1000-1200 Word History Essay

SIX

LA RECONQUISTA

The American Southwest seems to be slowly returning to the jurisdiction of Mexico without firing a shot.1 —Excelsior National Newspaper of Mexico

In 1821, a newly independent Mexico invited Americans to settle in its northern province of Texas— on two conditions: the Americans must embrace Roman Catholicism, and they must swear allegiance to Mexico. Thousands took up the offer. But, in 1835, after a tyrannical general, Santa Anna, seized power, the Texans, fed up with loyalty oaths and fake conversions, and now outnumbering Mexicans in Texas ten to one, rebelled and kicked the tiny Mexican garrison back across the Rio Grande.

Santa Anna led an army north to recapture his lost province. At a mission called the Alamo, he massacred the first rebels who resisted.

Then he executed the four hundred Texans who surrendered at Goliad. But at San Jacinto, Santa Anna blundered into an ambush. His army was butchered, and he was captured. The Texans demanded his execution for the Alamo massacre, but Sam Houston had another idea. He made the dictator an offer: your life for Texas. Santa Anna signed, and Texas had its independence. On his last day in office, Andrew Jackson recognized the Lone Star Republic of his old subaltern, who had led Old Hickory’s Tennesseans in the 1814 slaughter of the Red Sticks at Horseshoe Bend. Buchanan, Patrick J..

Eight years later, in his final hours in office, Pres. John Tyler decided to write his own page in history by annexing the Texas republic, denying the honor to Jackson’s protégé, James K. Polk, who had won the White House on a pledge to bring Texas into the Union. An enraged Mexico now disputed the U.S. claim to all land north of the Rio Grande. To back up that claim, Polk sent Gen. Zachary Taylor to the north bank of the river. When Mexican soldiers crossed and fired on a U.S. patrol, spilling American blood on what Polk claimed was American soil, he demanded and got a swift congressional declaration of war. By 1848, soldiers with names like Grant, Lee, and McClellan were in Montezuma’s city. A humiliated Mexico was forced to cede all of Texas, the Southwest, and California. To ease the anguish of amputation, the U.S. gave Mexico fifteen million dollars.

Mexicans seethed with hatred and resentment. In 1910, the troubles began anew. After a revolution that was antichurch and anti-American, U.S. sailors were roughed up and arrested in Tampico. Wilson ordered Veracruz occupied by U.S. Marines until the Mexicans delivered a twenty-one-gun salute to Old Glory. As Wilson explained to the British ambassador, “I am going to teach the South Americans to elect good men.” 2 When the bandit Pancho Villa led a murderous raid into New Mexico in 1916, Wilson sent General Pershing and ten thousand troops to do the tutoring.

Despite FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy, President Cárdenas, in 1938, nationalized U.S. oil companies on a day still honored in Mexican history. Pemex was born, a state cartel that would collude with OPEC in 1999 to run up oil prices to thirty-five dollars a barrel to gouge the Americans who had led a fifty-billion-dollar bailout of a bankrupt Mexico in 1994. One is reminded of Italian statesman Cavour’s response when asked the diplomatic goal of his unified nation in 1859: “To astonish the world with our ingratitude.” 3

The point of this history? Mexico has an historic grievance against the United States that is felt deeply by her people. They believe we robbed their country of half its land when Mexico was young and weak. There are thus deep differences in attitudes toward America between old immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe, and today’s immigrants from Mexico. And with fully one-fifth of all peoples of Mexican ancestry now in the United States, and up to a million more coming every year, we need to understand the differences between the old immigrants and the new, and the America of yesterday and the America of today.

Buchanan, Patrick J.. The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (Kindle Locations 1986-1995). St. Martin's Press. Kindle Edition.

1. The numbers pouring in from Mexico are larger than any wave from any other country in so short a time. In the 1990s alone, folks of Mexican ancestry in the United States grew by 50 percent to twenty-one million, and that does not include the six million Hispanics who refused to tell census takers their country of origin. Mexican Americans are also concentrated in the U.S. Southwest, though the Founding Fathers wanted immigrants spread out among the population to ensure

2. Mexicans not only come from another culture, but millions are of another race. History and experience teach us that different races are far more difficult to assimilate. The sixty million Americans who claim German ancestry are fully assimilated, while millions from Africa and Asia are still not full participants in American society.

3. Millions of Mexicans are here illegally. They broke the law to get into the United States, and they break the law by being here. Each year, 1.6 million illegal aliens are apprehended, almost all of them trying to breach our bleeding Southern border. 4

4. Unlike the immigrants of old, who bade farewell forever to their native lands when they boarded the ship, for Mexicans, the mother country is right next door. Millions have no desire to learn English or to become citizens. America is not their home; Mexico is; and they wish to remain proud Mexicans. They have come here to work. Rather than assimilate, they create Little Tijuanas in U.S. cities, just as Cubans have created a Little Havana in Miami. Only America hosts twenty times as many people of Mexican descent as of Cuban descent. With their own radio and TV stations, newspapers, films, and magazines, the Mexican Americans are creating an Hispanic culture separate and apart from America’s larger culture. They are becoming a nation within a nation.

