“You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. My family worked apple orchards in Washington State. There were Mexicans up there. When the season was over, they got on a bus and went back to picking peaches or whatever. My grandfather had pickers’ cabins for them, you know? They stayed a week or two, then were on their way. If they wanted citizenship, there was a policy: you came in, you signed your papers, it took about six months, you passed a bunch of tests, you stood there, did the pledge, you were a citizen. They stopped all that. They closed the door.
“Take the story of my gardener to heart, man. Edgar. He came here from Guatemala when he was fifteen. He knocked on my door in Lakeside, and said, ‘Hey, I’m in the neighborhood, I do gardening.’ Now he’s thirty-two. He’s got two Ford 1–50s. Wife and kids. He works with his cousins. They kick ass. He’s a guy with a handshake and a fair price. He pays taxes. But he cannot get his citizenship. He’s paid thousands to lawyers. He can’t even come out here. I wanted him to run my irrigation after the fire. He said, ‘I don’t want to go through that border check on I-8. I don’t want to get hassled and explain this and that.’ Ask people and they’ll tell you, ‘We don’t even try anymore. Come get me. I’ll pay the fine.’ That’s kind of the attitude now. But there is no fine. If you’re Mexican, you can’t be checked about anything. That’s how it is.
“They’re blatant about it in their rallies. [California Assemblywoman] Lorena Gonzalez, right in front of everybody, says, ‘The white people are afraid because we’re voting in numbers. They’re getting scared because we’re taking over.’ Who says that? Who gets away with that? That’s Hitler shit. ‘Oh, well, we can’t cover it, we can’t put that on the news.’ But some white guy says something, and they go after him.
“It’s not just workers coming up through here. On the news they say, ‘They’re just coming here to work!’ Bullshit, the Bloods and Crips of Central America are getting dumped here. Arizona is overridin’ with MS-13 [Mara Salvatrucha, an international Los Angeles–based Central American gang]. They learn Aztec and Mayan in the prison system so they can’t get detected. The media focuses on some poor woman and a little baby. Bull-fuckin’-shit. When Trump said, ‘We gotta secure our borders,’ it was beyond overdue.
“It’s not about a new wall. The question is, will Border Patrol be allowed to do their job? We’ve got telescopes mounted in the rocks all the way to Jacumba. We see everything. But Border Patrol has their hands tied. I always wave them down and talk to them, try to keep current. Once in a while they’ll let us look through the telescope. I always ask about the president, whoever it is. They tell me, ‘Yeah, we just got told: no more. We’re allowed one a day.’ It’s memos, emails, straight from the commander-in-chief.
“There are Minutemen groups here that try to help. All they do is tattle. They just call the Border Patrol. They’re not out there chasing people down like Machete [the 2010 film by Robert Rodriguez that portrays border vigilantes as bloodthirsty rednecks.] They’re a pretty positive force out here. People think, ‘My God! Vigilantism!” And they’re, like, ‘Man, we carry water, we see them, we call the border patrol and tattle on them. That’s all we’re doing.’ Our Border Patrol is also very humanitarian. They just round them up and drop them back at the border. But when they had Career Day about a month ago at the University of San Marcos in San Diego, the Mexicans freaked out when Border Patrol joined people from the defense industry, biotech. They ran to the head of the college: ‘We feel threatened!’”
Mills’s admiration for the candidate goes back decades. As a transient teenager, Mills worked in downtown Manhattan cleaning out property flips by Art of the Deal-era Donald Trump. “It was the ‘80s,” he says. “We were all going to be corporate entrepreneurs. I wanted to be like him, you know? Even then, everybody loved Trump or hated him, but he kept us working on these buildings. Ten bucks an hour. Then we’d fly South Carolina to New York for ninety bucks on Trump’s People’s Express, you know, his airline. You could be a punk rocker living on nothing on the Lower East Side, and still get from South Carolina to New York for ninety bucks.”
He never seriously considered another candidate. “They tried to push Jeb Bush down our throats [laughs]. I sent them back their mail with nasty notes. Then they call, I give them a piece of my mind. We’re tired of the machine. Do you think those people give a fuck about the people making cars and bug lamps? They don’t. We see Donald Trump as somebody that has all he needs. Donald Trump probably has places nicer than the White House. It’s kind of like, why not? I love it that he’s a street fighter.
