MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

94

MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

95

performance at making money, not his class, parentage, race or
religion.

If you wanted to retire, relax and be accorded status and priv-

ilege for being older, refined and male, then Mexico just might be a
better place than America. But if you were Irish, Japanese, Korean,
African-American, Indian, Muslim or Jehovah’s Witness, and
wished to work and get rich, then you’d do far better in America.
Any who disagree can ask themselves: how many millions of these
have flocked to Mexico, then or now?

The schools, without self-doubt, often rudely and with little

apology, dealt head-on with the contradiction that plagues every
immigrant to America. Lost in an entirely new world that initially
either ignores, oppresses, or discriminates against him, he naturally
tends to romanticize the distant culture that pushed him into exile
in the first place. I do not know whether my early teachers were
conscious of such human subtleties, or aware that an excess of def-
erence can encourage disdain rather than gratitude, that newfound
affluence can create envy, and that every majority culture—even
one that has recently arrived from Mexico and established an eth-
nic enclave in a small rural California town—tends to ostracize a
minority. Yet these were problems and paradoxes that our instruc-
tors sought to resolve one way or another. They seemed to know
that the Mexican immigrant could and should retain a pride in his
ethnic heritage—to be expressed in music, dance, art, literature,
religion and cuisine only—while being mature enough to see that
the core political, economic and social values of his abandoned
country were to be properly and rapidly forgotten. In my home-
town the idea was to turn Mexicans into Selmans. And yet, in
accomplishing this delicate task, our grammar school teachers of
the 1950s and 1960s, most with degrees from normal schools in
Texas and Oklahoma, knew far better the fundamental differences
between a flourishing multiracial society and a failed and fractious
multicultural quagmire than do our present Ph.D.s from Stanford
and Berkeley.