5. The waves of Mexican immigrants are also coming to a different America than the old immigrants. A belief in racial rights and ethnic entitlements has taken root among our minorities. This belief is encouraged by cultural elites who denigrate the melting pot and preach the glories of multiculturalism. Today, ethnic enclaves are encouraged to maintain their separate identities, and in the barrios ethnic chauvinism is rife. “The integrationist impulse of the 1960s is dead,” writes Glenn Garvin in Reason, “Liberal chic in the 1990s is segregation, dressed up as identity-group politics.” 5 If today Calvin Coolidge declared, “America must remain American,” he would be charged with a hate crime. 6

Buchanan, Patrick J.. The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (Kindle Locations 2013-2015). St. Martin's Press. Kindle Edition.

SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON, author of The Clash of Civilizations, calls migration “the central issue of our time.” 7 He divides immigrants into the “converts” who come to assimilate to our way of life, and “sojourners,” who come to work a few years and return home. “New immigrants” from south of the border, he writes, “are neither converts nor sojourners. They go back and forth between California and Mexico, maintaining dual identities and encouraging family members to join them.” 8 Of the 1.6 million arrested each year crossing the U.S. border, Huntington warns:

If over one million Mexican soldiers crossed the border Americans would treat it as a major threat to their national security and react accordingly. The invasion of over one million Mexican civilians, as [Mexican president Vicente] Fox seems to recommend, would be a comparable threat to American societal security, and Americans should react against it with vigor.

Mexican immigration is a unique, disturbing and looming challenge to our cultural integrity, our national identity, and potentially to our future as a country. 9

American leaders are not reacting “with vigor,” even though one Zogby poll has found that 72 percent of the people want immigration reduced, and a Rasmussen poll in July 2000 found that 89 percent wanted English to be America’s official language. 10 The people want action. The elites disagree and do nothing. Despite our braggadocio about being “the world’s last superpower,” the U.S. lacks the fortitude to defend its borders and to demand, without apology, that immigrants assimilate into society.

Perhaps our mutual love of the dollar can bridge the cultural chasm, and we shall all live happily together in what one author calls The First Universal Nation. 11 But Uncle Sam is taking a hellish risk in importing a huge diaspora of tens of millions from a nation vastly different from our own. And if we are making a fatal blunder, it is not a decision we can ever revisit. Our children will live with the consequences, balkanization, the end of America as we know her. “If assimilation fails,” writes Huntington, “the United States will become a cleft country with all the potentials for internal strife and disunion that entails.” 12 Is that risk worth taking? Why are we taking it?

Western nations are already breaking up over ethnicity and culture. Secessionist movements have broken apart the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia and are beavering away in France, Spain, and Italy. In 2001, Germany began a year-long celebration of old Prussia. In England, the Union Jack is being replaced on taxicabs and at World Cup soccer games with the medieval Cross of St. George. People identify less and less with the nation-state, more and more with kith and kin. In Alberta and Saskatchewan, independence parties have been formed, and 14 percent of British Columbia now favors separation from Canada. 13

A North American Union of Canada, Mexico, and the United States has been proposed by President Fox, with a complete opening of borders to the goods and peoples of the three countries. The idea enraptures the Wall Street Journal. 14 But Mexico’s per capita GDP of five thousand dollars is only a fraction of America’s, and the income gap between us is the largest on earth between two large neighbor countries. 15 Since NAFTA passed in 1993, real wages in Mexico have fallen 15 percent. Half of all Mexicans now live in poverty, and eighteen million subsist on less than two dollars a day, while the U.S. minimum wage is headed for fifty dollars a day. Throw open the border, and millions could flood across into the United States in months. Is our country nothing more than an economy? Buchanan, Patrick J.. The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (Kindle Locations 2042-2048). St. Martin's Press. Kindle Edition.

OUR OLD IMAGE is of Mexican folks as docile, conservative, friendly, Catholic people of traditional beliefs and values. There are still millions of these hard-working, family-oriented, patriotic Americans of Mexican heritage, who have been among the first to answer America’s call to arms. And any man, woman, or child, from any country or continent, can be a good American. We know that from our history.

