108

5. Mexico’s Environmental Collapse and America.

Padres Unidos and Community in Action marked a radical change of mind for South
Gate residents from Mexico. In Mexico working with the police had been
unthinkable. Cops were corrupt exploiters of the vulnerable. Supporting
them…was a bizarre idea. So when Mexican immigrants marched with the police
or called city workers to have an abandoned mattress removed, these were huge
civic moments. Years after coming here, immigrants in South Gate were warming
to a fuller participation in American life

Sam Quinones. Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration

In the 1980s, a great migration caused by Mexico‟s economic collapse,

initiated profound changes in the ethnic composition of the United States. In

addition to this demographic transformation, the Mexican crisis provides a

model for what could soon happen in those half-dozen or American states that

now face similar economic collapse. Few people would describe California‟s

current fiscal crisis as an environmental implosion, and yet –just as there was in

Mexico thirty years ago- there is a pressing environmental dimension to

California‟s predicament. The volume of water available to the Golden State is

shrinking on all fronts due to the same climate changes that dried out northern

Mexico. As the earth‟s tropics expand towards the poles, previously fertile

regions become increasingly arid. California‟s dense population, advanced

industry and huge agribusiness already require more water than is available, and

because its financial crisis has lasted decades, this populous American state can

no longer afford to buy increasing amounts of expensive water from other

regions. Despite the efforts of Governor Arnold, little is being done to resolve

108
 109

this potentially catastrophic lack. Today, California stands on the brink of

becoming a failed state because of a devastating financial crisis that will soon be

compounded by a disastrous reduction in available water and the loss of its

vital agribusiness.

Outmigration is the obvious long-term solution to the life-theatening

scarcity of such a vital resource as water. Already, at 270,000, California has the
1
second highest number of moving vans leaving the state annually. But this

number represents only the number of middle class families leaving. After the

2010 census, California might soon lose one of its 53 congressional seats

because outmigration has depleted the state‟s wage-dependent urbanites in

both the lower and middle classes. 2 Of course, these migrants are not

„environmental refugees‟ and their decision is not a „climate migration.‟ But if

climate change occurs during the kind of financial downturn that already causes

people to leave a region, its crushing expense will then tip the economic scales

into financial ruin. The migration this ruin then brings about will have powerful

joint causes :In the past, it was this same combination of financial chaos and

ecological devastation that initiated every known example of „failed state status.‟

So environmental collapse is like the aggrieved drunk who brings a gun to a last

stages of a wild party. No one agrees about when exactly things began to turn

sour, but no good can possibly come of it. Anyone who is still sober leaves.

109
 110

California is only repeating what already happened in Mexico. In the

1980s, Mexico experenced „la crisis,‟ the first round of a spiraling tail-spin of

economic woes that really never ended. If crushing poverty exposed Mexico to

the stupid, savage rule of the drug cartels, Mexico first began to plumb the

depths of poverty when its economy collapsed in 1982. There had been

warnings as early as 1976 when the peso was first devalued, but at that time the

country anticipated tremendous revenue from seemingly endless offshore oil

deposits. El boom petrolero (1976-1982) was an excessive period of infrastructure

megaprojects, widespread importation of foreign goods and expensive

government subsidy programs that supplied fertilizers or pesticides to farmers,

while also guaranteeing basic nutrition to all Mexicans. Using borrowed money,

the oil boom financed a half dozen years of false prosperity, but then

the Arab led oil cartel disintegrated and world petroleum supplies
rose causing the price of oil to drop precipitously…A financial
crisis in the summer of 1982…forced a devaluation of the peso and
unleashed successive rounds of hyperinflation that persisted
through the 1980s which came to be called the lost decade (la decada
perdida) 3

By 1989, Mexico was again staggering to its feet, but in 1994 the Chiapas

revolution ended the country‟s economic prospects by driving out all foreign

investment. So by 9/11, the crisis that began in Mexico as the „lost decade‟ had

lasted 20 years with only a short recess. From the beginning, this crisis

completely dissolved any elements of economic security for ordinary Mexicans.

110
 111

In February 1982, personal savings disappeared into an abyss of devaluation

when -overnight- the peso lost 30 percent of its purchasing power. Mexicans

with any financial resources left quickly invested them outside the country.

Banks closed. Inflation soared. Food prices, especially those of tortillas and

bread, doubled and then doubled again. Manufacturing and retail sales faltered

when many small businessmen unable to pay foreign dollars for their imported

inventories or materials went bankrupt. Across the nation jobs evaporated.

1,000,000 Mexicans suddenly found themselves out of work. As a result, the

national index of poverty doubled.

With devaluation, the country‟s foreign debt skyrocketed: “Mexico owed

234 billion pesos at 1981 rates, but 405 billion at the 1982 rate of exchange.” 4

In April, Pemex (Mexico‟s nationalized petroleum company) determined that

oil revenues for 1982 would amount to less than half the amount projected in

the national budget: Already poor, Mexico was suddenly destitute.

Infrastructure projects and social subsidies around the country ended

immediately. Simple food security became an everyday issue for ordinary

Mexicans. The social impacts were so complete that the crisis was personified

as a tangible villain demonizing the lives of ordinary Mexicans:

The darkness lingered on. Assassinations, corruption, street crime.

In everyday conversation, Mexicans referred to the phenomenon as,
simply, “la crisis.”… People said that la crisis was responsible for
every malady that afflicted them, a deus ex machina that was cause,

111
 112

not effect. … Because of la crisis you borrowed a thousand dollars

and risked your life sneaking acorss the U.S.-Mexico border.5

In the countryside, the Green Revolution which had transformed

Mexican agriculture in the 1950s and 1960s had begun to have an unforeseen

impact on ordinary small holdings farmers by the 1970s. Before the oil boom,

peasants were given fertilizers, pesticides and special seed stocks that made

their land magically produce many tons more corn, beans, wheat, sorghum,

soybeans and cotton. The Green Revolution made Mexican agribusiness

possible because it created an agricultural surplus in the semi-arid nothern and

northeastern zones of Mexico. But it was accompanied by huge water

management projects that transformed the national model of subsistence

agriculture into a modern export business that grew

major commercial crops including sugar cane, vegetables, alfalfa,

soybeans, cotton and wheat…in irrigation districts in northern
Mexico. Of the 6.2 million hectares of irrigated land, 2.8 million
are irrigated by 27,000 small producers with private or communal
water and land. 6

Unfortunately, most of Mexico‟s farmers were campesinos or ejidatarios

who grew personal crops on small privately or cooperatively owned plots of

land. They didn‟t have the benefit of irrigation megaprojects. In fact, with the

exception of ancient middle eastern hydrological technologies like qanats or

shadufs, mexican pesants weren‟t really involved in irrigated agriculture at all:

Instead they plant[ed] during the rainy season and stretch[ed] their
meager water resources over the dry months. The government‟s

112
 113

core agricultural and irrigation investments…passed these

producers by, leaving them vulnerable to climatic fluctuations and
to prices…set in…commodity markets.7

Moreover, although the Green Revolution radically increased Mexico‟s

food production, not all regions became self-sufficient. In some areas, the

situation was desperate long before the economic crisis broke. During the

1960s, despite the billions spent developing an indigenous agribusiness, hunger

was widespread in the south where “83 percent of all the farmers…could

maintain their families only at a subsistance…level.”8 For this reason, a national

system of food subsidies was instituted in the 1960s. Perhaps the best social

program ever created in Mexico, it guaranteed basic nutrition to all Mexicans.

Its abandonment in the early days of la crisis, left the poorest of Mexico‟s 90

million citizens without food to feed themselves or their children.

