Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (21 page)

Critics - mostly affluent and highly educated – complain that televised Monday night football, faked wrestling, 350 cable channels,
nonstop
coverage of Monica Lewinsky's antics or the tragedy of Chandra Levy all erode and cheapen our society. They suggest that we now predictably prefer the ephemeral to the lasting, and so care little anymore about good poetry, classical music, ballet, contemporary art, or even the fellowship of small farms, businesses and community get-togethers. And they are, of course, right. The kind of stable and uplifting culture that demands knowledge, training, education or familiarity for inclusion now thrives only in small enclaves in our major cities and some rural oases.

I have seen globalization's onslaught of cheap imported fruits and vegetables, and illegal and massive immigration simply destroy the agrarian world of the 1950s in which I grew up - including much of our own farm, lost to the bank because of poor prices and high costs. But I also appreciate that the local Wal-Mart - five minutes away from our doomed vineyard - is crowded with new consumers, recently arrived from Mexico, who drive Camrys and Civics purchased with easy credit, talk on cell phones for mere pennies, and reside in subsidized tract houses, with comforts superior to those found in more tasteful European homes. When I was in junior high school, summer jobs in town were prized and often meant a laborious apprenticeship under a hectoring small businessman who peered over your shoulder constantly as you tried to memorize his price tags and navigate through the maze of his ancient bronze cash register. Now, newly arrived clerks from Mexico at Jack-in-the-Box punch colored buttons with pictures of shakes and burgers and then instantly hand you a computer printout of your order - no dexterity, no languages, no skills needed other than physical and psychic resistance to the burdens of rote. The illegal alien makes fewer computing mistakes than I did three decades ago - and the "manager" is never really there, as his franchise seems to operate on autopilot and is monitored by videos far more percipient than any cantankerous boss of the past.

Our sophisticated and discontented in the universities are also correct that American tastes spread insidiously, and like bad money drive out any competing expression that offers real contentment and transcendence. But these more discerning critics still are profoundly mistaken in suggesting that grasping corporations, through the evil of advertising and the lust for obscene profits, foist a depressing mass culture upon the people.

Would that this were the case, and that the popular culture could therefore be reshaped with a magic wand of regulations into something a little more tasteful, less shocking to a submissive populace. But the truth, instead, is that Americans find their movies, videos, bestsellers, Internet surfing, TV shows and magazine crass-ness immensely relaxing and entertaining as well as easily accessible. In short, it is all a shared addiction that inexorably builds affinity across racial lines, despite the best efforts of the sophisticates to tear such commonality apart.

What leftists have completely missed is that the greatest engine for social and cultural equality and harmony in America is the corporations they denounce - amoral entities that follow profits rather than allegiance to ideas, prejudices good and bad, or tradition. Jack-in-the-Box couldn't care less that its clerk at the window is of illegal status or dark hue, or has values that are very different from most native Californians. Nor does it care whether she talks with her car-bound customers, or whether she needs government money to supplement her minimum-wage earnings. If she has hands and legs that work, then she is like any other human in the world; and if her English is nonexistent, well, then the corporation can craft a machine of universal symbols to bypass that slight impediment for the nine hours she is on its watch.

In my own community, the great fans of Business-Max and Home Club are Hispanics, not fifth-generation Anglos who have the education, affluence and perhaps memories to support the local family-owned grocery and the town's beleaguered lumber store. The former are cheap, always open, and more likely to offer help in Spanish; the latter are discriminating, prefer quality to quantity, and may hold forth on the problems in the community as you purchase a can of paint.

