MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 6

MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 7

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 �śaliens,” 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, Aztl�Ąn, 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 �śRepublica del Norte”

encompassing the entire Southwest. �śAn inevitability,” Truxillo

calls it, and it will obtain its sovereignty, he warns, �śby any means

necessary” as �śour 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-