Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (19 page)

Sometimes in the murky world of affirmative action, the activist turns out not really to be Mexican at all, but Chilean, Basque or Spanish! Indeed, we at the university regularly hire those from abroad with Hispanic last names to ensure that we are seen as a "diverse" community. (Part of the genius of the postmodern term "Hispanic" is that it gives quite a lot of cover for well-heeled Europeans and South Americans to receive preferences over native-born Americans.) The racialist may also be the well-meaning but Spanish-illiterate Latino weekend anchorman, who suddenly changes his name from John to Juan and never meets another "r" he won't trill. In the new media patois, local Hispanic politicians and judges in the news become "Hooseee Gonzzaleees," while murderers and rapists who appear on the screen are merely "Joe Gonzales."

The professional Latino means well, but his passion is not put in the service of racial or ethnic harmony, much less the truth. He is a professed tribalist of the first order who does not wish to live within his tribe. He has little desire to help his brethren by promoting the kind of assimilative culture that he simultaneously critiques and wants, and knows is his only salvation if his car, house and job title are any indication. He may make speeches and films about gang violence and teen pregnancy, but he never really tells us why these phenomena are widespread among "his people" or how they can be prevented. It is so much easier to leave cause and effect unacknowledged, so much more lucrative to sprinkle racism and victimization as cheap condiments here and there in his public rounds.

In this context, it is hard not to have grim thoughts about the white, liberal, guilty and frightened college presidents of the past few decades who set up racial satrapies on
California
campuses. Now safely retired in
California
coastal or mountain retreats, they have left behind a legacy of absurd intellectual ghettoes whose inhabitants are always angry. March once on the president's office in the 1960s and acquire a Chicano studies professorship; march twice and gain an entire ward, replete with separate theme dorms and private graduation ceremonies. After all, if in their private lives such white men preferred to live only among other affluent white people, why at work wouldn't they approve of separate dorms, departments and graduations for brown people?

Few of the Mexican-American friends I grew up with in my hometown speak fluent Spanish anymore, whether or not they finished college. (Completing eighth grade then provided a far better education than finishing high school does now.) They may not all be titled and degreed, but almost all are informed and can read, write, compute and understand the basic tenets of the culture they have helped to build and maintain - and which they most certainly think is far superior to that of Mexico. Their children know only a few words of Spanish - quite in contrast to the present 65 percent of all foreign-born Hispanics in the United States, who now speak only limited English. Most of my generation has become insurance salesmen, mechanics, contractors, teachers, civil servants, occasionally wealthy businessmen and high government officials
-
 
in
other words, the present-day "future of
California
." There are no Mexican flags on their cars, which more likely sport decals like "Proud Parent of a Lincoln School Honor Student" or "Semper Fi" About half of them, it seems to me, are not married to Mexican-Americans.

Most vote as Democrats, but are probably anti-abortion and perhaps even support the death penalty. Some joined and prospered in the Marines; others run the Lions and Kiwanis clubs. They are sensitive to occasional news of prejudice, yet display little affinity for the race-and-ethnicity industry that has taken hold on the CSU campus at nearby Fresno. In their daily lives, they are more worried about gangs and Mexican crime than about white racism. A few seem conscious of race, but only when the father is Anglo, the mother Mexican. This is because affirmative action (whether now legal or not), they believe, is not so affirmative toward a Justin Smith who is half Mexican as to a Justin Martinez or even the suspect Justin Smith-Martinez, although each is Mexican in the same measure.

But perhaps the well-integrated middle-age and middle-class residents of Selma are an exception and belong to an age gone by. For the most part, the children of illegal aliens not only are not learning the skills to compete with native-born Americans; they also in frustration are receptive to the lure of ethnic chauvinism
-
 
constantly
promoted by their teachers - to treat their wounded pride. In surveys conducted by the Russell Sage Foundation from the mid-1990s, children of immigrants were shown to have doggedly resisted assimilation. Five thousand students were surveyed at 13 years of age and then again at 17 to inquire about their attitudes toward their adopted country. Even after - or perhaps because of - four years of enrollment in American high schools, they were 50 percent more likely to identify themselves as "Mexican" or "Filipino" than as "Mexican-American" or "Filipino-American." So we can at least be sure that efforts to instill ethnic pride have two indisputable effects: they create a sense that the children of immigrants are not even what Theodore Roosevelt referred to as "hyphenated Americans," and ensure that they will not be given the rigorous training that allows them to compete on a level playing field. Indeed, the two phenomena are inextricably connected: the more the Chicano student takes therapeutic classes, the more he senses his own failure to achieve parity with other Americans, and the more he falls back on ethnic pride to supply the confidence he cannot acquire through intellectual achievement - and finally, the more his teachers, who themselves either cannot or will not instruct, must push the elixir of ethnic identification.

California has always been a great, though risky experiment in a truly multiracial society, united by a common language, culture and law - something not seen since the creation of the Roman Principate, in which Pax Romana was to give - or else! -
the
Gaul, the Spaniard and the Thracian alike the Italian notions of government, water via aqueduct, Juvenal's Satires and habeas corpus. But that subjugation of race to culture is forever a fragile state, not a natural condition. Each day it erodes if not actively maintained. Race, chauvinism, ethnicity creep hourly back into social life if not battled by citizens of strength and vision. A few malicious people can undo the work of centuries. Thus, each time a university president, a small-time politician on the make, or a bien pensant liberal journalist chooses the easy path of separatism, he does a little part in turning us toward Rwanda or Yugoslavia. The work of cultural unity is of the ages; advancing racial and ethnic separatism is a gesture of the moment.

