Race - could it be any other way in contemporary America? - is often cited as the most critical issue blocking the aspirations of Hispanics. The standard doctrine, promulgated by university ethnic studies departments, is well known: Mexicans were never able to morph as easily into "whites" as did the discriminated-against Jews or Irish simply because, like African-Americans, they were a people of a darker color and thus, throughout the long brutal history of the Southwest, were deemed inferior by the racist white majority. Indeed, who can deny the sometimes shameful exploits of the Texas Rangers or the visceral contempt that the great southwestern cattle barons had for the Mexican menial laborer whom he treated little better than his cows?
The problem with the accepted dogma is not that it is entirely false - thousands of racist writings and years of official biased protocol can indeed be used to substantiate such a view - but that it is only a partial explanation for Mexican disappointments, and in any case it belongs largely to the past. If only skin color can ensure entree into American society, how have Arabs, Koreans, Armenians and Japanese found parity with, and in many cases economic superiority over, the traditional white majority? Jet-black Punjabis, for example, are prominent in the professions of central California - medicine, law, agribusiness and academia - oblivious to the fact that their hue is often darker than that of African-Americans. Asians have a higher per capita income than California whites.
Thus the challenge is not to identify racism, but to assess the degree to which it or its legacy can affect a people today. Punjabis historically have not always been treated nicely in America, but they come from thousands of miles across a wide ocean with identifiable skills, close family networks, some English proficiency, a willingness to learn more, and a tradition of entrepreneurship, all of which seem to make race irrelevant. In fact, their ebony children who attend elite universities are not eligible for affirmative action. If anything, the University of California subtly and off the record looks askance at their overrepresentation - and this is an institution that already has been publicly rebuked for using de facto quotas in turning away qualified Asians from its Berkeley campus.
Californians are increasingly cynical and sense that affirmative action and special preferences are based neither on skin color nor on patterns of past discrimination, but simply are tied clumsily to a particular minority's failure to match the perceived economic performance of whites.
Koreans, likewise, are as "unwhite" as Mexicans; yet their culture puts a premium on business, education and family, not government largess. Like the Punjabi immigrants of today, and like the Japanese, Chinese and Armenian immigrants of the past, they have shrugged off the worst sorts of racial prejudices. So far, Mexican-American citizens have not been interned; nor have they been blown to bits while building railroads; nor have they suffered a holocaust by an invading Islamic power - disasters that did not stop the Japanese, Chinese and Armenians from reaching per capita economic parity with the majority in California. These other immigrants were at the end of their migrant odysseys and more likely to ponder the present and the future than to live in the past. I suppose "Don't get mad, get even" was thematic among these other victims of American racism and oppression. In my hometown of Selma, Armenians were zoned out of particular neighborhoods in the 1920s and were refused entry to the municipal swimming pool. Yet in two generations their capital and influence ensured that their homes and their private pools were the town's largest and most envied.
No Armenian today, despite skin color with a higher melanin content than that of the average white, claims to be "a person of color." Most Japanese do not either. "A person of color" does not necessarily mean that someone is, in fact, "colored" in any real sense; the term is largely absent among communities of dark Punjabis, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians and a host of brown and olive peoples. Instead, the nomenclature advertises that the self-described minority has deliberately defined himself in opposition to whatever "white" culture is - either out of real pride, justified anger, petty hurt, racial hatred or simple crass opportunism. And in a state rapidly growing more multiracial, we will soon need racial rubrics like those of the old Confederacy, backed by new-age genetic tracking, to figure out who exactly is "a person of color" - one-third, one-half or one-sixteenth nonwhite blood?
In any case, money has always eventually trumped race in America. The truism that race matters above all is forgotten when people of color earn more or become better educated than white people, but it returns with a vengeance when they remain isolated, poor and dependent. For all our boutique hatred of the moneyed classes, we accept that American plutocracy is a far more fluid system of opportunity than entrenched European or Asian hierarchies of class, color, ancestry and education. In sum, that racism has been a factor in the Mexican experience is indisputable; that in the present world of integration, intermarriage and government subsidy it still largely explains the disappointment and failure of millions of aliens is false.
Few observers of the immigration fiasco wish to talk honestly about the complex nature of Mexican society and the interplay there between race and poverty. Forget that the country is as poor as India and as chaotic as Zimbabwe, and far closer to us than either. There is something about the Mexican government that lies at the heart of the immigration mess - especially its passive-aggressive attitude toward the United States and its intellectually dishonest approach to the immigration problem.
Overlook for a moment that Mexico has never had any real history of sustained legitimate government, and only recently has taken the first steps in creating a multiparty system with free elections, an independent
