by Mirta Ojito
Jeff vividly remembered his father’s words when he was allowed to make his first call fourteen hours after he stabbed Marcelo Lucero. He grabbed the phone and told his father, Dad, I’m at the Fifth Precinct. Could you please come get me?
“Learning to hate is almost as inescapable as breathing,” note Levin and McDevitt in their book.
Like almost everyone else, the hate crime offender grows up in a culture that defines certain people as righteous, upstanding citizens, while designating others as sleazy, immoral characters who deserve to be mistreated. As a child, the perpetrator may never have had a firsthand experience with members of the groups he later comes to despise and then victimize. But, early on, merely by conversing with his family, friends, and teachers or by watching his favorite television programs he learns the characteristics of disparaging stereotypes. He also learns that it is socially acceptable, perhaps even expected, to repeat racist jokes and use ethnic slurs and epithets.15
It is not known if Jeffrey Conroy watched Bill O’Reilly or Lou Dobbs, and his father swears that there was never any talk against Hispanics at home. But it is a fact that when Jeff started going to school in 1996, Hispanic men, mostly Mexican, had begun to congregate around the 7-Eleven in Farmingville, not far from his house. By the time he got to high school, in the fall of 2005, Steve Levy had been elected Suffolk County executive.
Were Conroy and his friends paying attention? Perhaps not consciously, but even overhearing the anti-immigrant rhetoric that was prevalent in Suffolk County then, and indeed in the entire country, would have had an impact on them. “Young Americans are frequently targeted as the primary audience for the culture of hate, especially its films, music, and humor,” observe Levin and McDevitt. “Partially because they lack diverse personal experiences, young people are generally unprepared to reject prejudiced claims coming from sources they regard as credible.”16
Conroy once told a filmmaker that there “was more negativity coming out” of Levy’s mouth in the newspapers his son took to the bathroom to read every morning than in anything that his family had ever said regarding immigrants.17
Prejudiced feelings were a fact of life in the local high school in Medford, the same school that the young men from the so-called Patchogue 7 attended. In 2008, there were three thousand registered students in Patchogue-Medford High School, including four hundred self-described Hispanics.18
Clarissa Espinoza, Julio Espinoza’s youngest child, was one of them; she was a sophomore in the fall of 2008. Born in Patchogue, Clarissa is perfectly bilingual and bicultural. With her fair skin and flawless accent, she blended with the general population of the school and doesn’t remember being the target of discrimination, but that does not mean she was blind to it.
“I didn’t like high school,” she says softly. “There was racism everywhere. The school was very divided.”19
The division was stark and visible even to casual observers. Students who were learning English, mostly Hispanics, were placed in ESL classes, as mandated by the state. English-as-a-second-language classes are meant to teach English to newcomers, but in a school setting they can also create a barrier between native speakers and foreigners. In less politically charged circumstances, such a program can make a school more inclusive and international. This was not the case in Patchogue-Medford High School, where all four ESL classes were contained in one hallway with twelve classrooms. There was little interaction between ESL students and the rest of the school, and when there was, it wasn’t productive or positive.
A few days before the end of the school year in 2009, the year Jeff and most of his friends would have graduated, two students from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University—Tamara Bock and Angel Canales—conducted a series of interviews with Patchogue-Medford High School students for a documentary, Running Wild: Hate and Immigration on Long Island. The documentary aired on PBS; the transcript of their original interviews paints a dismal picture of high school life there.
A boy named David, sixteen and born in El Salvador, narrates how “the other people,” the white, non-Hispanic kids, would throw food at the Latino students who huddled together at their own tables during lunchtime. “Like they would say that we immigrants [should] go back to Mexico,” David recalled.
“And what do you do?” one of the filmmakers inquired.
“Nothing. Most of the time we remain quiet,” David replied.
“So, when you are eating and someone shouts ‘Go back to Mexico,’ what goes through your head? What do you think and how do you feel?”
“I feel very [long pause] ashamed because we are in a country that is not ours, you know.”
“Has there ever been a moment when someone has said something demeaning to you in the school hallways? And have you had a problem with someone who dislikes immigrant students here in school?”
“Yes, sometimes we are walking and they come by and push us with their arm and we can’t do anything because, you know, we don’t want to get in trouble with them,” David said.
