I ask why they think that is. “Maybe Obama needs the black market going,” responded Murray. “If the black market is cranking, well then, everybody kind of does okay. But you stop the black market, and this economy would crater.
“They’ve been packing drugs through here a long time, but thirty years ago, they weren’t hauling nearly the drugs they are now. Now they’re bringing four or five fifty-pound bundles at a time. What worries us isn’t the mule, but the pistolero that walks behind, in case of an ambush. We kinda got a problem here with two cartels using the same mountains. La Línea and El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel. One group sits on a hill and watches a trail for packers. They’ll go down and put these guys on their knees with guns to the back of their heads. Steal the drugs. Scare them back to Mexico. The pistoleros guard from behind, to get the drop on the other guys.”
I ask them if they’d feel any safer behind Trump’s proposed wall. “I don’t think Donald Trump is going to build a thirty-foot wall,” said Murray. “You can’t build a wall high enough to keep them out. Mexico knows what a cutting torch is. Those people aren’t stupid at all. They’ll build a gate with hinges on it. Either that, or cut it up and haul it off for scrap metal. What Trump is going to do, needs to do, is man the border.”
Judith jumped in, to clarify they have a Christian compassion for the people surviving off the cross-border drug economy. “I can’t get mad at these guys that are humping these big old heavy packs. They’re desperate down there. They’ve got a socialistic country. There’s no jobs, no industries. Working for two dollars a day. They have to feed their families, and if that job is available, I don’t blame them at all. There’s no way for a poor person to get a leg up and get started, unless it’s in the mafia. I feel we should take the job away from them, but I don’t know what I’d do to feed my family.”
I tell them their empathy for poor migrants doesn’t seem to mesh with Trump’s iron-fisted and racially inflammatory border rhetoric. “I think Trump has a lot of empathy for the Mexican people,” said Murray. “When he said the Mexicans coming over are rapists and drug dealers, well, he’s pretty much right, as far as the people that are going to stay. The Democrats are reading into what he said, because I could see myself saying the same thing. These packers humping fifty pounds of marijuana, they’re throwing it down on a highway and going back to Mexico. The guys coming to stay, I think we do have a big mix of bad guys coming across.
“Robert Krentz, a rancher friend of ours, was killed six years ago,” continued Murray. “Wasn’t five miles from here. We had a guy kidnapped over here who was working on a pipeline. There was three trucks hauling drugs. Two of them got stuck in the mud. They took his pickup and made him go all the way to Wilcox, Arizona. After unloading the drugs, they said, ‘If you tell them who we are or where we went, we’ll come back and give you your wife’s head in a paper bag.’ He was really traumatized by that. Another one that’s still under investigation. It could have been any of us.”
“We had a big meeting in March,” said Judith. “It was in Animas. Six hundred people showed up. That’s a lot of people. It was all about securing the border. Violent incidents keep happening.”
“We’re tired of politicians telling you stuff and doing nothing,” said Murray. “We met with Senator [Martin] Heinrich a couple of weeks ago [one of New Mexico’s two Democratic senators]. He’s smooth. He smiles at you, tells you what you want to hear. Then he drives off. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The only guy that’s been good and consistent is Representative Steve Pearce. But he’s one of many in Congress. The East doesn’t understand the West. They just don’t get what it’s like out here. There’s people back east that think the border is secure. Obama told them it is! Their attitude is, ‘What do you want, a moat with alligators in it?’ Well, yeah, that might help [laughs]! It would slow them down a little, till the alligators got full. A rancher friend of ours in Arizona, Ed Ashurst, just wrote a book called Alligators in the Moat. I could have written that book.”
I ask them about their experiences with Border Patrol. “Border Patrol has got me to where I’m almost an anarchist,” said Murray. “They’ve run my cattle out of the corral with their helicopters. Run my mules through barbed-wire fences. One time, it was three-thirty in the morning, they shined the brightest light I’ve ever seen in our bedroom window. Then hovered it over our front yard. I go out there, and they spotlight me on the porch in my BVDs. After the helicopter left, they called and said, ‘This is so-and-so with the Border Patrol. We’re working your area.’ I said, ‘No shit, Sherlock [laughs].’ I told them, ‘I almost shot your damn helicopter down, I didn’t know who it was!’ Boom. Here comes the FBI. They’re investigating me because they said they landed the chopper to look for bullet holes. I was standing out there in my underwear, no place to hide a gun.
