MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 10

MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 11

follow what we have done, slowly walking the path that leads to

Mexisota, Utexico, Mexizona or even Mexichusettsâ€"a place that

is not quite Mexico and not quite America either.

Many see a poetic justice in all this, a nemesis at work that

clears the ledger of past transgressions. That at least is the attitude

of many Hispanic activists. I have read dozens of their Chicano

memoirs and scholarly studies that offer a vast compendium of

racism and white prejudice. I offer the following recollection not

to deny that such pathologies existed and were hurtful, but to sug-

gest that the story was, and is, far more complex and not nearly

so one-sided as they think. For every two ethnic slurs, there was

an instance of enlightened kindness; for every bigoted teacher,

there was someone who went out of her way to help illegal aliens;

for every purportedly grasping corporate mogul, there were small

farmers of Japanese, Armenian or western European background

who worked alongside their laborers. And as someone who for the

first six grades of school found himself part of a very tiny minor-

ity of rural whites at predominantly Mexican-American Jefferson

and Eric White Schools on the west side of Selma, California,

I remember ethnic tensions as being typically spawned by weak

people of all backgrounds, rather than a comfortably familiar

melodrama of predictable racial heroes and villains.

The people who jumped me as an eight-year-old from the

blind side were often Mexican. Those who threatened to knife

me at fourteen for no reason other than because I was white were

Mexican. And the three youths who tried to break into my home

and assault my family when I was forty were all Mexicans. But then

so were all the friends who helped me fight back in grade school;

who have lived on our farm for forty years; and who as sheriffs and

police come out to protect us today when there are problems.

I have been upset that drivers who have ruined my vineyard

were illegal aliens with false identification. But then I also suspect

that the immigration certificates of those who have harvested our

grapes at the eleventh hour, when no one else would, were coun-