Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (6 page)

At the heart of the problem with Mexico are class, race, politics and economics. Simply put, Mexican elites rely on immigration northward as a means of avoiding domestic reform. Market capitalism, constitutional government, the creation of a middle-class ethic or an independent judiciary will never fully come to Mexico as long as its potential critics go north instead of marching for a redress of grievances on the suited bureaucrats in Mexico City.

Supporters of financial bailouts and unrestricted immigration perhaps err when they claim that such engagement is necessary to prevent a Mexican catastrophe. Unfortunately, the opposite is more likely to be true: there is always catastrophe in Mexico, and our complicity - in addition to protecting American investment
in
 
Mexico - postpones
 
an
 
evolution
 
in Mexican society
that could finally force a rapacious aristocracy to the table for needed concessions.

Reform and transparency in Mexico are stalled - understandably, since every day's delay means more flight by the oppressed, not progress for the beleaguered who remain behind. One can imagine the state of politics in America should the nation's unemployed, uninsured and insecure decide to walk across the border to Canada by the millions each year: our reactionaries would have little to fear from the less affluent who stay, and our reformers would have little constituency. (Liberal Canadians, who now preen about their generally open immigration policies, would quickly fortify their border if thousands of starving and illiterate Americans began to pour into Toronto or Montreal every month to receive Canadian entitlements.)

To restructure the economy of Mexico, democratize the political system and legalize the courts would be to empower the Indians of the rural and mountainous hinterland, and thereby keep millions of them home as a vocal force for further change, rather than push millions and their problems northward. "Safety valve" is an inadequate term to indicate how useful a mass outflow of the poorest is for the Mexican status quo. This, after all, is a society sitting on a demographic time bomb of almost 100 million with a population growth rate of 2 percent per annum - and no feasible way of providing jobs, health care, social justice or personal safety to a nation half of which will soon be under the age of twenty-five. Without the
promised land
to the north, there might well loom either political revolution or African-style famine and plague.

The Mexican government's rationale - can we not detect its pernicious legacy also here in
California
? - is that the Yanquis and gringos once invaded the country, stole the land and rigged the border to harm permanently the Mexican people, who, through no fault of their own, are now crowded into too little space and find themselves oppressed by el Norte and the evil Anglos. The legacy of autocracy, a corrupt legal system, tribalism, statism, endemic racism,
poor
education, an absence of family planning, the lack of religious diversity and a nationalism of bad faith are rarely mentioned in Mexicans' inventory of the causes for the massive pell-mell flight of its citizens northward.

No wonder the Mexican government so often slanders us, alleging unprovoked hostility in our rather pathetic attempts to plug the border with wire, steel and concrete as well as overworked and much-maligned border guards. Some pundits in Mexico City like to compare our feckless efforts at keeping Mexicans out to the Berlin Wall and other old communist partitions designed to keep citizens in. Yet walls historically bring a painful honesty to problems. They brutally define the nature and the direction of human traffic. Communist fortifications were an admission that people wanted out. A fenced Hong Kong, on the other hand, was proof that nobody was dying to reach Peking. The wall currently proposed by the Israelis is anathema rather than
a godsend to Palestinians, who, it turns out, want
the freedom to enter hated Israel for work, commerce and profit - and perhaps even to secure safe transit to Brooklyn - rather than cross into a kindred Lebanon or Jordan. Closer to home, our border barricades are a painful reminder that no American wants out, but millions of Mexicans most assuredly want in to the United States - a stark truth that cuts through almost all the nonsense about immigration and race that emanates from both sides of the border.

