The independent film The Gatekeeper (2002) presents a dystopian narrative about undocumented Mexican workers in the context of the US “War on Terror” that builds upon the longer history of farm fascism in California. Made on the cheap for around $200,000, it was written and directed by John Carlos Frey, who also stars as “Adam Fields,” a self-hating half Mexican American Border Patrol agent in San Diego who passes for white. Foregrounding the centrality of surveillance and media technology to both official and vigilante policing, the film opens with images of migrants crossing the border at night, as seen through the green light of night-vision goggles. At the same time, an anti-immigrant talk show called The National Radio Patrol: Defending America from the Mexican Invasion can be heard on the soundtrack. It is revealed that Agent Fields is watching the migrants  as he talks to the host of the show on his mobile phone before alerting a group of nativist vigilantes and joining them in attacking the migrants. 

Fields subsequently comes up with a sensational scheme to draw attention to the inadequacies of border enforcement. Equipped with a GPS device, a miniature digital camera, and a mobile phone, he goes undercover to join a group of immigrants illegally entering the United States on the 4th of July; as part of their celebration of national independence, his vigilante friends will then swoop down, apprehend the migrants, and film the whole caper for broadcast. Throughout his odyssey, we see repeated shots of the migration process from the perspective of Fields’s hidden camera, footage presumably to be used in the vigilante video. On the one hand, this narrative and visual conceit, like the opening scenes, suggests the material and symbolic centrality of media technologies to official and vigilante border policing, while, on the other hand, presenting an imaginary sort of "migrant worker cam" that frames the action from the perspective of migrants in ways that undermine nativist monopolies over a digital gaze.   

Fields's plan backfires, however, when two white drug traffickers intervene and kill the vigilantes as they swoop down on the migrants. His fate is sealed when he loses his mobile phone and, along with the other border crossers, is captured by the drug traffickers and made to carry gallon jugs filled with the chemicals used in making methamphetamine. 

He is then transported to a heavily fortified and electronically surveilled ranch on the US side of the border where he is forced at gun point to manufacture meth in a makeshift lab. His first attempt at escape fails, but then in a spectacular fantasy of farm worker sabotage, he manages to blow up the meth lab. 

Dramatically departing from the hispanophilic/hispanophobic film conventions for representing drug traffickers, the villains of The Gatekeeper are instead depicted as a sadistic white father-and-son team that recalls the patriarchal corporate agriculture of California history. The white meth ranchers, moreover, resemble the members of Fields’s nativist vigilante group, suggesting the ways that forms of racialized fascism have mediated between nativism and corporate agriculture. Finally, as a post-9/11 film, it anticipates the embedding of journalists among military units during the Bush administration invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and thus suggests parallels between the war on terror and the history of agribusiness militarization.