Patrolling the Homeland explores the tension surrounding the militarization of national borders through the perspective of US militia volunteers. Amidst a humanitarian crisis in which more than 7,800 people have lost their lives attempting to cross the border, US militias patrol the deserts along the Mexican border in camouflage, armed with assault rifles and night-vision goggles to “protect” the US. How and why US border militias conduct their activities is paramount to understanding similar movements, ideologies, and rhetoric around the world that oppose the movement of refugees and support the closing or restriction of international and regional borders.
Based on extensive and engaging ethnography, Patrolling the Homeland explores not how people strive to be moral but how they maintain their selfperception as already and always moral individuals in spite of evidence to the contrary. This book signifies a creative and unique addition to morality and ethics through an honest and critical examination of a unique social movement indicative of contemporary society. A valuable read for anthropologists, sociologists, criminologists, and individuals interested in morality and ethics, militias, border studies, and policing.
John R. Parsons holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Queensland. His research concentrates on the intersection of morality, narrative, and violence.
“This book is a unique study based upon ethnography in a very difficult area to secure access. It would not only be of interest to sociology/social studies related to immigration and border related studies but also criminology courses looking at policing in the broadest way.”
Mark Button, University of Portsmouth
“If one wants to understand the complexity of living in our contemporary world, then look no further than this book. John Parsons study of border militias in the United States offers a unique entree into the larger issues we all confront today. This is one of the most ethnographically and theoretically significant works in the anthropology of ethics that I have read in a long time.”
Jarrett Zigon, University of Virginia
PATROLLING THE HOMELAND
Volunteer Border Militias and the Power of Moral Assemblages
John Richard Parsons
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Parsons, John Richard, author.
Title: Patrolling the homeland : volunteer border militias and the power of moral assemblages / John Richard Parsons.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022035826 (print) | LCCN 2022035827 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032418094 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032418087 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003359814 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Border security--United States--Moral and ethical aspects. | Militia movements--United States. | Immigration enforcement--United States. | United States--Emigration and immigration.
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022035826
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022035827
ISBN: 978-1-032-41809-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-41808-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-35981-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003359814
Typeset in Bembo by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
For Cyril James Parsons, who always believed in me.
List of Figures x Acknowledgements xi
Patrolling the Homeland: Volunteer Border Militias and the Power of Moral Assemblages 1
The Struggle for Acceptance 4
Morality and Comfort 6
Why Mobilize? A Brief History of Opposition 9
Positionality 15
Structure of the Book 16
1 Border Watch 23
Searching and Hope 27
Militias, Vigilantes, and the State 30
Stigma 32
Media and Image 34
The Operations 36
Military Influence 42
Away from the Border 43
Border Watch 45
2 Morality and Comfort 49
Comfort 52
Moral Breakdowns 53
Discomfort and the Response 54
Imperatives – External and Internal – the Basis of Comfort 58
Ethical Affordances – The Internal Imperative 61
Moral Assemblages – The External Imperatives 62
The Power of the Assemblage 65
The Moral World 66
3 Ethnicity at the Nation’s Frontier 72
Contemporary Concerns 73
Crossing Borders 76
A Border Separates “Culture” 78
Assimilation 82
Freedom of Movement – a Privilege of Hierarchy 85
Controlling National Space 88
Ethnicity on the Border 91
4 Experience, Narrative, and the Moral Imperative to Act 97
The Narrative World of Border Watch 99
An Underlying Truth 101
Narrative 103
Experience 105
The Failings of the State 108
Evaluation and Justification – the Bounds of Assemblages 112
The Imperative and the Citizen-Soldier 114
5 Embodied Narrative on the Border 123
The Purse 124
An Unknown but Knowable Enemy 127
Chasing Fire 129
Authority 133
Contradiction and the Immorality of the Other 134
Rape Trees and Immorality 135
6 The Moral Citizen, Virtue Ethics, and the Internal Ought 144
Personhood 145
The Self 146
The Immoral Other 147
Incorporating Virtue Ethics 150
Good Guy with a Gun 152
Doing What One Ought, Not What One Wants 157
7 The Comfort to Act 167
Enjoyment and the Moral Imperative 169
Protecting Border Watch – The Power of Conformity 171
Fitting the Mold through Narrations of the Self 174
Danger and Bonding: the Enjoyment of Missions 177
Camaraderie 180
The Shifting of Morals 184
A World Without Self-Reflection 189
The Danger of Moral Assemblages 191
The Future of Border Militias 194
Bibliography 196
Index 209
FIGURES
1.1 Somewhere on the I-10. Credit: Author 24
1.2 Border Watch volunteers pose after a tracking class.
Credit: Author 33
3.1 Border patrol helicopter having a look. Credit: Author 92
5.1 Photo taken from the second saddle on a media trip.
Credit: Author 130
5.2 The “Rape Tree” found beside camp. Credit: Author 138
6.1 In camp preparing for an overnight mission. Credit: Author 154
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I must first thank the participants who agreed to be a part of this project for inviting me into their world and sharing with me their experiences. I walked away from the desert a different person, and I hope our relationships had a similar impact on you.
