Essay Questions

What is ironic about Lou Becker telling Ernesto “Shame on your for bringing God into this. Don’t bring God into this!”

Ernesto Martinez is aptly named: he is quite earnest in his attempts to relieve the suffering and dehumanizing of those crossing the border illegally into America. In defiance of restrictions, he leaves gallons of water available in the desert for anyone undertaking that challenge who might need it. When radio host Becker flat out suggests he should be arrested for this criminal behavior, Ernesto responds that he is taking orders from a higher authority: God. This immediately raises Becker’s hackles and he takes Ernesto to task with the language quoted above. This is especially ironic, of course, because Becker is a figure representative of those who came to prominence in the 1990’s launching assaults against liberal policies by appealing to evangelical Christians and in the process blurring the separation of church and state almost to the point of invisibility.

What is the one single word which indicates that Lou Becker’s ordeal in the desert has genuinely resulted in a moral and political transformation away from where he is at when the play begins?

More than any other character in the drama, Becker is a figure for whom the precision of words and terminology is of defining significance. As a right-wing talk radio host appealing to the basest instincts of his low-level critical-thinking demographic, his entire career rests precariously upon a precipice of very limited vocabulary composed of words that stimulate just the right response. This is Mexicans crossing the border outside of the conventions of the law are compared to cockroaches and called illegal “aliens.” That his transformation is authentic is never in doubt is an assurance that can be pinpointed to a single moment of his final broadcast:

“Today in the news…Ten illegal aliens…(Beat.) Ten migrants were caught at the…”

That single word which clarifies forever that Becker is a changed man is the on-air, mid-thought edit from the ideologically safe red meat of “aliens” to the ideologically compromised “migrants.”

How are the police officer and the documentary filmmaker thematically connected to each other in a way equitable to being two sides of the same coin?

Quite notably, neither of these characters are given names. The script refers to them respectively as DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER and ARIZONA POLICEMAN. Personality-wise, they seem to share little. The cop displays the typical lack of imagination that would be death for a filmmaker as well the conventional resistance to accepting any challenge to his notion of being invested with absolute authority whereas the documentarian exhibits a person that seeks to ingratiate himself with Ernesto.

On the other hand, both the police and the filmmaker demonstrate an undeniably similar propensity toward enjoying conflict and pushing limits. The cop is absolutely unbound in his behavior which continually pushes Sandi into an ever more intense state of agitation. Meanwhile, the documentarian—more subtly, it is true—appears to be quite eager to spark some sort of confrontation between Ernesto and the Minutemen. Even after Ernesto warns that they should leave before the militia members “start acting stupid and threatening us” the filmmaker’s response is to urge a confrontation because “I have to capture some conflict to sell this documentary.”

The point seems to be that both law enforcement in their active agency of agitation and the media in their observational role which thrives on conflict are nameless and faceless because they are all, within their respective, domains populated by the very same type of people.