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The Mexican Problem

What exactly is “the Mexican problem?” Is it about immigration and adherence to the law? Or, is it, as other leftists say, about human populations and bioregional balance? Or could it be a cultural issue where people are simply afraid of people unlike themselves?

It’s a highly complex issue and has been ever since Anglos first entered the borderlands, and it appears to be once again reaching a crescendo of tension. Hopefully not to the extent seen in the early twentieth century, when widespread, state-sponsored, indiscriminate violence was common. But who knows. Tensions are high, both from the left and from the right, and as usual, it’s the Mexicans caught in the middle.

Recently, a group of Texans announced plans to sue The Department of Homeland Security over the proposed border fence between Texas and Mexico, alleging Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Customs and Border Patrol officials did not tell landowners they had the right to negotiate the price for the federal use of their land, concealed how they decided what constitutes a reasonable price for seized land and showed favoritism to wealthy or well-connected landowners.

Another group of Texans openly talks of secession if The Department of Homeland Security doesn’t do something about “the Mexican problem” and their former compadre, George Bush.

I’ve already written about the problems with the fence. It’s an ecological nightmare, illogically positioned right smack dab in the middle of a bioregion, restricting the free movement of multiple species, including humans. It’s the human part where I break somewhat with Abbey and other social malcontents, because they want to restrict human movement along the border. I don’t. At least not to the same degree.

We join together in our understanding that the real solutions lie beyond our border. That there is no solutions as long as NAFTA and other American economic policies inhibit sustainable economic development in Mexico, particularly in the southern section.

But I’ve grown weary of the Mexican bashing, especially from people that have benefited immensely from their contributions, especially their labor. It’s born out of ignorance and ignorance breeds fear. Fear of something different. Fear that’s irrationally created by right wing propagandists that believe our entire Anglo-Saxon culture is being threatened. That our success is only made possible through the deprivation of others.

I recently had an interesting exchange of ideas on a discussion list about this topic. About how some societies feel it’s necessary to “conquer” or deprive one society or group in order to further the goals of their own. It’s myopic and ignorant, crying in the face of countless studies showing that cooperation between species and groups is a far more sensible and effective approach than non-cooperation. Scientists have long understood that the most cooperative individuals or groups are likely to enjoy the greatest survival benefits. Yet, most people insist on believing the common cultural, but false, Hobbesian meme, that life is a “struggle against all” and all of that “survival of the fittest” nonsense.

Societies rise and fall, but the most successful societies and groups adopt cultural traits from other societies and groups, inevitably strengthening their own. Is there a better example than the United States and our amazing cultural diversity? Our incredible mix of English, Irish, African, American Indian, Spanish, Jewish, Chinese, Japanese and Middle Eastern cultural attributes?

The Spanish language is a big issue for some folks, but it’s pointless to get all up in arms about it. A waste of time. The Mexicans are here to stay and so is the language. In fact, they were here, and so was the language, before us English speaking folks. They have as much right to be here as anyone else, but as Abbey said, everyone wants to be the last immigrant.

It’s important to remember that the Mexicans are a “conquered” people in the Southwest. Just like the American Indians. Their culture has been and remains under constant attack, and their important contributions and achievements are too often marginalized and ignored. Having been subjected to frequently brutal physical attacks, racism and a long process of economic attrition, is it any surprise that we’re witnessing defeatism that frequently arises when a cultural minority is annexed to an alien and “superior” culture?

In this respect, Mexicans and Spanish speaking people are much like the formerly enslaved Africans. (Mexicans, incidentally, abhorred slavery and this was historically a major issue for Texans with the Mexican population.) There’s a long and nasty history of capitalist opportunists taking advantage of Mexicans for cheap labor, including illegal and deadly human smuggling and the use of violence to break strikes, once the Mexicans figured out they had the power and ability to bring Anglo agriculture to its knees.

The fact is that without Mexican labor and their enormously important contributions in irrigation techniques and water management, the West we know today would not exist. Much of it was built on the backs of Mexican labor.

And then there’s the border itself. That little dotted line that’s the source of so much apoplexy. When established, the current boundary had little to do with economic or ethnic factors, and geophysically, it’s very poorly conceived. Even much of the original survey and map information was incorrect.