Even before the food subsidy program ended, however, the end of other

government subsidies had made small rural farmers vulnerable to increasing

levels of debt. During the Green Revolution, the government gave bags of

chemical fertilizers to small farmers who rejoiced because their yields

immediately multiplied. Farmers soon abandoned traditional agricultural

methods like the planting of the the three sisters –corn, beans and squash- that

enriched the soil as they used it. As they did so, they also abandoned or forgot

traditional skills, becoming dependent on the modern methods of „inputs‟

encouraged by the Green Revolution. Increasingly, small farmers relied on

113
 114

expensive fertilizers and pesticides to grow their crops and kill insects. What

they produced appeared cost-effective and marketable only because the

government‟s subsidized these chemicals. When the subsidies ended and were

replace by low interest loans through the government‟s bank, most small

farmers got into serious debt very quickly:

Three years after they first began to use fertilizers, corn yields
…dropped to their original levels. Not only that, if famers did not
add fertilizers the corn would not grow at all. By the early 1980s,
with their debt continuing to grow…people…were caught up in a
cycle of dependence. More and more were going to the United
States to…pay off their debts…the situation had deteriorated to
the point where the cost of fertilizers required to produce a
marginal corn crop often exceeded the value of the corn itself. 9

Long before 1982, rural farmers supplemented their income by exploiting

unsuitable, government owned lands -forests, hills, arroyos, unsettled

countryside- until these gave out due to erosion, salinization or desertification.

By the late 90s about one third (50 million acres or 20 million hectares) of all Mexican

farmland had been severly eroded, while much more (86 percent) was eroded to some

degree. In Tlaxcala, the smallest Mexican state whose economy relies on rain-fed corn

production, half of the state‟s arable land was destroyed by erosion amidst predictions it

will soon desertify completely. In the Mixteco region (of Oxaca state), 70 percent of all

once-arable land is now also ruined. Mexican farmers have a pat-phrase that describes the

exhaustion of their soil. “The land,” they say, “no longer gives.”10

As the land gave out, more and more peasants learned to survive by working as

farm laborers for larger growers who had water, who could afford fertilizers, and who

114
 115

produced crops for the international market. Often too, unemployed rural farmers

migrated to large cities where they worked seasonally in laboring jobs like construction.

But in 1982, after economic disaster had leveled Mexico‟s quality of life and eliminated

the availability of city jobs, drought struck the most productive zones of Mexican

agriculture resulting in a 40 percent loss of the corn harvest, and adding to the long list of

„push‟ factors now driving people –millions of people- out of Mexico. 11

The drought that began in 1982, was the vanguard of new climate change

rainfall patterns that present a serious and continuous challenge to local

farmers throughout the Mexican countryside. Drought exacerbates the problem

of radical declines in the levels of Mexico‟s aquifers so as bad as the current

water crisis is, it can only get worse. (-Unfortunately this is also true for

California.) Already rainfall changes have had disastrous effects in dry states

like Tlaxcala and Zacatecas. A former corn farmer in Zacatecas, describes the

conditions that forced many like him to leave the land and find work elsewhere:

Ordinary peasant farmers found themselves out of work and short of food.
In a good year I can grow four tons of corn and maybe three and a half of
beans. But with the sparse rainfall we had this year, I harvested less than a
ton of each. Six months of work, plowing, sowing, weeding, fumigating,
and that was all I brought in.12

In the 80s, massive migration to the United States was the only reasonable

course available for rural Mexicans who –due to environmental devastation-

would have starved if they stayed in place or who –due to economic

devastation- would have done little better in a large Mexican city. In Mexico,

these environmental forces are accepted and widely discussed, but in the U.S.

115
 116

the same issues are invariably lost when Americans sound alarms about how an

overwhelming wave of migration might change the ethnic make-up and

demographic predispositions of the United States. Moreover, Mexico was not

the only source of Latin environmental migration. Political upheaval and

economic chaos have already impoverished the citizens of Guatemala, El

Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaraugua, but these countries also share a

geographical rainshadow that is steadily worsening as a result of climate change.

Over 8 million residents of Central America‟s „drought corridor‟ suffer from

chronic malnourishment, since agriculture in the region fails annually when the

rains stop during the planting months of May to August.

Since the 1980s residents of Guatemala have fled to southern Mexico.

Despite Mexican efforts to repatriate them, between 50 and 100,000

unregistered Guatemalans remained in Mexico in the early 90s before

conditions in central America worsened.13 By 2002, the rate of chronic

malnourishment in Guatemala was 48%, the highest in Central America, and

the U.N. sent emergency relief to feed 6,000 Guatemalan children in mortal

danger from starvation,.

In addition to Guatemalans fleeing famine, even more Salvadorans pass

through southern Mexico.14 A famous song by the popular Norteño band Los

Tigres del Norte, recounts the journey of an undocumented Salvadoran refugee

fleeing 5,000 kilometres through Guatemala and Mexico into the United States.

116
 117

„Three Times a Wetback‟ (Tres Veces Mojado) is an anthem for modern Latino

migrants no matter their circumstances or country of origin:

…sabia que necesitaria mas que valor…

<<I knew that I needed more than courage…>>
Ya para muchos no hay otra solucion
<<[but] for many there is no other solution>>
Que abandonar su patria tal vez para siempre
<<than to leave their homeland forever>>

By the late 80s American response to the massive migration from Mexico

and Latin America turned into alarm. In 1983, Time Magazine warned that “Los
15
Angeles was being invaded” by a “staggering influx of foreign settlers.” I

remember being disappointed when I read this piece one morning at the juice

bar in the old El Centro market because there was no mention of L.A.‟s

Canadian community whose population was then double the size of my small

hometown. Apart from a local sitcom writer I knew who referred to L.A.‟s

expat Canadians as „the snowflakes‟, the 300,000 or so snowbirds in SoCal were

largely ignored because they were dwarfed by the influx of millions of newly-

arrived Latinos. While I enjoyed Mexican food and the festival of accents that

filled the city‟s public spaces, the rhetoric that targeted these migrants

surprised me. I drove around L.A. in an old car listening to salsa stations,

pretending I was a tourist in Latin America, but others were not charmed by

the Mexican invasion. Latino immigration from 1982 onward was bigger than

any other wave of immigrants in America‟s history. It was just too big for

117
 118

mainstream Americans to assimilate easily and quickly. At the time, I remember

it was a very emotional topic even in academic circles, and since I was an

uninvited gatecrasher, I stopped talking about it to my American friends

resolving simply to read whatever I could since I sensed that something very

important was happening. Much of California is Latino, of course, but today

7% of its current population are illegal immigrants (most of them from Mexico)

while hundreds of thousands of white and black middle-class Californians now

leave the state every year. These changes began in 1982, but deficit

outmigration –more people leaving than arriving- did not occur until California

itself experienced an economic downturn in the early 90s.

I left the state in ‟93. At the time there was very little in print in English

about Mexico‟s economic and environmental crisis. In the intervening years a

few books have appeared about the assault on Mexico‟s environment like Joel

Simon‟s excellent Endangered Mexico: An Environment on the Edge. At the same

time, quite a bit has been published about the Mexican migration so I‟ve

learned more la crisis and about America‟s Latinos. The current U.S. population

hovers at around 300 million people while the population of Mexico has

reached about 100 million. In the year 2000, the U.S. census reported there

were 35 million Latinos in the United States. This is more than the entire

population of Canada and, surprisingly, America‟s Latinos now outnumber

African Americans whose influence on American culture has been profound.

