In the pursuit of fashionable partial truths, the Truth was lost. Yes, most immigrants to the United States, not just Mexicans, were discriminated against. European Jews, the Irish, African slaves, the Japanese all had equal or worse horror stories. Millions of Mexicans, nevertheless, at great risk came to America rather than stay in Mexico because, like these other groups, they wanted a better life, and knew that millions of others under similar duress had achieved it. Because they slice history and culture so crookedly and because they are unable to deal with complex issues, poorly educated and politically biased intellectuals have tangled the entire Mexican immigrant community in a paradox: if America were so discriminatory and racist, and Mexico for its part such a wonderful society, why would any Mexican in this day of easy information flow ever come north to such a certified hell-hole?
Does anyone doubt that a resident alien from Mexico in her first year of college, should she enroll in Latin, classical studies and European history courses, might gain more knowledge of Americas heritage and learn the basics of grammar and syntax in ways impossible in "Chicano Body, Culture, and Power"? Or better yet, would not a classics major of Mexican heritage gain more self-esteem through real achievement and mastery of literature than by picking up clichés and slogans from the 1960s recycled in today's "postcolonial" history classes?
If "white" California is to be blamed for anything, it is for creating fiefdoms for hundreds of professors in the race business to fabricate classes and methods of instruction that impart almost none of the useful cultural information desperately needed by an alien seeking to prosper in America. If there is truly a lingering racism in California, then one need go no further than the state universities, where so much money and power has been handed over to an elite class of racialists who in return have created a curriculum designed to guarantee failure for the children of migrants. The victim in all this really is the Chicano student - but the oppressor is his cynical university advocate, who uses him to advance an agenda that ensures only a comfortable academic existence, not a greater likelihood of completing college. So far, not one study has shown how a La Raza studies department has affected the tragedy that between 30 and 40 percent of all Hispanics won't graduate from high school. But the one thing that young Mexican-Americans, so woefully denied access to knowledge about much else, do learn is the nomenclature of the race industry and how to classify and reclassify themselves according to the label of the day: Hispanic, Latino, Chicano/Chicana, Mexicano, Mexican, Mexican-American, Mestizo, Latin American, Nuevomexicano, Californio, Tejano, and on and on.
Names change, programs come and go, but what stays constant is the same dismal graduation rates and thus the same overrepresentation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in our jails, prisons and welfare programs. I have a fantasy that somewhere in some secretive laboratory in Montana a white supremacist and a crackpot racist got together, brewed the germs of our present school curriculum, concocted the virus of the La Raza separatist and racist mythology, and then released these pathogens by night in aerosol form to be inhaled by unsuspecting Californians, who then proceeded unknowingly to destroy the aspirations of millions of desperately poor aliens.
Acting under the psychosis caused by such intellectual germ warfare, we institutionalized an easy bilingual education rather than implemented an intensive program of English instruction for immigrants. In the current atmosphere of relativism, who is to say, after all, that any nation needs a common language? Or that speaking grammatically and writing clearly, in English or even in Spanish, constitute education - especially when this age-old education comes at the expense of an indigenous language and culture, and thus purportedly threatens the self-esteem of a future doctor or lawyer of color?
The fervent advocacy of bilingual education on the part of Latino elites has been a baffling development. Determined that the burgeoning population of young Mexican-Americans will not go the way of other minority groups and eventually lose both their native language and their ethnic identity, they press ever forward with an agenda that deprives these immigrants of the fluency and expertise in English that the past assimilationist and immersionist models insisted upon. After thirty years of such agitation, and with ample proof that California's recent ending of most bilingualism in its schools has raised Latino test scores, it is now legitimate to question the very motives of some in the La Raza movement: do they wish the best for the children of aliens who are poor, or continued spoils for themselves who are affluent?
Again, we butt up against a tragic paradox: the young Chicano who visits the emergency room does not want to be treated by a doctor who cannot read and understand the rather complex directions on a vial of lifesaving antibiotic that are likely to be printed only in English. He hopes that his surgeon also understands English perfectly and grasps intricate printed warnings about the fatal interactions between various medicines. He expects - no, demands - that his Hispanic nurse be able to communicate effortlessly with the supervising physician in English as she measures out potentially deadly antitoxins. Even a Chicano-Latino professor, should he need kidney surgery, would probably confess that he hopes his urologist was an undergraduate biology or history major rather than the possessor of a Chicano studies degree.
Instead of offering immigrants the chance to strive for commonly recognized excellence, we tell them that the cultures they came from are all inherently equal - almost so as to deny the very reasons why these aliens arrived here in the first place. This message is cynical at its core, for we know that some other cultures and nations have been
