Do
We Really Want to Become Mexico Norte?
By Chilton Williamson, Jr.
iants
sleep deeper than little people. Their sense of hearing
is much less acute, their vision far more near-sighted.
Alexander Hamilton called the public "a great beast."
Whether bestial in its nature or not, the American public
indeed is a giant that has slept very soundly, drugged with
superfluity and trivia, for the past few decades. And so
it failed to register even the most threatening voices that
were caught and heeded by individual listeners, who found
themselves in turn unable to waken the giant. Here are some
of those voices it missed hearing in its slumbers.
"We
are practicing 'La Reconquista' in California," (José
Pescador Osuna, a Mexican Consul General.) "Remember
187-proposition to deny taxpayer funds for services to illegal
immigrants-was the last gasp of white America in California"
(Art Torres, Chairman of the California Democratic Party).
"California is going to be a Hispanic state. Anyone
who doesn't like it should leave" (Mario Obledo, from
the California Coalition of Hispanic Organizations and formerly
State Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare). "They're
afraid we're going to take over the governmental institutions
and other institutions. They're right. We will take them
over….We are here to stay" (Richard Alatorre,
a member of the Los Angeles City Council). "We have
an aging white America. They are not making babies. They
are dying. The explosion is in our population….I love
it. They are s---g in their pants with fear. I love it"
(Prof. José Angel Gutierrez, of the University of
Texas). "We are politicizing every single one of these
new citizens that are becoming citizens of this country….I
gotta tell you that a lot of our people are saying, 'I'm
going to go out there and vote because I want to pay them
back'" (Gloria Molina, Los Angeles County Supervisor).
"Go back to Boston! Go back to Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims!
Get out! We are the future. You are old and tired. Go on.
We have beaten you. Leave like beaten rats. You old white
people. It is your duty to die….Through love of having
children, we are going to take over" (Augustín
Cebada of the Brown Berets).
What
the giant did hear-in its sleep at first, before it wakened
at last-was the collective roar issuing from several million
pairs of lungs belonging to some of the estimated eleven
to eighteen million illegal immigrants marching for the
stated purpose of intimidating the beast's keepers in Washington,
D.C., in the calculated risk of rousing the beast itself.
Whether or not the immigrants succeeded in their principal
endeavor, the gamble they took in respect of the risk turned
out to have been a losing one. Since the first demonstrations
in April, the United States has been awash in anti-illegal
immigrant sentiment, a significant proportion of it extending
to simple anti-immigrant feeling as well. So extensive has
what the media call the "backlash" been that even
journalists have felt compelled to take notice of it, albeit
in the sniffish tones in which liberals discuss every form
of social pathology. The question remains whether the giant
has awakened in time to save itself, and rescue the institutions
it created and by which it has lived for nearly four centuries
already.
Over
the past several weeks, rebellion has broken out against
the unofficial policy of open borders conducted for the
past forty years by American officialdom at every level,
accompanied by an attitude of defiance toward the criminal
alien population itself. In the U.S. House of Representatives,
in state and local government, and among citizens' organizations-some
newly formed, others freshly galvanized - opposition to
illegal immigration has gathered almost out of the air,
like thunderheads on a hot summer day. Congressional caucuses
aroused, hundreds of bills drafted in state houses across
the country, counter-demonstrations, militias, posses, citizens'
petitions and personal letters to American officials from
the President of the United States on down, a furious internet
traffic and exchange….All these attest to the fact
that immigration, dismissed for decades by cynical politicians
as an issue of secondary and tertiary importance even for
the large majority (85 percent and upwards) of the country
that wants to see substantially fewer, rather than more,
immigrants around, has now become the primary political
issue for Washington. For the last twenty years, the Federal
government has effectively ignored immigration, to its peril.
Now, the Senate and a portion of the House hopes to fudge
it as well. If they succeed in doing so, it will be more
to their peril still-as they would be assured of discovering
in another twenty years, when a third amnesty for (30, 40
million?) illegal aliens is up on the Congressional docket.
