Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (5 page)

Yet the old assimilationist model - still secretly admired, but publicly ridiculed - is working efficiently for only a minority of new immigrants, given their enormous numbers and the peculiar circumstances of immigration from Mexico in the last half-century. So what accounts for the stubborn resistance to assimilation, besides the increased numbers and our own lack of confidence in the melting pot? What makes Mexican immigrants so different even from the recently arrived Armenians, Chinese, Russians or Laotians?

Why, for example, do my second-generation Asian students often speak little Lao or Korean, date non-Asians, become hyper-American in their tastes and prejudices, and worry (often openly and rudely) about the sheer numbers of Mexican people who speak poor English, show few professional skills, and are overrepresented in our jails? And why do my Mexican-American students, even those of nearly 100 percent Indian heritage, face hostility from their own ethnic communities when they assimilate, speak perfect English, and prefer Latin and Greek literature to Chicano studies, attend the annual classics picnic but not the separate Latino graduation ceremony, and consider themselves about as Mexican as I see myself Swedish?

The obvious explanation is the closeness of Mexico, only a short drive to the south rather than oceans away. You can leave Los Angeles and be across the border in about three hours. That geographical nearness - the fact that the richest economy in the world is but a stone's throw from one of the most backward - has always been unfortunate for the Mexican arrival. It is hard to dream of a society further removed from a Mexican ghetto or rural village than is a
California
suburb. Had Mexicans flocked to Costa Rica, or had New Zealanders rushed into Los Angeles, the present problems of both hosts and guests would be nonexistent. Instead, a young man leaves his pueblo in Yucatan where cattle are starving for lack of fodder, and in two or three days he is mowing, bagging and dumping fescue grass in the most leisured and affluent suburb in America.

Moreover, for the campesino from Mexico there is little physical amputation from the mother country. In contrast, most other arrivals to
California
found the trip here a psychological guillotine. Their motherland - the Philippines, China, Japan, Basque Spain, Armenia,
the
Punjab - was cut clean off and discarded. The traditional homesick immigrant was now barricaded in his new homeland by thousands of miles of ocean, with little hope of returning to the Old Country every few months, and thus had to deal with Americans. For the Mexican immigrant, by contrast, the Rio Grande is no ocean, but a trickle easily crossed by a drive over a tiny bridge. A limited visitation, a family reunion - but usually not a permanent return – nourished enough nostalgia for Mexico to war with the creation of a truly American identity.

Most earlier
mass migrations were also largely one- or two-time affairs - explosive eruptions rather than a steady flow. The Irish came mainly in the decades after the great mid-nineteenth-century famines, but rarely arrive in any great numbers today. Jews once fled the pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe, but no longer immigrate as whole communities. The Cubans came in the hundreds of thousands after the fall of Batista, but after a mere forty years living in their Little Havana they are becoming assimilated and
Americanized
. Some Flondians may complain that their state's culture resembles Cuba, but in fact because there have not been hundreds of thousands arriving yearly from Cuba, the expatriate Cuban community is doomed - albeit slowly and almost invisibly - to lose its language and culture.

There is also a reason why the white minority in Miami, unlike its equivalent in Los Angeles, is envious of Latinos, and that revolves around the community's undeniable commercial success
-
 
a
phenomenon not entirely explained by the old generalization that "Cuban immigrants were middle-class refugees and Mexican newcomers were not." Instead, the astute Cuban-American must admit privately, "Thank God for the
island
of
Cuba
and for Castro himself, which barred the way back and cut us loose on our own here." Mexicans, on the other hand, migrate by simply walking across a porous border, steadily replenishing the Hispanic community in the United States with fresh aliens who strengthen ties with the world south of the border. Consequently, even after twenty years, 8 out of 10 never become naturalized American citizens - a statistic essentially impossible for expatriate Cubans who fled Castro's communism.

But again, the heart of the problem in
California
is always the truth we know versus the lie we speak. The reality is that, despite the grandiose boasts, the protestations of undying allegiance and the menacing outbursts of national pride, few immigrants ever really want to return to Mexico. Very few wish to live as they did in Mexico, to live with others who remain part of Mexico - in other words, to be a Mexican in Mexico rather than a Mexican in
California
. It is one thing to receive treatment and care from a Los Angeles oncologist and chemotherapist, quite another to endure a growing tumor in central Mexico. Professors of Chicano studies here fret about the loss of Spanish, the rising rates of intermarriage and the steady erosion of a "Chicano identity"; yet none wish to replenish their roots by moving their families to rural Mexico and a world of untreated sewage, parasite-infested water and herbalists standing in for cardiologists.

The more sober observers of all races know that if Mexico were separated from the border by a hundred miles of ocean, the so-called minority problem in
California
would vanish within a generation or two. As it now stands, the constant stream of new arrivals means that for each assimilated Mexican, there are always several more
who
are not. Unlike Southeast Asians, who came all at once to California and from thousands of miles away following the disaster in Vietnam, Mexicans have had no opportunity to mature together and slowly evolve as a distinct cohort into Americans.

In fact, the opposite is true. An Italian or a Jew knew that if he did not learn English and the American system, he was going to be left behind as his peers pressed ahead. A Mexican in California senses that if he fails to integrate into mainstream American society, there will always be thousands more newcomers like himself who will know almost nothing about the United States, and thus by sheer numbers join him in a viable expatriate culture. A Pole once accepted that she would perpetually stumble through the Cleveland phone book if she kept speaking Polish; a Mexican accepts as a given that Pacific Bell will double the size of its directory assistance just to accommodate her Spanish.

