| Excerpt: Mexico
China Is Not The Threat Yet
Chapter Three Mexico is America's tomorrow.
Eighty years ago, my grandfather said the United States will one day be a brown nation.
In another eighty years, he will be right.
My grandfather was not racist...not anti-Mexican. My grandfather taught himself Spanish. My grandfather planted several Mexican Baptist churches in border towns and villages. Those churches are active today.
In 2023, more than half of all American school children will be non-white minorities...most Hispanic...most of these Mexican. Private schools for Anglos will flourish.
In 2042, single-race non-Hispanic whites will be forevermore a minority in the United States. Near the end of the century, we will be majority Hispanic...read Mexican.
These projections are based on current trends. If Mexico implodes, refugees will overwhelm the United States. We have neither physical nor financial resources to handle millions of refugees.
In 2007, Rodriguez and Garcia joined the top ten most common American surnames, up there with Smith, Brown, and Jones. Mexico will one day stretch from Guatemala to the Canadian border, or - Canadians note - farther.
Tortilla and salsa sales nationwide are expected to increase 40% between 2005 and 2011.
Our African-American population will peak at 15%. African-Americans will be elbowed aside in competition for preferential treatment and welfare programs. Mexicans do not like Negroes.
The shallow will call me racist. Readers with minds working - not knees jerking - will find a pragmatist...a prophet. Mexico is our future. More precisely, lower class Mexico is our future. The class distinction is important.
The history of multi-racial, multi-cultural nations is not good. Lebanon and Belgium are modern examples. Think Yugoslavia....
The nation so many died to keep free will fragment.
Middle and upper class Mexican legal immigrants quietly buy businesses...invest in our economy...send their children to universities...make positive contributions to our society.
Mexican families own more than twenty of the 167 condominium apartments in the tower where I live. For now, these families use their apartments once or twice each year for shopping trips to San Antonio. Should things go wrong in Mexico again, as these Mexicans know they will....
Many Americans view China as an existential threat. China is not an immediate threat. Mexico is the threat. The Mexican invasion will overwhelm the United States. Mexicans will take the United States with the vote. China will have a weakened, fractured target. Chinese think long-term. Chinese are patient. Chinese do not need to invade.
In the 1970s, the San Antonio EXPRESS-News reported a CIA proposal to break off northern Mexican border states and Durango into a new country of Northern Mexico. The CIA proposed the United States invest heavily in this buffer country to provide jobs for hungry hordes the CIA saw in our future. We were preoccupied with the Soviet threat.
Breaking off those states into their own country would have been easy. The North resents rule from Mexico City. When he heard this story, a Northern Mexican businessman assured me the plan would have worked. He said the separation will happen some day.
No American understands Mexico. Mexicans themselves do not understand Mexico, but Mexicans know codes of behavior that keep a fiendishly complicated, complex, contradictory culture/society functioning. No non-Mexican ever learns all the codes, but I can give you enough detail to help you understand why you do not understand.
Mexican history and origins...morals and values...race and culture...laws and traditions... manners and mores... language and art... concepts of right and wrong... concepts of truth and untruth... concepts of justice and injustice... concepts of time and reliability...of responsibility and accountability... are vastly different from ours, frequently opposite ours.
Mexican Catholic religious experience is different from American Catholic religious experience. American Catholics never experienced the predatory Church. The Mexican Church is predator today.
One of the greatest errors we make in the United States is to think others think like we think. This is particularly true of political Liberals. Not even Canadians - our largest trading partner - whose language we share, who live next door, who have similar origins, and with whom we share a long border, think like we think.
Octavio Paz writes Mexican thinking is more Middle Eastern or Oriental than North American or European. Some Mexican problems originated in Moorish traditions imported by Spaniards.
And - we should note at the beginning - Mexicans have much to be Mexican about.
For most of their history - after and before the Conquest - ordinary Mexicans have been prey. In their dealings with the United States, Mexicans still see themselves as prey. Many Mexican attitudes are attitudes of prey.
Nowhere are Mexicans and Americans more different than in their racial conflicts...better said racial conflictions for Mexicans. American racial conflicts are relatively simple black and white - pun intended - and largely societal. Mexican racial conflictions are personal, complex, contradictory, internalized, and painful.
The Mexican is proud to be Indian. The Mexican is ashamed to be an Indian who was conquered and exploited by white Spaniards. At least until the 1960s, white Mexico City women did not shave their legs. Leg hair was proof they were not Indians. Don't think about how hairy legs looked in stockings.
