Hunting Season (14 page)

Economic difficulties exacerbated the situation. On December 1, 2008, the National Bureau of Economic Research announced that the United States had entered an economic recession, which had really started in late 2007, when more than three hundred thousand jobs disappeared in November alone.
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Banks failed, businesses declared bankruptcy, homes lost value, and even birthrates plummeted.

Experts agree that immigrants are often blamed for economic woes and that, in tough economic times, hate crimes increase in frequency and violence. There is something else the experts agree on: hate crimes have been part of the fabric of American society for a long time.

On August 11, 1834, a raging anti-Catholic mob carrying signs that read “No Popery” and “Down with the Cross” broke into the Ursuline Convent in Boston, Massachusetts, and set fire to it. The attack on the convent, which had been built in 1818, was the result of tensions between Boston’s Protestant natives and newly arrived masses of Irish Catholics. This event is described by historian Ray Billington as “the first act of violence resulting from nativism” in the United States.
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Ten years later, riots erupted between Protestants and Catholics in May and July 1844 in Philadelphia and the surrounding districts of Kensington and Southwark. In the end, thirty people died, including an eighteen-year-old Protestant boy; hundreds were wounded; and dozens of Catholic homes were burned to the ground.
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If hate crimes then were mostly about religious differences, ethnicity later came into play, and practically no one was spared: nineteen Chinese massacred in Los Angeles in 1871;
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eleven Italians lynched in New Orleans in 1890;
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thirteen hundred Greeks driven out of Omaha, Nebraska, in 1909 by an angry mob;
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hundreds of Mexicans beaten and injured in a ten-day riot in 1943 Los Angeles;
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Vietnamese fishermen attacked in Galveston, Texas, in 1981;
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and a forty-nine-year-old Sikh born in India shot five times and killed in Mesa, Arizona, as part of a post-9/11 rampage by a white aircraft mechanic from Phoenix.
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The first recorded instance of violence against Latino immigrants came during the California Gold Rush, when miners decided that “none but Americans” would be allowed to mine in certain areas.
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Mexicans, Chileans, and Peruvians were ordered
to leave the area around Sutter’s Mill at Coloma.
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In December 1849, a confrontation between Chilean miners and natives left two Americans dead, three Chileans shot, and eight flogged. In the end, all Spanish-speaking miners in the locality were banished.
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In the early twentieth century, violence and abuse of power were primarily directed against Mexican immigrants.
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A century later, the same can be said, although not all the victims are Mexicans, even if the perpetrators set out to attack them.
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Because immigration from all countries in Latin America greatly increased in the second half of the century, it is impossible to distinguish visually who is from Mexico and who is not. It is equally difficult to tell who was born abroad and who is a US-born, bilingual, and bicultural child of immigrants. There was no such confusion right after World War I, when thousands of destitute Mexican workers arrived in US cities desperately seeking jobs in a recession. In Denver, in 1921, public hysteria over the massive number of jobless Mexicans converging on the city culminated in local authorities incarcerating hundreds of Mexicans on loitering charges and detaining them in jail cells without trial dates.
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Competition for jobs was at the root of most instances of abuse, but greed was often a factor as well. In December 1927 in Stanton, Texas, police deputies C. C. Baize and Lee Small promised work to three Mexican men. The officers brought them to a bank and told them to wait at the entrance while they went inside, supposedly to arrange employment. The deputies then came out firing guns, killing two of the men, and claiming they had caught the Mexicans trying to rob the bank. Their incentive was a $5,000 reward offered by the Texas Bankers Association for anyone who apprehended bank robbers. The surviving Mexican told the true story.
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Through the years, the incidents pile up—the beating of a farmworker in Phoenix, Arizona, on May 9, 1912;
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the clubbing to death of a fieldworker in Rio Hondo, Texas, in May 1921 because he called out to a young white girl in Spanish;
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the attack
on a couple in Luling, Texas, in 1926—the wife was raped—by a soldier from Fort Sam Houston, who was simply transferred from his base.
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By the second half of the twentieth century, the harassment was institutionalized, and later still became law. In 1954, Operation Wetback—a “paramilitary operation to remove Mexicans from several southwestern states”—led to the deportation of more than fifty-one thousand Mexicans and Mexican Americans from California alone.
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Between 1954 and 1959, approximately 3.7 million Latinos were deported, most of them without due process. The roundups and deportations were based on visual assessments of Border Patrol officers. Thus, many US citizens and Latinos from places other than Mexico ended up deported to a place they had never been to.
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Forty years later, Proposition 187, also known as the Save Our State Initiative, passed in California in November 1994. (It was later declared unconstitutional by federal courts.) The ballot initiative, the first time a state stepped on federal ground to pass an immigration law, was to establish a citizenship screening system, and it aimed to prevent undocumented immigrants from using health care, public education, and other social services in the state. After its passage, there was a 23.5 percent increase of hate crimes against Latinos in the Los Angeles area.
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On June 11, 1995, arsonists torched the home of a Latino family in Palmdale, California, after spray painting on the walls: “Wite
[sic]
power” and “Your family dies.” “Mexico” was painted on the wall with an “X” through it.
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In 2004, in Dateland, Arizona, Pedro Corzo, a Cuban-born regional manager for Del Monte Fresh Produce, was gunned down by two Missouri residents who traveled to a remote section of southern Arizona with the specific intent of randomly killing Mexicans. The young ringleader was later tried as an adult and received two life sentences for the murder; his accomplice was
sentenced to life.
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Similar encounters, though not all deadly, took place in California, Tennessee, Texas, New Jersey, Georgia, Utah, Alabama, Louisiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Wyoming, Missouri, Nebraska, Florida, and Washington, DC, according to a report compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center that included cases from 2004 to 2007.
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One of the most horrible and senseless crimes of hatred against Latinos took place in a suburb of Houston, Texas, on April 22, 2006, when David Ritcheson, sixteen, was attacked by racist skinheads at a house party after he supposedly tried to kiss a twelve-year-old girl. David Henry Tuck broke Ritcheson’s jaw in knocking him unconscious, while screaming, “White power!” and calling Ritcheson a “spic” and “wetback.” Keith Robert Turner joined in, and the two attackers burned Ritcheson with cigarettes, kicked him with steel-toed boots, attempted to carve a swastika into his chest, poured bleach on him, and finally sodomized him with a patio umbrella pole. It took thirty surgeries before Ritcheson, confined to a wheelchair and wearing a colostomy bag, was able to return to school. Tuck was later sentenced to life in prison. Turner got ninety years.

