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

their supply. And the resulting muddle arises not because we are too crowded per se. Japan, after all, feeds, clothes and educates three times as many as we do without the natural wealth or open spaces of a California. If we were committed to metering immigration and demanding language immersion and complete assimilation of all new arrivals, California in time could handle a steady stream of legal Mexican immigrants.

The problem, rather, is the changing attitude toward immigration and assimilation - making too many of us increasingly separate and unequal, and thus apprehensive that a big state with plenty of room is already too crowded for what we have become. It has always been easier for people who emigrate to keep their own culture than to join the majority - if we have learned anything from our turn-of-the-century arrivals, it is that assimilation is difficult -  but for the first time in our nations history it is now also felt to be easier for their hosts to let them do so.

Rarely now do southwesterners express a confidence in our culture or a willingness to defend the larger values of Western civilization. The result is that our public schools are either apathetic about, or outright hostile to the Western paradigm - even as millions from the south are voting with their feet and their lives to enjoy what we so often smugly dismiss. Our elites do not understand just how rare consensual government is in the history of civilization. They wrongly think that we can instill confidence by praising the less successful cultures that aliens are escaping, rather than explaining the dynamism and morality of the civilization that our newcomers have pledged to join.

Few in government or the media have a clue that secular rationalism, religious tolerance and the chauvinism of a middle class ensure that we enjoy a rare degree of liberality in our lives -  only possible through a foundation of material prosperity built on the sanctity of private property and free markets. Even more rarely do they appreciate how such Western values are not predicated on race or ethnicity, but on simple acceptance of a core set of rights and responsibilities. Few Mexicans could ever be accepted as full citizens in China, Japan, Zimbabwe or Saudi Arabia - in other words, in many places of the non-Western world that define their citizenry by the criteria of race, tribe or religion. Despite the campus rhetoric of resentment and discrimination, it would be far harder for an Anglo immigrant to be accepted as a full citizen in a Michoacan village than it would be for a Mixotec to take root in Fresno.

Yet through multiculturalism, cultural relativism and a therapeutic curriculum our schools often promote the very values from which new immigrants are fleeing - tribalism, statism and group rather than individual interests. If taken to heart, such ideas lead our new arrivals to the postulates that cause abject failure in California: "My home buddies are my only friends"; "The school has failed to help me"; "Chicanos aren't treated right and need to stick together." In a larger sense, if we were to entertain the attitudes toward women that exist in Mexico; stress the need to favor relatives and friends rather than follow the blind protocols of civil service; or copy the Mexican constitution, court system, schools, universities, tax code, bureaucracy, energy industry or sewage system, then millions of Mexicans quite simply would stay put. There is a reason, after all, why those in a rather cold and inhospitable Canada, north of the Dakotas and Minnesota, do not cross into America by the millions, while others from a temperate, naturally beautiful, oil-rich, mineral-laden and fertile Mexico do.

The answer to our current dilemma has nothing to do with race. It has everything to do with the degree to which a society is openly Western, and can thereby create a culture that trumps its natural environment.

How, then, exactly did the old assimilationist model work? As I remember it, simply and effectively. In our grammar schools during the 1950s and 1960s, English was definitely the official language. As a result, at our local schools that were overwhelmingly first-generation Mexican, one could hear not a word of Spanish even on the playground. Groups of four and larger were not allowed to congregate at recess. Mr. Jackson, our Arkansas-bred principal, gave us lectures about "rat-packing" hapless individuals, and swore he would whip anyone who jumped someone unexpectedly and with greater numbers in an "unfair fight." Anytime he heard that four or five were going to "get" someone after school, he offered them boxing gloves and said they were welcome to go against him first. I remember that those caught fighting with "Mexican" kicking instead of the accepted "American" punching earned four, rather than two, spankings.

In class, a rather tough Americanism was rammed down our throats: biographies of Teddy Roosevelt, stories about Lou Gehrig, recitation from Longfellow, demonstrations of how to fold the flag, a repertoire of patriotic songs to master. "America the Beautiful" was memorized including its mostly forgotten second and third stanzas, along with a dozen other songs, from the almost impossible to sing "My Country 'Tis of Thee" to the corny "God Bless America." (I can still remember the Spanish-accented refrains of "Stand besid her")

"Manners" and "Civics" were taught each week - weird lessons like not appearing "loud" in public or wearing glittery or showy clothes; the need for picking up random trash from the sidewalks; and especially the avoidance of the "hard look" or staring down strangers with the intent of "being unpleasant." Thinly veiled, but never expressed overtly, was the idea that much of our assimilationist rhetoric arose in direct antithesis to the perceived practices of our many immigrants from Mexico. The pachuco, now glorified in our universities as the original nationalist rebel who bravely battled the prejudices of white America, was our special boogeyman in 1963. We were told that this mutinous chuko combined the worst characteristics of Elvis Presley with dangerous