Kevin MacDonald: Mexican stories

Kevin MacDonald: Lately I have been inundated with stories about Mexicans. Up in Morgan Hill (near San Jose), four White students had the temerity to wear American flags  on Cinco de Mayo, resulting in Mexicans swearing at them in Spanish. The John and Ken radio show, a major LA-area talk show with  a huge audience and very negative attitudes on illegal aliens, interviewed a woman who recounted being physically threatened by a crowd of Mexican students swearing at her in Spanish . She closed her comments by saying that she thinks that it may all end with a race war.

I suspect that the response of the White students indicates an emerging racial/ethnic consciousness. Overtly, it was about American flags versus Mexican flags, but the racial difference was obvious.

Today’s LA Times recounts the story of a Mexican family that crossed the border a century ago. What’s amazing is that after a century they seem completely unassimilated to the US. They have large families with “dozens of relatives” living in adjacent houses, and they still speak Spanish as their first language. A Mexican gunman with a long record of arrests murdered three family members, including the mother of his child. The family is depicted as working class. In other words, no assimilation and no upward mobility in 100 years.

Today’s LA Times also has an article on Ricardo Dominguez, a Mexican American just granted tenure at UC-San Diego. Dominguez is a performance artist who, in the words of this tenure-granting letter, is a “defining figure in the migration of performance art from physical space to virtual space.” His performances in virtual space are political gestures aimed at shutting down websites of people who are not on board with his leftist-ethnocentric, pro-immigration agenda.

His latest claim to fame is using $10,000 in public funds to develop a cell phone that tells illegals where there’s water while entertaining them with poetry as they cross the desert (“May the wind always be at your back”). His course is described as “Trans( )infinities as an (empty set) of potential aesthetic practices that move between, through, across, and beyond the post of the post-contemporary by transfixing on the loan words” — whatever that means. But it’s good enough for tenure at the University of California. And of course, his moment of fame has received a great deal of encouragement from his numerous colleagues on the academic nutcase left: Dominquez describes the praise he has received as  “a kind of glorious moment in the performance. … It’s the humanity that has gathered around … Electronic Disturbance Theatre.”

Another LA Times story from today describes 14 Mexican-looking people (I realize this is profiling) who were arrested after tying up traffic for hours while lying down in front of the city jail as a protest against the Arizona immigration law. They joined their hands  together inside plastic piping to make it harder to arrest them. The sign in the print edition had a clenched brown fist and a what looks like a reference to Arizona’s “racist laws.”

Finally, there was the article in the NY Times by Zev Chafets on Julian Castro, the “The Post-Hispanic Hispanic Politician.”  Castro’s mother is a former La Raza activist, and it’s pretty obvious she still identifies as a Mexican and is not too fond of Anglos:

To Rosie, the Alamo is a symbol of bad times. “They used to take us there when we were schoolchildren,” she told me. “They told us how glorious that battle was. When I grew up I learned that the ‘heroes’ of the Alamo were a bunch of drunks and crooks and slaveholding imperialists who conquered land that didn’t belong to them. But as a little girl I got the message — we were losers. I can truly say that I hate that place and everything it stands for.”

Despite this, the whole point of the article is to assure readers that there is no danger of Mexicans being an unassimilated minority:

In 2000, while Castro was still in Cambridge, the political theorist Samuel P. Huntington argued that mass immigration from Mexico poses an existential threat to the United States. “Mexican immigration,” he wrote, “is a unique, disturbing and looming challenge to our cultural integrity, our national identity and potentially to our future as a country.” At the heart of Huntington’s critique, which many Americans share, is the sense that Mexican-Americans will form a permanent, unassimilated superbarrio across the Southwest and elsewhere. Julián Castro’s San Antonio is one place that counters that concern.

Chafets writes as if finding one Mexican politician who seems on the surface to be assimilated means we should all breathe a sigh of relief–despite Castro’s radical mother and a whole lot of very unassmilated Mexicans, even after several generations. What I see does nothing to remove Huntington’s concerns.

But it’s clear that Castro is getting a huge publicity push. Chafets quotes people eager to declare him to be the likely first Latino president. And it doesn’t hurt that his chief of staff is Robbie Greenblum — a Jewish lawyer. If nothing else, Castro has figured out how to get ahead in American politics, and Zev Chafets and the NY Times are doing all they can to play along.