The Mexican is proud of his Spanish heritage. The Mexican is ashamed of the oppression of Indian ancestors by the white Spaniard. White Mexicans do not share this shame.
The Mexican is proud of his mixed blood. He is proud to be La Raza, the new race. Mexico is the only truly mestizo country. The Mexican is ashamed of his mixed blood, of the rape of his Indian grandmothers by his Spanish grandfathers. For much of Mexican history, an Indian or Mestizo woman was available to any white men at the whim of the white man. The woman could not refuse.
For a Spaniard, to be the son of a whore is shame. For a Mexican, to be a son of rape is shame. Rape is Mexico's enduring shame. His brown forefathers' inability to protect their women from white men is one of several roots of the modern Mexican's machismo, thin-skinned faux-masculinity.
Boyé Lafayette de Mente explains this in WHY MEXICANS THINK & BEHAVE THE WAY THEY DO! If you associate with Mexicans or Mexican-Americans, de Mente's slim volume is a must-read. Your Mexican-American friend or co-worker - of either gender - does not see things the way you do.
The thoughtful American will read THE LABYRINTH OF SOLITUDE, by Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz. Paz writes of the many masks Mexicans wear. Paz writes with sadness of his people... of his culture... of his country. I quote Paz often.
Laura Esquivel's multiple-award-winning LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE is another window into Mexican culture. I know a family who forbad one daughter to marry. That daughter spent her life taking care of her sisters' children and grandchildren...unpaid. A Mexican daughter is her mother's possession for all her life.
Quadruple-award-winning MYSTICS OF REYESVILLE by my friend, Corrine Chacón, illustrates the importance of mysticism in Mexican life. Corinne can suck the reader into a scene. Corrine designed the cover for this book.
BROWNSVILLE: STORIES by Oscar Casares and SOUTH TEXAS TALES: STORIES MY FATHER TOLD ME by Patricia Cisneros Young are delightful glimpses into aspects of Mexican border life. Patricia - a professor at University of Texas at Brownsville - married my school friend...long-time border newsman Bill Young. Patricia's stories are polished gems. Patricia and Oscar beautifully express the feel of border Mexican life.
A Mexican grandmother came into a West Side restaurant where I breakfasted. The two little girls with her took chairs. The grandmother said to the little boy, "Do you want a high chair, Papá? From his earliest childhood, Mexican women inflate a Mexican male's ego.
When I was a boy, it was said to get along with Mexicans give the men tobacco and leave the women alone. Bugler was the roll-your-own brand of choice.
In La Cucaracha, the line y para mujeres, Jalisco means for women go to Jalisco.
After the French occupation of Guadalajara, French soldiers stayed to settle. Because of their white European blood, women of Jalisco were fairer-skinned - had finer features - and were considered prettier.
African contributions to Mexican DNA are not discussed. We have a chapter on México Negro. The mestizo is not bi-racial, the mestizo is tri-racial.
The Mexican is proud of Mexico. The Mexican is ashamed of Mexico...a country whose northern half was taken by force by an alien nation...of a country forever in the cultural, military, and economic shadow of Protestant North Americans...of a country incapable of responsible government.
Miss Tillie and I were guests in a palatial home in Mexico City. Our hosts were as gracious and aristocratic as any aristocrats in Europe...even Southern Spain, where aristocratic standards are maintained as nowhere else. As a parting gift, our host, Manolo, gave me a map of Mexico as it was before the United States took half of Mexico in the War of 1848. Manolo did not mean to offend. Manolo wanted to make a point important to all Mexicans. Manolo wanted me to understand.
Did Manolo just happen to have that map in a drawer? Did Manolo buy that map to give to me?
Some months later, when Miss Tillie and I reciprocated with dinner in San Antonio, I arranged in advance for payment at the restaurant. Manolo paid me the compliment I most treasure. He said, "Bien Escondido." Bien escondido means well hidden. I hid payment for the meal well.
Mexicans today see Mexico as the Indian woman and the United States as the white man.
Even nature conspires against Mexico. The centrifugal force of the turning of the earth pushes the water of the Rio Grande ever-so-slightly harder against the Mexican riverbank. The Mexican side is gradually cut away. Soil cut from the Mexican bank builds up on the U.S. side. The symbolism is acute.
