Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Davis Hanson Read Free Book Online

likely to ponder the present and the future than to live in the past. I suppose "Don't get mad, get even" was thematic among these other victims of American racism and oppression. In my hometown of Selma, Armenians were zoned out of particular neighborhoods in the 1920s and were refused entry to the municipal swimming pool. Yet in two generations their capital and influence ensured that their homes and their private pools were the town's largest and most envied.
    No Armenian today, despite skin color with a higher melanin content than that of the average white, claims to be "a person of color." Most Japanese do not either. "A person of color" does not necessarily mean that someone is, in fact, "colored" in any real sense; the term is largely absent among communities of dark Punjabis, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians and a host of brown and olive peoples. Instead, the nomenclature advertises that the self-described minority has deliberately defined himself in opposition to whatever "white" culture is - either out of real pride, justified anger, petty hurt, racial hatred or simple crass opportunism. And in a state rapidly growing more multiracial, we will soon need racial rubrics like those of the old Confederacy, backed by new-age genetic tracking, to figure out who exactly is "a person of color" - one-third, one-half or one-sixteenth nonwhite blood?
    In any case, money has always eventually trumped race in America. The truism that race matters above all is forgotten when people of color earn more or become better educated than white people, but it returns with a vengeance when they remain isolated, poor and dependent. For all our boutique hatred of the moneyed classes, we accept that American plutocracy is a far more fluid system of opportunity than entrenched European or Asian hierarchies of class, color, ancestry and education. In sum, that racism has been a factor in the Mexican experience is indisputable; that in the present world of integration, intermarriage and government subsidy it still largely explains the disappointment and failure of millions of aliens is false.
    Few observers of the immigration fiasco wish to talk honestly about the complex nature of Mexican society and the interplay there between race and poverty. Forget that the country is as poor as India and as chaotic as Zimbabwe, and far closer to us than either. There is something about the Mexican government that lies at the heart of the immigration mess - especially its passive-aggressive attitude toward the United States and its intellectually dishonest approach to the immigration problem.
    Overlook for a moment that Mexico has never had any real history of sustained legitimate government, and only recently has taken the first steps in creating a multiparty system with free elections, an independent judiciary and an open media. And that its professed worries about its own citizens coming north to be exploited by American agribusiness resulted in a transitory policy of containment that was never really enforced and was largely ignored. Instead, the key to understanding Mexico's perplexing attitude toward America is simply found in Thucydidean exegesis: it is a proud state that was invaded twice by the United States and defeated, losing a great amount of its own territory - land which then thrived due to the very fact of its separation from Mexico. Those realities are not forgotten by Mexico. Japan might be defeated and humiliated by the United States, have its citizens in America incarcerated, its leaders hung and jailed, and its entire culture altered by American fiat - and then build an economic powerhouse to compete with and rival its former conqueror, all without constant tutorials about the evils of Okinawa. But Mexico seeks salve for its self-inflicted wounds in the history of a century past, rather than embrace honestly its own failures in the present.
    The Irish government perhaps once regretted, but still accepted that its population had to leave or