22 August 2005Gabriel Thompson
Most of the news, since I became literate at least, has been negative. In recent years it has only gotten worse. Torture, war, repression, abuse-these words have become standard fare for Americans reading the paper or tuning in to the evening broadcast. Even the good news always seems to have a silver lining: a union wins a contract, but the raised wages remain woefully inadequate; a protest has thousands more participants than expected, but the positive results of the act-aside from the feelings of power among the participants themselves-appear negligible.
And yet every now and then something miraculous happens, and though these miraculous occurrences might be small, they peel back a layer of sour ugliness to reveal a fruit that is so sweet it is breathtaking. The scope of the event isn't what matters. What is important is that the event occurred. It occurred, and more might follow.
On August 19th the New York Times ran a story under a curiousheadline: "2 Illegal Immigrants Win Arizona Ranch in Court Fight." For anyone that has been paying attention to the growing anti-immigrant backlash in Arizona and elsewhere, what followed was a narrative so sweet that it appeared impossible, as if a country accustomed to artificial sweeteners was hit with a dose of unrefined, organic sugar.
Here is the story: In March of 2003, undocumented Salvadoran immigrants Fátima Leiva and Edwin Mancía were crossing the Arizona border when they were apprehended by Casey Nethercott, who allegedly threatened and then pistol-whipped them. Nethercott was then a leader of Ranch Rescue, a paramilitary vigilante group that conducts operations with names like "Falcon" and "Eagle," hunting for "invading aliens." If you think the Minutemen are at the extreme end of the anti-immigrant spectrum, you haven't met Ranch Rescue. They post photos on their website of a bunch of goons dressed in camoflauge wandering around in the heat, assault rifles in hand. They traffic in conspiracy theories. They are a symptom of a racist, nativist culture; nothing new, but still terrible.
The Southern Poverty Law Center initiated a lawsuit against Nethercott for the incident, as well as against Jack Foote, who founded Ranch Rescue and gained notoriety for openly sharing his racist views, like his proposition that Mexicans are "dog turds." Both declined to defend themselves. The judge hearing the case issued a default judgement against Nethercott for $850,000 and Foote for $500,000. Neither have much that can be taken. Except, of course, "Camp Thunderbird," the 70-acre ranch that Nethercott purchased in 2003 and has since used as his base of operations.
But no longer. When Nethercott is released from jail in five years, for carrying a weapon as an ex-felon (he has, to say the least, a troubled past), he will have to look for another location to peddle his hate. The new owners of the ranch will be Leiva and Mancía, who have been awarded the ranch by the judge. They are also applying for visas available for immigrants that are crime victims. For now, they can remain in the US, where they are doing what immigrants do:working.
I spent a week on the Arizona-Mexico border, living with the Minutemen and reporting on their activities. It is hard to express the profound pleasure I felt when reading about the case in the Times. I read it a second time and smiled. I had an odd feeling of remembrance, an almost déjà vu certainty that this has happened somewhere before. Yet I couldn't quite put my finger on it.
Then it hit me: I've read about this case before, in the form of poetry. The poet is Martin Espada, a Puerto Rican wordsmith that I had the pleasure of meeting last year in Manhattan. One of his most powerful poems is entitled "Imagine the Angels of Bread," where he asks us to imagine a world turned upside down, a world that usually seems out of reach. Here is an excerpt of the poem, the excerpt that was jarred from my memory while reading the Times:
This is the year that thosewho swim the border's undertowand shiver in boxcarsare greeted with trumpets and drumsat the first railroad crossingon the other side;this is the year that the handspulling tomatoes from the vineuproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine, the hands canning tomatoes are named in the will that owns the bedlam of the cannery; this is the year that the eyes stinging from the poison that purifies toilets awaken at last to the sight of a rooster-loud hillside, pilgrimage of immigrant birth; this is the year that cockroaches become extinct, that no doctor finds a roach embedded in the ear of an infant; this is the year that the food stamps of adolescent mothers are auctioned like gold doubloons, and no coin is given to buy machetes for the next bouquet of severed heads in coffee plantation country. \
Many bad things are happening this year; they will continue to happen. And yet, we should remember that this is also the year that Fátima Leiva and Edwin Mancía reached into the pocket of their racist attacker and pulled the deed to his land. Who knows what might happen tomorrow?
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Gabriel Thompson is a Brooklyn-based writer who is completing his first book, There's No Jose Here: Following the Lives of Mexican Immigrants in a Country that Can't Remember Their Name. you can reach him through his website, wherethesilenceis.org.
http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=8561§ionID=30
