Raymond Herrera isn't bothered that people are split on whether he's a patriotic activist or a self-hating, racist nut.
The 60-year-old Victorville resident and Vietnam War GI has become a fixture at city council, school and county board meetings, where he and members of his fledgling group, We the People, California's Crusader, decry the ills of illegal immigration and voice support for tougher laws.
He's conducted surveillance on day laborers.
He's helped stage protests.
Most of all, Herrera offers no apologies for lending a Latino face to the fight against illegal immigration. His rallies and protests as a former Minuteman became so heated at times they teetered on the brink of violence.
"I stopped counting the death threats after 500," Herrera said.
He stressed that neither the Minuteman Project nor his We the People tolerate violence or racist slurs and that the violence is always instigated by the other side.
He jumped head-first into the thorny immigration fight as the national rally spokesman for the Minuteman Project, a nationally recognized opponent of lax immigration laws.
"He's obviously 100 percent Mexican by blood, but he's 1,000 percent American by spirit," said Jim Gilchrist, founder and president of the Minuteman Project, which recruited Herrera in 2006. "The guy's incredible. I don't know where that passion comes from."
About three months ago, Herrera left the Minuteman Project
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to launch his own group in the Inland Empire.
During that time, We the People has fought to make itself heard.
In September, Herrera and a handful of supporters appeared before the Hesperia City Council to protest three Spanish-language billboards advertising for Wells Fargo bank. He called on the City Council to require all billboards in the city be in English.
The group vowed to launch a campaign asking customers to close their Wells Fargo accounts if the company didn't take the signs down.
Within weeks, the signs were removed.
On Nov. 17, Herrera and his associates spoke at a San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors meeting where they praised members for renewing a program that screens for illegal immigrants in county jails. Then they urged the board and local law enforcement to do more.
"Enforce it at schools, enforce it at the bank, enforce it at checkpoints," Herrera told the board.
We the People says its mission is "to influence institutions of political corruption and the corporations and employers that unlawfully hire and exploit illegal aliens."
It's hard to tell whether it's We the People's mission or tactics that most anger Herrera's foes.
"He's a racist. He wants to pick on a group of people that have less rights, and they're trying to struggle in this country to have a better life," Latino activist and San Bernardino County school board member Gil Navarro said. "As a veteran, I defended this country against people like him, who are anti-American as far as I'm concerned."
Herrera said he's long learned to dismiss criticism.
His work, he insists, is not about self-hatred, but rather promoting an American culture and norms established by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant settlers in the early 1600s.
"Our society, America, is an Anglo Protestant core-cultured society. Everything that you do is the end result of the Anglo Protestant way of life," Herrera said. "This is not to promote white skin. I don't care if you're black, white, brown, green or yellow. If you're an American, you live the Anglo way of life."
Records on file with the Veterans Administration show Herrera served in the U.S. Army from 1967 to 1970. He says he spent much of that time as a paratrooper fighting in Vietnam.
He's never seen without his signature black ball cap, "173rd Airborne Brigade" stitched across the front. A half-dozen medals, including a Purple Heart, are pinned to the cap, which Herrera said only leaves his head when he sleeps.
The Purple Heart, he explains, was awarded following an ambush in the Binh Dinh Province of Vietnam's South Central Coast region in 1968. He and his platoon came under enemy fire after walking into a booby-trapped field of punji sticks - short, sharpened stakes of bamboo implanted upright into the ground and camouflaged by vegetation.
One of the punji sticks punctured Herrera's ankle, which he said swelled to the size of an elephant's leg.
After the war, Herrera returned to Rialto as a carpenter in the 1970s. He learned the trade and worked his way up.
He blames illegal immigration for hurting his hopes of a better life.
Illegal immigrants started landing jobs in the building trades, cutting deeply into his income, he says. Instead of being a well-paid construction worker with jobs stacked up, Herrera says he found himself living on the poverty line and barely able to support his wife and seven children.
"I lost my American Dream, all because of the complicity in Washington," Herrera said.
Decades later, there's clearly still fight in Herrera.
As a Minuteman, Herrera has courted the press, heading rallies from San Bernardino County to the White House. And, not surprisingly, he's made the hiring of day laborers one of his biggest issues.
In San Bernardino County, Herrera and his colleagues distributed literature saying that they would photograph and film employers who hired workers off the street and post the images on the Internet.
"We're here to stand up against the illegal employer," Herrera told a reporter in April 2007.
In May, Herrera and fellow members of the Minuteman Project clashed with the owner and employees of Graziano's Italian Restaurant and Bar in Upland, where a sign hung advertising Cinco de Mayo.
The group entered and offered the owner a pamphlet about the American flag, then went outside to snap pictures of Minuteman members standing in front of the Cinco de Mayo sign, clutching American flags.
Both sides got into a shouting match, and police were called to keep the peace.
In late summer, Herrera decided to branch out on his own and start his own organization.
"I felt I needed to go out on my own to deliver the message I needed to deliver," Herrera said.
Robin Hvidston, a former member of the Minuteman Project who now is rally organizer for We the People, calls Herrera "a warrior" and a "true patriot" who was willing to die in the cauldron of Vietnam for his country.
She described him as a man who understands the history of the United States and its Constitution, and is well versed in the works of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.
"The color of his skin is American," Hvidston said. "There is no skin color on the battlefield. You're just Americans."
Source: dailybulletin.com/
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