"Ferocious differences"

The other day I mentioned in a blog posting how striking I found it that a fourth-grader in a local school -- a Hispanic boy, the son of Mexican immigrants who can't speak English -- stood in the presence of visitors and gave a recitation about his favorite figure from history: Santa Anna, the villain of the Alamo. It was striking to me because this first-generation Texas boy had completely inverted the founding myth of Texas. And by 2020, say the demographers, Hispanics will be the absolute majority in Texas. How will Texans of the future think about Texas, when the villains and the heroes of the Alamo are reversed?

My second thought was that Texans are already losing Texas, as it was, because of people like me. The Texas population has increased by one-third since 1990 -- and half of those newbies are immigrants (either foreign or people like me, from within the US). To me, the Alamo is a John Wayne movie. Well, that's putting it too harshly, but it's true that I don't have the sort of emotions about the Alamo that native Texans do. I didn't grow up with that story. It's not my story. It's not my history. It's a beautiful story, but only that to people like me. I recognize the Alamo's importance as a myth, but it's not a felt significance, as it is for older native Texans I meet. I wonder how important it is to Texans my age and younger. I honestly don't know.

Anyway, I was musing today on how culture is something we carry in our heads, and if we forget about it, it's pretty much gone. Cut off from place, it becomes quite difficult to maintain cultural traditions. Modern America -- which is to say post-agrarian America -- is all about mobility. We've built an economy and an entire way of life around mobility, and the rootless individual is the ideal American. It seems to me that we constantly hear immigration apologists on the left and the right say that anyone who points to significant differences between Americans and the Mexicans who are moving here en masse in the great migration from the south is some sort of racist or nativist. They're just like us, is the constant refrain, and it's insinuated, or said outright, that you're a racist or a nativist if you believe otherwise. This strikes me as exactly the kind of idiotic error that got us into this mess in Iraq -- the idea that inside the breast of every foreigner is an American, dying to come out. This is not to say that we shouldn't have immigration, certainly, but it's to say that we ought to realize that by importing millions and millions of poor people who are rather unlike modern Americans, we are going to cause a big cultural shift.

Don't take my word for it. In 1995, Jorge Castaneda, the Mexican political scientist who went on to become his country's foreign minister, wrote a long essay in The Atlantic Monthly, talking about how profoundly different Mexico was from the United States -- and how little appreciated this is in America. The link is here, though I suspect it's behind the Atlantic firewall. Castaneda wrote it in the wake of the economic disaster of the mid-1990s, when Mexico devalued the peso. Relevant passages follow:

As so often in the past, a deeper series of factors made Mexico mysterious, even to the most trained or sympathetic eye. The key to that series, the single element that explains the opacity of Mexican society and politics to so many, is the simple but critical fact that Mexico is radically, substantively, ferociously different from the United States, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. The mistake that many outside Mexico made was to believe that the highly perceptible differences of the past were superficial enough to be swept away by a modernizing leader and an apparently acquiescent population. The mistake that many inside Mexico made was to persuade themselves (ourselves)that those differences would surface automatically, almost immediately, and work their magic directly in the streets and villages and at the polls. From abroad, the absence of reaction to change was interpreted as support -- enthusiastic at best, resigned at worst. Domestically, opposition was reduced to waiting for the children of Sanchez to rise up in arms or protest over the destruction of their myths, if not their world. Both views missed the point: the Mexican difference is everything a difference should be -- no more, no less.

Castaneda identifies one of the most profound differences as the degree of social inequality in Mexico, versus the United States. The US is a middle class nation, but Mexico is ruled by an oligarchy. Secondly, there's the Mexican conception of time. People stand in a radically different relationship to it in Mexico, versus the US, the result, Castaneda theorizes, of the enduring social stasis in the country, as well as its climate. And this opens up to the third gulf of understanding separating the US from Mexico: their views of history. Here's Castaneda:

In this conception of history, what little change there is acquires inordinate importance. Each cluster of events becomes crucial. The rest of the time not much occurs, but whatever does is overloaded with meaning and import for the future. Although the different significance attached to history has often been emphasized -- leading to the cliche that Mexicans are obsessed with history, Americans with the future -- the deep gap it opens between two nations and cultures makes it far more than a matter of temperament. For the United States, history is folklore plus the recent past; for Mexico it is the essence of the present.

There are many good reasons for this difference. To begin with, history has played different roles in nation-building in the two countries. In the United States, the quintessential country of immigrants, history has barely served to forge the ties that bind a nation together, because the past is not common to successive waves of immigrants. Many other factors fill the void that history leaves: the rule of law, the frontier, an ideological attachment to a unique form of government, and so forth. Mexico, on the other hand (a country whose only large-scale immigration was the Spanish conquest and 300-year colonization), to the (dubious) extent that it is a fully consummated nation, is so because of a common origin, from which everything else stems: territory, la raza, language, religion. These all date back to the conquest, and to the successive episodes of Mexico's subsequent transformation: independence, the reform and Juarez, the Revolution. In a country as deeply divided as Mexico, as segregated socially and as splintered regionally and ethnically, one of the few unifying themes is precisely, though paradoxically, a shared history, even if an official version of it has to be invented in order for its study and reading to be common to all.
[snip]
Mexicans harp on past tensions and conflicts with the United States not because of anti-Americanism but because of the significance of history. It's the history that counts, not the Americans' specific part in it. The United States is just one slice of Mexican history, whereas the idea of history cuts across every segment of Mexican political and cultural life: its literature and archaeology, its education and art, its identity or lack of identity. If the American dream is the archetypal bond in the United States, the Mexican memory unites Mexico. Without it the country as we know it might simply not exist.[Emphasis mine -- RD]

What is the American dream? Prosperity and individual autonomy. A commitment to the obligations of history and the ties that bind us to place inhibit the realization of the American dream. The globalized consumerist economy, the same thing that makes it possible for Americans like me and migrants from Mexico to move to Texas to pursue our fortunes, requires severing or at least weakening the bonds of history, and all that entails -- our personal commitment to place, to extended family, to tribal myth.

The Mexicans that come north will be chewed up by the dynamism of capitalism too, in time. But if Castaneda is right, they have a lot more psychological resources with which to resist assimilation. And certainly the contiguity to Mexico, plus the overwhelming numbers in which they're coming and settling here in the Southwest, makes assimilation less likely to happen, or at least to happen more slowly. In time, they'll be turned into rootless consumers like the rest of us. But by then, there will be a new Alamo myth displacing the old one. And a new culture in this land.

Perhaps it can't be stopped. I suspect it can't be. But people ought to think about this. This is what it costs us to be prosperous and modern.

UPDATE: At dinner just now, I was thinking about this post, and about how I used to read Matthew the story of the Alamo over and over when we lived in New York. He was really little then, but he loved that story (from Bill Bennett's Book of Virtues). Once after hearing it, he cried and said, "I hate the Mexican Army!" He was not yet four when we moved to Texas, and once, while I was on a business trip, Julie and her mom took him to Sea World down in San Antonio, and to see the Alamo. Julie told me that little Matthew put his fingers in the bullet holes, and he saw Jim Bowie's knife, and he wept again. The Alamo myth has entered his heart, and he was born on the west side of Manhattan. Maybe I need to get my lame a** down to San Antonio on a pilgrimage to the Alamo, and take the story into my own.