Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Davis HANSON Brain LAMB Interviews Victor HANSON LAMB, HOST: Victor Davis HANSON, the name "Mexifornia" comes from what? HANSON: Actually, it`s a term that I discovered that was used by sort of the La Razza (ph) left that was a connotation for a new hybrid-cultured California that would be not part of Mexico and not part of the United States. So the editors that I worked with embraced that as the title, but a lot of people think it came from the conservative right, but actually, it didn`t LAMB: Who`s La Razza? HANSON: It`s a very funny word. It means "the race." There`s a National Council of La Razza that`s an advocacy group, people, they claim, of Mexican heritage. But I`m very worried about that nomenclature because it reminds me of the connotations of "Das Volk." Any time you have a word for "the people," but it really means the race, I think it`s outside the boundaries of the American assimilationist experience. LAMB: What`s a classics professor doing writing a book about Mexifornia? HANSON: I don`t know! Sometimes I wish I hadn`t have written it. But I actually live on a farm in central California, and I am a fifth generation. I`ve lived with Mexican-Americans. My daughter`s boyfriend`s a Mexican-American. I have a brother married to a Mexican-American, step-nephews and nieces. So it was sort of a memoir, a literary memoir of what I grew up with, and it was -- it was prompted by the idea that I thought that the world that I used to know of assimilation and second and third-generation Mexican-Americans were such wonderful citizens that this new generation was not getting the same opportunities. I was worried about the problems for the future of California. LAMB: Paint a picture for us of where you live. HANSON: It`s the exact geographical center of the state of California. It`s about 20 miles southwest of Fresno, three miles from a town called Salma (ph). It`s a small family farm. LAMB: How many acres? HANSON: Originally, it was about 135, and then when my parents died, it was broken up among cousins and siblings, and one thing happened, and now I have 45 of my own. LAMB: And what`s on the land there? HANSON: Grapes that we produce raisins. And it`s rented out now because I`m not able to farm. LAMB: Why not? HANSON: Well, I`m a Hoover fellow at Stanford University. I`m a professor at Cal State. And I write military histories and classics, and it just doesn`t give me enough time to get out in a tractor anymore. LAMB: And your family started in this area what year? HANSON: Somewhere -- we`re not sure because there were no records then. It was 1872, 1873. My great-great grandmother came with her son, my great- grandfather, both of whom I never met, and built the house that I live in. And then I remember my grandfather very well, Reese (ph) Davis, who was the grandson of the founder and then grew up in this place. LAMB: And where did that family come from originally? HANSON: They came from Missouri, and they were fleeing the detritus of the Civil War, and there was advertising $4 an acre in the central valley. Transcontinental railroad had just opened, so they came out. My father`s side were Swedes, and they had a farm 10 miles away. And they came in the 1880s. So the two families were -- they sort of merged, and we had a farm in Kingsberg (ph) and a farm in Salma. But they were both -- one was -- I`m a fifth-generation on one side and fourth on the other. LAMB: You said you`re not sure you`re glad you wrote the book. Why? What... HANSON: Well, because it`s a very strange thing that`s happening. We have the corporate conservative right who wants a perennial supply, I think, of cheap labor, who is in alliance with the therapeutic left that wants an unassimilated constituency. And the language that we use -- protectionist or racist -- precludes discussion of this issue, which is -- we have an election coming up in California, a bizarre election. But we have this 800-pound gorilla of illegal immigration, and it doesn`t have anything to do with Mexicans or Mexico or legal immigration. It`s a particular illegal immigration from Mexico that`s starting a whole series of inconsistencies, antitheses problems. And we`re not discussing it. LAMB: What`s the -- what are the numbers? HANSON: Well, we don`t know. Nationwide, I think the U.S. census suggests there`s nine million illegal aliens. I`ve seen figures of 15 or 19, 20, that advocates on both the left and right will use, that are currently in the United States. In California, I`ve seen as many as 3 to 4 million. A term that`s used now is immigrants, meaning people were born in Mexico, and that precludes the argument whether they`re here illegally or legally. But whatever the term we use, it`s a radical shift since, say, 1970, where we had 400,000, not 4 million. And most of them were here legally, and we had the assimilationist pattern, where we had no bilingual education, no Chicano studies, and it was based on assimilation, intermarriage and unity of the United States. And I -- and I grew up in that generation, and the people that I knew -- I was one of the few non-Mexican- Americans in my school district. They`re all smashing successes now. LAMB: There was one point in your book where you -- you talk about what -- people invoked the Chicano name to you, used it, and you turned on them and said -- and you used the -- characterized yourself as white. Do you remember what I`m talking about? HANSON: Yes. I`ve had students that have come out of sort of this therapeutic classes in Chicano studies that will be in my class, and they`ll -- they`ll sort of give prerequisites for their questions on Greek history or humanities or Western civilization. They`ll say, As a Chicana, I want to say -- and this self- nomenclature. And I`ve sometimes said, Do you know where that leads to? It leads to Rwanda. It leads to the Balkans. It leads to historically really disturbing things. How would you like it if I said, as a professor of classics, As a white person, or As an Anglo, or As a Swede? So we really want to get away from that. And when you do that and try to remind students that just because their professor has suggested that`s a way of expressing ethnic pride that historically, it has a bad, bad, bad landscape around it, it works. LAMB: In your classes at Cal State -- Fresno? HANSON: Yes. LAMB: What`s the mix? HANSON: Really don`t know. I think university-wide, it`s 50- 60% Mexican- American, but in California, you almost need the racial connotations of the old Confederacy because these -- these surveys, people -- what do you do if you`re one third, one fourth, one half? But people who fill out the survey probably would suggest 50 - 60% of the student body is Hispanic, 10% Asian. So-called whites are in a minority. My students are mostly, in classics, I would say -- we just put -- placed a person at Princeton, Sal Diaz (ph). He`s Mexican-American. We have one at Yale, Curtis Easton (ph), who`s Puerto Rican. Sabina Robinson (ph) is African-American. We really don`t have anymore white students in the numbers that we used to. So they`re a small minority. LAMB: And you -- you seem to be -- I don`t want to use a psychological term, but you seem to be mixed on the way you feel. One page, I`m getting a story about how close you are to the Mexican-American community and they`re your friends, and the next page, you lay out some rather strong stories about... HANSON: Yes. LAMB: ... the down side of it all. HANSON: Yes. Well, I think the issue can be explained that Mexican-American heritage is very valuable. It`s the best -- I think some of the best -- I have to say that because those are the people I know and I like and I grew up with. I didn`t really grow up with people who were not Mexican-American to any large degree -- are some of the best citizens. And that`s where the tragedy starts to entail. After 1970, we suddenly felt the market doesn`t work anymore. You used to attract workers by raising wages. Instead, the idea was that people will not work, so we need people to come from Mexico. We used to assimilate people by teaching them English. Suddenly, we had bilingual education. We have driver`s license the governor`s going to sign. So we had all this alternate world of jurisprudence, bilingual education. And the result of it was, we`re starting to see apartheid communities that resemble sort of the communities in Mexico, rather than the United States. Where I live, Parlier (ph), Orange Cove (ph), Mendota (ph), they`re almost 100 percent immigrants, people who were born in Mexico. And they are not visited by so-called elite representatives of those constituencies in Fresno.