Vigilantes Oscuros

When the news revealed that the recent sightings of Los Vigilantes Oscuros were pranks by a couple of teenagers, Gregory finally articulated the feeling of having been watched his entire existence. Los Vigilantes Oscuros were crepuscular, tall spirits in black hats who kept watch from the hills dotted across Southern California. Accounts of the vigilantes appear in the histories of Native Californian tribes and Mexican Colonials and by Gregory’s misty feeling of judgement. The watching made Gregory feel stretched-out flat, as if he had to justify every element in his surroundings.

The teenagers had placed foldable silhouettes with electric, glowing eyes. Motors let them move slightly and long jackets covered the pranksters below who slid out as the afternoon light fell completely black. Then they would fold Los Vigilantes Oscuros and hide. Maybe funny at first, during the boredom of the potential end of the world associated with the virus lockdown; the dog walkers pointing, the joggers pausing, the children crying when they first saw the Watchers  and then later needing to be reassured as they thought of the tall, black swaying silhouettes just before bed. The news soon shifter in tone from amusement to manhunt when an elderly woman died of fright. She (it’s unclear if she was a busybody the pranksters knew) opened her window to a tall, black hat with hellish eyes below the rim looking straight into her. Clutching her chest on her last call to her daughter, she described the demon watchers and the amused face on the neighbor boy watching her from the window.

The prankers were caught and paraded on the news in grown-out crew cuts and right-sided smirks that stretched beyond Covid masks as they were handcuffed. The contraptions were taken in as evidence. As they hadn’t invented Los Vigilantes Oscuros, these boys had not produced the feeling of being watched for Gregory, only called attention to it, as he sat alone, watching news of watchers.

Despite his sense of foreboding, he had never seen sprites or duendes out there on the hills at dusk, had not even  witnessed the robotic kiddie prank, lit up by imagination and electricity. The world is overbright, hyper-theatrical, and too much. The brightness keeps him from watching. Stark contrasts weren't his favorite thing, and contracts seemed to be the world to be seen in sunny California.

Gregory couldn’t weld his notion to any other in the pantheon of the paranoid: CIA, internet companies, Reticulons, vaccine nanobots, immigrants needing work, UFO cults, or time police, though, of course, one never knows. Let it be Los Vigilantes, let their reason for watching be an answer. He figured the clues were in the name.

Vigilantes, Gregory thought, is much like the English vigilant. Oscuros, dark, like the English obscured. Almost like “unknown watchers,” but the real English translation is dark watchers. “Dark” seems more the clue to the why of watching, rather than the sense of presence, the unknown entity observing, judging passively, gathering information for unknown ends. “Dark” referencing their capes or hats didn’t seem to be correct. Gregory wouldn’t be disturbed by Zorro cosplayers wasting their time at the edges of Californian jogging trails and suburban medians. “Dark” referencing the hours of their appearance was also a poor fit. Dawn and dusk, the two doors to darkness, were much more apt Los Vigilantes exist in the creeping dark and melt away in both the coming of the night and the day. Vigilantes Crepúsculos. Neither here-nor-there people.

Like nepantla, the Nahuatl word academics made careers out of applying to the state of colonized people and Gregory despised as much as foggy notions of feeling like a zoo, on secret television, for the abnormal visitors who delight in imbalances of power.

Gregory stood up and stretched, the afternoon was getting old, the day to day itself already getting old in the virus lockdown. Los Vigilantes Oscuros aren’t just watching the approaching and receding dark of the world, they are watching people. The darkness of people about their day, blinded by the mundane, excised by witnessing like slicing a sample of humanity for the microscope. Hundreds of years of colonization, Los Vigilantes Oscuros only observed. The new mundane brutality of servitude pressed under glass. The US invasion, the hunting of Native people, the displacement, the lynching of Mexican Americans, the Zoot Suit Riots, police killings, ICE deportations, and security checks. The children in cages. They greedily beheld the trauma of the world, no, just locally to California. The trauma of brown people, Raza, here on the west coast, as “essential” workers die without support, forgotten. Indifference proven with the Watchers’ silence for thousands of years, for hundreds of years of occupation and exploitation and certainly since Gregory’s own existence. Twilight and dawn have just enough light to see, not illumination enough for details to truly understand, to care, or even to experience the same darkness as everyone else. Gregory went to the window. What’s a story, he reasoned, but survival data to relate to others. Dark Watchers transmit nothing.

Los Vigilantes Oscuros watch only for entertainment.

Gregory opened the window, cool air coming in. Though the land still had light, afternoon was leaving. In California, the nights are always cold, waters from the depths of the ocean rise and take the heat from the air. How could these watchers not act? They have seen; they should know the inequities of the world better than anyone. Shadows began running farther from the hills near his own house. Twilight. Gregory leaned out.

“Los Vigilantes know we get shot for nothing. They know they ban our language; they ban us; they say we’re foreign. We get exploited and told it’s fair.” A rant said aloud despite himself, the kind only certain outsiders liked to hear.

The sense of watching burned him, now more than any other time he could remember. Watchers had to be near. Gregory grabs at your arms, pulling your silhouette to the window frame. “Say something,” Gregory grunts. You both struggle and he has you all the way through the window.

All you have to do now is close your eyes and Gregory will fade away in the darkness you refuse to share.