By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

The shadow of an angry god is covering the American landscape, a shadow engendered more by malice than mischief, made stronger by frightened hordes of xenophobes. This shadow is not a recent phenomenon. Nor is it group-specific. In the Americas it’s the historical shadow of apprehension and desperation brought into being when two worlds made contact with each other. It’s the shadow of fear of the "other."

There is a growing movement of Catonists in the American Republic who fear immigrants and what they augur for America’s future. Catonists are pessimistic about that future. Cato was a senator in the Roman Republic during the Punic Wars with Carthage in the third century BC. He was an "anti-intellectual monumentalist" who fed Roman fears of encroachment by decadent foreigners whose alien values, he contended, would disrupt the Roman political tradition and the organization of the nation. And though the Roman Empire was a multicultural enterprise, Cato was a Roman supremacist who believed that Rome was for the Romans. It was not multiculturalism that destroyed Rome, Samuel Huntington believes it will destroy the United States; it was the excesses of its leaders who believed that because of the power they wielded they had become gods.

Missing in the current debate over immigration are the voices of Mexican Americans, those who are at the crux of the issue. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that Mexican American voices are absent in most public policy discussions in this country. This is why, as Mexican Americans, we must debate the debaters, those who are arguing most strenuously for immigration reform, not because we are opposed to immigration reform but because we are a vital part of that issue and our voices ought to be, therefore, part of the debate. Unfortunately, the only views Americans get about public policy issues like immigration are those advanced by mainstream debaters who are caught up myopically with the topic, oftentimes Catonists who have only a single-minded view of America’s future and what the United States should be. Instead of populist vision of America, including all our visions of America, we are subjected to a singular vision of America based on one man’s view–an American Cato.

In our time, Immigration and English Only have become two sides of the same coin. Since World War I, American jingoism has folded its fear of foreigners (feigned or real) into its lexocentric view of the world–that the English language reigns supreme as the intercontinental lingua franca. To a large extent, that is pretty much the case. The English language has become the principle language for world-wide communication, not because of any inherent qualities of the English language but because of the same kind of historical circumstances that made Latin in its time the lingua franca of the Roman world. I’m not necessarily drawing a parallel here, just an observation. Though at this juncture it would be wise to heed the words of Santayana, the Harvard Hispanic hisorian who cautioned that those who cannot heed the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.

It’s out of this fear, hardened and institutionalized, that the current wave of American nativism rises. In the mid 18th century, just after the U.S. War against Mexico (1846-184, American attitudes about the territory dismembered from Mexico focused more on the promise of the land than on patrolling it. The wrested Mexican territory was, after all, an expansive piece of real estate, and, according to the propaganda of the time, sparsely populated which is wh it was there for the taking. But the fact of the matter is that the annexed Mexican territory was much more populated than Anglo statistics have suggested. The Tejano historian Arnoldo De Leon has painted, perhaps, the best "picture" of this land and its population of the time. He describes the landscape as dotted with small communities and family jacales connecting the larger population clusters like San Antonio, El Paso, and Santa Fe, communities of Hispanos doing for themselves as frontier people everywhere have done for themselves. Anglo American accounts, however, have distorted the reality of the Hispanic Southwest to fit their own providential purposes.

Denigration of the peoples of the Hispanic Southwest began almost as soon as the two rival European powers, Spain and England, established toe-holds in the Americas. England brought with it the historical animus of the "Black Legend." In the 17th century, the New England patriarch and minister, Cotton Mather, translated the King James bible into a rough but robust Spanish in order to persuade the Spaniards and their hybrid offspring in Mexico to abandon the catholic church and its popish tradition. In the 18th century, mounting tensions between Spain and England worsened the situation in the Hispanic Southwest over territory that began to loom in the consciousness of Anglo Americans as manifestly theirs by destiny. Mexicans, not Spaniards nor criollo Spaniards, but hybrid Mexicans were considered mongrels. In 1852, Colonel John Monroe reported to Washington that "the New Mexicans are thoroughly debased and totally incapable of self-government, and there is no latent quality about them that can ever make them respectable. They have more Indian blood than Spanish, and in some respects are below the Pueblo Indians, for they are not as honest or as industrious." In Two Years Before the Mast (1959) , Richard Henry Dana described the Mexicans (now Mexican Americans) of San Francisco as "an idle thriftless people" who could "make nothing for themselves."