118
 119

Still, official figures describing the size of this emerging minority are inevitably

misleading. Although the known Latino population in the U.S. includes about

18-20 million legally-landed people of Mexican origin, it probably does not

include the six million Mexican immigrants who applied for foreign identity

cards at Mexican consulates between the years 2000 and 2006. 16

Most likely, the people who applied for these documents are illegal aliens

since this form of identification was designed by Mexico to help its foreign

remittance workers remain in the United States: (there is little other reason for

Mexicans in America to need these identity cards). In addition, these six million

are only a fraction of the enormous and fluctuating number of illegal

Mexicans living in the U.S. at any given moment. So, to guesstimate, we might

put the total number of Mexicans in America at the end of the first decade of

the 21st century somewhere below 30 million people: not quite 10% of the U.S.

population. (This number, of course, does not include children born to

Mexican parents in the United States who are sometimes referred to derisively

by native-born Mexicans as pochos, meaning spoiled or rotten fruit).

The fact that, as a matter of their daily routine, between 1/5 th and 1/3rd of

the entire population of Mexico sleeps, eats and works in the United States

disturbs many Americans and has for some time. Because they are immediate

neighbours, Mexicans often return home, and until recently they have not

assimilated readily to American culture any more than do the half-million or so

119
 120

seasonal „snowbirds‟ who leave Canada to enjoy the warmth of Arizona,

California, Florida, Nevada, or New Mexico for a month or more every winter.

Although some Americans in the service industries harbour mild resentments

towards visiting Canadians (mainly because our wintering seniors tip so

grudgingly) the only time I experienced genuine and widespread anti-Canadian

prejudice occurred the day I was changing planes in Atlanta after the Blue Jays

won the 1992 pennant, making it at last, as I was foolish enough to say out

loud, “a real World Series.” Resentment of Mexicans throughout America, on

the other hand, is quite visible and common.

Usually, American journalists and historians think the great Mexican

migration was caused simply by the economic collapse that began in 1982. But

it‟s more accurate to think of this wave of migrants as the result of a one-two

combination of punches in which first the economy, and then the environment

connected with Mexico‟s undefended chin. It was at this time that many

Mexicans began to revise their image of the United States. After 1982, for more

and more Mexicans, America came to symbolize “the land where the problems

of Mexico [could] be solved,” where “the benefits of an advanced economy

promised but not delivered by the Mexican development plan [could] be turned

into reality.”17

Over the next 20 years, as America gradually became the symbol and the

site of Mexican economic salvation, anti-U.S. sentiment disappeared.

120
 121

Apparently, a high percentage of Mexicans now have “a favorable opinion of

the institutions of American society.” 18In response to national polls conducted

in 1991 and 2002, nearly 60% of Mexicans said they favored a political union

with the United States if that would improve Mexican living standards. 19

Cynics will say that Mexicans have only acquired their more appreciative

attitude towards the United States because of Mexico‟s unrepairable economic

and environmental chaos. They‟re probably right, but it might still be a good

thing. The radical change in Mexican attitudes is a marked improvement over

the deep suspicion, mistrust and hostility towards the United States that has

accompanied Mexican nationalism since the humiliating (Mexican-American)

war of 1847. What fascinates me most, however, is the knowledge that this

same combination of economic and environmental collapse is usually what

pivots social orders into spirals of decline so severe that they can bring on a

dark ages or „critical crisis periods‟ “when environmental conditions play a

significant role in determining how societies…are reorganized.” 20

In his Trilogy on World Ecological Degradation, economic historian Sing C.

Chew traces connections between the environment and the collapse of

expansive economies immediately prior to the onset of each dark age. In

Chew‟s case studies, economic collapse is always accompanied by the

simultaneous collapse of the natural environment that once sustained its

society. Chew claims –and it seems sensible- that all economies are dependent

121
 122

on the environments that sustain them, so economic collapse is characterized

by a loss of the environmental carrying capicity for human expansion and

progress. This is as true today in California as it was in 1982 in Mexico:

If, in the 1980s, crisis was the most common adjective used to
describe the Mexican economy, much the same could be said of
its environmental predicament. Forty years of rapid
industialisation…had taken a devastating toll on its natural
resources and the health of its citizens…It is hardly an
exaggeration to say that the deterioration of Mexico‟s
environment has been comprehensive and on a magnitude with
few rivals….21

Today, Mexico is still engaged in the suicidal destruction of its topsoil

through erosion, deforestation, salinization and desertification. This destruction

threatens the land and it people, but it also threatens “Mexico‟s ancient culture

of corn” by initiating more intensive land uses including logging and

overfarming.22 The destruction of Mexico‟s arable land has worsened

considerably since 1995, when it the following, very dark, description was

written:

by 1988, more than 400,000 hectares had gone out of

production because of salinization. This is equal to 1 million
tons of food grains…enough to satisfy the basic needs of 5
million people…another 100,000 will be fallow by 2005 because
of salinization and waterlogging. This increasing agricultural
contamination affects the surface water that feeds into lakes and
aquifers. 23

The war on topsoil has virtually ended the indigenous production of corn,

beans and squash for small holdings farmers, who are the majority of all

122
 123

agricultural producers in Mexico. But the extent of devastation to the Mexican

environment is even greater as a result of the rush towards industrialization in

all potentially commercial fields. With the exception of China, Mexico leads the

world in industrial damage to its environment. This damning overview of the

Mexican environment was published in 1995:

The ecological crisis [is] seen in the net reduction of [Mexico‟s]

forests at a rate exceeding a million acres annually (second only to
Brazil…)…the reduction of the Lacandon forest zone by 70
percent since 1950, and the disapperance of thousands of species
of fauna and flora in a nation with one of the world‟s highest
levels of biodiversity The threat from environmental pollution [is]
evident in the severe degradation of its two most celebrated
natural lakes, Lake Chapala and Lake Patzcuaro; the
contamination of over 60 percent of its rivers; severe oil spills
along the Mexican Gulf coast, damaging national fisheries and
aquatic life; inadequate sanitation and sewerage facilities in more
than half of Mexico‟s municipalities, both large and small; the
virtual absence of hazardous waste disposal facilities throughout
the nation; and, perhaps most notoriously, the venomous air
pollution blanketing the world‟s largest urban area, Mexico City,
and one of the highest rates of pulmonary disease on the globe. 24

Mexico‟s war on its own environment is so great that in 1999, the United

Nations sounded an alarm about the impact its collapse would continue to have

on the country‟s population. They warned that the lowest income groups would

continue to experience a decline in their living standards; that the countryside

would continue to become impoverished: that land would become less

productive; and that corn and bean yields, which are the staples of the Mexican

diet, would continue to decline until there is “widespread hunger in the

123
 124

birthplace of the green revolution.”25 What this means for Mexican migrants to

the United States is that there is very little reason -other than family and

friends- to return to Mexico. Those who remain following the financial

devastation of 2009 no longer have the option of fleeing to a healthier

economy. So Mexicans are now trapped in a collapsing society that is

increasingly chaotic and dangerous as well as very short of food and water. So

far, -and it will not remain this way- Mexico has been able to survive the onset

of a Central American dark age –or what is now usually called „failed state

status‟- by substantially reducing its population and importing large amounts of

foreign currency to support those who remain. Sending Mexicans north to

work for their wealthy neighbour leaves fewer mouths to feed in Mexico, and

Mexicans working in American send money home to sustain their loved ones.

No wonder the Mexican government does everything it can to encourage

northward migration.

Unfortunately, in the United States, the impact of Mexico‟s one-two,

economic-environmental punch has been profound. Economically and socially

Mexico may have been knocked down by these punches, but, as it fell, much of

Mexico actually landed in America. The 9 billion or so dollars of remittances

that Mexican-Americans send home every year would go a long way to shoring

up today‟s broken American economy. Some out-of-work Americans are now

very angry that many jobs in the United States go to Mexican illegals who are

124
 125

powerless to prevent ruthless employers from undercutting the minimum wage.

