Americans no more? - immigration and assimilation - Cover Story
Scott McConnell

IT TAKES no great imagination for a visitor to Southern California to feel witness to a great tide of history. Heading south toward Los Angeles on U.S. 101, a valley opens up near Oxnard: with coastal mountains surging magnificently on the left, and the Pacific on the right, a driver can see flat green fields stretching for miles. There, stooped at the waist in orderly lines, are hundreds and hundreds of Mexican laborers.

Such a scene, with the mountains and speeding cars and lush fields, was visible thirty years ago as well, but without the same resonance. Americans could think, and many did, about the tedium and difficulty of the farm work and the poverty of the workers, all in a state of such plenty. But today this tableau gives rise to more powerful interpretations. These are more often explored by Mexican intellectuals or Mexican-American activists, but they should be in our minds as well.

Listen to the late Carlos Loret de Mola, writing in Excelsior, one of Mexico's leading newspapers: "A peaceful mass of people, hardworking, carries out slowly and patiently an unstoppable invasion, the most important in human history. You cannot give me a similar example of such a large migratory wave by an ant-like multitude, stubborn, unarmed, and carried on in the face of the most powerful and best-armed nation on earth." The result of this migration, he continues, is to return the land "to the jurisdiction of Mexico without the firing of a single shot." For despite the wealth of the United States and its historic ability to absorb immigrants and convert them into Americans, these workers "continue to be Mexican and even to impress their personality on their surroundings." The American upper classes live "in increasing splendor, [but] their luxury . . . marks the beginning of their decadence." The land, Loret de Mola concludes, "ends up in the hands of those who deserve it."..........

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