“I’m almost fifty. So many of us, we have kids getting to college age. We’re like, why do we have colleges full of illegals getting a free ride? We’re saying, ‘My kid got a 3.8 average and he’s not being accepted, and this kid is automatically accepted because he’s an Obama ‘Dreamer’ [Obama’s D.R.E.A.M. Act never passed Congress and hasn’t been signed into law].” Tuition that should be $8,000 is $38,000 because we’re paying for all the illegals to go to college. There’s frustration. You can’t even say ‘illegals.’ Now it’s pretty words like ‘undocumented.’
I asked Mills about Trump’s proposal to round up and deport every undocumented immigrant in the country. “One of my friends is from Mexicali, she lives down near Palmer Avenue at Imperial Beach, where there’s this big banner: No Trump. No Wall. She told me she’s afraid Trump will try to round everybody up. It scares her. Well, I think he shouldn’t have been saying that. You can’t just round up 2.5 million people. But you could figure something out. What if the employers all got fined or jail time for hiring people without documents? That would put a stop to it, period. You cut the snake’s head off, right there.
“Another thing that’s frustrating, my son is in seventh grade, and he’s constantly being called a racist. He’ll listen to us, go to school, and say, ‘We should do something about the border. You don’t know what the illegals go through.’ He’ll try and tell some of their hardship, and the other kids will go, ‘You’re just a racist! You and your dad are just racists!’ I tell him, ‘Son, it’s a name, don’t let it bum you out, you know? But it just sucks that if you try and bring up anything, you know, the culture pounces on you. You’re like, ‘When in the fuck did all of this happen?’
“In southern California, things are getting way tenser between everyone. Way more. Illegals, blacks, whites. There never used to be so much of this. We all seemed to get along better before the last eight years. I’m not going to blame the president. Maybe it’s society. Maybe it’s the Internet. Everybody beating each other up online. I honestly don’t know.”
* * *
Later that afternoon, I stop for lunch on the forsaken main drag in Jacumba, an Old Highway community of 500 people with an economy built around social security checks and a trickle of tourists drawn to the local hot springs. Opposite a row of broken and boarded-up shops is the nation’s most unlikely soul-food restaurant, Jay’s Southern Café, run by the Cousins family of Baton Rouge. Digging into Jay’s fried fish platter, I checked my email and saw a letter from Becky Wyrick. I’d written her from New Mexico asking if she and Kris had gone to a recent Trump rally in San Diego, where protestors clashed with riot police and Trump supporters, resulting in thirty-five arrests.
“The rally was fine,” she wrote. “But when we left, we were flipped off, booed, spit at, things were thrown. People blocked our path to yell ‘Fuck Trump.’ It was scary. Without saying anything too incriminating, Kris took care of any threat that came at the family. The few scuffles I saw were in response to [Trump supporters] being pushed, poked, shoved or other-wise mistreated by the protesters. Trump supporters were there to see their candidate speak. Anybody else was there to cause trouble. A girl I work out with works for Chula Vista PD and was there in riot gear. One protestor tried to grab her vest and pull her to the ground. The real craziness popped off behind us as we walked to the car, and we didn’t see how bad it got until we checked the news the next day. I’m glad we got out
of there when we did.”
I thought about the scene in San Diego as I drove out of Jacumba and looked south toward the mountains in Mexico, a vista that always reminds me of the famous final minutes of The Terminator. In the scene, Sarah Conner is stopped for gas in her Jeep somewhere near the California-Mexico line. It’s windy and she’s about to leave when a boy points to some dark clouds and exclaims, “Viene una tormenta!” Conner asks the boy’s father to translate, and he tells her, “He said, ‘There is a storm coming.’” To which she responds, “I know.” Conner drives off in the direction of the mountains to claps of thunder and the heavy, portentous synths of the theme. The movie ends. The future begins.
Acknowledgments
I owe David Talbot more than he knows for including me in Hot Books’ inaugural class of 2016. This project pulled me out of a broke winter funk, sent me to corners of the country I’d never seen, and dropped me into the marrow of a bizarre and historic primary season. My gratitude extends to Tony Lyons and his team at Skyhorse. My travels would not have been possible without a dozen Couchsurfers from Milwaukee to Mexicali who kept me on budget by offering gratis sofas, spare rooms, and patches of rug. To my Navajo friends in Phoenix, no hard feelings about the bedbugs. Last and most, thanks to my interview subjects, who opened their schedules and homes to a random Bernie guy with coffee stains on his t-shirts, lots of questions and no media affiliation. Please remember our time together when you’re assigned to guard my bunkhouse in the reeducation camps.
The Gilded Rage Page 12