Could it be that two of the greatest villains in the destruction of the old assimilationist model that integrated my boyhood Mexican friends into an American outlook and expectation have been big government and big corporations, both entities that have no interest in local institutions? The former finds power in mindless consensus, the latter in money, and both look askance at anything that poses an obstacle.
Only later, in high school, did I slowly learn why Caesar Chavez himself vastly preferred dealing with agribusiness corporations rather than small farmers - with giant, wealthy entities, not sticky little enclaves of cranky and always broke Japanese, Armenians, Swedes, Mexicans and Punjabis who lived next to and not much differently from their workers. Indeed, if he was ever to realize his ambitions of becoming the Mexican George Meaney in charge of a vast empire of stoop laborers, then Chavez needed the opposition of an easily caricatured rapacious, racist, wealthy, white enemy. He wanted a countryside not full of small family farmers, but of a few big agribusmessmen. The agribusiness corporation was an easy foil, which under an avalanche of liberal commentary, boycotts and high-profile visits to Fresno and Delano by the Kennedys and other celebrities could capitulate on television with a wave of the pen, sending his own union millions of dollars in paycheck deductions that, of course, would be looted, lost or mishandled by an extended clique of his family and cronies. And so precisely all that came to pass for poor Caesar Chavez in the 1970s.
Meanwhile, our schools quietly pressed on in presenting their version of American history, including the saga of the struggle for workers' rights. World War II? We all reviewed the "Four Freedoms" to stress how we had no other choice but to destroy the Nazis and Japanese militarists before we could remake their countries on principles similar to our own - which, being far more humane, would ensure that they did not revert to Auschwitz and the Rape of Nanking. In the early 1960s we knew intimately the story of Hiroshima and the Japanese internment; yet we learned that such tragedies were not the sole themes of World War II, but part of a saga that included the sacrifices at Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Okinawa - names mostly unknown to present-day schoolchildren.
Immigrants shared in these discussions. Almost every Mexican kid had a father, uncle or cousin who had fought on the frontlines of World War II or Korea. Our teachers were often veterans and appreciated the opportunity to tell war stories. One student's father volunteered to come into class and show us the manual of arms with an old unloaded carbine. Arthur Luna brought in his dad's medal during war show-and-tell. Mrs. Burton - I remember it as if it were yesterday - announced to us all, "Remember, all you children, that your parents from Mexico fought for this country so that you could have what they did not."
Again, lofty and simplistic? Perhaps. But valuable for eight-year-olds of all races to hear? Entirely.
Even on occasions in the higher grades when the majority of my class found adolescent affinity with past victims of American intolerance, most still believed that they were beneficiaries of a system that could and would evolve and thus always offer them more advantages than any alternative. A sense of humility and balance achieved through comparison with contemporary societies elsewhere, and confidence in our values, measured against a recognition of innate human weakness, framed all such debates about the American experience.
We once discussed a recent episode of the television show Maverick about an Indian woman named "Sue" (code name for Sioux) who, disguised as a white woman, as I remember it, had murdered a card shark for his boast of murdering Indians. The show's hero, Bart Maverick - remember this was in 1962 or 1963 - lectured the congregation of miners contemplating her punishment that she should go free and that they all were improperly on Indian land and were more likely than she the real thieves and murderers. Our Mrs. Goddard, who led the classroom discussion, seemed especially pleased that we should know of the sins of miners and settlers against Indians, without suggesting that these sins exemplified the entire American experience. We forget that several of the classic Westerns of that age - Katy Jurado complaining of prejudice in High Noon, the beleaguered Mexican villagers of The Magnificent Seven, the sympathetic homesteaders of Shane, or the odious and racist cattle baron in The Professionals - portrayed Mexicans, blacks and the poor as noble souls or as victims of unjust white racism.
Given the current pessimism and national obsession with racism, sexism and oppression, it is easy now to ridicule as naive the former trust in American institutions and to suggest that such recollections as those above are simply the biased nostalgia of someone from the "dominant" culture. Yet the positive impact upon immigrants of the traditional education that sought to make one from many was indisputable. Almost all of those from my second-grade class are today teachers, principals, business men and women, and government employees. If the purpose of such an education system as the one that formed us was to turn out true Americans of every hue, and to