The U.S./Mexican water treaty is egregiously - I do not have a stronger word - unfair to Mexico. Almost all water in the Rio Grande is Mexican water from Chihuahua. Texas contributes two trickles from the Devil's and Pecos rivers. With bigger dams on the Concho and Salado rivers, Mexico could end irrigated farming in Texas... or sell us water we take now through an unequal treaty. The heavily populated Rio Grande Valley would be uninhabitable.
As one Mexican famously said, "Poor Mexico, so far from God...so near the United States."
Nuevo Laredo and other Mexican cities dump millions of tons of raw sewage into the Rio Grande. Rio Grande Valley farmers irrigate carrots and onions and cabbages from the river. The United States built a sewage treatment plant for Nuevo Laredo. When it broke Nuevo Laredo did not repair it. Nuevo Laredo dug a ditch around it.
Racially, Mexicans fall into three groups: indios, mixed-blood mestizos, and white Spanish.
White Spanish of Northern Mexico and Southern Texas are Sephardic Jews, descendents of conversos... Jews converted to Catholicism. These were and are invariably of the elite.
One legend holds Pancho Villa was Jewish, the illegitimate son of a converso hacienda owner.
African slaves - in only a few generations - disappeared into indio/mestizo populations.
For Indians and Mestizos, gaucupin is a derogatory word for white Spaniards and white Mexicans, gah-oh-chew-peen, accent the peen.
For mestizos and white Spaniards, indio is a racially derogatory word for darker-skinned Mexicans. Eeen-dee-oh, accent the eeen.
Porfirio Diaz, perhaps Mexico's most powerful president, was mestizo. Porfirio applied French skin-lightening cream to his face and hands every day. In Porfirio's official portrait, his skin is white. Porfirio married a much younger aristocratic white wife... daughter of an industrialist. Porfirio was a patriot. Not to the point here, but there is much to admire about Porfirio Diaz. In Mexico, contradictions are endless.
Oddly, words for skin color are not insulting.
A dark-skinned Mexican in an otherwise light-skinned family will be called El Prieto, the dark one. A dark-skinned daughter of an otherwise white family I know is called Negra, Blackie. No insult is intended. No insult is imagined. A lighter skinned offspring is guero - where-oh - whitey. Accent the where.
New research indicates a child's prejudices are in place by age nine months. The faces an infant sees are the faces he will be comfortable with all his life.
A surrogate grandmother's maids' brown daughters played with my brother and me like fat white dolls. A landscape of white and brown faces is for me natural. Millions of Americans are not comfortable with this landscape. Millions more Americans will have opportunity to be uncomfortable with radical changes in our racial/cultural landscape. Mexico moves north.
Since I was a boy, I have been fascinated by Mexico. Mexicans have always been kind to me. In this book I share some of what I experienced, some of what I observed, some of what I was taught, and some of what I read. Mexico is perhaps best learned by osmosis.
Years ago, when I lived in Europe, I berated a Brownsville friend for never coming to Europe. He said, "Why should I go all that far when Mexico is right here?" He was right. No country is more interesting. Mexico is a fascinating land...enchanting even. Mexicans are enchanting people.
Gun buffs will want to know a Mexican artillery general, Manuel Mondragón, designed - in the 1890s - the first gas-operated semi-automatic infantry rifle. Germany briefly used a light machine gun version in WWI fighter planes.
The Mondragón was sensitive to ammunition quality, and was abandoned as soon as the Germans had mechanically operated - therefore less ammunition-sensitive - replacements. Mondragón's theory was sound. Most modern military rifles use some variation of Mondragón's system. Mondragón is never given credit. Mexicans would say that is to be expected.
I hope this book contributes to your understanding of Mexico. I hope this book makes you want to learn more about Mexico. Mexico is your grandchildren's children's future.
I share with you the best places to go. The most useful and reliable travel guide is MEXICO & CENTRAL AMERICA, now published as the Footprint series. Reports in the two best-known travel guide series are not always written from on-the-spot observation. One writer for LONELY PLANET confessed to writing his Mexico chapters from his girlfriend's apartment in San Francisco. He had not been to Mexico. The writer of the Peshawar chapter of a LONELY PLANET guide I used in Pakistan had never been to Peshawar...nor had the writer he cribbed from.
The hippie travel bible - PEOPLE'S GUIDE TO MEXICO by Karl Franz - is entertaining and useful, even if you do not hitchhike...or sleep on beaches...or travel in an old school bus. Franz's cultural insights are astute.
