Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (20 page)

Yet for all the harm done to Mexican immigrants by both the naive and the opportunistic, there is nevertheless another, countervailing engine of change at work in America. It is the more nebulous and wholly amoral power of a new popular and global culture, whose intrinsic character is to unite us all in shared appetites for material things that dissolve the old prejudices of race, class, language and culture. In I960 a Mexican immigrant student was taught the positives of the United States in his classes and told to emulate his peers through rapid acceptance of American culture - even as he found his Anglo girlfriend's parents wary, the new music and customs foreign, personal discrimination undeniable, and formalities at work and play constant reminders of his otherness. Now the opposite is true: the schools and government seek to accentuate his differences - even as he wades knee-deep into a world that doesn't much care whom he dates, and where he feels at home with the prevailing, and already familiar, tastes in music, clothes and television.

Is globalization like the dark, godless power of Tolkien's ring - or is it the calmer, more uniform and postheroic world after the destruction of that ring, where uniqueness and difference vanish without the need of elemental struggles along age-old divides of culture and politics? I resent the cultural obliteration caused by global uniformity - which is wiping out our small farm along with the community of which I was a part - but I am not so naive as to deny that ultimately, and perhaps by accident, its results are radically homogenizing, leveling, and so in a weird sense democratic at the most basic, popular level. I may find the new Selma crass and boring, and may prefer the old - but I accept that most would not agree and would rightfully claim that life at the material level is far easier today and far more informal.

The new residents of Selma would find my old nostalgic world of small-town America - farmers exchanging pleasantries in little shops and family businesses - static, hierarchical, exclusionary and far more repressive, impoverished and boring than the wide-open society of our new malls. That Selma as I once knew it is dead; yet its obituary for most Mexican-Americans comes as good news, not bad, for its successor edge city on the freeway offers opportunity and comfort undreamed of a half-century ago. Before, when we purchased a car, we went to see Ed Butler and his single salesman over at the Ford agency, listened to an hour-long talk about raisin prices and Sun-Maid inefficiency, perused his glossy "catalog" to inquire about ordering extras like seat belts and radios, and handed him a check for a down payment on delivery in six weeks (or, as in the case of my nineteenth-century grandfather, paid cash carefully withdrawn from a savings account). Now we all go to the sprawling, multimillion-dollar Auto-Mall, with its inventory of five thousand autos, and can walk out with a $40,000 SUV on a Visa card.

Globalization and its harmonious bastard culture will put out to pasture the race agitator at the university, but it may well also drown out beautiful Mexican folk songs with American-style rock in Spanish.
Sounds of hip-hop draw blonds and Koreans alike.
Television assumes interracial smooching. Gay desire makes no distinction between brown and black, who fight alike the sexual prejudices of their respective cultures.

Celebrity magazines with glossy pictures and little text proliferate, aimed at the illiterate of all races. Bestsellers are often confined to mystery, sex and diet - with plenty of illustrations, big fonts and a vocabulary of fewer than a thousand words, all readable in a couple of hours. The current taste in popular music runs to shouting laced with obscenity, underscored by a pounding, totalitarian rhythm. These assaults on formality, prior erudition, modesty and manners may be offensive, but they assume that almost all Americans, without education or knowledge of fixed genres, find instant commonality with one another through the medium of desire.

The supercharged nature of such texts, pictures and sounds, delivered instantaneously through inexpensive radios, televisions and the Internet - along with the swift and easy way they are discussed and debated via cell phones and e-mail - has the effect of creating a dynamic popular ethos that often trumps all previous hierarchies. Not only are the authority of family, religion and government waning, but all the suppositions and pretensions of the old culture - class considerations, racial prejudices, snobbery of any sort - are silenced as well by the high-decibel magnetism of popular entertainment and its ferocious dumbing-down to the level of easiest comprehension and acceptance. What a war the new popular culture has inadvertently taken up through the pursuit of its own naked greed - no less than an assault on the age-old class, race and gender hierarchies that were previously thought to be innate to, and unassailable within, the human condition!