Other advantages surely accrue to the Mexican status quo from its leaders' deliberate export of their own citizenry in staggering numbers. Most obviously, billions of much-needed foreign dollars are sent back into Mexico from its quasi citizens up north, legal and otherwise. An enormous expatriate community in America (Los Angeles is one of the largest urban concentrations of Mexicans in the world) gives Mexico leverage in its relationship with the United States, which involves billion-dollar loan guarantees and the creation of free-trade leagues - along with the apparent freedom to follow Middle Eastern oil price hikes at will. Feigned concern over its poor abroad in the United States also provides the bureaucrats in Mexico City with some camouflage of compassion and commiseration in dealing with its skeptical and neglected underclass at home. I often see the Mexican consular official in Fresno on television, for example, lecturing Americans on how inconsiderate they are to Mexicans here illegally. To my knowledge, not one interviewer has ever asked the official why they are here and not there. A Mexican government official is rightly irate when an alien has been roughed up by a
California
sheriff, but wrongly silent when dozens of campesinos on the wrong side of the border are gunned down by the Mexican police.

So there has indeed been complicity on the part of Mexico in the great migration north. And there has been a shameful and unforgivable absence of honesty on the part of our own political and academic establishment in legitimizing Mexico's venality. The Mexican government looks on the exportation of its poorest Indians as an economic issue: remittances from illegal aliens reach the billions of dollars and so prop up the Mexican government and help feed the starving who otherwise would look in vain to a nonexistent safety net at home.

There is also an element of racism involved - one oddly ignored in the race-charged debates in contemporary America. For the most part it is not light-skinned Mexicans of Spanish heritage who are coming to the United States, but rather the poorest and brownest, largely Indian - and this apparently suits an elite in Mexico City that does not wish to explain why the whiter people of Mexico are better off than those who are browner. Indeed, if one were studiously to watch any of the Spanish-language television stations - whether owned and operated by Mexican nationals or by Mexican-Americans - one would surmise that surely the Ku Klux Klan had a hand in the programming. Most are either white or coated with white pancake makeup; nearly every prominent woman is a dyed blonde; every privileged host and hostess is about as Anglo-looking as can be. Yet all the characters
who
are subservient - taxi drivers, maids, gardeners, "the help" - resemble the hundreds of thousands of darker-skinned people who risk their lives to enter the United States illegally.

I have met wealthy elites, academics and journalists from Mexico City who privately laugh that they are exporting their Indians and Mestizos, their unwanted, into the United States. Their smile disappears when I reply that we instead figure what they suppose to be riffraff are the real cream of Mexican society: frontiersmen and women whose endurance and courage are good prerequisites for Americanization, and who in fact are superior people to those who oppress them at home. So while the powers in Mexico City regard departure as good politics - a valve of sorts that releases dangerous pressures rather than allow explosions of the type that occurred in the country's earlier checkered history
-
 
in
an odd way the joke ultimately is on them. Within twenty years the poor, brown Indian alien could enjoy a material existence in America superior to that of the upper-class white Mexican in Mexico City.

Bill
  
Reverse Chauvinism

There are also other themes that explain the Mexican government's peculiar rationale for sending millions of its own citizens out of the country. Surely an element of pique is involved. Mexico, whose vast natural resources of fertile land, oil and minerals have not resulted in the bounty of a similarly endowed
California
, realizes that it is not its land or people, but its culture that holds the country back. Out of envy or spite, there are many in Mexico who experience schadenfreude at the problems that arise when the continent's poorest and mostly illiterate head north to perplex the richest and most sophisticated. If America once invaded Mexico and hurt its pride, Mexico has now invaded America - but with millions rather than thousands, and as an occupying force that plans to stay. Anytime great wealth is juxtaposed to abject failure - the former
Berlin
, Hong Kong and communist China, the Koreas, Israel and the West Bank, southern Europe and northern Africa are good examples - sparks can fly. And Mexico is Catholic, America mostly Protestant or secular. The former believes fate is set at birth, the latter that man earns his condition mostly here on earth. All this and more contributes to making Mexico a special case. But there is a final consideration on America's part that has also made Mexico singular.

In the last twenty years we have seen a disingenuous new motto, "the borders crossed us, not we the borders," proclaimed by Mexicans both in
California
and in Mexico - or as Professor Truxillo of the
University
of
New Mexico
put it, "Southwest Chicanos and Norteno Mexicanos are becoming one people again." Note the key word again, and his care to say "Southwest Chicanos" rather than "Southwest Americans."

