyes adjusted to the daylight. By her own admission, she spent hours on Facebook and her blog during sleepless nights like last night, and she had dragged herself out of bed just in time for our interview. The day before, we had met for lunch in the nearby trendy metropolis that was famous as a haven for Hollywood celebrities and its pulsing gay subculture. I had intended to interview Eve and then Louise there that afternoon. When Louise phoned me to say she couldn’t keep our appointment, though, Eve invited me to spend the evening at their place and interview her the next day. The drive to Crystal Lake was short, but a study in contrasts. Lush gated golf communities that ringed the city gave way to desolate desertscapes punctuated by trailer parks as we headed toward Crystal Lake. Eve’s shiny red pickup zoomed past a brown-skinned youth skateboarding along the freeway and broken-down vehicles that littered the shoulder. We were passing through a hardscrabble area known among Californians, liberal and conservative alike, for its high crime rates, meth labs, and Mexican population. Eve turned onto a two-lane highway that practically dead-ended into the Crystal Lake Country Club, and then swung into the development through an ungated entrance. Medium-sized single-family homes in desert-toned stucco with rock gardens and terra-cotta tile roofs

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lined the winding cul-de-sacs encircling the artificial lake, clubhouse, and golf course. Though modest by the standards of its posh counterparts closer to the city, the development was a veritable island of white lower-middle-class luxury compared with its surroundings. But Eve disliked it. She loathed California in general—the people were too liberal, and the gun laws too strict—and agreed to move there only for Bill’s civilian job. And as for this particular neighborhood? Eve didn’t play golf, and the residents were too old, too boring, and too stuck-up for her, though she conceded that she had met the Minuteman who introduced her to Camp Patriot at a Christmas party down the street. Truth be told, the only reason they ended up in Crystal Lake Country Club was that it accepted pets, Eve told me, and Bill and Eve most definitely owned pets: two cats, three dogs, and a dozen tropical fish in an eighty-gallon tank that was Bill’s pride and joy, second only to his grandchildren. Just as Eve finished introducing me to their cats and dogs, Bill popped his head in the front door and bellowed, “Where’s my dinner, woman?!” He was joking, of course, because Eve didn’t do much cooking and was proud of the fact that Bill was the homemaker in their household. At camp, she made sure that everyone knew that the crock pot she had brought to aid Liz in the kitchen belonged to Bill (“Bill will kill me if I don’t bring it back!”), and she claimed she would never marry a foreigner, not because he was foreign but because “foreign men are the dominant figures in the household.” That setup wouldn’t suit her: “Well, not in my household!” Bill was a large man with gray hair and a darker complexion than Eve’s, a product of his partial Korean heritage. Home from work for the day, he changed into boxer shorts and his “Grandpa is Joe Fix-It” T-shirt, which showed Snoopy hammering away at Woodstock’s birdhouse, and padded around the house for the remainder of the evening. Eve took me to the clubhouse for dinner, leaving Bill to fend for himself, and when we returned, she retired to their bedroom to check her Facebook messages. Eve needed her space at home, but Bill was happy I was there, he assured me. He worried about Eve’s reclusiveness and wished she would have friends over more often. Bill fiddled with the fish tank in the living room and made conversation easily. He told me about the many foreign-exchange students they had hosted over the years and how, if it hadn’t been for Eve (here he lowered his voice in mock secrecy and pointed to the bedroom instead of pronouncing her name out loud), he would have liked to have more children. Bill adored their

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two grandchildren and regaled me with stories from the time when they and their mother (Eve and Bill’s daughter) came to live with them for several months while their father was deployed in Afghanistan. He was especially partial to the youngest, his granddaughter, who called him “Papa” and knew how to dial him up from her mother’s phone. I couldn’t help overhearing Bill’s end of one such conversation the next morning. He plied his granddaughter with questions about what had happened to her forehead in the picture he had received most recently on his phone, commiserated with his grown daughter about the trials and tribulations of getting kids to clean their rooms, then proffered his best parenting tip: hide candy in the children’s rooms to motivate them to pick up. Eve rejoined us, wrapped in a thick royal purple bathrobe and carrying a photo album and a cardboard box filled with trophies and ribbons. I expected her to exercise bragging rights about her children and grandchildren, but the album featured her dogs, not her human family. Eve loved her English mastiffs, and she described in detail each of the dogs she had owned and shown over the years (names, pedigree, individual quirks, competition history, etc.). Indeed, in the days I spent with her, Eve shared more about her four-legged friends than her children, though she did mention that her twenty-four-year-old daughter was a stay-at-home mom and that her thirty-year-old son was gay and lived with his partner in Northern California. Eve slipped the reference to her son into our lunchtime conversation while pointing out the gay waiters at the restaurant, who, she informed me, performed in drag in the evening. She liked the gay scene in town and told me she had fraternized with quite a few gay people in her lifetime. There were a lot of them in the military—almost all the women were lesbians, Eve claimed—and she was not proud of how they were treated. It was getting late for a weeknight, but Eve didn’t need to be anywhere in particular tomorrow morning. Or afternoon, for that matter. She had been unemployed for almost a year now, ever since the fuel cell company where she had worked laid her off. And except for the Minutemen, she was not much of a joiner, so there were no meetings or other activities on her agenda. We mulled over the options for the two of us for the following afternoon, and Eve rejected each in turn. Bill thought we might have fun at the music festival in town, but Eve objected that there would be “wall-to-wall Mexicans” with a lot of out-ofcontrol kids. I proposed that she take me target shooting, but Eve said she didn’t know of any nearby gun clubs or ranges; the last time she

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had fired her gun was down at the border. Plus, she didn’t like wasting her good ammo at ranges—hollow tips were for shooting people, not targets. Bill made a final pitch, for shopping at the outlet mall or the boutiques downtown. Eve just shrugged. She was getting restless—it was time to check Facebook again—so we put our deliberations on hold. Before we all turned in, Bill called my attention to his knack for home decorating. Had I noticed that each room in the house was in a different style? I had to agree that with its plaster of Paris cherub statuettes and plastic bunches of grapes arranged on the buffet, its rococo mirror, and candlesticks that resembled Corinthian columns, the dining room evoked ancient Rome; and the living room, with its stone hearth, high ceiling, and exposed beams, suggested a Swiss chalet. Bill showed me the way to the guest room and told me that there he was going for African. Eve had already retired to the master bedroom next door, but if I needed anything, Bill added, just let them know. As I settled in under the safari-themed bedspread and switched off the elephant-shaped lamp on the bedside table, memories of Eve’s sociability at camp months ago clashed with my impressions of her present unhappiness. The Eve I knew from Camp Patriot was outgoing and enthusiastic, and leaned into life, but the Eve in the room next door struck me as lonely and at a loss. And no wonder. She had enlisted straight out of high school at the age of eighteen, and the military and her work were the only world she had ever really known. She was not used to putting down roots, making a home with Bill, and having time on her hands, let alone in a state where she couldn’t even get a permit to carry a concealed weapon. But at Camp Patriot, the weight of learning to be retired, learning to be civilian, and learning to be conservative in ultraliberal California was temporarily suspended. Eve could become her old self again, if only for a few days. The next morning during our interview, Eve narrated the story of her induction into the Camp Patriot Minutemen in detail. “It was horrible” were the first three words out of her mouth. The dogs basked beside us on the patio as the midmorning sun warmed the concrete slab to their liking, and Bill approached with two tall glasses of iced tea to partly alleviate the noontime heat. Like any other muster, the plan had been to do recon and tracking in the morning and then patrol at night, but that didn’t happen, thanks to the boys and their toys. Actually, it had taken only one toy to distract them from the mission, Eve explained—a new rifle that one of the Minutemen had brought to show off and that all the rest of them, “of course,” had had to try out. “Oh, let’s

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go fire this weapon,” Eve droned in a low voice, doing her best dumbguy impression, and then likened the gun to “a piece of candy they’ve been deprived of after so many years.” Besides, some of the guys hadn’t wanted to go to out with “a female” in the first place, so they weren’t in any hurry to head out to the field anyhow. When I asked how she could tell, she looked at me incredulously and laughed: “God, I’ve been in the military twenty years!” Eve added that she was very good at reading body language, but then backtracked. It wasn’t that the guys hadn’t been nice to her, mind you. They just hadn’t known her well enough to trust her yet. And who wouldn’t err on the side of caution? Eve persisted and finally made it out on patrol, but the guys underwhelmed her with their apathy and lack of professionalism. “To me, sitting on a lawn chair at the top of a mountain with night-vision goggles is not exactly what I call recon.” Plus, somebody would always start talking. “It’s like, in the back of my mind, ‘Shut up! You don’t come out here and talk!’” Of course, guys didn’t like to be told what to do, she continued, so she kept her mouth shut, put up with their incompetence, and powered through. And she was glad she did. Eve paused, gulped her iced tea, and lit a cigarette as she anticipated bringing the story to a climax. The guys started to get to know her and—at her very next muster—George agreed to join her to “lay up” right on the border, just as she had been taught in the military. “‘Hey,’ I says, ‘you wanna go down and get closer to the border?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, sure!’ . . . So George and I start trekking down the hill and everything. I’m in prone position, George is standing, and neither one of us is talking. It was a real recon operation. And this is what I joined for.” When I asked Eve point-blank whether there were any obstacles that Minutewomen faced that Minutemen didn’t, she repeated what she had already told me about the military: “With a woman, it goes back to proving yourself.” “You always had to bust your butt harder than the guys,” she recalled. And while a lot of women slacked off (like the guys) or screwed their coworkers to get ahead, Eve had made a name for herself as hardworking and trustworthy. “Did I have a badass attitude? Hell yeah!” But the military helped her tame it and turn it into an asset. By the end of her career, she was working for senior officers, not enlisted personnel, and she had achieved the rank of staff sergeant, she claimed. Living proof that a woman—even one from “Polecat Hollow,” Eve’s nickname for her Appalachian hometown, and even one who had never been to college—could succeed in spite of the obstacles. You just had to be strong. Eve had signaled her veneration of strong women in other ways,

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even before we sat down to interview. As when she jumped to Sarah Palin’s defense the night before at the country club lounge, where we had dined. Sarah Palin was Eve’s idol, I deduced, when Eve overheard an older white man in golf attire who was drinking at an adjoining table remark loudly that Palin “isn’t very bright,” and Eve burst into the conversation to shout him down. As our interview turned to the topic of the Tea Party, she reminded me, “Nobody better put Sarah Palin down in front of me!” Eve loved Palin because she was a strong woman who was tough enough to survive in a man’s world. “Nobody’s gonna mess with her!” Above all, she had proved that she could take all the “dirty shit” men slung at her. “Like they attacked her daughter when they found out she was pregnant. Big friggin’ deal. ‘How many of your daughters got pregnant?’ But do you ever hear anything about it?” Bill appeared with two plates, each bearing a meticulously arranged homemade tuna fish salad sandwich, a bag of chips, and an individually wrapped chocolate, but before I turned off the tape recorder, I had to ask, did Eve consider herself a feminist? That question always elicited some combination of shock, reproach, and a resounding no from the border grannies, but Eve hesitated. Yes and no, she told me. Everybody should be given the chance to prove themselves, and she would support a woman who could do the job, 100 percent. But there were some jobs that men would never let women do. For example, you would never see a woman Navy SEAL, Eve conjectured. “Men are never going to let that happen.” They just wouldn’t, so why try to change things? To make matters worse, not every woman could do every job, even when they wanted to or thought they could, and when they didn’t get what they wanted, they “start[ed] screaming, ‘Well, I’m a woman!’ ” And this was what Eve didn’t like about feminism. “I don’t think women should use that to get what they want. And a lot of them do. . . . You have women out there who make a bad name for the rest of us because they are feminists.” In other words, Eve was a proponent of a sort of do-it-yourself feminism that advocated for strong women who were smart enough to choose their battles wisely, worked harder than men, overcame the obstacles placed in their paths without complaint, and stoically endured the abuse meted out along the way. This feminism rejected the oldfashioned notion that a woman’s place was in the home, but accepted the inevitability of the structural inequalities that made it difficult to succeed anywhere else. In its gendered role reversal, Eve and Bill’s relationship flew in the face of presumptions that men were natural war-

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riors and women nurturing helpmates, as did Eve’s ability to break into the male world of the military and the Minutemen. And Eve celebrated these achievements as evidence of women’s empowerment. But Eve’s feminism was also a feminism that partly attributed failure to weakness and excoriated women who publicly decried the gender discrimination and double standards that persisted. Eve knew that Sarah Palin faced harsher moral judgment and more mudslinging than men who had come close to grasping political power, but she was not prepared to call it misogyny, for fear of betraying her fierce individualism, skepticism about change, and conservative credentials. When I pressed the point about her feminism, Eve responded cryptically that some people said that she had liberal views even though she wasn’t a liberal, “because there’s a lot of things I agree with but understand why these things aren’t going to change.” Change, apparently, was for liberals. Few other Minutewomen defied gender norms grounded in separate spheres quite like Eve, but she was not alone in her do-it-yourself equal-opportunity outlook. “My attitude,” Liz informed me, “is men and women are the same. . . . If anybody’s capable of doing a job, let ’em do it . . . but they got to prove they can do it.” Nearly twenty years Eve’s senior, Liz couldn’t physically keep up with the younger women anymore, but she, too, fancied herself a tough cookie and had only unkind words for women who were weaker and less self-sufficient than she was. “The one thing I don’t like,” she told me about Camp Patriot, “is that you get women that are ‘Oh, I’m so helpless!’” And when Liz learned I had been consorting with women like Lisa and Janet and Pat, she drew the line between Minutewomen and border widows in no uncertain terms. So you have been interviewing Minuteman wives, she asked disapprovingly, reminding me that real Minutewomen weren’t homebound. Real Minutewomen were tough enough to go to the border and spend serious time at Camp Patriot, with or without their husbands. Similarly, Tammy attributed the glass ceiling that women hit in some fields to their lack of strength. In the military, for example, they simply couldn’t haul sixty- or eighty-pound packs like men could, she told me. “That’s not sexist, that’s reality,” Tammy concluded, then, like Eve, exonerated Minutemen of any blame for how they treated women: “Same thing with the Minutemen. . . . They didn’t, like, shun women, but it took a tough woman to stay in there, because it was a man’s world.” By the time our interview was winding down, I was in awe of the freedom that Eve had gained from the narrow gender constraints put

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on conservative women, but I was also cognizant of the price she had paid for that freedom. She told me she hadn’t talked to her mother for over ten years, was estranged from most of Bill’s family, and couldn’t relate to her old friends who had contented themselves with raising children and grandchildren. In fact, most of her friends these days were online. Bill disappeared back into the house, and when Eve thought no one was looking, she fed her sandwich to the dogs. She hadn’t had much of an appetite lately, except for the shots of Johnny Walker Black that she downed at each meal we ate together. Soon, she asked for a break from recording our interview and headed inside: to pop her “happy pills,” as she called them and, it went without saying, to check Facebook. Contrary to popular perceptions of rightist movements as monolithically masculinist and traditionalist in their views about gender, this chapter demonstrates that the Minuteman movement was a space where diverse understandings of women’s proper place in society— including but not limited to a separate-spheres ideology—coexisted and frequently clashed. Shifting focus from the Minutewomen whom I call border grannies to Minutewomen known around camp as gung ho highlights these differences and their consequences. All Minutewomen—indeed, all aging women, I would argue—bore the brunt of ageism and sexism, but those who chose to enter this male-dominated sphere on men’s terms bore the heaviest burden of all. Women such as Phyllis, Eve, and Shannon, though, who refused to offer up the requisite degree of deference and automatic respect, came perilously close to beating men at their own game. Gung ho women believed in the equality of the sexes, rejected the cult of domesticity, and demonstrated women’s power by breaking gender barriers in their careers and in their homes. For these reasons, I refer to the gender ideology they subscribe to as feminist. These ideas and practices, however, stood in tension with their blind faith in the existence of a level playing field; their elevation of masculine-like strength, toughness, and tenacity above other moral qualities; their denigration of so-called weak women; and their insistence that the ability to persist and prove oneself was all that was needed to succeed. Though not identical, this assemblage of beliefs bears a strong resemblance to forms of feminism invented by the Right and referred to as equity, individualist, libertarian, or freedom feminism (Deckman

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2016; DiBranco 2015). These conservative brands of feminism, writes the scholar-activist Alex DiBranco, constitute a “dangerously legitimizing female face for misogynist ideology” (2017, 11). How so? In their absolute aversion to weakness, I suggest, Minutewomen like Eve inevitably if unwittingly endorsed the notion that, to put it crudely, it was better for men to grab a p——y than to be one, and better for gung ho women to praise this audacity than to cry foul. After all, they were—and had to prove that they were—tough enough to take it.