Globalization can now unite any two people from the most disparate backgrounds in taste, appearance and manner of daily life. Humberto Gama, who lives down the road from me, has been in the United States for twenty years. I am not sure of his legal status, a topic never broached between us. He works occasional jobs - farm work and construction mostly - and is married with three children. I still hear only Spanish waft across the vineyard from his numerous parties and weekend festivities. He has filed for workman's compensation, been on welfare, received unemployment insurance - and worked on and off the entire time he has been drawing his various subsidies; a global citizen, he assumes that the spreading Western idea of entitlement can ameliorate the occasional roughness of the marketplace. I have little idea what he makes, but imagine it is under $30,000. He drives a 1991 Chevy Astro van, which he
bought
used for about $3,000. It looks not all that different from a $30,000 new model, and for purposes of driving to town and back, it is just as serviceable. His sneakers, jeans, T-shirts and hat - off the rack from Kmart, Old Navy and The Gap - look no different from mine. He has no health insurance, but then various state and federal programs and local clinics seem to provide him with adequate care. To my knowledge he has never forgone medical treatment for lack of funds, and he doesn't worry much about the pro forma bills that occasionally come from the Selma hospital - an institution claiming to be millions of dollars in the red each fiscal year. We forget that globalization is not merely the proliferation of goods, but also of notions of entitlement, and Humberto at least expects high-tech medical care as part of his newfound affluence.

People in town treat him no differently from me. In the new classless society of California, the fact that I have a Ph.D. in classics and he quit high school somewhere in Mexico during his second year, while critical factors in determining our respective incomes, is mostly irrelevant. The status provided by educational attainment means absolutely nothing to people at McDonald's or Jiffy Lube, and perhaps even to the teachers we both encounter at the local back-to-school night. When I take my daughter to the emergency room with a bloody leg, we are given service no more quickly than is Humberto; health insurance cards, five generations of residence in the same town, ample capital, the ability to discuss with the physician the nature of the epidermis - all that and more means hardly a thing to the Hispanic clerk at the admittance window, and even less to the interns who put us way at the back of the line of wounded and ill in our brave new society.

This is all as it should be, but nevertheless is a revolutionary development in the history of civilization. Americans are actually the radical society that French intellectuals envisioned when they shook their fists at the barricades, before slinking back to their lounges and salons for more table talk and pipe dreams.

As neighbors, Humberto and I talk with a familiarity that suggests we are in the same class, have the same tastes and share similar problems. This is fact, not supposition, and the equality is natural, not forced. His television is nicer than mine; indeed, his family uses two cell phones. Their home - a small wooden ranch house - is provided by a local farmer to ensure his presence for occasional chores. Humberto listens to rap music on his work truck - a 1992 Dodge Dakota he bought from me in 1998 for $2,000 (paid over three months) with 80,000 miles on it. On purchase, he immediately put in a bed liner, added a new stereo, had it detailed - so now it is in better shape and more reliable than the Mazda I got to replace it, which has cost me much more in the last four years than Humberto's Dakota has cost him. And his teenagers, not mine, will be sent letters of invitation by a
University
of
California
desperate for "diversity," which they define largely by race. So is Mr. Gama poor and oppressed?

In terms of opportunity to travel, yes. He rarely ventures out of
Fresno
County
. He eats out at Denny's, not an upscale restaurant in Fresno. He gulps down Snickers and Korn-Nuts, not Odwalla fruit drinks and celery sticks. Even at forty he is heavy, and not always well. His chances to find lucrative and steady employment are dwindling as his belly enlarges, his knees weaken and his English remains poor. Yet if one were to judge only by his clothes, the superficial appearance of his cars and appurtenances, or those of his wife and children - not to mention their consumer habits, their choice of entertainment and general tastes - the Gamas are not much different from the family of a third-generation California suburbanite who works for a software company for $100,000 a year.