But the demographic sea change, especially in California, where a fourth of the people are foreign-born and almost a third are Latino, has spawned a new ethnic chauvinism. When the U.S. soccer team played Mexico in the Los Angeles Coliseum a few years back, the “Star-Spangled Banner” was hooted and jeered, an American flag was torn down, and the American team and its few fans were showered with water bombs, beer bottles, and garbage. 16

Two years ago, the south Texas town of El Cenizo declared Spanish its official language and ordered that all official documents be written in Spanish and all town business conducted in Spanish. 17 Any cooperation with U.S. immigration authorities was made a firing offense. El Cenizo has, de facto, seceded from the United States.

In the New Mexico legislature in 2001, a resolution was introduced to rename the state “Nuevo Mexico,” the name it carried before it became a part of the American Union. When the bill was defeated, the sponsor, Rep. Miguel Garcia, suggested to reporters that “covert racism” may have been the cause— the same racism, he said, that was behind naming the state New Mexico in the first place. 18

A spirit of separatism, nationalism, and irredentism has come alive in the barrio. The Latino student organization MEChA demands return of the Southwest to Mexico. 19 Charles Truxillo, a professor of Chicano Studies at the University of New Mexico, says a new “Aztlan” with its capital in Los Angeles is inevitable, and Mexicans should seek it by any means necessary. 20

“We’re recolonizing America, so they’re afraid of us. It’s time to take back what is ours,” rants Ricky Sierra of the Chicano National Guard. 21 One demonstration leader in Westwood exulted, “We are here … to show white Protestant Los Angeles that we’re the majority … and we claim this land as ours. It’s always been ours and we’re still here … if anybody is going to be deported it’s going to be you.” 22

José Angel Gutierrez, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Arlington and director of the UTA Mexican-American Study Center, told a university crowd: “We have an aging white America. They are not making babies. They are dying. The explosion is in our population. They are shitting in their pants in fear! I love it.” 23

Now, this may be Corona talk in the cantina, but more authoritative voices are sounding the same notes, and they resonate in the barrio. The Mexican consul general José Pescador Osuna remarked in 1998, “Even though I am saying this part serious, part joking, I think we are practicing La Reconquista in California.” 24 California legislator Art Torres called Proposition 187, to cut off welfare to illegal aliens, “the last gasp of white America.” 25

“California is going to be a Mexican State. We are going to control all the institutions. If people don’t like it, they should leave,” exults Mario Obledo, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, and recipient of the Medal of Freedom from President Clinton. 26 Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo told Mexican-Americans in Dallas: “You are Mexicans, Mexicans who live north of the border.” 27

Why should Mexican immigrants not have greater loyalty to their homeland than to a country they broke into simply to find work? Why should nationalistic and patriotic Mexicans not dream of a reconquista ?

Consider the student organization MEChA, whose UCLA chapter, a few years back, was chaired by one Antonio Villaraigosa, who came within forty thousand votes of being mayor of Los Angeles in 2001. MEChA stands for Movimento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, the Chicano Student movement of Aztlan. What is El Plan de Aztlan for which MEChA exists? In its own words, MEChA aims to reclaim the land of their fathers that was stolen in the “brutal ‘gringo’ invasion of our territories.” 28

With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlan. 29

In El Plan, “Aztlan belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops and not to foreign Europeans. We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent.” 30 The MEChA slogan is “Por la Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada.” Translation: “For our race, everthing. For those outside our race, nothing.” 31

MEChA demands U.S. “restitution” for “past economic slavery, political exploitation, ethnic and cultural psychological destruction and denial of civil and human rights.” 32 “Political Liberation,” asserts MEChA,

can only come through independent action on our part, since the two-party system is the same animal with two heads that feed from the same trough. Where we are a majority we will control; where we are a minority we will represent a pressure group; nationally we represent one party: La Familia de Raza. 33

In its constitution, MEChA declares that its official symbol “shall be the eagle with its wings spread, bearing a macahuittle in one claw and a dynamite stick in the other with the lighted fuse in its beak.” 34

MEChA is the Chicano version of the white-supremacist Aryan Nation, only it claims four hundred campus chapters across the Southwest and as far away as Cornell and Ann Arbor. With its rhetoric about a “mestizo nation,” a “bronze people,” a “bronze culture,” a “bronze continent,” and “race above all,” it is unabashedly racist and anti-American. That Villaraigosa could go through a campaign for mayor of America’s second-largest city without having to explain his association and repudiate MEChA testifies to the truth that America’s major media are morally intimidated by any minority that can make out credentials as a victim of past discrimination.

