Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (18 page)

A fourth newspaper report alleged that more Mexicans than whites have been jailed under
California
's somewhat draconian "Three Strikes and You're Out" legislation. Again, the obvious question was never raised: Could it be because they were committing more third strikes than their white or Asian counterparts - and if so, why? Nor did the article wonder: If Mexicans were going to prison in large numbers for committing felonies such as murder, rape, theft and assault, who were their victims? Could it be mainly innocent Mexicans? The account also did not raise other issues such as whether Mexicans committed proportionally more violent crimes against Anglos than Anglos against Mexicans.

The final pertinent story I encountered in my week's reading centered on a number of aliens who have tragically died in the
Arizona
desert. The main theme of the article was that California's recent "fence" near San Diego and its increased border vigilance there, coupled with the American "paranoia" after 9/II, had caused dozens of poor immigrants to die of dehydration along the much more perilous and poorly demarcated routes through the desert. The reader was to conclude that overt racism had resulted in a policy to kill innocent Mexicans who simply wished to come to the Untied States to better themselves. The obvious logical counterarguments were absent from the story. Why did a fence arise in the first place south of San Diego, if not to stop thousands of Mexicans from simply storming through immigration control and onto the streets and highways of southern
California
, endangering themselves and startled motorists? Did a nation that recently lost three thousand of its citizens to foreign terrorists, some of whom were here illegally, not have the right to police its own borders? Did the Mexican government have culpability for the tragedy in the
Arizona
desert by not bothering to keep its citizenry from coming north under such radically changed conditions? And when the United States decided that in a time of war it wished to reinforce its border policies, should it have made illegal border-crossing much more difficult or only a little bit more difficult?

The "progressive" worldview that churns out such stories has completely lost the sense of human precariousness common to all civilizations. Rather than confess that mankind by its very nature is prone to be murderous, sexist and racist - and that only liberal institutions of the West can rein in these innate proclivities - we instead demand instantaneous perfection of our own country and no other, both in the present and in the past. Nowhere in these stories is there any allowance for human fallibility or weakness, no admission that Twinkies can be more alluring to the palate than cabbage, or that doctors, fearing constant lawsuits and increasingly employed as bureaucrats by HMOs, naturally feel better able to relate to people who speak their own language.

Worse still, the constant refrain that "they" are doing such terrible things to Hispanics perpetuates the myth that what one selects to eat, what language one chooses to learn, what crime one commits or forgoes - all that and more is beyond the realm of individual agency and rather subject to larger deterministic forces, usually prejudicial in nature.

Sometimes the problem is not so much the slanted ideology of such popular news accounts, but simply the imbalance that is a part of basic reporting today. What constitutes real news now? Take, for example, a typical issue of the Fresno Bee, this one dated Monday, November 25, 2002. Greater Fresno and the surrounding sprawl
are
now a considerable metropolis of nearly one people - a large city more than a rural backwater. And November 2002 was a perilous time in American history, as the United States began to ponder war with Iraq while continuing to wage a multi-pronged campaign against terrorists. Yet nobody would suspect any of that from reading the front page of the city newspaper. The top headline blared, "Man Slain After Chase Ends Near Selma," over an article detailing how a young Hispanic criminal confronted law enforcement officials after a carjacking, threatened to kill them, and then was gunned down not far from where I live.

The next story on the right, headlined "Donations to Mexico Stranded," explained how efforts by local Hispanics to send food and clothing to the Mexican town of Nayarit after the devastations of Hurricane Kenna had been stymied by the inefficiency and obduracy of the Mexican consulate. The care packages were still sitting on pallets in a Fresno warehouse weeks after the disaster. The third headline, on the left side of the front page, announced that "Fresno's Motel Kids Find New Digs," and the story chronicled new efforts to house foster children.

At the bottom of the page, "Young Migrants Follow Perilous Path North" presented the theme that very young Mexicans are crossing
illegally on their own
and not being treated very well by smugglers. The story suggested that their harsh experiences were somehow the fault of the United States because of a failure to enact a new border agreement with Mexico. One illegal alien in Georgia was quoted as reassuring her underage son, who had been sent back across the border, not to worry because she would employ the smuggler to try again to lead him across the desert.

Still searching for a story about world affairs this November morning - was there anything going on besides unfair treatment of local Hispanics? - I turned to the editorial page. There were three opinion essays. At the top was a column by Roberto Rodriquez entitled "Exceptions to 'All Life Is Sacred' Tough to Reconcile." Rodriquez faulted the hypocrisy of anti-abortion activists for supporting the death penalty (but not pro-abortion activists for opposing it) and detailed how such insight about the preciousness of life was inculcated in him by Mexican elders when he was growing up in Tijuana and had an irrational fear of ants. The logic in the rambling and incoherent piece was hard to follow as it skipped between the death penalty, Mexico, abortion, bombing and ant colonies, but somehow I gathered that an older generation of Mexicans had taught Rodriquez about a superior way of viewing life on earth, and that we as Americans should follow his creed so that we don't go to war to "crush them like ants" and kill "tens of thousands of innocent civilians." Inasmuch as I had just read on page one that some Mexican parents were sending their own twelve-year-old children unescorted across the scorching Arizona desert in violation of American law, and that the Mexican government was abetting such a dangerous trek, and that Mr. Rodriquez had obviously abandoned his beloved Mexico for a callous United States, I was confused by his invective.

Ruben Navarrete Jr. wrote the second essay, right below the Rodriquez piece: "Ethnic Hyphen Symbol of Pride, Not Separatism." In it he argued that using hyphenated self-identification was hardly antithetical to national unity. This also troubled me inasmuch as the usually sensible Mr. Navarrete grew up near me with middle-class parents, had little if any contact with either Mexico or recent immigrants, and does not speak Spanish. His call for people like himself to self-identify as Mexican-American would be as useful as my adopting the label "Swedish-American" when I do not speak Swedish, do not live among Swedish immigrants, and know nothing of life in Sweden. The only reason for me to identify myself in that way would be to invest in some sort of movement or ideology that brought real attention to or preferences for Swedish-Americans.

