The Wall Is a Lie

Last week a militia patrolling the Mexico-New Mexico border, and calling itself the United Constitutional Patriots, caught a group of 200 or so men, women and children crossing the desert in search of safety and rest. These are the so-called asylum-seekers who have been walking from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico in more and more numbers for the past few years. A million are expected to come knocking in this year alone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwwm98EjD98

They’re leaving their homelands because, as anybody who knows the slightest thing about the history of those places and their current state understands, their home countries are not so much shitholes, as the President might term it, but hellholes. Honduras, to focus on just one, has been named one of the most dangerous places in the world outside an active war zone for the past decade, and its government is so controlled by drug traffickers and Big Business that the only hope Hondurans have of living without fear of rape, murder or starvation is if there’s a coup. They’re praying for a coup. Short of that, there’s always the long march north, during which they risk more rape, murder, dehydration, and all other forms of physical and spiritual death, and at the end of which awaits the ICEboxes, abusive Homeland Security agents and, if they’re lucky and don’t get sent back to hell, low-wage work and second-class citizenship.

As those following Christ’s loving example used to chant:

We are the pure and chosen few
And all the rest are damned
There’s room enough in Hell for you
We don’t want Heaven crammed!

Any mother in Tegucigalpa willing to pack up her kids and make the 2200-mile trek to El Paso, across some of the most hellish terrain on earth, must really be fleeing something God-awful. America bills herself as the land of opportunity, but those people on the march aren’t flooding our border in hopes of scoring themselves a sprawling mansion with an infinity pool and shiny new Lam in the driveway; the only opportunity they’re looking for is the chance to work hard days and long hours, provide for their kids, and live in relative peace. This the old American Dream, so I was once told, and these people are the latest influx of dreamers, beginning with the Germans and the Irish and the Chinese and the Bohemians and the Jews and the Italians.

But to the members of United Constitutional Patriots, men like Jim Benvie, the group’s 43-year-old spokesman from Minnesota, the men, women and children coming over the border and turning themselves in to Border Patrol so they can petition from asylum—to “Bemidji” Benvie and everybody like him, these poor souls are nothing more than dirty, stupid, disease-infected invading criminals. (Larry Mitchell Hopkins, the group’s 69-year-old commandant, was arrested by the FBI in his home state of New Mexico on Saturday.)

A female member who filmed the video of UCP’s latest haul can be heard saying, “There’s a lot of coughing in this group,” or something like it, over and over. What does Nurse Nightmare expect from these people —fleeing violence and starvation and walking hundreds of miles across hot, stifling climes controlled by sadistic gangs— once they reach their destination in the middle of the night and are stopped in the desert by a group aiming assault rifles? Smiles and songs? The ounce of concern she expresses for the little ones in the group is apparently nothing compared to her concern that there are foreigner kids in her “backyard” at all, since she asks viewers to share her video as proof that we need to build Trump’s promised wall.

The only thing the video is proof of is that either some white people, these white people who see asylum-seekers as invaders, are either bald-faced liars, being lied to by bald-faced liars, are plain stupid, or sheer crazy—and there really is no difference between the last two. Stupid people can be just as dangerous as crazy people, and they tend to hang around in gangs, feeding each other’s craziness and stupidity. (Stupid, by the way, is not the same thing as ignorant, which is is just as dangerous, but with not nearly as much blame; stupid people prefer to not know.)

So to combat the stupidity of the stupid people and put my tiny torch to the lies of the liars, as well as help any ignorant people who may be toying with the idea of joining up with the United Stupid Liars of America, or whatever that stupid group is called, let me say something about these so-called invaders and Trump’s wall. (What I’m about to say got me flagged by Facebook for spreading hate speech, but thankfully the Internet is still the land of the free and home of the brave.)

Here’s the truth: White people are the invaders of this land, America, from tip to tip, Alaska to Argentina. When I say white people, I mean my white ancestors, too. I am here, I exist, because some of my ancestors invaded, stole land from my other ancestors who were already living here, killing a lot of their people, my ancestors’ people, and raping my ancestors’ women. As with most Latinos, I am descended, or I arose rather, from white people. I can say this, that and the other about white people because not only do I have white friends, but I have white DNA. I even have a white name, Héctor Luis Álamo, which doesn’t sound white-white, like Donald John Trump or Brett Kavanaugh, but it’s plenty white compared to Lempira or Agüeybaná. I’m also black, which means my white ancestors dragged my African ancestors to America in chains to work for free, raping the women on the side.

Like with most Latinos as well, I’m also descended from Indians. I was born in Illinois, which is the French word for what the Algonquian Indians of the area called themselves, the Ilinouek, “ordinary talker.” I was born in Chicago, which itself is an Indian word referring to the wild onions that grew in the marshes and along the rivers there.

Now I live in Nevada, which is the homeland of the Paiutes, but was conquered by the Spanish, who named it after the snowy (nevada) peaks separating the state from California (also Indian land with a Spanish name). I live on the outskirts of Las Vegas (“the meadows”), in a very white area called Green Valley, just off Arroyo Grande Boulevard, near Valle Verde Drive, Paseo Verde Parkway, and Stephanie Street. Of course, the English names are much newer than the Spanish ones; I don’t know what the Paiutes called this place, their home.

