of the future which in the course of human things must resemble
if it does not reflect it”).

But immigration concerns me in yet another way: not just

as a native or as a historian, but also as a teacher whose students
increasingly come mostly from Mexico. For two decades I have
driven up daily to the college campus at Fresno to teach persons,
not “peoples,” and so have seen that assimilation is still possible
during the current immigration onslaught—if we forget group
causes and the rhetoric of the multicultural industry, and simply
concentrate on providing interested students with opportunities
that match their often ignored aptitudes.

Mentors tend to claim primacy for their own disciplines—

physicists swear that science will alone save us; educationists know
that the nature of man is subject to improvement given the right
pedagogical method; classicists insist that knowledge of philol-
ogy, history and literature produces a singularly educated citizen.
As one who teaches Latin and Greek to classes including many
immigrants from Mexico, I have observed remarkable transforma-
tions in these immigrants that were as wonderful to me as they
may have been problematic to many of my more “progressive”
colleagues in the social sciences. Illegal aliens and Mexican resi-
dents who learned Latin, who came to speak perfect English, who
were intimate with Roman consuls and the tragedy of Antigone
tended to become proud American-Mexicans rather than unsure
and troubled Mexicans, finding self-esteem in accomplishment
rather than in therapeutic rhetoric. (I’m sure that the same is true
for those who mastered quantum mechanics and any of the other
solid disciplines.) Arturo, Gil, Jorge, Frank, Hortensia and dozens
of others—the more they read Cicero and explored the beauty and
paradoxes of Western civilization, the more they became prized
and recruited candidates for graduate school, federal employment
and corporate jobs—and the more often they told me about how
their self-appointed ethnic caretakers in the university became dis-
turbed at their evolution into something quite beyond the need for

MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

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