We are at the last frontier of cultural democratization and limitless mass production, where for the first time in history, entertainment, fashion and media are economical, understandable, reachable and apparently enjoyed by everyone - regardless of race, age or gender. Whether this plethora of cheap goods and boorish entertainment derives from the labors of one billion Chinese who are now exporting their wares on the world market, or the ability to send satellite signals and the Internet into Amazon villages is unclear. What is indisputable is that the drudgery of the American workplace - forty full hours each week, with few European-style perks, and dismal wages for the uneducated - is ameliorated by cheap electronic goods, cheap clothes, cheap almost everything, spiced with sounds, images and tastes that are uniformly accessible and unifying. Europeans who drive their safe government cars to the beach, work seven hours a day, enjoy six to eight weeks off yearly, and have nearly all their medical problems, tuition, natal care and rest home worries taken care of by a maternal government see us as impoverished. Yet Americans find Europeans' tiny homes, solitary small cars, single televisions, and outrageously expensive food, clothes, entertainment and gasoline a real poverty that restricts the individual's ability to satisfy his cravings.

I used to roll my eyes when my parents turned on Perry Como and Frank Sinatra; today my children and I listen to Moby. My father and mother once complained that our clothes were too raggedy; our children now are likely to be dressed like us. My grandmother wore a pleated skirt and my grandfather wore railroad bib overalls; today my daughter and son wear each other's flannel shirts with unisex denim cutoffs, sometimes pilfered from my drawer. Just as age or gender distinctions have been absorbed by media and entertainment, so it is, at last, with race and national heritage - the last and most stubborn of man's traditional pecking orders to fall.

To the alien from Mexico, so often young and male, immediate inclusion into this new dynamic civilization has had a startling effect - perhaps deleterious to his moral development, to be sure; but for the purposes of immediate assimilation, on the other hand, undeniably good. Movies have sexy women of all colors. Images of a Hispanic Penelope Cruz dating Anglo Tom Cruise splash across magazine covers. The public cares little what color are Oprah, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, Jennifer Lopez (most recently engaged to Ben Affleck), Ricky Martin or Antonio Banderas. The only requisites for success in this glitzy culture are charm, athleticism, looks and pizzazz - none of it the property of any one ethnicity. If a Latina is curvy, she not only captures more attention than a rail-thin white woman - such universally human propensities and tastes are hardly new - but for the first time wins commensurate money, status and celebrity as a pinup in a world where the prejudices of the past are shown to be money-losers in the present.

The result is that millions of illegal aliens are seeing brown women and men arm in arm with blacks, Asians and whites at Food4Less and Starbucks, but also in limousines and giving celebrity interviews.
Superficial equality?
Perhaps.
But again, for the first time in civilized memory all the old readily perceivable biases are simply vanishing - and that does affect a deeper reality. What class divisions we have are far more fluid than Europe's or Asia's. Money - a much fairer and more fluctuating barometer of status than birth and breeding - can put a prosperous cesspool franchiser on the local ballet board and lead his kids to be courted by the top universities.

This almost instantaneous blending of the social classes through shared cravings has, of course, nearly wrecked the efforts of immigrants to hold onto traditional Mexican life. I might complain that Chicano Dance instructors at my university are not providing our students with the necessary educational tools to succeed; they will lament in turn that their immigrant constituents are hopelessly hooked on rap music and would not be able to
recognize
 
a
 
Mexican
 
folk
 
ballad
 
without
 
some
 
instruction.

Consumerism in its most recent manifestation explains a great deal of the pathologies of second-generation Mexicans who grew up on violent video games, rap music, junk food, hanging at the mall, and without any of the strictures of traditional Mexican society such as the patriarchal family, church and extended kin. Yet for good or evil, the new America, unlike that even of the 1950s, now hardly objects to racial integration, intermarriage and open housing. What that means is there are almost no institutional barriers and few cultural impediments to assimilation - apart from those promoted by ideologues and intellectuals. While some Americans worry that illegal aliens are bringing their own culture up here, the aliens' extended families at home lament that our culture - even -is down there.

