Intimacy Across Borders: Race, Religion, and Migration in the U.S. Midwest

6. Too Close to Home

6 | Too Close to Home Luis Ramirez came to the United States from Mexico in 2002 to look for work and ended up in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, a town of 5,500 located eighty miles northwest of Philadelphia. He made a home here and held two jobs—picking strawberries and working in a potato chip factory; he worked so hard that his nickname was “El Caballo ,” “the horse.” He was engaged to a local woman and had two children with her. He also sent a large chunk of his earnings to his mother in Guanajuato. Yet to some in this struggling coal town, Ramirez would never belong . On July 12, 2008, the twenty-five-year-old was beaten to death by a group of young men, all of them white, who yelled racist slurs at him during the attack. One of the boys, Brian Scully, who was sixteen at the time, admitted in court that he told Ramirez, “This is Shenandoah . This is America. Go home, you Mexican motherfucker.”1 Crystal Dillman, the victim’s twenty-four-year-old fiancée, an Anglo who grew up in Shenandoah, said Ramirez was often called derogatory names, including “dirty Mexican,” and told to return to his homeland. “People in this town are very racist toward Hispanic people. They think right away if you’re Mexican, you’re illegal, and you’re no good,” said Dillman (“Immigrant Beaten”). Retired Philadelphia police officer Eileen Burke, 136 | chapter 6 who lives on the street where the fight occurred, testified that she heard a youth scream at one of Ramirez’s friends after the beating to tell his Mexican friends to get out of Shenandoah, “or you’re going to be laying next to him” (“Immigrant Beaten”). Ramirez was the familiar stranger, the representative of a growing Latino population making Shenandoah their home. He was no migrant worker passing through town; he was engaged to a local girl, father to local kids, going to a local party, walking home at night through the town, with the sister of his fiancée, as if he was just like any other resident . His actions indicated a level of comfortability—of intimacy—with the town and its spaces—that angered his attackers. The intimacy had a sexual component, for, as I noted in the introduction, the first comment made—what started the whole attack—was Brian Scully’s question to the young woman, “Isn’t it a little late for you to be out?” Roger Laguna, an attorney for one of the boys, told the Chicago Tribune before the trial, “You see a fifteen-year-old white girl with a person you believe to be a gangster or a thug: What’s wrong with this picture? Most of us keep it to ourselves, but you’ve got seventeen-year-olds out there being rude and dumb; they broached the topic” (quoted in Olivo). The Anglo boys were claiming the right to control the park as well as the young woman sitting in it; Ramirez threatened their sense of control, and thus they had to deny what was surely a moment of commonality in order to transform Ramirez from another young man into “a spic.” That moment in the park when his face was “exposed, menaced,” to return to Levinas, was for the Anglo boys an invitation to “an act of violence” (1985, 86), and it was an invitation they accepted as they alternated between seeing Ramirez as a singular individual and seeing him as the representative of a group they had been encouraged to hate. As Sara Ahmed describes it, “Hate involves the negotiation of an intimate relationship between a subject and an imagined other, as another that cannot be relegated to the outside” (2004, 49). When Ramirez got up out of the swing and said something in Spanish, then walked away, the teens ran after him and beat him viciously. Brandon Piekarsky, age sixteen, delivered a fatal kick to the head as Ramirez lay unconscious on the ground—a blow later described as having the power of a “field goal kick.” Small-town pride. The attackers were all popular high school athletes and honors students; some of them also had a history of harass- too close to home | 137 ing Latinos, of calling out “Go home, spics” and wearing Border Patrol T-shirts. The two who were tried as adults in state court—Piekarsky and Derrick Donchak...