MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 108

MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 109

accent, rotten teeth and battle scars. He lived in a shack in a sub-

section of the barrio at the edge of the school, a rural shantytown

(�śSunnyside”) where Okies and blacks had settled in the 1940s

and not yet fully abandoned by 1963. If there was hostility shown

to students by our tough faculty composed of World War II vet-

erans, it was usually directed against him. �śBe nice to Jimmy�"his

family is ignorant and doesn’t know any better,” we were told in

condescending tones. �śThey are white trash who never made it,”

our Texas- and Oklahoma-raised teachers said about Jimmy. �śI’ve

seen his kind back home, so be careful, you guys,” our principal

warned.

The underlying assumption in making such comments to

our majority of Mexican students was that they had a real culture

and family stability that could lead to success, while white-trash,

dysfunctional families like the Halls�"a �śneedle and syringe,” the

rumors went, had landed Jimmy’s sometime father in the �śstate

pen”�"were beyond redemption. The prejudice toward Okies is

now romanticized and airbrushed, but I remember it as visceral

and unending until the 1960s. My wife, who has this drama in her

family background, claims that it persisted well into the 1980s.

Did our education neglect the labor unions and the struggle

of the oppressed? Not at all. As the nascent United Farm Workers

movement was capturing national attention by staging strikes daily

right outside town, our seventh-grade history teacher was sketch-

ing out the dreadful struggle of the coal miners and steel workers,

and reminding us how in a free and capitalist society the poor

always had to organize to find redress from the powerful. Other

mentors explained the unhappy saga of the immigrants�"Irish,

Jews, Italians, Chinese, Mexicans�"not to teach the cheap lesson

that America was racist and oppressive, but in the belief that our

country was better than others because our parents and grandpar-

ents had taken it upon themselves to improve an unjust situation.

Caesar Chavez was, of course, hated by the local farming

establishment�"unreasonably so, for his initial cause was just and