White people invaded this land, America. Not “the Americas,” like they say. The one America, the one land, from where the Inuits hunt whale and walruses, all the way down to where the Mapuches are hunted by Chileans. If you see white faces in Canada, Uruguay, or anywhere in between, they’re proof of the invasion: white people are from Europe, after all, but brown people are from America.

This isn’t hate speech; this is history. A lot of white people, the good white people, will readily agree with what I’m saying. A lot of other white people will call me a lying Spic Commie piece-of-shit. No matter what color you are, never turn your back on those white people; they don’t love anything but the color of their skin.

White people invaded America. Keeping to what they named “the united States,” the invasion began in Florida (with Spain) and then Virginia and New England (England, obviously). The white people from England killed and cheated the Indians out of their land, and created 13 colonies on the stolen blood-soaked land.

London gave the invaders going to Virginia in 1609 a charter to extend the colony’s western border all the way to the next ocean, regardless of who was in their way. But eventually the English Crown got friendly with the Indians (they needed some Indian allies against the French up in Canada and their Indian friends), and one of the reasons the 13 Colonies broke away from George was because he wouldn’t let his English subjects invade and settle in the lands of his Indian allies, whom had been promised the land between his colonies and the Mississippi. So the freedom-loving but slave-owning colonists declared their independence from Georgie and immediately began reconnoitering the Indian territories to the west.

Without consulting Congress, President Jefferson bought France’s stolen Indian land west of the Mississippi, which the French called Louisiana after their Sun King, doubling the size of the fledging United States overnight. Then Jefferson, who was having sex with his dead wife’s enslaved African half-sister Sally, whom he also held the deed to, sent brave Lewis and Clark on an expedition to find a route to the Pacific —and the riches of Asia— before Congress could give its approval. The two conquerors —I mean explorers— made an Indian woman show them the way and vouch for them with the hostile Indians they came across.

From then on it was a race to the sea. Driven on by the Northern capitalists’ need for raw materials and the Southern slavers’ lust for land, the United States spent the next hundred years on a series of invasions and extermination campaigns against the Cherokee, the Creek, the Algonquin, the Sioux, the Crow, the Comanche, the Cheyenne, the Navajo, the Ute, the Apaches, the aforementioned Paiutes, the Chumash in California, and the Nez Perce in the Pacific Northwest. (There were more tribes caught in the path of the white invaders—a lot more.) They even invaded the lands of the part-Indian Mexicans, who had separated from Spain; the white people didn’t even bother changing the names of the places they stole, only replacing the j in Tejas with an x, and making it social unacceptable and legally inaccurate to pronounce Nevada in the original Spanish way. (It’s neh-vah-tha, you goddamn philistines!)

The white people didn’t even stop at the ocean either. They kept on invading—Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Samoa. Seems their plan was to invade everywhere till the places that could be conquered were, east to west, north to south. They considered it their destiny to do so, and the destiny of everyone else to make way or die. The world hasn’t seen anything like the white people who invaded America, not since the Mongol hordes that brought the Black Plague to Europe, or Attila the Hun; but even they didn’t stay around for long.

And now, after all their invading and butchering and land-grabbing, it’s the white people who want to build a wall to protect them (and their stolen land) from brown people. The hypocrisy! The fucken nerve!

Again, this isn’t hate speech. This is straight-up history. White people who call what’s going on right now at the southern border an invasion are straight-up lying. They’re either lying, or stupid, or crazy, or ignorant. If they’re ignorant, well, now they know a bit of the truth. I don’t feel like explaining everything white people did to Central America and Mexico —hell, all of Latin America— that has made those places so unlivable today. Google my name, “history,” and “Latin America” or “Central America,” “Honduras” or “Puerto Rico.” White people can play stupid all they want; that’s their prerogative, I guess. But they can’t make me, who knows the truth, who knows the history of this country, and the history of Latin America—they can’t make me play dumb, not for another second, not even a little. It’s clear what playing stupid with stupid or crazy people gets you: a crazy stupid president, crazy stupid government, and a crazy stupid system that’s too crazy stupid to do anything about mass shootings, even at schools, or the man-made destruction of our planet.

And people like Andrew Sullivan, who’s an immigrant from England and so smart he’s figured out a way to be gay, Catholic and a Republican all at the same time—he can fret all day long worrying about the browning of America, and telling white people they have nothing to worry about, because “America will always have a large ‘white’ majority—but this time with simply a lot of Hispanic last names.” America, the America real Americans think of whenever they talk about America, that America doesn’t belong to any one race or culture.

Correction: If land can belong to any person or group of people (which it cannot), then this land here belongs to the Indians who were living on it first. We are all on stolen land; anyone who doesn’t have Indian blood in them is an invader. And, so, if this stolen land is to be dominated by any one race and its culture, why the hell would it be the white race, when white people are only the very latest newcomers?

That’s just crazy talk.

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Hector Luis Alamo is the Editor and Publisher of ENCLAVE and host of the Remember the Show! podcast. He tweets from @HectorLuisAlamo.