So perhaps it is understandable that first passage of the Sensenbrenner Bill in

the House of Representatives in 2006, was a panicked response to the rising

tide of Mexican migration, an issue which achieved the earmarks of hysteria in

the anxiety and confusion following 9/11. The desperation of the period can be

measured by Sensenbrenner‟s proposal that illegal aliens should actually receive

a prison sentence for remaining in the United States without documents or that

legal American residents should be so imprisoned for helping an

„indocumentado.‟ As a former „indocumentado‟ in California, who was helped

by so many Americans I cannot count them, I find Sensenbrenner‟s proposal

truly alarming. The only crime I ever knowingly committed in America was

overstaying my visa. According to Jim Sensenbrenner, that‟s sufficient reason

to send me and others like me to prison.

Of course, not many Americans are bothered by the presence of a few

undocumented Canadians. Many Canadians are white, native English speakers

unhampered by an accent as noticeably „foreign‟ as that of Australians, Britons,

New Zealanders or South Africans, so Canadians generally move invisibly and

effortlessly through the United States. The „circularity‟ of their seasonal

migration goes unnoticed and their unwillingness to assimilate isn‟t

accompanied by any resentment I‟ve noticed. This is not true for Mexicans,

who come to the United States not as tourists but as workers, and whose

125
 126

visible differences have always invited prejudice. Friends in the States welcome

me and tolerate my odd opinions even though they think I‟m slightly more

midguided than the average Democrat. A recent survey described the opinion

held by 55% of Americans that Canada has a special economic relationship

with the United States to which no form of protectionism should apply.

Mexicans, however, experience a very different welcome. An anthropology

professor, Leo Chavez, believes that something similar to what was once called

the „Yellow Peril‟ (the early 20th century fear that America would be

overwhelmed by Chinese immigration) is at work here. Chavez traces the

historical development of what he calls a ‘Latino Threat Narrative’‟ directed

mainly against Mexicans. It is often used, Chavez says, by politicians or the

popular press to deny Latinos the right to live and work in the United States.

For example, in 1985, when the Mexican migration was already well underway,

U.S. News and World Report ran a piece called ‘The Disappearing Border: Will the

Mexican Migration Create a New Nation?” which sounded the following alarm:

By might of numbers and strength of culture, Hispanics are

changing the politics, economy and language in the U.S. states
that border Mexico. Their movement is, despite its quite and
largely peaceful nature, both an invasion and a revolt. At the
vanguard are those born here…who are ascending within the U.S.
system…Behind them comes an unstoppable mass…who…claim
ancestral homelands in the southwest, which was the norther half
of Mexico unti the U.S. took it away…Like
conquistadors…America‟s riches are pulling people all along the
continent‟s Hispanic horn in a great migration… 26

126
 127

Chavez identifies the anxiety that United States will be „reconquered‟ by

disgruntled and dispossessed Latinos as a constant theme underlying the

stereotypes that characterize all statements opposed to Mexican immigration

since the 1920s. The most powerful motif of this ideology is the claim that

Mexicans are reluctant or unable to assimilate into American culture. Allegedly,

this is the main difference that sets Mexicans apart from earlier immigrant

groups and warrants less tolerance towards them. Simply put

The Latino Threat Narrative characterizes Latinos as unable or

unwilling to intergrate into the social and cultural life of the
United States.27

Although, as Chavez demonstrates, this claim is very widespread throughout

the extensive literature of the Latino Threat Narrative, the simple truth is that

many previous immigrant groups were also simply „birds of passage‟ who

arrived in the United States with the intention of making money and then

returning home wihtout assimilating. In the nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries these temporary Americans included many immigrants from the

Balkan and Slavic states; but in addition, 66 percent of all Romanians returned

to their European homes as did 45 percent of all Italian immigrants to America.

Only Jews, Germans and Irish people seemed to have been universally satisfied

with their new lives in the United States. Perhaps this is because they were

fleeing pogroms, famines and deeply divisive political unrest. 28

127
 128

But to be completely fair, descriptions of Mexican‟s unwillingness to

assimilate to Anglo culture are difficult to deny. Until the beginning of the

twenty-first century, there was considerable truth to them. Even Jorge

Castenada, Vincente Fox‟s former foreign minister (from 2000 to 2003) admits

that –with good reason- Mexican migration to America is generally described in

terms of its circularity.29 Mexicans come to America to work and earn money

which they then send or take home. Although they frequently stay longer, when

they come to America, they come –as I once did- with a limited time-period in

mind. Where my goals were a beach (Malibu), sunshine and a Ph.D., the

intention of most Mexican migrants has been to return to their homeland after

collecting a saddelbag full of dollars. But at the end of the first decade of this

new century, this is no longer completely true. The disappearance of

productivity among Mexico‟s small farms is the first reason immigrants no

longer return. But then there are the changes that America itself effects inside

all visitors. I was changed radically by my years in California: people who come

from Mexico are also changed.

Women in particular experience an enormous personal transformation.

Although during the twentieth century Mexican immigrants to the United

States were predominantly male, many Mexican women who ventured into the

north became reluctant to return to Mexico. Second generation journalist,

Joseph Contreras describes the reaction of one woman –his own mother- to his

128
 129

family‟s return to Mexico from Los Angeles. Born in Chihuahua in 1924, Olga

Contreras was three years old when she immigrated to El Paso. Although a

naturalized American, she returned to Mexico with her husband and their

American-born children in the mid-6os. But there, according to Contreras, she

became very discontent:

My mom announced in the late spring of 1968 that she was fed
up with life in Guadalajara and the sexist attitudes of my father‟s
newfound buddies and was taking me back to Los Angeles. 30
The difficulty Mexican-born women have in returning to Mexico is well-

documented, and often accounts for the protracted stays in the United States of

their entire families. Although American women have probably not yet

achieved absolute parity with men in terms of civil liberties, equal pay and equal

opportunity, they are much further ahead than rural Latino women. Latinas‟

resistence to returning south often has, at a bedrock level, an understandable

reluctance to lose the personal liberties cherished by Americans. Sara, a highly

articulate entrepreneur who came from San Rafael in Zacatecas to Los Angeles,

first cast her reasons for wanting to stay in the United States in an economic

light:

The men are always talking about “when we return,” but I can‟t see that
there‟s anything left to return to…You can‟t live from cultivating the
land any more and there are no jobs…What‟s more, who will send the
money down for the others to live if we abandon Los Angeles and return
home? I keep telling Pablo that we should save our money to buy a little
house here since the eight of us are paying almost $18,000 a year in rent
for this four bedroom bungalow.31

129
 130

As she continued, however, the deeper reasons emerge for Sara‟s (and many other

Latinas) desire to stay in America:

San Rafael is a great place to live when you‟re a young girl. But once
you‟re married you‟re expected to live with your husband‟s parents, and
you‟re not free to walk about on the street…people will gossip about
you…criticize you. It‟s just crazy. I‟m a woman of thirty and I wouldn‟t
have the freedom of a thirteen year old. I‟m not kidding….I can
remember how I felt totally asphyxiated in my in-law‟s home…Can you
imagine someone like me, who has her own…earnings, a woman who
drives a minivan, who goes here and there in Los Angeles visiting her
friends –can you imagine me shut away like a prisoner in Pablo‟s
parent‟s house in San Rafael? 32

Another wonderful illustration of how America changes the Latinos who visit

begins with a demonstration of Latina‟s resistence to returning home and how

this hampers that of their husbands and children. But I include it here because

–remarkably- it morphs into a powerful example of how and why more

Mexicans are now actually assimilating into American culture.

In the Chicago suburbs during the 1980s and 1990s, Mexican-Americans

perfected the art of establishing small business partnerships among families and

friends in order to build taquerias, small take-out Mexican food restaurants that

freed them from the rotten jobs as day-laborers that had once greeted the

arrival of most Mexicans seeking their fortune in the United States.

