Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (12 page)

• A young alien ran a red light, hit my truck and attempted to flee before I called the police on my cell phone. He had no identification, registration or insurance, and was clearly intoxicated.

• Not long after this I was in a bank where I watched an older gentleman sign his name with an "X." As I waited, three customers directly ahead of me argued with the teller over bounced checks, missed car
payments
 
and
insufficient funds - two in Spanish, one in an Indian dialect that not even a Hispanic employee could quite decipher. Forty minutes later I went home without reaching the teller. No economist calculates the billions that are lost in time and efficiency in
California
daily when thousands of aliens must have translators and be instructed in the basics that millions of Californians take for granted. Instead, we all obliviously go about our business and hope the old system can transform a Native American from central Mexico into a suburbanite - without impinging on his indigenous culture and heritage, of course.

• A visit to the Department of Motor Vehicles is an hour-long disaster. English seems not to be spoken on either side of me; the line does not move; and the customers cannot understand the myriad forms to be filled out for their trailers, vans and cars.

• My daughter's car was hit in an intersection by a young Mexican who ran a stoplight, propelling her vehicle into a neighboring yard. The Mexican-American policeman took no report, issued no citation and let the driver off - after getting her phone number.

• In a car parked deep in our orchard, a man of about forty was slapping and cursing a younger woman. Was he armed? Was she in danger? I approached the car, asked him not to hit the woman and then to leave. He did - as both cursed me on the way out, the victim far more than her abuser.

Such are the whirling images that now surround someone living in
California
, at the epicenter of illegal immigration. The other day I went up to my office at
California
State
University
, then to the library, and at last to the department office. It was late summer and the campus was largely deserted after summer school had ended - except for hundreds of young grade-schoolers, the vast majority of them Mexican and Mexican-American. Race seems the unspoken prerequisite for participation. There are literally dozens of programs for such underprivileged, geared for kids from kindergarten through high school, all well-intended and inspirational: classes and workshops in self-esteem, remedial English, Chicano pride, vocational training, SAT preparation, Mexican history,
Mexican
grievances. Lunch, tutors, teachers, the use of computers and classrooms are provided free of charge. The message that I glean from the literature describing their efforts is one involving the primacy of self-esteem, a certain obligation on the part of others to accommodate Chicanos, the need for racial solidarity, and a vague notion that the spoils of
California
, for a variety of sinister reasons, are not being divided fairly.

My classics students, with a good knowledge of two or three languages, European history and Western literature, and with impeccable English, often find tutorial and guidance work in these programs, which all seem to have titles that include buzz words like "Help," "Pride" or "Diversity." The irony, of course, is that our assimilated Mexican classics majors make both perfect tutors and imperfect role models for these state-mandated programs. Their commitment to education has given them the skills to impress these young kids and their teachers - and the confidence not to need any of the very counseling, tutoring and self-esteem that they provide to others. In fact, our own students' worry is how to duck the separate (or, in the euphemism of our administrators, "auxiliary") Hispanic graduation ceremony in spring. When they have received fellowships for graduate study, for some reason, ethnic counselors and professors whom they scarcely know turn up to prompt them to attend their self-segregated rites to give proof of Chicano success and pride - as if the Greek, Latin, French and German they have mastered could for a single day be the approved curriculum of the Chicano-Latino studies faculty. Recently one of our Mexican-American Latin and Greek students, who entered
California
illegally wrapped in a blanket, was accepted with full support to the Ph.D. program in European history at Princeton, with additional funding from the Mellon Foundation and a promised slot at
Cambridge
University
in England for a year. Suddenly he was claimed by all the professors whose efforts at "instilling pride," rather than teaching the hard subjects, were antithetical to the very education and discipline that won him such attention. Professors and activists harp on the notion of blanket racism in admissions, but all of our talented Hispanic students accept that they are being given opportunities and advantages unknown to middle- and lower-class whites - deference in fact traditionally reserved for the legacy-holders among the white Eastern elite.

