MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

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MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

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an isolationist or a nativist by the corporate Right, and a racist or a
bigot by the multicultural Left?

Mexifornia is about the nature of a new California and what

it means for America—a reflection upon the strange society that
is emerging as the result of a demographic and cultural revolu-
tion like no other in our times. Although I quote statistics gleaned
from the U.S. Census and scholarly books on Mexican immigra-
tion into the United States, this is not an academic study with
the usual extensive documentation. I write instead of what I have
seen and heard living half a century in California’s Central Valley,
at the epicenter of the upheaval. Most of the children I went to
school with were Mexicans or Mexican-Americans. Many of them
remain my close friends today—inasmuch as I live on the same
small farm south of Fresno where I grew up, 130 years after my
great-great-grandmother built our present home. Those who speak
of an explosion of illegal immigration into California usually cite
the counties of Fresno, Kings and Tulare surrounding me and the
nearby towns of Selma, Dinuba, Sanger, Parlier, Orange Cove,
Cutler and Reedley as examples of California’s radically changing
demography and its attendant social and economic challenges.

For those of you who live outside of California, far away

from Mexico, and sigh that the problem is ours, not yours: be
careful. California has always been an idea, not merely a place.
Our climate, social volatility and an absence of anything farther
west always put us on the cutting edge. After all, we gave America
Hollywood and with it the tabloid popular culture that rules our
contemporary worldview. The modern protest movement began in
Berkeley. Gay rights called San Francisco home. Theme parks were
born in southern California. Bikinis, bare navels, the dyed-blond
look—they all showed up here first.

Wherever you live, if you want your dirty work done cheaply

by someone else, you will welcome illegal aliens, as we did. And if
you become puzzled later over how to deal with the consequent
problems of assimilation, you will also look to California and