"At the Ready" (2021)
A recent documentary about the recruitment of young Latinos to the Border Patrol and careers in law enforcement generally
It has been a minute! The past few months have been totally nuts. I was teaching a new course on “The History of College Sports” (I’ll share my syllabus in a future post, if anyone is interested), and coaching not one but two of my son’s baseball teams. And I’m not even gonna comment on politics right now, which has also been consuming a lot of my mental energy as well. I’m sure you can relate.
I wanted to write now—especially to all you teachers—about a documentary I saw last night, called “At the Ready.” It came out in 2021, and you can stream it on Max, and, I’m sure, other platforms. It was directed by Maisie Crow. You can learn more about her here: http://maisiecrow.com/. She seems to have directed lots of great movies, about reproductive rights, the environment, and other subjects.
The movie first caught my attention because I’d heard about a program called Border Patrol Explorers, which exists to recruit young Latinos, in particular, to jobs in the Border Patrol. From there, it didn’t take long to discover the movie, which follows a group of high school students in El Paso Texas who are members of a club that trains them how to be agents. They go and compete against other high school students, in mock drug busts, active shooter drills, domestic violence incidents. I was shocked to learn that 900 public schools across Texas have such programs.
“At the Ready” is about the dreams of young Latinos—and the dreams that their parents have for them—who’ve always yearned for careers in the Border Patrol or other law enforcement agencies, such as the police or the marines; they all see jobs with the Border Patrol as a stepping stone or as an end in itself. The pay starts at about $50,000 per year, and can be as much as $100,000 within just a few years.
Some of the parents interviewed said, in Spanish, after having immigrated to the United States themselves, that their kids’ participation in the club represented the fulfillment of their hope that they graduate from high school and find stable jobs in the United States. Others said they were happy to have their kids doing this work, because narco-trafficking posed a real threat.
The movie is set against the backdrop of the U.S. Senate race between Beto O’Rourke and Ted Cruz, and many of the participants in the club are voting for the first time, after spending a long time considering the choice. They listened to their teachers in the Border Patrol Explorers program, their parents, candidates for office, and local news anchors, then made different decisions based not only on their experiences with the club, but also their identities as queer and as the children of immigrants.
Especially because it’s about high school students considering their futures, I think it’d work really well in your classrooms, and would force them to understand a particularly thorny issue in Latino communities today. It’s a super interesting, well-captured story. Watch it!
And stay tuned for more from me on the teaching of Latino history, and teaching and learning about Latino communities in the present.