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 1970—and changed profoundly.

True, the two decades of Mexican revolution between 1910

MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

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