Four years later, W. W. H. Davis, U.S. Attorney for the Territory of New Mexico, writing of his experiences with Mexican Americans, described them as "possess[ing] the cunning and deceit of the Indian, the politeness and the spirit of revenge of the Spaniard, and the imaginative temperament and fiery impulses of the Moor." He said they lacked the "stability and character and soundness of intellect that give such vast superiority to the Anglo-Saxon race over every other people." He ascribed to them the "cruelty, bigotry, and superstition of the Spaniard. Moreover, he saw these traits as "constitutional and innate in the race." In a moment of kindness, however, Davis suggested that the fault probably lay with their "spiritual teachers," the Spaniards, who never taught them"that beautiful doctrine which teaches us to love our neighbors as ourselves."

In 1868, the Overland Monthly published "The French in Mexico" by William V. Wells in which he wrote that "in the open field, a charge of disciplined troops usually suffices to put to flight the collection of frowzy-headed mestizos, leperos, mulattoes, Indians, Samboes, and other mongrels now, as in the time of our own war with them, composing a Mexican Army." In our time, Walter Prescott Webb characterized the Mexicans as possessing "a cruel streak" that he believed was inherited partly from the Spanish of the Inquisition and partly from their Indian forebears. Webb asserts that "on the whole, the Mexican warrior . . . . was inferior to the Comanche and wholly unequal to Texans. The whine of the leaden slugs stirred in him an irresistible impulse to travel with, rather than against, the music. He won more victories over the Texans partly by parley than by force of arms. For making promises and for breaking them he had no peer." Even John Steinbeck in Tortilla Flat portrayed Mexican Americans as lovable carousers claiming Spanish blood in the face of their color, "like that of a well-browned meerschaum pipe."

I cite these examples not to inflame the current tensions between Anglo Americans and Mexicans (including Mexican Americans) but to point out that the animosity of Anglo Americans toward Mexicans and Mexican Americans is not a recent phenomenon but one of historical duration. It has always seemed to me that the tensions between the United States and Mexico will not be eased until the United States deals with the historical complexities of its race relations vis-s-vis Mexicans. Unfortunately, like William Blake’s "mind-forged manacles" far too many Anglo Americans are still manacled to the mentality prevalent more than a century and a half ago toward Mexicans and Mexican Americans. It’s in this cauldron of animosity that Anglo Americans are still stewing. Paradoxically, even those whose forebears came to the United States in the 20th century. This situation is a lot like contemporary southerners whose antecedents played no part in the Civil War and in the events that led to that conflagration but think of themselves as "rebels" whose regional values and traditions were done in by the North. Little thought is given to the role white southerners played in their own demise.

In like fashion what is dismissed about the Mexican American experience is the role Southwestern Anglo Americans played in the nation’s effort to subjugate Mexican Americans from the very begining, some 157 years ago. Anglo America regarded Mexican Americans as a helpless and uncivilized group that needed a firm hand in order to establish a racial comity with "Mexicans" in subordinate positions much like the blacks of the South. Anglo Americans saw "Mexicans" as either meek unlettered peasants or sexually aggressive savages requiring the strong hand of discipline. At heart, this was intellectual and moral sophistry masquerading as realism. In actuality Anglo Americans created a caste system in the Southwest in order to maintain their racial superiority and an aristocracy resembling the quondam aristocracy of the ante-bellum South. This was the point I made in "The Mexican-Dixon Line," a piece I wrote for El Grito: Journal of Mexican American Thought in the Summer of 1968 when I was one of the Quinto Sol writers. Though dismissed by some historians, I perceived the same patterns of paternalism in the Hispanic Southwest as existed in the ante and post-bellum South.

