If you want to understand how Homeland Security influences us, go to south Texas and take a walk around neighborhoods whose streets were paved by the "clash of civilizations" in cities and towns at or near the border. One such street is San Antonio's Military Drive where, on any Friday, Saturday, or Sunday night, you can, if you pay close attention, watch the directions Latino identity is taking in times of war.
Between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. teen and 20-something Mexican and Mexican-American youth drive along a six-block stretch of Military Drive that sits between Lackland and Kelly Air Force bases. On their way to secluded spots for hanging out and making out, young people in trucks, jalopy Toyotas, and other cars pass F-14's, Flying Fortresses, and other storied war-planes displayed in front of the many air bases and military production facilities lining the drive in this martial metropolis.
Young cruisers usually end their back and forth search for companionship, love and lust by parking in front of one of the several military recruitment offices dotting the strip malls that line Military Drive. Their desire leads some into a crowded lot across the street from a recruitment office that is the center of daytime life on the drive. Nightlife on this part of the strip centers around the nearby Diversions Game Room which stays open late to accommodate the entertainment needs of cruisers and walkers in the neighborhood.
It is stunning to see how technology and big money have transformed -- and integrated -- video games and war since the days of Pac Man and Space Invaders. Gamers who enlist will be trained with war game simulations designed by the same companies that designed those at Diversions. Here they pay for the opportunity to play "Crisis Zone," "King of Fighters," "Police 9-11," and other video games requiring them magically to enter digitized worlds, like one in which they must free white Americans being held hostage in shopping malls by dark-skinned terrorists.
Gamers leaving Diversions who look across the drive see the windows of a Marine and Navy recruiting office, plastered with colorful posters of planes, ships, and troops engaged in "real life" versions of scenarios depicted in the video games. The posters are emblazoned with messages encouraging youth to accelerate your life" or to dedicate their lives to "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of all who threaten it."
In the lot in front of Diversions, a young man is punching another as friends try to separate them. Several minutes after his friends calm one of the somewhat inebriated young teens, I approach him to ask a few questions.
A recent graduate of one of San Antonio's worst high schools (and one with a heavy presence of recruiters in a city that is one of the Pentagon's most important source of new recruits), the young man seems primed to continue traveling along Military Drive beyond the cruise: "I just graduated and signed up for the Army." Asked if the war in the Persian Gulf influenced his decision, he quickly answered, "Fuck yeah. I wanna go kill Iraqis!"
This soon-to-be soldier boy was about to be baptized into the kingdom of war, a kingdom that is smelting his youthful bravado, worship of violence, and poor man's patriotism into another one of the "good guy" heroes hailed by politicos and recruitment posters in San Antonio and beyond. His tragic disposition to kill – and die – reminded me of how fervent nationalism, poverty, and military conflict forged similar identities of "good" and "bad" people, of "terrorists" and "defenders of freedom" in Cold War Central America. And at a time when the "war on terror" is well on its way to replacing the Cold War as the primary wedge separating "good" and "bad" governments, and "good" and "bad" citizens, identity choices like those of the video-gaming young fighter can be seen as fresh expressions of the newly reconfigured national security culture that is wiring us for war.
Latinos – young and old, native born and immigrant -- have fast become fodder for a U.S. elite urgently needing to align individuals, institutions, and entire communities along the "axis of good" in the "global war on terror."
Everyone from President Bush and Karl Rove to corporate and religious leaders, are speaking Spanish and learning about cultural intricacies in a mission-critical task to sustain power. Cruising on Military Drive has meaning for many besides those in its cars and video arcades.
How the very young Latino population (the average age is 26) aligns itself in this "new kind of war" is a matter not just of national but global import. The Pentagon has staked the future global deployment goals of the most powerful military on earth on the life – and death – decisions of the country's largest "minority" as African Americans and women reject military recruiters at exponential rates; African American recruits are now 14 percent of the total, dropping from 23.5 percent in 2000.
The enlistment of large numbers of gamers, immigrants, and other Latinos is nothing less than a matter of survival for U.S. power interests struggling to reconfigure their own great global game.
Similarly, the electoral choices of Latino voters will determine the fate of politicos and parties for years to come. What kind of "Americans" recent immigrants, U.S.born, and other Latinos decide to become depends on several external and internal factors, factors that will increasingly define distinctions between "loyal," "civilized," God-fearing, pro-war Latinos and undocumented immigrants, gangs, anti-war and anti-recruitment activists – the throngs of Latinos being cast in the role of anti-civilizational "bad guys."
In this sense, certain Latinos also serve as a powerful, media-driven contrast around which whites and Blacks and even more assimilationist Latinos in the United States can define what they are not; viewed as the "law breakers" and as "potential terrorist threats," undocumented immigrants in particular reinforce conservative ideas about citizenship, ethnic and racial identity, and political persuasion. Similarly, transnational gang banger "bad guys" have become the lynchpin linking, in Cold War fashion, rich and poor neighborhoods from the United States to Central America to a new cross-border struggle, one that fuses the "War on Drugs" to the "war on terror."
As domestic law enforcement morphs into an extension of the "Global War on Terror," a growing choir of FBI officials, police chiefs, and increasingly militarized police departments label those formerly designated a "gang problem" during the war on drugs as "terrorist threats." District Attorneys, like the Bronx's Robert T. Johnson, apply statutes originally designed to combat terrorists to Chicano, Central American, and other transnational inner-city gangs like the Salvadoran Mara Salvatrucha. The Minutemen and the growing cohort of anti-immigrant, anti-Latino groups are not the only ones forging identities by civilizationally clashing with the "bad" Latinos.
Pressures to align against the new "bad guys" – be they Arab or immigrants or Latino gang bangers -- also push many San Antonio Latinos to adopt "good" identities as they pay homage at the local "shrine" of those who defend freedom.
This article was supported with an award from the Independent Press Association's George Washington Williams fellowship.
