This is a book about citizenship, broadly conceived. Adopting Benedict Anderson’s concept of nations as imagined communities, Jennifer Johnson spent many hours at Camp Patriot, a remote, privately owned, Minutemen base camp near the southern border in California. Through her participation in camp activities, Johnson became a temporary part of that community. Her goal was to understand how these border activists conceived of citizenship and civic responsibility as they pertain to immigration. Johnson focused on the women who opted to join this male-dominated group, a decision that provided a fascinating gender dimension to her work. Through observation and extensive interviewing, Johnson largely succeeds in describing a gender-inflected worldview suspicious of government, elites, rapid social change, and foreigners.
The Minutemen as a social movement drew energy from growing political tensions concerning the security of the southern border of the United States. Founded in 2004, the organization had a lifespan of approximately a decade; by the mid-2010s, opposition to illegal immigration had moved on to state legislatures, the Tea Party, and other conservative groups. Johnson’s visits to Camp Patriot, which took place between 2010 and 2013, occurred as the movement was beginning to lose steam. Camp Patriot closed in 2014.
Members came from all over the United States, but principally the Southwest. They organized themselves in military-style “musters” to patrol the border with binoculars and to report any suspicious activity to the US Border Patrol for further investigation. Most Minutemen were white men, often retired, with the flexibility to spend significant time away from home. They shared a passion for securing the border against illegal immigration and a belief that the federal government was failing in this task.
The image of the Minutemen in the media was macho, with an undercurrent of readiness for violent confrontation; gun ownership and the ability to use a firearm were prerequisites for membership. This image did not leave room for women with similar convictions. In reality, however, women were a significant part of this movement, not only joining in musters and patrols but also taking primary responsibility for the traditionally female roles of buying, preparing, and serving food. Those women who wanted leadership roles in the organization, not surprisingly, confronted a hard-to-penetrate glass ceiling maintained, not just by men in the group, but also by other women.
The relevant literature on the Minutemen, Johnson notes, is slim, and not particularly illuminating on the role of women in the organization. Nor has aging been an important variable in the study of social activism generally. In fact, the implicit assumption in the literature, as in popular culture, has been that as people grow old, they become less inclined toward protest. Johnson, however, found just the opposite. The women’s grown families and grandchildren were a spur to their activism. Every grandmother described their children as unsupportive of their mother’s activism and their grandchildren as dangerously naïve about the threat of immigration. Their indifference fueled a sense among these women that they had to take action.
The rank sexism these women encountered in the Minutemen provoked one of two responses. Some endured sexist remarks and the lack of leadership options as a sign of their own grit and dedication to the cause. Johnson was particularly struck by a photo of a group of Minutemen’s female members dressed in pink, with one leg raised, chorus-line style. The idea came from men in the group, thinking this might be a way to humanize their effort.
A few women pushed back against the sexism of the male rank and file, insisting on being considered for leadership positions and responding to sexist remarks with sarcasm. For example, a female military veteran challenged the skills and dedication of the most outspoken male Minutemen at Camp Patriot. Their resistance seemed to have little effect on the group as a whole, which was built on a foundation of male responsibility to guard the homeland while women tended to home and family. These “gung ho” women were considered misled at best, or “not real women.”
The women of the Minutemen, even those who pushed back against rampant sexism, shared the group’s core beliefs. They were politically conservative, suspicious of big government, and inclined to see uncontrolled immigration as a serious threat to the nation’s well-being. Like their male colleagues, these women were neither wealthy, well-educated, nor well-traveled. For the women, an additional motivation in their common struggle was to protect their grandkids from threats that their own grown children refused to recognize. They saw the sexism of the organization as a minor problem in comparison.
As the Minuteman movement lost steam, exhausted by the hard work of its members absenting themselves from family for significant periods of time, buying food to sustain a rustic camp in the desert, and doing work not recognized as necessary by anyone except members and sympathizers—the group’s anti-immigrant activism found new outlets. Johnson followed some of the women she met into their post-Minutemen lives, often staying in their homes. She found them deeply engaged in anti-immigrant civic activism, mostly at the local level. Conservative organizations, such as the Tea Party, adopted stronger anti-immigrant stances, in part to attract former Minutemen to their cause.
Studying a group that sees itself at war with illegal immigration and angry at the federal government and at elites generally poses many obvious logistical and ethical challenges for academic research. Johnson gamely handled snide remarks about her status as a professor with a laugh and allowed herself to be thought of as a potential recruit to the movement. This worked for her because, from the perspective of the Minutemen, her presence and interest helped validate their cause. In her book, Johnson shares some of her ethical dilemmas as she walked the fine line between warmly associating with the women she studied and remaining herself. Her book is a model of how to study a marginalized population, and she helpfully provides an appendix to detail many of the challenges she faced.
Readers interested in the occasionally testy relationship between the Minutemen and the US Border Patrol, however, may be disappointed. Johnson was not in a position to study their interactions or their point of view. Nor is this a study of the Minutemen as a movement; its overall dimensions and geography are barely sketched out. I wished for more of this background as a reader. Johnson also does not describe any tensions she experienced as the spouse of a Mexican national with two bicultural children. She chose not to dig very far into the racial stereotypes that animated the Minutemen.
The book has two real and lasting strengths. One is its careful and caring description of how a political issue can offer aging women a way to express themselves and make themselves visible in a society prepared to ignore them. The other important contribution is to lay out, in richly developed terms, a view of citizenship, and particularly civic responsibility, that prioritizes protecting the homeland from social and demographic change. In these turbulent times, such concerns are salient for many Americans, but not particularly for the cosmopolitan elites whom intellectuals know best. This book is an opportunity to get better acquainted with a less welcoming point of view.