The result was the establishment of one the most ridiculous borders in the Western Hemisphere. The river which many forded to enter the United States ironically has a Spanish name. It’s a river that brings people together, not keep them apart. Along the river, cities and towns are often “twins,” many with interconnecting communication. And there have constantly been battles over water rights because the border was so poorly laid out. It frankly would have made more sense to push the boundary further south and included Lower California, the port of Guaymas and the lands lying within the watershed of the Colorado and Rio Grande river systems. Ellen Churchill Semple stated in American History and Its Geographic Conditions (1903) that “The Rio Grande is anything but a satisfactory boundary between the United States and Mexico. Dry for months of the year, it bears no semblance of a barrier….the political frontier line which is run along a river is an artificial one, for every drainage system forms an unbroken whole.”

And while Americans consider the borderlands “theirs,” as late as 1943 maps used in Mexican schools designated these lands as Mexican and temporarily in the hands of the United States. Mexicans of course have long felt bitter over the loss of land, having unknowingly ceded territories rich in gold and silver and having lost a bitter and exceedingly violent war to the United States. General Winfield Scott readily admitted that the United States had “committed atrocities to make Heaven weep and every American of Christian morals blush for his country. Murder, robbery and rape of mothers and daughters in the presence of tied-up males of the families have been common all along the Rio Grande.”

So, as is usually the case, there’s another side to the story.

It’s also important to note that Mexican immigrants didn’t make the same sort of abrupt psychological and sociological transition immigrating Europeans did. When crossing the border, there was (and still is to a large degree), a feeling of continuity. A gradual transition and within the same bioregion. They could travel from Chihuahua to Santa Fe without feeling any abrupt change in physical environment or even in language. Psychologically and culturally, Mexicans never immigrated to the Southwest; they simply returned.

There’s more than an underlying current of racism with the Mexican issue. People fear being invaded by the low-rider culture. Mexican gangs. An army of dark skinned, silver chain wearing males in El Caminos coming for our white women. Messing up the gene pool. We don’t mind the calzonaires blancos, sombrero and pantaloon wearing humble tamale sellers on the street corner or the lovely Señorita serving our margaritas (they’re like little social ornaments), but we don’t want an invasion of Rico Suaves.

Back in the early 1920′s, just before the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, there was an enormous amount of “data” compiled in an effort to support the idea that Mexicans were inferior to whites and their culture was one of “delinquency, poor housing, low wages, illiteracy, and high rates of disease.” One of most bizarre, Nazi-like stories I’ve ever heard, is that of “The Forty Blonde Babies” that took place in Clifton, where an angry mob of armed, Anglo-Americans invaded to “save” 40 white, mostly blonde, babies from a Catholic priest and their intended Mexican adoptive parents.

Spanish speaking people are portrayed as inferior to Anglos, comically in movies like Texas Across The River (1966) where in the opening credits you see cartoonish looking Spaniards being kicked around by Texans, while also portraying the American Indians as savages. The same, stereotypical images were made famous in hundreds of spaghetti westerns, where at one point, Spanish speaking actors actually insisted on wardrobe changes to counterbalance the bad guy image so often portrayed. And then there’s the famous and ridiculous looking Frito-Bandito types, happy (but violent), usually fat, often drunk, loaded to the gills Mexican in his poncho, sombrero and gun belts crossed on the chest.

This sort of racism and classism has long been present, even within the Spanish speaking community. New Mexico was at one time divided into two major classes: ricos and pobres, a caste system, the rich and the poor, often based on skin color. Lighter skinned people were considered more “Spanish” and of a higher class. They held positions of power and were the beneficiaries of large land grants.

But the ricos themselves were eventually victims of racism and capitalist cronyism. In the late 19th century, the implementation of Anglo-American banking, finance, law and trickery was used to full effect to subjugate the ricos by taking their land. This was accomplished by questioning the validity of land grants, the filing of bogus claims and the establishment of taxes that could not be paid. Once the taxes couldn’t be paid, Anglo-Americans would buy up the lands at tax sales and promptly have the tax reduced from $1.50 per acre to .30 cents per acre.

In New Mexico, the subsistence, bartering Manitos society was essentially destroyed by creeping American capitalism, banking, land ownership and judicial meddling.

This process is once again in full swing in America, as the banking elite forecloses on lower and middle income Americans. Wealthy capitalists buy your house on the courthouse steps, turning what used to be a home for your family into part of their “inventory.”

“Just pay your bills,” you say. Well, a lot of land owners can’t pay increasing tax bills, thanks to speculative, upper end development that drives tax bills through the roof. And there are countless scenarios where people that never missed a payment get put under by catastrophic medical expenses and simply don’t have the resources to withstand the storm. Banks are driven by profit, and if a substantial downpayment was made on the house, taking the home is good business.

