Mexifornia
Victor Davis Hanson
Copyright © 2003 by Victor Davis Hanson
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FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hanson, Victor Davis.
Mexifornia : a state of becoming / Victor Davis Hanson.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 1-893554-73-2
I. Hanson, Victor Davis. 2. Mexican Americans - California - Social conditions. 3. Mexican Americans - Government policy - California. 4. Immigrants - Government policy - California. 5. Popular culture - California. 6. California - Emigration and immigration. 7. Mexico - Emigration and immigration. 8. California - Ethnic relations. 9. California - Social conditions. 10. Selma (Calif.) - Biography. I. Title.
F870.M5 H37 2003 305.868720794 - dc2I 2003049003 10 987 6 54321
For my Classics students at CaliforniaStateUniversity, Fresno, 1984-2003
Contents
Preface ix
Introduction I
I: What Is So Different about Mexican Immigration? 19
2: The Universe of the Illegal Alien 35
3: The Mind of the Host 60
4: The Old Simplicity That Worked 75
5: The New Gods That Failed 103
6: The Remedy of Popular Culture? 126
Epilogue: Forks in the Road 142
Preface
I MET SANTIAGO LARA over twenty years ago. On a late March morning in 1982 he pulled into the orchard, jumped out of a broken-down station wagon filled with seven kids, caught me on the tractor and asked whether he could thin some plums until he found a new job. I had no idea who he was or where he came from. He looked exhausted - red-eyed, unshaven, in dirty clothes. I gave him what work I had, a temporary job for two days. Two decades later I still see him occasionally, and he still doesn't look good. Now over sixty, with white rather than raven-black hair, he continues as an occasional farm laborer and walks permanently stooped. He neither speaks a word of English nor has a single child who graduated from high school, although he has many children and grandchildren, some on various forms of disability, welfare and unemployment, others successful and gainfully employed, and a few who have been jailed.
When he left Mexico years ago his government wanted citizens like Santiago gone lest he agitate over his poverty or the bleak future looming for his children. In turn, he and millions like him were welcomed by Americans who wanted such immigrants to work cheaply for them. Liberals and ethnic activists wanted Santiago too, either as a future "progressive" voter or as another statistic in their loyal ranks of needy constituents. The rest of us didn't
much care whether he came or stayed - as long as the economy remained strong and he avoided welfare and ensured that his kids graduated from high school. In fact Santiago, though he worked very hard, did neither.
Santiago Lara professes that he will die in Mexico, but there is something about the United States - or at least the mostly Mexican United States in which he lives - that makes even a visit home across the border almost unnecessary. We Americans, for our part, are unsure whether we want more, fewer, or no such Santiagos inside our borders, because we are confused over exactly what we are becoming. People from the rest of the country look at the eerie, fascinating thing that California is becoming, and they wonder about their own destiny.
I once thought Santiago and his children were going to become like us, but now I am not so sure. Instead, I think our state is becoming more like the Laras - or at least like something in between. In my small hometown of Selma in the middle of California's Central Valley, more people now speak Santiago's language than my own. The city's schools are more segregated than when I attended them forty years ago and their scholastic achievement is far lower. There are now more overt signs of material wealth among Selmans - new cars, cell phones, CD players, VCRs, color televisions - but also much more anger that "aliens," even if their fortunes have greatly improved in the United States, remain still poorer than the native-born. At the corner store there are more signs in Spanish than in English. And the government-subsidized apartment building two miles away is full of small children, baby carriages and young pregnant women - all evidence that someone at least still thinks big families are good in a world where many childless natives deem them bad.
So are we now a Mexifornia, Calexico, Aztlan, El Norte, Alta California, or just plain California with new faces and the same old customs? Many of us think about this in the abstract. Charles Truxillo, a Chicano studies professor at the University of New Mexico, for example, promises that some day we will all be part of a new sovereign Hispanic nation called "Republica del Norte" encompassing the entire Southwest. "An inevitability," Truxillo calls it, and it will obtain its sovereignty, he warns, "by any means necessary" as "our birthright."
What is the nature of California, traditionally the early warning sign to the rest of the nation, and what will be its eventual state of being? After September II, 2001, the question of secure borders and a unified citizenry no longer stands afar in the future or remains a parlor game of academics and intellectuals, but is a matter of everyone's concern right now, both in and out of California. In a nation beset with new enemies who wish to destroy us, do we have common values and ideas that unite more than divide us? If our fundamentalist adversaries see us Americans of all colors, ethnicities and religions, without exception, as infidels