Whatever we are doing wrong in our
California
schools, it is not, as popular myth suggests, a result of doing nothing. If anything, the problem is one of frenzied activity - almost always of the wrong kind. Our bankrupt state at great cost, in loco parentis, has taken up the task of turning thousands of children of illegal aliens and resident immigrants into familiar mall kids with Valley-girl accents, cell phones and Old Navy T-shirts, who rightly should not have to cut grass and pick grapes like their grandparents and parents. They are given every sort of counseling, pep talk, grievance boilerplate - everything but a real education that might allow them to compete with native Californians. How strange that we give minority children billions of dollars in extra aid and education that brings them almost no real scholarly preparation, but a lot of resentment among those taxpayers who subsidize it.

I have reached the point where I now believe that the military would do a better job than we in the university do with young people of all backgrounds. I note that Mexican-American - and all other - students who enter our classes after four years of military service are far better educated and disciplined than their peers of similar age. They are reluctant to waste a penny of their hard-earned education benefits, which is not true of others who have grants lavished on them because of their ethnic heritage and the modesty of their parents' income. Many good-thinking liberals worry about the exorbitant $400 billion that will soon be allotted for defense expenditures; but they fail to investigate how much of such funds are spent on salaries and training - manpower rather than just hardware. In contrast, few are concerned how much capital is provided to our universities, both by state and federal agencies, that not merely fails to ensure real education or even reasonable graduation rates, but in fact may do far more harm than good by creating a sense of victimhood and a reliance on government largess.

Not far away from my farm, in the Central Valley town of Parher, there are entire tracts of three-bedroom, two-bath houses available with federal assistance to recent immigrants. A new health center is blocks away. None of this subsidy was provided by local municipal funds. Indeed, the city government - plagued by constant corruption, recall elections and tribalism - is little more than a ward of the federal government. (Policing was for years taken over by the county.) The town is 99 percent Mexican or Mexican-American, often broke, and dependent upon state and federal money for almost all of its services. And yet it has nice streets, homes, clinics and schools.

So America really is endeavoring to level the playing field in one era, rather than in the traditional three generations of past immigrant experience, as it feverishly tries to meet ever-rising expectations. Nineteenth-century Italian families may have taken sixty or more years to achieve economic equity with WASPs, but America has now unleashed its creativity and enormous powers of production to attempt to reduce that race for absolute parity to a decade or two. Anything less, we are told, and our society is failing, racist or pathological.

African-Americans, of course, resent the Mexican immigrants' development of such a sense of entitlement, and make a good case that the wages of their own youths' entry-level jobs are permanently depressed because of cheap alien labor. They also feel that the increasing desirability of bilingual skills for mid-level state government employment is simply another roadblock for their own advancement. Asians are bewildered by our state's labyrinth of contradictory laws and subsidies. The older Asian generation scoffs at the need for any special state aid when one can open a donut shop, stereo store, auto shop or accounting firm - even as their highly educated and often professionally employed children vaguely sense that a system of racial spoils, in fact, might prove advantageous to themselves.

The new ethnic argument for massive government help to the less fortunate is perhaps most troubling to aging white Californians of Oklahoma extraction, the millions who drove into the state from the dire poverty of the Dust Bowl and got very little in housing, aid or education from the state or federal government. Those who work in the race industry allege that the relative success of these onetime Okies after a half-century comes exclusively from "being white." But I am not so sure. Most farmers resented their presence, especially their bothersome accents, culture and religion. I think the Okies' achievement in assimilation grew not out of our hospitality, but out of our brutality, which altered them and forced them to be more like Californians. In any case, now in their old age, they are mystified by a world in which only Spanish is spoken and government entities require no proof of citizenship. The Dust Bowl migration to
California
is strangely almost never recalled in any discussion of Mexican aliens. Yet the culture of
Oklahoma
in the 1930s and 1940s was as antithetical to
California
as are Mexico's present customs. The arrivals then were, if anything, hungrier than today's migrants, and their own efforts at assimilation as checkered, as blocked by prejudice, cultural pride and nihilistic opposition. Today, Dust Bowl
Oklahoma
is a distant memory. Scarcely any Californian under thirty knows or cares whether his grandparents were kissing cousins of Steinbeck's Joads. I know my three children do not; my wife's mild efforts to evoke in them a smidgeon of pride in the Oklahoman heritage they got from her
has
been a total failure. But then it has been a halfhearted effort all along, since she was a product of an educational system that taught all of us to shed the past, to forget rather than nurse our wounds, and to embrace the future.