A pioneer of this movement into the entrepreneurial middle-class was

Carlos Ascencion (Chon) Salinas, who made his way to Michigan from

Atolinga at age 15. A small town of 2,700 people north of Guadalajara in

130
 131

Zacatecas, Atolinga has been sending its citizens north to Chicago for nearly 50

years. Like many other Atolingans in Chicago, Chon got his first job washing

dishes at a Golden Nugget Pancake House. Two years later he became their night-

shift manager. In 1976, at age eighteen, he was hired to manage a prestigious

local jazz dinner club. Then, 10 years later, he put together a group of investors

to buy a really nice sit-down restaurant in Lincoln Park where he had been

manager for several years. He lost the deal, but since he had the investors

assembled, he bought a faltering taqueria and twisted its concept a bit in order

to serve “American versions of Mexican food, geared to gringo taste…It was

Mexican fast food for Americans, and for Chicago it was new.” 33

Through hard work, native intelligence and an extremely positive attitude,

Salinas soon had six taquerias around Chicago and two more in Nebraska

where his sister lived. Despite his success, he missed Mexico and believed “that

he would one day return to Atolinga to live” so, after a few years, he began

pressing his Anna, his wife, to return. She

…balked. Women‟s lives in the village were brutish. She liked Chicago‟s
services –the diswasher and refrigerators and supermarkets. The kids were
gowing up. She didn‟t want to go back to Atolinga to live.
[Still,] Chon insisted. What would it take to get her to return? he asked. A
house, big and luxurious she said finally, built in the American style, with
a driveway, and a lawn and set back from the property line. She found a
photograph of a house in a magazine and gave it to her husband. He gave
it to an architect. “Build me something like that,” he said. 34

131
 132

A devoted husband and father, Chon Salinas spent several years building

Anna‟s house. But meanwhile he and other

Atolingan immigrants had to admit that their village had become less a
hometown than a place to spend a couple of quiet weeks a year. Atolinga‟s
residents…generally viewed them as wealthy and arrogant…A party Chon
Salinas and a friend attended in Atolinga emptied when they arrived. On
village streets, poor men…who‟d never left town hit [Chon] up for money
and scolded him if he didn‟t recognize them immediately.
“The things I used to feel returning to Atolinga I don‟t feel here
anymore,” Chon said.35

Chon began finding reasons for not returning to Mexico. The decisive inner voice

that guided his complex business decisions told him that his kids were in private schools

and were still growing up. Soon they‟d be in college. He should return then. Since his

business was doing so well, it was a shame to leave it. „Make hay while the sun shines,‟

he thought, using a newly-learned American expression.36 Meanwhile his wife‟s parents

died, His own mother became naturalized and went to live in Nebraska. His wife‟s

beautiful and expensive new house stood empty on a hill overlooking Atolinga. As the

appeal of life in the gossipy small town of his birth diminished, Chicago seemed

increasingly like his life‟s biggest adventure. Every day there was less and less to return

to in Mexico. Finally, Chon came to the realization that he was no longer entirely

Mexican:

“After thirty years in Chicago…I found myself,” he said as

he drove his SUV through the city‟s north side one winter
afternoon…“All that time I thought I was going back…Imagine
the energy it uses up –all that time you‟re thinking that you‟re
going back. It keeps you from growing and involving yourself in
life here. It takes over part of your brain. It‟s not so much what
you spend in money. It‟s that it uses up all your energy…A lot of
immigrants spend most of their lives doing that. 37

132
 133

If Chon‟s self-knowledge and self-realization led to an awakening about

how America had changed him, he is not alone. Many other Mexican

Americans experience similar transformations during their time in the United

States. This transformation has a direct bearing on the central claims of the

Latino Threat Narrative since although it may once have been true that Mexicans

cycled through the United States before returning homeward, it is no longer

very true at all.

In 1982, in South Gate near Los Angeles, there was a changing of the

guard. GM, Firestone and three other local plants closed that year and the town

lost nearly 12, 000 jobs. There was a sudden burst of „white flight‟ from South

Gate and other middle-class suburbs that had Anglo names like Lynwood,

Downey, Bellflower, Lakewood, Norwalk, and Cypress. White residents were

only too happy to sell. So Latinos eagerly picked up these homes on the cheap.

La Crisis had just begun, and Mexico was in such a mess that everyone knew it

would take years for change to happen. In 1982, returning home seemed like

economic suicide. As a result, South Gate

went from 80 percent Anglo in 1980, to 80 percent Latino in

1990…the city grew from sixty-six thousand to eighty-six
thousand people in that decade…By 2000, 92 percent of the
population was Latino…[But] in the early 1990s, South Gate
was [still] a town with a Latino population governed by a white
city council, which a dwindling group of white seniors
elected…Playing soccer was prohibited in South Gate parks, as
were pinata parties.38

133
 134

The story of how South Gate achieved a more representative municipal

government is not as straightforward as you might think. Mexicans living in the

United States traditionally have been quite politically apathetic. Of course, they

often feel uncomfortable in their new land and want to keep a low profile. But

there is also the issue of circularity. Migrants from Mexico have been busy

making money to send home. America has been just a factory dormitory to

them. No one has much interest in contributing to a place that they intend to

leave. South Gate, however, provides us with an illustration of how that is

changing. The gradual acculturation of Mexicans in South Gate also offers

Americans an explanation for the overwhelming demonstrations by Latinos

across the United States in the spring of 2006 when a Republican from

Wisconsin, Jim Sensenbrenner, threatened many of their brothers and sisters by

passing a new bill that would make illegal immigration a criminal offense

punishable by imprisonment.

What happened in South Gate, happened gradually. In 1982, South Gate

elected the first Latino City Councilman, Henry Gonzalez a local UAW

representative. Car dealerships around the city responded by inviting Latino

business: “Se habla espanol” signs were displayed prominently in the plate glass

windows. A few years later, the state electoral district that included South Gate

became the only such district in the state to become predominantly Latino.

Then, in 1994 the Chiapas Revolution compounded Mexico‟s economic woes

134
 135

by driving all investment and many more migrants out of the country‟s serially

dysfunctional ecomony. Of course many ran to California, but that same year,

Californians overwhelmingly approved Proposition 187 denying costly state

education and health care benefits to the swelling numbers of illegal aliens. This

happened just as millions of illegal immigrants finally became eligible for

citizenship under the federal amnesty program passed by congress in 1986.

Across the country, California‟s Proposition 187 scared Latinos witless. Fearing

that the conservative backlash in California might go national, millions rushed

to become U.S. Citizens.

In South Gate, after citizenship became widespread, the city became much

more settled and comfortable. The number of gorgeous Latina contestants in

the city‟s annual beauty queen contest increased. Pinata parties were made legal

in the city‟s parks. The Chamber of Commerce began publishing a bilingual

version of its newsletter. Older Latinas who had been unable to join the

Women‟s Club of South Gate formed their own Multicultural Club which had

much better parties, better music, more dancing, and much better food. People

also started painting their houses, a sure sign of civic pride. At last, Mexican

migrants “were putting down roots in a town they‟d once intended to pass

through.” 39

The demographic changes in South Gate attracted the attention of Albert

Robles an ambitious political science major from UCLA who‟d once been a

135
 136

state assemblywoman‟s aide. Aged 27 in 1992, he won a seat on South Gate‟s

City Council and then proceeded to ravage the town‟s trust and finances for the

next 11 years.

1992 was also the year that riots burned throughout L.A. in response to

the acquittal of the four LAPD officers charged with beating Rodney King, a

black former felon caught speeding one night on a lonely highway. During the

riots, the fires expanded every day. They crept northward from Watts towards

Hollywood and then into Pasadena where I lived, and also into the Valley.