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M

inuteman activity had peaked by the time I attended my first muster, in 2010 (Beirich 2013), and old-timers were pining for the heady days when Camp Patriot brimmed with activity, a time when Minutemen called in sightings of thirty to forty IAs (illegal aliens) each muster and the Border Patrol actually did something about them. But since 2008, the economy had been in the toilet, and an alleged foreigner was in the White House, and even the handful of die-hard volunteers who still came to camp each month were losing hope. When I made my last visit to Camp Patriot, in February 2013, their mood was gloomier still. Obama had been elected again, and rumors had it that he had ordered the Border Patrol to “stand down,” to turn a blind eye to unauthorized crossings. A bipartisan bill to provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already in the United States—“amnesty,” the Minutemen called it—was in the works, and would—they believed— beckon every Juan, José, and María in Mexico to cross over. And to top it all off, the Sandy Hook tragedy had renewed a national debate about gun control, which, for the Minutemen, raised the specter of a gun grab by the federal government. Dwindling in numbers and deeply demoralized for these reasons, the most mild-mannered Minutemen and Minutewomen I knew were talking of defending themselves to the death should the government try to take their guns away, of stockpiling AR-15s, of pulling together a real militia. By 2014, Camp Patriot had closed for good, and the media confidently declared that the Minuteman movement—“perhaps the most visible civilian attempt to stop illegal immigration” in recent decades—had “all but disappeared” (Medrano 2014). Where, exactly, had the Minutemen gone? Like the pumped-up

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rhetoric I had heard at Camp Patriot in its death throes, some journalists suggested that the Minutemen had disappeared from public sight by going underground, channeling their anti-immigrant animus and militaristic infrastructure into more nefarious clandestine organizations (Bauer 2016; Hoffman 2016; Neiwert 2013). This chapter, however, explores a different, less sensationalist possibility; namely, that rank-and-file Minutemen simply returned home and took the border back with them. This possibility came to my attention through a close examination of the activist arcs of women who were instrumental in the earliest phases of the Minutemen and who, by 2010, were no longer frequenting Camp Patriot or taking part in the border patrols that were the movement’s hallmark. For all intents and purposes, these women had abandoned their political activities at the border, but they did not abandon border politics altogether. Rather, they carried their activism to the suburban subdivisions, high-desert outposts, and small cities and towns they called home. The portraits of these women tell two interrelated stories relevant to the current political moment. First, these vignettes illustrate the dynamics that link the dissolution of the Minutemen, the rise of the Tea Party, and, by extension, the election of Donald Trump. Scholars have documented how the Tea Party, in apparent disarray in 2010, contributed to Trump’s victory by cultivating a grassroots activist base with the “motivation, skills and political mindedness” necessary for a successful campaign (Rohlinger and Bunnage 2017, 9). This base worked through Congress and crafted a new, distinctly uncivil political style on Twitter, which was deployed expertly by Trump (Gervais and Morris 2018). We also know that during this period, a multitude of highprofile Minuteman leaders jumped ship to the Tea Party movement (Burghart and Zeskind 2012; Hoffman 2016; Holthouse 2011). The best-known examples, Arizona’s Chris Simcox and California’s Jim Gilchrist and Tim Donnelly, found in the Tea Party a platform from which to relaunch or resurrect fledgling political careers that had been tarnished by allegations of financial impropriety and a murder case, crimes that had damaged the Minutemen’s reputation. Some who hitched their wagons to the Tea Party, like Tim Donnelly, discussed in this chapter, kept their “hard-core nativist personas” intact (Holthouse 2011). Others, however, attempted to rebrand themselves as more mainstream conservatives through association with the Tea Party, broadening their political agendas to include issues other than immigration. Although we know a fair bit about overlapping leadership among

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the two groups, we know much less about the connection between the Minutemen and the Tea Party at the grass roots. Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind (2010) show that concurrently with the Minutemen’s decline, five of the six major Tea Party organizations active at the time adopted nativist demands. Moreover, Burghart and Zeskind (2012) argue persuasively that this move or transfer to the Tea Party strengthened the nativist agenda by delivering its message to a larger audience and—by folding it into a more holistic platform—making it more resilient and difficult to oppose. But how and why, exactly, did this transfer occur? What did the rebranding and repurposing of the Minutemen look like on the ground, and how were Minutewomen, in particular, implicated? The other story this chapter tells concerns what Monica Varsanyi (2011) calls the rescaling of our national boundary through attempts to make and enforce immigration policy locally. The US Constitution stipulates that making and enforcing immigration law is the purview of the federal legislative and executive branches, but state and municipal governments have felt increasing pressure since 2000 to assume these regulatory and policing functions (Stuesse and Coleman 2014; Provine et al. 2016; Varsanyi 2010). By targeting different levels of government, and with different consequences for the communities they lived in, each of the Minutewomen profiled here played a part in this process of rescaling border politics as they brought the border back home. Some of these Minutewomen brought their alarmist views and determination to restrict immigration back to newly built suburban enclaves or remote rural areas that lacked dense social networks, a palpable sense of community, or a history of sustained labor migration to the area. This relative geographic and social isolation was the case for Bella and April, both transplants to the places where they resided, and both engaged in activism trained less on policing immigrants in their local communities than on promoting more restrictive measures at the state level and electing state representatives who would champion those efforts. Both told me they had attended Minuteman-sponsored protests at day-labor sites, intended to shame employers who hired undocumented workers, but neither confronted employers who were also their neighbors (Bella, for example, admitted she had surveilled daylabor hiring at a Home Depot parking lot in the next county over), nor did they target industries central to the economic well-being of their hometowns. In short, their activism was spatially and socially at least one step removed from their neighbors or places of residence.

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In places with different demographic compositions and histories, however, the localization of anti-immigrant activism yielded a border politics that was up close and personal, and deeply divisive. This was the case in small cities and towns in California’s fertile central corridor and along the coast—like Joanna’s and Ellie’s hometown, Las Mesas—where a continuous agricultural expansion dependent on migrant labor had sustained a century of virtually nonstop Mexican settlement and, in recent decades, a steady flow of Central American arrivals as well. In Las Mesas, controversies instigated by the local Minuteman chapter, which Joanna headed, reverberated throughout the community, splitting it into fractious halves. One defended immigrant rights and expounded the virtues of diversity; the other, in increasingly strident terms, demanded respect for the rule of law. Residents rallied to do away with the “imported poverty” (as Joanna called it) and dependency on city services that illegal immigration allegedly caused, by mobilizing for stricter enforcement of federal labor laws. In contrast to Bella and April’s activism, however, their struggle played out in the city council, and the employers affected were childhood friends and neighbors. The polarization of the community that ensued foreshadowed, in a microcosm, the polarization of the nation under Trump.

Bella Stevenson: Widow of the Reagan Revolution

“Don’t know if you are familiar with the publication National Review, but they are sponsoring the cruise,” Bella e-mailed me in October 2012. “I have subscribed to that magazine for almost 45 years. William Buckley was the founder and editor until he passed away a few years back. He is my hero. Ditto Ronald Reagan.” And so began my political education with Bella. If you asked anyone at Camp Patriot about women who had made the California Minuteman organization what it was, the conversation would turn to Bella. Old-timers remembered her friendship with Joanna, formed back in the days when Camp Patriot was nothing but a place to pitch your tent, and the two of them spent weeks at a time there away from their husbands in order to keep the camp up and running when other volunteers headed home for the workweek. Many fondly recalled her legendary hospitality—the endless supply of breakfast sandwiches and coffee she served to volunteers coming off the grave-

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yard shift, or the room she made for other ladies to sleep in her doublewide RV. Even Minutemen who had never met Bella knew how she had become like a dutiful daughter who cared for Kurt, the widowed World War II veteran beloved by everyone at Camp Patriot but neglected by his family. But only Harry’s characterization of Bella as an educated and committed conservative even remotely prepared me for her intense patriotism and devotion to political life. Bella and I hadn’t met yet—she hadn’t been to Camp Patriot since her now ex-husband used her Minuteman involvement to paint her as a racist in their messy divorce proceedings and she lost the RV in the settlement—but once Liz put in a good word for me, she was happy for me to visit. The only catch was that she was going on a cruise in early November, a postpresidential election cruise with over thirty prominent conservative intellectuals as the distinguished guests and speakers, people such as James Buckley, William Buckley’s brother and a former US senator. Later, in person, Bella recounted how she had cut her teeth as a political activist while campaigning for James Buckley back in the 1960s when she lived in upstate New York. In her introductory e-mail, though, she focused her energy on conveying the excitement of her upcoming travel plans. There would be cocktail parties, seminars, and late-night smokers with these conservative icons. It didn’t matter where the cruise was actually going, she explained. The point was to experience either the thrill of Mitt Romney’s victory or the agony of his defeat in the company of these great men. It was only October, though, Bella pointed out. If I could come before the election, I could help her put up yard signs and work the phone bank for the Republican candidate for the state assembly in her district, whom she had been campaigning for. As an added bonus, Michael Reagan was coming to the nearby West Ridge Republican Women Federated this month, and Bella promised to get me a ticket if I could coordinate my visit with those dates. Of all of Ronald Reagan’s children, Michael was Bella’s favorite, even though he was from the president’s first marriage. Michael always adored his father and never, ever disgraced the family. I would learn soon enough that decorum and self-discipline meant the world to Bella, and that she despaired that younger generations had lost these values. Bella brought our e-mail exchange to a close by inviting me to stay at her home and asking for my breakfast and drink preferences (“Please remind me what you like to drink: coke, juice, etc., coffee or tea in the morning? red or white [wine] or beer? If you don’t tell me, I will buy all of them.

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What do you eat for breakfast?”). Her over-the-top generosity was evident before I even stepped foot in her home. Bella had recently relocated from Northern to Southern California and lived in a gated golf community. When I arrived on her doorstep at midmorning, the desert heat was already rising from the pavement in waves. Bella hobbled out to greet me. She had broken an ankle since we scheduled my visit, but insisted that I stay with her nonetheless. Settling into a wheelchair that she maneuvered with difficulty across the flagstone patio and into the narrow front door of her (thankfully) onestory rental unit, Bella led me straight to her kitchen, waving off my feeble offers to help, and ordered me to make myself at home. Two shih tzu mixes she had rescued from the pound vied for her attention at the base of her wheelchair. Except for the chicken breasts and ground beef she boiled for them, Bella didn’t cook anymore, but she had stocked her refrigerator with bagels, cream cheese, cans of Starbucks frappuccino, beer, and a six-pack of yogurt in anticipation of my visit. An attractive woman wearing black tights, a red Rose Bowl hoodie sweatshirt (that she offered me as a souvenir from Southern California when I departed), pink lipstick to match, and her tinted blond hair pulled back in a perky ponytail, Bella might not have seemed to be on the cusp of turning seventy. But like Liz, she had been well into her sixties when she first joined the Minutemen, years earlier, and she, too, was already a grandmother at the time. As if to prove it, on the fridge in front of us—in a magnetic frame that read, “Inside every old person there is a young person wondering what happened”—was a photo of a much younger Bella cradling her youngest granddaughter. But this was one of the rare snapshots of her grandchildren displayed in Bella’s home, because her relationship with her grown children was strained, and she hadn’t seen her grandchildren in forever. Nothing if not discreet, Bella wouldn’t badmouth them directly, but her eye rolls and the innuendos she dropped throughout my visit communicated that she didn’t approve of her children’s spouses and she especially didn’t approve of their values as parents. Her eldest, Claire, had been a professional model, but now made her children the center of her universe, and not in a good way. Claire and her husband spoiled their children rotten, and when times got tough—as when their fourteenyear-old “acted up” (I was spared the details)—they relied on others— “a facility” (again, no details)—to do their dirty work. Bella was particularly unsympathetic with this outsourcing of a child’s upbringing, because she had managed to maintain discipline in her household even

