Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Davis Hanson © 2003 Published by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit tax exempt corporation. The following excerpts appear on pages 75-79.

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 stynmied Mexican aspirations for a century and a half until the rise in the 1970s of militant interest groups – MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán), 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 causa?  Has the lot of Hispanics – gauged by graduation rates from high school, percentages with college degrees, per capita crime statistics vis-à-vis whites and Asians – improved through these efforts to renew ethnic pride and force society to recognize past Chicano icons from Joaquín 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 Cortéz 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 Joaquín 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 Sinarquismo 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 López 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 Kit Carson National 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 the 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 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.

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 antithetical to their homeland, and thus their last and only hope.

Read here about the experience of the illegal immigrant in California.

Interviews:
Kathryn Jean Lopez in the National Review

Book Reviews:
Emily Cochran of Town Hall
Walter A. Ewing of the American Immigration Law Foundation
John Fonte of the Hudson Institute
William A. Rusher in the National Review