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

"Swedish-American" when I do not speak Swedish, do not live among Swedish immigrants, and know nothing of life in Sweden. The only reason for me to identify myself in that way would be to invest in some sort of movement or ideology that brought real attention to or preferences for Swedish-Americans.

The third op-ed, at the bottom of the page, was by George Will on the future political makeup of the U.S. Senate.

And all that was what passed for a day's headlines and commentary for the hundreds of thousands of readers in the central San JoaquinValley. The tragedy here lay not merely in the marked imbalance of the Fresno Bee's efforts to reach new readers, but in its condescending approach to Americans of Mexican descent. The assumption was that they would naturally rather read about the daily hometown shootouts, the pride of hyphenated IDs or even ants in Tijuana than about whether their own country was going to war.

If we were ultimately to trace the DNA of such stories in the popular media or explain the obsession with race and separatism, we must look to the avalanche of books from Latino studies departments across the United States. As a single but representative example, take the recent anthology entitled Latinos: Remaking America (California, 2002), edited by M. Suarez-Orozco and M. Paez, a professor and a researcher at Harvard, and subsidized by the DavidRockefellerCenter for Latin American Studies. The two scholars collect twenty-one essays whose general theme seems to be that racism, the brutalities of American capitalism, right-wing reaction and general neglect by white people have all conspired to hold Latinos back in America. Forget for the moment the irony of such attacks on the system being published through icons of American capitalism like David Rockefeller, the endowment of Harvard University, and the state-subsidized University of California Press; instead, examine the lengths to which the book's authors go to explain away any positive developments on the immigration front.

The first essay sees intermarriage in a bad light. ("But investing that sort of Utopian power in the genetic mixing of our era only serves to heighten a new form of racial essentialism and once again to frame the process of overcoming racial hierarchy as a fundamentally biological one.") A book devoted to race is now worried that "mixing" (the phrase itself has echoes of "mongrelization") might make race irrelevant and dilute racial power along with bloodlines.

Another essay in the book struggles with the fact that Cubans were given over $1 billion in the decade between 1965 and 1976 by the federal government to aid in refugee resettlement, and that the recipients were mostly whiter, wealthier and more conservative Latinos. Confronted with these bothersome facts demonstrating American generosity, communist persecution, and dramatic success in the United States, the author hopes that refugees from Central and South America who are poor and dark-skinned will dilute this Cuban strength, prevent more embarrassing scenes like the Elian Gonzales demonstration, and end the "hegemony" of Miami's' Cuban elite and their "fixation" on Castro.

The next essay criticizes rude "Anglo teachers who reprimanded Mexican students for speaking Spanish," along with the cruelty of free markets ("rapid industrialization and capitalist development"), as being instrumental in creating barrio gangs. Somehow it is capitalism that, after luring the oppressed across the border, keeps them perennially poor - a thesis that does not explain why it is that while Cubans of their own volition seek Florida, North Koreans go south and Mexicans trek north, the opposite is never the case.

Most of the book's twenty-one essays - which I can imagine being required reading for the future reporters of the Fresno Bee and other papers - struggle with the dilemma of proving racial prejudice when interracial marriage is at an all-time high. They posit blanket discrimination against Latinos, when Cubans are excelling in all areas of American society. They argue that a recent rise in test scores following the demise of bilingual education means nothing if it jeopardizes the power of the mother tongue, and insist that affirmative action must remain based on race rather than poverty despite an emergent Hispanic middle class. After being exposed to such professors, their programs and their books, an innocent would have to assume that the progress of Hispanics in America is a dispiriting failure. Someone not so innocent would understand that the chief fears of such intellectuals are no longer racial prejudice, but rather the end of the primacy of race, and the dissolution of minority blocs in voting, residence and mindset.

The new race industry is not restricted to Ph.D.s in the universities. On the local level, hundreds of teachers, government bureaucrats and union officials are committed to the same agenda of separatism and racial spoils. And given the sheer numbers of new immigrants, the undeniable past history of racism in California, the trendy guilt of the California suburbanite, and the failure of all too many Mexican immigrants to find economic success commensurate with that enjoyed by Koreans, Punjabis and other new arrivals, we do live in a time of an unusual opportunity for the demagogue and provocateur. Let me be clear on this: the race-hustler is not at one with the millions of successful third- and fourth-generation Hispanics in California who pretty much go to work and tune him out, and whose own race is rather low on their list of pressing issues, far behind the next raise, the struggle against backyard rye grass, and the choice between an all-terrain Jeep or a minivan. It is also true that the type of the brawling race provocateur is as old as America itself. In some sense, he is related to the Irish ward boss, the Polish precinct worker and the Italian borough master of former times. A century out of date, he shares a nineteenth-century vision of enormous ethnic blocks, entirely unassimilated, with tough burly capos like himself riding to prominence at their head. He imagines himself as bursting into locked rooms, bowling over the timid man at the podium,