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without a man around. Bella’s first husband left her in 1970—they had three children under the age of five at the time—but not before uprooting her from the East Coast and moving the family to California. As she backed out of the kitchen and wheeled past a sitting room partitioned off from dogs and pedestrian traffic by a waist-high canvas screen, Bella apologized for the cramped quarters, the seventies look that she thought the place exuded, and the fact that her Cape Cod– style furniture was out of place. This arrangement was only temporary, she explained, part of a healing move away from Northern California after her most recent divorce put an end to much that she had cherished about her previous life. By the 1990s, Bella had remarried a successful investment banker and, with her children getting older and more independent, had finally found the time and money to return to the things she loved most. She remembered those days as a time when she “really, really got into full gear .  .  . politically,” joining the San José Republican Women, attending the national Republican Convention, and demonstrating when Bill Clinton came to town. She missed those days, and the sitting room seemed to remind her of them and the good life she had led in a spacious home and redwood-shaded backyard in a posh neighborhood near Silicon Valley. Two overstuffed love seats accented with throw pillows surrounded an antique wooden end table, and in one corner stood an upright piano with sheet music for J. S. Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” prominently propped open. A china closet filled with gilded plates and a collection of crystal decanters and glasses was wedged into another corner, and the artwork on the walls depicted English hunting scenes and a cornucopia brimming with fruit. Bella made it to the end of the hallway and beckoned me to follow her into the den. It was dark, but when my eyes adjusted, I realized we had entered the inner sanctum of Bella’s political religion. Framed newspaper clippings with boldface headlines came into focus: the front page of a newspaper dated November 7, 1984, with the headline “Reagan wins big” and an image of a young Ron and Nancy clasping their hands over their heads in victory; another that read “Impeached!,” accompanied by a photo of Bill Clinton, head buried in his hands in defeat. On the same wall hung a commemorative Ronald Reagan Presidential Library medal, a headshot of the president, and a quotation from his second inaugural address about our American heritage—“our sound”—being “hopeful, idealistic, big-hearted, decent and fair,” all mounted behind glass. The newest issue of the monthly National Re-

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view rested under the TV remote on an end table next to a leather recliner. Days later, when Bella finally put her feet up in my presence and turned on the TV, I caught sight of more Republican kitsch stashed in the cabinets of her entertainment center. There was a pair of vanity slippers, one sewn to look like Nancy Reagan tucked into bed and the other like Ronald Reagan in a red-and-white-striped nightcap. There were also star-spangled elephants of various sizes, and—my personal favorite—a set of nested Russian dolls in the likenesses of (in descending order) Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Hillary Clinton, and a saxophone. When I stated the obvious aloud—that Bella appeared to be a huge Ronald Reagan fan—she confirmed that he was, indeed, her hero. She had been a newlywed in upstate New York when she started following his rise on the national political scene in the mid-1960s after his speech endorsing Barry Goldwater. She had adored him then, not—like the members of her bridge club who had fawned over him for his good looks and Hollywood-idol status—because of his celebrity but because of what he stood for. Bella’s faith in Reagan’s doctrine of peace through strength—a strong military, strong businesses, strong leaders, strong families, and, now more than ever, strong borders—remained unshakable after all these years, but she couldn’t say the same for her confidence in the GOP. In fact, it was her despair over conservative leaders’ lack of resolve to defend the country and the American way at the US border after 9/11 that had motivated her to check out the Minutemen. “They had the fence-building thing right on the border,” Bella recalled. “If the government wasn’t going to build the fence, we would start building it.” Then, to add insult to injury, instead of praising those efforts, George W. Bush branded the Minutemen “vigilantes.” Bella had not yet forgiven or forgotten that betrayal. With her ankle in a cast, Bella couldn’t drive, so we nixed our plans to go to the campaign headquarters where she volunteered. Instead, over the course of the next few days, we spent many hours stretched across the cushioned redwood deck furniture on Bella’s patio. Of late, she had taken on the project of sorting through the plastic bins—one of hundreds, she claimed—packed hastily during her retreat from Northern California. Now, to pass time with me out on the patio, she pried one open and began to unearth its contents. She pulled silver-plated serving spoons and forks, small crystal serving dishes, candlesticks, and even a silver candlesnuffer out of shredded newspapers and into the sunlight. She used to entertain a lot back then, she

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explained, but would soon ship all this stuff off to Goodwill or “whatever.” I suggested that she might pass a few things on to her children, but Bella dismissed the possibility out of hand. Her children preferred “Pottery Barn” over “classical,” she claimed sarcastically. In fact, of all the artifacts Bella recovered from the bin, the only one she planned to keep was the 1940 vintage edition of Life magazine that featured the evacuation of Dunkirk, which she planned give to Kurt, the eighty-four-year-old World War II veteran whom she had met at Camp Patriot years ago. Bella had been busy corresponding with Kurt’s relatives that week to collect photos and other memorabilia for a surprise, this-is-your-life eighty-fifth birthday party to be held at Camp Patriot. When we went inside, Bella showed me a photograph of a young Kurt in dress uniform that she picked up from the stack of items on her dining room table, and then reminisced about an era when Americans sacrificed what needed to be sacrificed in times of crisis. That was patriotism, back when the GOP was the party of patriots. But those days were gone, Bella lamented. And this realization was what had prompted Bella to throw in her lot with the Minutemen: the urgency of lifting a finger, of actually doing patriotism. Looking back on it, Bella laughed at the implausibility of her leaving behind her urbane life in Silicon Valley to become a Minuteman. At first, she hadn’t been certain women would be welcome at Camp Patriot. Once she had seen pictures of women at camp, though, she went down for an inaugural event and committed to stay for a month, without realizing that the hotel room she had booked was an hour’s drive from camp. Bella was not the outdoorsy type, and she laughed as she remembered pitching a ten-dollar K-Mart tent that she shared with her two dogs, just to be closer to camp. That had happened, she explained, way before they had refurbished the historic building that would serve as their clubhouse and bunkhouse, and way before they had anything resembling a meal plan. She stuck it out in the cold, went on patrol with the best of them, and even learned to carry a gun. Honestly, though, she had never been as interested in conducting “ops” and “comms” and “recon” as she had been in making a political statement about the border and making it real for folks back home. And that had meant convincing others that the Minutemen weren’t “nutcases” or “camo-clad radicals.” At Camp Patriot, she got to broadcast that message through CNN’s Anderson Cooper when he came for a PR event for the fence-building initiative and asked her about George Bush’s vigilante remark. “Do I look like a vigilante? I have five grand-

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children!” Bella recalled responding. Some of the people in her social circles got it, like the lady in her bridge club who had invited Bella to speak about the Minutemen to the Daughters of the American Revolution. But others thought she was “out there.” At the time, after all, where Bella lived had been surrounded by Northern California’s sanctuary cities and hotbeds of radicalism such as Berkeley. Sometimes she had had to be “very selective” about whom she even mentioned the Minutemen to. Even now, resettled in a part of California friendlier to political conservatives, Bella had to watch her step. At the dog park in her development, for example, where a gentleman had recently asked her to happy hour. She was tempted to accept his offer, but imagined that the dog park was teeming with liberals and wondered whether he was one of them. What would he think about her Minuteman connection and conservative politics? That she was ordinary Bella by day and a camoclad radical by night? Evening fell, and as she opened a bottle of wine and stroked a lap dog with a pink diamond-studded collar, no image was further from my mind than Bella as a camo-clad radical. She lit candles that flickered over the cheese and crackers she had set out for us, and then phoned Jared to ask him to join us. Jared was the manager of the nearby Quality Inn, where Bella had stayed for an extended period when she first arrived in the area, and he was her only close friend there. Before Jared arrived, Bella told me she had been trying to persuade him to accompany her on the postelection cruise and had even offered to pay his way. Jared was both gay and young enough to be her son, Bella clarified, lest I get the wrong idea. He had moved there to shake off his very midwestern, Lutheran upbringing and come to terms with his identity as a gay man. As we settled in to wait for Jared, I pondered what strange bedfellows he and Bella made, what with their age difference, not to mention Bella’s attachment to tradition and her veneration of conservative values. Then again, though, maybe not so strange. Both were transplants to this place and, I suspected, were trying to make new lives in the wake of loss. Twice divorced, estranged from children and grandchildren, grappling with getting old, downsizing and downwardly mobile, Bella was facing the loss of family relationships, former social circles, the trappings of an upper-class lifestyle, and youth. But she was facing the loss of something else, too, I thought, as she passed me a white cocktail napkin embellished in green with the Reagan family crest, a

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souvenir from her last trip to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum and the Ronald Reagan Pub there. The Reagan Revolution was over, and Bella had lost her trust in the GOP as the champion of patriotism, defender of democracy, and protector of the American way. And the Minutemen, with their rhetoric equating unauthorized border crossings with terrorism and the abdication of political leadership with the GOP, had had no small part in removing the scales from her eyes. Bella was a widow of the Reagan Revolution, cut adrift from the institutional moorings of political conservatism that her beloved GOP had provided. As I would learn in the next day or two, however, Bella wasn’t quite ready to embrace the Tea Party as her post-Minuteman political home. For the time being, at least, she was leaving that path to patriotism to people like April and Denny Foster.

April Foster: Post-Minuteman Patriotism, Tea Party– Style

Although Bella’s social circles had narrowed over the years, she did stay in touch with some of the folks she had met at Camp Patriot. There was Joanna, for instance, her closest friend from back in the day, and April and Denny, who lived just a few hours away from Bella’s new home in Southern California. My constant flow of questions about Minutewomen got Bella thinking that maybe we should pay April a visit so that I could interview her, too. Bella hadn’t seen April in months. April rarely left her home, Bella alleged, and Bella would love to get together with her, so she texted April and then arranged to pay the teenager who had been running errands for her that week to drive us. The next morning, we loaded the dog carriers (Bella didn’t go anywhere without her dogs) into the back of her maroon SUV, with “Romney/Ryan 2012” and “Nobama 2012” bumper stickers, and headed “up the mountain” to the high desert. This part of California was a pit, Bella warned me as we set off on our impromptu road trip. To pass the time along the way, she insisted that she and I compete to make words from the letters of the license plates of the cars in front of us (Bella bested me every time); when she tired of that game, she switched on the David Webb show on Patriot Radio for the remainder of our journey. Eventually, the winding four-lane highway we had been ascend-

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ing at a rapid clip leveled off into a straight two-lane roadway lined with big-box stores, strip malls, and fast-food restaurants. As the area around us became more populated, evidence of the upcoming elections cropped up. There were banners and yard signs galore for the heated Eighth Congressional District race, but the one that immediately riveted my attention promoted Gregg Imus for Congress. Gregg, I had heard, was one of the founders of the California Minutemen. As we cruised by a banner affi xed to a telephone pole that featured a life-size Minuteman, musket across the knee, I was expecting Bella to point it out to me with pride. She didn’t, though. Instead, she lit a cigarette and complained about our teenage escort’s overly cautious driving until he sped up slightly and we turned onto the unpaved road where April and Denny lived. A few miles in, Bella directed us to be on the lookout for a small house with a red barn to the side. Apparently, we passed right by it, because we were soon heading into uninhabited desert with no other dwellings in sight, churning up a veritable dust storm as we went. By the time we had turned around and circled back, April and Denny were in their driveway, ready to wave us down. A flock of lifesize decoy geese adorned the otherwise barren front yard. Later, April told me that she and Denny acquired the whole lot for seventy dollars at an auction. April was a white woman of medium build in her late forties or early fifties who, in her black T-shirt, tan shorts, white bobby socks, and black flats, exuded an air of no nonsense. Simple diamondstud earrings peeked out from under her straight black hair with graying roots and curled-under bangs that poofed up in a distinct 1980s look. A matching diamond-studded pendant in the shape of a cross hung from a thin chain necklace, just beside the Romney/Ryan pin that spelled out the candidates’ names in block lettering filled with rhinestones. The front of her T-shirt read, “Ban Illegals, Not Guns.” As if in uniform, Denny, too, was wearing a black T-shirt and tan shorts, but the sleeves had been cut off to expose his biceps, and the front of his shirt read, “Special Forces: One Shot, One Kill.” April and Denny ushered us into their home, a one-story ranch they built themselves, April informed me with no small measure of satisfaction. Just inside the door, a hunting jacket and hat hung on a coat rack next to a wall clock with an American flag background. The common area consisted of three small adjoining rooms painted bright blue, a den, a living room and kitchen-dinette, and a hallway that elbowed past the kitchen and dead-ended in a pair of bedrooms and a single

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bathroom. A shelf running a few feet below the ceiling around the circumference of the common area was lined with antique-looking novelties. April and Denny lived there by themselves—they didn’t have children—so although their home was small, it was spacious and charming, I thought. When I said so to Bella in private on our way home, though, she begged to differ. Charming? That wasn’t how she would describe it, she sniped. Our exhausting journey had worn away at Bella’s impeccable manners just enough to let her class prejudice show through. We settled around April and Denny’s kitchen table for small talk before I asked April about recording an interview. We had come bearing gifts—bags of burgers from town—and as we began to eat, April, Denny, and Bella checked in with one another about the whereabouts and well-being of friends from their days together down at the border. Then, without much warning, April turned the topic of conversation to “the situation up here.” Things were going to get “really, really bad,” April predicted. A friend who was a sheriff had told her that they were calling in the reserves to get ready for when California collapsed. Denny chimed in that he was stockpiling ammunition, but before they could say more, Bella cleared her throat and reminded them that I was a “tenured professor of sociology” and was there to ask about their history with the Minutemen. April and Denny nodded, and inquired about Camp Patriot. Had I been to the border yet? Was so-and-so still there? Were they still running monthly musters? We compared notes until I decided it was a good time to ask whether I could record our conversation, and they agreed. When I mentioned that I was especially interested in the women’s perspectives, Denny retired to a recliner with its back toward us but within earshot, and rocked energetically for the duration of the interview, interjecting only sporadically. “Well, it started just locally,” April began, and then described incidents “with Mexicans” that had made her adamant about deporting illegal immigrants and stopping them from entering the country in the first place. Did I know that even in the ’70s, Mexicans were having babies—“anchor babies”—in the first-aid station at Disneyland? She knew because she had worked there. And at a different job she had worked down there, Mexicans came through the parking lot and “attacked” her car, twisting the antenna into a pretzel. But the last straw? “One night after we’d moved up here, we get a knock on the door . . . and there was somebody who didn’t speak English.” “All the way up here,” April added incredulously, “and he was looking for money!” Around that time, she and

