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

since 1982, only 20 percent had become citizens by 1997. Some local schools, like my former elementary campus two miles from our farm, are 95 percent first-generation Mexican immigrants. How many are U.S. citizens is either not known or not publicly disclosed.

At the gas station a mile away from our farm, I rarely hear English spoken. Almost every car of immigrants that pulls in displays a Mexican flag decal somewhere. In our local cemetery I try to put flowers on the graves of our dead, even as I tiptoe around pinwheels, streamers, tiny wooden crosses and the litter left from eating and drinking. The graveyard where everyone from my great-great-grandmother to my parents and sister and fifteen other kin are buried is no longer a staid and sometimes grim European-inspired field of memory, but a more raucous picnic ground to commemorate the days of the dead with talking and snacks. Yet as I pass families laughing and chatting, sitting on blankets around the headstones, they hassle me as little as I them. I think that we both silently pray that their children will prove as industrious as they have been. Periodic visits to the final resting place remind me that we are all united in California, at least in that we generally will not get out of here alive.

What are we to make of it all - illegal aliens' baffling failures and clear successes, immigration's explicit costs and implicit benefits? I think it best to imagine present-day California as a wild frontier, every bit as exciting, dangerous and feral as the Mother Lode gold towns circa 1849. Then prospectors also came for the promise of El Dorado - and likewise in numbers beyond the powers of the law and government to absorb. Just as it was not clear then whether early California would sink into chaos or emerge energized by its hardworking new arrivals, so too our own future is again in doubt.

California, after all, best summarizes the entire paradox of illegal immigration into the United States. It is the most liberal and affluent area of the Southwest, as well as America's largest and most forward-looking state. Our upscale lifestyle is famous for being easy, laid-back and nonjudgmental. In contrast, our newcomers are not the elite or even the middle class from a poorer country, but the most uneducated and destitute of the entire North American subcontinent - usually not those of Spanish heritage, but Indians fleeing discrimination and hatred.

What a potentially explosive mix this experiment has become, not only mingling races, cultures and classes, but also testing very concretely California's often abstract commitment to progressive ideas. Standing athwart Californians' path to their envisioned Utopia of pristine redwoods, dot.coms and air-conditioned malls are millions of the world's poorest. And the state simply cannot quite figure out whether it has become a promised land based on cheap immigrant labor or a looming nightmare of unassimilated Third-Worldism.

ONE

What Is So Different about Mexican Immigration?

Despite its Statue of Liberty, recitations of Emma Lazarus's poetry, and melting-pot imagery, America has always struggled with issues of immigration - mostly when it was a matter of the poor, dispossessed non-Anglos or non-Protestants coming in by the millions. Boatloads of refugees were denied entrance to the United States during the Holocaust. Starving Irish were compared to lower primates and denied employment; Italians were demeaned as little more than criminals; Poles were dismissed as stupid menials fit only for unskilled labor. As for "Oriental" immigration, there is no need to talk of it, since whole university departments now exist to explore the racism of the "Yellow Peril."

North America was originally settled largely by northern Europeans - English, Germans, Scandinavians, French and Dutch - who came as farmers and settlers in the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries and set the cultural protocols, so in effect they enjoyed a head start in adaptation, which later arrivals have not had. But even then, there was prejudice from an entrenched Anglo-Saxon elite; my grandfather's Swedish family came en masse to California to help found the town of Kingsburg (near Selma), the idea being that only within a colony of similar "stupid square-heads" could Swedes be left alone to prosper.

The second wave of immigrants - southern Europeans, Asians, Irish and Latinos - encountered an entrenched dominant culture of mostly Anglo- and northern-European Protestants, and suffered accordingly. Entire libraries document the plight of these aggrieved arrivals and their strange century-long metamorphosis from the despised "other" into the accepted majority of "whites" - as their growing incomes slowly washed away their racial and religious differences.

In a narrow sense, the mass arrival of millions of poor Mexicans is not all that different from the great influx of other groups who were poor and not northern European. We see now some of the same evolutionary signs that appeared in the nineteenth century: one to two generations of poverty and frequent degradation, followed by a generation of middle-class Mexican-Americans intermarrying with other groups and moving into traditional suburbs. Between 1995 and 2000, Hispanic income on average grew 27 percent - a rate of growth faster than that of any other minority group - as a virtually new class of assimilated and affluent Mexican-Americans arose. Their culture was now indistinguishable from the majority culture, and thus their ethnicity was quickly redefined as more or less "white," as had happened to Greeks, Italians, Armenians and Punjabis before them.

Yet the old assimilationist model - still secretly admired, but publicly ridiculed - is working efficiently for only a minority of new immigrants, given their enormous numbers and the peculiar circumstances of immigration from Mexico in the last half-century. So what accounts for the stubborn resistance to assimilation, besides the increased numbers and our own lack of confidence in the melting pot? What makes Mexican immigrants so different even from the recently arrived Armenians, Chinese, Russians or Laotians?

Why, for example, do my second-generation Asian students often speak little Lao or Korean, date non-Asians, become hyper-American in their tastes and prejudices, and worry