MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

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MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

99

The bien pensant punditry—which lives exclusively north of the
border, most often in white suburbs that are not integrated—will
rush to add that southern California and northern Mexico will
soon create their own regional civilization, perhaps even their own
language and culture. An offspring not wholly of either parent will
arise, and this Califexico, Mexifornia or Republica del Norte is not
a “bad” thing at all, but something which, if not exactly advanta-
geous, at least is inevitable.

After all, these pundits note, two thousand maquiladoras—

American corporations with Mexican workers—are expanding
along the border, creating the veneer of American popular culture
over the miasma of a Third World infrastructure. They do not
dare say publicly, but they hope privately that this new hybrid
civilization—at least its water, sewage, streets, police force, hotels,
universities, cars and banks—will resemble San Diego more than
Tijuana.

A former Mexican resident of Mendota—now a nearly

all-Mexican community on the west side of California’s Central
Valley—remarked to me recently that he finally left his town
“when the last white people left.” His unspoken, apparently racist,
message was echoed by a resident of Parlier, another nearby town
that has also become essentially all Mexican. The latter boasted to
me that he transferred all his children to nearby Kingsburg schools
where “there are lots of white people.” It would be easy to dismiss
such crudity as the false consciousness of a victim of ingrained
racism, or to suggest that such thinking is confined to a small
minority of self-hating Mexicans. (Or perhaps the more sophis-
ticated might attribute these startling confessions to affluence and
white racism that created better material conditions in Kingsburg
and ensured worse schools and social services in Parlier.)

Maybe, maybe not. As I see it, what both of these very bright,

proud, capable men instead meant was that there were simply too
many unassimilated Mexicans in Mendota and Parlier to ensure an
American future for their children, a critical mass that had made