Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (23 page)

Under such a logical continuation of present policy, Spanish, de facto, becomes coequal with English; poverty becomes endemic; the federal and state governments replace the impoverished municipality as the salvation of last resort; schools erode; crime soars; and there seems to be little cultural opportunity for integration and Americanization. Many of those mired in these communities soon attempt to migrate to more integrated towns, as if it is not enough to make it across the border, but rather, real opportunity requires reaching towns that are not essentially simulacra of those found back in the Old Country - a pattern similar to other immigrant experiences from the very beginning of our history.

The Central Valley town of Parlier or Mendota could be the model for large parts of
California
if immigration remains unchecked. In that case, legal and illegal status becomes increasingly irrelevant for the basics of public life - college tuition, driver's licenses, welfare eligibility and perhaps soon even voting privileges. In the bilingualism that emerges, a new argot of Spanglish, neither Spanish nor English, is mastered as a language to be read and written with little real facility, while waves of newcomers, whether literate or not, demand or at least expect Spanish-only businesses and social services. Provocateurs in the race industry, government, and academia all rise up to meet the emerging opportunities offered by balkanization, giving ideological and political support to the idea of a true postmodern society without borders.

The performance of
California
schools sinks from the current dismal rank of 46th in the nation to dead last. Whites and Asians become increasingly bitter about having to accommodate their culture to millions of aliens, and African-Americans resent the erosion of entry-level wages and the gradual evolution of general racial preferences into more or less Hispanic and bilingual preferences. The state continues to run enormous deficits - perhaps twice the current annual $34 billion of red ink - as its budget doubles the present $100 billion in efforts to provide health care, remedial college courses, special tutoring, more law enforcement, widespread Spanish translation, and expanded prisons to meet the challenges of millions who continue to arrive illegally from Mexico.

So how would this new Mexifornia develop, if it takes root? I fear it would turn into an apartheid state that even the universal solvent of popular culture could not unite: an entrenched though shrinking white and Asian middle and upper class; a buffer group of assimilated and intermarried Mexican-Americans, whites and blacks; and dwarfing both of these, a large, unassimilated and constantly growing younger cohort of Mexicans, at odds with inner-city African-Americans. The California of today - the state with the highest number of Nobel Prize winners living amidst the highest rates of English illiteracy in the general American population - would morph into a new California without the Nobel laureates.

In such a future, the unskilled labor of illegal aliens fails to ensure a middle-class existence, but fuels the resentment to demand more government services and American privileges of the type that Mexicans south of the border could never envision. Our multicultural state would have the veneer of a new alternate identity; but in fact, it would combine the worst attributes of
both nations
, a dumbing-down of both languages, and radical and scary American individualism shorn of both the Anglo-Saxon-inspired allegiance to the letter of the law, and traditional Mexican familial and religious bedrock values. The law as we know it - in matters of citizenship, voting, legal status, driving and liability – would matter little, ignored when it proved inconvenient, turned to only in extremis.

Others look at California and see the nation's richest agricultural production, the embryo of the entire semiconductor and computer industries, Hollywood, favored tourist getaways, ideal weather, the infrastructure of a once great university system, oil, minerals and timber, key military bases and plants, busy ports -
 
and America's most indebted state government amid social chaos. It is as if the wealthier our natural bounty and the richer the inheritance from our hardworking and creative forefathers, the greater the failure of the present generation that took so much and seems to be leaving so little.

What kind of fate do we want? In more placid times, this could be an academic question. But today we are at war with those who desire to kill us all, whatever the group we claim to belong to. The scab of our carelessness and inattention has been torn away, showing that the wound of separatism and ethnic conflict needs immediate care, lest it fester into disunity and thus weaken us when the stakes are so high. Yet there is some hope for salvation from the nightmare. Why? Because we got into our present mess only during the last thirty years and then only by doing almost everything wrong. To recover our state, our region and ultimately our nation, we still need not do everything right.