�Necessary Sacrifices�

The Department of Homeland Security didn�t have to ask Rusty Monsees for consent to build a segment of the border fence on his property. Monsees, 60, who grew up on a 34-acre stretch of land along the Rio Grande, preempted the fence�s planners. "I called them and told them I wanted it, that it would work." Unlike many proponents of the fence, Monsees has much to lose if the project is completed. His land will be split in two. His view of the river will be obstructed. He will have to sell an undeveloped sliver of his backyard to the federal government. But for Monsees, these are necessary sacrifices. "I�m tired of the violence out here," he said. "I�m tired of the drug running. I�m tired of having to worry about my daughters� safety." Monsees stands on the bank of the Rio Grande and recalls the drama that has played out along the narrow river and its swampy outcropping. He remembers when the Mexican police gunned down several men in innertubes with machine guns. "The river," he said, "was red with blood." When he was 8, a man crossed the river, broke into his kitchen and approached his mother with a butcher�s knife, he recounts. Julia Monsees acted quickly, grabbing a shotgun and shooting the intruder in the hip. Since then, Rusty ysays he�s shot four men himself. But Monsees� take on immigration, on U.S.-Mexican relations, is far from simple, and hardly xenophobic. Detailing his family history�which includes longstanding ties to the country across the river�brings the gruff, shotgun-bearing man to tears. "Come to think of it," he said, "if I had to choose a group to live with, I�m going to have to say I would go to Mexico." How does the ally of Mexico, the man who has more friends in Matamoros than Brownsville, justify his support for the barrier that the Mexican government has called "medieval?� The answer sets Monsees on a winding narrative from Mexico City to Brownsville. The tale includes gunshot wounds, love triangles, drug deals. When it�s over, a 60-year-old Rusty Monsees, points to the land on which the border fence will soon be built and says, under his breath: "It would break my father�s heart." Family history on the border In 1915, after Cuban Monsees, Rusty�s father, was barred from joining the U.S. Army during World War I, he took a train from South Texas to central Mexico, where he joined up with Pancho Villa�s troops before some of the Mexican Revolution�s bloodiest battles. During his tour with Villa, 35 years before Rusty was born, the elder Monsees learned fluent Spanish, adopted the revolution�s code of honor, and started two families in Mexico. "My father provided for them, he paid for them to attend college," Rusty said. "But my dad gave me other things that he didn�t give them�he gave me attention. I still feel that I owe them a debt." Rusty doesn�t keep in contact with his older half-brothers and sisters in Mexico, but he thinks about them often. "Life isn�t always easy down there," he said. Of the people that cross through his property, leaving a well-marked trail through the marsh, he is sure that many�like his estranged Mexican relatives�are only looking for a better life. But he struggles to reconcile his compassion with his need for security. Even in the 1940s, the first decade of the family�s life on the river, the Monsees� worried about safety. Without a fence or a well-staffed border patrol, they relied on their southern neighbors in Mexico to warn them of encroaching threats. "There would be chorus, they�d be singing and yelling and screaming, �Monsees, Monsees.�" And after awhile it gives the information of what�s coming down." There were drug traffickers. There were families. Once there was a group of 150 El Salvadorans. There were also children who crossed the river to ask the Monsees� for food and water. "But these were the gente," Monsees said. "They weren�t like the smart alecks we�ve got crossing now." A question of personal security Rusty doesn�t know the family who now owns the farm across the river. He depends instead on the border patrol to take care of unwanted guests. But their services, he says, are inadequate. "People know when shifts end. I see them crossing at those times, when there are no agents." Like the Minutemen Project, a group of activists who independently monitor the U.S.-Mexico border, Monsees does his best to supplement the state-funded force. But Monsees calls the Minutemen "uninformed and self-righteous." "They don�t understand the border like I do," he said. When it comes to his quarter-mile of the Rio Grande, Monsees considers himself an expert. When Border Patrol officials came to speak to him about the fence, he took one of them by the hand. "I�m older, balder and fatter than you," Monsees told him, "so listen to Daddy." He went on to demand that a gate be placed on his tract of land after the fence is constructed, allowing him easy access to riverbank. Though he says that the border patrolmen acceded, no official construction plans have been approved in Brownsville, according to the Department of Homeland Security. For Monsees, who now spends most of his time alone on his largely fallow farmland, personal security has become something of an obsession. With a bad hip, he can�t patrol the land like he used. The fence, he said, will do the job for him. But Monsees� support for the barrier comes with the baggage of a hundred years of Brownsville history. And after all of the stories that take the river as a backdrop�from the gunshots to the food handouts�he understands that his politics might appear anomalous. When he stands next to the river, where, for Monsees, the political and the emotional converge, the tears come easily. "My life is what takes place here at the farm," he said, "and my life is affected by what takes place immediately across the river." "And there has always been tragedy on the river.