“If you talked to a hundred people along the border, you’d hear similar stories about Border Patrol. It’s the attitude they give them in school. They hired so many, whoever could pass the test, guys from New York City and Chicago. You get to thinking about these guys when you see tattoos up to their jaw. And they’re federal officers? They hold dominion over me? They tell them the people out here are probably all drug runners. Why else would we live here? Ranchers are suspects until proven guilty. If never proven guilty, you’re always a suspect. Once, at a checkpoint, the agent asked if my AR-15 was fully automatic. I said, ‘That’s against the law, you dummy!’ It’s aggravating, they’re looking for anything. They’ve been up here at night, gone through our out buildings.
“One day a helicopter came low over the windmill, scared one of my colts into a barbed wire. I had to sew up his chest. I went to Border Patrol in Deming. They locked the doors, wouldn’t talk to me. Finally, a ranch liaison comes out, asks me, ‘Is it true you said that if the helicopter had landed, you’d have whipped that pilot’s ass?’ He had a recorder in his pocket. He was trying to set me up for threatening a federal officer. I said, ‘You know, I don’t remember saying that, but if I would have thought of it, I’d have said it.’”
“A lot of our friends around here won’t go near Border Patrol,” added Judy. “Sometimes [they do] things just to make sure everybody understands they’re the bosses, and we’re the peons.”
“One more story,” said Murray. “A friend of ours was checking waters on his land, south side of Highway 9. A patrolman parks in front of him, wouldn’t move. He rolls up and bumps the bumper of the Border Patrol, just to get that guy’s attention. It’s his ranch, his road, and here’s this federal officer thinks he owns the world. Another patrolman arrives, they have him at gunpoint, lay him flat on the ground, handcuffed. Kept him that way for three hours in a hundred-and-five heat. Bumping the car—that was ‘assault of a federal officer.’ Border Patrol dropped the charges, but state police pursued it. It’s called ‘stone garden money.’ The federal dollars that Border Patrol spreads to local law enforcement on the border. It buys loyalty. If the sheriffs don’t do what the Border Patrol wants, they pull the ‘stone garden’ funds.”
I pointed out that they sounded more heated when talking about the Border Patrol than they did talking about the cartels. While the Keelers grew up with Mexicans and occasional violence on the border, the kind of federal power represented by Border Patrol seems more of a foreign presence in the land. Toward the end of my day with the Keelers, Murray reminisced about his charmed youth on the old wire-fence border, where he worked and socialized with the braceros on his father’s farm.
“I learned Spanish as a kid working with the braceros,” he recalled. “We had fourteen braceros that worked for my dad’s farm, halfway between Columbus and Deming. They would get in the back of our pickup and we’d take them to town to buy whatever they needed, food, clothes, and shoes. They were great guys, you know, heck. At eight years old I was introduced to tractor work. A Case Tractor with a big old clutch. The braceros would take me in the evenings on that same Case Tractor to putt around and shoot rabbits. The border wa
s nothing like it is now. If there were three or four braceros that wanted to go home, I’d just load them in my pickup, a .22 or something hanging in the back, and just drive across the border. I’d park, go drink a beer, and come back across. Nobody ever questioned. In Deming we both went to school with Mexican kids who’d come up from Puerta Palomos. Mothers came up and had the babies at the hospital.
“The bracero program was a wonderful program. Bring it back. The secret on the border is, if you bring back a work program for agriculture workers, then all you have to do is enforce the law. Just enforce the law. There would be no running around trying to deport people, because they wouldn’t have jobs. They’d go home by themselves. Nobody would have to deport them.”
After hearing their stories, I decided to show them the route my phone had mapped to the nearest gas station. I was running low, and could think of better places to be stranded than a rocky, no-signal road in the middle of the Peloncillos.
