Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (17 page)

The catalogue of courses from any
California
university reveals the intellectual world that immigrants and their children can be press-ganged into. There are dozens of classes on Chicano pride, but scarcely any on the seminal events of American history. Recently I was looking at the list of classes from the
University
of
California
at Santa Barbara for the academic year 2001-2002. Sixty-two different courses were listed under "Chicano Studies," among them Introduction to Chicano Spanish; Methodology of the Oppressed; Barrio Popular Culture; Body, Culture, and Power; Chicana Feminism; History of the Chicano; History of the Chicano Movement; History of Chicano and Chicana Workers; Racism in American History; Chicano Political Organizing; Chicana Writers; De-colonizing Cyber-Cinema; Dance of the Chicanos; and dozens more. The history department offerings included thirteen similar courses on Latino and Chicano issues, in addition to more generic classes on race and oppression. But the entire catalogue had only one class on the Civil War per se, "Civil War and Reconstruction." There were no real courses dedicated to either the Revolutionary War or World War II.

What is truly fascinating about the ethnic pride courses is that there has been no evolution in the subject matter over the three decades that such courses have been taught - even though there is now a growing third generation of one-quarter, one-half and full Hispanics who speak no Spanish and have never been to Mexico. Racism and oppression were de rigueur in the early 1970s, when racial studies departments and professorships were forced upon timid administrators. But why should racism and oppression remain as unchanged themes thirty years later, when Mexicans are no longer a minority of less than a million, but the largest ethnic group in the state of
California
and the largest minority in the nation? Could we not go down from sixty-two courses to perhaps ten? Aging La Raza professors, who drive their SUVs in from the suburbs and send their kids to UCLA and
Berkeley,
continue in some time warp to denigrate a system that has given them and their families so much.

The theory behind such a curriculum, of course, is that someone without competitive educational skills in English, the sciences and history might come to UC Santa Barbara or UC Davis and there regain a lost sense of self-esteem through "Methodology of the Oppressed." Or that armed with theoretical grievances, this student might be able to spot how the
University
of
California
- a metaphor for the wider world - in some ways sought to disenfranchise or otherwise exploit the Chicano student. Meanwhile, "white" students can also take such courses as a form of masochism to discover why they must become religiously devoted to bilingual education and affirmative action, and must make various sorts of reparation for past inequities - their contribution toward legitimizing the very race industry that offers such therapeutic courses in the first place.

Such institutionalized therapy is the sad legacy of the Movimiento - the great upheaval of the 1960s in which Mexican-American intellectual elites sought redress of past racism and stereotyping by the mandate of a pure racial identity and grand talk of ethnic separatism. The wages of this original sin are with us still - the idea that so-called Chicanos can find parity with whites only through government coercion, income redistribution and racial chauvinism, rather than by the very hard work of traditional education that once ensured that Mexican kids spoke perfect English, knew as much about math and science as members of any other ethnic group, and expected to find status and respect by becoming educated and prosperous.

In the pursuit of fashionable partial truths, the Truth was lost. Yes, most immigrants to the United States, not just Mexicans, were discriminated against. European Jews, the Irish, African slaves, the Japanese all had equal or worse horror stories. Millions of Mexicans, nevertheless, at great risk came to America rather than stay in Mexico because, like these other groups, they wanted a better life, and knew that millions of others under similar duress had achieved it. Because they slice history and culture so crookedly and because they are unable to deal with complex issues, poorly educated and politically biased intellectuals have tangled the entire Mexican immigrant community in a paradox: if America were so discriminatory and racist, and Mexico for its part such a wonderful society, why would any Mexican in this day of easy information flow ever come north to such a certified hell-hole?

Does anyone doubt that a resident alien from Mexico in her first year of college, should she enroll in Latin, classical studies and European history courses, might gain more knowledge of Americas heritage and learn the basics of grammar and syntax in ways impossible in "Chicano Body, Culture, and Power"? Or better yet, would not a classics major of Mexican heritage gain more self-esteem through real achievement and mastery of literature than by picking up clichés and slogans from the 1960s recycled in today's "postcolonial" history classes?

If "white" California is to be blamed for anything, it is for creating fiefdoms for hundreds of professors in the race business to fabricate classes and methods of instruction that impart almost none of the useful cultural information desperately needed by an alien seeking to prosper in America. If there is truly a lingering racism in
California
, then one need go no further than the state universities, where so much money and power has been handed over to an elite class of racialists who in return have created a curriculum designed to guarantee failure for the children of migrants. The victim in all this really is the Chicano student - but the oppressor is his cynical university advocate, who uses him to advance an agenda that ensures only a comfortable academic existence, not a greater likelihood of completing college. So far, not one study has shown how a La Raza studies department has affected the tragedy that between 30 and 40 percent of all Hispanics won't graduate from high school. But the one thing that young Mexican-Americans, so woefully denied access to knowledge about much else, do learn is the nomenclature of the race industry and how to classify and reclassify themselves according to the label of the day: Hispanic, Latino, Chicano/Chicana, Mexicano, Mexican, Mexican-American, Mestizo, Latin American, Nuevomexicano, Californio, Tejano, and on and on.

Names change, programs come and go, but what
stays
constant is the same dismal graduation rates and thus the same overrepresentation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in our jails, prisons and welfare programs. I have a fantasy that somewhere in some secretive laboratory in Montana a white supremacist and a crackpot racist got together, brewed the germs of our present school curriculum, concocted the virus of the La Raza separatist and racist mythology, and then released these pathogens by night in aerosol form to be inhaled by unsuspecting Californians, who then proceeded unknowingly to destroy the aspirations of millions of desperately poor aliens.

