by Patrick Strickland
Melville House Publishing
2/22/2022, hardcover
SKU: 9781612199269
This real-life Western tells the story of how citizens in a small Arizona border town stood up to anti-immigrant militias and vigilantes.
The Marauders uncovers the riveting nonfiction saga of far-right militias terrorizing the border towns of southern Arizona. In one of the towns profiled, Arivaca, rogue militia members killed a man and his nine-year-old daughter in 2009. In response, the residents organized and spent two years trying to push the new militias out through boycotts and by urging local businesses to ban them. The militias and vigilante groups again raised the stakes, spreading Pizzagate-style conspiracy theories alleging that town residents were complicit in child sex trafficking, prompting fears of vigilante violence.
The Marauders flips the standard formula most often applied to stories about immigration and the far right. Too often those stories are told from the perspective of the ones committing the violence. While Strickland doesn't shy away from exploring those dark themes, the far right are not the protagonists of the book. Rather, the people targeted by hate groups, and the individuals who rose up to stop them in their tracks, are the heroes of this dramatic story.
Reviews:
" The Marauders is a blistering book, a hard-ass stare into the voracious mouth of the US-Mexico border. Patrick Strickland has done a fine piece of reporting from places we don't dare to tread." -- Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil's Highway
"Strickland crosses the desert of simplistic, hopeless border narratives and finds an oasis: communities resistant to the disease of militant right-wing extremism ravaging the country. An important antidote to the cartoonish border stories that make 'news.'"
--Roberto Lovato, author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas
"Patrick Strickland is one of the most incisive writers looking at the future of politics and identity, and The Marauders is a master work unveiling the caustic violence that many people engage in while upholding the imperial legacy of national borders." --Shane Burley, author of Fascism Today
"The Marauders is a timely reminder that far-right militants didn't just appear from nowhere to strike at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. As Patrick Strickland reports, they have been actively instigating violence and mayhem all across the country since our nation's founding, often with the vocal support of nativist politicians."
--Mike German, author of Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide
About the Author:
Patrick Strickland is a journalist and author from Texas who has reported from some fifteen countries across Europe, the Middle East, and North America. His reportage has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Politico, The Guardian, Vice, In These Times, and elsewhere. He is the author of Alerta! Alerta!