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The battle lines are clearly drawn. Directly in front of the border protesters, counter-demonstrators, most of them Hispanic, hold up mirrors and black plastic banners to block the lights. Aida Mancillas, a university language professor who is protesting the headlight rally, believes uneasiness about the economy and San Diego's expanding minority population fuels the demonstrations. The percentage of whites in San Diego County is expected to decline during the '90s from its current 74% to 60%, while that of Hispanics will rise from 14% to 23%. "Borders are breaking down everywhere, and it's frightening," says Mancillas. "There is a general concern that the economic standing of whites is slipping, and so the undocumented worker becomes a target of their fears." Before long, the competing protests have degenerated into shouting matches, with Hispanics chanting, "Racists go home!" while whites call back, "Wetback lovers!"
The object of much of the nativist anger is the thousands of immigrants, legal and illegal, who work on northern San Diego County farms, which last year yielded $770 million in strawberries, tomatoes, avocados and other produce. Many of the workers live in appalling squalor. As expensive housing developments continue to go up near the farms, residents often discover that they live next door to Third World-style worker encampments. "The Americans don't want us here, and so they are always reporting us to the authorities," says Longilo Miranda, 18, a worker from southern Mexico. He lives with his father in a scrap-wood lean-to. Marjorie Gaines, a city-council member in Encinitas, an upscale seaside community that includes some of the encampments, charges that undocumented workers litter, breed disease, commit crimes and harass whites. Gaines claims that drunk aliens burned down a local convenience store after the owner refused to sell them liquor. "These are border toughs," she says.
Increasingly, though, it is the illegal aliens who are victims of violent assaults by whites. Armed robbers and overzealous U.S. Border Patrol agents ^ are responsible for countless beatings and shootings of immigrants at the frontier. But human-rights activists say San Diego's racial attacks are a microcosm of hate crimes flaring nationally. In one of several attacks involving white youths, Leonard Paul Cuen, 21, was questioned last May and remains a suspect in connection with the death of Emilio Jimenez, 12. The boy was shot as he crossed a field not far from the site of the protest and within range of Cuen's home.
Last January farm worker Candido Gayoso was found in a field, feet and hands bound, a paper bag over his head. On the bag was scrawled "No mas aqui," ungrammatical Spanish for "Don't come back." The owner of a market frequented by farmhands was found guilty of assaulting Gayoso. In February Kenneth Kovzelove, 18, was sentenced to 50-years-to-life imprisonment in the shooting deaths of two field hands. He matter-of-factly admitted killing them simply because they were Mexican.