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

promoting traditional education to young Latinos - broad classes in history, logic, philosophy, Western civilization, literature and classics - Chicano leaders ensure a constituency that simply does not possess the learning to question the one-dimensional history and cardboard-cutout heroes and villains that these leaders force-feed them.

Most past segregation was cultural rather than racial, and thus rarely absolute, since anyone who somehow got education, money and a nice house was accepted as mainstream. But even forty years ago there was certainly not much institutionalized racism left. My father's closest friend on the local junior college faculty, Ray Velasco, was a well-respected physics teacher in 1962. Even a small, conservative rural town like Selma was openly even-handed: In 1965 our top drama student in the fourth grade was Hilario Montoya. Our head football coach thirty-five years ago was Mexican-American. My high-school girlfriend, Ellen Martinez, received a full-ride scholarship to UC Santa Cruz in 1971. Our student body president in 1972 was Mexican-American.

At the acme of the La Raza movement of the 1960s and 1970s, so-called Hispanics had been in the mainstream of American life for years and had found their talent widely appreciated by all races - the best-selling recording artists Herb Alpert, Linda Ronstadt, Richie Valens, Freddie Fender and Joan Baez, the mega-stars Anthony Quinn and Ricardo Montalban, the actresses Raquel (Tejada) Welch, Chita Rivera and Rita Moreno, television icons like Freddie Prinze, Cheech Marin, the great Roberto Clemente, Orlando Cepeda, Tony Oliva and Jim Plunkett, tennis stars such as Rosie Casals, Pancho Gonzales, the famous coaches Tom Flores and Pancho Segura and the golfers Lee Trevino, Chi Chi Rodriguez and Nancy Lopez. And all this success came well before Selena, Fernando Valenzuela and Jennifer Lopez, and without the need of activists like Luis Valdez or Corky Gonzales. Most Americans did not know whether such heroes were Cuban, Puerto Rican or Mexican - and didn't much care, inasmuch as they were interested in talent, not race.

Hispanics were not always commensurately represented in all American institutions, but notable examples like those above could be multiplied ad infinitem, suggesting that roadblocks were not legal or institutional, but the inevitable social prejudices typical of dominant cultures the world over, which tend to react against their minorities (though elsewhere with autocratic government sanction that thwarts the possibility of amendment by a maturing and more tolerant citizenry). So when today's social critics talk of segregated swimming pools, race wars, and a scary atmosphere for Mexicans akin to the Deep South of segregation days, they are largely talking of a time long before Desi Arnaz and Jose Ferrer.

Until 1970, California dealt with rising Mexican immigration the way it handled the lesser influx of Asians, Sikhs, Armenians and all other mass arrivals of immigrants - with rather unapologetically coarse efforts to insist on assimilation. Behind such a one-dimensional policy there were simplistic but unmistakable assumptions about the immigrant: he was here to stay and become an American, not to go back and forth between the old and the new country. He was to become one of us, not we one of him. He was here because he chose to be here, and so was required to learn about us, not we about him.

An underlying supposition in that rather unsophisticated thinking was the prime theorem: the United States is a place far superior to Mexico. Otherwise the immigrant would have stayed put and we would instead have joined him, and thus we would have been his guests there, rather than his hosts here. A corollary was no less important in the mind of the Californian: if we changed so as to accommodate the Mexican alien, then logically he would have no need to come here, since he was voting with his feet to reject Mexican culture, not replicate it. As a Mexican friend admitted to me in a moment of candor, "If you let us make California into Mexico, we will just go to Oregon. If we turn Oregon into Mexico, we'll stampede our way into Washington. If we turn Washington into Mexico, we'll sneak into Canada." What he meant, I think, is that the preservation of American society in its present form -  democracy, freedom, uncensored media, diversity in politics, religion and ethnicity, open markets, private property, a vibrant middle class, secular government, civic and judicial audit and more - was attractive to brave Mexicanos stuck in Mexico. They saw America as antithetical to their homeland, and thus their last and only hope.

What was all this chauvinistic and self-acclaimed sense of "superiority" of the United States over Mexico really about? Surely it was not based on racial or genetic pseudoscience, for even racist Californians conceded that many Mexican immigrants, against great odds, soon found parity in every sense with native Californians. Rather the difference was empirically based and multifaceted - legal, economic, religious, historical, cultural and political. Our courts, it was once agreed, were less likely to be corrupt and tended to be systematic and public, not secretive, haphazard and capricious. Our police could be corrupt, but petty bribery was the exception, not the rule, and they did not assassinate reformers with regularity and impunity. There was nothing quite like the mordida in America - the "bite" put on citizens by every government official; those caught taking money were usually shamed and retired or jailed. Our police today are not escorting cocaine dealers and using squad cars to provide security for heroin smugglers on a regular basis.

Our religions were diverse - from eccentric Christian fundamentalists and persecuted Mormons to almost secular Unitarians and Congregationalists - not monolithic parishes. The many branches of Protestantism taught various and sometimes quite contrary doctrines concerning God's grace in this world and the next. Catholicism was more likely to suggest that the ills and inequities of this world would be redressed in the next; in the days before liberation theology, the grasping rich would get their due when they faced God, rather than be held accountable in the present. Under the monopoly of