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Denny had heard about the Arizona Minutemen from April’s brother. “They had like a $100 background check . . . and I thought ‘$200 is just too steep.’” So when the Minutemen came to California, April and Denny jumped at the opportunity to get involved. For two years, April and Denny were regulars at Camp Patriot. Until the mail-order business they ran out of their home began to suffer as the economy crashed, and they just couldn’t afford to go back and forth each month. But April believed that Minutemen like her and Denny had been “chosen for some reason to hang in there, to keep the spirit going.” Then she mentioned the Tea Party. “We honestly feel that our involvement back in 2005 got this started,” April stated. I was confused about what “this” was, but before I could inquire, she continued. “We just had to stay in there, and then more and more people would say, ‘Oh, you know, I like your T-shirt. Where can I get one of those?’” April explained that she and Denny just loved wearing their Minuteman T-shirts around here, striking up conversations about border issues with people in town—“at the post office, at the water company, at the grocery store, you know, you name it!” I probed for more details. Was she active in the Tea Party? “Oh gosh, yes. Are you kidding?” she gushed, and then explained that right now the Tea Party’s work up there was focused on getting their candidates—Tim and Gregg—elected. April (and Bella, too) had been on a first-name basis with the California state assemblyman Tim Donnelly and Gregg Imus since meeting them way back when through the Minutemen. Tim and Gregg had cofounded a chapter of California Minutemen and stood out from establishment Republicans for their outspoken stance against immigration. The local Tea Party had thrown its full weight behind them. Our formal interview ended when April suggested we take a break so that she and Denny could give me a tour of their home and barn. Conversation resumed when we returned. While our driver napped on the sofa and Denny went to feed the goats and chickens they kept in their backyard, April filled Bella and me in on the political drama unfolding there in one of California’s most conservative districts. A rare Republican-on-Republican race was pitting the newbie Gregg Imus against Paul Cook for a seat in Congress. This was their chance to beat the Republican establishment at its own electoral game. Taxpayers, property owners, and patriots should beware, April warned us, if Cook, the establishment candidate, prevailed. A California state assemblyman, Cook had conspired to strip citizens of their individ-

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ual freedoms and resources through overregulation, April contended. She paused to show us a glossy postcard that accused Cook of drafting legislation that regulated recreational off-road vehicles in order to extract excessive fees and fines from drivers. The front depicted Cook at a motorbike rally, leaning over to confer with another man in a suit and tie. A speech bubble above their heads read, “Any chance we can tax these guys for not complying with my new Helmet Law AB1595?” The back listed ways that Cook had hurt citizens, for example, by “crossing party lines,” “lying to his own party,” and siding with illegal aliens against “legal, licensed, insured, U.S. citizens,” a reference to his support for legislation that impeded police from impounding vehicles of drivers whose only (“only” in quotation marks) crime was that they were unlicensed. In bold red print, the postcard urged readers to “vote yes on gregg imus”; in fine print, it added a disclaimer: “Not paid for by any candidate.” Almost in the same breath, April warned us about Agenda 21, a United Nations scheme to render rural Americans “easier to control” by corralling them into cities under the guise of so-called sustainability. State and municipal planning initiatives that toed the Agenda  21 line would be even more insidious than governmental overreach through taxation, because they justified taking property from people like her and Denny in the name of saving the planet. April had picked up a bound copy of the full Agenda 21 text at an informational meeting sponsored by the Tea Party not long ago, and she pulled it out of a drawer for us to look over. In case we wanted to learn more, she proffered. Bella politely declined and then declared that it was getting late. We would need to be on our way soon. Before we departed, Bella asked April for one more favor. Would she show me their larder? April kept one of the best-stocked larders around, Bella bragged, like the Mormons who stored food and water to last five years. April lowered her voice and replied point-blank that she didn’t show anyone her larder. And she was dead serious. If her neighbors were to find out about it, she added, they would come straight to her house in an emergency. Bella admitted that it would be “every man for himself” in a situation like that. Then, turning to me, she laughed nervously, adding, “You must think we’re all kooks!” The ride back to Bella’s gave me plenty of time to take stock of lessons learned during my brief visit to the high desert. April and Denny clearly cherished their existence on the outskirts of society, as far off the beaten path of new migrant arrivals as possible. Indeed, as April told the story, it was the crime and chaos that undocumented immi-

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grants brought to the increasingly diverse city she used to call home that had forced her to flee to this high-desert outpost in the first place. In a tragic twist of fate, though, “they”—those brown bodies and all that they represented to her—had followed her “all the way up here,” knocking on her door at night. I did not know where April first learned to see a stranger in need or a mother so desperate for health care that she gave birth in a first-aid station as criminals and evil opportunists. I did know, however, that the Minutemen had ground this lens to perfection. April and Denny could not sustain their commitment to patrol the border with the Minutemen over the years, but they could “keep the spirit going” by bringing the group’s perspective on border issues back to their far corner of California, to others struggling to make sense of—to “see”—the migrants now in their midst. Proudly donning their Minuteman apparel, they channeled this spirit through chance encounters at the post office, at the water company, and at the grocery store. And April and Denny now channeled this spirit through the Tea Party, too, a political movement more vibrant and viable in this hardscrabble mountain region than in the posh metropolitan area where Bella lived. Unlike Bella, April and Denny lacked strong partisan loyalties to the GOP and gravitated naturally to the political home that the Tea Party offered. Indeed, seemingly synonymous with candidates with high-profile Minuteman pasts, the Tea Party had merged imperceptibly with the Minutemen in their minds. In our conversation, April moved fluidly between references to the Minutemen and the Tea Party, heedless of the point where one organization ended and the other began. But as she settled into her work with the Tea Party, she came to see the ills of society through a new, wider-angle lens that captured more than just insecure borders. April’s politics was not just about immigration anymore; it had broadened to include fending off the intrusive arm of the state in the form of taxation, overregulation, and governmental conspiracies to rob citizens of their property. April’s politics was now the full-on anti-elitist, antiestablishment politics of Tea Party populism.

Bella Stevenson, Redux: Patriotism without Parties?

For Bella, however, just the opposite seemed to hold true. When I phoned her to arrange a follow-up visit in February 2013, her voice-mail

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message tipped me off to just how intense her preoccupation with immigration had become. “Hi. This is Bella. Please leave a message. For English, press one. For Swahili, Vietnamese, or Arabic, press 2. On second thought, just hang up and call back when you can speak English.” But the clincher was what I would learn about Tim Donnelly. By the time I arrived on Bella’s doorstep once again, “Tim Donnelly: Patriot, not Politician” had replaced “Romney/Ryan” and “Nobama” on Bella’s bumper, and she was ready to throw her all—her money, her time, and her blood, sweat, and tears—into Donnelly’s upcoming campaign for governor. This wouldn’t be the first time that Bella had rallied for Donnelly. In 2010, she had campaigned for him to win his California State Assembly seat, convinced that he was the only politician out there serious enough about the immigration issue to take a stand. For example, just one year into his first term, Tim opposed the California Dream Act, which permitted state funds to be spent on college tuition grants to undocumented students. Bella—together with a loyal core of Donnelly followers—had been right there: first in Sacramento to address the legislative committee drafting the bill, and later, once it passed, from her home, answering phone calls about the petition drive for a referendum to repeal it. Her favorite memory of their extended effort to oppose that legislation was when she got a second phone line at home to help out with the petition drive, and Tim gave out the number on a popular radio show. “Bella, prepare yourself,” Bella said, reenacting Tim’s command for my benefit. “People are going to be calling you because I’m going to give out your number.” Sure enough, they did. “Within a week, . . . I had about a thousand phone calls, and I was absolutely going insane,” she recalled. It was this single-minded commitment to an anti-immigration politics, I realized, that had driven a wedge between Bella and her beloved GOP and cut her loose into partisan limbo. And the Tea Party? An embarrassed silence enveloped Bella whenever it came to April and Denny’s Tea Party politics, and when I asked point-blank for her own thoughts about it, she waffled. Bella insisted that she had never been involved in the Tea Party, but vacillated as she attempted to explain her reluctance. “It’s just that, um, I guess I don’t know enough about them,” she started off. “They’re very religious, many of them,” she added. Then: “Wherever I’ve lived, there weren’t any real Tea Parties.” Bella assured me that it was not “a snob thing,” and when I suggested that maybe she saw the GOP as a better option for getting officials elected, she denied that, too. She concluded, cryptically, that

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even though she held the same beliefs as the Tea Partiers did, she “just felt [she] could do better in other things.” Bella’s beliefs had drifted toward the Tea Party’s, and she backed the same kind of fringe candidates, like Donnelly, against more establishment picks. But Bella’s upper-class sensibilities and misgivings about religion prevented her from openly endorsing the movement. Bella was an atheist. She didn’t say why, but I guessed it had something to do with her strict Catholic upbringing and father, who had a to-do list each day that included go to Mass, get drunk, and beat the crap out of his wife (Bella’s words, not mine). Or perhaps it was her bitter disappointment with the Church for getting rid of the Latin Mass, which Bella likened to the government getting rid of “The StarSpangled Banner.” Either way, Bella would be perfectly happy to become fertilizer when she died, she told me. And she certainly didn’t relish the prospect of rubbing elbows with fundamentalist Christians in the Tea Party, policy affinities notwithstanding. In the end, though, the similarities between April’s and Bella’s post-Minuteman activism outweighed their differences. Although April worked through the Tea Party and Bella worked around it, both channeled their energies into state-level electoral contests that had few immediate consequences at the local level. For both women, bringing the border back home entailed injecting anti-immigrant vitriol and political organizing into suburban enclaves or isolated rural areas with large English-speaking Anglo majorities and relatively small, recently arrived Latino minorities. In the agricultural towns and small cities in California’s central corridor and coast with large, long-established Mexican populations, bringing the border back home entailed something different. In those towns, like the one where Joanna and Ellie resided, bringing the border back home was deeply personal and devastatingly divisive.

Joanna Peters and Ellie Sherman: Embattled in the Breadbasket

The Amtrak train had left the station before I decided to check my e-mail. It was mid-January 2013, months after Barack Obama had won a second term in office and weeks since Joanna had agreed to my visit. I was thinking that both Obama’s victory and Joanna’s willingness to receive me in her hometown today were a done deal. Until, that is, I

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discovered Joanna’s one-liner in my inbox demanding to know how I voted in the past presidential election. Verbatim: “I need to know if you voted for Obama. Joanna.” In a matter of hours, the train was scheduled to pull into the station where, I imagined, I would come face-toface with Joanna and her inquisition. I started to sweat. A handful of passengers disembarked before me at the whistlestop where Joanna had directed me to get off the train. An elderly Latino couple picked their way down the steps to the platform with heavy suitcases bearing tags marked TIJ (Tijuana International Airport), and an older white woman exhorted a small boy to “behave for Grandma.” Joanna had warned me to watch myself here—the station was isolated, and God knew who would be lurking around—but the large, lively, and multigenerational party that greeted the older couple in Spanish made the station feel anything but isolated and dangerous. In any case, I had nothing to fear, because Joanna arrived shortly, greeted me perfunctorily, and popped open the trunk of her Lincoln Town Car for me to store my suitcase. As I climbed into the front seat, I couldn’t help wondering whether anyone besides me had noticed the “Secure the Border” sticker with a Minuteman icon in her back window. Las Mesas, the small city where Joanna had lived virtually her entire life, was about ten miles from the station. On our drive, acres of desolate and deserted land surrounded us, but when Joanna drove me back in the daylight in a few days’ time, these reappeared as fields of bright green broccoli, strawberries, and red cabbage as far as the eye could see. We engaged in small talk until Joanna turned onto the main boulevard leading toward Las Mesas’s town square and remarked that she wanted to take this route so that I could see for myself “what’s happened to my town.” Red, white, and blue shield-shaped signs that read, “Las Mesas, All American Town” lined either side of the street, but what Joanna wanted me to see was the abundance of taquerías and Spanish-language signs denoting businesses that catered to the Mexicans and Central Americans who had come to Las Mesas to “steal” farmwork from Americans. Joanna wanted me to take a good look around. This was what happened when a town was “occupied by foreign nationals.” Joanna offered to stop at the local IHOP before depositing me at the Motel 6 on the other edge of town, where I would be staying. Our server was a dark-skinned Latino man in his twenties or thirties with a name tag identifying him as “Juan.” To my ear, Juan spoke nearly unaccented English, and when Joanna pointed out to him that his

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name tag was on upside down, he quipped comfortably that that was so he could read it. I thought this was funny, but Joanna did not seem amused. We ordered coffee and then got down to business. Now that she and I could look each other in the eye, Joanna informed me that I needed to know that she was not as nice as Bella and had agreed to meet with me only because Bella vouched for me. She wouldn’t be inviting me into her home, as Bella had done, let alone asking me to overnight there. Joanna added that even if she were inclined to ask me to stay with her, she couldn’t, because her eldest son and his family had “lost their home” and were now living there. Given her all-business, no-pleasure approach to me thus far, Joanna was predictably stingy with details about her family life throughout my visit. Tonight, though, she gave me the basics. Her three grown children were college educated (“I sent my children to college to become stupid,” she editorialized), and the youngest (“You’ll laugh when you hear this”) had majored in Latino studies and was working for the Peace Corps in South America. One granddaughter was college aged but taking a gap year. Joanna thought that was just as well, since the only valuable thing she would learn at college was the cost of illegal immigration—when she couldn’t get into classes because they were overflowing with illegals going to the University of California system for free. If people like her granddaughter only knew the facts about illegal immigration, they would put an end to it. Before I had quite finished my coffee, Joanna got up and readied herself to leave. She allowed me to pick up our measly four-dollar tab (the next day, she insisted that we go Dutch for lunch, since she refused to become “beholden” to anyone), and we headed for the door. I was thinking that, miraculously, we had made it through our first encounter without a confrontation about voter preferences. When we got to her car, though, Joanna dropped the bomb. I joked nervously that I hoped she wouldn’t make me walk to the motel, but that I had been known to vote for Obama. Joanna upbraided me for believing in “socialized medicine”—she was terrified at the thought of losing her health coverage under Obamacare, and I should be, too, she warned. She prophesied that I would be sorry for having voted for him, and so would my children. She did not, however, make me walk to the motel. The next morning, Joanna picked me up promptly at eleven for brunch, the only other time she had set aside to meet with me while I was in town. It was chilly, and when she got out of the car at the locally owned restaurant she had chosen, I saw that Joanna was dressed

