MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

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MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

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terfeit as well. Immigration, assimilation and the entire dilemma
of the Mexican border are insidious problems—a moral quagmire
in which any posing as ethical instructors had better take care that
they themselves, either implicitly or overtly, do not in some way
benefit from the presence of unassimilated illegal aliens.

In some sense, I know Mexican-Americans perhaps better

than I do so-called whites. I confess—not out of any racialist
feeling, but simply because of habit and custom—that I feel more
comfortable with the people I grew up with, a population of
mostly Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and whites who were raised
with nonwhites. I have Mexican-American nephews, nieces, sisters-
in-law and prospective sons-in-law as well as neighbors. My older
brother married a Mexican-American; my twin brother married a
high school friend who was divorced from a Mexican illegal alien.
I married someone from Selma High School whose family had
left Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl depression. The neighboring
farmhouse to the west is home to resident Mexicans; so is the one
immediately to the east. My two daughters are going steady with
Mexican-Americans who grew up nearby in Selma; and the people
I eat lunch with, talk with and work with are all either Mexican
or Mexican-American. And so I have come to the point where the
question of race per se has become as superficial and unimportant
in my personal life as it has become fractious and acrimonious on
the community, state and national levels. Some of the paradoxes,
hypocrisies and hilarities that characterize California as a result
of changing attitudes and more immigrants are subjects of this
book.

Two themes dominate most of what has been written about

Mexicans in California, and I have tried to avoid both. On the
one extreme, we hear scary statistics that “prove” California will
become part of Mexico by the sheer fact of immigration. On the
other, we are told that either nothing much is changing, or that
what alterations are occurring in the fabric of our social life are all
positive. The truth, as always, is in between: California is passing