Grandmothers on Guard

Drawing on extensive research, including 900 hours of interviews, often recorded in the field, this project examines the place of older women in the conservative vigilante group the Minutemen. Active largely between 2005 and 2014, the group organized hundreds of volunteers to physically patrol the US-Mexico border, while encouraging nativist views on a national scale. Johnson is interested in the small but very active group of women, mostly older and retired, who organized and patrolled on the border ina group dominated by men. Within this group of women--Johnson closely follows seventeen in the study--the role of grandmotherhood took on a particular symbolic weight as a way of reaffirming these women's roles within family units, largely based on ideals of domesticity associated with the 1950s, and as a way of allaying their fears of becoming increasingly obsolete in society. Yet, these women also subverted some of their traditionally gendered roles, both within camps on the border and through the internet and mass media--