MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 16

paternalistic counsel.

Arturo crossed the border illegally and after four years of

college he reads Greek, Latin, French and German. Gil now runs

a Latin class at the local junior high school. Jorge, who in Latin

composition classes used to correct my own lectures on tenses

of the subjunctive in subordinate clauses, is better educated than

many of his professors at Cal State Fresno. Frank, a scholar of the

early Church, left our MA program in ancient history to become

a computer programmer. Hortensia wasn’t sure exactly how four

years of Greek and Latin could support her, but is now an excep-

tional primary school teacher. As far as I can tell years after their

graduation, these young men and women left the university to take

up productive professional lives while defining themselves as indi-

viduals and as Americans, rather than as part of a collective and

dependent Mexican underclass.

Because of the disparate angles of my perception, this book

is part melancholy remembrance of a world gone by, part detached

analysis by a historian who knows well the treacherous sirens of

romance and nostalgia, and part advocacy by a teacher who always

wanted his students to be second to no one.

Thousands arrive illegally from Mexico into California each

year. Indeed, our state is now home to 40 percent of America’s

immigrants. Such immigration from the south is hardly a new

development along the porous 2,000-mile border between the

United States and Mexico. For over a hundred years, Mexicans

have easily fled into California and the wider American Southwest.

Drought, political revolution and economic depression have all

brought the desperate and oppressed in. Sometimes America’s own

recessions and backlashes have driven them back out. Yet some-

thing has changed since 1970â€"and changed profoundly.

True, the two decades of Mexican revolution between 1910