Debbie Nathan

An old friend in the border city El Paso writes, lamenting that she looked drab at a recent protest against the idea of building a wall to keep out immigrants.

It’s hard to believe she came off as less than fabulous, since she’s a veteran street campaigner, versed in the art of political buttons, placards, and tees. In any case, I offer here an item guaranteed to make fair-skinned girls glow at their next immigrant rights demonstration. It’s an iron-on that I put together for a big New York march. I made tee shirts with it — wore one myself and carried five more in my purse. In minutes after joining the march down Broadway, I got smiles, high-fives, and Where-can-I-get-thats. I was soon empty handed and happy.

Feel free to copy the design. Or email and I’ll send you a PDF that you can heat transfer to make your own shirt.

I’ve been trying to work out “Gringo” as an acronym, too — don’t want to leave the men out! But I’m having trouble, so am running a contest. Send me your slogan ideas based on this word, and next Tuesday I’ll pick the best one. Winner gets a free shirt, adorned with the design.

Miss Teen Mexico US Latina’s gown is aqua, shiny, liquid and long. Just like the Rio Grande River, and surely you wouldn’t want it — or her — trussed up and blocked by ugly old concrete or girders. Miss TMUSL (her name is Breeana Shaw) doesn’t like that idea. Lovely Miss Texas Latina, Martha Barraza, is also displeased. So is Miss Teen US Latina, 15-year-old Nicole Karrody. Recently the three endorsed an upcoming, extended protest against erecting walls to divide border cities on the Texas-Mexico line. The young women even promised to attend some of the many events that will take place. Envisioning these gatherings — scheduled August 25 to September 9 (calendar here) — people are thinking mostly about the kayakers poised to row the river to show unity between both countries, and the binational mayors who plan to shake hands across bridges. These things will happen, and they’ll be well and good. But wow, Beauty Queens against Border Walls! Could anything be more mainstream? More “It’s so, like, OK to have progressive politics”?

Come to think of it, kayaks and mayors are pretty OK, too. This All-American cultural centrism is a far cry from border militarization protests I’ve attended (and — full disclosure — helped organize) over the past 20 years. Mostly they’ve featured angry signs, indignant chants, and scents (like copal and patchouli) emanating from Chicano indigenistas and Anglo desert pagans — people who’ve moved their lifestyles as far as possible from the marketing world of Outside magazine and ingenue contests. Other attendees are beyond the market not from choice but due to sheer border poverty: farm workers, house maids, laid-off blue-jean stitchers. Occasionally, out-of-town reporters show up. They wade into the crowd with facial expressions suggesting this is more anthropology than journalism. Militant fronterizos – the local word for border residents: to most interior-eros they’re a little weird and scary.

Now comes unweird and unscary, thanks to Jay Johnson-Castro. He lives in Del Rio, a Texas town bordering the Mexican city Acuña. Weeks ago, he started sending out calls to kayakers and rowboaters up and down the Rio Grande’s long stretch, from dry, mountainous El Paso/Juárez to the swamps of McAllen/Matamoros, on the Gulf. Johnson-Castro suggests mass paddling as a way to organize against border walls, which he obviously is pissed about. But his emails and PR material also sound laid back and inviting. He makes protest sound like picnic. It often seems so anyway, even on those “La gente! Unida! Jamás será vencida!” marches, tromping around in the sun and breeze, sniffing the incense, greeting the friends’ newborn baby — though few talk about these pleasures.

The second part of Johnson-Castro’s name comes, he told me recently, from a father with European ancestry who he never met. “I was raised Johnson!” he said. He’s from the West Coast, and came to the border in the 1980s because that’s where he wanted to live and have his family. For the past several years he’s run a Bed and Breakfast out of a big mansion in Del Rio. He’s spent time there trying to make others comfortable.

That must be how he managed to recruit not just beauty queens to his “Border Ambassadors” anti-wall movement, but also the mayors of some cities, including El Paso; and even Silvestre Reyes, the US Congressman who used to be a Border Patrol official. Granted, the pols know it’s a safe bet among their constituents to oppose border walls in the middle of cities. They’re unsightly, hard to maintain, and not so necessary anyhow. It was Reyes who stationed hundreds of Border Patrol agents in downtown El Paso in 1993 to keep Mexicans out without a wall. His innovation was the opening salvo in a fatter, meaner US immigration policy that drove crossers from cities to the desert, where they now die in droves in places like Arizona. Meanwhile, there’s a border wall only a few miles from downtown El Paso. It’s ugly and restrictive, but it’s out of sight out of mind. The pols don’t complain.