Federal and state largess without stern audit, access to cheap consumer products imported from abroad, and a vast social network of friends and relatives have ensured that Humberto is royalty compared with his relatives back in Mexico. And there is, of course, the tax code. Humberto pays no tax on his off-the-books earnings, and almost no levies on his reported income. When I was growing up in Selma, we all paid income taxes; now those like Humberto who make below $30,000 pay almost none. In 1955 the military got 62 percent of all federal dollars, entitlements 21 percent; now this is reversed: individuals receive 61 percent of federal dollars and the military 17 percent. And this revolutionary notion that government is to rectify what individuals cannot has had dramatic effects in Selma. Welfare, disability, workman's compensation, Head Start, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, supplemental assistance - all that largess (and the availability of cheap Chinese-produced goods) has created a real consumer class from the immigrant community, the unemployed and the half-employed - while this newfound affluence has made them, in a way, angrier that they are still not as wealthy as others.

In short, Humberto Gama is outwardly indistinguishable from many of the professors I work with. His car on its daily trek into Selma looks not much different from those of soccer moms on their way to upscale white suburban schools. Humberto's is a Potemkin middle-class existence to be sure, but even its facade simply did not exist a mere two decades ago, when I could easily spot the clothes, cars, habits and general look of the illegal alien in a matter of seconds. Now these distinguishing marks have been dissolved by the advent of a globalized look, a veneer of sameness and fraternity, an equal access to the electronic world of imagery and message and the means to pay for it - with little regard for actual earned income or racial identification.

This instant American satisfaction of the baser cravings has enraged our European friends, who among their own youth see Big Macs displacing haute cuisine, rap eclipsing more sophisticated music, and Star Wars trouncing grim Swedish melodrama. Our liberal professors and journalists at home might enjoy the nuance and minutes-long still shots of French film, but young whites from Montana and Chicanos from East Los Angeles, if they watch foreign movies at all, alike prefer Jackie Chan. Immigrants from Mexico tend to agree with the latter, not the former. They understand that American mores and tastes in the culture at large set few requirements for full participation - not money, education, breeding, parentage, race, accent or religion. The Mexican immigrants I know who listen to English-speaking radio are more likely to turn to the loud and sometimes grating voices of Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage than to the subdued and often nasal tones of NPR.

Almost anyone can understand the plot of an American movie and sit transfixed by the human and technological pyrotechnics - car chases, explosions, murderous heroes on a mission of revenge, bodies littered about, nudity, obscenity, sex scenes,
syrupy
endings. Video games, unlike books, plays or board games, are universally hypnotic precisely because they demand little literacy, provide explosions of color and imagery, and require only a type of eye-hand-brain synergy that is not culturally specific. Fast food offends few since it is neither spicy nor sour, and thus calls for no acquired taste. Instead it grows increasingly bland, ample and cheap - and packaged in such a way that it is as easily edible in a car as at a table.

Americans are criticized for preferring quicker, cheaper Taco Bell to more conventional and tastier real Mexican dishes; but then, illegal aliens too - especially young males - increasingly buy such American take-out rather than traditionally prepared tortillas. Their girlfriends agree, and - costs being about equal - likewise choose to eat in the car en route to the mall, rather than stay home in a hot kitchen rolling corn-flour dough. Mass communication through darting images on television, pictures on computer screens and photos in printed matter are more easily digested than written texts.

If such schlock is sweeping the globe - and along with it American English, American business protocols, American sports, American advertising, American media and American casual behavior - one can imagine the net effect of it all at its place of birth in America, of which California remains the epicenter. At a time when illegal immigration is at an all-time high, and formal efforts at forging a common culture and encouraging assimilation are at an all-time low, the habits, tastes, appetites and expressions of everyday people have offered a rescue of sorts - perhaps deleterious to the long-term moral health of the United States, but in the short term about the only tool we possess to prevent racial separation and ethnic tribalism. Informality in dress, slang speech, movies, videos, television - all this makes assimilation easier, even at a time when professional racialists are calling for highbrow separatism.