DOUGLAS - Ever since she was appointed as magistrate for the city of Douglas in 2002, Alma Vildosola has been hearing the rumors.
 Alma Vildosola, the justice of the peace for Precinct 1 in Douglas, has been the center of rumors regarding citizenship. |
The rumors, which purport that Vildosola is not a U.S. citizen, or, worse, that she is an illegal immigrant, are baffling to the 48-year-old Mexican-born judge, who has been a U.S. citizen for more than 10 years.
"I don't understand it," Vildosola said. "Do these people really think that the state supreme court would let me be a judge if I were an illegal immigrant?"
The rumors and the insistence of those who propagate them are also baffling to her supporters, like former Superior Court Justice James Riley, who represented Vildosola during a court challenge last fall from McNeal resident Alice Novoa-Benson.
Novoa-Benson tried unsuccessfully to annul Vildosola's Democratic primary victory on the grounds that, among other things, she did not meet citizenship or residency requirements.
"It's provably true that Alma is a naturalized citizen," Riley said. "It's a matter of public record, and if these people would just take the trouble to search the public record, they wouldn't make such baseless allegations."
Indeed, after Border Patrol Agent Nicholas Corbett was charged with murder in Vildosola's court on April 23, several readers wrote or calledWick News Service urging an investigation of the judge's legal status. A 10-minute visit to the Cochise County Elections Office yielded a copy of Vildosola's naturalization certificate, which showed the judge had become a citizen on Sept. 24, 1996, at U.S. District Court in Tucson.
The document was filed with the office on June 6, 2006, and copies are available to any member of the public upon request, said County Elections Director Tom Schelling.
Questions about Vildosola's residency in the U.S. were similarly resolved after a minutes-long investigation at the county Assessor's Office, where records revealed Vildosola purchased property on 13th Street in Douglas in July 1997 and that she owns a single-family home on the parcel.
The house was built in 2000, the records show, and has been classified since then as owner occupied.
Vildosola's husband, an architect based in Agua Prieta, Sonora, designed the home, the judge said.
"It's a very nice house," she noted modestly.
A 'prophet of God' spreads the word
Novoa-Benson, who grew up in the Douglas-Agua Prieta area with Vildosola, has been perhaps the judge's loudest and most persistent accuser.
A regular and unsuccessful candidate for justice of the peace in Precinct 2, Novoa-Benson doggedly challenges her losses in court, where she alleges widespread voting by illegal immigrants.
According to an Aug. 20, 2003, story in the Arizona Daily Star, Novoa-Benson made her case during one challenge in Cochise County Superior Court by quoting from the Bible and claiming she was "a prophet of God" on a mission to "take back the sovereignty of our nation."
She lost the case.
In October 2006, she filed a complaint alleging that Vildosola and her Republican rival George Hoke had won tainted primaries, supporting her claim with a sparsely worded one-page memo titled "Disputed and More Problematic Residency, Citizenship, and Illegal Voting the Primary Election 12 September 2006 Cochise County Arizona."
In addition to allegations of illegal voting in both party primaries, Novoa-Benson claimed Vildosola "was not at the time of the election eligible to (sic) the office because of residency and citizenship requirements."
She did not produce any evidence to support the citizenship or residency allegations, and the claim was dismissed on a technicality - despite Novoa-Benson's request, based on a 1928 legal precedent, for a continuance.
Dismissed from the judicial system, the "Disputed and More Problematic Residency" memo quickly found its way onto the Web site of the anti-illegal-immigration biker group American Freedom Riders, from which it spurred a series of postings titled "Illegal Alien Wins Primary Election" on right-wing blogs such as Freedom Folks and Immigration Watchdog.
The accusations also were picked up by the local political Web site The Anderson Report, named after its publisher, Sierra Vista resident and former chair of the Cochise County Republican Committee Ben Anderson Jr.
"Vildosola's green card or citizenship status papers are replete with obvious inconsistencies that make her candidacy for any U.S. elected office highly suspect," Anderson wrote on his Web site, adding: "There are very strong suspicions and allegations that Alma Vildosola is actually an illegal alien."
Anderson was not relying on his own research when he made these statements, he told the Herald/Review. His principal source was Novoa-Benson.
And while he acknowledged that Novoa-Benson's courtroom histrionics might make her a questionable source, Anderson said he trusted the boxfuls of documents she had collected as alleged evidence.
"The methodology that she used and the research that she did was absolutely incredible," he insisted.
Furthermore, even if Vildosola's naturalization certificate, the document that ultimately determines U.S. citizenship, is authentic, Anderson said, skeptics like him won't trust it because they don't trust the government that issued it.
"There's just a lack of trust and faith in officialdom," he said.