Acting under the psychosis caused by such intellectual germ warfare, we institutionalized an easy bilingual education rather than implemented an intensive program of English instruction for immigrants. In the current atmosphere of relativism, who is to say, after all, that any nation needs a common language? Or that speaking grammatically and writing clearly, in English or even in Spanish, constitute education - especially when this age-old education comes at the expense of an indigenous language and culture, and thus purportedly threatens the self-esteem of a future doctor or lawyer of color?

The fervent advocacy of bilingual education on the part of Latino elites has been a baffling development. Determined that the burgeoning population of young Mexican-Americans will not go the way of other minority groups and eventually lose both their native language and their ethnic identity, they press ever forward with an agenda that deprives these immigrants of the fluency and expertise in English that the past assimilationist and immersionist models insisted upon. After thirty years of such agitation, and with ample proof that California's recent ending of most bilingualism in its schools has raised Latino test scores, it is now legitimate to question the very motives of some in the La Raza movement: do they wish the best for the children of aliens who are poor, or continued spoils for themselves who are affluent?

Again, we butt up against a tragic paradox: the young Chicano who visits the emergency room does not want to be treated by a doctor who cannot read and understand the rather complex directions on a vial of lifesaving antibiotic that are likely to be printed only in English. He hopes that his surgeon also understands English perfectly and grasps intricate printed warnings about the fatal interactions between various medicines. He expects - no, demands - that his Hispanic nurse be able to communicate effortlessly with the supervising physician in English as she measures out potentially deadly antitoxins. Even a Chicano-Latino professor, should he need kidney surgery, would probably confess that he hopes his urologist was an undergraduate biology or history major rather than the possessor of a Chicano studies degree.

Instead of offering immigrants the chance to strive for commonly recognized excellence, we tell them that the cultures they came from are all inherently equal - almost so as to deny the very reasons why these aliens arrived here in the first place. This message is cynical at its core, for we know that some other cultures and nations have been not merely different, but often far worse at providing freedom and security for their people. But to maintain the fiction of cultural equality, our schools, while harrowing up the evil in the soil of America, have waffled on the fifty million or more killed by Mao and Stalin, the existence of slavery in contemporary Sudan, and the rampant corruption and lawlessness in Mexico today. In this regard, American schools have also completely failed to note the critical distinction between a multiracial and a multicultural society. The former welcomes all races to learn one language and heritage; such a society is found only in the present-day West. The latter encourages separate but purportedly equal languages and traditions, and is a prescription for disaster
-
 
as
we have seen in Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia and much of India.

Serving side dishes of therapeutic history and imagery to each racial and ethnic group, an idea hatched in the 1970s, not only erodes the basis of national unity, but also emboldens the architects of separatism to demand even more concessions from appeasers in the deans' offices and legislatures. Suddenly we had racial enclaves throughout the university, segregated "theme" houses and graduation ceremonies, the institutionalization of racist assumptions, and set-asides in university admissions. Concessions denoted weakness, which was felt to be evidence of guilt arising over past prejudice, and that, in turn, justified more present concessions.

Almost all of our university research into issues of health, the environment and crime has become astonishingly separatist, and the racially charged ideas peddled in thousands of master's and doctoral theses have trickled down into our daily papers, to be digested by the general public. In one week alone, I read in our local newspaper the following five stories:

First, a "recent study" suggested that Hispanics were forced to breathe worse air than Anglos. The method of arriving at such a finding was never discussed, but apparently we were to imagine that power plants or polluting industries were deliberately placed in barrios. Am I supposed to believe that the bad air that I and thousands of white others breathe in the Central Valley is any different from what my Mexican neighbor three hundred yards away inhales? Does toxic air simply hover in one place while people stay put to breathe it in? Does Parlier, which is 99 percent Hispanic, have dark clouds of particulate matter while five miles away the town of Reedley, which is more white than Mexican-American, enjoys clear blue skies?

The next story reported that diabetes was more common among Mexican people after they arrived in the United States than it had been in Mexico - a result of their partaking in our malignant diet. Such an unfortunate statistic may be true. But the article's author teased out a further implication: that cheap American fast food, through nefarious corporate advertising, had been foisted particularly upon people of color and was contributing in a racist fashion to their premature deaths. Nowhere in the story was there an acknowledgment that Mexicans, like everyone else, must educate themselves as to the value of fruits and vegetables, and strive to avoid Coca Cola, beer, Big Macs and fries, with Twinkies for dessert. The article gave no statistics on diabetes and obesity among poor white people - a group that seems to have been no more successful in avoiding such lethally starchy, high-fat diets. Nor did it acknowledge that such unwholesome fare, while certainly unfavorable to well-being and longevity, might be safer in the short term than many of the foods and the water in rural Mexico that are laced with bacteria and parasites.
Thus while Mexican aliens are perhaps becoming obese, they are now suffering far less from catastrophic dysenteries and malnutrition - and therefore, on the whole, living longer in America than they would in rural Mexico.

The third newspaper article, in advocating more medical interpreters for Mexican patients, alleged that local doctors on average spent far less time with Hispanics than with their white counterparts. Again, the methodology was never exactly specified. (What constituted "Hispanic" - one-quarter, one-half, three-quarters Mexican ancestry? Who and how many doctors or patients were interviewed and what were they asked?) But more importantly, the journalists did not address three or four obvious though unpleasant questions: Why should American doctors hire interpreters for patients inside America? Why does the Hispanic community not insist on more English immersion programs to ensure that the sick are able to communicate effectively and at length with their doctors? Why do not children or relatives who speak English interpret for patients instead of costly state translators? And finally, is this a distinctly American problem? Would the Mexican government worry much that Americans in Mexico did not understand Spanish - and therefore got shorter shrift from doctors - when they visited Mexican hospitals?