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

the conservative Catholic Church in Mexico, an entire culture was taught that sex was for procreation, and the more children, the more souls that could be saved. In contrast, the American Protestant tendency was to regard many offspring as requiring too much time and investment from parents, siblings and society at large - an idea that Catholics considered silly and selfish as well as blasphemous.

According to the educational theory that once held sway, America was the creation of Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin and Adams; Mexico was the legacy of Hernan Cortes and Pedro Alvarado. Pilgrims were not the same as conquistadors, or so our teachers in their pride maintained. We broke away from liberal reforming British parliamentarians; Mexico much later and with more difficulty separated from a more authoritarian Spanish monarchy. North America was opened to mass immigration; Spain tried to keep all but the Spanish out of Latin America. We were a temperate climate; much of Mexico was nearly tropical. We kicked the English and French out early; Mexico had Spanish and French in their country even in the nineteenth century. American settlers from all over Europe swarmed into a largely uninhabited, but Mexican, Southwest; adventurous Mexican families and homesteaders in covered wagons did not then venture into a largely uninhabited Oregon, Montana and Wyoming. We fought Germans; Mexico intrigued with them. American society at its best was a society of three classes, not two; in Mexico it was mostly a war between campesinos and their patrons, as society from the very beginning of the Spanish conquest was to be defined as the private property of the elite hidalgos and cabalkros.

Ours was not so much a patriarchal society, at least in comparison with Latin America or the Arab world. Women were more visible, often worked outside the home, and were active in protests; not so much in Mexico, at least in times of peace. In the United States, private property, deeds and title searches were de rigueur; the rule of property law was not so sacrosanct in Mexico. A man finding his newly built house on someone else's lot made headlines in America; in Mexico it raised not an eyebrow. Florida, a long peninsula with an inhospitable climate, was settled and its swamps drained as it became a successful multiracial state; Baja California, about the same size and shape and also blazing hot, until recently remained mostly a parched wasteland.

There was no siesta in America; more likely you ate your fatty foods while driving to and from work. Various strains of our heritage, some of them pernicious and neurotic - from the WASP ethic to German Mennonite and Scandinavian habits of constant work - made us pay more attention to our jobs and income than to our families and recreation. Americans, it seemed, lived to work; Mexicans worked to live. All that and more made America, rather than Mexico, an often cut-throat economic powerhouse, where the system protected capital and property, the government dispensed largess at the will of the people, and a person was judged on his performance at making money, not his class, parentage, race or religion.

If you wanted to retire, relax and be accorded status and privilege for being older, refined and male, then Mexico just might be a better place than America. But if you were Irish, Japanese, Korean, African-American, Indian, Muslim or Jehovah's Witness, and wished to work and get rich, then you'd do far better in America. Any who disagree can ask themselves: how many millions of these have flocked to Mexico, then or now?

The schools, without self-doubt, often rudely and with little apology, dealt head-on with the contradiction that plagues every immigrant to America. Lost in an entirely new world that initially either ignores, oppresses, or discriminates against him, he naturally tends to romanticize the distant culture that pushed him into exile in the first place. I do not know whether my early teachers were conscious of such human subtleties, or aware that an excess of deference can encourage disdain rather than gratitude, that newfound affluence can create envy, and that every majority culture - even one that has recently arrived from Mexico and established an ethnic enclave in a small rural California town - tends to ostracize a minority. Yet these were problems and paradoxes that our instructors sought to resolve one way or another. They seemed to know that the Mexican immigrant could and should retain a pride in his ethnic heritage - to be expressed in music, dance, art, literature, religion and cuisine only - while being mature enough to see that the core political, economic and social values of his abandoned country were to be properly and rapidly forgotten. In my hometown the idea was to turn Mexicans into Selmans. And yet, in accomplishing this delicate task, our grammar school teachers of the 1950s and 1960s, most with degrees from normal schools in Texas and Oklahoma, knew far better the fundamental differences between a flourishing multiracial society and a failed and fractious multicultural quagmire than do our present Ph.D.s from Stanford and Berkeley.

On "Old Country" day for "show and tell" we all brought in our family's native dress, food and books to class - hardly a diverse exercise when well over 90 percent of the students at EricWhiteElementary School were from Mexico. The student presentations were one-dimensional and completely predictable, as were the teachers' evaluations; indeed, today such a response would earn immediate dismissal for the teacher and hours of therapeutic counseling for the aggrieved students.

The Mennonite Eric Scheidt once showed us his family's East Prussian Bible and even spoke a few words of German for us - as he was politely reminded how lucky his parents were to be here rather than being caught in Hitler's Germany. My twin brother and I brought Swedish rye crackers, a straw dahla horse and pictures of Vikings; but we were hurt when Mr. Payne remarked that Sweden was neutral in World War II. We replied that all second-generation Swedish Hansons in