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 cultureâ€"even

one that has recently arrived from Mexico and established an eth-

nic enclave in a small rural California townâ€"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 heritageâ€"to be expressed in music, dance, art, literature,

religion and cuisine onlyâ€"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.