Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (2 page)

The people who jumped me as an eight-year-old from the blind side were often Mexican. Those who threatened to knife me at fourteen for no reason other than because I was white were Mexican. And the three youths who tried to break into my home and assault my family when I was forty were all Mexicans. But then so were all the friends who helped me fight back in grade school; who have lived on our farm for forty years; and who as sheriffs and police come out to protect us today when there are problems.

I have been upset that drivers who have ruined my vineyard were illegal aliens with false identification. But then I also suspect that the immigration certificates of those who have harvested our grapes at the eleventh hour, when no one else would, were counterfeit as well. Immigration, assimilation and the entire dilemma of the Mexican border are insidious problems - a moral quagmire in which any posing as ethical instructors had better take care that they themselves, either implicitly or overtly, do not in some way benefit from the presence of unassimilated illegal aliens.

In some sense, I know Mexican-Americans perhaps better than I do so-called whites. I confess - not out of any racialist feeling, but simply because of habit and custom - that I feel more comfortable with the people I grew up with, a population of mostly Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and whites who were raised with nonwhites. I have Mexican-American nephews, nieces, sisters-in-law and prospective sons-in-law as well as neighbors. My older brother married a Mexican-American; my twin brother married a high school friend who was divorced from a Mexican illegal alien. I married someone from
Selma
High School
whose family had left
Oklahoma
during the Dust Bowl depression. The neighboring farmhouse to the west is home to resident Mexicans; so is the one immediately to the east. My two daughters are going steady with Mexican-Americans who grew up nearby in Selma; and the people I eat lunch with, talk with and work with are all either Mexican or Mexican-American. And so I have come to the point where the question of race per se has become as superficial and unimportant in my personal life as it has become fractious and acrimonious on the community, state and national levels. Some of the paradoxes, hypocrisies and hilarities that characterize
California
as a result of changing attitudes and more immigrants are subjects of this book. Two themes dominate most of what has been written about Mexicans in
California
, and I have tried to avoid both. On the one extreme, we hear scary statistics
that
 
"
prove"
California
will become part of Mexico by the sheer fact of immigration. On the other, we are told that either nothing much is changing, or that what alterations are occurring in the fabric of our social life are all positive. The truth, as always, is in between:
California
is passing through tumultuous times, but there is no reason to anticipate that it must become a de facto colony of Mexico. More importantly, I do not believe all that much in historical determinism - the idea that broad social, cultural and economic factors make the future course of events inevitable and render what individuals do in the here and now more or less irrelevant.

My main argument instead is that the future of the state - and the nation too, as regards the matter of immigration - is entirely in the hands of its current residents.
California
will become exactly what its people in the present generation choose to make it. So it is high time for honest discussion, without fear of recrimination and intimidation. How else are we ever going to sort out the various choices that will decide our collective fate - especially at a perilous time when we find ourselves at war with those who kill us as Americans regardless of accent, skin color or origin? That many in the business community will consider what follows naive or dub me a protectionist/isolationist worries me as little as the critical voices I am sure to hear from an academic elite whose capital remains largely separatist identities and self-interest. Both parties, after all, did their part to get us into this predicament and have so far escaped accountability for the harm they have done.

I have changed the names of my teachers and associates in my hometown out of concern for their privacy, and because we live and work together. In three cases, to protect the identity of close friends I have made slight changes in the description of where they live and work. I thank my wife, Cara, and my colleague in classics at
California
State
University
, Fresno, Professor Bruce S. Thornton, another rural
San Joaquin
Valley
native, for reading the manuscript and offering criticism and help. Peter Collier first suggested that I write the present book - an expanded version of an essay that appeared in City Journal. I thank him and also Myron Magnet, editor of City Journal, for help in editing both the present book and the original article. My literary agents, Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu, as always, have proven valuable representatives and friends.

Introduction

I WRITE HERE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE of a farmer whose social world has changed so radically, so quickly that it no longer
exists
. Three decades ago my hometown of Selma was still a sleepy little town in central
California
, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, between the coast and the high Sierra. It was a close-knit community of seven thousand or so mostly hardscrabble agrarians whose parents or grandparents had once immigrated from Denmark, Sweden, Armenia, Japan, India, Mexico and almost every other country in the world, to farm some of the richest soil in the world. Selma's economy used to be sustained by agriculture - in the glory years before the advent of low prices caused by globalization, vertically integrated corporations and highly productive high-tech agribusiness - and supplemented by commuters who worked in nearby Fresno. The air was clear enough that you could see the lower Sierra Nevada, forty miles away, about half the year on average, not a mere four or five days following a big storm, as is now the case.

Sociologists call a small, cohesive town like the old Selma a "face-to-face community." As a small boy I used to dread being stopped and greeted by ten or so nosy Selmans every time I entered town. Now I wish I actually knew someone among the many I see.

The offspring of Selma's immigrant farmers learned English, they intermarried, and within a generation they knew nothing of the old country and little of the old language. Now Selma is an edge city on the freeway of somewhere near twenty thousand anonymous souls, and is expanding at an unchecked pace, almost entirely because of massive and mostly illegal immigration from a single country: Mexico. Because my great-great-grandmother arrived to carve out our present farm from desert in the 1870s, before Selma existed, and my children are the sixth successive generation to live in the house that she built, I was deeply attached to the old town, now vanished. It was by no means perfect, but it was a society of laws and customs, not a frontier town like the current one, in which thousands reside illegally, have no lawful documentation, and assume that Selma must adapt to their ways, not the

reverse
.

