Is America, as our medieval foes assert, a single culture? Or are we, as many of our sophisticated, homegrown social critics allege, many cultures of many races? If snipers, suicide bombers and poisoners wish to kill indiscriminately black, brown, yellow and white Americans because they are alike, why do many professors, journalists and politicians claim that we are, and should be, different and separate? And in a world of sectarian killing - in Bosnia, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, India - is it wisdom or folly to emphasize our differences over our similarities, to champion separatism as preferable to assimilation, and toy with the principle that the law matters only according to the ephemeral circumstances and particular interests involved?
Our immigration dilemma is a simple but apparently unsolvable calculus: Americans want the work they won't do to be done cheaply by foreigners who, they wrongly assume, will inevitably transform themselves into Americans. In turn, the downtrodden Mexicans who come here and their elite advocates in America romanticize Mexico, a nation that brought them the misery they fled, while too often deprecating the place that alone gave them sanctuary. Everyone sees this - at least in the abstract - and can probably agree on the appropriate remedy: far less illegal immigration and a more measured policy of legal immigration, along with a stronger mandate for assimilation. But caught in a paralysis of timidity and dishonesty, we still cannot enact the necessary plans for a workable solution. To do so, after all, entails confronting a truth that is painful and might displease thousands who have grown comfortable with the present chaos. Who wants to be called an isolationist or a nativist by the corporate Right, and a racist or a bigot by the multicultural Left?
Mexifornia is about the nature of a new California and what it means for America - a reflection upon the strange society that is emerging as the result of a demographic and cultural revolution like no other in our times. Although I quote statistics gleaned from the U.S. Census and scholarly books on Mexican immigration into the United States, this is not an academic study with the usual extensive documentation. I write instead of what I have seen and heard living half a century in California's Central Valley, at the epicenter of the upheaval. Most of the children I went to school with were Mexicans or Mexican-Americans. Many of them remain my close friends today - inasmuch as I live on the same small farm south of Fresno where I grew up, 130 years after my great-great-grandmother built our present home. Those who speak of an explosion of illegal immigration into California usually cite the counties of Fresno, Kings and Tulare surrounding me and the nearby towns of Selma, Dinuba, Sanger, Parlier, Orange Cove, Cutler and Reedley as examples of California's radically changing demography and its attendant social and economic challenges.
For those of you who live outside of California, far away from Mexico, and sigh that the problem is ours, not yours: be careful. California has always been an idea, not merely a place. Our climate, social volatility and an absence of anything farther west always put us on the cutting edge. After all, we gave America Hollywood and with it the tabloid popular culture that rules our contemporary worldview. The modern protest movement began in Berkeley. Gay rights called San Francisco home. Theme parks were born in southern California. Bikinis, bare navels, the dyed-blond look - they all showed up here first.
Wherever you live, if you want your dirty work done cheaply by someone else, you will welcome illegal aliens, as we did. And if you become puzzled later over how to deal with the consequent problems of assimilation, you will also look to California and follow what we have done, slowly walking the path that leads to Mexisota, Utexico, Mexizona or even Mexichusetts - a place that is not quite Mexico and not quite America either.
Many see a poetic justice in all this, a nemesis at work that clears the ledger of past transgressions. That at least is the attitude of many Hispanic activists. I have read dozens of their Chicano memoirs and scholarly studies that offer a vast compendium of racism and white prejudice. I offer the following recollection not to deny that such pathologies existed and were hurtful, but to suggest that the story was, and is, far more complex and not nearly so one-sided as they think. For every two ethnic slurs, there was an instance of enlightened kindness; for every bigoted teacher, there was someone who went out of her way to help illegal aliens; for every purportedly grasping corporate mogul, there were small farmers of Japanese, Armenian or western European background who worked alongside their laborers. And as someone who for the first six grades of school found himself part of a very tiny minority of rural whites at predominantly Mexican-American Jefferson and Eric White Schools on the west side of Selma, California, I remember ethnic tensions as being typically spawned by weak people of all backgrounds, rather than a comfortably familiar melodrama of predictable racial heroes and villains.
The people who jumped me as an eight-year-old from the blind side were often Mexican. Those who threatened to knife me at fourteen for no reason other than because I was white were Mexican. And the three youths who tried to break into my home and assault my family when I was forty were all Mexicans. But then so were all the friends who helped me fight back in grade school; who have lived on our farm for forty years; and who as sheriffs and police come out to protect us today when there are problems.
I have been upset that drivers who have ruined my vineyard were illegal aliens with false identification. But then I also suspect that the immigration certificates of those who have harvested our grapes at