For the Conquest Generation of Mexican Americans (1848-1912), the U.S.–Mexico border was porous, with little or non-existent control of ingress and egress. While Mexican Americans along the U.S.–Mexico Rio Bravo borderlands understood that the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo) constituted the border between the United States and Mexico, the border had little more than symbolic value. West of El Paso the U.S.–Mexico border was no more than a line staked out across the deserts of southern New Mexico, Arizona, and California, all the way to San Diego. Mexicans came north from Mexico and crossed the border to visit relatives or friends who stayed with the wrested territory or who crossed the border to be with relatives or friends. There were few constraints to restrain them. The same was true of Mexican Americans who crossed the border into Mexico to visit friends and relatives who chose to leave the annexed territory and to remain mejicanos nationally. The swath of borderlands became a unique feature of American westward expansion. Today, however, we are faced with the prospect that by the year 2008 Americans of all stripes will need passports to leave and to enter the United States. All in the name of securing our borders.

The issue of white European immigration did not become a national concern until the early part of the 20th century. Asians, of course, encountered early immigration restrictions, the most notable among them being the Chinese Exclusion Acts of the latter 19th century. While Mexicans may have been anathematized in the Southwest, their necessity in the economic harvest of the region did not impede their ingress into the United States. However, their economic role did not lessen the harsh and oftentimes brutal treatment Mexicans were subjected to by the pathological racism of Anglo Americans endemic in the Hispanic Southwest. One of the greatest mass migrations in human history, according to Ernesto Galarza, was the exodus of a million and a half Mexicans who made their way into the United States between 1910 and 1930, the years of the Mexican Civil War (1910-1921), often referred to as the Mexican Revolution, and its aftermath.

Added to the numbers of Mexican Americans and their progeny who made up the Conquest Generation from 1848 to 1912, the migration of one and a half million Mexicans into the United States swelled the number of mejicanos in the country. From 1912 to 1960 these two groups morphed into the Assimilationist Generation which considered its survival in the United States contingent on how quickly and successfully they could learn English and become Americans. While taunts of "English Only" were hurled their way, the Assimilationist Generation of Mexican Americans took those taunts seriously. In its constitution of 1929, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) endorsed the priority of learning English. Americanization classes were offered everywhere LULAC councils were organized. Special classes were developed for the instruction of English to Mexican American children. English language escuelitas sprang up everywhere sponsored by LULAC. At the time, LULAC leaders bought into the proposition advanced by Anglo Americans that the English language was the glue that held all Americans together, shunting aside the fact that while African Americans spoke English they were still not part of the whole ostensibly held together by the glue of language. Only the most flawed kind of logic suggests that language is the glue of unity among a people. If that were so, then there should be no strife in Ireland or the Middle East. Nor in the former Soviet Union. Nor where internecine conflict rages between people who speak the same language. It’s more than language that creates national character and national unity. More than anything, it’s "respect for individual differences" that strengthens national purpose.

By the mid 1920s, Mexicans were brought into national immigration formulas and a border patrol was established to maintain some semblance of control on Mexicans coming into the United States. My father crossed in 1921 but he did not intend to take up permanent residence in the United States though he did become a citizen in 1932 via one of the early amnesty laws of immigration. The birth of his children in the United States anchored him to the American soil. We escaped the repatriation scheme of the mid 30s, though almost a third of the million and a half who came to the United States between 1910 and 1930 were not so lucky. The noose of repatriation made no distinctions between Mexicans who were citizens of the United States and those who were not. The roundup carried off many Mexican Americans to Mexico where for years they petitioned for their right of return as American citizens, not unlike Palestinians petitioning for return to their homeland.

World War II was a turning point in Mexican American history in a way that World War I was not. Military archives abound with the names of many Mexicans and Mexican Americans who saw service in the armed forces both at home and abroad during World War I. But during World War II more than 500,000 Mexican Americans served in all branches of the military distinguishing themselves by winning more Medals of Honor than any other ethnic group. Like their American kin, Mexican troops saw action in the Pacific alongside American units. This is why I’m baffled by the contemporary American mind that considers Mexicana (and by extension, Mexican Americans) as the enemy. The explanation is that Mexico is the soft under-belly of the United States. And the likelihood is high that terrorists could infiltrate the United State through Mexico. Ergo the U.S.–Mexico border needs to be sealed. We should note that this is not a consideration for the U.S.–Canadian border. Many Mexicans and Mexican Americans wonder why this is so. And it appears to escape Anglo Americans that the terrorists who slammed commercial airliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center did not fly those planes from Mexico into the United States. As Shakespeare put it in Hamlet during the mousetrap scene, this is miching malecho–mischief badly misplaced or badly carried out. Or as psychologists put is: "misdirected anger." In this case, I doubt that it’s misdirected prejudice, for historically that prejudice has been targeted to Mexicans and Mexican Americans specifically.

