Mexifornia: A State of Becoming, Victor Hanson [cool books to read .txt] 📗

heavily populated Hispanic kingdom, nation or hegemony -  use whatever term you will - and today, slowly, through the agency of peaceful and inevitable historical change is righteously reverting to its former and proper status. Look at a Chicano studies text and you see the map of the original Nuevo California that includes not just the present-day state, but all of Nevada, Arizona, Utah, parts of New Mexico, Colorado and even southern Wyoming! - as if there were once thousands of prosperous Mexicans plying their culture in a vast Hispanic American North.

A recent Zogby poll revealed that 58 percent of Mexican citizens believe that "the territory of the United States' Southwest rightfully belongs to Mexico." In contrast, the same poll showed that 68 percent of Americans want the U.S. military deployed on the border to keep illegal aliens out. Thucydides would conclude that with contrasting attitudes like that, you have the ingredients for a war of some sort - if not waged conventionally, then perhaps demographically.

Few in Mexico who entertain the zany irredentist vision of Nuevo California think such a process out carefully, and do not quite know what the eventual condition of the border zone between us will be - a greater Mexico, a simple assimilation of millions of brown gringos, or a new intermediary state of Mexifornia, with affinities to both countries and full allegiance to neither. It is common to hear those millions who come here slander Mexico to their new neighbors - which is logical, given their brutal treatment and low expectations back there; but just as frequently, nostalgia and romance gradually take over and make Mexico more attractive as it grows more distant. Thus to the Mexican government, the presence of millions of its nationals in the world's wealthiest country next door surely has more positive than negative consequences. Its expatriates naturally will at first lobby for concessions on everything from immigration to NAFTA, and ultimately, in theory, staff the government of California with Spanish-speaking officials sympathetic to close ties with Mexico City. Yet the lesson remains: Mexico is likable only from a safe distance.

Mexico's entire image has changed in our schools and popular culture. We went without a blink from racist pictures of a sleepy, mustachioed man in sombrero and poncho under a tree in the pueblo's plaza, to the other extreme of students dressed in Aztec costumes talking about Mexican law codes in the university free speech area. The former was cruel and insensitive, but at least it gave the immigrant a negative push to assimilate into the culture of his new land; the latter is comically ahistorical and ensures separatism and hence failure.

Instead of growing more distant, this newly romanticized Mexico of primal force and natural virtue has made strong claims on the heart of the new arrival, and thus has been ever more deleterious to his odyssey of becoming an American. Mexicans here can vote for candidates there. They see contenders for the presidency of Mexico campaigning in their American barrios. So even as they remain permanent residents of America, they continue to be civic participants of Mexico in absentia. Once they are free from their oppressive government, they reinvent Mexico as a nurturing landscape that obliterates the kleptocracy it actually is. The past corruption of politics and economics is forgotten in more hospitable surroundings, replaced by the romance of a distant culture. In a world where "all cultures are equal" and where racism, corruption and murder in the Third World are judged by a standard different from the West, too many Mexican authorities are not seen for what they often are: apparatchiks and gangsters, operating without the rule of law, who drive millions of their best and most intrepid citizens away. Mass kidnappings, endemic police-inspired murder, and rampant human-induced disasters at home seem to make far less impression on immigrants than the failure of California to provide driver's licenses to illegal aliens or to honor cards provided by the Mexican government as valid IDs. In short, Mexico, the exporter of human cargo, presents an especially difficult and understated problem in the present immigration quagmire: They not only send us their surplus people; they export to us their own national confusion and conflicted self-image as well.

TWO

The Universe of the Illegal Alien

HOW DOES THE WORLD of illegal immigration look to the alien himself? Let us start by being candid. Nearly all the fruits and vegetables picked in the Southwest, supplying most of America with its fresh produce, are picked by Mexicans, most of them aliens, many of whom arrived in this country illegally, by stealth or by fraud. The nicest residential lawns in the Southwest are mowed by Mexicans, again mostly illegal aliens, but also green-card holders and naturalized citizens. In most restaurants in the southwestern United States the dishes are bussed and washed by Mexicans. In short, almost any physical labor that requires little skill or education but a great deal of physical strength and stamina and some courage, and that pays only a little over the minimum wage is now done by people born in Mexico - some with proper credentials, others without documentation and with dozens of false IDs.

Young men and women from Mexico now take on tasks that whites, Asians, African-Americans and second-generation Mexican-Americans apparently will not. This fact is denied repeatedly by almost all native-born Americans, who believe - even if they do not say so - that aliens are taking our good jobs. But rarely are unemployed whites, Asians, blacks, or second- or third-generation Mexican-Americans ever referred by the welfare department to pick in our nectarine orchard. Once a confused carload of poor whites showed up to pick grapes and left after a brief rendezvous with heat and dirt - baffled that anyone would be crazy enough to do such work. The last time I worked with white farm laborers -  other than my brothers - in the vineyards was in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and they all had names like Delmas, Otis, Rhoda,