My nephew and niece lost their Spanish at four years of age. They don't know anything now of their grandparents' village in Mexico. Their father was an illegal alien dishwasher; twenty-five years ago he took them to his Mexican village before granting custody to his ex-wife and her new husband, my twin brother. Both adults now, they date Anglos, South Americans, Asians and almost anyone they find attractive. They themselves are unsure whether they are half Mexican or half "white." And they don't care, anyway. If you told their friends that they were Spanish, Italian, Greek or Cuban, nobody would know the difference. My other brother's wife is Mexican-American; her father lives in Mexico City - and survives on his hard-earned American Social Security checks. Assimilation, in other words, through
both intermarriage
and shared consumerism, works. As far as I can tell, no one in my family as of yet has called for a Republica
del
Norte.

My neighbor is married to a Japanese woman; their daughter married a Mexican-American; their grandson - one-quarter Anglo, one-quarter Japanese,
one
-half Mexican - is now being raised by an Anglo stepfather. Nor is such racial complexity, a Tiger Woods sort of amalgam, at all atypical in
California
, at least outside the faculty suburb. No wonder that the race industry is perplexed that its Neanderthal rubrics from the glory days of the 1960s ("check here for Anglo, Hispanic, non-Mexican Latino, African-American, etc.") increasingly make little sense to anyone. What all these people have in common is that their dress, patois and tastes are becoming more homogeneous. And these propensities are predicated on the democratic principle that what is most accessible to the most people sells (the annual so-called Hispanic market represents $300 billion in sales), and what is not, doesn't. I used to hear Spanish ballads out in the fields, blaring on the radios of plum pickers. Such campesinos themselves wore khaki-like uniforms with straw hats and said "si senor - no senor" when told to pick fruit by color or size. They looked and acted like the peasants in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Now the illegal alien plays ghetto-inspired rap, wears his baseball cap backwards, is amply tattooed, and is more likely to answer "OK already" or "No problema"
-
 
mimicking
Schwarzenegger rather than speaking Spanish. I miss the old world; those in this new world would not.

If one were a small farmer trying to keep alive a traditional agrarian way of life for his children, if one were a third-generation Japanese small nurseryman struggling to survive amid a parking lot full of cheap plants at Orchard Supply, if one were proud of his Punjabi roots, religion, dance and customs and wished his daughter to preserve an ancestral way of life drawn from a rich past in India, then the juggernaut of Blockbuster, Festival 10 Theaters, Pizza Hut, Costco, Borders Books, Amazon.com, MTV, Michael Jordan, Selena videos, Judge Judy, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
and
all that it represents would be maddening, even satanic in the way it destroys localism - and perhaps assaults nature itself. But if one were to come from dire poverty, oppression and racism in Mexico, then this same apparatus, by its very obliviousness to all distinct culture of the past, can turn a suspect outsider into a welcome insider within a few years. My best memories of the Bill Clinton sexual scandals were the amused smiles of illegal aliens at our nearby gas station as they snickered over tales of his phallic use of a cigar; they felt this was quite a country when their own sexual mores were superior to those of the President of the United States.

We should be clear about the limits of the assimilating culture, however. The illegal alien may marry a fourth-generation Anglo (as in the case of my sister-m-law), he may wear a Chicago Bulls cap and gyrate to punk rock, but that superficial immersion in American culture is no substitute for real civic education about American history, culture and values. But at least the leveling effect of popular culture does buy us a little time. It gives America a few years of respite before we must deal with the catastrophe that we are not educating millions, not teaching them a common and elevated culture, and not addressing the dilemma of open borders. But then we are not quite killing each other either, as happens daily in almost every multiracial society on the planet.

In the meantime, millions of Mixotec, Oaxacans and Indians from Jalisco and the
Yucatan
are very quickly becoming superficially similar to millions of white, Asian and African-American youth - a host generation that
itself
is increasingly illiterate, unskilled and ignorant of so much about the institutions and the very nature of its own country. If we in the 1940s and 1950s were once like Greece, with the local city-states' rich pride, culture, rigidity and baffling protocols for privileged citizens and those deemed inferior as me tics and helots, we are surely now more like imperial Romans of Petronius's age, when all flocked to share without discrimination in the riches and occasional debauchery of a new global order.