One thing we don’t want, in all seriousness, is an expansion of gang violence. An expansion of Mara Salvatrucha, the LA born group more commonly known as MS-13. We’ve got our hands full already with mafia, Hells Angels, Crips and the like. But the gang argument is too often used to stereotype Spanish speaking people. It’s a real threat, but not any more of an indictment than Hells Angles are of Anglos. Gangs are gangs. Thugs are thugs.

Another stereotype is the ridiculous portrayal of the happy Mexican in his elaborate Mariachi and ranchero costumes during Cinco de Mayo. It seems ridiculous to dress like the elite people whose downfall is being celebrated, and my hope is the Mexican people have another revolution and free themselves from the oppression of capitalists in Mexico City, Washington and Wall Street.

“Speak the language or go back to Mexico!” It’s interesting to note that thirty or so years after the discovery of gold, Los Angeles was still a small, Mexican town where Spanish was spoken almost universally, and where all official documents, including ordinances were published both in Spanish and in English. The Spanish language predates English in the Southwest and has been spoken in that region since the 16th century. Today, nearly thirty million people in the United States speak Spanish, and the United States has the fifth largest Spanish speaking community in the world, after Mexico, Columbia, Spain and Argentina.

Get used to Spanish. It’s here to stay, and you’ll sound better educated if you learn it and stop complaining about it.

And let’s not forget some significant contributions made by Spanish speaking people on this continent. They contributed many things that were institutional and cultural in nature, but in their carretas they brought us some real goodies. Hoes, spades, grinding stones, clamps, pliers. The first wheels turned on our soil. Peaches, figs, oranges, apples, grapes, apricots, limes, pears and lemons. They planted over 260,000 orange trees in the mission groves in California. Horses, goats and pigs.

They taught the Navajo how to weave wool. The Navajo and other American Indian groups of the Southwest inherited the churro sheep. That the Navajo became largely a pastoral people can be traced to this early cultural borrowing. And as it should be, the Spanish wisely borrowed dyes from the Navajo. It’s amazing how things can work when you embrace positive cultural attributes instead of fighting an entire group of people.

Spanish speaking peoples made important contributions in land-use systems, systems far superior to their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, because Spanish civil law was based on recognition of the shortage of water, whereas the Anglo-Saxon counterpart was formed in a land where water was not a problem. They’re very different. Communal utilization of limited water supplies, ruled by the zanjero, is largely a Spanish contribution and still utilized in Spain.

Even today, property rights between spouses in the Spanish-Mexican borderlands are in accordance with the Spanish ganancial system of community property.

Even some of our most cherished American icons are gifts from the Spanish. The first cattle were brought by the Spanish when the San Carlos anchored in San Diego bay in 1769. An import we could have done without, certainly, but it was the Spanish that did it, not the King Ranch in Texas. The Spanish introduced sheep herding and our most cherished icon, the “cowboy,” along with chaps, saddles, bridles, bit, spurs, lariats and cinch. Even the hat and the concept of the ranch. All Spanish, but a good example of us Anglos making good use of cultural adaptation and borrowing.

The Southwest has been a diverse mix of cultures for centuries. American Indian, Anglo-Saxon, German, Spanish, African. While American Indian languages have unfortunately struggled to survive under official policies of Anglo assimilation (many completely disappearing), Spanish continues to thrive and the culture of Spanish speaking people will continue to expand.

This doesn’t mean one group of cultural attributes or one society has to dominate or “win out” over another, but it does mean we have an opportunity to learn from one another and develop an integrated, cooperative, sustainable society. One that’s uniquely ours. An American culture. One that makes you really proud to say “I’m an American.”

But back to that discussion I had, where Bill White commented on “the assumption that the well being of some must be purchased zero sum fashion by the deprivation of others.” I maintain that to move onward, we must seek the antithesis of that statement, to a true egalitarianism and toward the acceptance of the notion that the well being of the few is purchased through the well being of all, regardless of background. To build a society where no man seeks to dominate another, and where we all work together for the common good.

Not necessarily every, single person. How is that possible in a world of nearly seven billion humans?

It’s not, but when you climb a mountain, you don’t stare at the summit and constantly tell yourself “it’s not possible.” You take one step at a time, moving gradually, acclimatizing and establishing base camps along the way. You’re not trying to change the world; you’re only trying to change yourself, your community and your region. That’s a fair and reasonable goal.

Too utopian? Far fetched?

How do you know it won’t work if you don’t even try?

Source material: An old college textbook by the late and distinguished writer Carey McWilliams, North From Mexico, 1968.

Adios, amigos.