Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (16 page)

Still, in the public schools we got a vague message that this hated Caesar Chavez was "standing up for his people." What that precisely meant, we were never told other than that it was a very American thing to "stand up for your people." I distinctly remember putting a "Huelga" and a "Boycott Grapes" sticker on the bumper of my cattleman great-uncle's car, which he unknowingly drove around with for two days, to the perplexed looks of his reactionary friends. But the fact was that the handful of us Anglo kids who lived on small farms with our grandparents, parents and cousins usually
were
not that much better off than the Mexican families who had migrated from farm work to business, the post office or the schools. I remember that when my friend Armando Aguallo visited our tiny one-bedroom farmhouse in 1962, he gasped, "We have a nicer home than you and we're Mexican!" And so he did, given my father's failures as a cotton farmer before going to town for work. In any case, we had no vested interest in defending corporate agribusiness and more or less hoped the "big guys" would be unionized and leave the rest of us alone to work beside people we grew up with.

Could it be that two of the greatest villains in the destruction of the old assimilationist model that integrated my boyhood Mexican friends into an American outlook and expectation have been big government and big corporations, both entities that have no interest in local institutions? The former finds power in mindless consensus, the latter in money, and both look askance at anything that poses an obstacle.

Only later, in high school, did I slowly learn why Caesar Chavez himself vastly preferred dealing with agribusiness corporations rather than small farmers - with giant, wealthy entities, not sticky little enclaves of cranky and always broke Japanese, Armenians, Swedes, Mexicans and Punjabis who lived next to and not much differently from their workers. Indeed, if he was ever to realize his ambitions of becoming the Mexican George Meaney in charge of a vast empire of stoop laborers, then Chavez needed the opposition of an easily caricatured rapacious, racist, wealthy, white enemy. He wanted
a countryside
not full of small family farmers, but of a few big agribusmessmen. The agribusiness corporation was an easy foil, which under an avalanche of liberal commentary, boycotts and high-profile visits to Fresno and Delano by the Kennedys and other celebrities could capitulate on television with a wave of the pen, sending his own union millions of dollars in paycheck deductions that, of course, would be looted, lost or mishandled by an extended clique of his family and cronies.
And so precisely all that came to pass for poor Caesar Chavez in the 1970s.

Meanwhile, our schools quietly pressed on in presenting their version of American history, including the saga of the struggle for workers' rights.
World War II?
We all reviewed the "Four Freedoms" to stress how we had no other choice but to destroy the Nazis and Japanese militarists before we could remake their countries on principles similar to our own - which, being far more humane, would ensure that they did not revert to Auschwitz and the Rape of Nanking. In the early 1960s we knew intimately the story of Hiroshima and the Japanese internment; yet we learned that such tragedies were not the sole themes of World War II, but part of a saga that included the sacrifices at Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Okinawa - names mostly unknown to present-day schoolchildren.

Immigrants shared in these discussions. Almost every Mexican kid had a father, uncle or cousin who had fought on the frontlines of World War II or Korea. Our teachers were often veterans and appreciated the opportunity to tell war stories. One student's father volunteered to come into class and show us the manual of arms with an old unloaded carbine. Arthur Luna brought in his dad's medal during war show-and-tell. Mrs. Burton - I remember it as if it were yesterday - announced to us all, "Remember, all you
children, that
your parents from Mexico fought for this country so that you could have what they did not."

Again, lofty and simplistic?
Perhaps.
But valuable for eight-year-olds of all races to hear?
Entirely.

Even on occasions in the higher grades when the majority of my class found adolescent affinity with past victims of American intolerance, most still believed that they were beneficiaries of a system that could and would evolve and thus always offer them more advantages than any alternative. A sense of humility and balance achieved through comparison with contemporary societies elsewhere, and confidence in our values, measured against
a recognition
of innate human weakness, framed all such debates about the American experience.

We once discussed a recent episode of the television show Maverick about an Indian woman named "Sue" (code name for Sioux) who, disguised as a white woman, as I remember it, had murdered a card shark for his boast of murdering Indians. The show's hero, Bart Maverick - remember this was in 1962 or 1963 - lectured the congregation of miners contemplating her punishment that she should go free and that they all were improperly on Indian land and were more likely than she the real thieves and murderers. Our Mrs. Goddard, who led the classroom discussion, seemed especially pleased that we should know of the sins of miners and settlers against Indians, without suggesting that these sins exemplified the entire American experience. We forget that several of the classic Westerns of that age - Katy Jurado complaining of prejudice in High Noon, the beleaguered Mexican villagers of The Magnificent Seven, the sympathetic homesteaders of Shane, or the odious and racist cattle baron in The Professionals - portrayed Mexicans, blacks and the poor as noble souls or as victims of unjust white racism.