For adventures from the Mexican Revolution, no book can match INSURGENT MEXICO by John Reed.
The movie, REDS, was based on the story of Reed, an American Communist journalist in Russia. Reed reported the Mexican Revolution before he went to Russia. That Communist could write! Reed's prose has a lushness few writers equal... a lushness I do not attempt. INSURGENT MEXICO was also published as MEXICO IN FLAMES.
Anita Brenner uses text and photographs in THE WIND THAT SWEPT MEXICO to explain the causes of the Mexican Revolution, the first Socialist revolution. Socialism was promptly Mexican-ized.
Mexicans exchanged old predators for new. That is what Socialist revolutions do. In practice, ideological incest blurs differences between Marxism, Socialism, and Fascism. Fascism is the dominant gene. In power, every Socialist...every Marxist... is a Fascist. Fascism is Communism's grandchild. The genealogy is Communism... Syndicalism... Fascism. Look it up.
Nazi - I am sure you remember - means National Socialist Workers Party.
In YESTERDAY'S TRAIN, Terry Pindell uses the no-longer-in-service Mexican passenger train as a vehicle for Mexican history.
No understanding of Mexico is possible without understanding the Conquest. THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO by Beatrice Berler is a short, reader-friendly condensation of W.H. Prescott's definitive 1843 history of the Conquest. Critics complain Prescott was Eurocentric, researching only Spanish sources.
For the Politically Correct, a Nauatl-language history of the Conquest from Aztec perspective exists. I do not know if the account is real or fiction. I suspect fiction. If the story is Politically Correct, the Politically Correct will not care if it is fiction. A Nauatl chief told me of Nauatl prophecies of airplanes and automobiles.
We have no chapter on the Conquest. We have no chapter on Cortez. Everything I tried to write read like history. I am not a historian. I am a storyteller...a teller of true stories. Which of many of these stories is true is up to you.
We have no chapter on the Day of the Dead.
There are good biographies of Cortez. Cortés/Cortez's relationship with his Indian mistress, La Malinche, is totemic to Mexicans...white man on top. Octavio Paz called Mexicans sons of La Malinche.
It is important to understand that Cortez's conquest was only possible with the help of Indian allies. These tribes wanted Aztecs destroyed.
Alan Riding's 1984 bestseller, DISTANT NEIGHBORS, is a good comprehensive Mexico read for Americans.
Paul Horgan's GREAT RIVER, THE RIO GRANDE IN NORTH AMERICAN HISTORY is good. The book is as long as the river.
T.R. Fehrenbach's FIRE AND BLOOD: A HISTORY OF MEXICO is excellent.
The serious student will read all of these. The bibliographies of these books will lead you as deeply into things Mexican as you want to go. I will get you started.
I will explain why Mexicans in the United States do not assimilate.
I will teach you what may be the most important verb in Mexican Spanish...the most profane word in Mexican Spanish. Mexicans see in that verb their history, their lives, and their future. Mexicans are the most profane of Spanish-speakers.
I will teach you how to smuggle a parrot.
Perhaps I will teach you how to burn green mesquite, or to build an impenetrable, bobcat-and- coyote-proof goat corral without posts, with only light thorn brush... using only a machete... or how to find dry fire-starter in rain-soaked brush. Mexicans taught me these things.
Deep in South Texas brush I rode up on an old Mexican who had built a thorn brush corral. He browsed his goats - cattle and sheep graze, goats browse - on brush all day. At night he and a small granddaughter slept in the entrance of the corral to keep out predators. The child had no shoes. They had no shelter. The old man's only weapon was a machete. He probably knew how to use it.
Do not say the curse word to anyone. Do not smuggle a parrot. U.S. Customs will not be amused. The parrot could have psittacosis.
And, please note - again - in a land where facts are distasteful and truth is elastic, fact checking is difficult. Mexicans think it boorish to examine a good story too closely. Where possible, I give competing versions of stories.
The biographer of Pancho Villa, Friedrich Katz said, "The most serious difficulty I had to deal with was to extract the historical truth from the multifaceted layers of legend and myth."
As I write this chapter, the City Council of New York City debates a bill that would allow non-citizens to vote in municipal elections. Those favoring voting rights for non-citizens say those opposed are racists.
Those who use the words fascist and racist most freely have no clue what either word means.
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