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.MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 94MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 95performance at making money, not his class, parentage, race orreligion.If you wanted to retire, relax and be accorded status and priv-ilege for being older, refined and male, then Mexico just might be abetter place than America.But if you were Irish, Japanese, Korean,African-American, Indian, Muslim or Jehovah’s Witness, andwished to work and get rich, then you’d do far better in America.Any who disagree can ask themselves: how many millions of thesehave flocked to Mexico, then or now?The schools, without self-doubt, often rudely and with littleapology, dealt head-on with the contradiction that plagues everyimmigrant to America.Lost in an entirely new world that initiallyeither ignores, oppresses, or discriminates against him, he naturallytends to romanticize the distant culture that pushed him into exilein the first place.I do not know whether my early teachers wereconscious of such human subtleties, or aware that an excess of def-erence can encourage disdain rather than gratitude, that newfoundaffluence can create envy, and that every majority culture—evenone that has recently arrived from Mexico and established an eth-nic enclave in a small rural California town—tends to ostracize aminority.Yet these were problems and paradoxes that our instruc-tors sought to resolve one way or another.They seemed to knowthat the Mexican immigrant could and should retain a pride in hisethnic heritage—to be expressed in music, dance, art, literature,religion and cuisine only—while being mature enough to see thatthe core political, economic and social values of his abandonedcountry were to be properly and rapidly forgotten.In my home-town the idea was to turn Mexicans into Selmans.And yet, inaccomplishing this delicate task, our grammar school teachers ofthe 1950s and 1960s, most with degrees from normal schools inTexas and Oklahoma, knew far better the fundamental differencesbetween a flourishing multiracial society and a failed and fractiousmulticultural quagmire than do our present Ph.D.s from Stanfordand Berkeley [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]