A year after the attack, Ritcheson, who until then had not been identified in press accounts, spoke at a hearing of the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. In a wrenching testimony, he recalled the horrific experience for lawmakers deliberating over strengthening federal hate crime laws. “With my humiliation and emotional and physical scars came the ambition and strong sense of determination that brought out the natural fighter in me,” Ritcheson testified. “I am glad to tell you today that my best days still lay ahead of me.” Tragically that was not the case. Less than three months later, he committed suicide, jumping from a cruise ship into the Gulf of Mexico. He was eighteen years old.
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Closer to Patchogue, on April 29, 2006, in East Hampton, New York, three Latino teenagers were lured into a shed by a neo-Nazi skinhead and his friends and then threatened and terrorized with a chainsaw and a machete. The Latino youngsters were held for ninety minutes while their attackers yelled, “White power!” “Heil Hitler!” and other insults.

“This is how you run across the border,” one of the skinheads shouted as he chased the Latinos around with the running chainsaw. The attacker, fifteen, was later charged as a juvenile with reckless endangerment.
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On September 10, 2006, in Hampton Bays, New York, Carlos Rivera, a construction worker from Honduras, was stabbed multiple times outside a bar by Thomas Nicotra and Kenneth Porter, who yelled racial epithets during the attack. Nicotra and Porter, who were known to have insulted bar patrons before, were charged with felony robbery and assault as hate crimes. Porter was sentenced to one year in Suffolk County Jail for first-degree assault after testifying against Nicotra, who was sentenced to nine years in state prison.
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Almost two years later, on the night of July 12, 2008, in the coal town of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, several high school football players were coming home from a party when they came across Luis Ramírez, twenty-five, an undocumented Mexican immigrant. An argument broke out, with some of the football players yelling ethnic slurs at Ramírez. Two of them—Brandon Piekarsky and Derrick Donchak—began fighting with Ramírez, who was knocked out after a punch in the face. When he was down, prosecutors later charged, Piekarsky gave him a kick to the head. Ramírez died two days later from head injuries. The following year Piekarsky and Donchak were both acquitted of all serious charges against them, but later, indicted on federal charges, they were found guilty of a hate crime and each sentenced to nine years in prison.
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Ramírez was the first Latino victim of a hate crime to become a national story in 2008. The second was Marcelo Lucero, in Patchogue.

By the time Jordan Dasch drove his 1996 red SUV into Patchogue, the village was quiet and few were walking the streets. The library, the hub of activity in the evenings, had long closed. The lights of the theater were off and only the cleaning crews remained in the restaurants on Main Street.

Suddenly the group spotted a man walking down the street. Kuvan thought he was Hispanic and yelled, “Stop the car! Stop the car! Let’s get this guy.” Jordan stopped the car fifty to seventy yards in front of the man. Kuvan, Anthony, Nick, and José jumped out of the car and ran toward the man. Jeff, Jordan, and Chris also got out of the car but stayed near it.

The man the group had spotted was Héctor Sierra, a fifty-seven-year-old waiter at Gallo Tropical, a popular Latin restaurant on Main Street owned by a Colombian family. He had come to the United States legally in 1973 and had lived in New Jersey, Queens, and Manhattan before settling in Patchogue, a place he thought was safe and quiet.
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A naturalized US citizen, he had lived back and forth between Patchogue and his native Colombia for years. At the time, he had been working at Gallo Tropical for seven years and had risen to the position of headwaiter.
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That day, he had started his shift at 10:00 a.m. and had worked until 11:30 p.m. to accumulate a little overtime. He was tired and decided to leave the restaurant through the back door to shave off a block from his seven-block walk home. It was foggy and dark in the streets, almost midnight, and Sierra walked fast. He had little on him: a watch, a cell phone, and a wallet with a few dollars in it, but he had heard about groups attacking Hispanic men in the streets, so he was cautious. He wore a baseball cap, put his hands in the pockets of his coat, and walked with his head down.

Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a reddish, perhaps brown, SUV making a left turn and passing him slowly, as if whoever was in the car was watching him or knew him and wanted to stop and say hello. Sierra didn’t know anybody who owned an SUV. He walked faster. He couldn’t tell how many people were in the car but heard voices and knew immediately that, were anything to happen, he would be outnumbered.

The car stopped in front of a building. It was the only car around, and the streets were deserted. Sierra heard a noise from inside the car, three or four popping sounds, one after the other. To him, it sounded like a small-caliber gun. Then he saw four young men get out of the car—two from the right side and two from the left. They are young, he thought. Very young. Still, there were four of them and he was alone. Whoever was still inside the car kept the motor running. Not a good sign.