But we should remember that as recently as 1970 there were only 800,000 Mexican citizen immigrants in the United States. Remember that when the United States stole
California
there were fewer than 10,000 Mexicans living in a vast uninhabited area, one that itself had been stolen from Spam, which in turn had stolen it from the Indians. And recall that the parents or grandparents of 95 percent of
California
's current adult Mexicans were born in Mexico. The murky idea behind "the borders crossed us" is that the vast American Southwest was once part of a heavily populated Hispanic kingdom, nation or hegemony -
 
use whatever term you will - and today, slowly, through the agency of peaceful and inevitable historical change is righteously reverting to its former and proper status. Look at a Chicano studies text and you see the map of the original Nuevo
California
that includes not just the present-day state, but all of
Nevada
,
Arizona
,
Utah
, parts of
New Mexico
,
Colorado
and even southern
Wyoming
! -
as
if there were once thousands of prosperous Mexicans plying their culture in a vast Hispanic American North.

A recent Zogby poll revealed that 58 percent of Mexican citizens believe that "the territory of the United States'
Southwest
rightfully belongs to Mexico." In contrast, the same poll showed that 68 percent of Americans want the U.S. military deployed on the border to keep illegal aliens out. Thucydides would conclude that with contrasting attitudes like that, you have the ingredients for a war of some sort - if not waged conventionally, then perhaps demographically.

Few in Mexico who entertain the zany irredentist vision of Nuevo California think such a process out carefully, and do not quite know what the eventual condition of the border zone between us will be - a greater Mexico, a simple assimilation of millions of brown gringos, or a new intermediary state of Mexifornia, with affinities to both countries and full allegiance to neither. It is common to hear those millions who come here slander Mexico to their new
neighbors - which is
logical, given their brutal treatment and low expectations back there; but just as frequently, nostalgia and romance gradually take over and make Mexico more attractive as it grows more distant. Thus to the Mexican government, the presence of millions of its nationals in the world's wealthiest country next door surely has more positive than negative consequences. Its expatriates naturally will at first lobby for concessions on everything from immigration to NAFTA, and ultimately, in theory, staff the government of
California
with Spanish-speaking officials sympathetic to close ties with Mexico City. Yet the lesson remains: Mexico is likable only from a safe distance.

Mexico
's entire image has changed in our schools and popular culture. We went without a blink from racist pictures of a sleepy, mustachioed man in sombrero and poncho under a tree in the pueblo's plaza, to the other extreme of students dressed in Aztec costumes talking about Mexican law codes in the university free speech area. The former was cruel and insensitive, but at least it gave the immigrant a negative push to assimilate into the culture of his new land; the latter is comically ahistorical and ensures separatism and hence failure.

Instead of growing more distant, this newly romanticized Mexico of primal force and natural virtue has made strong claims on the heart of the new arrival, and thus has been ever more deleterious to his odyssey of becoming an American. Mexicans here can vote for candidates there. They see contenders for the presidency of Mexico campaigning in their American barrios.
So
even as they remain permanent residents of America, they continue to be civic participants of Mexico in absentia. Once they are free from their oppressive government, they reinvent Mexico as a nurturing landscape that obliterates the kleptocracy it actually is. The past corruption of politics and economics is forgotten in more hospitable surroundings, replaced by the romance of a distant culture. In a world where "all cultures are equal" and where racism, corruption and murder in the Third World are judged by a standard different from the West, too many Mexican authorities are not seen for what they often are: apparatchiks and gangsters, operating without the rule of law, who drive millions of their best and most intrepid citizens away. Mass kidnappings, endemic police-inspired murder, and rampant human-induced disasters at home seem to make far less impression on immigrants than the failure of
California
to provide driver's licenses to illegal aliens or to honor cards provided by the Mexican government as valid IDs. In short, Mexico, the exporter of human cargo, presents an especially difficult and understated problem in the present immigration quagmire: They not only send us their surplus people; they export to us their own national confusion and conflicted self-image as well.