The research project that led to this work was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship, the University of Queensland’s School of Social Science, and the Center for Inter-American and Border Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. I am lucky and privileged to have been a part of each.
I could not have put this together without Gerhard Hoffstaedter’s continual support, critiques, open door, and conversations that have helped me improve as an academic, writer, researcher, and person. I also thank Lee Wilson whose pointed critiques induced the discomfort that led to improvement. I thank the University of Queensland’s School of Social Sciences postgraduate community for their friendships and intellectual engagement. I thank Josiah Heyman and Silvia Torezani for their support, advice, and critique during the fieldwork portion of this project and for inviting me to spend my time in their excellent center. The downtime, distraction, and discussions about my work and all manner of things the amazing Amy Boulding, Naomi Robinson, and Sara Riva provided throughout my research will never be forgotten. Their friendships provided me the mental space to keep working and thinking. Thank you.
I must also thank John Shearer and Amy Donnelly for taking the time to read and critique earlier versions of the manuscript. I know it must have been challenging, but your insights and help have improved the work immensely.
To my family, Sheryl and Sandra Parsons, Duncan, Patrick, and Oscar Berents, and Isabel Flores, thank you for your belief in me. I would not be here without you.
Finally, I thank Mabel Sanchez, who has been with me on this journey since I began my fieldwork. Your insights, conversations, and company have shaped this book and me beyond anything I could have imagined or hoped.
PATROLLING THE HOMELAND
Volunteer Border Militias and the Power of Moral Assemblages
There’s an imaginary line out there between right and wrong, good and evil. I believe what I am doing is good. And I believe what I am standing up against is evil.
-Tim ‘Nailer’
Foley, Cartel Land
This book is about morality. It is about the human search for comfort in the absence of judgment and evaluation. It is about enjoyment and how easily our enjoyment can lead us to dismiss, ignore, or become oblivious to the suffering others experience.
By the end of the book, I hope to have convinced you that each action we and others perform is not inherently moral or immoral, or even anethical, but that each contains the potential to be moral. It is the act of evaluation that transforms action from potentiality to moral reality, and we will see that many people orient themselves toward a freedom from evaluation. Without concern for how our actions are evaluated, we can simply enjoy ourselves, free of the moral overtones and undertones that permeate our lives. An individual’s awareness and concern for potential ethical evaluation define moral experience as we move through the world, and different social relations impart unique conceptions of morality upon us. Conflicts arise in ourselves when our personal conception of what is and what is not moral and ethical contradicts the dominant definition in the external world we find ourselves within. To avoid evaluation, judgment, and the reflexivity they initiate, many individuals seek social relations in an attempt to find a union between competing moral imperatives: Between our internal imperatives that define what we consider right and just, and external imperatives defined by the social worlds we exist within.1 If we find this harmony of imperatives, the potential for evaluation is reduced, and we may find the comfort to act without considering the ethics of our actions.
In this book, I explore the moral world of a United States (US) border militia. In the southern deserts of the US, the volunteers of the border militia found a social collective in which the external imperatives condoned their internal imperative, they had found a space in which their belief in the morality of their actions and themselves was verified by those around them. In this space, free of moral conflicts, they found the moral comfort to enjoy patrolling an area of the desert where thousands have perished.
In the US, militias and vigilantes have been conducting activities at the border since its inception. Border militias, like the one in this book, have existed since at least the 1980s. These militias operate in an area that can only be described as the home of a humanitarian crisis. In the early 1990s, growing concern about an inability to control the border spurred an increase in public and political discourse about the security of the nation’s frontier. 2 While the Clinton administration spoke of protecting sanctioned immigration by reducing unauthorized migration, Chief of the El Paso Border Patrol, Silvestre Reyes, took action. In September 1993, Chief Reyes lined a 20-mile section of the border between El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua with his agents in an effort to deter people from crossing. It signaled a change in policy from pursuing individuals once they had crossed the international border to an attempt to prevent them from entering in the first place. It worked, and apprehension rates in the sector fell dramatically. 3 Operation Blockade, as it was initially known, received a mixed response. However, its effectiveness became the catalyst for a new philosophy of border security, Prevention Through Deterrence (PTD). Border Patrol quickly adopted the ideology and formally introduced it in their 1994 Strategic Plan. The effects of this strategy have been tragic.
