Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Hanson (books for 7th graders txt) 📗

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 KitCarsonNational 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.

Mexican pathology is ignored in a monolithic caricature of the often heartbreaking history of the border, and so too are the early American efforts at redressing racism: the California Mexican Fact-Finding Committee, the state high court's reversal of the Sleepy Lagoon murder case, and the efforts of Anglos like Carey McWilliams and Alice Greenfield to champion Mexican causes. We know that easy therapy rather than complex tragedy brings dividends under the present system of racial antagonism in our universities, but does it bring college graduation rates above 7 or 8 percent as well? The terrible suspicion remains that by not emphasizing and