Terrorism and the threat of terrorism seems to have provided cover for the hard bigotry of self-fulfilling prophecies. That is, Anglo Americans don’t think Mexicans in particular and Mexican Americans by extension have the knack or the willpower to deter the influx of terrorists into the United States passing through Mexico and the Hispanic Southwest, an apprehension engendered by an incident in Texas in 1915 known as El Plan de San Diego, one of the most bruited insurgent activities by Mexican Americans.

Basilio Ramos was apprehended by Texas Rangers who found in his possession a document entitled El Plan de San Diego which called for a Mexican American uprising on February 20, 1915. The Plan, put forth by the Provisional Directorate of San Diego, Texas, outlined the creation of an interim Mexican American republic with provisos for possible re-annexation to Mexico. As a result of that find, Texas authorities rounded up thousands of Mexican Americans and charged them with conspiracy to commit treason. A rampant public lynched hundreds of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. That reaction hardened Anglo perspectives that Mexican American loyalty was to Mexico and not the United States, setting back progress for Tejanos that was not ameliorated for decades.. Not even the exploits of Mexican Americans during World War II allayed Anglo perspectives about Mexican American loyalty, nor did they allay the prevalent Anglo contention that Mexicans (including Mexican Americans) should go back to where they came from, failing to realize that scores of Mexican Americans were already where they came from.

These kinds of incidents only fueled the prospects for a Mexican American holocaust, elements of which are manifest today in the form of "racial profiling." Mexican Americans in particular and American Hispanics in general continue to be targets of racial prejudice in the United States, owing, I contend, to the long-standing historical animus between England and Spain. Other groups of Americans experience prejudice and discrimination in the United States engendered by the country’s accreted fear of non-white Americans and foreigners. One of the fall-back positions of that fear is to seek comfort and refuge in a common language in the belief that national unity can be achieved and discord eliminated if all Americans spoke only one language. This of course privileges the American language which we continue to call English even though that language has become the amalgam of all the languages spoken by Americans, making the term "English" a misnomer in identifying the American language.

Because of the contempt many Anglo American conservatives and neo-conservatives have for Mexicans, they are clamoring for sealing up the U.S.–Mexico border. In Arizona a posse comitatus has organized an armed militia of "Minutemen" to patrol the U.S.–Mexico border, explaining that the group is simply trying to help the Border Patrol in its daunting job of stemming illegal entry into the United States. Illegal entry includes more groups than just Mexicans. There are no accurate records to indicate just how many entrants to the United States came illegally via routes other than Mexico. This does not take into account the numbers of legal entrants to the United States who overstay their visas or those who look so "American" that they do not call attention to themselves as illegal entrants or entrants at large in the United States with expired permits. It appears that only "swarthy" illegal entrants or "swarthy" Americans who look like terrorists raise red flags for immigration officers and officials.

Terrorism is indeed a plague on the houses of civilization. The manifestations of terrorism today remind us of the terrorism history has ascribed to Mongol hordes over-running the borders of civilized Western societies. Terrorism has always been a tool in the arsenal of political and ideological purpose. One needs only to read the national histories of both developed and underdeveloped countries to note the havoc of terrorism in the acquisition of political representation or control. In the Hispanic Southwest the Conquest Generation of Mexican Americans bore the slings and arrows of Anglo American terrorism as Anglo Americans sought to dominate the newly acquired southwestern territory by terrorizing the Hispanic populace of the region. It’s important to note, however, that Mexican Americans resisted that terrorism with the insurgency politics of a group oppressed in their own land. In this sense, early Mexican American insurgency bears the characteristics of Irish insurgency in its effort to free Ireland from the colonial yoke of Great Britain. Or of Palestinian insurgency to free themselves from the yoke of Israeli imperialism. In our time, the Chicano Movement was a manifestation of Mexican American insurgency to secure social justice.

