MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson
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MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson
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miners and settlers against Indians, without suggesting that these
sins exemplified the entire American experience. We forget that sev-
eral of the classic Westerns of that age—Katy Jurado complaining
of prejudice in High Noon, the beleaguered Mexican villagers of The
Magnificent Seven, the sympathetic homesteaders of Shane, or the odi-
ous and racist cattle baron in The Professionals—portrayed Mexicans,
blacks and the poor as noble souls or as victims of unjust white
racism.
Given the current pessimism and national obsession with
racism, sexism and oppression, it is easy now to ridicule as naïve
the former trust in American institutions and to suggest that
such recollections as those above are simply the biased nostalgia
of someone from the “dominant” culture. Yet the positive impact
upon immigrants of the traditional education that sought to make
one from many was indisputable. Almost all of those from my
second-grade class are today teachers, principals, business men
and women, and government employees. If the purpose of such
an education system as the one that formed us was to turn out
true Americans of every hue, and to instill in them a love of their
country and a sense of personal possibility, then the evidence forty
years later would say that it was an unquestionable success.
In the tiny town of Selma, where we lived in the late 1950s
and early 1960s, at the cutting edge of what would become a
tidal wave of Mexican immigration, we not only knew that our
country was different from others, but also understood why and
how it was clearly superior. And the confidence that sprang from
such knowledge, tested by criticism and supported with facts, gave
us the ability to counter the cheap anti-Americanism abroad, and
here at home to create a real sense of national harmony. Like most
other Americans we saw the McCarthy era, Jim Crow and the
sexual chauvinism that affected the country in the early 1960s as
symptoms of the imperfection of the human condition, but cur-
able with work and patience. We were not tempted to believe that
there were better answers in other systems elsewhere. None looked