Race - could it be any other way in contemporary America? - is often cited as the most critical issue blocking the aspirations of Hispanics. The standard doctrine, promulgated by university ethnic studies departments, is well known: Mexicans were never able to morph as easily into "whites" as did the discriminated-against Jews or Irish simply because, like African-Americans, they were a people of a darker color and thus, throughout the long brutal history of the Southwest, were deemed inferior by the racist white majority. Indeed, who can deny the sometimes shameful exploits of the Texas Rangers or the visceral contempt that the great southwestern cattle barons had for the Mexican menial laborer whom he treated little better than his cows?

The problem with the accepted dogma is not that it is entirely false - thousands of racist writings and years of official biased protocol can indeed be used to substantiate such a view - but that it is only a partial explanation for Mexican disappointments, and in any case it belongs largely to the past. If only skin color can ensure entree into American society, how have Arabs, Koreans, Armenians and Japanese found parity with, and in many cases economic superiority over, the traditional white majority? Jet-black Punjabis, for example, are prominent in the professions of central California - medicine, law, agribusiness and academia - oblivious to the fact that their hue is often darker than that of African-Americans. Asians have a higher per capita income than
California
whites.

Thus the challenge is not to identify racism, but to assess the degree to which it or its legacy can affect a people today. Punjabis historically have not always been treated nicely in America, but they come from thousands of miles across a wide ocean with identifiable skills, close family networks, some English proficiency, a willingness to learn more, and a tradition of entrepreneurship, all of which seem to make race irrelevant. In fact, their ebony children who attend elite universities are not eligible for affirmative action. If anything, the
University
of
California
subtly and off the record looks askance at their overrepresentation - and this is an institution that already has been publicly rebuked for using de facto quotas in turning away qualified Asians from its Berkeley campus.

Californians are increasingly cynical and sense that affirmative action and special preferences are based neither on skin color nor on patterns of past discrimination, but simply are tied clumsily to a particular minority's failure to match the perceived economic performance of whites.

Koreans, likewise, are as "unwhite" as Mexicans; yet their culture puts a premium on business, education and family, not government largess. Like the Punjabi immigrants of today, and like the Japanese, Chinese and Armenian immigrants of the past, they have shrugged off the worst sorts of racial prejudices. So far, Mexican-American citizens have not been interned; nor have they been blown to bits while building railroads; nor have they suffered a holocaust by an invading Islamic power - disasters that did not stop the Japanese, Chinese and Armenians from reaching per capita economic parity with the majority in
California
. These other immigrants were at the end of their migrant odysseys and more likely to ponder the present and the future than to live in the past. I suppose "Don't get mad, get even" was thematic among these other victims of American racism and oppression. In my hometown of Selma, Armenians were zoned out of particular neighborhoods in the 1920s and were refused entry to the municipal swimming pool. Yet in two generations their capital and influence ensured that their homes and their private pools were the town's largest and most envied.

No Armenian today, despite skin color with a higher melanin content than that of the average white, claims to be "a person of color." Most Japanese do not either. "A person of color" does not necessarily mean that someone is, in fact, "colored" in any real sense; the term is largely absent among communities of dark Punjabis, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians and a host of brown and olive peoples. Instead, the nomenclature advertises that the self-described minority has deliberately defined
himself
in opposition to whatever "white" culture is - either out of real pride, justified anger, petty hurt, racial hatred or simple crass opportunism. And in a state rapidly growing more multiracial, we will soon need racial rubrics like those of the old Confederacy, backed by new-age genetic tracking, to figure out who exactly is "a person of color" - one-third, one-half or one-sixteenth nonwhite blood?

In any case, money has always eventually trumped race in America. The truism that race matters above all is forgotten when people of color earn more or become better educated than white people, but it returns with a vengeance when they remain isolated, poor and dependent. For all our boutique hatred of the moneyed classes, we accept that American plutocracy is a far more fluid system of opportunity than entrenched European or Asian hierarchies of class, color, ancestry and education. In sum, that racism has been a factor in the Mexican experience is indisputable; that in the present world of integration, intermarriage and government subsidy it still largely explains the disappointment and failure of millions of aliens is false.

Few observers of the immigration fiasco wish to talk honestly about the complex nature of Mexican society and the interplay there between race and poverty. Forget that the country is as poor as India and as chaotic as Zimbabwe, and far closer to us than either. There is something about the Mexican government that lies at the heart of the immigration mess - especially its passive-aggressive attitude toward the United States and its intellectually dishonest approach to the immigration problem.

Overlook for a moment that Mexico has never had any real history of sustained legitimate government, and only recently has taken the first steps in creating a multiparty system with free elections, an independent judiciary and an open media. And that its professed worries about its own citizens coming north to be exploited by American agribusiness resulted in a transitory policy of containment that was never really enforced and was largely ignored. Instead, the key to understanding Mexico's perplexing attitude toward America is simply found in Thucydidean exegesis: it is a proud state that was invaded twice by the United States and defeated, losing a great amount of its own territory - land which then thrived due to the very fact of its separation from Mexico. Those realities are not forgotten by Mexico. Japan might be defeated and humiliated by the United States, have its citizens in America incarcerated, its leaders hung and jailed, and its entire culture altered by American fiat - and then build an economic powerhouse to compete with and rival its former conqueror, all without constant tutorials about the evils of Okinawa. But Mexico seeks salve for its self-inflicted wounds in the history of a century past, rather than embrace honestly its own failures in the present.

The Irish government perhaps once regretted, but still accepted that its population had to leave or starve. Eastern European states were glad to see the Jews go on their journey to America. These governments lost control of their immigrants the minute they arrived in the United States. Such is not the case with Mexico, which both deliberately exports its unwanted and, once they safely reach American soil, suddenly becomes their champion and absent parent, as much out of resentment toward the United States as in real concern for people whom they apparently are so gladly free of.