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in a long-sleeved thermal shirt, a denim jacket, jeans, and wine-colored suede winter boots. Replete with a blond-brown suede purse with a long fringe, Joanna struck me as the epitome of western fashion. The owner greeted Joanna warmly and seated us on the patio, but we waited to order until Ellie arrived. Joanna told me that in addition to Ellie, she had invited another woman who was involved in the local Minuteman chapter to join us. The other woman had refused; her employer disapproved of her Minuteman connection, so she had to be careful whom she associated with in public. And besides, Joanna added, with what I perceived as the ever-so-slightest twist of the knife, “She’s done with academics.” Like me. Within minutes, Ellie pulled up a chair and introduced herself. Slight of stature with snow-white hair, Ellie was eighty-five years old and proud of it. She had never been to the border—she was afraid of guns and hated the heat—but she had been by Joanna’s side ever since Joanna founded the local Minuteman chapter, back in 2008. Ellie downplayed her contribution to the cause—at her age, Ellie quipped, she was too old to “do anything but write letters to the editor”—but Joanna dismissed her modesty. In point of fact, Joanna said, it was Ellie’s and others’ letters printed in the Las Mesas Daily News that made her aware of the presence of like-minded people in the community and inspired her to get the local chapter up and running. And in some ways, the changes in town had weighed on Ellie more heavily than on Joanna, since she used to live right in town, just around the corner from Central High. In 2005 or 2006, on May 1—“Communist Day,” Ellie called it—when the high school kids had wrapped themselves in Mexican flags and marched through town, Ellie had counterprotested in front of city hall. When the students confronted Ellie’s group, chanting, “Mexico, Mexico, Mexico,” she didn’t say a word. “We just held our [American] flags up.” And did I know that Ellie had had to move from her home “because things got so bad?” Joanna asked. “They” had thrown eggs at Ellie’s house and defecated on her lawn, and her beloved neighborhood had decayed a little every day. “You couldn’t find a place to park,” Ellie related, because they would have four or five cars and junk in their driveway. They didn’t take care of their lawns. They would play Mexican music real loud. They would sit outside and drink beer. They wouldn’t move their barbecue pit to the other side of their yard, even when Ellie asked nicely. And the crowning blow? When she asked her neighbor to edge his lawn, he refused on the grounds that in Mexico he didn’t have to edge his lawn, and he consid-

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ered this Mexico. “ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘You know what? You can stick Mexico where the sun doesn’t shine.’” And Ellie and her husband moved to the other side of town. That was before Joanna knew Ellie, about the same time that Joanna joined the Minutemen. After 9/11, the Minutemen were, in Joanna’s words, “a godsend.” She was trying to figure out what to do— she was too old to sign up for the military—when the Minutemen came along. Joanna hadn’t been to the border for a long time, but she had been very, very active there at the outset. She was retired, her children could take care of themselves, and she could spend months at a time at Camp Patriot in the fifth wheel that her eldest son drove down and set up for her. When her husband had had a heart attack, though, she needed to “pull back and take care of [her] family” again, and that was when Joanna began pouring all her energy into the local chapter. It wasn’t easy going, though, Ellie and Joanna agreed, as they reminisced about that first big event the Minutemen held in Las Mesas, a panel that brought renowned speakers such as William Gheen, the president of the national Americans for Legal Immigration, to town. Protestors with Mexican flags infiltrated the program, and the hotel that hosted the event had had to play bouncer. And when the Minutemen made their first call for members to join the local chapter, a handful of public officials went on record denouncing them. Ellie and Joanna recalled one councilwoman in particular, Esmeralda Rufino, who opposed them at every step. “She was all for open borders,” Joanna stated. “Taking money from anybody’s taxes to support the cause of ‘these poor people had to come here because they have no opportunities somewhere else.’ You know, just the typical liberal tripe.” I would get a better sense of who “these poor people” were after brunch, when the three of us headed back to Ellie’s place for a brief visit. Ellie was eager to show me the scrapbooks that she had kept of all the letters to the editor that she had written over the years. Ellie’s new home was, indeed, located, on the opposite side of town, near the hospital that, Joanna informed me, “births 10,000 babies a year, illegal alien babies from Oaxaca.” The housing stock here was newer than that in the neighborhoods near where I was staying (and where Ellie used to live), and the winding streets, cul-de-sacs, and road signs that alerted drivers that they were “entering private property” contrasted with the easily navigable, pedestrian friendly, gridded streets on the other side of town. We entered Ellie’s single-story home through her one-car garage, and Ellie and Joanna both laughed when I pointed out

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the plastic “Parking for Americans Only” sign tacked to the wall. A friend had given it to her, Ellie explained as she led us through the back door into her kitchen. Joanna and I waited in silence as she retrieved three white plastic binders for my perusal—I could borrow them for the day and return them to Joanna tomorrow when she took me back to the train station, Ellie offered. When Joanna noticed that one of the binders contained minutes from Minuteman chapter meetings and a membership roster, she directed Ellie to remove these materials and, ultimately, persuaded her not to lend this binder to me at all. Before we left, Ellie ushered us into her living room to show me a photograph of her deceased husband. There were large sepia-toned portraits of two women hanging on one wall, one in a beautiful oldfashioned oval frame. Ellie told us that these were her mother and grandmother. Her grandmother was Spanish, and her mother, who was half-Spanish and half-American, spoke Spanish but did not teach Ellie. With such deep roots in Las Mesas, Ellie couldn’t fathom moving away, unlike Joanna, who would sell her house in a heartbeat and move back to Texas, where her father was from, if her husband weren’t having such a hard time letting go. In fact, Joanna and her husband had already bought property in Texas, and they stayed there part of the year. It wasn’t that they didn’t have history here in Las Mesas, of course. They both had graduated from local high schools—Joanna from Bernardo High School, which she thought “looks like a jail” now—and had lived all their adult lives there. And it was a close-knit community where everybody knew everybody. Like Ellie, who had known Joanna’s husband practically before Joanna did, when she worked at the phone company and he was a phone repairman. But Joanna was fed up. The problem, she said, was the 10,000 acres of stoop crops, like strawberries, that surrounded Las Mesas, and the growers who refused to mechanize because it was cheaper to hire illegals than buy machines to harvest. Ellie disclosed that one of her best friends growing up was in agriculture, but wouldn’t talk about immigration with Ellie. Unlike Joanna, Ellie wasn’t convinced that the growers were to blame. It was contractors, not growers, who hired illegals, she asserted. To illustrate, Ellie produced a printout from the website of one such contractor and pointed to a line that read, “As the employer, we handle all the complex legal compliance issues involved in obtaining work visas.” Either way, the Las Mesas Minutemen had spent their best years pushing for stricter enforcement of labor laws locally, and Joanna and Ellie remembered this herculean effort well. “We went to city council

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meetings every other week,” Joanna said, a hint of exhaustion creeping into her voice. “We were going to planning commission, code enforcement, and county supervisor meetings” to urge city officials to mandate that local employers use the federal E-Verify database to check the legal status of potential employees. Ellie piped up that the Minutemen always had had a good turnout at city council meetings—like the time that fifteen of them had turned up decked out in their Minuteman shirts—but Joanna’s dejection overpowered Ellie’s optimism. It was all for naught, Joanna insisted. As a concession, the council had mandated that the city run all new municipal employees through the system for a six-month trial period, but wouldn’t touch city contractors, let alone private industry. And then, to add insult to injury, California passed a state law prohibiting municipalities like Las Mesas from making E-Verify mandatory. If there was any silver lining to the effort they had put in, it was that their battle had brought attention to the bigger problem of enforcing the law of the land, and that torch had been taken up by the Freedom Rallies, what Joanna called a “spinoff ” from the Minutemen. “The most valuable thing in our country is the Constitution,” Joanna opined, and that was what the folks spearheading the rallies, aka the Tea Parties, were putting front and center. The Minutemen as an organization wasn’t allowed to get directly involved in elections or party politics, but Tea Party organizers could, and the Tea Party had the added benefit of being safer. “It’s not as easy to slander the Tea Party versus the Minutemen,” Joanna clarified, “because the Tea Party is not a single-issue group and there is no one leader in the group. We’re all Tea Party members.” By early afternoon, I was back at the motel. The weather was spectacular, so I opted to make a walking tour of Las Mesas. There were sidewalks along the main route that led into town, but few pedestrians passed me by. One was a woman with indigenous features, small children at her side and a baby wrapped in a rebozo. (“Straight from Oaxaca,” I could almost hear Joanna say.) In the center of town, a complex of public buildings—the civic center plaza—looked new but retained a Spanish Mission–style shape and feel. Among these structures was the home of the Las Mesas Historical Society and Museum, which touted the multiethnic character of the area, with shout-outs to nineteenthcentury “Swiss dairymen,” “Danish, Portuguese and Japanese farmers,” and “Spanish, English, Irish and Scotch settlers” (but no mention of the continuous presence of Mexican settlers since the early

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twentieth). A modern-looking youth center was named after someone with a Latin-sounding surname (a politician who was the “son of illegals” who had made their fortune in the drug trade, Joanna alleged when I mentioned it later). Past the plaza was an upscale, indoor shopping mall, where I headed straight to Starbucks for a pick-me-up before turning back. The young person in front of me in line was wearing a letter jacket that trumpeted the “Bernardo High School Mariachi Band and Ballet Folklórico.” (I didn’t dare mention that to Joanna.) Everywhere in Las Mesas, it seemed, were markers of the multiple generations of Mexicans who had made the place what it was today—and of the erasure, denial, and denigration of that legacy. Finally, I strolled through Ellie’s old neighborhood, which was near my motel. On a late weekday afternoon there were no signs of life except for a house where two Latino men were working in a front yard and several other Latinos, including two teenage girls, were socializing in the driveway. Most of the houses appeared to be single-family, and were generally well maintained. Worn American flags flew in front of a pair of houses, and a Buddha lawn ornament graced another. No Mexican flags or other symbols of Mexican-ness were on display, unless, of course, I counted the Latino-looking pushcart vendor peddling pork skins and pumping out electronic music that was audible but not deafening. A far cry from the urban decay and decadence that Ellie had described. My stay in Las Mesas had been less eventful than I had hoped, but I had seen and heard enough. This was a community split by racialized fears of generational and cultural change, stoked in no small part by Minutemen and Minutewomen like Joanna. It was a community where taquerías dotted Main Street, where Juan managed the local IHOP, and where brown-skinned men and women kept local industry afloat with the stoop labor they did in distant fields. And it was a community where youth could join the Bernardo High School Mariachi Band and take pride in their Mexican heritage. But Las Mesas was also a community where an aging Anglo minority whose demographic edge had slipped away looked past these economic and cultural contributions to see only a threat of conquest and loss. And unlike April in the high desert and Bella in her gated golf community, Ellie and Joanna in Las Mesas perceived this threat and loss at very close range. Although I didn’t know it at the time, Las Mesas was also a place that foreshadowed, by five years, the future of our nation. It would become a nation deeply divided—like Las Mesas—over immigration, but

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Bringing the Border Back Home | 171

more disturbing still, one incapable of and closed off to the challenges of difference and dialogue. It would become a nation that met those challenges not with warmth and hospitality, but with hard-edged dogmatism and distrust like Joanna’s. This would be a nation embattled and embittered in the breadbasket and beyond. This chapter demonstrates how the extralegal border-patrol movement mobilized an army of outspoken immigration opponents who did not cease their activism upon the dissolution of the border-patrol infrastructure. Rather, these people channeled their energy and resources into institutionalized efforts to influence policy and policymakers through political pursuits closer to home. Some, like Bella and April, set their sights on change at the state level, campaigning for California State Assembly candidates committed to an anti-immigration agenda or taking leadership roles in petition drives to repeal immigrantfriendly reforms. Others, like Joanna, brought polarizing rhetoric and perspectives on immigration honed by the Minutemen into the heart of local politics, pitting neighbors in close-knit communities with long histories of Mexican migration against one another in battles over local employment and crime ordinances. Though their trajectories took different forms, each kind of activist brought the border back home and, in doing so, illustrated the Minutemen’s lasting effects and long-term legacy. But more than that, this chapter raises the distinct possibility that the combination of politicized nativism and disillusionment with the GOP that the Minutemen inculcated in its members drew Minutewomen into the Tea Party’s sphere of influence and, surprisingly often—as is the case of Tammy in chapter 2—into the ranks of its organizers (Deckman 2016). The post-Minuteman paths of all the women discussed in this chapter intersected with the Tea Party in some fashion. Even Bella, who ostensibly held the Tea Party at arm’s length, quietly unhitched her wagon from establishment GOP candidates and attached it to a Tea Party darling and a quixotic campaign for governor that one political analyst dubbed “California’s GOP suicide mission” (Finley 2012). Bella’s case was especially instructive because it presaged the populist challenge to major political parties more generally, and to the GOP in particular, that ultimately swept Trump into power. Bryan Gervais and Irwin Morris (2018) refer to this as the rise of “reactionary Republicanism,” and Claire Malone (2016) calls it “the end

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of a Republican Party” as we knew it throughout the twentieth century, a trend fueled by an overwhelming preoccupation with cultural and racial change among the GOP’s conservative base and against traditional concerns about small government. In 2012 and 2013, Bella was not yet ready (at least in my presence) to reject the GOP establishment, but she was questioning what it meant to be a Republican and detaching herself from the GOP in the process. The key to gaining her political loyalty was no longer partisan affiliation but a hard-line stance on immigration. Interestingly, most of the women I met in the course of my research—like Liz in chapters 2 and 3—described joining the Minutemen as a turning point in their political lives, jolting them from apathy into political awareness and activism. But not Bella. Bella had been a self-described political animal all her life. She chalked her lifelong political inclinations up to her working-class parents, deploying a classic American Dream narrative to tell their story. Neither of her parents had more than a third-grade education, but they read the morning and afternoon papers every day and discussed current events around the dinner table. In spite of their working-class backgrounds, they instilled in Bella an acute awareness of her political surroundings and an eagerness to exercise her duties as an engaged citizen in the public sphere. It was the weight of this lifetime accumulation of political experience with and loyalty to the GOP, I suspect, that kept Bella from rushing headlong into the Tea Party’s arms. But that was not the case for Minutewomen like April and Joanna, and they embraced the Tea Party warmly. April, in particular, threw herself into Tea Party politics without reservation, and this transition from the Minutemen to the Tea Party expanded her political horizons exponentially. In this regard, her familiarity with UN Agenda 21 is worth noting. Around 2010, Tea Party organizations launched an extensive campaign to paint this obscure planning document calling for sustainable approaches to human development as evidence of a one-world-government conspiracy to destroy both America and regimes of individual property rights writ large (Trapenberg Frick 2013; Trapenberg Frick et al. 2015; Trost 2012). April’s acceptance of this alternate reality and her determination to pass it on to me suggested, at least anecdotally, that the Tea Party’s efforts had succeeded, and that her current political concerns ranged far beyond “just” securing our nation’s borders.