Still, downtown walls are symbols, just like beauty queens are. If you can get mayors and a Congressman to kiss pretty babes for the cameras and diss a potent sign of xenophobia, that’s not bad. And the girls — sure, their gown and swimsuit stuff is cheesy and objectifying. Still, these young, Latina pageant winners are icons to their people’s sense of its beautiful self. And that self will be out on the river over the next several days, smiling and strutting and signing autographs against paranoia, hate — and maybe even neo-liberalism.

Rich people take note: Border Ambassadors wants you! Throw some real money at this movement and you can march, chant, and be righteous, sure — but you can also chill out at Johnson-Castro’s B&B and eat tasty Mexican food near where filming was done for Like Water for Chocolate. For your donation of $500 or $1,000, Johnson-Castro offers complimentary weekends at his mansion, and a guided tour of Del Rio/Acuña with dinner at a good Mexican restaurant.

“I’ll order them cebollada, he says. “That’s steak with onions, a local favorite. Or if they’re vegetarian, we’ll get chiles rellenos with Oaxaca cheese. This is a great place. We  want to show the world we get along fine here. We’re against walls because we’re a community. We don’t want Washington messing with that.”

For more information on Border Ambassadors and its upcoming events, click here.

(Wolfman Jack got his broadcasting start in Del Rio/Acuña. His radio station still exists there.)

To make it to the Republican presidential caucuses, former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani has been flip flopping the cosmopolitan stances he used to take on gay, women’s and immigrant rights. Once he supported them; now he’s against. And lately, he’s adopted another opportunistic tad: implying that Staten Island is a center for rustic values.

Reporting from the presidential campaign trail in Iowa yesterday, the New York Times described how Rudy repeatedly exploited misperceptions about New York City’s least populated borough while responding to heartlanders who asked if he understands life in the boonies.

“You’ve been out here in the country where there are no roads,” said one Iowa farmer. “When you get back to the big city, are you going to forget the little guys out here who are farming to feed you?” Giuliani responded that when he was mayor, “I didn’t forget anybody,” because, “The place that kind of won the election for me was Staten Island. It’s the closest thing that New York City has to — I wouldn’t call it rural, but suburbs.” When asked if he’d ever worked on a farm, he sheepishly said no, then again went into his Big-Apple Mayberry routine. The people in Staten Island, he said, “feel like they are part of their own community. You get the same feeling you get in smaller-town America.”

Staten Island may have more houses and more Republicans than the other boroughs, but casting it as a C&W song is as silly as Rudy’s recent claims that he dwelled for weeks at Ground Zero after 9/11 (in fact he spent only a few hours). Staten Island has probably never been “smaller-town America” in terms of multi-culti demographics. And though it used to have farms, they were hardly enclaves of social conservatism, even decades ago.

True to New York City form, I discovered all this last year while poking through mountains of shlock at an estate sale in Brooklyn.

It took place in a rambling old house bursting with price-tagged memorabilia, including schoolwork  by a young woman who attended Brooklyn College after World War II. I found one of her semester papers, done for Sociology 12 with Professor Waterman. It is neatly handwritten, on lined composition paper, and was submitted on December 23, 1947. Its title is “Visit to a Staten Island Garden Farm.”

For her research, the student interviewed several farmers, including Gus Thanasoulis, a Greek. He raised beets, carrots and other vegetables, and sold them at his roadside stand on Richmond Avenue.

The sociology student noted that – just like Mexicans crossing the border illegally today — Thanasoulis and his wife were immigrants from a rural region, with no education. They’d started farming in Staten Island in 1919, and almost 30 years later, Thanasoulis still wasn’t so good with his English. He got news from a Greek paper, and his second-language grammar glitches were duly recorded in the research paper. (”We grow small stuffs, such as spinach.”)

And like farmers today who resort to hiring undocumented labor, the Staten Islanders had difficulty finding cheap workers. Of late, the student remarks, farm wages have become unattractive to local men, who started drifting off the land after noticing they “could easily earn more in a war plant.” The bracero program must not have made it to the East Coast by then, because “to solve the problem,” children “as young as fourteen years of age” were employed in the Staten Island fields.

The term paper also describes a visit with a farmer who was a prominent activist in the Staten Island Growers’ Association. The researcher was weirded out to find this elderly man living with an unmarried daughter who – unlike other farm women, she notes – wore “men’s sneakers” and “overalls,” and looked “most unfeminine.”

Shades of the Greenwich Village dyke scene a free ferry ride away. In fact, the student concludes in her 1947 paper, it’s wrong to think of Staten Island farmers as rural people. “They live in New York City,” she writes. They are “definitely urban in thoughts.” They act “no differently from the real urban dweller.”

“Interesting,” Professor Waterman writes on the paper’s cover page.