Because this is a matter that in reality, as opposed to
politics, cannot be fudged; in which some (the American
majority) must be winners and others (the aliens) losers,
or else all must in time become losers together.
There
is no possibility, of course, of the Mexican triumphalism
expressed by our Mexican-"American" spokespersons
ever being realized, though the best they can plausibly
hope for-Reconquista achieved by the reluctant cession of
at least certain of the Southwestern states to Mexico-would,
one would think, be triumph enough. Alarming as the demographic
figures (and, worse, the projections) are, only Third World
mathematics could suggest that 12.5 percent of the U.S.
population, even when augmented by 11-18 million legalized
Mexicans and their descendents, is sufficient to "take
over government institutions and other institutions"
across the nation, let alone compel Americans to flee their
country "like beaten rats." (If Mexicans in El
Norte do not really believe their own braggadocio, they
should be actively encouraged to do so, no other attitude
being nearly so dangerous to their future in the U.S. as
this one is.) More certain still, however, is that a Mexican
takeover of America would be as much a defeat for the Mexicans'
interests as it would be for the European-American population.
(Alas for the mass of the Mexican people, an education in
the doings and sayings of dead white people is required
to understand the meaning of the phrase "Pyrrhic victory.")
Reconquista,
though it would be a welcome byblow of migration, a satisfactory
act of revenge, and a gratification of Mexican national
pride, is not the principal reason why millions of Mexicans
have chosen to emigrate to the United States. They come
in order to escape a dysfunctional society, and their society
is dysfunctional because they, as social, political, and
entrepreneurial beings, are dysfunctional themselves. While
they are indeed capable of hard work and the discipline
work entails, even as workers they can prosper as a people
only within the institutional framework of a Western society
such as the United States that has created that framework
and holds it together under direction by Westerners. It
is one thing to earn living wages as a landscaping grunt,
another to establish and manage a landscape business onself.
Beyond that, the role of a successful business man entails
more than just making money: His work, whose future depends
heavily upon the political milieu, has a civic dimension
in addition to the economic one, a dimension that overlaps
his social and, finally, his personal existence as well.
This is to say, his life in its economic aspect is a part
of his cultural existence. And culture is the largest and
most significant portion of his inheritance, and that of
his inheritors.
Mexican
and American culture are not simply incompatible, they are
fundamentally opposed to one another, which is one reason
why the history of Mexican-American relations has been so
troubled. What we call "Mexicans" are predominantly
Indians, both in overall numbers and in genetics, descendants
of the Aztecs, Toltecs, and many other tribes, whose blood
is merely tinctured by the Spanish inheritance. Granting
amnesty to the highest estimated number of illegal Mexicans
would be to add 18 million to the previously nationalized
population of Hispanic-Latino descent amounting to 37.5
million people, for a total of 55.5 million. Fifty-five
million Latin-American Indians in the U.S. is not so very
different from an equal number of Apache or Comanche Indians
in our midst. Anyone who thinks the social and political
traditions of mestizo Mexico are compatible with those of
America should read up on Mexican history, in particular
that especially violent chapter having to do with the Mexican
Civil War, beginning in 1910 with the overthrow of President
Díaz and ending, effectively, with the assassination
of President Obregón in 1928. In a mestizo America,
presidential contests would be decided not by ballots but
with guns, and President George W. Bush's distant successor,
rather than being put out to pasture on a few hundred grand
per year after leaving office, would be bayoneted in both
eyes by his rival and jeered by soldiers as he staggered
blindly about the Oval Office (the fate that befell President
Madero in 1913).
Such,
indeed, seems to be the vision of Augustín Cebada
of the Brown Berets and - who knows? - perhaps it will come
to pass after all. Meanwhile, SeZor Cebada should consider
whether degrading his prosperous American refuge of Los
Angeles into the high-rise equivalent of Ciudad México
is really in his own best interest or that of his compatriots,
while President Bush needs to contemplate his treatment
in the history books. When all of Mexico follows Cebada
to the United States, and the U.S. itself is transformed
as México Norte, there are no winners, on either
side of the border. Only losers all around.
