reverse.
Time passes; things must change. And so I accept transformations that are inevitable: a price-cutting Wal-Mart would drive out our third-generation Japanese-owned nursery, and multinational agribusiness would overwhelm the once prosperous Sikh family farm down the road. While I saw all this happening as if by time lapse, I hoped that the new Selma would at least retain the language, customs, laws and multiracial but unicultural flavor of the old. But it has not.
I look at these things, however, also as a classics professor at the local CaliforniaStateUniversity campus twenty-five miles away. As a historian I accept in the abstract that culture is unstable and always evolves - often radically. The Greek polis became the Hellenistic municipality; the Italian republic turned into the polyglot Roman Empire; Hebrew Palestine became in turns Persian, Greek, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, English and Israeli. By training, we in the academy are detached observers who try to inculcate a sense of distance and objectivity, an acceptance of the fact that history is restless and culture mutable. There are age-old processes far larger than ourselves, which predate us and will go on long after we are dead. So I mostly watch Selma and listen, trying to forget about my own past and present, and attempt to chronicle dispassionately what is going on around me - especially the strange paradox of immigrants streaming toward Western countries even as many are angry at themselves for doing so. I still try to drive out the echoes of my grandfather's subjective folk wisdom and my long-dead aunt's exhaustive Selma genealogies (e.g., "The youngest Josephson girl married Aram Eknonian's older brother who lived on Tucker Street") to replace it with the cold logic of Thucydides, who knew so well the nature of man and the predictable mess he creates (e.g., "an exact knowledge of the past [is] an aid to the understanding of the future which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it").
But immigration concerns me in yet another way: not just as a native or as a historian, but also as a teacher whose students increasingly come mostly from Mexico. For two decades I have driven up daily to the college campus at Fresno to teach persons, not "peoples," and so have seen that assimilation is still possible during the current immigration onslaught - if we forget group causes and the rhetoric of the multicultural industry, and simply concentrate on providing interested students with opportunities that match their often ignored aptitudes.
Mentors tend to claim primacy for their own disciplines - physicists swear that science will alone save us; educationists know that the nature of man is subject to improvement given the right pedagogical method; classicists insist that knowledge of philology, history and literature produces a singularly educated citizen. As one who teaches Latin and Greek to classes including many immigrants from Mexico, I have observed remarkable transformations in these immigrants that were as wonderful to me as they may have been problematic to many of my more "progressive" colleagues in the social sciences. Illegal aliens and Mexican residents who learned Latin, who came to speak perfect English, who were intimate with Roman consuls and the tragedy of Antigone tended to become proud American-Mexicans rather than unsure and troubled Mexicans, finding self-esteem in accomplishment rather than in therapeutic rhetoric. (I'm sure that the same is true for those who mastered quantum mechanics and any of the other solid disciplines.) Arturo, Gil, Jorge, Frank, Hortensia and dozens of others - the more they read Cicero and explored the beauty and paradoxes of Western civilization, the more they became prized and recruited candidates for graduate school, federal employment and corporate jobs - and the more often they told me about how their self-appointed ethnic caretakers in the university became disturbed at their evolution into something quite beyond the need for paternalistic counsel.
Arturo crossed the border illegally and after four years of college he reads Greek, Latin, French and German. Gil now runs a Latin class at the local junior high school. Jorge, who in Latin composition classes used to correct my own lectures on tenses of the subjunctive in subordinate clauses, is better educated than many of his professors at Cal State Fresno. Frank, a scholar of the early Church, left our MA program in ancient history to become a computer programmer. Hortensia wasn't sure exactly how four years of Greek and Latin could support her, but is now an exceptional primary school teacher. As far as I can tell years after their graduation, these young men and women left the university to take up productive professional lives while defining themselves as individuals and as Americans, rather than as part of a collective and dependent Mexican underclass.
Because of the disparate angles of my perception, this book is part melancholy remembrance of a world gone by, part detached analysis by a historian who knows well the treacherous sirens of romance and nostalgia, and part advocacy by a teacher who always wanted his students to be second to no one.
Thousands arrive illegally from Mexico into California each year. Indeed, our state is now home to 40 percent of America's immigrants. Such immigration from the south is hardly a new development along the porous 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico. For over a hundred years, Mexicans have easily fled into California and the wider