And nowhere has ethnic intimidation been more successful than in the academy. After years of disruptive MEChA protests, the University of Texas has downgraded Texas Independence Day. In 2000, the university held a “private alumni fund-raising event to milk the holiday for money, while according it virtually no public recognition.” 35

MEANWHILE, THE INVASION rolls on. America’s once-sleepy two-thousand-mile Mexican border is now the scene of daily confrontations. Ranches in Arizona have become nightly bivouac areas for thousands of aliens, who cut fences and leave poisoned cattle and trails of debris in the trek north. Even the Mexican army is showing its contempt. The State Department reported fifty-five military incursions in the five years before the incident in 2000, when truckloads of Mexican soldiers barreled through a barbed wire fence, fired shots, and pursued two mounted officers and a U.S. Border Patrol vehicle. 36 Border Patrol agents believe some Mexican army units collaborate with the drug cartels.

America has become a spillway for an exploding population that Mexico is unable to employ. With Mexico’s population growing by ten million every decade, there will be no end to the long march north before the American Southwest is fully Hispanicized. Mexican senator Adolfo Zinser conceded that Mexico’s “economic policy is dependent on unlimited emigration to the United States.” 37 The Yanqui-baiting academic and “onetime Communist supporter” Jorge Castaneda warned in Atlantic Monthly, six years ago, that any American effort to cut back immigration “will make social peace in … Mexico untenable … . Some Americans dislike immigration, but there is very little they can do about it.” 38 These opinions take on weight, with Senator Zinser now President Fox’s national security adviser and Jorge Castaneda his foreign minister.

Under Fox, Zinser, and Castaneda, Mexican policy has shifted to support of the illegals entering the United States. An Office for Mexicans Abroad has been set up to help Mexicans evade U.S. border guards in the deserts of Arizona and California by providing them with “survival kits” of water, dry meat, granola, Tylenol, antidiarrhea pills, bandages, and condoms. The kits are distributed in Mexico’s poorest towns, along with information on where illegals can go for free social services in California, no questions asked. In short, Mexico City is now aiding and abetting an invasion of the United States, and the U.S. political response is one of intimidated silence and moral paralysis. 39

As the invasion rolls on, with California as the preferred destination, sociologist William Frey has documented an out-migration of African Americans and Anglo-Americans from the Golden State in search of cities and towns like the ones they grew up in. 40 Other Californians are moving into gated communities. A country that cannot control its borders isn’t really a country anymore, Ronald Reagan warned us some twenty years ago.

Concerns about a radical change in America’s ethnic composition have been called un-American. But they are as American as Benjamin Franklin, who once asked, “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them … ?” 41 Franklin would never find out if his fears were justified. German immigration was halted during the Seven Years War.

Former president Theodore Roosevelt warned, “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.” 42

Immigration is a necessary subject for national debate, for it is about who we are as a people. Like the Mississippi, with its endless flow of life-giving water, immigration has enriched America throughout history. But when the Mississippi floods its banks, the devastation can be enormous. Yet, by the commands of political correctness, immigration as an issue is off the table. Only “nativists” or “xenophobes” could question a policy by which the United States takes in more people of different colors, creeds, cultures, and civilizations than all other nations of the earth combined. The river is rising to levels unseen in our history. What will become of our country if the levees do not hold? (Kindle Locations 2128-2141). St. Martin's Press. Kindle Edition.

IN LATE 1999, this writer left Tucson and drove southeast to Douglas, the Arizona border town of eighteen thousand that had become the principal invasion corridor into the United States. In March alone, the U.S. Border Patrol had apprehended twenty-seven thousand Mexicans crossing illegally, half again as many illegal aliens crossing in one month as there are people in Douglas. 43

While there, I visited Theresa Murray, an eighty-two-year-old widow and a great-grandmother who lives in the Arizona desert she grew up in. Her ranch house was surrounded by a seven-foot chainlink fence that was topped with coils of razor wire. Every door and window had bars on it and was wired to an alarm. Mrs. Murray sleeps with a .32-caliber pistol on her bed table, because she has been burglarized thirty times. Her guard dogs are dead; they bled to death when someone tossed meat containing chopped glass over her fence. Theresa Murray is living out her life inside a maximum-security prison, in her own home, in her own country, because her government lacks the moral courage to do its duty and defend the borders of the United States of America.

If America is about anything, it is freedom. But as Theresa Murray says, “I’ve lost my freedom. I can’t ever leave the house unless I have somebody watch it. We used to ride our horses clear across the border. We had Mexicans working on our property. It used to be fun to live here. Now, it’s hell. It’s plain old hell.” 44

While Theresa Murray lives unfree, in hellish existence, American soldiers defend the borders of Korea, Kuwait, and Kosovo. But nothing is at risk on those borders, half a world away, to compare with what is at risk on our border with Mexico, over which pass the armies of the night as they trudge endlessly northward to the great cities of America. Invading armies go home, immigrant armies do not.

Buchanan, Patrick J.. The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (Kindle Locations 2141-2156). St. Martin's Press. Kindle Edition.

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