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Conclusion | From Republican Motherhood to Patriotic Grandmotherhood

A

s I sat down to draft these final pages, we were a nation mourning two tragedies: a shooting rampage in an El Paso Walmart that targeted “Hispanic” immigrants, and the separation of hundreds of adult immigrant workers from their children during massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Mississippi. What possible light could the stories of one small group of grandmothers guarding the nation shine on these events? Could evidence from their activist and everyday lives illuminate a path forward, a path leading out of and away from these desperate times? Fundamentally, these women’s stories remind us that the motives for militantly opposing immigration are complex; that we miss the mark analytically and empirically if we settle for unidimensional explanations like those that focus narrowly on racial hatred. Specifically, their lives illustrate how a group of aging white working- and middle-class women has navigated the interlocking forces of sexism, ageism, and classism by committing themselves to an exclusionary ethnonationalism targeting immigrants. Scholarship on nativism has generally overlooked the import of aging and ageism in and of themselves, as well as in combination with sexism and classism. It is clear, however, that anxieties related to aging as working-class women fed Minutewomen’s fear of unchecked immigration and molded their binary, zero-sum view of immigrants as a threat to American families. The group of women I studied was small in number, but given the growing political influence of old people today, the lessons gleaned from studying them loom large in significance. In 2020, nearly one quarter of eligible voters will be sixty-five and older, and if the past presidential election is any indication, they will turn out to vote in

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much higher numbers than their younger counterparts.1 Looking even further ahead, the US Census Bureau predicts that by 2035, the number of elderly in the US general population will outstrip the number of children for the first time in our nation’s history (Noah 2019). Against this demographic backdrop, it is more imperative than ever to understand the relationship between aging and attitudes toward immigration. At a deeper level, however, the interconnectedness of these women’s personal and political lives points to new ways of thinking about how women try to make and remake the nation. In her groundbreaking work on the ideology of Republican motherhood, Linda Kerber demonstrates that the upheaval of the Revolutionary War opened spaces for rethinking women’s political agency. “The war,” she writes, “raised once again the old question of whether a woman could be a patriot— that is, an essentially political person—and it also raised the question of what form patriotism might take” (1980, 9). Similarly, our post-9/11 war on terror and criminalization of immigrants prompted the women in this study to reevaluate limits to their political agency and subjectivity as patriots. In contrast to Kerber’s Republican mothers, though, these women embraced their intrafamily status as grandmothers, extended their political intervention across an additional generation, and became patriots in relationship to their grandchildren. Enabled by the social and political infrastructure constructed by the Minuteman movement, these women fused love of country and love of family to refashion themselves as patriotic grandmothers. Patriotic grandmothers insert themselves into ethnonationalist projects differently from women whose relationship to family revolves around motherhood. That is, the symbolic work that grandmothers do to make the nation in their own ethnoracial image is not the same as that of mothers. Having moved well beyond their biologically reproductive years, patriotic grandmothers no longer labor to repopulate the nation, and they relinquish, too, the duty to transmit to their adult children the values and traditions central to upholding an AngloSaxon, heterosexual, Christian nation. Instead, patriotic grandmoth-

1. According to the Pew Foundation, 71 percent of eligible voters age sixtyfive and older reported having voted in the 2016 election, compared with 46 percent of those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, 59 percent of those thirty to forty-four, and 67 percent of those forty-five to sixty-four (Noah 2019).

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ers step back to survey the damage done by this imperfectly socialized middle generation, and then step in to rescue a national family in crisis. From one generation removed, patriotic grandmothers apply symbolic first aid to a country in critical condition. Understanding and acknowledging the complexity of these dynamics makes for better social science. Further, nuanced analysis of this sort can inspire the empathy necessary to help break the cycle of political polarization that grips the United States today. Of late, Americans have become too quick to cancel those with whom they disagree, too slow to listen and observe, and too distracted by the antics of our political leaders to seek out the facts. For these reasons, we have become a nation incapable of talking across differences, reduced to strident expressions of competing visions of America that at times take tragic forms. Strictly speaking, this diminished capacity to engage in dialogue does not pull the trigger in racially motivated massacres or execute draconian immigration policies with cruel consequences. It does, however, feed on the same absence of empathy. In her study of the Tea Party in the Deep South, Arlie Hochschild attributes this lack of empathy to a misplaced fear that conflates careful consideration of “the other” with fuzzy thinking. “We, on both sides,” she writes, “wrongly imagine that empathy with the ‘other’ side brings an end to clear-headed analysis when, in truth, it’s on the other side of that bridge that the most important analysis can begin” (2016, xi). In this book, I endeavored to begin “on the other side” by crafting an open-minded and intellectually honest representation of Minutewomen’s meaning worlds. I hoped to help humanize Minutewomen without, however, endorsing their border politics. My view is that the economic, social, and cultural contributions of immigrants have enriched this nation immeasurably, and that attempts to divert and disempower immigrants in our midst and those in transit are not only impractical and inhumane but also woefully shortsighted (Brown 2010; Dear 2013; Jones 2012; Marshall 2018). That said, our best hope for reaching some national consensus on a more just and effective immigration policy begins not with condemnation but by identifying and affirming the depths of fear that lead older women to take up arms at the US-Mexico border in order to protect their grandchildren from harm. This book helps us take a small step in that direction.

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Appendix | Walking the Line

Walk the line (verb). To mark or secure a boundary by walking along it. (Idiomatic) To maintain an intermediate position between contrasting choices, opinions, etc. A da p t ed f rom You r Dict iona ry.com Between July 2010 and February 2013, I spent over nine hundred hours at Camp Patriot and conducted in-depth, open-ended interviews with seventeen women and eight men active (or formerly active) in the California chapter based there. For fieldwork at camp, I attended eleven musters in total (six consecutively in late 2012 and early 2013), each lasting three to eight days, during which I spent virtually every waking moment with my research subjects. For interviewing, I traveled to the hometowns of seventeen women, thirteen of whom invited me into their homes and six of whom welcomed me into their homes for several days at a time. I slept in their guest rooms, ate at their tables, and lounged in their living rooms, three-season rooms, and hot tubs, spending, again, every waking moment in their presence. And since I do not drive (to the great amusement of my informants), I asked for and always received rides from Minutemen and Minutewomen to and from camp, or to and from the nearest airport or train station. If I ever felt like a captive audience to views at odds with my own, and to radio talkshow banter that made my blood boil, it was during these endless hours in, quite literally, the passenger seat. If done with purpose and integrity, all ethnographic research is challenging, but fieldwork and interviews that require intense interaction over prolonged periods with groups a researcher finds “distasteful” (Esseveld and Eyerman 1992) pose particular challenges.1 I am by no means the first left-leaning academic to

1. “Distasteful,” Johanna Esseveld and Ron Eyerman note, “are those individuals and groups with whom the researcher shares neither political orien-

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do this type of face-to-face work with groups on the right. But it is still surprisingly rare compared with research based on archival sources such as websites and movement propaganda.2 To demystify my procedures and encourage future researchers to help fi ll this gap, this appendix describes some of the challenges I encountered in the course of conducting this study and how I met them, to the best of my ability. I wish I could say that this project evolved as part of a lifelong commitment to researching conservatism and the right wing in the United States. In reality, though, it grew out of a combination of chance circumstances, sheer curiosity, and unexamined idealism. I am a Latin Americanist by training, and my research before this project focused on indigenous justice movements in southern Mexico, movements I admired for their progressive ideals and resistance to oppressive and corrupt governance. By 2007, however, drug-related violence had begun to unravel the social fabric of the communities where these movements operated, making life there increasingly unpredictable for locals and outsiders alike. With two children under the age of five and in no hurry to return to my original field sites in Mexico for the time being, I cast about for an alternative. Initially, the Minutemen piqued my curiosity because their claim that they were doing the government’s job resonated with my analytical interest in how people on the margins of society create extralegal justice systems when statebacked systems of justice fail them. As I began to learn more from the media and the earliest academic presentations on the group, however, I became disconcerted with the tone and tenor of conversations about the Minutemen, especially among scholars. Reflecting on her perseverance in studying the Right, Jean Hardisty points to her underlying commitment to the individual freedoms of all, including her political enemies, and her inclination to push back against “the arrogant dismissal and even disdain that they have received from liberals, progressives, and the political mainstream” (1999, 6). Reading these words years later, I realized that a similar impatience with unfairness went far in explaining my stubborn decision to take on a topic I knew nothing about and to then stick with it for almost a decade. This decision set me up to walk a line between the world of the Minutemen and the world of left-leaning academia, a balancing act that created thorny eth-

tation nor way of life and whose politics and/or way of life are found objectionable” (1992, 217). 2. For example, compare the number of scholarly books and articles on the Minutemen based on archival sources (Castro 2007/2008; Chavez 2008; DeChaine 2009; Doty 2009; Dove 2010; Holling 2011; J. Johnson 2011; Kil, Menjívar, and Doty 2009; Moller 2007; Navarro 2009; Oliviero 2011; Yoxall 2006) with those based on interviews or fieldwork (Elcioglu 2015; Haltinner 2016; J. Johnson 2015; Shapira 2013).

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ical, political, and methodological dilemmas every step of the way, in and out of the field. One of the hallmarks of researching the Right is that researchers— because of our typically liberal, progressive, or even just mainstream political views—find ourselves on the outside of a bright line dividing insiders and outsiders when it comes to our research subjects. Again, all ethnographic research requires finding ways to gain an insider’s perspective without losing critical distance. Walking this line becomes trickier, however, when it maps onto sharp ideological differences and when researchers come up against the strong binary (“us” versus “them”) mindset common on the Right. But in interactions with others curious about my research on the Minutemen, I found myself walking another line as I attempted to represent the world of the Minutemen to liberallearning academia. Other researchers of the Right have described facing resistance, hostility, and distrust from those presumed to be fellow insiders in one’s academic community and beyond, including mentors, colleagues, and readers (Armitage 2008; Ginsberg 1997; Waldner and Dobratz 2019). I had expected to have to work hard to earn acceptance from my research subjects, but I had not anticipated needing to manage stigma from my own tribe. At the outset of the project, though, these matters did not concern me, preoccupied as I was with wrangling access to the Minutemen. As I recount in the introduction, my friend Greta, a politically and socially conservative Southern California native, supplied the social capital that connected me with antiimmigration circles near her hometown. She also contacted Camp Patriot organizers by phone and requested permission for us to visit. Still, I worried that the Minutemen would rebuff my attempts to interact with them up close and might even deny me permission to visit camp. I knew that ethnographers of the Far Right have to overcome a deep-seated distrust of academics (Blee 2007; Blee and Creasap 2010), and I seriously doubted that the Minutemen would allow, let alone welcome, me into their ranks if they discovered who I really was. Thus, I came up with an elaborate plan to pass as Greta’s guest—and Greta’s guest alone—at my first muster. I scrubbed references to my research and teaching interests in “vigilantism” from the internet; I requested and received a temporary waiver of informed consent from my college’s Institutional Review Board (IRB);3 and I secured an e-mail account and phone line not affi liated with

3. This waiver of informed consent applied only to my initial field visit. Before beginning sustained fieldwork and interviewing, I requested and received approval from my college’s IRB to secure informed consent verbally. I requested and received a waiver of the requirement to secure written documentation of informed consent in order to help safeguard the identities of research subjects. In addition to employing pseudonyms in all my notes and interviews, this measure helped ensure anonymity by eliminating a paper trail leading back to research subjects, in case legal authorities subpoenaed my research materials. As part

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an educational institution, and designated it solely for communication with the Minutemen. I was determined to withhold what I considered the most incriminating aspects of my identity—that I was a professor at a liberal arts college, that I researched and taught about Mexico and the US-Mexico border, that I was married to a Mexican. I never lied to my Minuteman informants, and I certainly never considered assuming a fake identity to disguise who I was. But as the example of my preparations to gain entrée illustrates, the distinction between overt and covert is not always clear-cut, and decisions about how much, when, or what specifically to disclose and to whom can be complex and entail unavoidable trade-offs. In this case, I had anticipated that giving the project a shot at getting off the ground required compromising strict adherence to the principles of informed consent. I was wrong. And as it turned out, my plan to meticulously manage my identity in the field failed miserably from the get-go. As I allude to in chapter 1, Jim was the Minuteman in charge of laying down the law for new members and guests at Camp Patriot, and any resistance I had to telling the truth and nothing but the whole truth crumbled at once under his withering gaze and rapid-fire questioning. How had Greta and I met? What brought us to the border? And what did I do for a living? Teach? Where? What? Rereading my field notes from that first visit, I was mortified by how easily I caved and by the details I needlessly offered up (that I was a college professor from the Midwest, that I was a sociologist, and that I taught about borders and immigration). Thankfully, though, I was wrong about my status as an academic being a deal breaker. I was wrong because I had been wrong about who the Minutemen were and how they perceived outsiders. The Minutemen were not synonymous with the secretive white-supremacist organizations that others have studied (Blee 2002; Daniels 1997; Dobratz and Shank-Meile 1997; Hughey 2012; McVeigh and Estep 2019), though there is evidence that some white supremacists have infi ltrated the ranks of the Minutemen (Doty 2009; Zeskind 2005). To the contrary, my experience and the experience of other ethnographers is that Minutemen view outsiders as a resource rather than a threat. For example, Emine Elcioglu notes that although she is a person of color, her status as a woman facilitated her access to male Minutemen because it helped them enact masculinist protectionism. “My physical presence,” she writes, “made it easier for [them] to imagine their object of protection and thereby embody the role of a good male protector” (2017, 243). Chapter 1 in this book describes a similar dynamic when Tony, Pete, and Jim performed the perils of the border for women like me. But perhaps

of this research protocol, I provided each participant with written information about my project, my contact information, and contact information for the IRB administrator at my college.

