Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Davis Hanson

Author:Victor Davis Hanson [Hanson, Victor Davis]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Sociology, Social Science, California - Ethnic relations, Mexico - Emigration and immigration, Political Science, Emigration & Immigration, Mexican Americans - Government policy - California, Popular culture - California, Government policy, Government, Mexican Americans - California - Social conditions, Hispanic American Studies, California, Social conditions, State & Local, California - Emigration and immigration, Immigrants, United States, Biography & Autobiography, Selma (Calif.), Mexican Americans, California - Social conditions, History, Immigrants - Government policy - California, Mexico, Popular Culture, West (AK; CA; CO; HI; ID; MT; NV; UT; WY), State & Provincial, General, Ethnic Studies, Hanson; Victor Davis
ISBN: 9781594032172
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2007-09-24T22:00:00+00:00

FOUR

The Old Simplicity That Worked

THE NEW MYTHOLOGY of La Raza taught in our colleges and universities goes something like this: California was and is an utterly racist state. Its myriad of laws and protocols stymied Mexican aspirations for a century and a half until the rise in the 1970s of militant interest groups - MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztldn), MAPA (Mexican-American Political Association), the United Farm Workers and La Raza studies departments everywhere. They alone finally, and only through protest, agitation and occasional violence, have just started to change the complexion of California by insisting on more balanced and sensitive educational programs, coupled with a vast safety net of state assistance and federal affirmative action preferences to redress past injustices. All this was in rightful recompense for the theft of California from Mexico. Under this regime - intellectual and literal - today's massive illegal immigration is seen as just deserts in returning the American Southwest to its proper cultural foundations.

What has been the result of la causal Has the lot of Hispanics - gauged by graduation rates from high school, percentages with college degrees, per capita crime statistics vis-a-vis whites and Asians - improved through these efforts to renew ethnic pride and force society to recognize past Chicano icons from Joaquin Murrieta to Caesar Chavez?

Unfortunately, nearly the opposite is true, Three decades after the rise of the new militancy and separatism, along with unchecked immigration, Hispanics have the highest dropout rates from high school and the lowest percentages of bachelor's degrees of any ethnic group in the state. For all the good intentions, outreach programs, city-sponsored Cinco de Mayos, Caesar Chavez state holidays and eponymous boulevards and billions of dollars in entitlements, the government - alas! - apparently does not have the power to create instantaneous parity by fiat. Indeed, in our collective efforts to be angelic we can sometimes be devilish by establishing the principle that the state is responsible for an individual's success or failure.

The key achievement of all these militant groups was the promulgation of a partial truth, which by its very incompleteness became part of today's Big Lie. Racism, discrimination, labor exploitation - these and more, of course, have been the burdens of the Mexican-American experience. They are also universal pathologies, and quite predictable given the peculiar relationship between a vast democratic and capitalist American nation and an autocratic, economically backward Mexico. But instead of being pondered in that light, these shortcomings are defined as uniquely the sins of white Americans.

The result of the whitewashed new history is that Aztec cannibalism and human sacrifice (especially at the dedication of the great pyramid of Huitzilopochtli in 1487) on a scale approaching the daily murder rate at Auschwitz are seldom discussed as a part of the Mexican past. While Cortes is loudly condemned, we do not hear that the Tlaxcaltecs and other tribes considered the Europeans saviors rather than enslavers. Terrorist organizations of the late nineteenth century like the Gorras Blancas and the Mano Negra are romanticized.

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