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

four families sent their only sons to World War II, in which all saw combat and not all survived - a desperate effort on the part of ten-year-olds to establish their patriotic flies. The onus was on us to prove our American credentials, and we found little empathy by claiming to be Swedes and absolutely no guilt to be tapped among our teachers for their being somewhat less ambiguously American.

All of us, but the vast Mexican majority in particular, rolled our eyes and were nauseated when Margaret Olsen went on and on about Denmark, claiming that Copenhagen was cleaner than Los Angeles and that Danes were the worlds finest craftsmen. We put up with her silly handmade Danish dress, but deeply resented the idea that anything important in Denmark could be better than anything unimportant here. Why else, we wondered, would her parents have come here in the first place - and as late as 1940, no less? But of course, almost every other class presentation was Mexican-inspired - piñatas, lore about Pancho Villa, the glories of the Mexican saints - and thus just as brutally reinterpreted by our teachers as interesting artifacts of a foreign culture, but hardly the building blocks of a truly lawful and humane society such as our own.

Again, the paradoxical mentality of the immigrant was not politely ignored and certainly not assuaged, as it would be today, but rather directly assaulted. The unvoiced assumption - a formulation of classic know-nothingism - resonated with us: If it is really so good over there, why don't you go back? Was this an exercise in American exceptionalism? Absolutely. Did our teachers lay the foundations for later chauvinism that might manifest itself collectively in what is now derided as American "unilateralism" on the world stage? Perhaps. But did the relegation of cultural diversity to the realm of the private and familial rather than the public and official encourage divisiveness and tension? Hardly at all.

The goal of assimilation that was once the standard, if unspoken orthodoxy in our schools and government is now ridiculed as racist and untrue. The result is that the very idea of both Mexico and America is changing, as is the experience of the immigrant. Instead of growing more distant, a romanticized Mexico is kept closer to the heart of the new arrival - thus erecting a roadblock on his journey to becoming an American. Those who die as Mexicans in California have sought neither to become citizens of the United States nor to return to Mexico. As a local columnist for our paper recently described their nether world: Pens-aban que se iban a ir patras ("They thought they would go back to their home"). Apparently he was sad that those who fled Mexico always nostalgically promised to go back, yet eventually died in the United States.

Sociologists, the media and university activists now envision balkanized enclaves in America, assuring us that retaining the umbilical cord of Mexican culture is not injurious. Instead, we are for the first time creating a unique culture that is neither Mexican nor American, but something amorphous and fluid - the dividend of the multicultural investment. Whether you break the law to reach California or immigrate legally, it makes little difference in determining how well you drive, whether you send your kids to college, or whether you draw on the public services of the state. The bien pensant punditry - which lives exclusively north of the border, most often in white suburbs that are not integrated - will rush to add that southern California and northern Mexico will soon create their own regional civilization, perhaps even their own language and culture. An offspring not wholly of either parent will arise, and this Califexico, Mexifornia or Republica del Norte is not a "bad" thing at all, but something which, if not exactly advantageous, at least is inevitable.

After all, these pundits note, two thousand maquiladoras -  American corporations with Mexican workers - are expanding along the border, creating the veneer of American popular culture over the miasma of a Third World infrastructure. They do not dare say publicly, but they hope privately that this new hybrid civilization - at least its water, sewage, streets, police force, hotels, universities, cars and banks - will resemble San Diego more than Tijuana.

A former Mexican resident of Mendota - now a nearly all-Mexican community on the west side of California's Central Valley - remarked to me recently that he finally left his town "when the last white people left." His unspoken, apparently racist, message was echoed by a resident of Parlier, another nearby town that has also become essentially all Mexican. The latter boasted to me that he transferred all his children to nearby Kingsburg schools where "there are lots of white people." It would be easy to dismiss such crudity as the false consciousness of a victim of ingrained racism, or to suggest that such thinking is confined to a small minority of self-hating Mexicans. (Or perhaps the more sophisticated might attribute these startling confessions to affluence and white racism that created better material conditions in Kingsburg and ensured worse schools and social services in Parlier.)

Maybe, maybe not. As I see it, what both of these very bright, proud, capable men instead meant was that there were simply too many unassimilated Mexicans in Mendota and Parlier to ensure an American future for their children, a critical mass that had made both towns more resemble those left behind in Mexico than those in the United States, and therefore less safe, secure and desirable places to live. The Mendota resident amplified just that feeling by explaining to me that he liked living in a community with educated doctors, teachers, small business, and English as the standard language - because "things work better that way." Or as my friend from Parlier put it: "If I wanted to live in Mexico, I don't need to live in Parlier."

The immigration problem is much more than just a result of our demand and