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because I am white and because I never explicitly disabused them of the notion, some of the Minutemen I interacted with also perceived me as a potential convert to their cause and a recruit to their organization. Researchers have dealt differently with the challenge of misidentification. In their research on white supremacists and nationalists, for instance, Kathleen Blee (a white woman) openly rejected her informants’ politics and declared to them that she would not be swayed (2018); Matthew Hughey (a white man), in contrast, self-consciously exploited this potential to surmount initial obstacles to entrée. “To open up, people had to feel that I was open to ‘recruitment,’” he observes, adding: “As I emphasized our commonalities and portrayed a ‘possessive investment in whiteness,’ members slowly changed their tone” (2012, 231). I, too, labored to project an image of open-mindedness, but I did so unreflexively, by playing a game of good cop, bad cop with other liberals in order to position myself favorably with the Minutemen. Again, I saw this clearly for the first time when I reread my field notes from Camp Patriot. After I disclosed that I was a college professor (and Tony quipped that it was time to “kill the liberal now”), someone described liberal youth as cavemen “in leotards, with bones through their noses.” I responded that I had an abundance of these in my classroom back home. There are other examples of how I jokingly agreed with instead of objecting to such stereotypes, but this one suffices to show how I opened the door to the possibility that I was different. I insinuated that even though I was liberal, I was not like those liberals, and this attitude conveyed the impression that I might be amenable to recruitment after all. Although I am not proud of having thrown my students under the bus on this occasion, this rhetorical move enabled me to establish common ground with the Minutemen, which I might not have been able to do otherwise, and eased my entrée into their world. Indeed, although a few remained aloof (one even implying I might be a “mole” for some unnamed higher authority), nearly all the Minutemen at Camp Patriot embraced the apparent opportunity to fl ip the liberal in their midst, especially one who might influence young minds in the classroom. In addition, my entrée was facilitated by this particular Minuteman chapter priding itself on its transparency to outsiders, conditioned perhaps by the steady stream of reporters, TV producers, documentarians, political opponents, and even graduate students that had eagerly attended its events in the early years. Members claimed to welcome my presence and the chance to project a positive image of the Minutemen—and conservatives more generally—as well-informed, rational, rule-bound, and responsible citizens who cared deeply about the future of the country. Moreover, my request to return to Camp Patriot as a researcher coincided with national scandals tainting Minutemen as pathological and even homicidal. Cognizant of this bad press, leaders jumped at the chance to show an outsider that the Minutemen had nothing to hide, and they authorized my participation in all aspects of camp life. By 2010, the Camp Patriot Minutemen

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(along with other branches nationally) had begun to experience serious attrition among active members, and that downturn seemed to work in my favor as well. In the context of decline, the prospect of attracting a new recruit or at least a warm body for events at Camp Patriot must have been especially appealing. Sustaining the impression that I might be sympathetic to the Minutemen’s cause, however, had the disadvantage of ratcheting up expectations and pressure on me to conform. Sometimes this pressure manifested as gentle rebukes in private conversations with members whom I had come to genuinely like and whom I would presumably hate to disappoint. This was the case when Harry exhorted me to vote absentee in Ohio (my permanent residence) instead of in California (my temporary residence) in the 2012 presidential election. My vote would actually make a difference there, he informed me, adding, “I’m assuming you’re not voting for Obama.” At other times, this pressure took the form of veiled threats to cut off access to the field should I fail to conform. This occurred, for instance, when members warned me that people who advocated for open borders were unwelcome at Camp Patriot. Only on one occasion, however, did I genuinely fear the consequences of failing to live up to these expectations. Traveling alone by train at night and dependent on Joanna to meet me at my solitary destination, I received an e-mail from her demanding to know whether I had voted for Obama in the recent presidential election (see chapter 3). Given the timing of the message, I interpreted it as a very real threat to withdraw her cooperation should I prove to be, in her eyes, politically disloyal. Although I equivocated in the field about my border politics and voting preferences (I responded to Joanna’s face-to-face follow-up with “I have been known to vote for Obama”), I did not equivocate about my status as a researcher. I introduced myself as “a college professor writing a book about the Minutemen” to members who were not present when the board approved my research at Camp Patriot, and regulars around camp who knew me introduced me to others as “the lady professor.” Not every member appeared comfortable with me, and a few went to lengths to avoid interaction after learning of my intentions as a researcher. But they were the exceptions; nearly all Minutemen seemed to appreciate my eagerness to learn about camp life, my openness to taking part in activities they assumed liberal outsiders would avoid (e.g., learning to shoot a handgun), and my willingness to listen to their views and take them seriously. They permitted me to gather “intel” by day and execute surveillance “ops” by night, comb trails on foot for evidence of recent smuggling activity, shoot targets at a makeshift range, shop for and prepare camp meals, and join them for dinner and some gambling at nearby Indian casinos. To allay fears that I might be collecting evidence to incriminate the organization or individual Minutemen or Minutewomen, I refrained from tape-recording daily interactions and photographed subjects only with their explicit consent. I took handwritten notes at camp in private and expanded them into typed, detailed field notes from memory as soon as possible after each muster. I also requested and received elec-

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tronic newsletters from this chapter until it folded, in 2014, and a few members included me on e-mail distribution lists to which they forwarded political and sometimes personal items of interest with some frequency. With most research subjects during most of my time in the field, I believe I struck a good balance between transparency (clearly identifying myself as a researcher) and methodological effectiveness (putting him or her at ease). With one informant, however, my inability to maintain this balance toward the end of my study created a very sticky wicket. I describe it in detail here because it illustrates how minor missteps can have major consequences when researching groups one finds distasteful. I spent lots of time in the field with Liz, the Minutewoman who shouldered the day-to-day responsibility for keeping Camp Patriot up and running during lean times. Overextended and underappreciated, she frequently pressed me into service during musters to help ease her burden, and she came to count on my companionship as the numbers of attendees at each muster dwindled over the years. She also began to refer to me as her friend and then, astonishingly, as “our newest member.” I had never fi lled out an application or paid membership dues, yet Liz seemed determined to will my membership into existence, even when I insisted that, really, I had not joined the Minutemen and that I was just a college professor studying them. I chalked Liz’s puzzling recalcitrance up to a textbook case of misidentification, of research subjects fitting researchers into their social worlds on their own terms rather than on ours. I gave it little additional thought until a photograph of me with my first name included in the caption appeared in the organization’s monthly newsletter, which Liz compiled. Worse still, the photograph depicts me smiling as I pose next to a water barrel at the site where I had watched Minutemen slash water jugs that humanitarian organizations had placed in the desert for migrants (see chapter 2). There are many layers to unpack here. First, I committed a rookie mistake that put my research at risk of unintentionally lending legitimacy to the Minutemen. All researchers who choose to study groups whose values, attitudes, and actions are anathema to their own must contemplate the possibility that their work will further these groups’ aims. Before initiating my project, I had carefully weighed this risk and come up with ways to minimize it (see the discussion of pseudonyms below). But I did not think through the implications of allowing the Minutemen to photograph me in the field, namely, that photographic images of me doing the things that Minutemen do might suggest to them and to others that I endorsed their activities and ideology. It is unlikely that this Minuteman chapter or the nativist movement as a whole ever reaped any material rewards—additional recruits or donations, for example—from this act. It did, however, bolster Liz’s false claim that I was a member, and it propped up the image of this chapter as thriving and able to attract new recruits. Second, this debacle highlights the ethically fraught and emotionally painful choices that researchers studying groups like the Minutemen face in the

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course of participant observation. Some readers will likely find my decision to remain silent while watching a Minuteman destroy water supplies for migrants morally indefensible. It was an extremely difficult choice, but it was a choice, grounded in the belief that my ability to document such acts and report them with authority at a later date depended on remaining outwardly nonjudgmental in the moment. In light of the Minutemen’s reputation for physically confronting migrants at the border, I thought long and hard, before committing to this project, about what I would do if I witnessed abuse during these encounters. Legal observers from organizations such as the ACLU argue that private citizens like the Minutemen who forcibly detain any person on US soil, whether here legally or not, commit the crime of kidnapping. The Minutemen claimed that they never forcibly detained anyone—that they limited their actions to reporting sightings to the Border Patrol—though on occasion migrants would voluntarily stop and ask them for help (water, first aid, food) and the Minutemen would remain on the scene until the Border Patrol arrived. Given their sensitivity to outsiders’ criticism, I suspected that the Minutemen would try very hard to live up to this claim if I was present during an encounter with migrants. But what if I were wrong? I decided in advance that I would intervene if I witnessed Minutemen physically or verbally mistreat a migrant, but that I would refrain from expressing disapproval or interfering with actions that did not rise to that level of harm. Data collection for this project began with fieldwork at Camp Patriot, but to learn more about how women negotiated roles and constructed identities as Minutemen required expanding the number of female subjects in my study. On average, fifteen card-carrying Minutemen attended each Camp Patriot muster (in the first year of fieldwork, the average reached eighteen), and at most, a third of these were women. To include more women, I constructed a snowball sample by using references from people I met at camp to identify female Minutemen who were active at Camp Patriot in the past or whose primary venue of activism had always been hometowns located far from the border. Concentrating on women at that phase of the research was consistent with theoretical or purposive sampling. For comparative purposes, I also included eight men in my final interview sample. Of the sixty-seven references to female Minutemen, I chose twentyeight whose names came up repeatedly in conversations at Camp Patriot, and I requested permission to interview them in their hometowns. Nine declined or did not respond to my request, and I was unable to locate accurate contact information for two others. Seventeen, however, responded positively, and most of them did so enthusiastically. All twenty-five subjects (male and female combined) agreed to record indepth interviews. These ranged from half an hour to six hours in length and elicited open-ended, narrative accounts of how interviewees first became aware of the Minutemen, how and why they decided to get involved, and what obstacles and opportunities they understood their involvement to have presented. Like Blee’s unstructured life-history interviews, these interviews prompted subjects

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to tell me about the events and experiences that had shaped them as activists. I avoided asking about their political beliefs, in an effort to penetrate the veneer of movement rhetoric. Interviewing in their hometown settings also provided critical insights about their lives by allowing me to observe Minutewomen interacting with family and friends in their places of residence, recreation, and worship. Of the seventeen women I interviewed, in sixteen hometowns, thirteen invited me into their homes, introduced me to family and friends, and allowed me to accompany them to restaurants, shopping centers, gun shows, and church. Six welcomed me into their homes for several days at a time, and I made a second such visit to one of these women, at her insistence. The proximity and shared experiences that these encounters facilitated helped me better grasp how iconic and seemingly discrete moments of Minuteman activism—“going to Camp Patriot” and “policing the border”—meshed with the rest of these women’s lives. Data collection for this project concluded in February 2013. My sabbatical leave would have enabled me to continue through May, but by February, my field notes revealed that additional time in the field would be unproductive. Exhaustion had set in (I recorded falling asleep in the passenger seat of George’s truck on the way to ops), as had the crushing boredom that comes with saturation (I recorded “taking out my knitting and listen half-heartedly” to Harry, and spending an afternoon watching TV while “ignoring Liz”). Falling asleep on the job, listening half-heartedly, and ignoring informants make for terrible ethnography, and experienced ethnographers know that they are signs that it is time to pack up and go home. Back “home” at the University of California’s Berkeley Center for RightWing Studies, I labored to get my data analysis and writing under way. Back home in Ohio, my full-time teaching, advising, and chairing an academic department forced this project onto the back burner. In retrospect, I understand that although competing demands on my time hindered me from making headway, so too did an underlying anxiety about writing up my results. I worried that if my analysis proved insufficiently damning of the Minutemen, my fellow social scientists would doubt my “objectivity.” On the fl ip side, I worried that if I relied too heavily on the language and conceptual frames available in my discipline, I would simply reproduce the stereotypes that had helped motivate me to take on this project in the first place. How would I walk this line? I had spent the better part of three years studying the Minutemen, and I had “walked the line” in the most literal sense of the term: “to mark or secure a boundary by walking along it.” Now I needed to find a way to walk a line through what I feared would be an ideological minefield to produce an intellectually honest and sociologically sound analysis of what I had observed. One strategy that helped ease this anxiety was the use of pseudonyms. In my writing on the Minutemen, I use pseudonyms for all people and places, with the exception of public officials, the state of California, and large cities in this state. This practice freed me from the concern that I might stigmatize individ-

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uals who participated in my research, and emboldened me to relate instances of unflattering and unethical behavior unapologetically. Masking also gave me the courage to describe individual Minutemen empathetically without worrying that they might use positive portrayals to benefit themselves personally or politically. This was not a moot point, since several of my informants claimed they would be running for elected office at the local and state levels (and I can confirm that at least two did). Concealing identities in print helped mitigate the possibility that they could use my research as grist for their political mills. Of course, the use of pseudonyms is not without its critics, who point out that masking is never foolproof, can lead to a false sense of security, and complicates replicability and follow-up research by others (Jerolmack and Murphy 2019). It is true that tracking down the identities of some of my highest-profi le informants would not be impossible. In the case of this study, however, they were not the informants that I described as engaging in illegal or especially incriminating acts, and the negative consequences to them of having their identities exposed are likely minimal. For the rest, pseudonyms afford plausible deniability, that is, the opportunity for an informant to deny that he or she appears in the pages of this book, even when others suspect that is the case. It is also true that masking makes replicating or following up on this study difficult, but it is my belief that the many advantages of using this technique outweigh this significant disadvantage. In time, and with the gift of another sabbatical leave, I pushed through my insecurities and completed the data analysis and first draft of this manuscript. Throughout this process, I alternated between analysis and writing, using a grounded theory approach that included open and focused coding of all field notes and interview transcripts. Whenever possible, I triangulated field observations (what informants did) with interview transcripts (what informants said) to avoid the ethnographic fallacy of accepting informants’ own accounts at face value. I also fact-checked self-reported demographic data such as age and other biographical details with public records, obituaries, and LinkedIn profi les when available. As I prepared the final manuscript, however, doubts and indecision returned as I wrestled with reviewers’ feedback. One comment in particular left me paralyzed: “Throughout, the author seems to be defending the participants from claims of racism.” After all these years of processing what I had observed, had I still failed to regain critical perspective? Had a misplaced sense of indebtedness for their participation in my project made me reluctant to name the Minutemen as the racists they really were? Had my own whiteness and intellectually lazy acceptance of whiteness as an unmarked category lulled me into ignoring—or worse, defending—racism? As I revisited these terrifying possibilities, I happened on a podcast about media coverage of the 2016 presidential elections, featuring an interview with Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times. Asked about the de-

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bate among the Times editorial staff over whether to use the term “racist” to describe Donald Trump, Baquet said this: “My view is that the most powerful writing lets the person talk, lets the person say what he has to say, and it is usually so evident that what the person has to say is racist or anti-Semitic that to get in the way and say it yourself is less powerful” (Barbaro 2020). I do not pull any punches in my descriptions of the Minutemen in this book, and I have provided what I hope is a clearheaded analysis to unpack their views. In the end, though, I erred on the side of not getting in the way, of giving readers the chance to walk the line themselves.