Students on their way to the gym would mumble under their breath, “You Mexican, go back to your country,” whether the student was Mexican or not. Or, they’d yell, “Talk English!” and rush off to class. Other times, they would threaten the Latino students, saying that, if they complained, they’d call “la migra,” immigration authorities. The list of insults was long, another student said. “You hear ‘spic.’ You hear ‘Mexican.’ You hear ‘dumb-in-a-can’ [for Dominican]. You hear ‘beaner.’ ‘Border hopper.’ There is a lot. The list can go forever. You hear ‘alien,’ ‘illegal,’ or ‘II’ for ‘illegal immigrant.’ ”
Another teen, a boy named William, said, “You can’t walk in the hallway without looking back.” Angelica, seventeen, who was born in New York City but moved to Patchogue when she was nine, said she had heard “nasty comments” about Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. This is how she analyzed the behavior of some of her classmates:
I don’t think that they’re racist or anything. Like, I think it’s what they hear at home. Like when you’re hearing stuff on the news saying that, oh, like, Mexicans are crossing the border and Hispanics are coming over here and they’re trying to take over our jobs. I think it’s their parents telling them all this stuff and it gets implanted and embedded in their head. So they come to school with this hatred towards Hispanics, when, like, they’re not the only immigrants coming to this country. But, like, I think the kids, they hear it at home, and then they come over here and they think they know everything but they are really ignorant.
She went on: “Everywhere. It’s everywhere. If you walk down Patchogue on Main Street, you hear people in the street. If a Hispanic man is riding his bicycle or something down Main Street, you hear people, like, making nasty comments. Always, everywhere.”
One teacher who spoke to the filmmakers, Craig Kelskey, a physical education instructor who had been working at the high school for thirty years, said the school was a reflection of the community. “Whatever problems are going on in the community, those problems get brought into the school,” he said. “I mean, I’m sure that there’s things said to certain kids during the course of the school day and of course you would be scared. I think that is only human nature.”
The resentment toward Hispanics was fueled, in part, by the mistaken assumption that the Patchogue-Medford School District had had to cut sports programs in the high school to pay for ESL classes. About five hundred of the district’s eighty-five-hundred-plus students were taking ESL classes then. They hailed from forty-three countries, two-thirds of which were Spanish speaking.20 Parents and students alike thought the trade-off unfair, even if there never was any such trade-off. High school sports were sacrosanct and school board members always instructed the school superintendent, Michael Mostow, to “figure out” how to continue the program, even when there was no money left in the budget, even if they had to use old equipment. He did, taking money from here and there to keep all sports afloat and the voters ha
ppy.21 Still, even if sports were not sacrificed, the animosity continued. Why should the taxpayers pay for the education of the children of “illegals”? many asked openly.
Community blogs were replete with anti-immigrant commentary, some thoughtful; some virulent. “Not my problem if ESL classes are crowded, hard to get to or there’s not enough of them or because of budget cuts. My tax money shouldn’t be funding these programs to begin with!! If I go to Mexico are they going to pay for and send me to classes to learn Spanish? Don’t think so.” So read a message posted on Medfordcommunity-watch.com in November 2008 and signed by “Dana.” Another post read, “The problem is on the Federal level of government with their failure to take control of the immigration problem. . . . Americans are tired of paying the way for people who don’t belong here and our sense of fairness is being pushed to the limit. I believe this anger would exist against any nationality that would take advantage of us in this manner. If the governments of these other countries aren’t taking care of there [sic] own people why should we be expected to foot the bill for their care?” This one was signed “DG.”
Even earlier, in a 2005 Long Island political forum, someone signing herself or himself “PM REALIST” wrote: “WHY DIDN’T THEY CUT THE ESL CLASSES? LET THESE KIDS LEARN ENGLISH LIKE OUR FOREFATHERS AND MOTHERS!!!”22
In many ways, the school was a microcosm of what was happening in the community. The district went from 4 percent to 24 percent Latino in five years. Three of the seven elementary schools in the district were 50 percent Latino in 2008.23 A week before Jeffrey Conroy and his friends set out to hunt “beaners” in Patchogue, a swastika and some anti-black comments were found scrawled in a stairwell at the school, the same week that Barack Obama was elected the first black president of the United States.
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.24 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.25
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.26
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;27 eleven Italians lynched in New Orleans in 1890;28 thirteen hundred Greeks driven out of Omaha, Nebraska, in 1909 by an angry mob;29 hundreds of Mexicans beaten and injured in a ten-day riot in 1943 Los Angeles;30 Vietnamese fishermen attacked in Galveston, Texas, in 1981;31 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.32
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.33 Mexicans, Chileans, and Peruvians were ordered to leave the area around Sutter’s Mill at Coloma.34 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.35
In the early twentieth century, violence and abuse of power were primarily directed against Mexican immigrants.36 A century later, the same can be said, although not all the victims are Mexicans, even if the perpetrators set out to attack them.37 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.38
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.39
Through the years, the incidents pile up—the beating of a farmworker in Phoenix, Arizona, on May 9, 1912;40 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;41 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.42
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.43 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.44
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.45
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.46
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.47
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 2007.48
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.49
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.
