So there has indeed been complicity on the part of Mexico in the great migration north. And there has been a shameful and unforgivable absence of honesty on the part of our own political and academic establishment in legitimizing Mexico's venality. The Mexican government looks on the exportation of its poorest Indians as an economic issue: remittances from illegal aliens reach the billions of dollars and so prop up the Mexican government and help feed the starving who otherwise would look in vain to a nonexistent safety net at home.
There is also an element of racism involved - one oddly ignored in the race-charged debates in contemporary America. For the most part it is not light-skinned Mexicans of Spanish heritage who are coming to the United States, but rather the poorest and brownest, largely Indian - and this apparently suits an elite in Mexico City that does not wish to explain why the whiter people of Mexico are better off than those who are browner. Indeed, if one were studiously to watch any of the Spanish-language television stations - whether owned and operated by Mexican nationals or by Mexican-Americans - one would surmise that surely the Ku Klux Klan had a hand in the programming. Most are either white or coated with white pancake makeup; nearly every prominent woman is a dyed blonde; every privileged host and hostess is about as Anglo-looking as can be. Yet all the characters who are subservient - taxi drivers, maids, gardeners, "the help" - resemble the hundreds of thousands of darker-skinned people who risk their lives to enter the United States illegally.
I have met wealthy elites, academics and journalists from Mexico City who privately laugh that they are exporting their Indians and Mestizos, their unwanted, into the United States. Their smile disappears when I reply that we instead figure what they suppose to be riffraff are the real cream of Mexican society: frontiersmen and women whose endurance and courage are good prerequisites for Americanization, and who in fact are superior people to those who oppress them at home. So while the powers in Mexico City regard departure as good politics - a valve of sorts that releases dangerous pressures rather than allow explosions of the type that occurred in the country's earlier checkered history - in an odd way the joke ultimately is on them. Within twenty years the poor, brown Indian alien could enjoy a material existence in America superior to that of the upper-class white Mexican in Mexico City.
Bill Reverse Chauvinism
There are also other themes that explain the Mexican government's peculiar rationale for sending millions of its own citizens out of the country. Surely an element of pique is involved. Mexico, whose vast natural resources of fertile land, oil and minerals have not resulted in the bounty of a similarly endowed California, realizes that it is not its land or people, but its culture that holds the country back. Out of envy or spite, there are many in Mexico who experience schadenfreude at the problems that arise when the continent's poorest and mostly illiterate head north to perplex the richest and most sophisticated. If America once invaded Mexico and hurt its pride, Mexico has now invaded America - but with millions rather than thousands, and as an occupying force that plans to stay. Anytime great wealth is juxtaposed to abject failure - the former Berlin, Hong Kong and communist China, the Koreas, Israel and the West Bank, southern Europe and northern Africa are good examples - sparks can fly. And Mexico is Catholic, America mostly Protestant or secular. The former believes fate is set at birth, the latter that man earns his condition mostly here on earth. All this and more contributes to making Mexico a special case. But there is a final consideration on America's part that has also made Mexico singular.
In the last twenty years we have seen a disingenuous new motto, "the borders crossed us, not we the borders," proclaimed by Mexicans both in California and in Mexico - or as Professor Truxillo of the University of New Mexico put it, "Southwest Chicanos and Norteno Mexicanos are becoming one people again." Note the key word again, and his care to say "Southwest Chicanos" rather than "Southwest Americans."
But we should remember that as recently as 1970 there were only 800,000 Mexican citizen immigrants in the United States. Remember that when the United States stole California there were fewer than 10,000 Mexicans living in a vast uninhabited area, one that itself had been stolen from Spam, which in turn had stolen it from the Indians. And recall that the parents or grandparents of 95 percent of California's current adult Mexicans were born in Mexico. The murky idea behind "the borders crossed us" is that the vast American Southwest was once part of a