Time passes; things must change. And so I accept transformations that are inevitable: a price-cutting Wal-Mart would drive out our third-generation Japanese-owned
nursery,
and multinational agribusiness would overwhelm the once prosperous Sikh family farm down the road. While I saw all this happening as if by time lapse, I hoped that the new Selma would at least retain the language, customs, laws and multiracial but unicultural flavor of the old. But it has not.

I look at these things, however, also as a classics professor at the local
California
State
University
campus twenty-five miles away. As a historian I accept in the abstract that culture is unstable and always evolves - often radically. The Greek polis became the Hellenistic municipality; the Italian republic turned into the polyglot Roman Empire; Hebrew Palestine became in turns Persian, Greek, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, English and Israeli. By training, we in the academy are detached observers who try to inculcate a sense of distance and objectivity, an acceptance of the fact that history is restless and culture mutable. There are age-old processes far larger than ourselves, which predate us and will go on long after we are dead. So I mostly watch Selma and listen, trying to forget about my own past and present, and attempt to chronicle dispassionately what is going on around me - especially the strange paradox of immigrants streaming toward Western countries even as many are angry at themselves for doing so. I still try to drive out the echoes of my grandfather's subjective folk wisdom and my long-dead aunt's exhaustive Selma genealogies (e.g., "The youngest Josephson girl married Aram Eknonian's older brother who lived on Tucker Street") to replace it with the cold logic of Thucydides, who knew so well the nature of man and the predictable mess he creates (e.g., "an exact knowledge of the past [is] an aid to the understanding of the future which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it").

But immigration concerns me in yet another way: not just as a native or as a historian, but also as a teacher whose students increasingly come mostly from Mexico. For two decades I have driven up daily to the college campus at Fresno to teach persons, not "peoples," and so have seen that assimilation is still possible during the current immigration onslaught - if we forget group causes and the rhetoric of the multicultural industry, and simply concentrate on providing interested students with opportunities that match their often ignored aptitudes.

Mentors tend to claim primacy for their own disciplines -
 
physicists swear that science will alone save us; educationists know that the nature of man is subject to improvement given the right pedagogical method; classicists insist that knowledge of philology, history and literature produces a singularly educated citizen. As one who teaches Latin and Greek to classes including many immigrants from Mexico, I have observed remarkable transformations in these immigrants that were as wonderful to me as they may have been problematic to many of my more "progressive" colleagues in the social sciences. Illegal aliens and Mexican residents who learned Latin, who came to speak perfect English, who were intimate with Roman consuls and the tragedy of Antigone tended to become proud American-Mexicans rather than unsure and troubled Mexicans, finding self-esteem in accomplishment rather than in therapeutic rhetoric. (I'm sure that the same is true for those who mastered quantum mechanics and any of the other solid disciplines.) Arturo, Gil, Jorge, Frank, Hortensia and dozens of others - the more they read Cicero and explored the beauty and paradoxes of Western civilization, the more they became prized and recruited candidates for graduate school, federal employment and corporate jobs - and the more often they told me about how their self-appointed ethnic caretakers in the university became disturbed at their evolution into something quite beyond the need for paternalistic counsel.

Arturo crossed the border illegally and after four years of college he reads Greek, Latin, French and German. Gil now runs a Latin class at the local junior high school. Jorge, who in Latin composition classes used to correct my own lectures on tenses of the subjunctive in subordinate clauses, is better educated than many of his professors at Cal State Fresno. Frank, a scholar of the early Church, left our MA program in ancient history to become a computer programmer. Hortensia wasn't sure exactly how four years of Greek and Latin could support her, but is now an exceptional primary school teacher. As far as I can tell years after their graduation, these young men and women left the university to take up productive professional lives while defining themselves as individuals and as Americans, rather than as part of a collective and dependent Mexican underclass.

Because of the disparate angles of my perception, this book is part melancholy remembrance of a world gone by, part detached analysis by a historian who knows well the treacherous sirens of romance and nostalgia, and part advocacy by a teacher who always wanted his students to be second to no one.

Thousands arrive illegally from Mexico into
California
each year. Indeed, our state is now home to 40 percent of America's immigrants. Such immigration from the south is hardly a new development along the porous 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico. For over a hundred years, Mexicans have easily fled into
California
and the wider American Southwest. Drought, political revolution and economic depression have all brought the desperate and oppressed in. Sometimes America's own recessions and backlashes have driven them back out. Yet something has changed since 1970 - and changed profoundly.

True, the two decades of Mexican revolution between 1910 and 1930 gave us one million new arrivals, and subsequently the rate has often been nearly fifty thousand per year. What is new is not so much the increased volume of immigration, but a growing despair and uncertainty over how - or even whether-----to assimilate

the
arrivals into the fabric of the United States. In America's immigration dilemma, no state is
more unsure
of itself (or more broke) than
California
- and perhaps for just that reason no home is more sought out by illegal aliens.

Most arrivals are given work by grateful employers. Indeed, businesses profit greatly from the aliens' much-needed labor - even as the audacious newcomers are increasingly resented by millions of other Californians for coming in such numbers and under such unlawful circumstances. Although illegal aliens are eager to get a fighting chance to succeed in America, many are not prepped for, nor immersed into the cutthroat competitive culture they help to mobilize.