Black people were very unhappy, and suburbs that had their own black

neighbourhoods had their own fires. Carjackings multiplied. Freeways were

safe to drive, but –even in daylight- the surface streets were very unsafe so the

small number of people who drove through the city -out of necessity or

madness- no longer stopped for lights or for street signs. For me, it was a rare

glimpse at anarchy. Television and furniture stores were emptied by gangs of

looters who formed mosh pits in front of the broken windows to empty them

of their inventory. Helpless to stop it, I took careful note. No one except the

looters or the courageous members of the Los Angeles Fire Department went

out at night, unless it was to climb up to your own roof to learn how close you

were to the fires. Throughout the day you often heard the pock-pock of small

arms fire in the distance. This became closer and much more frequent at night.

You considered buying weapons. Neighbours offered to lend you some. You

136
 137

stayed awake at night while your family slept, sitting near the door in the

darkness while your asthmatic son coughed from the smoke that smelled of

burning wood and old tires. Gladys Knight sang „Midnight Train‟ low on the

stereo. After a dozen wonderful years, you realized it was time to leave, and

even though it was not your fault you felt defeated as Glady‟s sang:

“L.A. proved too much for the man.”

Down in South Gate, the riots had a different and very positive impact,

one that would eventually defeat Albert Robles and unite the city‟s Latino

population in what would become their first American political involvement. It

was April, but it was very hot. The curbside Jacarandas, which require

considerable encouragement from the sun, were already blooming. Watts and

South Central L.A. have window-bars and graffiti instead of decorative trees. In

these neighbourhoods, the city began burning as soon as the policemen‟s

acquittal was announced. There were plumes of black smoke on the southern

horizon as you drove west on the 101. If you tried to count them, about a

dozen were always visible. But you had always missed this one or that one so

you started counting again. -After a while you gave up.

The hostility towards LAPD was palpable and because they were

ridiculously outnumbered, the police retreated to their station houses. There

was a brief lull as city residents registered this power vacuum, and what was

about to fill it. Agitated people began hunkering down or throwing bags and

137
 138

bedclothes into their cars and leaving. Right around this time, South Gate‟s

Police Chief, George Toxcil, had an inspiration. Using a small army of city

officers supplemented by hastily positioned railroad cars, he was able –more or

less completely- to seal off South Gate from its northern neighbor Compton.

This prevented anyone from from entering the town. So while the curved

beltway of surrounding suburbs burned for days in the fires, South Gate‟s

Latino children played safely in the city‟s parks, no doubt wondering where all

the smoke was coming from.40

During the riots, Toxcil gained substantial political capital. But he didn‟t

use it to run for office. Instead, he instituted a community-oriented policing

program called Community-In-Action (CIA) that organized police officers and

citizens in public clean-up campaigns emptying junk out of alleys and vacant

lots, fixing broken windows and chain link fences, painting over graffiti. During

the next decade, lasting long after Toxcil‟s tenure, crime nearly disappeared

from South Gate. It worked so well, that the police opened a separate

substation where officers volunteered to tutor and coach neighbourhood kids

after school hours. -For very good, but for very different reasons, Mexican kids

are usually afraid of both the Mexican and the American police. But the latch-

key kids of South Gate didn‟t run in the opposite direction towards drugs,

tagging or gangbanging. Instead, they were doing homework, and working on

their jumpshots while also getting ready to participate in el sueño americano (the

138
 139

American dream). The relationship between the community and the police

solidified over the next few years. It is still in place today. More than one parent

has marvelled at the unique character of South Gate:

In what town in Mexico have you seen any kind of relationship

between the police and the community?…It doesn‟t happen very
often in the United States either.41

Albert Robles didn‟t have kids, so he may have missed the vital political

information that if Chief Toxcil‟s successors ever stumbled in South Gate,

there were thousands of willing hands to catch them and set them upright.

Instead of kids, Robles had ambition and he understood Mexican political

culture very well. Mexican elections are quite different from their American

counterparts. Sleaze, of course, is a common element in any electoral process,

but in Mexican elections it takes a different form, just as Mexican lucha libre

differs from American professional wrestling by preferring masks and aerial

maneuvers over bashing people with folding chairs. During his political career,

Albert Robles became a master of Mexican electoral sleaze. The trouble started

in 1994, when Albert together with South Gate‟s first Latino councilman,

Henry Gonzalez, were joined by two other Latinos to form the first Latino

majority on city council. At the time the mayorality was an honorary and

rotating position lasting one year. Albert became mayor first. Henry became

vice-mayor. When it was Henry‟s turn in 1995, Albert found two councilmen to

veto the transition and he remained on as South Gate‟s mayor. Then he

139
 140

approved a city funded home loan program to encourage first-time

homebuyers:

He applied for and received a forty-thousand-dollar loan from the

program, with which he bought a house, Albert [also] took a
speed reading class and tried to get the city to pay for [that]. 42

This was the first time he tapped into municipal funds for personal gain,

but it would not be the last. Robles hung onto the mayoralty throughout 1996,

and before he was ousted in 1997 he hired himself as City Treasurer at a salary

of $75,000 per annum. City Council made him sit in the public seats, but he

was not at all cowed. He regularly shouted abuse and threats at Mayor

Gonzalez and the other council members. He was a very strange, Nixonian

politician whose unpersonable tactics were mainly intimidation, greed and slimy

manipulation of others‟ self-interest. In 1999, he seems to have realized that

Mexican style politics would work very well in South Gate so he began a

compaign of free gifts and anonymous mailers to manipulate the council

election in order to win himself a controlling three-seat majority. Although he

personally would not sit on city council again, he had already managed to install

one proxy, Raul Moriel, a local landlord who always voted his way. In 1999, he

installed another, Xochilt Ruvalcaba, the former city hall switchboard operator.

It was a very dirty election in which anonymous mailers accused the

Mayor, Henry Gonzalez, of being a drunk and of becoming a millionaire at

140
 141

municipal expense. Another council member, Joe Ruiz, had the worst of it

however. Mailers falsely accused him of being a child molester, and this

reputation would dog him for years. In 1999, both men lost their races and

Robles‟ tools, Moriel and Ruvalcaba, were handily elected. Robles was now

only one council seat away from controlling city hall and in the newly Latino

South Gate, he had left himself with a very easy last mark.

Bill de Whitt was a white, Republican businessman whose door factory

had remained in South Gate despite the economic downturn. He was a civic

minded, square-dealing Californian on the model of Gregory Peck. When

South Gate‟s population changed, de Whitt had pushed for Spanish language

interpreters at City Council meetings. But that didn‟t matter to Robles. In 2000,

he engineered a recall election for de Whitt. During the campaign anonymous

mailers flooded South Gate and accused de Whitt of being anti-Latino. De

Whitt lost to Xochilt Ruvalcaba‟s cousin, a beautician named Maria Benavides,

who didn‟t even live in South Gate.

Suddenly, Robles had his council majority.

The new council got to work by giving itself a 500 percent pay raise. They

created a Community Development Corporation of which they became

directors at a monthly salary of $1600. They also formed a Finance Committee

that met for 5 minutes before each council meeting. Each time they met, they

paid themselves $150. Council seats that had previous paid a maximum of

141
 142

$7,200 including all perks and bennies now paid $36,000. In addition they

created a Community Services Department whose start-up involved 100

employees at a cost of $3.2 million. This was an old, Tammany Hall style

maneuver that put friends and relatives onto the municipal „pad‟. Maria

Benavides brother, for example, was made a manager –noone knew of what- at

an annual salary of $53,000.

Around this time, Albert Robles began attracting a lot of attention. A new

district attorney, Steve Cooley established a task force on integrity that focused

on South Gate politics and California‟s Secretary of State, Bill Jones,

announced that in future, his office would oversee elections in South Gate.

