How then did we get to this present dilemma in California? How did we arrive at a world where thousands of citizens have lounged, embittered, on the dole while harvests go unpicked? How did we ignore thousands here, but demand that thousands more come illegally from across the border? How did we manufacture provocateurs at the university who burn the flag of the land they so desperately want to inhabit, while they proudly wave the flag of the country they so demonstrably prefer to abandon? How did we craft a society where the juvenile chooses the barbarism of the predatory jungle, but when injured or maimed he emerges from the wild to demand as his inalienable right the expensive succor of a compassionate and ordered culture he professes to despise? How did we create an intelligentsia that offers as models the despot Montezuma and the outlaw Pancho Villa, instead of Socrates and Lincoln?
If Mexico had not been contiguous to the United States, if migrants had only come in the thousands, not millions, if self-proclaimed advocates on campus and in the media had been honest and responsible folk, and if this had remained an America of the melting pot rather than the separatist culture of the 1980s and 1990s, then, I think, we would have fewer problems with race, culture and immigration.
But that is a lot of ifs.
SIX
A Remedy in Popular Culture?
WE MUST KEEP SOME PERSPECTIVE. Even if only six out of ten California residents of Mexican heritage are really graduating from high school, that figure still implies that every year, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are entering the work force in occupations other than menial labor and slowly finding their way into the mainstream, to join earlier immigrants in the American middle and upper classes.
It is not uncommon in my hometown to be stopped by a Mexican-American policeman, to talk about one's kids with a Mexican-American school principal, and to remonstrate with a Mexican-American city council member - many of them identifiable as being of Mexican heritage only by surname, never by accent, manner or appearance. Small business men and women - restaurant owners, brake shop owners, labor contractors and truck fleet owners - are increasingly Mexican-Americans.
What this progress proves is that millions of Mexican aliens and their offspring grew up in California at a time when high standards and civic education were still embedded within the public schools and when assimilation, not separatism or multiculturalism, was the model of success. In contrast, the legions of more recently arrived Mexicans and the youth who grew up in the very different environment of the 1980s and 1990s have not had these benefits, and are now stranded in a destructive in-betweenness, often the pawns of those who play the parlor game of identity politics.
Yet for all the harm done to Mexican immigrants by both the naive and the opportunistic, there is nevertheless another, countervailing engine of change at work in America. It is the more nebulous and wholly amoral power of a new popular and global culture, whose intrinsic character is to unite us all in shared appetites for material things that dissolve the old prejudices of race, class, language and culture. In I960 a Mexican immigrant student was taught the positives of the United States in his classes and told to emulate his peers through rapid acceptance of American culture - even as he found his Anglo girlfriend's parents wary, the new music and customs foreign, personal discrimination undeniable, and formalities at work and play constant reminders of his otherness. Now the opposite is true: the schools and government seek to accentuate his differences - even as he wades knee-deep into a world that doesn't much care whom he dates, and where he feels at home with the prevailing, and already familiar, tastes in music, clothes and television.
Is globalization like the dark, godless power of Tolkien's ring - or is it the calmer, more uniform and postheroic world after the destruction of that ring, where uniqueness and difference vanish without the need of elemental struggles along age-old divides of culture and politics? I resent the cultural obliteration caused by global uniformity - which is wiping out our small farm along with the community of which I was a part - but I am not so naive as to deny that ultimately, and perhaps by accident, its results are radically homogenizing, leveling, and so in a weird sense democratic at the most basic, popular level. I may find the new Selma crass and boring, and may prefer the old - but I accept that most would not agree and would rightfully claim that life at the material level is far easier today and far more informal.
The new residents of Selma would find my old nostalgic world of small-town America - farmers exchanging pleasantries in little shops and family businesses - static, hierarchical, exclusionary and far more repressive, impoverished and boring than the wide-open society of our new malls. That Selma as I once knew it is dead; yet its obituary for most Mexican-Americans comes as good news, not bad, for its successor edge city on the freeway offers opportunity and comfort undreamed of a half-century ago. Before, when we purchased a car, we went to see Ed Butler and his single salesman over at the Ford agency, listened to an hour-long talk about raisin prices and Sun-Maid inefficiency, perused his glossy "catalog" to inquire about ordering extras like seat belts and radios, and handed him a check for a down payment on delivery in six weeks (or, as in the case of my nineteenth-century grandfather, paid cash carefully withdrawn from a savings account). Now we all go
