MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

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MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

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we are becoming. People from the rest of the country look at the
eerie, fascinating thing that California is becoming, and they won-
der about their own destiny.

I once thought Santiago and his children were going to

become like us, but now I am not so sure. Instead, I think our
state is becoming more like the Laras—or at least like something
in between. In my small hometown of Selma in the middle of
California’s Central Valley, more people now speak Santiago’s lan-
guage than my own. The city’s schools are more segregated than
when I attended them forty years ago and their scholastic achieve-
ment is far lower. There are now more overt signs of material
wealth among Selmans—new cars, cell phones, CD players, VCRs,
color televisions—but also much more anger that “aliens,” even if
their fortunes have greatly improved in the United States, remain
still poorer than the native-born. At the corner store there are more
signs in Spanish than in English. And the government-subsidized
apartment building two miles away is full of small children, baby
carriages and young pregnant women—all evidence that someone
at least still thinks big families are good in a world where many
childless natives deem them bad.

So are we now a Mexifornia, Calexico, Aztlán, El Norte, Alta

California, or just plain California with new faces and the same
old customs? Many of us think about this in the abstract. Charles
Truxillo, a Chicano studies professor at the University of New
Mexico, for example, promises that some day we will all be part
of a new sovereign Hispanic nation called “Republica del Norte”
encompassing the entire Southwest. “An inevitability,” Truxillo
calls it, and it will obtain its sovereignty, he warns, “by any means
necessary” as “our birthright.”

What is the nature of California, traditionally the early warn-

ing sign to the rest of the nation, and what will be its eventual state
of being? After September 11, 2001, the question of secure bor-
ders and a unified citizenry no longer stands afar in the future or
remains a parlor game of academics and intellectuals, but is a mat-