“It’s a good thing you asked,” said Judith Keeler. “You don’t want to go that way. It’s longer and less safe. If you run out of gas or bust a tire on the rocks, nobody’s coming along to help. Go the way you came in. And come back sometime after the rains. It’s dry now and it looks sad. But when it’s green, and the mountains are in flower, and the springs are running water, this place here is as good as it gets.”
* Less discussed are the rampant labor violations and human rights abuses that define H-2B guest worker programs. See the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2013 report, “Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States.”
Chapter Six
California
Orange County created the Orange Candidate. The Rhode Island–sized sliver of Southern California coast has served as the Right’s suburban laboratory for more than half a century, exporting its products along a continental conveyer belt that connects the land of Sleeping Beauty Castle with that of Trump Tower and points in between. The citizen-scientists who built this laboratory were a myriad lot—white flighters from Los Angeles, defense industry execs from back east, conservative replants from the farm and Bible belts—but together they sent enough ideological beakers spuming to become known as, in the famous designation of Fortune magazine, “nut country.” By the early 1960s, Orange County was establishment shorthand for the New Right that took human form in the Golem-piloting-the-Hindenburg candidacy of Barry Goldwater. Four years later, those same “nuts” were gobbling boycotted California grapes in celebration of the triumph of Richard Nixon, who developed the themes of his “silent majority” campaign, according to historian Lisa McGirr, on a close study of Orange County. Nixon wasn’t alone in his regard for the place. Ronald Reagan said Orange County was “where good Republicans go to die.”
Donald Trump has never been a “good Republican,” but there’d be poetry in his checking into an Orange County hospice. Orange County hatched and refined the beta strains of his campaign’s xenophobic nationalism, from John Birch Society anti-communism, to backlash border politics, to the “Birther” movement launched by Orange County dentist Orly Taitz. There’s yet more Orange-tinted Trumpism in the county’s distinction as among the largest ever to declare Chapter 9 bankruptcy.
Like the rest of the country, Nixon’s Orange County has changed. Today half of the once overwhelmingly white county’s residents are immigrants; a third are Latino, clustered around Anaheim and Fullerton. In April, when street clashes erupted outside a Trump rally in Anaheim—home of Disneyland, the “happiest place on earth”—Orange County protestors might have been as numerous as those from bordering L.A. County. The protests and confrontations continued the next day outside and inside Anaheim City Hall, where the city council heard arguments on a resolution denouncing Trump’s rhetoric on Muslims, immigrants, and refugees. The council rejected it by a three-to-two vote.
If it were possible to program and bring to life a Weird Science–style prototype of the perfect California Trump voter, he or she would combine aspects of the old and new Orange Counties. He would be a white, non-religious small-business owner with working-class origins, influenced by the area’s conservative-libertarian ethos, while nonetheless reflecting its changing demographics and lifestyles.
This is the profile of Kris Wyrick, a thirty-eight-year-old Trump fan with a long red goatee, shaved head, and an easy, reclined SoCal demeanor. I met Wyrik and his wife Becky in Alpine, a town of fifteen thousand nestled inside the Cuyamaca Mountains, two hours south of Anaheim. Alpine marks the beginning of eastern San Diego County, a mountainous region of isolated ranches and Border Police compounds that eventually opens into the flatter, more Mexican-flavored Imperial County and Coachella Valley. The Wyricks aren’t from here. They grew up a few blocks away from each other in a Latino-majority neighborhood in Anaheim. They hopped the bus to Alpine in 2006 with two backpacks and a shared desire to get away from bad situations in Orange County. “The cops were looking for me because my mom falsely accused me of robbing her place,” said Kris. “I got my backpack and I just bumped out.”
Together, Kris and Becky have since built up a busy welding and repair business called Alpine Motorsports. In a giant open-air garage strung with American and Gadsen flags, Kris works on a clutter of dirt bikes, ATVs, skid loaders, and chainsaws. On weekends, he sometimes joins a local Minutemen organizer named Bob Maupin on armed citizen patrols of the border. Among his customers and friends is Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter, whose district covers east San Diego County. An immigration hardliner known for his efforts to deny federal funding to “sanctuary cities,” Duncan was the first congressman to endorse Trump and lobby for his campaign on Capitol Hill.
