Mexifornia: A State of Becoming

Rating:
Summary: Treasure of the Sierra Nevada
Review: AN EXCERPT FROM PAGE 139: I used to hear Spanish ballads out in the fields, blaring on the radios of plum pickers [who] wore khaki-like uniforms with straw hats and said "si señor -- no señor" when told to pick fruit by color or size. They looked and acted like the peasants in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre." Now the illegal alien plays gehtto-inspired rap, wears his baseball cap backwards, is amply tattooed, and is more likely to answer "OK already" or "No problema" -- mimicking Schwarzenegger rather than speaking Spanish. I miss the old world; those in this new world would not.

Hanson's delightful little book would make a happy companion to Windschuttle's "The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past." Windschuttle is also an academic, but he never leaves the ivory tower; his is always the view from ABOVE. Victor Hanson is also an academic, but he owns a farm south of Fresno, and this spellbinding book is multiculturalism as it looks ON THE GROUND. Perhaps his most fascinating conjecture is that academia and the liberal press have helped legitimize the false security of tribalist victimization. This has broad implications for the culture of poverty everywhere in the U.S.

This thought-provoking treasure is also, in its wit and entertaining style, the book Tom Wolfe (Bonfire of the Vanities) or David Brooks (Bobos in Paradise) would have written if they weren't stuck back in old New York. (The New Yorker: "California, harbinger of everything...") His vignettes from life ring so true the reader can't help but laugh with recognition.

Hanson is honest about his nostalgia, honest about his predictable "today's youth ain't up to snuff" phase of life, honest about everything. But despite some blunders ("North America was originally settled by Northern Europeans"), a racist he is not. I waited until the penultimate page for him to mention what we can learn from the many strengths of the Mexican family, but he finally did.*

I'm a Massachusetts Yankee in California half my life now. I didn't expect to agree with everything this fourth-generation native said, but I got the sense that he didn't end up with the book he set out to write, either. Though very conservative, he's refreshingly devoid of a triumphalist agenda. Neocons will be disappointed by his definition of the Good Life, for example, and his unfettered thinking in general.

Hanson gets high marks for even attempting to tackle such a complex problem, but nothing makes for a better read than new ideas intelligently set forth in the most engaging possible way.



*See "Con Respeto" by Dr. Valdes for the hard-working illegal-alien perspective, or the fictional "Tortilla Curtain" by T.C. Boyle for another, more tragic view FROM BELOW.