The official United States Border Patrol statistics listed the death toll from attempted clandestine border crossings of the Southwest border between 1998 and 2020 at 8,050 (2021). The extreme environments leave little uncertainty that thousands more have sadly perished and will never be found.4 Arguably, the most shocking aspect of this policy is the acceptance that not only did the authors of the original strategic plan assume migrants in “remote, uninhabited expanses of land and sea along the border can find themselves in mortal danger” (U.S. Border Patrol 1994, 2), but also that it was a measure of its success; “[v]iolence will increase as effects of strategy are felt” (4). Amidst this crisis, and in support of such policies, US border militias patrol the deserts in camouflage, armed with assault rifles and night-vision goggles to “protect” the US. It is because of the PTD policy the militias operated in these regions. They believed in the idea of deterrence and that only those nefarious characters transporting drugs, humans, or violence would risk traversing the harsh environment. It was in the regions no wall could ever be built, where only a wire fence divides the two nations that militias believed they are in an ongoing battle for control of the land with cartels. The militias described their project as filling the gaps where the Border Patrol was unable or unwilling to defend and secure the border. The PTD may have worked in their eyes by stopping economic migrants, but it is the danger
of crossing the desert that confirmed to them their opponent was an immoral Other bent on harming US communities and citizens. Who else, they argued, would risk the journey.
It is impossible to know how many groups and individual US citizens conduct forms of surveillance and patrols along the Mexican border.5 Many groups exist with no name or internet presence, and many individuals take it upon themselves to patrol the border alone. When I began my fieldwork, I knew of eight active militias conducting some form of activity on the border. Of these eight, two agreed to participate in this research project. A third militia, whose primary focus was in assisting government emergency services, also participated. The latter militia was in a US state bordering Mexico and had a passing interest in border security but did not engage in any activities directly related to the border. One militia had a similar interest in aiding emergency services, and despite being based in a Southeast state, conducted one or more operations on the border each year. The last militia existed purely as a border militia and conducted week-long operations on the border six times a year. Its volunteers came from across the US and were often members of their local militias as well.
A diverse group of people volunteered for the militias. They had differing views on a variety of political issues, including undocumented migration. Many had friends and colleagues who were undocumented. Some had family in Mexico. Others wanted every undocumented individual in the country removed and the borders forcefully closed. Nevertheless, the volunteers’ concern over the danger an unsecured border posed to their communities and families united them. Similarly, each militia’s stance and perception of the border reflected the volunteers’ views; violent cartels waited in Mexico south of an unsecured border and brought violence and narcotics into the US. A concern they saw the government had failed or was unwilling to address.
Border Watch is the composite of the three militias I spent time with over 11 months between 2017 and 2018. I joined Border Watch on five separate operations to the US–Mexico border, one tracking class, and spent hundreds of hours at BBQs, on couches, and a few strip bars with the volunteers. By the end of my fieldwork, I had attended more operations than most volunteers. I had become an experienced non-member that, with a bit of trepidation on the volunteers’ side, allowed me to engage easily with the new volunteers that arrived at every operation. The volunteers came from across the US, and the distance meant that a lot of my interaction with the volunteers in northern states was limited to text or email between the operations. From my base in El Paso, Texas, I was able to travel the southern states and attend the operations, rallies, or simply catch up with the volunteers.
I have formed a composite group and characters to provide the volunteers and militias with what confidentiality I can for such a small community. In the process, I have sought to maintain the integrity of the individuals’ views, character, and their worlds. Following Ghassan Hage, I have attempted to adopt a Spinozan ethic to, “not deplore, not to laugh, not to detest, but to understand” (Spinoza
cited in Hage 2000, 21). My interest is in how the volunteers made their lives viable, or specifically in this book, moral. I do not aim to evaluate the volunteers of Border Watch, ethically or otherwise. My aim is to understand why and how rational, thinking, and often considerate and warm individuals undertook extreme actions in defence of what they valued most.
The quote by Tim “Nailer” Foley opening this book formed the basis of my inquiry. In the documentary Cartel Land (Heineman 2015), we follow the members of an Autodefensa in Mexico and a border militia in the US. Tim Foley is the outspoken and prominent founder of Arizona Border Recon. He came to fame through Cartel Land and has since appeared in numerous documentaries, news reports, and the like around the world. In the quote above, Foley succinctly paints a moral world divided by a national border that maintains the separation of Good and Evil. Standing against the latter, he implied, situates oneself amongst the former. I soon realized Border Watch defined the moral world in the same way. Among the volunteers, moral justification was nonexistent for, in standing against the cartels, they were fulfilling an internal and external moral imperative to protect the nation. In this harmony, against an evil and immoral Other, their morality and the morality of their actions was assured. In this book, I explore the volunteers’ moral world, how it came to be, and how, within Border Watch, it provided them the comfort to act.
