Thread: One foot in Mexico, the other in the U.S.A.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/o ... tte08.html

Ruben Navarrette Jr. / Syndicated columnist
One foot in Mexico, the other in the U.S.A.

SAN DIEGO — Juan Hernandez once had a job that many Mexican-Americans would love to have.

From December 2001 to September 2003, the native Texan and professor of U.S.-Mexico studies served as the equivalent of Mexico's ambassador to Mexican immigrants living in the United States. As the director of President Vicente Fox's Office for Mexicans Abroad, he served as a go-between and reintroduced Mexico to its runaway children in the north while doing the same for the runaways.

Hernandez had an office at Los Pinos (the Mexican White House), but he'd fly home to the United States once a week to meet with immigrant communities from Alaska to Arizona to Alabama. He'd listen to their concerns and reassure them that Mexico, the country of their birth, had not forgotten them.

I saw him in action when I was working in Dallas, where he used to teach at the University of Texas at Dallas. Hernandez was in town to address a business luncheon. It was one of those functions where Mexican waiters pick up the dishes, and they're mostly invisible. In cities such as Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas — or any other place with a self-declared "state of emergency" over the self-inflicted wound of illegal immigration — the idea of being waited on by the same people we want to get rid of is so common that you miss the irony.

Hernandez didn't. From the podium, he called out to one of the waiters in flawless Spanish and told him that he was there representing the Fox administration and that his countrymen in Mexico had not forgotten him. The man, visibly touched by the gesture, smiled and nodded.

I loved it. Not because I was witnessing some secret communiqué in a plot to retake the Southwest but because, given that Mexican immigrants sent home about $16 billion last year, Mexico owes them reassurances — and respect.

Before he took that job, Hernandez made an introduction of a different sort. Simply put, he introduced one rancher to another.

While teaching in Dallas, Hernandez happened to meet both Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Fox, then the governor of the Mexican state of Guanajuato. He thought the two men would hit it off, and indeed they did.

When the governors became presidents, they set out to craft an immigration accord to match Mexican workers with U.S. employers. Bush proposed a plan to grant a kind of temporary amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants in the United States. And that, in turn, helped spark the current debate in Congress over immigration reform.

The way Hernandez sees it, Congress now has a chance to create a more honest and realistic approach to the immigration issue, one that benefits both of the countries to which he lays claim: the United States and Mexico.

That's right. In defining his allegiance, as Mexican Americans are forever asked to do by nativists, Hernandez refuses to choose between the United States and Mexico. For that, a racist and anti-Mexican Web site once labeled him "an American traitor." Sort of a Benedito Arnold.

Hernandez doesn't care. For him, this issue isn't political but personal. His mother was born in the United States and his father was born in Mexico.

"I've always had one foot in the United States and one foot in Mexico," he told me by phone from his office at a university in Fort Worth.

This dual allegiance sets the tone for his new book, "The New American Pioneers: Why Are We Afraid of Mexican Immigrants?" In it, Hernandez recalls his experiences, and profiles hardworking and taxpaying Mexican immigrants in communities in the United States — the sort of people who, according to the author, not only mean no harm but are also in a position to do this country a lot of good.

Hernandez makes a fair point. Immigrants, legal and otherwise, don't bring much to this country except a mighty work ethic, a sense of optimism and the belief that tomorrow will be brighter than today. Elsewhere, I hear doom and gloom as the native-born cry in their $3 cups of coffee about how their government is "selling them out" to globalization and how America's best days are behind it.

What a waste of good citizenship. Natives need to take lessons from immigrants. Maybe then they can reconnect with the spirit of America: that change isn't about fear. It's about renewal, which always brings strength, vitality and hope.

That's the message that Juan Hernandez wants to share with his countrymen — well, the ones on this side of the border.

Ruben Navarrette's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com

That gives me a pain! $3 a cup of coffee.....he hasn't been around a lot of American workers, has he?

If he loves Mexicans and Mexico so much, maybe he should gather them all up and take them home.

He's not the kind of citizen I believe Americans should be.

Navarrette said:
What a waste of good citizenship. Natives need to take lessons from immigrants. Maybe then they can reconnect with the spirit of America: that change isn't about fear. It's about renewal, which always brings strength, vitality and hope.

What a bunch of self serving tripe. He proposes to tell America and Americans what it means to be one??? Liberty, rule of law, personal freedom and private property- all antagonists to those who would try to beguile us with claims of good citizenship?? He is to teach Americans what America means? His arrogance is only exceeded by his La Raza cheerleading.

Illegal aliens: by definition are lawbreakers who are not immigrants. They have no interest in investing in America nor in becoming American. The $16B says it all. If they are such patriotic nationalists, I would remind them that they have a nation. Go home and fix your own damn problems before you would break our laws and then lecture us on holding you to account. Traitor. No that's incorrect. They never gave a trust, so they can't break one. They are not traitors, they are aliens. Illegal aliens.