***

(Counterpunch Editors’ Note: New York Greens vividly recall that it was Farmer Rudy who personally directed the uprooting and eviction of dozens of community gardens across Brooklyn and the Bronx in the late 1990s. The mayor replaced these organic green spaces with condos, office towers and, perhaps, a Whole Foods outlet or two. AC/JSC)

(PPS: This item by me appears in the August 21 online edition of Counterpunch, but I’m reprinting it here to show you pix of that old term paper. For more on the candidate’s opportunism and related creepiness, pick up America’s Mayor, America’s President? The Strange Career of Rudy Giuliani, edited by Robert Polner with preface by Jimmy Breslin, Soft Skull Press. I have an essay in the book).

Seriously, New York City needs to screen Nacho Libre for our cops. That’s the implication of today’s news that an immigrant arrested in May while wearing a mask at a protest march was just vindicated in court. The case has been covered by the Spanish-language paper El Diario, but ignored by the mainstream media. That’s too bad, because it’s a textbook lesson not just in the city’s changing socio-culturality, but also in the blowback that can happen when liberals and lefties – misguidedly thinking they’re being progressive – comply in denying First Amendment rights to people and movements they hate.

It all started at this year’s immigrants’ rights march on May 1. Some 20,000 people showed up around Broadway and Astor Place. Lots were Mexicans – no surprise, since they’re the city’s fastest growing Latino immigrant group, and most are undocumented. One attendee, 25-year-old Rosendo Bonifacio, came with a few family members, including his brother. Some were wearing Lucha Libre masks similar to the one I’ve posted here.

The fellow in the picture is Fishman, one of Mexico’s big lucha champs. Everyone interested in pop culture should know already about people like him. And I don’t mean just culture south of the border, but also as expressed and enjoyed by Latinos and even gringos in the US – they love this stuff (click here). So does the S&M, B/D crowd, which lately has immigrated right along with Nacho to the big screen, a la The Notorious Bettie Page (a film so acceptable that I saw it for rent in the Atlanta airport DVD store yesterday).

OK, so Rosendo and some kin wanted to wear lucha libre masks at the demo. How come? Because over the last couple decades in Mexico, it’s become de rigueur for clever, showy community organizers to do the same while campaigning for their various movements. There’s Super Barrio, champion of the rights of the poor; Super Ecologista, fighter for the environment; Super Gay, hero for civil rights for homosexuals, and Super Animal, who works to outlaw cock fights and bull fights. Along with the masks, they wear Batman-style capes and spandex tights. They look like Clark Kent on acid right out of the phone booth, crossed with a Kiss concert. They’re nutty and dopily sexy looking and above all, sweet; they help turn politics into carnival, which in turn makes better politics. For more information on this longstanding and hopefully viable phenomenon, read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing In the Streets. And check out the documentary film SuperAmigos. (The guy above, in case you’re dense, is Super Gay.) For Mexicans the lucha libre fighter has become emblematic of their struggle to endure, in their homeland and up north. Brooklyn artist and Mexico native Dulce Pinzon has a brilliant takeoff on the theme, in her photo series of nannies, deli countermen and other New York workers decked in superhero garb.

At Astor and Broadway, Rosendo was apparently donning his lucha gear, as were his relatives, when some of NYPD’s finest ordered him to nix the mask. According to police, Rosendo got physical about the prohibition. The whole thing turned into a nasty rout (click here for depressing YouTube documentation). That’s why Rosendo ended up in court.

But why a ban on masks in the first place?

Believe it or not, there’s a state law which says that unless they’re involved in something politically innocuous like a Halloween parade or Brazil night, no more than two people can congregate on the street in masks.

“Oh,” you’re probably saying, “there’s likely some righteous historical reason. Probably about combating the Klan, back when they were riding around with their faces under sheets so they could murder blacks.”

Nope. At least, not in New York. The current law actually evolved from a statute enacted in 1845, when it was used by rich estate owners to oppress impoverished tenant farmers in the Hudson Valley and the Catskills. A few decades after the American Revolution, mega-landlords – who had been lax until then about collecting rent – started suing tenants for the money and evicting them en masse. By the early 1840s, thousands were fiercely fighting back. Tenants signed petitions, started a newspaper, lobbied the legislature, and held dances and meetings. Their goal was to end landlord control over estates and redistribute land to the tenants so they could be independent farmers. The ideal was Jeffersonian and maybe more.

Many tenants also bore arms to drive sheriffs off the estates and intimidate “scabs” who continued paying rent. They performed mummery while doing this, dressing as “Indians” in calico gowns and masks of sheepskin or painted muslin. Landlords responded by pressing for enactment of the 1845 anti-masking law. With modifications from the mid-1960s (which also ban men from cross dressing in public), it’s still on the books today.