The Struggle for Acceptance
Border Watch and its volunteers were keenly aware of the contentious political environment they existed within. In 2016, Donald Trump ascended to the presidency on a campaign of xenophobic rhetoric that refocused the nation’s attention to its southern border. The rhetoric of governments does not exist in a vacuum, and Trump referenced long histories of racism that echoed those of border militias. Like many border militias, Border Watch existed before Donald Trump began his campaign and has continued after. Trump’s campaign, however, saw the media return to the border, and men and women like Foley appeared on numerous news channels to become the voice and hero of anti-immigrant sentiment and a warning of radicalization alike. The most notable addition to this media engagement comes from Shane Bauer (2016), who went “undercover” with the Three Percent United Patriots. This militia, with chapters across the US, also conducted specific border operations and its members were among those storming the Capitol Building on the sixth of January, 2021.
In his article, Bauer describes the men and women of the militia in honest detail. Their lives, fears, and actions are on the page without, it is to be assumed, their consent. In the article, Bauer talks about the contentious actions of one man who destroyed water jugs in the desert that could have been “someone’s lifeline.” At the time, Bauer did not intervene, choosing instead to condemn their actions from the page. Bauer’s choice to go undercover and conceal his intent stems from the performances most militias conduct with media outlets. Their answers
are usually calculated, seeking to gain support and justify their actions. Bauer’s work, though ethically problematic and slightly dangerous, circumvented this performance and provides us with an insight into the Three Percent United Patriots that superficial interviews and engagement could not.
The militias I engaged were experienced with the media, choosing only certain members to stand before cameras, chat with reporters, and direct them to particular features of the environment in an orchestrated dance that allowed them to control their image. To gain any real sense of who these people were, separating myself from the media would be crucial. Though I did not have the luxury to go “undercover” like Bauer, participant observation offered the greatest opportunity to avoid the performance of interviews and understand, share, and experience the world of the border militia.
Formally, participant observation is the process in which the researcher takes part in participants’ daily lives and activities as a means of “learning the explicit and tacit aspects of their life routines and their culture” (DeWalt and DeWalt 2010, 1–2). It is the belief that through living fully with others over lengths of time, our fundamental assumptions and theories of the world are questioned in a democratic exchange between educator and educated.6 It is a method in which the contradictions, feelings, and insights of all parties are valued, for it is in their difference that the world can be known. Or, as Van Maanen (2011, 151) perfectly describes it:
participant-observation, now a rather tired and stock if oxymoronic phrase that indexes one of the most impressive ways yet invented to make ourselves uncomfortable. Fieldwork is a technique of gathering research material by subjecting the self-body, belief, personality, emotions, cognitions-to a set of contingencies that play on others such that over time-usually a long time-one can more or less see, hear, feel, and come to understand the kinds of responses others display (and withhold) in particular social situations.
Unfortunately, the requirement to lean on participant observation took some time to sink in as I followed the training manuals on good, verifiable data collection.
On my first trip to the border, I carried my notebook everywhere. Predictably, the appearance and existence of the notebook altered my reception among the volunteers. When the volunteers saw it, their conversations changed. Some stopped entirely, and many volunteers became noticeably uncomfortable and guarded. In the following operations, I left my notebook in my pocket and jotted down verbatim key quotations and conversations when I ducked off to the “toilet” or to rest by a tree alone. My audio recorder, which I dutifully carried with me everywhere ready for an interview, produced similar responses until an incident meant it was quickly retired. On my second operation, I had conducted my fifth interview around the campfire late one night. The following day, I stood around a car, chatting with several volunteers as they got ready for an
upcoming mission. During the conversation, one of the volunteers mentioned I had conducted the interview. At that moment, a tall, broad former marine turned to me with anger burning in his eyes. I was acutely aware of the pistol at his side as he told me in no uncertain terms that if I had recorded him, I would not be breathing much longer. I assured him I would do no such thing without his consent and put the recorder away for good.
I conducted a further seven interviews with volunteers as part of a documentary being made about one of the groups. Toward the end of my time with Border Watch, a small documentary crew accompanied several operations. The producer was an independent filmmaker and supporter of the organization. On my fourth operation, the documentary crew began a process of interviews. The producer knew of my work and had seen my interactions with the volunteers. Realizing he could not direct the documentary and interview the volunteers effectively, he asked if I would conduct the interviews for him. After discussing this with the volunteers and director, I accepted with the confirmation the interviews would be available for this research project, and I would be free to formulate questions and direct the interviews as I chose. In this respect, short of a few interruptions by the producer, the interviews were no different from those I had conducted earlier. The audience, however, was very different. Without a doubt, the formalized setting of the interviews with lights, cameras, and an audience standing behind the paraphernalia altered the responses of the volunteers.