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Index

African Americans, racism against, 81–82, 91. See also Obama, Barack Agamben, Giorgio, 63, 90 age: activism, relationship with, 61– 62; agency vs. appearance of male dominance and, 62; as difference, 60; “doing old womanhood,” 19; number of elderly in U.S., 173–174; old age, fluidity of, 20n5. See also generations; old womanhood ageism: construction of grandmotherhood and, 41; contested, 88–89, 91; experience of, 64, 74; scholarship, lack of, 60; sexism and, 64, 74, 89, 173 Agenda 21 (UN), 160, 172 aging: generational transitions and, 94; growing old as social process, 60; Minutemen as space of transformation and, 59; working-class white men and, 61. See also old womanhood Ali, Syed, 5, 9 American Dream narrative, 44, 172 “anchor babies,” 158 Anderson, Benedict, 5–6, 57 Andreas, Peter, 15 Angel Moms, 16

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Ball, Molly, 92 Baquet, Dean, 185–186 biographical availability, 61 Blee, Kathleen, 10, 12, 180, 183–184 Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, 23 border fences/walls: activism across spectrum at, 40; Camp Patriot and, 28; effects of, 15; history of, 14; literal and figurative inclusion and exclusion, 14; Trump and, 1 Border Granny, 43, 45–46, 54 borderlands: dangers of border, performance of, 48–51; drug trafficking in, 69; exceptionality and, 63, 90–91; rescaling of border politics, 148; as site of production and reproduction of meaning, 40; terrorism fears and, 90, 98, 156 Border Patrol: agents killed in line of duty, 70, 132; creation of, 40; encounter with, 86–87; informed of Minutemen locations, 86, 110; rapes by, 50 Buckley, James, 150 Buckley, William, 149 Burghart, Devin, 148 Bush, George W., 9, 46–47, 50, 153 Bush, Laura, 44–45

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California Coalition for Immigration Reform (CCIR), 8, 11–12 California Dream Act, 17n3, 162 California Proposition 187 (“Save Our State”), 8–9 Camp Patriot (pseud.): about, 27– 28; Bella on early days of, 154–155; “border ops,” 48–52, 110, 132; closure of, 27n7; December musters, 81; ethnographic vignette of, 28– 34; friendships and companionship, 28, 34, 77, 149; Ladies’ Day, 34, 128, 131; showdown between Liz and the young gunslingers, 81–90; “site security” by women, 51–55, 74–76; survival unit, 83– 85; wives at, 128, 130–131. See also misogyny Carlson, Jennifer, 120 Chavez, Leo, 15, 34, 40 Cheney, Dick, 67 Chinese Exclusion Act, 39 Christianity: Christian Right, 97; Islam as enemy of, 25, 101; Marge vignette, 97, 101–106, 112; separatespheres ideology and, 130; Tea Party and, 163; U.S. as Christian nation, 25, 57, 97 civil defense, 112 class: Bella, April, and, 158; civil rights movement and, 23; doing difference and, 19, 60; economic vulnerability in post-9/11 period, 13–14; exclusionary ethnonationalism as response to classism, 173; guns and symbolic import and, 120; Palin populism and, 92–93; performativity and, 40–42; Tea Party and, 73, 163; working-class white men and aging, 61 Clinton, Bill, 152–153 Cohen, Philip N., 5, 9 color-blind racism, 23–24

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Cook, Paul, 159–160 Cooper, Anderson, 54–55, 154–155 coyotes (human smugglers), 44, 49– 51 Creasap, Kimberly, 10 Crocker, Betty, 21, 43–46, 54 Deckman, Melissa, 93 Diani, Mario, 7 DiBranco, Alex, 145 difference, “doing,” 19–20, 60–61 Donnelly, Tim, 147, 159, 162 Doty, Roxanne, 15, 90 DREAMERS, 27 drug trafficking, 69 D’Souza, Dinesh, 25 Edelman, Murray, 55–56 Elcioglu, Emine, 179 Esseveld, Johanna, 176n1 ethnonationalist project, 15–16, 38– 40, 173 exception and exceptionality, 63, 90–91 “extremism,” 2, 9–10, 12–13 Eyerman, Ron, 176n1 family: grandma grizzlies and defense of, 93, 94–95, 112, 120; overriding feminism, 45–46; women’s duty to protect, 42, 45 femininity. See gender feminism: “antennas,” feminist, 128, 131; conservative, 125–126, 144– 145; Eve’s do-it-yourself feminism, 142–143; nativist, 17 Fenstermaker, Sarah, 19, 60 Forde, Shawna, 69 Freedom Rallies, 169 gender: “armed femininity” and masculinist realm of power, 41, 120; “doing gender” and “doing dif-

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Index | 205

ference,” 18–20; hypermasculinity, 3–4, 58; intersection of age and, 60; labor, gendered division of, 16, 21, 48, 125; nationalism and, 15– 17; old womanhood agency vs. appearance of male dominance, 62; performativity and traditional gender roles, 50–51, 58; protection of women, 49–50. See also feminism; misogyny generations: baby boomers and Silent Generation, 95–96; definitions of, 93–95; at microlevel and macrolevel, 21; middle generation, 94, 96, 98, 118, 121, 151–152, 175. See also grandma grizzlies and intergenerational dynamics Gervais, Bryan, 171 Gheen, William, 167 Gilchrist, Jim, 3, 147 globalization, 39, 51 government: Agenda 21 (UN) and, 160, 172; conspiracies of, 89, 159– 161, 172; corruption and greed of, 70, 74; as derelict in duty or refusing to act, 3–4, 13–15, 43–47, 153; energy subsidies, 72; generational theft and, 96; guns to be taken by, 33, 75, 107, 146; Muslim takeover and, 89; politics of exceptionalism and, 90; populism and, 92–93; pressure on, 3, 120, 148; stealing from whites and giving to immigrants or the poor, 92–93, 98, 106, 118, 133. See also local political activism, anti-immigrant grandchildren. See grandma grizzlies and intergenerational dynamics grandma grizzlies and intergenerational dynamics: Christianity and, 101–106; family, defense of, 93, 94– 95, 112; generational theft and, 93, 117–118, 120–121; generation and,

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93–96; guns, relationship to, 98, 120; Liz vignette, 106–111; Marge at the gun show, 111–117; Marge vignette, 98–106; middle generation, antagonistic relationship with, 94, 96, 98, 118, 121, 151–152, 175; motherhood and political action, 120; New Right and, 97; Palin’s populism and, 92–93, 96, 117; restoring family and rescuing nation, 121 grandmotherhood: intersectionality and, 41–42; Operation Granny Brigade, 43–47, 53–55; social movements and, 41–42, 56–57; symbolic work of motherhood vs., 174–175. See also performativity Granny Peace Brigades, 56 Great American Constitutional Revival, 71 “gung ho” women, 128–131, 136–137, 144–145 guns: Arizona vs. California laws, 136; to defend family, 112; fear of government taking them away, 33, 75, 107, 146; Liz vignette, 75; Marge vignette and gun show, 111–117; Second Amendment rights, 33, 116– 117; symbolic work of, 98, 120; talk about and relationship to, 98 Haltinner, Kristin, 4n2, 17 Hardisty, Jean, 177 hate-group stereotyping, 10 Higham, John, 7 Hochschild, Arlie, 175 Hogan, Jackie, 16 Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette, 40 Howe, Neil, 95 Hughey, Matthew, 180 “hunting” migrants, 11 Huntington, Samuel, 25 hypermasculinity. See under gender

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identity construction, 20–22, 89 “illegals”: assumption of immigrants or Latinos as, 40; coyotes (human smugglers), 44, 49–51; gun show and, 116–117; handouts to, 106, 118; home invasions by, 67; jobs taken by, 106; learning about, from Minutemen, 108; medical care and, 118; Mexicans conflated with, 40, 158; numbers of, 118, 121; property values and, 110; “race-neutral” focus on, 25; story of tracking, 11; “undocumented immigrants” as political correctness, 25, 33; violence attributed to, 114, 117. See also immigrants imagined communities, 6, 57 immigrant-rights activism, 4, 27, 40, 56 immigrants: ancestors contrasted with current immigrants, 101–102, 105– 106; “anchor babies,” 158; border wall and death of migrants, 15; demographic trends, 7–8; historical shift to focus on, 39; Mexicans imagined as outsiders, 39– 40; in U.S. imagination, 6. See also “illegals” Immigration and Nationality Act (1965), 8 immigration policy: globalization and, 39; in history of U.S., 6; rescaling of, 148. See also local political activism, anti-immigrant Imus, Gregg, 157, 159–160 “independents,” 13 intergenerational dynamics. See grandma grizzlies and intergenerational dynamics intersectionality, 19–20, 60 Iraq War protests, 56 Islamophobia: Christianity, Islam as enemy of, 25, 101; identity work

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and, 89; Marge vignette, 101, 104– 105; nativism and, 9; Obama and, 81–82; school violence blamed on, 104–105; Sharia Law, 25, 82, 133; terrorist fears, 25 Jaffe, Sarah, 123 Jones, Reece, 90 Katzenberg, Laura, 126 Kerber, Linda, 36, 174 King, Neal, 60 Klatch, Rebecca, 21, 97 Klein, Naomi, 124 Ku Klux Klan, 12 labor, gendered division of, 16, 21, 48, 125 labor and day labor, 25, 39, 148, 168–169 Ladies’ Day, 34, 128, 131 Lazarus Project, 105 legality as “race-neutral” frame, 24– 25 local political activism, antiimmigrant: April vignette, 156– 161; Bella vignette, 149–156, 161– 163; decline of Minutemen and, 146–148; Joanna and Ellie vignette, 163–171; rescaling of border politics, 148–149; Tea Party and GOP intersections, 147–148, 171–172 Malone, Claire, 171–172 Malverde, Jesús, 49 Manifest Destiny, 39 Manne, Kate, 124 masculinism. See gender McClintock, Anne, 16 McGirr, Lisa, 12 Mexican territory, U.S. colonization of, 39 military experience, 61, 132–134

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Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC): Operation Granny Brigade, 42–47, 53–55, 68, 76–77; women among leaders of, 4n2 Minutemen: about, 2–3; decline of, 146–147; “extremist” label as problematic, 9–10; independents, 13; nation, nativism, and making of, 5–10; number of women in, 4n2; performativity and, 15; race and, 25–27; as space of transformation, 59. See also specific topics misogyny: “acting like men,” 126, 127; being tough enough to take it, 123– 124, 140–144; conservative feminism and, 125–126, 144–145; defined, 124; Eve at Camp Patriot Vignette, 131–136; Eve home life vignette, 126–127, 137–144; “gung ho” women, 128–131, 136–137, 144– 145; Harry vignette, 127–131; Larry vignette, 133–136; separate-spheres ideology, 125–126, 129–130; sexism vs., 124; Trump and, 122–124 Morris, Irwin, 171 motherhood: nationalism and, 16; over multiple generations, 94; symbolic work of grandmotherhood vs., 174–175. See also grandma grizzlies and intergenerational dynamics Mothers Against Illegal Aliens (MAIA), 16, 42 Muslims. See Islamophobia Nader, Ralph, 106 nation: as imagined community, 5–6, 57; rescuing, 121 nationalism: “defensive,” 7; ethnonationalist project, 15–16, 38–40, 173; gender and, 15–17; white, 37 Native Americans, 18n4, 66, 91

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nativism and the new nativist movement: defined, 7; demographic trends and, 7–8; grandmotherhood and, 42; making of the Minutemen and, 5–10; race and, 22–27; struggle animated by, 13; Tea Party and, 148 New Right, 23–24 9/11 attacks, 9, 13–14, 41, 81, 108, 111 Obama, Barack, 26–27, 81–82, 107, 110–111, 119, 146, 163–165 old womanhood: comparison of Tammy and Liz stories, 63–65, 89; cultural contexts of, 62–63; doing difference, activism, and, 60–62; doing old womanhood, 19; exceptionality and, 63, 90–91; identity work and, 89; Liz vignette, 74–81; showdown between Liz and young gunslingers, 81–90; Tammy vignette, 65–74; “Why I Love Old Women” (old woman prospector story), 87–88. See also age; generation Oliviero, Katie, 17, 41, 120 Operation Granny Brigade, 42–47, 53–55, 68, 76–77 Palin, Sarah, 92–93, 96, 117, 142, 143 performativity: backstage “site security” by women, 51–55; dangers of the border and rape tree discourse, 48–51; ethnonationalist project and, 38–40; hypervisibility and invisibility, 43, 55; Operation Granny Brigade and, 43–47, 53–55; political spectacle and performance of grandmotherhood, 55–58; race, class, gender, and intersectionality in, 40–42; scholarship on, 15, 40–41; traditional gender roles and, 50–51, 58

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political spectacle, 55–56 Proposition 187, California (“Save Our State”), 8–9 race: African Americans, attitudes toward, 81–82, 91; color-blind racism, 23–24; legality as “raceneutral” frame, 24–25; nativism, Minutemen, and, 22–27; Obama and the postracial, 26–27; performativity and, 40–42; white nationalism, 37; whiteness, 22–23, 26; white supremacy as label, 25–26 Raging Grannies, 56, 58 rape tree discourse, 44, 49–51 Reagan, Michael, 150 Reagan, Nancy, 152–153 Reagan, Ronald, 149, 152–153 Reagan Revolution, 156 Remembrance Project, 16 Republican Party (GOP): disillusionment with, 153–154, 156, 159, 162– 163, 171–172; Federated Republican Women, 10–11, 150; Palin and, 92; rape tree narrative and, 50; Trump and, 92, 122. See also Tea Party movement right-wing ideologies: Christian Right vs. libertarianism, 97; conservatism vs., 26; Old Right vs. New Right, 23–24. See also “extremism” Romero, Mary, 42 Romney, Mitt, 150 Roy, Carole, 73 Sandy Hook shooting, 104, 114, 146 Second Amendment rights, 33, 116–117 Secure Fence Act (2006), 14 self-reliance, 105–106 separate-spheres ideology, 125–126, 129–130

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sexism: ageism and, 64, 74, 89, 173; classism and, 173; contested, 91; misogyny vs., 124; proving oneself vs., 69; “reality” of strength and, 143; Trump and, 123. See also misogyny sex trafficking moral panic, 44–45 Shapira, Harel, 35, 61 Simcox, Chris, 3, 68, 147 social constructivism, 20–22 sovereignty: globalization and, 39; Minutemen performativity and, 15; popular, 15, 90; states of exception and, 63, 90–91; symbolic significance of borders and, 14, 36 Tea Party movement: April vignette, 159–161; Bella vignette, 162–163; former Minutemen leaders and, 147–148; Freedom Rallies, 169; Liz vignette, 70–74; nativism and, 148; Obama, racial resentment, and, 27; Palin and, 92–93; Tammy vignette, 117; Trump and, 147 terrorism, fears of: border crossings and, 98, 156; borderlands and, 90; Islamophobia and, 9, 25; post-9/11 fears of, 13, 14; refuge, thoughts of, 107 Tetrault, Justin, 10 Texas Rangers, 39 theft, generational, 93, 117–118, 120–121 Trump, Donald, 1–2, 5, 92, 122–124, 186; white nationalism and, 37 United Nations, 160, 172 Valiente, Celia, 62 Vanderboegh, Mike, 50–51 Varsanyi, Monica, 148 Von Hentig, Hans, 94–95, 121

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wall. See border fences/walls West, Candace, 18–19, 60 white nationalism, 37 whiteness, 22–23, 26 white supremacy as label, 25–26 Wilkerson, Laura, 1–2 Winant, Howard, 23 wives: border avoided by, 53; border politics and identity as, 94;

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Ladies’ Day, 34, 128, 131; as not real Minutewomen, 143; separatespheres ideology and, 130; visiting Camp Patriot, 128, 130–131 Zeskind, Leonard, 148 Zimmerman, Don, 18, 60 Zolberg, Aristide, 6

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