In some sense, I know Mexican-Americans perhaps better than I do so-called whites. I confess - not out of any racialist feeling, but simply because of habit and custom - that I feel more comfortable with the people I grew up with, a population of mostly Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and whites who were raised with nonwhites. I have Mexican-American nephews, nieces, sisters-in-law and prospective sons-in-law as well as neighbors. My older brother married a Mexican-American; my twin brother married a high school friend who was divorced from a Mexican illegal alien. I married someone from SelmaHigh School whose family had left Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl depression. The neighboring farmhouse to the west is home to resident Mexicans; so is the one immediately to the east. My two daughters are going steady with Mexican-Americans who grew up nearby in Selma; and the people I eat lunch with, talk with and work with are all either Mexican or Mexican-American. And so I have come to the point where the question of race per se has become as superficial and unimportant in my personal life as it has become fractious and acrimonious on the community, state and national levels. Some of the paradoxes, hypocrisies and hilarities that characterize California as a result of changing attitudes and more immigrants are subjects of this book. Two themes dominate most of what has been written about Mexicans in California, and I have tried to avoid both. On the one extreme, we hear scary statistics that "prove" California will become part of Mexico by the sheer fact of immigration. On the other, we are told that either nothing much is changing, or that what alterations are occurring in the fabric of our social life are all positive. The truth, as always, is in between: California is passing through tumultuous times, but there is no reason to anticipate that it must become a de facto colony of Mexico. More importantly, I do not believe all that much in historical determinism - the idea that broad social, cultural and economic factors make the future course of events inevitable and render what individuals do in the here and now more or less irrelevant.
My main argument instead is that the future of the state - and the nation too, as regards the matter of immigration - is entirely in the hands of its current residents. California will become exactly what its people in the present generation choose to make it. So it is high time for honest discussion, without fear of recrimination and intimidation. How else are we ever going to sort out the various choices that will decide our collective fate - especially at a perilous time when we find ourselves at war with those who kill us as Americans regardless of accent, skin color or origin? That many in the business community will consider what follows naive or dub me a protectionist/isolationist worries me as little as the critical voices I am sure to hear from an academic elite whose capital remains largely separatist identities and self-interest. Both parties, after all, did their part to get us into this predicament and have so far escaped accountability for the harm they have done.
I have changed the names of my teachers and associates in my hometown out of concern for their privacy, and because we live and work together. In three cases, to protect the identity of close friends I have made slight changes in the description of where they live and work. I thank my wife, Cara, and my colleague in classics at CaliforniaStateUniversity, Fresno, Professor Bruce S. Thornton, another rural San JoaquinValley native, for reading the manuscript and offering criticism and help. Peter Collier first suggested that I write the present book - an expanded version of an essay that appeared in City Journal. I thank him and also Myron Magnet, editor of City Journal, for help in editing both the present book and the original article. My literary agents, Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu, as always, have proven valuable representatives and friends.
Introduction
I WRITE HERE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE of a farmer whose social world has changed so radically, so quickly that it no longer exists. Three decades ago my hometown of Selma was still a sleepy little town in central California, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, between the coast and the high Sierra. It was a close-knit community of seven thousand or so mostly hardscrabble agrarians whose parents or grandparents had once immigrated from Denmark, Sweden, Armenia, Japan, India, Mexico and almost every other country in the world, to farm some of the richest soil in the world. Selma's economy used to be sustained by agriculture - in the glory years before the advent of low prices caused by globalization, vertically integrated corporations and highly productive high-tech agribusiness - and supplemented by commuters who worked in nearby Fresno. The air was clear enough that you could see the lower Sierra Nevada, forty miles away, about half the year on average, not a mere four or five days following a big storm, as is now the case.
Sociologists call a small, cohesive town like the old Selma a "face-to-face community." As a small boy I used to dread being stopped and greeted by ten or so nosy Selmans every time I entered town. Now I wish I actually knew someone among the many I see.
The offspring of Selma's immigrant farmers learned English, they intermarried, and within a generation they knew nothing of the old country and little of the old language. Now Selma is an edge city on the freeway of somewhere near twenty thousand anonymous souls, and is expanding