As for Novoa-Benson's voluminous research, she failed to bring any of it to the October 2006 hearing, but told the Herald/Review to "wait and see," that she would produce it at a later date.
Repeated telephone calls last week to her cell and home numbers went unanswered.
The filmmaker and the traffic citation
Novoa-Benson's allegations against Vildosola caught the attention of another local resident: documentary filmmaker Mercedes Maharis of Hereford, who had her own bone to pick with Vildosola after a contentious civil traffic case.
In August 2004, Maharis found herself in Vildosola's municipal court in connection with a fender bender in downtown Douglas. When Vildosola found Maharis responsible for a citation fee but excused a ticket issued to the other driver, Maharis accused the judge of unfairness and appealed to the Cochise County Superior Court.
She lost the appeal and was required to pay the $130 citation fee. And so when Novoa-Benson showed her some of her alleged evidence against Vildosola, Maharis was intrigued.
"Alice Novoa-Benson brought me a lot of papers, and I wanted to know more, because I was severely wounded by this person," explained Maharis, producer/director of the 2005 DVD documentary "Cochise County USA: Cries from the Border."
So she tagged along to Novoa-Benson's October 2006 election challenge at the Superior Court in Bisbee. She also approached the local Republican Party headquarters, where campaign volunteers say she reported possible problems with Vildosola's citizenship, and claimed that Vildosola's home address in Douglas was actually a vacant lot.
Had she done her own public records investigation into Vildosola's citizenship prior to suggesting potential problems to others?
"I didn't know how to do it," she insisted. "That's why I went to Republican Party headquarters and asked them to investigate."
Her claim that Vildosola's residence was a vacant lot was, however, the result of a records search at the county Assessor's Office, she said, although it was unclear how her results differed so greatly from those obtained by Wick News Service.
Maharis said she never followed up on her vacant lot suspicion by going to Vildosola's home address of 2901 E. 13th St., as listed in the telephone book and other county records. If she had, she might have seen a 2,940-square-foot home at the corner of East 13th Street and Encanto Avenue with the number 2901 prominently displayed and Vildosola's gold Mercury Sable sedan parked in front.
At least one local official was not impressed with Maharis' journalistic technique.
"She got a little bit of misinformation from someone, and she not only perpetuated it but she embellished it," said Douglas Mayor Ray Borane.
"If she's a journalist, she should verify it for herself without going around half-cocked and causing all this malicious harm to people."
Maharis, however, defended her approach. She said she received some information that seemed credible, and followed up by asking questions about it.
"I didn't smear anybody," she said. "It's a free country and I can ask. I will not be maligned because I ask questions."
Possible motives behind why claims were made
Vildosola isn't sure what caused Novoa-Benson to turn on her. They knew each other as girls, she said, back when Vildosola was attending Douglas High School, and they never had any major disagreements.
As for her other critics, those who have picked up on Novoa-Benson's allegations of non-citizenship and non-residency, Vildosola suspects they are upset by the idea of a judge who is both a woman and Hispanic.
Recalling her traffic case with Maharis, she said that after her ruling, Maharis alleged she was being victimized by a Hispanic conspiracy.
"She started saying that because I was Hispanic, the police officer was Hispanic and the other driver was Hispanic, that I was teaming up with them," she said.
Borane thinks the allegations against Vildosola result from a misunderstanding of Douglas' border-town culture. Outsiders can overreact, he said, when they see how people like Vildosola, who have family and friends in both the U.S. and Mexico, move freely back and forth across the border.
Others, like Cecile Lumer, head of the Bisbee-based immigrant-rights group Citizens for Border Solutions, believe the persistent attacks on the judge's citizenship reveal an ugly anti-immigrant side of the local anti-illegal-immigration movement.
"I definitely think that this kind of rumor-mongering has its roots in racism, just as I think that much of the anti-immigrant stance of people also has a strong racist element," she said.
For her part, Maharis flatly denies any anti-Hispanic motivations, and cited her experiences living in Central America, teaching under-privileged Hispanic kids and learning to speak Spanish.
"I love the Latin culture," she said. "I have a master's degree in Latin American studies."
Anderson also rejected the claim of racism. The anger fueling the rumors about Vildosola, he said, comes from people who resent what they see as a permissive attitude in Douglas toward illegal immigration, as well as a history of corruption in the city.
As long as that anger is there, Anderson predicted, rumors will continue to circulate about Vildosola's citizenship, whether there is evidence behind them or not.
"It's become an urban legend that has stuck," he said.
As for Vildosola, she says she's learned to take the accusations in stride, no matter how malicious or untrue.
"At first it bothered me, because you never know how people will use rumors to hurt you," she said.
"But then you sort of get used to it, especially when you know that it's not true."
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