Suddenly too, Robles was arrested for threatening the lives of state legislators

Marth Escuitai and Marco Antonio Firebaugh. City Council responded to this

news by quickly creating the position of deputy city manager for which they

hired Robles at an annual salary of $111,000. If his position was terminated as a

result of criminal charges, he would receive a severance package of $180,000.

Stupidly, Robles then approached the police union asking them for criminal

immunity and offering to cut them into his lucrative municipal operation.

Together they would control South Gate.

What Robles was suggesting has been such a common scenario in

American municipal politics that it is sometimes wonderfully satirized in films

like the Coen brothers‟ Miller’s Crossing. But unlike movie police, the South Gate

142
 143

force wouldn‟t play. Perhaps, this was because Robles was just far too dirty for

them. In any case, they‟d enjoyed a decade of building good community

relations in South Gate. The little suburb south of Watts and Compton had

become famous for its community policing programs and, since the time of

chief Toxcil, local officers had been hired with that set of values in mind. In

pitching his sleazy deal to them, Robles encountered a culture he didn‟t

understand. The South Gate police were as popular and had as much job

satisfaction as firefighters. They were quite happy serving and protecting their

special community. They were welcomed at civic events by parents and

children alike. People from different races mixed at the public events without

giving it a second thought. The police knew they would damage their own

credibility and effectiveness if they got into bed with a politician universally

regarded as the Latino Joe McCarthy. Around South Gate, Latinos already

called him the „cucuy‟, Spanish for boogeyman. What white people called him

is unprintable.

When the police rejected his overtures in 2002, Robles got truly nasty. He

hired a new police chief and then began plans to shut down the municipal force

intending to replace them with contract workers from the L.A. County

Sherriffs department. This was too much for South Gate residents. White

seniors, second and third generation Latinos and Mexican immigrants all rallied

behind Joe Ruiz who engineered a recall election for city council. At a series of

143
 144

municipal meetings, the Police Union, the Community In Action, Padres

Unidos, The Woman‟s Multicultural Club and the Women‟s Club of South

Gate achieved remarkable solidarity that saw the city through the two

municipal electionsof 2003: the recall, (which Robles‟ postponed until the last

minute), and the regularly scheduled election 6 weeks later. In the face of a

common enemy, South Gate‟s Mexicans and Whites unified and Mexican

immigrants learned the strengths of U.S. civics. The American ability to

participate effectively in government is quite different from the Mexican system

of power cliques and interest groups. It is for this reason that a high percentage

of Mexicans appear to have changed their minds about the United States and

now have “a favorable opinion of the institutions of American society.” 43

All this happened two years before the Sensenbrenner bill. It happened

first because Mexican immigrants began buying homes in America when it

became clear that life in Mexico was no longer feasible and they needed to hang

onto their American jobs and American lives indefinitely. A second reason that

Mexican immigrants became involved in their American community was that

proposition 187 in 1994 scared them into accepting American citizenship in

order to protect the right to social services for themselves and their children.

Nationally, Mexican American and Latino activism began to coalesce in

resistance to proposition 187. The decade following 187 and immediately

preceding Sensenbrenner‟s bill, (1994-2005) saw something completely new as

144
 145

Latinos increasingly postponed the traditional circularity of their migration and

began integrating into American society as never before. In 2002, New Mexico

elected America‟s first Latino Governor, Bill Richardson, who had formerly

served as President Clinton‟s Energy Secretary. But most acts of integration did

not occur on the national stage. Instead they took place in small communities

throughout the country when Latinos began to seek an active role in their

communities. A truly wonderful book documenting the variety and breadth of

this integration is Sam Quinones, Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream:True Tales of

Mexican Migration, from which I draw the complex story of Albert Robles‟rise

and fall in South Gate.44 Because this decade of acculturation and activism

preceded the passage of Sensenbrenner‟s bill (HR 4437) by Congress in 2006,

Mexican and other Latino Americans were in place, organized, active and

prepared to react to the next manifestation of the Latino Threat Narrative in a

very new and different way. Just as a influx of exoduster migrants changed

Californian politics in the 1930s, so the Mexican migration would change

America in the first decade of the 21st century.

As Leo Chavez puts it: “The immigrant marches of 2006 were not one

event but many.”45 For the first time, Mexican and Latino activists were

galvanized into action in the United States. Their ad hoc coalition spread

across the country via the internet, radio and other mass media that catered to

immigrants and Latinos. All of these prompted Latino participation in peaceful

145
 146

demonstrations across the country. There were calls for work and school

boycotts and for moratoriums on buying and selling in order to demonstrate

the size of America‟s Latin minority and its collective financial muscle. The

response was remarkable. In 2006. civic demonstrations against the

Sensenbrenner by Mexicans and Latinos crisscrossed the country from March

until May. Other ethnic groups soon joined in. Many were American Catholics

from large urban centers of Catholicism. Cardinal Mahoney of L.A. and Mayor

Richard Daly of Chicago spoke forcefully, favorably and often about the role of

immigrants in America and the rights they should be accorded. There was also

participation by Korean and Chinese Americans. These demonstrations were

larger and more frequent than the historic civil rights march on Washington in

1963 or even the very largest of the anti-Vietnam demonstrations in the late

sixties. They included a march and demonstration in Chicago on March 10 th

later estimated to involve 300,000 people; a march and demonstration on

March 25th, involving 500,000 people in downtown Los Angeles and similar

marches in Phoenix AZ and Charlotte NC; marches on April 26 th in Oakland,

San Francisco, Fresno, Yakima, Washington DC, Phoenix, Detroit, Columbus,

Ohio, Houston, Woodbridge VA, Norwood MA, and Longmont CO;

demonstrations on April 9 th of about 400,000 people in Dallas with similar but

smaller marches in San Diego, Miami, St. Paul, Birmingham, Des Moines, St.

Louis, Salem and Boise; on April 10th, rallies in Washington DC and Los

146
 147

Angeles with about 500,000 marchers each and other large rallies in Phoenix,

Houston, Omaha, Boston, Atlanta and many other cities; and, on May Day,

there were demonstrations in most large cities across the country, the largest

being those of Los Angeles and Chicago with about ½ million demonstrators

each.

The symbolism at these events is fascinating. A large number of Mexican

flags were noticeable and, of course, these indicated many of the marchers‟

heritage. But in a remarkable show of solidarity, Latino demonstrators also

sported white shirts and tops that gave viewers impression of an enormous

army united in a common and decent cause. Many, many people also carried

American flags that were clearly intended to send the message that these

demonstrators no longer saw themselves as foreign workers. They were

claiming their rights and status as taxpayers, integral to the United States

economy. As one marcher put it “A lot of us…broke the law to get here. That

doesn‟t mean we don‟t love America.” 46Or as another protestor said:

I‟m legal. But if I try to help someone who has no papers

[according to HR 4437] I‟m a criminal. For years, I was very
quiet. I only worked and paid taxes. Now it‟s necessary to
protest.47

In Washington, the political reaction to this overwhelming display of

solidarity was abrupt and immediate. Republicans in the House of

Representatives started to back away from the most extreme measures of HR

147
 148

4437, including the those that would make it a felony to be in the United States

without documentation or that would make it a felony to help an

„indocumentado‟. Some Republicans tried to shift the blame onto their

opponents, claiming that the Democrats had somehow been responsible for

removing the offensive criminal provisions from the bill. 48 But 10 years of

activism and integration had left the demonstrators with greater political acuity

than the busy residents of South Gate who had been buffaloed for so many

years by Albert Robles‟ anonymous mailers. There was a realization that their

greater participation in the process of America would result in improved

conditions and greater respect. So the spring of 2006 should be understood as a

turning point in American electoral politics. It was the moment when

America‟s Mexican minority came of age becoming an important voting block

in American national and state level politics. This transition underlies Sonia

Sotomayor‟s ability to win GOP approval for a seat on the Supreme Court in

2009: very few senior Republicans are willing to risk opposing her nomination.