Like my earlier interviews and those the volunteers gave to media outlets, performativity flowed easily. The volunteers carefully considered their answers and avoided some topics entirely under guidance from the leadership. Like the Veddas in Charles Seligman’s (1911) account, the militias performed the character they wanted to portray to the audience. As a result, informal interviews, conversations, and participant observation form the bedrock of my research. The interviews I conducted provide valuable background and points of comparison to the informal notes. In particular, they indicate a shifting concern for the moral evaluation of their actions that accompanies a shifting audience, a topic I discuss in Chapter 7. However, we cannot disregard the interviews entirely, for within them, we can begin to identify the narratives that define the internal and external moral imperatives the volunteers experienced.
Morality and Comfort
My presence in Border Watch altered the dynamic substantially. I was new, foreign, and came from a “liberal” university. The volunteers of Border Watch treated me warily, and I could sense the unease rippling through the militia in those first few operations. In my presence, whether speaking to me directly or among themselves about their activities while I was present, the volunteers used subtle and obvious techniques that worked to justify their presence in the desert. One of the key techniques they used with me and other outsiders was altering the perspective on their interaction with migrants. The popular belief is that border
militias terrorize, kidnap, and tie up migrants they encounter.7 The volunteers were very keen to explain that in the deserts, migrants are often in need of immediate medical attention. The thousands of deaths in the desert were not, for the volunteers, a result of their activities. Instead, it was the reason they carried extra water and medical supplies. By portraying themselves as humanitarians in the midst of a crisis, they sought to alter the perception of them from xenophobic paramilitary groups to concerned citizens. Similarly, Border Watch was quick to explain the danger cartels posed to US communities and described the visceral crimes committed by undocumented migrants in the US. What interested me was how this shifted over time as the volunteers became comfortable with me.
Unlike the news reporters who joined Border Watch for a day, and maybe returned for a second, I stayed for the duration of the operations. Over the course of the first two operations, I had become familiar with some members, I had “proven” myself, as it were, and separated myself from the news media. At this point, the unease the volunteers felt seemed to abate. No longer were their conversations peppered with justification. No longer was their language kept in check, and terms like “cockroaches” and “animals” were suddenly used to describe narcotraffickers in my presence. It appeared the potential for ethical evaluation I presented had somehow diminished, as though they were safe to be themselves around me. With my threat diminished, the volunteers of Border Watch no longer justified their activities; they simply enjoyed themselves. I had entered the field wanting to know how the volunteers justified their activities to themselves, but now it became apparent they did not need to; they were acting in ways they and their community of peers deemed “right.” It was how my presence altered that dynamic that interests me; how, when met with the potential threat I posed, the volunteers’ actions and words shifted. When my threat diminished, so too did their ethical performativity. The comfort they felt with me allowed them to once again be themselves. Evaluation was the key. The volunteers’ moral experience and interaction with me were defined by uncertainty of how I, and through me, a broader audience would evaluate their actions. Once reduced, the volunteers became comfortable, and it is with comfort I begin my analysis.
The central question guiding my research is how, in an area thousands have perished, did the volunteers enjoy activities that one volunteer described as “hunting humans?” Socrates argued that if people knew what is right and wrong, they would always do what is right because to do otherwise would make them uncomfortable.8 I take the underlying concept of Socrates’ ethical thoughtcomfort - as the starting point for my investigation into Border Watch. With comfort in mind, an analysis of Border Watch indicates how its volunteers moved through life, defined social collectives, Others, and themselves in ways that allowed them to be comfortable. They avoided the discomfort produced by negative ethical evaluations by defining the moral world in a specific way and surrounding themselves with individuals who shared this outlook.
To explain how the volunteers could patrol the desert hunting humans, I work from a theoretical framework in which a multitude of moral assemblages
contain moral imperatives that define what is and what is not acceptable in any given situation. Each individual navigates this network of assemblages presented with the ethical affordances particular to their unique positionality. Within the affordances presented to us, separate yet interconnected with the moral assemblages around us, we find personal moral imperatives.
Webb Keane (2014, 2016) introduced the concept of ethical affordances that I believe holds the best promise of understanding the difference in concepts of ethics and morality between people, but also in explaining the potentiality of ethics. All objects, actions, thoughts, emotions, words, situations, etc., contain a range of affordances in how individuals view them. Ethical affordances are any object of attention that can be viewed in moral or ethical terms. Nothing is inherently ethical or not, but all has the potential to be so given the particularities of the observer. The concept prioritizes the individual perspective as affordances are derived from our experiences and perceptions of and within the world. Thus, they are culturally and historically situated and represent the world that we draw upon and make decisions in relation too. Our evaluations of that world formulate an imperative, a sense of what ought to be done in any given situation. To evaluate someone’s, or crucially, our own action is to judge it against a concept of what we feel one ought to do. In moments one is the subject of evaluation, by the self or others, self-reflection may occur. I contend this self-reflection can be uncomfortable and is one catalyst for moral self-cultivation.
