by Manuel Miles

Recently, an American friend of mine wrote a column in which he updated the constant gringo whine about how them thar Mexican furriners is invadin’ thuh A-merrcans.  While he came up with a couple of new twists, for the most part his plaint was just more of the same old crap.  While waiting for my back to dry, I would like to point out a few of the enormous contradictions in this standard gringo hypocrisy:

“They are illegal.” 

So are a lot of things, and gringos do them anyway.  What los estupidos actually mean is that them furriners is in the USA and they don’t want them to be, legally or otherwise.  That is why they have made it illegal for Mexicans to move to such traditional Anglo-Saxon enclaves as Nuevo Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Texas and California.

If we are to talk legalities, the Yanquis’ ancestors’ occupation and seizure of two thirds of Mexico was and is illegal.  That didn’t stop them.  The Americanos who immigrated to Texas often did so illegally and, in defiance of Mexican law, they brought slavery into that Mexican state.  Then they rebelled and seized Texas, which their backers in the USA soon annexed as a (slave) state.

A series of attacks on the rest of Mexican territory followed, and the pattern was much the same; Yanquis immigrated massively into Mexican states, frequently illegally, then caused trouble and asked the US government to “rescue” them.  An American general who fought in one of those wars (called “the Mexican-American War” by the victors) said, “Never in history was a more unjust war forced by a strong nation onto a weaker one.” [I believe it was Winfield Scott who said this, but it might have been another US general.]  Unfortunately, that is not true (history is full of even more unjust wars), but the man at least knew that he was fighting on the wrong side.

Finally, the subversion of the legitimate government of Alta California was engineered by US “adventurers”, who bribed corrupt Mexican officials to rebel and then “aided” them, seizing this estado in the process.  The American empire had reached the Pacific Ocean and its “manifest destiny” (imperial mission) was fulfilled, for the time being.

So much for any gringo right to speak to Mexicanos of legalities.

Today, occupied Mexico is being reoccupied by the descendants of those who were evicted by the gringo invaders.  I went to high school in La Ciudad de Nuestra Madre la Reina de Los Angeles (“Ell Ay” to you gringos), and the only ones who even knew how to pronounce the name of the city, county and state in which they lived were los chicanos.

How can Mexicanos be “foreigners” in Santa Fe, Nuevo Mexico and Sacramento, California, and Las Vegas, Nevada and Amarillo, Texas when they are the only residents who know what the names of those places mean?!  I was once on an airplane in which some gringo Texans were struggling to complete a crossword puzzle from one of their (ingles) newspapers.  The clue was “cottonwood”, but the word only had five letters, and started with the letter ‘A’.  They were stumped, and that leads us to the second major gringo complaint:

“They don’t assimilate into our culture.”

First off, allow me to ask, once I recover from a fit of hysterical laughter, “What ‘culture’?!”  Such a concern is akin to a blind man worrying about eyestrain.  A teaspoon of yogurt has more culture than the entire USA. 

Don’t them furriners do the national dance of the USA, the “hokey pokey”?  Or do they refuse to dine on that fine, world-famous American cuisine?  Perhaps they don’t watch enough television?  Maybe they turn up that salsa and tejana music so loud that you can’t hear your heavy metal and rap “music”?

The real complaint is that they are not as pale, both in epidermis and intellect, as the gringos.  If the USA is ever to have a culture, it will be thanks to the Cubanos, Puerto Ricanos and Mexicanos, and not to Metallica, Snoop Doggy Dog, Burger King, Jerry Springer and Adam Sandler.

Throughout history, imperial heartlands have been swamped by hordes of those who have been impoverished and/or dispossessed by the empire’s depredations.  And, throughout history, those heartlands have been culturally enriched by those waves of immigration.  It is one of the few benefits, for an empire’s citizens, of the forced investment of their lives and fortunes in the conquests of the imperial state.

In this manner, Greek medicine, architecture and astronomy was brought to Rome, for example.  Tea and ketchup, now thought of as being essentially British, came from Asia.  From the Arabs, the Europeans learnt a number system which made advanced mathematics possible.  Yet the Americanos whine and moan and squeal as if they were being tortured!

If the gringos were smart, they’d take advantage of the opportunity to learn from those whom they have conquered; they’d encourage bilingualism in place of their  xenophobic ignorance of the world beyond the strip mall.  If they did that, however, they’d no longer be Americans; it would be the death of their inbred “culture” of self-worship.

What a loss.

January 20, 2002