Given the current pessimism and national obsession with racism, sexism and oppression, it is easy now to ridicule as naive the former trust in American institutions and to suggest that such recollections as those above are simply the biased nostalgia of someone from the "dominant" culture. Yet the positive impact upon immigrants of the traditional education that sought to make one from many was indisputable. Almost all of those from my second-grade class are today teachers, principals, business men and women, and government employees. If the purpose of such an education system as the one that formed us was to turn out true Americans of every hue, and to instill in them a love of their country and a sense of personal possibility, then the evidence forty years later would say that it was an unquestionable success.

In the tiny town of Selma, where we lived in the late 1950s and early 1960s, at the cutting edge of what would become a tidal wave of Mexican immigration, we not only knew that our country was different from others, but also understood why and how it was clearly superior. And the confidence that sprang from such knowledge, tested by criticism and supported with facts, gave us the ability to counter the cheap anti-Americanism abroad, and here at home to create a real sense of national harmony. Like most other Americans we saw the McCarthy era, Jim Crow and the sexual chauvinism that affected the country in the early 1960s as symptoms of the imperfection of the human condition, but curable with work and patience. We were not tempted to believe that there were better answers in other systems elsewhere. None looked to Cuba for tolerance of dissent, to China for racial equity, or to the Third World generally for gender parity.

The only thing that made us Americans any different from other people, we were taught, was our singular Constitution and democratic creed, which provided a framework for moral evolution. The promulgation of such a pragmatic ideology relieved us from the ethical posturing that would overtake the campuses, or any bloody effort to ram equality and fraternity down the throats of our countrymen with the barrel of a gun. So we looked back at the bad moments in American history for signs of amelioration, not for evidence that we must become revolutionaries. And we did not inflate our own moral pretensions by deprecating our ancestors on the frontier who lacked our material bounty and technological safety net, but often possessed physical courage and strength that we did not.

I know from my children that today's students see a different picture. They focus on dismal failure in the American experience where we once saw progress. We appreciated the slow struggle of politics and culture to trump universal human pathology. Now they are taught that bourgeois liberalism creates a particular American malevolence not found in other cultures and nations.

The victories of World War II, the reconstruction of Europe, the containment of homicidal communism, and the painful effort to ensure racial and sexual equality of opportunity here at home would have been impossible without an America sure of what it was and aware of what it had to do. Yet the self-confidence that taught values to the immigrant has nearly vanished from our schools. The results in the decline of civic education are unmistakable. It is not just that millions of Americans do not understand fully the mechanics of their own government or the seminal events of their history - 57 percent of American high-school students, we were recently told, are now deemed "not proficient" in basic history - but that they also have little idea of what it is to be an American. Ask a high-school student to define an "American" and you will be met either by silence or by annoying catchphrases such as "diverse" or "multicultural," if not hollow references to being "nonjudgmental" and allowing others to "do their own thing." How can a society that is increasingly ignorant of its own past offer instruction to immigrants about the nature of the culture they must embrace?

It cannot. Consequently, we are left with one of the last great absurdities among the bankrupt ideologies and worldviews of the twentieth century: the present-day efforts of well-heeled elites and comfortable middle-class white teachers and bureaucrats to provide to immigrants desperate to become part of the United States every reason why they should hold themselves separate and not commit themselves to the new world they have discovered. It will be left to cultural historians in saner times to ascertain whether this self-loathing deprecation so endemic in the West today was the product of guilt over material abundance or of a genuine desire to reshape American society radically and by undemocratic means. In either case, the results of such bottled piety upon the immigrant have been disastrous.

FIVE

The New Gods That Failed

WHAT ACCOUNTS FOR THE erosion of the civic education so necessary to sustain a unified nation that has no common race or religion? The first reason for a rejection of assimilation in our schools was ideological. We have not yet experienced all the consequences of the big bang of multiculturalism, authoritarian utopianism and cultural relativism - the isms that tell young people that facts, dates, people and hard data are either irrelevant or biased, or simply not facts at all, and that to question such a dogma could be "racist." I have had too many young students who mouthed clichés like, "We don't need to study the West," but when asked what "the West" was, were speechless and could not provide even a wrong answer. We have experienced enough of the assorted isms to know that all such ideology is antithetical to the notion of civic education, which historically has been national, realistic and in some way tragic rather than therapeutic. The old idea was that we were humans, not gods, and so we did not regard history as an exercise in deconstructing the past by retroactively apportioning blame and praise according to present standards of morality.

In the fourth grade we were asked to memorize the names of all the
California
missions. Protestant and Catholic alike learned that Father Serra was a civilizing, if flawed figure who tried to introduce agriculture, transportation and some refinement to a barren
California
landscape. In contrast, later generations have been told that the friar was a martinet who whipped Indians and forced them to convert to Catholicism. Surely the truth lies somewhere between the romanticism of my own education and the cynicism of the current indoctrination. But what is missing in the new dispensation is any sense that the world in which we now live - the cosmos of universities, the rule of law, antibiotics, surgery and eyeglasses - for good or ill evolved from the world of Father Serra, not from the indigenous peoples of California whom he may or may not have oppressed.

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.