Almost immediately after the annexation of northern Mexico, Father Martinez of Taos engaged in a number of insurgent activities. In La Vegas, New Mexico, las Gorras Blancas (the White Caps) was organized to protect Hispanos from Anglo American depredations. In other words, Mexican Americans did not go gently into that good night of military occupation. In 1896, the Alianza Hispano Americana was organized in Tucson, Arizona as a benevolent fraternal society to protect the civil rights of Mexican Americans in Arizona. Almost immediately, the Alianza Hispana Americana began publication of Alianza Magazine as an information medium, almost a full decade before publication of The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). The struggle for Mexican American civil rights is not a coat-tail phenomenon. It sprang parallel to the African American struggle for civil rights.

In a recent piece of mine entitled "Tyrannus Lex: Common Ground and the English Only Movement," I wrote about the efforts of English Only groups to legislate English as the national language of the United States, eliminating linguistic efforts to help anyone in the country with any kind of public assistance or accommodation in the languages of those needing help to achieve social and economic justice in the United States. In particular, this would mean the elimination of bilingual education and bilingual ballots. I’m not sure what this would do to American place names from other languages. We’ve already tried calling "French fries" "freedom fries." What would we call a "plaza" or a "patio" and thousands of other places identified with words from languages other than English?

The real aim of "immigration reform" is not just to diminish the growing use of foreign languages in the United States. It’s agenda is far more sinister than that. It seeks to restore "whiteness" to the American population. It’s an agenda of "ethnic cleansing" that is driving immigration reform, though the reformers would vehemently deny it, loathe to acknowledge it for fear of being found out. Recently at the University of North Texas in Denton, neo-conservative Anglo students staged a "Catch an Immigrant Day" ostensibly to call attention to the problem of "illegal immigration," specifically Mexicans "illegally" in the United States. The event produced a backlash of protest from Mexican American students at the university and from Mexican Americans throughout the state. The event highlighted the incipient bigotry neo-conservatives toward Mexicans and Mexican Americns.

In the year 2005 the United States is not the country it was a scant 50 years ago nor is it the country it was 229 years ago at its founding. Efforts to keep it bucolic and pristine are simply wrong-headed. Immigrants have been the life-blood of the nation. They built the country’s railroads, its skyscrapers, its bridges, its highways. They ventured where few others dared to go. They learned to speak to each other in a patois of linguistic inclusion, leaving their legacy in the American lexicon. We hear about the stress immigrants place on national resources. But we hear nothing about how immigrants contribute to the national weal. From the current census data, Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, DC, estimates that 3.8 million households headed by undocumented workers in the United States generated 6.4 billion in Social Security taxes in 2002.

Today there are Americans who want to undo all of that, who want to change the American Constitution to curb the linguistic vitality of the American language, who like the Roman Senator Cato want to keep foreigners at bay, lest they contaminate the Arcadian traditions of the United States, all of them now myth.

The Constitution is an organic document, not static. We cannot know exactly what the framers of that document had in mind when they proffered it to the nation. That it has worked to create one of the most unique nations on earth is a testament to the vision of its founders. We do not need Constitutional amendments to ossify the English language. We do not need restrictive militaristic restraints to curb immigration.

The United States is a nation of nations. It was so in the beginning as Jean de Crevecoeur wrote in his Letters from an American Farmer. The population of the United States at its founding was a polyglot aggregation of people: Swedes, Norwegians, French, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Dutch, Polish, English, Indians, and African slaves. It’s a "rainbow" nation, as the Reverend Jesse Jackson proclaims, wait- ing for the storm to subside so it can sparkle in its multi-colored radiance.

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Dr. Felipe de Ortego y Gasca, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English Language and Literature - Retired Tenured Faculty, Texas State Univeristy System--Sul Ross
English, Linguistics, Journalism, Information Studies, Bilingual Education, Chicano Studies -- Dean Emeritus, Hispanic Leadership Institute, Arizona State University
Chair Emeritus, The Hispanic Foundation, Washington, DC -- E-mail: felipeo@usawide.net

Visiting Scholar and Lecturer in English and Bilingual Studies Texas A&M University at Kingsville -- E-mail: p-ortego@tamuk.edu
http://www.hispanicvista.com/HVC/Opi...2505ortego.htm