MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

12

Introduction

I

WRITE

HERE

FROM

THE

PERSPECTIVE

of a farmer whose

social world has changed so radically, so quickly that it
no longer exists. Three decades ago my hometown of
Selma was still a sleepy little town in central California,

halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, between the coast
and the high Sierra. It was a close-knit community of seven thou-
sand or so mostly hardscrabble agrarians whose parents or grand-
parents had once immigrated from Denmark, Sweden, Armenia,
Japan, India, Mexico and almost every other country in the world,
to farm some of the richest soil in the world. Selma’s economy
used to be sustained by agriculture—in the glory years before the
advent of low prices caused by globalization, vertically integrated
corporations and highly productive high-tech agribusiness—and
supplemented by commuters who worked in nearby Fresno. The air
was clear enough that you could see the lower Sierra Nevada, forty
miles away, about half the year on average, not a mere four or five
days following a big storm, as is now the case.

Sociologists call a small, cohesive town like the old Selma a

“face-to-face community.” As a small boy I used to dread being
stopped and greeted by ten or so nosy Selmans every time I entered
town. Now I wish I actually knew someone among the many I see.

The offspring of Selma’s immigrant farmers learned English,

they intermarried, and within a generation they knew nothing
of the old country and little of the old language. Now Selma is
an edge city on the freeway of somewhere near twenty thousand
anonymous souls, and is expanding at an unchecked pace, almost
entirely because of massive and mostly illegal immigration from
a single country: Mexico. Because my great-great-grandmother
arrived to carve out our present farm from desert in the 1870s,
before Selma existed, and my children are the sixth successive gen-
eration to live in the house that she built, I was deeply attached to
the old town, now vanished. It was by no means perfect, but it was

MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

13