Almost all the volunteers of Border Watch had emotional and traumatic experiences of narcotics and/or narcotics-related crime in their home communities. The volunteers made sense of these experiences through narratives that described an unsecured border and an immoral Other. The Other, viewed from the particular standpoint and experiences of the volunteers, developed a moral imperative for action. The volunteers felt the citizens of the US ought to stand against this threat and in doing so, would fulfill this imperative. Crucially, the imperative is culturally defined, yet through the volunteers’ experiences, it became internalized into how they experienced and subsequently evaluated the world. Once we accept that every person has a particular and personal concept of what is and what is not ethical and moral, we can begin to see how ethical evaluations of acts can differ. The act itself is neither ethical or not; it is the evaluation and the evaluator that determines its affordance and positionality. Humans do not do this in isolation, and it is to the concept of moral assemblages I turn to make sense of the sociality of morality and ethics.
At their core, moral assemblages (Zigon 2013, 2010, 2014) are the set of guidelines defining acceptable and non-acceptable actions, words, thoughts, and modes of being in any given social context or set of relations. They are the shared relational affordances toward objects of evaluation, built from a single individual and their relation to the world, between two people, a collection of individuals, or between groups of people. These are often unarticulated and formed through the negotiation between people in the process of interaction, yet defined by the broader cultural history of our upbringing that is imparted and ingrained in
our worldview. As our relationships grow, dissolve, and evolve, these rules can be negated, reinforced, or altered so that the assemblages shift and change over time. The unique, singular, and malleable assemblages interweave with other similarly constructed assemblages built from separate and or overlapping sets of social relations. In this interaction, negotiation occurs as the terms of acceptable and non-acceptable alter. We will see throughout this book that moral experience is defined by our relationship to this interwoven network of assemblages. Comfort, I suggest, is found when we no longer need to be aware of this shifting evaluation, when we no longer need to be aware and considerate of the competing and sometimes contrasting claims as to what is and what is not moral and ethical.
As noted, what initially caught me off-guard was the complete lack of justification I found in Border Watch when the media vanished and my position within the militia was accepted. It had seemed that with my and the media’s absence, the potential for ethical evaluation, conflict, and the discomfort it produced was nonexistent. Border Watch situated itself within a moral world that juxtaposed a moral Us against an immoral Other. The dominant moral assemblage within Border Watch contained an imperative that called for citizens to protect the nation and its communities from this Other. The moral imperative underlying Border Watch coincided with the affordances the border situation presented to the volunteers. This harmony of imperatives enabled the volunteers within Border Watch a space to fulfill their internal imperatives largely free of the ethical evaluations conflicting imperatives produce and in turn, relatively free of self-reflection. When it did occur, the polemic moral world provided the background for self-reflection to be positive.
For the dedicated volunteers, communal and personal narratives created and reinforced the dominant moral assemblage within Border Watch and solidified its positionality on the “Right” side of a moral dichotomy that provided moral legitimacy to its activities. In other words, the harmony of imperatives meant they no longer needed to be aware of a shifting frame of reference. They had removed themselves from a network of moral assemblages by controlling and promoting a single dominant assemblage within Border Watch, one that condoned the actions they enjoyed. The dominance of the moral assemblage within Border Watch allowed the volunteers to forgo ethical performances that contradicted their internal imperatives and created the space for volunteers to dwell comfortably with each other and their actions. In Border Watch, the volunteers found the comfort to act in ways that many find morally reprehensible.
Why Mobilize? A Brief History of Opposition
In this book, I am interested in the moral experiences of the volunteers more so than the particular circumstances that led them to the desert. However, the reasons for their mobilization are entwined with their moral assessment of the activity and themselves. I explore this further in Chapter 4, but for now, it is helpful
to note the particular circumstances of the volunteers’ lives as they differed from the volunteers of the recent border militias that preceded them.
When we hear of border militias today, one of two images springs to mind. One envisions western films and romantic notions of brave men in lawless lands, upholding order, and stability.9 Alternatively, as Jessica Conaway has put it, “investigation beyond the sound bites and propaganda uncovers the truthpatriotism, civic duty, and protection of property rights are simply ad hoc justifications for “wetback” sport hunting” (2005, 1421–2).10 Border militias and vigilantes are not a new phenomenon on the US–Mexico border but stem from a long history of violence at the nations frontier that focused on race and citizenship. For reference, between 1848 and 1879:
Mexicans were lynched at a rate of 473 per 100,000 of population. In comparison, African Americans [were] lynched at a rate of 52.8 victims per 100,000 of population in Mississippi between 1880 and 1930 (the time period and state in which African American lynchings were most rife).
