'Mexifornia' Is a Tragedy in the Making

Los Angeles Times ^ | June 29, 2003 | Victor Davis Hanson

[Mister Magoo]

COMMENTARY

'Mexifornia' Is a Tragedy in the Making By Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson, a fellow at the Hoover Institute and a classics professor at Cal State Fresno, is author of "Mexifornia. A State of Becoming" (Encounter, 2003).

June 29, 2003

My hometown of Selma — like most other communities in rural Central California — used to be a stable municipality. Immigrants from Europe, Japan, China, Armenia, the Punjab and Mexico flocked here to farm and prospered from their hard work, acumen and the natural bounty of the San Joaquin Valley. They came in one-time waves, under legal auspices and, within one or two generations, emerged as assimilated English-speaking citizens.

By 1970, Selma was a rich, multiracial society bound together by a cohesive and common culture.

That dream is now slipping away. Here in Central California, we have de facto apartheid towns made up almost exclusively of Mexican immigrants. Many are illegal residents who do not speak English and cannot and do not participate in the civic life of the state — voting, community service organizations and jury duty.

[DoughtyOne]

Thank you for the post. Someone was nice enough to copy me with the article. That's how I could respond to it's tenets. I really do appreciate you posting the article form a different source, because I value very highly the archival nature of FR. This document should be here for folks to refer back to for years to come.

Great job.

[BurbankKarl]

I get this strange feeling when I leave the LA area and vacation with my friends in Seattle. It usually takes me a while to figure out what is different...but then I realize it is all the white people. It is the people speaking English, and not spanish, armenian, etc.

[concentric circles]

Note that the post is from a year ago and is a much more expansive treatment than the LA Times story. The preface to his book, linked at the end, is a good read as well.

[krunkygirl]

BUMP for _Death of the West_ by Pat Buchanan

[A Navy Vet]

"California's Republican leadership are a damned bunch of fools."

Nowadays, I extend that thought to a national level. Not only fools, but cowards. I've lost all faith in the Republican party since Newt left. Conservatism is almost a dead ideology amongst the new pandering party. Right, they're not as bad as most Dems, but they're on their way. Is ANYONE, any longer talking about government being the problem and not the solution, ala, Ronald Reagan? Is anyone talking about downsizing? Maybe a few at the most.

My fix: Constitutiional amendment to limit terms, with specific in-session time limits. The more they stay home, the less damage they do.

[DoughtyOne]

Thank you. I didn't read your post in full, so didn't compare. I appreciate you bringing it to my attention that they are different. And thanks for the other link as well.

[c-b 1]

Slowly becoming a 3rd World State?

Correction, Rapidly becoming a 3rd World State!

[PatrioticAmerican]

It already is a mess and will only get worse.

[DoughtyOne]

Your comments on Big Government really cut to the chase don't they. Then you ask yourself how we ever got into this problem with the SCOTUS when Republicans appointed all but two of them.

The Republicans have basicly surrendered on all issues but a couple that are important to me. Hell they try to out Democrat the Democrats on most issues these days.

$40 billion more for the Department of Education
Sign off on Campaign Finance Reform
$450 billion for Ted Kennedy and Hillary Rodham's healthcare
Open borders
The acceptance of UN, UNESCO, EU, WTO, NAFTA and other organizations userption of our self-determination

Eh, why bother, this is lost on all but a few these days.

What the hell did we fight for if we were going to adopt some of the worst leading tenets of every nation we've gone to war with?

[Guillermo]

Don't you just love it when a plan comes together?

[henderson field]

Then you finally realized that the blacks and the Mexicans are the real segregationists. Do you actually think they want to live with whites?

[lentulusgracchus]

So what's all this bulls**t about them being the 'minority', then?????? I don't like it one bit.

Excellent question. It's a mind game.

"Minority" and "minority rights" is actually an inversion. The real statement that people are making when they talk about "minority rights" is that they feel they ought to be, or will be the majority, that they ought to be able to determine outcomes for the community as if they were the majority.

Whether their posture parses out as ethnic fascism or as anticipation that they will overhaul European-Americans politically and reduce them to an abused substratum following the path now being walked by Anglo-Dutch Afrikaners, the "minority" catchword or catchphrase signals a focus on something other than constitutionally constrained democracy and is a declaration of hostilities against both the majority per se and its democratic institution.

It isn't necessarily so, as columnist Carl Rowan once thought -- back when he was warning us that whites would become a minority in this century and that then there'd be "a new sheriff in town" -- that democracy will work for a new, anti-white majority the way it did for European-Americans in the last 200 years. If they have rejected the virtues and the habits of mind necessary to sustain constitutional republicanism as too "white" (as they have done to date, and as Professor Hanson's article shows is true for the Chicano community's leadership as much as it is for the black civil-rights and community leadership), then therefore it's just possible that democracy in America will pass away with the majoritarian incumbency of its old champions, and that American government will take another form, no doubt easily recognizable from the zoo of authoritarian models we have available now.

If the center cannot hold, then the political emergence of minoritarian political blocs presages an attempt on representative government itself, or civil war, or both. Minoritarian governments are almost always authoritarian, if not outright dictatorships. The Ba'ath Party began as a socialist Arab party, but it became a minoritarian, totalitarian apparatus in both Syria and Iraq, as the vehicle of the Alawites in Syria and of the Sunnis, and especially the Tikritis around Saddam Hussein, in Iraq.

[DugwayDuke]

"I remember, over twenty years ago, attending a festival in Roxbury, Mass (black section of Boston). I suddenly realized that I was perhaps the only White person around for miles. At the time, I found it fascinating to be a "minority" for the first time in my life. Now, when I see a place like Los Angeles, and I truly see White people being minorities -- yet still criticized as Oppressors, I realize that the whole racial game is completely rigged. It's (still) all about hurting the racial group with the wrong skin color."

Just remember, Bill Clinton said that whites were becoming a minority and that was a good thing.

[FITZ]

.........damned few whites to be seen.

For me, being the only "white" around doesn't matter ---it's the American-ess of the group. Patriotic blacks in the military, or English speaking American-culture people of color are perfectly fine. And if I go to Mexico, it doesn't bother me at all not to see an American for days. It's when you look around and you feel you're in a foreign country ---but you're in the USA ---that part bothers me. When you're the only one who can speak the language of this country, the only one who thinks the Constitution wasn't written by a few evil white men only for a few evil white men.

[Nea Wood]

I just got back from my first trip to Los Angeles (business, not pleasure!) I was amazed at how few White people I saw.

True. It's to the point where if I see a person with blond or red hair, I just about do a double-take. Kind of ironic, since people used to think that the stereotypical Californian was a gorgeous blond like Pamela Lee or some blond, tanned surfer dude. Now...just try and find a blond!

[ladyinred]

Hanson is just great, and his stuff is printed all over. He doesn't write just for the LA Times, if he does at all. This is an excerpt from his new book. He lives in my area and is on our local talk stations all of the time. A very intelligent, well informed professor at Cal State Fresno. I am going to get this book, as it sounds very interesting. I won't register on LA Times either.

[Joe Hadenuf]

Save your money Miss. You don't need a book to tell you what's happening.....Or a flag, to tell which way the.....Never mind.....

[ladyinred]

Thanks! I thought maybe this username and password was a joke, do I tried it and bingo! I was online! :-)

[ladyinred]

I know which way the state is going that is for sure! I live here, as apparently so do you. But Hanson is one of my favorites so I want to read his book. He is very much against this influx of imigrants from Mexico himself!

[Joe Hadenuf]

Have at it, Miss.