The anti-masking law was almost overturned in 1999. That’s when the KKK tried to hold a rally in Manhattan, but Bernard Kerik – the Giuliani-era police chief – tried to get it canceled by invoking the old law. The New York chapter of the ACLU defended the Klan’s right to wear their sheets, amid scathing disagreement by many progressives who rightly abhor these scum but weren’t looking past their noses when it came to the First Amendment — which everyone deserves to the fullest extent possible, regardless of how revolting their ideas are — and that should include whatever they stick on their faces. In 2002, the law was deemed unconstitutional on appeal by judges who said it put unacceptable limits on free speech. But two years later, it was reinstated by yet another court, which ruled that the Klan already had white robes to convey its racist message, so it didn’t need hoods as well. The anti-masking law still stands. Legal reasoning today is: If you and your friends have on other clothing that makes your political point, you have no right to masks.

It’s pretty stupid and potentially pernicious, especially when you imagine a political protest of the future, with burka’d women ordered to de-veil under threat of arrest, since their long, body coverings already convey Islamic “messages.” According to the law, this could happen. People wearing hoods to protest Abu Ghraib and the war in Iraq might also be at risk. Use your imagination and I’m sure you’ll come up with more examples.

(Left: This is the mask of Mexican lucha fighter Judio — Spanish for “Jew.”)

El Diario didn’t say why Rosendo got off yesterday. I assume it was at least partly because a judge decided that for people in certain cultures, spandex over thighs and belly just isn’t enough to convey yearning for immigrant rights — the mask is needed, too. So the Mexican walked. But like I said, who knows what will happen to the next batch of ethnics who dare dress for protest success?

Meanwhile, can we get the cops to a theater to see Nacho? And maybe eat nachos, but give them popcorn, too. The word in Mexican Spanish for that movie munchie is palomitas, meaning, literally, “little doves.” Diminutive signs of peace – paz, as they say in Spanish. As common and vital to the city as pigeons, and often as little tolerated, much less loved.

Bowing to anti-immigation pressure yesterday, the Bush Admin announced that US employers now have 90 days to clear up worker social security numbers that don’t match with the government’s database. After that, employers who don’t fire out-of-status workers will face criminal sanctions. So will employees.

According a guy I know in the Mexico state San Luis Potosi who I’ll call Jose, this new policy is going to be better for women than a trip to Bloomingdale’s.

The intent of the new policy is to eradicate employment opportunities in the US for the undocumented. Of course, we’re talking only about the overground economy, including the agricultural sector. Will we be getting any fresh broccoli or apples after the new rule takes effect? Whatever; there’s always MacDonald’s.

Meanwhile, there’s the black market — which is far more about female nannies and house cleaners than about crack dealer dudes. Employers of domestic help rarely pay social security, and the government certainly won’t be knocking on the doors of lady bosses in the West Village or Brentwood, much less checking ID amid the Bugaboos in Washington Square Park.

Still, for Central American and Mexican women, there’s the fabled, illegal trip across the evil Rio Grande or Arizona desert, with the snakes and dehydration and sexually assaultive “coyotes” — the smugglers. Who wants to risk that?

Plenty of distaffers. Studies show that half of illegal immigrants coming from the south today are female. And Jose explained to me yesterday that crossing for women is getting downright convenient, thanks to the US government.

Jose has crossed solo several times in the past 15 years to work in agriculture. Lately, though, stepped up border enforcement has made it so difficult to get past Laredo that he’s taken to hiring a coyote for $1300. He knows lots of people who’ve always used smugglers, and until recently, he says, the coyotes were a nasty lot. “They would cross 40 people at a time, impose the charges at the border, make everyone walk three to six days to San Antonio, often rob customers, and frequently rape the women travelers.”

But now, Jose says, all those Border Patrol agents are having an effect. It’s so hard to cross now that fewer people are coming. This has created intense competition among the coyotes, who have responded by vastly improving their services.

“Now, they pay your way on a first-class bus from your home town to the border. They cross only 8 people at a time. After they get you to the US side, you only have to walk a few hours because they’ve made arrangements with farmers in South Texas to put you up for the night, even feed you. And some of those farmers are gringos,” Jose adds. “Then they put you in vans and drive you to Houston.”

“And they’re much nicer to women now. No more robberies. No rapes. They know it will get out by word of mouth, and they desperately want to maintain and expand their customer base.”

There you have it. Thanks to our feds, female crossing now is kinda like a visit to Bliss. Who knows, maybe soon the coyotes will be offering bikini waxes and pedicures.