Yoxall
2006
The last public lynching of a Mexican, Rafael Benavides, took place in Farmington, New Mexico in 1928. While recovering in hospital from a gunshot wound he received during his arrest, masked men dragged him outside to a waiting vehicle. A convoy grew as they drove to an abandoned farm where they hung Benavides from a tree. The coroner’s verdict claimed Benavides died by strangulation caused by unknown parties, and a grand jury, formed due to the outcry over the verdict, failed to return a single indictment despite the testimony of over 50 witnesses. The public outcry over the upheld verdict instigated a change in violence along the border. Without the public support extra-legal violence once enjoyed, it became shrouded in secrecy.11
The 20th century saw continued violence marked by racism, but thanks to authors such as Agnes E. Meyers and Carey McWilliams, the wretched living conditions and social segregation of migrant workers were brought into public view. The awakened awareness of migrant lives led to the 1951 President’s Commission on Migratory Labor in American Agriculture.12 Unfortunately, the report opened the door for new theories to capture simmering fear of communism and link it with migration. In particular, a five-article series by Gladwin Hill in 1951 dramatized the report’s findings on the living conditions, segregation, and exploitation of migrant workers, but also detailed threats they posed to US society. Most notably for our purposes, Hill called into question the security of a border that allowed in thousands of undocumented migrants to enter the country among which communist spies could hide.13 The idea captured the imagination and fear of the US so much so that it became central to the Reagan administration’s view of the US–Mexico border.14 Unsurprisingly, the fear of “who” enters the border is found in anti-immigrant discourse and among border militia volunteers today.
With public concerns over the insecurity of the US–Mexico border rising, the latter half of the century saw an increase in organized civilian responses to undocumented migration. In 1977 the Klan Border Watch took place in San Ysidro, California. The organization had declared around 450 Klan members would patrol the border in California, Texas, and New Mexico. The Watch garnered media attention and condemnation from activist groups and politicians. The Brown Berets, a Chicano movement standing against police brutality, said they would rally 1,500 members to oppose them15 and in San Ysidro, California, 40 people rallied to protest the Klan Border Watch.16 On the first night of operations, however, Border Patrol reported no sightings of the group and observers only listed sightings of at least 10 members and six vehicles with KKK logos taped to their sides.17 A decade later the Light Up the Border movement begun by Muriel Watson, a border patrol widower, attracted more than 1,000 people in 1990 to line their cars up along the border at night with their headlights illuminating a stretch of the border near Tijuana, Baja California. The movement also attracted opposition as pro-immigrant activists arrived with tin foil and mirrors to disrupt the light.18 In the mid-1990s, the PTD policy altered the geography of the border and forced more migrants to attempt crossing in the loosely habited regions increasing the number of incidents with ranchers.
The exploits of Roger Barnett, a former law enforcement officer turned rancher, along with his two brothers and ranch hand led the vigilante charge. Known as the “Barnett Boys,” they began vigilante activities in 1996 making citizen arrests of undocumented migrants on the Barnett ranch.19 With 20 other ranchers they would later form the Cochise County Concerned Citizens Group who in 2006 claimed to have made citizen arrests of over 12,000 undocumented migrants since 1996. 20 The movement inspired Jack Foote, who began Ranch Rescue in Arlington, Texas in 2000. Hiding behind various US laws and customs, Ranch Rescue united deeply xenophobic and racial fears with the goal of securing US citizens’ properties and livelihoods. Their racist dialogue, fear of a Mexican invasion, and connections to the neo-Nazi National Alliance led the Anti-Defamation League to list Ranch Rescue as a White supremacist paramilitary hate group. 21 The group performed several operations on the border in which members were decked out in combat fatigues and carried a variety of assault rifles. In 2002, Ranch Rescue would garner attention when one of their patrols seized 280 pounds of marijuana in Lochiel, Arizona. They would again garner attention when two members were charged with aggravated assault and unlawful restraint after detaining two Salvadorians and beating one with a pistol. 22
While these groups had garnered media and academic interest, the Minutemen Project of 2005 was the first to bring prolonged engagement by social scientists, and with it, a deeper understanding of the movement and those who volunteer. Mostly retirees armed with no more than pistols, the men and women of the Minutemen descended on the southern Arizonan desert with deck chairs and RVs. Their goal was to conduct 24 hours surveillance operations for up
to a month at a time. As a spectacle, 23 the Minutemen Project welcomed the media with open doors. Their primary aim was to raise awareness of the “illegals” streaming across the border and, in doing so, force immigration reform in Congress. 24 Based on participant observation, Roxanne Doty’s The Law Into Their Own Hands (2009) provides a well-researched analysis of civilian border patrol interactions with the media, anti-immigrant, white nationalists, and white supremacists organizations. Doty’s analysis centers on the interaction between popular sovereignty – in which the power of the state is found with the people –and exceptionalism – a political situation in which sovereign power excludes certain people from the rights of the nation. I cannot disagree with Doty, as these two elements were in play at the border and functioned to create a liminal space in which the distinction between citizen and non-citizen was the focal point. Yet, Doty’s analysis centers on media and inter-group interaction, thereby limiting the voices of the Minutemen to the upper echelons of the militia and dismissing the complexities and contradictions of individual volunteers evident in her data. From her work, we simply do not get to understand the volunteers’ motivations for joining the movement.