A week before the California primary, I drank Pepsis with Kris and Becky outside their garage. We talked about their lives in Orange and San Diego Counties, race, the border, and Trump. Throughout the conversation, a brown pit bull named Kayoss eyed me warily from her bed.
“It was get out of Orange County, die, or prison,” said Kris. “All my friends are in prison or dead. My ex–old lady, she’s a drug addict. My son—we just needed to get away. This town saved our lives. We planted roots. Slowly but surely, we’ve just grown and grown. It’s weird, because the majority out here is white people. [Back home], it’s almost all Hispanic and you are literally fighting to stay alive. There wasn’t very many of us in the neighborhoods where we grew up, around Santa Ana and Anaheim. It’s all Mexican. In Garden Grove, they’re all Oriental. You just try to find people that you can hang out with.
“Growing up, I got shot at. When I walked through some neighborhoods, I had to duck into bushes because of my skin color. You’re walking along, all of a sudden, they’re hanging out the car with guns. Happened a lot. We’d be walking around Knott’s Berry Farm [an Orange County amusement park founded by conservative Nixon supporter, Walter Knott], a car pulls up, full of Mexicans, and they’re like, ‘What’s up, wood? [Slang for white boy.] What the fuck you doing in my neighborhood, wood?’ I’ve been pistol whipped, got scars here from that…. I’ve been through some shit. Sometimes trouble follows you.”
Becky, who is a little younger than Kris and wears her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, said: “This is Orange County. When people hear ‘Orange County,’ they think of ritzy places like Huntington Beach, the show The O.C. They think of Mickey Mouse. But you go two streets over from Disneyland, you’re in straight ghetto. When I used to do bad things, I’d get my drugs a block from Disneyland. There’s a lot of tweakers in Orange County. Don’t dare go out at night by yourself. I wouldn’t go back into my old neighborhood. Last time I was in Orange County, I did drive through, but I wouldn’t get out of the car. It’s crazy.
“My school, Anaheim High School, was ninety-seven percent Hispanic. If you’re white, you’re always an outcast. For a while, I tried to fit in. I did the big hair, the lip liner. Then you get made fun of for trying to be a chola. So you hang out with white people, because you’re accepted. But now you’re a racist because you only hang out w
ith white people. Either way, you’re an outcast. I begged my mom to switch schools. She wouldn’t do it. I ended up dropping out right before I graduated. I couldn’t handle it. When my older friends graduated ahead of me, I was left by myself. I’d get picked on all the time: ‘Oh, you don’t speak Spanish? Why not? Are you racist?’ I was, like, ‘No, I’m not racist. My mom’s not Spanish. We didn’t learn it. What do you want me to do?’ That’s not saying I didn’t have any Mexican friends. I did have.
“You’re going to get stuck if you don’t get the fuck out of there. Your friends ain’t going to do it for you. They’re only going to keep bringing you down. Alpine saved us. Gave us a chance to break away from all the nonsense. When I was growing up, I never went to the same school for two years in a row. Our kid’s been in the same school district since elementary. That, to me, is fundamentally the shit. To me, that’s cool. We didn’t want him to have the same challenges we did. His school is pretty diverse. There’s two schools here: one near the [Viejas Indian] reservation, it’s a terrible school, known for raucousness. He goes to the charter in Spring Valley. It’s diverse, a nice mix of everybody. He plays football, gets good grades. The black guys call him ‘White Chocolate’ [laughs]. He’s accepted. That’s how it should be. I saw this show on seals. They kicked out a red-headed seal from their pod. Made him live by himself because he was ginger. You got to have a good mix. That way, no one’s singled out.”
Kris said, “Racial profiling? Dude, I know exactly what that means. People think white people don’t get racial profiled. We get racial profiled all the time. Even down here. When we first got to Alpine, we didn’t have much money. We were driving a junky Jeep and got pulled over on a weekly basis. The police are, like, ‘Where are you coming from, [a local bar known for bikers and meth]?’”
The Gilded Rage Page 10