From Green Beret to Border Human Rights Activist: A Podcast with Mike Wilson and José Antonio Lucero

The Border Chronicle

Tohono O’odham Mike Wilson’s story gives us a compelling, personal, and geopolitical glimpse into the borderlands across a history of militarization, resistance, and transformation.

How does one go from a U.S. Special Forces Green Beret in El Salvador to doing humanitarian aid work on the border? This is where Tohono O’odham Mike Wilson begins this podcast conversation, with a profound and personal story of transformation. It happened at the height of the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in 1989, when Wilson accepted an invitation to eat dinner at a family’s house in Sosonate, where he was stationed. At first Wilson took this as part of a military tactic to win the hearts and minds of the local population. But little did he know that it was his heart and mind that would be changed.

In this conversation, Wilson is joined by University of Washington political scientist José Antonio Lucero, a native of El Paso and chair of the UW’s Comparative History of Ideas Department. Lucero is the coauthor of their compelling and extraordinary new book What Side Are You On? A Tohono O’odham Life Across Borders. We conduct this audio interview in the same style of the book, with Wilson talking about his life story and the portrait it paints of the borderlands, and Lucero framing it in a broader geopolitical and historical context.

There is much to cover, since Wilson’s story starts with growing up indigenous in the segregated mining town of Ajo, Arizona in the mid-20th century, to the grave consequences of U.S. foreign policy in Central America in the 1980s, to the militarization of the border in the 1990s and 2000s, and finally to the humanitarian aid work that he still does to this day. We talk about all this, with the added bonus of hearing their thoughts on the U.S. elections and what it means for the borderlands.

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