How, then, can we recreate civic education to help unite an increasingly fragmented society, and to bring Hispanics and other recent arrivals into the body politic of the United States? It will not be easy - if only because millions of Americans in education, the arts and government have invested a great deal in, and profited handsomely from, a relativist and multicultural society that rejects any unifying core. Their dream is vastly different from the multiracial society in which millions of Americans with a broad spectrum of skin colors speak the same English, share the same commitment to the values of the Constitution, and gradually become indistinguishable through integration, assimilation and intermarriage. Returning to a multiracial society under the aegis of Western culture would put a lot of people in the universities, politics and government bureaucracies quite literally out of business.

What, then, can we do? We must reject the new cultural relativism, situational ethics and arrogant utopianism that have escaped from the university and circulate like an airborne toxin in the popular culture. Scholars must stop teaching nonsense like the idea that Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, important though they were, affected American history more profoundly than John Adams or Alexander Hamilton, or that gangsta rap is essentially no less musical than Beethoven. Rather than blame the United States for persistent imperfection, our educators should emphasize how far we have come in eradicating sins that seem intractable to much of humankind elsewhere.

Just as importantly, we should acknowledge that the new vocationalism of the Right is as pernicious as the multiculturalism of the Left. If students are taught that the main purpose of education is to impart lucrative skills - profitable business acumen or accounting expertise - and that the accompanying good life will itself constitute the Good Life, it will be impossible to mold a generation that will welcome sacrifice or develop any common concern about the well-being of the less fortunate.

Rarely do our students ever learn anything about the great American Captains - Washington, Winfield Scott, Sherman, Grant, Pershing, Patton, Bradley, Doolittle - either because of a general dogma that war is always evil and unnecessary, or simply because of the military ignorance of their teachers. Yet no society can long survive if it cannot produce men of war who emerge in its darkest hours to defend, without subverting,
its
most cherished values. Caesar Chavez and Susan B. Anthony - whose names all of today's grade-school students seem to recognize - may have been great reformers, but there simply would not have been anything to reform if not for people such as Grant, Sherman and Patton, whose genius and achievements are part of our youth's vast historical illiteracy.

My own elementary school is still two miles away, but whereas forty years ago it turned out skilled and confident Americans, its graduates who enter high school now have among the lowest literacy levels and the most dismal math skills in the state. The lucky ones who eventually go on to college are likely to be among the 47 percent of students entering the California State University system who need remedial classes - the largest university in the world, and nearly half the freshmen take high-school, not college, courses.

Yet for Hispanics, just reaching the remedial CSU programs is a great achievement in itself. Despite millions in federal and state expenditures in the last twenty years, by 1996 only 61 percent of Hispanics - both native and foreign-born - had graduated from high school. Nearly a decade later, out of every 100 Hispanics
-
 
native
or foreign-born, illegal or lawful immigrants, citizens or aliens - who now enter
California
high schools, 30 will drop out. And of the remaining 70, fewer than 4 will matriculate prepared for any serious college-level courses in mathematics. Less than 10 percent of all adult Mexican-Americans currently hold a bachelor's degree.

Some may argue over the data, wondering precisely who are those listed as "Hispanic" on surveys and by what chronological parameters a failure to graduate is measured. And new data in the twenty-first century may shed a different light on all this. But what is unarguable is that we are clearly faced with skyrocketing asymmetries between Hispanic and non-Hispanic performance in our schools - a problem that has been apparent since the 1970s, when hundreds of thousands of aliens began coming into this country illegally and were adopted by the intellectual inheritors of the prior decade's political radicalism.

How then did we get to this present dilemma in
California
? How did we arrive at a world where thousands of citizens have lounged, embittered, on the dole while harvests go unpicked? How did we ignore thousands here, but demand that thousands more come illegally from across the border? How did we manufacture provocateurs at the university who burn the flag of the land they so desperately want to inhabit, while they proudly wave the flag of the country they so demonstrably prefer to abandon? How did we craft a society where the juvenile chooses the barbarism of the predatory jungle, but when injured or maimed he emerges from the wild to demand as his inalienable right the expensive succor of a compassionate and ordered culture he professes to despise? How did we create an intelligentsia that offers as models the despot Montezuma and the outlaw Pancho Villa, instead of Socrates and Lincoln?

If Mexico had not been contiguous to the United States, if migrants had only come in the thousands, not millions, if self-proclaimed advocates on campus and in the media had been honest and responsible folk, and if this had remained an America of the melting pot rather than the separatist culture of the 1980s and 1990s, then, I think, we would have fewer problems with race, culture and immigration.

But that is a lot of ifs.

SIX

A Remedy in Popular Culture?

WE MUST KEEP SOME PERSPECTIVE. Even if only six out of ten California residents of Mexican heritage are really graduating from high school, that figure still implies that every year, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are entering the work force in occupations other than menial labor and slowly finding their way into the mainstream, to join earlier immigrants in the American middle and upper classes.

It is not uncommon in my hometown to be stopped by a Mexican-American policeman, to talk about one's kids with a Mexican-American school principal, and to remonstrate with a Mexican-American city council member - many of them identifiable as being of Mexican heritage only by surname, never by accent, manner or appearance. Small business men and women
-
 
restaurant
owners, brake shop owners, labor contractors and truck fleet owners - are increasingly Mexican-Americans.

What this progress proves is that millions of Mexican aliens and their offspring grew up in
California
at a time when high standards and civic education were still embedded within the public schools and when assimilation, not separatism or multiculturalism, was the model of success. In contrast, the legions of more recently
arrived
Mexicans and the youth who grew up in the very different environment of the 1980s and 1990s have not had these benefits, and are now stranded in a destructive in-betweenness, often the pawns of those who play the parlor game of identity politics.