After the end of institutionalized discrimination in the last half of the twentieth century, our schools also wrongly took on the remaining - and doomed - task of replacing a level playing field of opportunity with an absolute equality of results. In a drive for near-instantaneous and perfect egalitarianism, there was a multifront effort to legislate and profess equality rather than simply provide the environment that would facilitate its emergence. How impatient we have become in our quest for Utopia! Because of the rapid improvement in our material lives through technological advances, the fiction developed that the nature of man could be similarly improved at the same dizzying pace. It is as if emphasizing the grandeur of Aztec culture might make the shock of an Indian's arrival in the United States from Mexico less traumatic - even though all the protocols of the American public schools, from secularism and free speech to tolerance and rationalism, had no pedigree in Tenochtitlan!
The snippets of Old Country history fed to the immigrant like exotic hors d'oeuvres in his new world as a way of making him feel proud of his past must always be very selective, because the truth is often simply not palatable. Romanticizing the Aztecs, who were not averse to ripping out the hearts of virgins and children, and who were loathed by all the surrounding peoples they enslaved, is merely the most hair-raising example. Few Californians today realize that Native Americans were treated as badly by the Mexican government as by the gringos, or usually far worse. The Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora both offered government bounties for the scalps of Apache men, women and children. The Chinese, who usually came to Mexico only as a means of circumventing American immigration restrictions - hardly as oppressive as Mexican statutes - routinely experienced theft, rape and murder at the hand of Mexicans, all of which went unnoticed or were abetted by the government. (Even now, illegal aliens from Guatemala and elsewhere in Central America find the conduct of Mexican border guards far more brutal than anything experienced by Mexicans coming into America.) No California students today are taught that the Pershing expedition of 1916 against Pancho Villa - the purported locus classicus of Yankee imperialism - actually brought back some Chinese refugees and other exploited people whom American soldiers had saved from certain extermination in Mexico.
The catalogue of courses from any California university reveals the intellectual world that immigrants and their children can be press-ganged into. There are dozens of classes on Chicano pride, but scarcely any on the seminal events of American history. Recently I was looking at the list of classes from the University of California at Santa Barbara for the academic year 2001-2002. Sixty-two different courses were listed under "Chicano Studies," among them Introduction to Chicano Spanish; Methodology of the Oppressed; Barrio Popular Culture; Body, Culture, and Power; Chicana Feminism; History of the Chicano; History of the Chicano Movement; History of Chicano and Chicana Workers; Racism in American History; Chicano Political Organizing; Chicana Writers; De-colonizing Cyber-Cinema; Dance of the Chicanos; and dozens more. The history department offerings included thirteen similar courses on Latino and Chicano issues, in addition to more generic classes on race and oppression. But the entire catalogue had only one class on the Civil War per se, "Civil War and Reconstruction." There were no real courses dedicated to either the Revolutionary War or World War II.
What is truly fascinating about the ethnic pride courses is that there has been no evolution in the subject matter over the three decades that such courses have been taught - even though there is now a growing third generation of one-quarter, one-half and full Hispanics who speak no Spanish and have never been to Mexico. Racism and oppression were de rigueur in the early 1970s, when racial studies departments and professorships were forced upon timid administrators. But why should racism and oppression remain as unchanged themes thirty years later, when Mexicans are no longer a minority of less than a million, but the largest ethnic group in the state of California and the largest minority in the nation? Could we not go down from sixty-two courses to perhaps ten? Aging La Raza professors, who drive their SUVs in from the suburbs and send their kids to UCLA and Berkeley, continue in some time warp to denigrate a system that has given them and their families so much.
The theory behind such a curriculum, of course, is that someone without competitive educational skills in English, the sciences and history might come to UC Santa Barbara or UC Davis and there regain a lost sense of self-esteem through "Methodology of the Oppressed." Or that armed with theoretical grievances, this student might be able to spot how the University of California - a metaphor for the wider world - in some ways sought to disenfranchise or otherwise exploit the Chicano student. Meanwhile, "white" students can also take such courses as a form of masochism to discover why they must become religiously devoted to bilingual education and affirmative action, and must make various sorts of reparation for past inequities - their contribution toward legitimizing the very race industry that offers such therapeutic courses in the first place.
Such institutionalized therapy is the sad legacy of the Movimiento - the great upheaval of the 1960s in which Mexican-American intellectual elites sought redress of past racism and stereotyping by the mandate of a pure racial identity and grand talk of ethnic separatism. The wages of this original sin are with us still - the idea that so-called Chicanos can find parity with whites only through government coercion, income redistribution and racial chauvinism, rather than by the very hard work of traditional education that once ensured