The third op-ed, at the bottom of the page, was by George Will on the future political makeup of the U.S. Senate.

And all that was what passed for a day's headlines and commentary for the hundreds of thousands of readers in the central
San Joaquin
Valley
. The tragedy here lay not merely in the marked imbalance of the Fresno Bee's efforts to reach new readers, but in its condescending approach to Americans of Mexican descent. The assumption was that they would naturally rather read about the daily hometown shootouts, the pride of hyphenated IDs or even ants in Tijuana than about whether their own country was going to war.

If we were ultimately to trace the DNA of such stories in the popular media or explain the obsession with race and separatism, we must look to the avalanche of books from Latino studies departments across the United States. As a single but representative example, take the recent anthology entitled Latinos: Remaking America (
California
, 2002), edited by M. Suarez-Orozco and M. Paez, a professor and a researcher at Harvard, and subsidized by the
David
Rockefeller
Center
for Latin American Studies. The two scholars collect twenty-one essays whose general theme seems to be that
racism,
the brutalities of American capitalism, right-wing reaction and general neglect by white people have all conspired to hold Latinos back in America. Forget for the moment the irony of such attacks on the system being published through icons of American capitalism like David Rockefeller, the endowment of Harvard University, and the state-subsidized University of California Press; instead, examine the lengths to which the book's authors go to explain away any positive developments on the immigration front.

The first essay sees intermarriage in a bad light. ("But investing that sort of Utopian power in the genetic mixing of our era only serves to heighten a new form of racial essentialism and once again to frame the process of overcoming racial hierarchy as a fundamentally biological one.") A book devoted to race is now worried that "mixing" (the phrase itself has echoes of "mongrelization") might make race irrelevant and dilute racial power along with bloodlines.

Another essay in the book struggles with the fact that Cubans were given over $1 billion in the decade between 1965 and 1976 by the federal government to aid in refugee resettlement, and that the recipients were mostly whiter, wealthier and more conservative Latinos. Confronted with these bothersome facts demonstrating American generosity, communist persecution, and dramatic success in the United States, the author hopes that refugees from Central and South America who are poor and dark-skinned will dilute this Cuban strength, prevent more embarrassing scenes like the Elian Gonzales demonstration, and end the "hegemony" of Miami's' Cuban elite and their "fixation" on Castro.

The next essay criticizes rude "Anglo teachers who reprimanded Mexican students for speaking Spanish," along with the cruelty of free markets ("rapid industrialization and capitalist development"), as being instrumental in creating barrio gangs. Somehow it is capitalism that, after luring the oppressed across the border, keeps them perennially poor - a thesis that does not explain why it is that while Cubans of their own volition seek
Florida
, North Koreans go south and Mexicans trek north, the opposite is never the case.

Most of the book's twenty-one essays - which I can imagine being required reading for the future reporters of the Fresno Bee and other papers - struggle with the dilemma of proving racial prejudice when interracial marriage is at an all-time high. They posit blanket discrimination against Latinos, when Cubans are excelling in all areas of American society. They argue that a recent rise in test scores following the demise of bilingual education means nothing if it jeopardizes the power of the mother tongue, and insist that affirmative action must remain based on race rather than poverty despite an emergent Hispanic middle class. After being exposed to such professors, their programs and their books, an innocent would have to assume that the progress of Hispanics in America is a dispiriting failure. Someone not so innocent would understand that the chief fears of such intellectuals are no longer racial prejudice, but rather the end of the primacy of race, and the dissolution of minority blocs in voting, residence and mindset.

The new race industry is not restricted to Ph.D.s in the universities. On the local level, hundreds of teachers, government bureaucrats and union officials are committed to the same agenda of separatism and racial spoils. And given the sheer numbers of new immigrants, the undeniable past history of racism in California, the trendy guilt of the California suburbanite, and the failure of all too many Mexican immigrants to find economic success commensurate with that enjoyed by Koreans, Punjabis and other new arrivals, we do live in a time of an unusual opportunity for the demagogue and provocateur. Let me be clear on this: the race-hustler is not at one with the millions of successful third- and fourth-generation Hispanics in California who pretty much go to work and tune him out, and whose own race is rather low on their list of pressing issues, far behind the next raise, the struggle against backyard rye grass, and the choice between an all-terrain Jeep or a minivan. It is also true that the type of the brawling race provocateur is as old as America itself. In some sense, he is related to the Irish ward boss, the Polish precinct worker and the Italian borough master of former times. A century out of date, he shares a nineteenth-century vision of enormous ethnic blocks, entirely unassimilated, with tough burly capos like himself riding to prominence at their head. He imagines himself as bursting into locked rooms, bowling over the timid man at the podium, and wresting out entitlements and quotas for his clients based on their percentages in the nations population.

This racialist is akin to the union organizer of a past era
-
 
but
now government money rather than wages, now reparations and entitlements rather than mere patronage are his requisition. He knows where and when to press his demand: now to bully the meek college president; now to be more cautious in the push for quotas and entitlements at the less pleasant arena of farm, construction site or food plant, with tougher pink folk of tattoos and missing teeth.

The chief fear of the race manipulator?
That unchecked immigration may cease; that his minions may learn to read and write English with ease; that his brother or sister may marry "the other"; that a Mexican middle class might flourish in private enterprise apart from government service or entitlements; that the Mexican propensity for duty, family and self-sacrifice might yet take hold in the United States and make him obsolete.