Identifying this gap, Harel Shapira (2013a, b) has provided a rich ethnographic account of the Minutemen “on the line.” Shapira altered the analysis from the ideological to the individual and revealed the motivations of the rank-and-file members for patrolling the border. Doing so allowed Shapira to dismantle the stereotyped notion of the Minutemen prevalent in Doty’s work and international media reports. Shapira concluded that the many ex-soldiers who made up the Minutemen joined to reclaim a sense of self and meaning through the act of soldiering. Shapira’s empathetic work brings life to the volunteers enabling us to witness how their precarious place in society attracted them to a militia offering its volunteers a space to be themselves, or at least, who they wanted to be. Border Watch is similar in this respect. It provides the space for ex-military personnel to rediscover a community full of bad humor, rough environments, and enemies to unite them and for those who never joined the armed forces a space to experience these with security. In contrast to the Minutemen before them, it was the paramilitary-inspired activities that attracted the Border Watch volunteers as they envisioned themselves as skilled warriors able to stand against evil.
Emine Fidan Elcioglu’s 2020 addition to this border militia literature, Divided by the Wall, also looks to identity cultivation as a primary motivation for mobilization. Divided by the Wall is a comparative piece between pro and antiimmigrant organizations focused on immigration and the US–Mexico border. Due to her comparative emphasis, Elcioglu is able to identify common themes running across her respondents’ political views. For Elcioglu, it is the interaction between two elements that lead to mobilization. Every respondent, she argues, utilizes activist organizations to address what she defines as conflictual identities. The pro-immigrant activists were troubled by a privileged but progressive identity in which the recognition of their privilege as typically white, upwardly mobile individuals contrasted with their progressive values. Elcioglu argues
these individuals joined pro-immigrant activist groups to overcome this conflict. Each of her pro-immigrant respondents had personal experiences that highlighted their privilege as US citizens, and the relative powerlessness of migrants. Together, these contributed to a particular view of the state as strong, punitive, and even vindictive. In the activist groups, Elcioglu’s respondents were able to address their conflictual identity by leveraging the very same privilege that led to their conflict to help the “third-world migrant” navigate the desert and immigration services.
In contrast to the pro-immigrant activists, those in anti-immigrant groups believed the state was weak and unable to secure its borders. This belief is central to all border militias and is crucial in their mobilization and an aspect that I will return to in Chapters 1 and 3. Whereas the pro-immigrant activists were highly educated and on a path of upward mobility, Elcioglu describes the anti-immigrant activists as less educated, with lower incomes, and were primarily downwardly mobile blue-collar workers. This leads Elcioglu to define her anti-immigrant respondent’s conflictual identity as “white but working class” as they grappled with the diminishing privilege they believed their citizenship and race promised. When Elcioglu argues, “their downward mobility was paired with a sense of white entitlement, it produced confusion, anxiety, and deep racial resentment” (2020, 105) that led them to mobilize at the border to simultaneously reclaim a sense of power lost in their own lives and strengthen the state.
Elcioglu presents the most recent engagement with border militias and offers crucial insight into the movement. However, my analysis sharply contrasts Elcioglu’s in regards to racism within the movement. I discuss the differences in more detail in Chapter 3, but for now, while Elcioglu isolates racial tensions and declining power as the reasons for mobilization on the border, my research identifies racism as a symptom of a broader worldview and nationalist concern. It is unsurprising that border militias attract those with racial resentment and white nationalist ideals. However, Border Watch itself was opposed to these ideas as they would jeopardize their goal of becoming a part of the state security apparatus. As such, they worked toward weeding out any such elements and individuals from their organization. This is, however, not true of all militias. As opposed to racial anxieties and a sense of fading white entitlement, the Border Watch volunteers’ conflictual identity, to use Elcioglu’s terminology, was one defined by their enjoyment of violence in a world condemning it. Like Elcioglu’s anti-immigrant respondents, Border Watch existed in relation to the concept of the weak state, but rather than one in which they could reclaim a sense of power, the volunteers made use of their power to develop and maintain a community that condoned the paramilitary-style activities they enjoyed.
In lieu of economic precarity, the Border Watch volunteers were confronted with a different reality that helped prompt their action. With few exceptions, the volunteers of Border Watch had experienced some form of traumatic event linked to the Drug War in their families and home communities. Most volunteers hailed from the Northeast of the United States, with Arizona, California, and