FOUR

The Old Simplicity That Worked

THE NEW MYTHOLOGY of La Raza taught in our colleges and universities goes something like this:
California
was and is an utterly racist state. Its myriad of laws and protocols stymied Mexican aspirations for a century and a half until the rise in the 1970s of militant interest groups - MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztldn), MAPA (Mexican-American Political Association), the United Farm Workers and La Raza studies departments everywhere. They alone finally, and only through protest, agitation and occasional violence, have just started to change the complexion of California by insisting on more balanced and sensitive educational programs, coupled with a vast safety net of state assistance and federal affirmative action preferences to redress past injustices. All this was in rightful recompense for the theft of
California
from Mexico. Under this regime - intellectual and literal - today's massive illegal immigration is seen as just deserts in returning the American Southwest to its proper cultural foundations.

What has been the result of la causal Has the lot of Hispanics - gauged by graduation rates from high school, percentages with college degrees, per capita crime statistics vis-a-vis whites and Asians - improved through these efforts to renew ethnic pride and force society to recognize past Chicano icons from Joaquin Murrieta to Caesar Chavez?

Unfortunately, nearly the opposite is true, Three decades after the rise of the new militancy and separatism, along with unchecked immigration, Hispanics have the highest dropout rates from high school and the lowest percentages of bachelor's degrees of any ethnic group in the state. For all the good intentions, outreach programs, city-sponsored Cinco de Mayos, Caesar Chavez state holidays and eponymous boulevards and billions of dollars in entitlements, the government - alas! -
apparently
does not have the power to create instantaneous parity by fiat. Indeed, in our collective efforts to be angelic we can sometimes be devilish by establishing the principle that the state is responsible for an individual's success or failure.

The key achievement of all these militant groups was the promulgation of a partial truth, which by its very incompleteness became part of today's Big Lie. Racism, discrimination, labor exploitation - these and more, of course,
have
been the burdens of the Mexican-American experience. They are also universal pathologies, and quite predictable given the peculiar relationship between a vast democratic and capitalist American nation and an autocratic, economically backward Mexico. But instead of being pondered in that light, these shortcomings are defined as uniquely the sins of white Americans.

The result of the whitewashed new history is that Aztec cannibalism and human sacrifice (especially at the dedication of the great pyramid of Huitzilopochtli in 1487) on a scale approaching the daily murder rate at Auschwitz are seldom discussed as a part of the Mexican past. While Cortes is loudly condemned, we do not hear that the Tlaxcaltecs and other tribes considered the Europeans saviors rather than enslavers. Terrorist organizations of the late nineteenth century like the Gorras Blancas and the Mano Negra are romanticized. The everyday killer Joaquin Murrieta becomes a modern-day Robin Hood who acted on behalf of his people. Endemic and historic Mexican discrimination - either on the basis of skin color (zambos or negras) or class (surrumatos) - is passed over. We are not often told of the racist, anti-Semitic and essentially fascist Smarquismo movement of the early twentieth century, which favored both Prussian militarism and later German Nazism and claimed half a million supporters in Mexico and thousands north of the border. Reies Lopez Tijerina has made a comeback, a popular folk icon in my college days, with his silly lawsuits about reclaiming "Chicano land" from present-day New Mexicans, including efforts to annex the
Kit
Carson
National Forest
to help create a vast racial state of "Aztlan." Yet rarely do the commentators who have resurrected Tijerina for their pantheon of brown heroes point out that his broadsides were racist to the core and laced with anti-Semitism. Few today discuss how the UFW failed because of its corruption and misappropriation of workers' funds - and its often bizarre antics such as forcing employees to undergo Synanon-inspired coercive training.