azstarnet.com, 16 July 2000
'Cactus Wall' has fallen, on both sides of border
By Richard Rodriguez
Early this month, after Mexicans elected Vicente Fox their new president, a U.S. journalist gushed: "The Cactus Wall has fallen." In more ways than one, I'd say.
For what we are witnessing in Mexico is also apparent throughout the United States. The line separating "us" from "ellos" is blurring.
Consider Mexico: Not so long ago, Mexicans would refer to citizens of the United States as norteamericanos. But then the North American Free Trade Agreement forced Mexicans to look at the map: Mexico is a North American country.
After the win, Fox appeared on U.S. television, wearing a Reaganesque grin. He urged the formation of a "common market" of Mexico and its fellow North American neighbors. He made the suggestion in English. Fox speaks fluent English.
He's not the first Mexican president to do so. But he is the first to be so unguarded. (Earlier presidents, for reasons of Mexican pride, were more cautious about speaking English in public.)
While Fox was holding an unprecedented bilingual press conference in Mexico City, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, on a swing through California, was insisting to audiences that the GOP has "corazon," and Vice President Al Gore was mocking his Republican rival for promising voters only "palabras."
Clearly, some change is going on - on both sides of the border. Mexico is becoming North Americanized. The United States is becoming - what shall we say? - Latinized.
Because, in centuries past, a large part of the United States was ruled by Spain, then Mexico, it is perhaps ludicrous to speak of the Latinization of the United States today as something "new." Yet, of course, it is.
England and Spain left more of their mark on the New World than any other European countries. But they were Renaissance rivals. Antagonism marked the borders that separated each culture from the other. To this day, one hears of cafeteria battles between "Hispanic" and "Anglo" high school students, proxies in a sea battle between the Spanish Armada and Queen Elizabeth's navy.
But now, a change. Mexico's new president carries an English surname and is not shy about his knowledge of English. Texas, a state with a long history of friction with Mexico, has a governor who is not shy about his Spanish fluency or his Mexican in-laws. Pity the nativists on both sides of the border!
Because Mexico is the smaller country and poorer, the Mexican nativist perhaps could have anticipated our brave new mundo. American nativists have more reason to be surprised, but they would do well to remember that none other than President Richard M. Nixon was the father of today's Hispanic America.
In 1973, the Nixon administration described America as a pentagon: no longer just a black-and-white dialectic between Europe and Africa. Nixon colonized America.
His administration proposed five choices on the affirmative-action form: white, black, Asian/Pacific Islander, American Indian/Alaskan Native and Hispanic. (Choose one.)
Initially, many Mexican-Americans resisted the Nixonian label. After all, Mexicans in America represent 70 percent of all Hispanics. So, many felt their story and status diminished by Nixon's sweeping "Hispanic" category. Others regarded the English word as too colonial and chose "Latino," the word that remains today the more politically correct.
In truth, however, "Latino" is doubly colonial. For it is, after all, a Spanish word, and it connects the descendants of Latin America to the far shores of the Latin empire, which is southern Europe. I prefer Nixon's term. "Hispanic" is appropriate to our confused state of affairs.
The purpose of Nixon's five choices was to flatten differences, rather than to compartmentalize us from each other. Nixon would have said, I think: To get rid of a minority, to make it disappear into America, throw money at it - and affirmative-action privileges and little flatteries.
In 19th-century America, Irish and Italian immigrants were told that they were "white." (America is a country of broad strokes.) Just so, does America today tell Peruvian and Salvadoran immigrants that they are alike, Hispanics.
The immigrant may refuse the label. But with time, the experience of America forces it. If you are Mexican and live in the United States, you end up knowing more Salvadorans than you ever would in Mexico. If you are Cuban in Miami, you hear a standardized Spanish accent on Spanish-language television. If you are a Dominican in Hartford, Conn., you end up hearing politicians call you Hispanic; after a while, you come to believe them.
Those of us today who call ourselves Latino or Hispanic are, in fact, merely acknowledging our Americanization. We're like the Vietnamese teen-ager who told me recently that she dates only "Asian," or the woman who cares for my parents and who calls herself a "Pacific Islander" - we have all become children of Nixon's America.
Richard Rodriguez is author of "Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father." He is an editor for Pacific News Service. |