The arrival of a Latin voting block, and the beginning of their voice in

national politics, of course, has great significance for America‟s future.

Demographic projections have it that by 2050 a majority of all Americans will

be Latin and most of these will be of Mexican ancestry. But in addition to

changes in the complexion of America, there is a much more vital lesson to be

learned from the great Mexican migration and the integration of Latinos into

148
 149

American culture. It is this: when economic collapse is accompanied by environmental

collapse the resulting destruction of any region’s carrying capacty initiates massive human

migrations. These migration can only be measured in the tens of millions. This is

relevant, of course, because today –in the late summer of 2009- California

stares into an abyss similar in kind and cause to the double-barreled catastrophe

that has assailed Mexico since 1982. Since 2003, the outmigration from

California‟s urban centers that began among low-skilled workers across all

ethnicities in the mid 90s, now extends to its middle classes. 49 Los Angeleño

journalist and author, Candice Reed, is only one of these. But she is one of the

most vocal. In late summer 2009, Reed published a farewell to California as

„Dear California, I‟m dumping you‟ in the Los Angeles Times:

Dear California…

You‟ve totally lost perspective…I‟m sinking into depression! We

can‟t pay our bills…the phone is ringing off the hook with
creditors...Children…are losing healthcare, more than 766,300
Californians lost their jobs…last year…we‟re at the top of the
foreclosure charts. You need to change and you refuse to admit it.
For the first time…I‟m embarrassed to say…we are together.

There‟s no doubt I still have feelings for you but…I lost my job in
the newspaper industry and my house is being sold under duress.
I want out. I‟m leaving you…and you might as well know the
truth; there‟s another state…I‟m falling…for. 50

In plainer terms, the quality of life that once made California synonmous

with paradise is in decline. Like Candice Reed, lower and middle class

149
 150

Americans are finding opportunities for employment and more affordable lives

with better quality elsewhere. Reed has moved to Chelan, WA where she now

works for a small local paper while her retired husband has taken a job laboring

in a local vinyard. The growing exodus from California in which the Reeds are

participating is the result of an economic crisis that was brought on by

attempting to sustain a high quality of life without levying additional tax. Peter

Schrag, the author of Paradise Lost, the book that first warned California‟s about

the state‟s nearly inevitable decline, writes:

California…had been coasting on the capital investment of the

1950s and 1960s and had…been disinvesting by letting that
infrastructure deteriorate…In 1960 California spent nearly $1.50
per person for infrastructure. In the 1980s and 1990s, it spent
roughly $0.25. California‟s backlog on infrastructure –the
schools and other public buildings, roads, water and sewer
systems that needed to be built, repaired or modernized- was
conservatively priced by the California Buisness Roundtable in
the late 1990s at $90 billion, by a state commission in 2002 at
$100 billion, and by others at considerably more. 51

In addition to the rapid downturn of California‟s infrastructure, there is

in store an environmental crisis of proportions unequalled before in any of the

United States. Water, of course, is already a major challenge to the 38 million

people who live in the state. There is little more to be had elsewhere and,

anyway, California can no longer afford to buy it. –In addition to the problem

of a general lack of potable water that will already squeeze millions of people

out of the state, there is also the problem water quality. In recent decades

150
 151

salinity has became a serious threat. Most Californian water comes from the

aquifers or from the lower Colorado River. In the past decade, because of

aquifer depletion and evaporation at reservoirs, the concentration of salts has

increased in both sources (since the same amount of minerals are now

dissolved in much less water). California‟s famers are forced to irrigate fewer

acres with the same volume of water, to switch to more salt-tolerant crops, to

install expensive tile drains., or to somehow obtain more water simply in order

to produce a dwindling volume of crops. In 2001, the problem became

especially obvious for farmers in the Imperial Valley, the centerpiece of

Californian agribusiness. In The Big Thirst, a book about the history and future

of water crises in California, Norris Hudley describes what‟s in store:

The Imperial Valley has been especially hard hit, pouring millions of
dollars into a struggle to control salts that, baring some unexpected
technological breakthrough or infusion of new water, will inevitably be
lost. If that happens the valley will be abandoned, thus following a patten
established by many earlier civilizations stretching as far back as Sumer in
the third millenium B.C. 52

In the coming years, droughts, heat waves and increasingly large forest mega-fires

(like the ones now beginning near Bishop, Lake Naciemento, San Bernardino, Ventura

and Sta Cruz) will increase the state's irreparable economic devastation while reducing its

carrying capacity and making California -- especially southern California -- a truly

miserable place to live. The dream is genuinely over. This is the beginning of the end. As

I write this, I am very sad because I have postponed returning to California for 16 years,

and in the meantime it has been ruined by greed and mismanagement. Without any help

151
 152

in sight, California is now unable to cope with any major crisis -- a mega-fire, an

earthquake, a drought -- so climate change can only continue to kick the state, and keep it

down in the coming years. I remember my first day on the beach in Santa Monica in late

August 1980. It was so beautiful I thought that I would stay in SoCal forever. But we had

kids and no health insurance. We left for a more affordable life in my native Canada.

Now, the Paradise I loved is gone. It's like that song-of-a-girl you were going to find the

nerve to dance with before the party ended. For the rest of your life you'll feel the

disappointment of not following through.

1
Don Poulson. Daily News. The Way I See It: The Not-So-Great Business of California. Retrieved online on 08/17/2009
at http://www.redbluffdailynews.com/fdcp?1250606957991

2
Richard Simon. Los Angeles Times. „California Could Lose A House Seat After 2010 Census. Retrieved online on 08/17/2009 at
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jul/15/local/me-california-delegation15

3
Marcela Cerruta, Douglas Massey. „Trends in Mexican Migration to the Untied States: 1965-1995,‟ in
Jorge Durand, Douglas Massey, eds. Crossing the Border: Research from the Mexican Migration Project.
(New York, Russell Sage, 2004): p 21.

4
Judith Adler Hellman. Mexico In Crisis, second edition (New York, Holme and Meir, 1983):pp 223-4.

5
Ruben Martinez. Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail. (New York, Henry Holt,
2001): p 10.
6
Introduction,‟ in Scott Whiteford and Roberto Melville, eds. Protecting a Sacred Gift: Water And Social
Change in Mexico. (San Diego, CA, Center for U.S. – Mexican Studies, 2002): p 8.
7
Ibid.
8
Cynthia Hewitt de Alcantara. Modernizing Mexican Agriculture: Socioeconomic Implications Of
Technological Change 1940-1970. (Geneva, UN Research Institute for Social Development, 1976) p 310.
9
Joel Simon. Endangered Mexico: An Environment on the Edge. (San Francisco, Sierra Club Books,
1997): p 37.
10
Ibid.
11
Judith Adler Hellman. Mexico In Crisis, second edition (New York, Holme and Meir, 1983): p 230.

152
 153

12
Judith Adler Hellman. The World of Mexican Migrants: The Rock and the Hard Place. (New York, The New Press,
2008): p 38.
13
Matthew J. Gibney, et al. Immigration and Asylum: from 1900 to the Present.(Sta Barbara, CA; ABC-
Clio, 2005): p 77.
14
Maria Cristina Garcia. Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States and
Canada. (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006): p 45
15
“The New Ellis Island.” Time Magazine. June 13, 1983. pp 18-20.
16
Jorge Castenada, Ex Mex; From Migrants to Immigrants. (New York, The New Press, 2007); p 125.
17
Alejandro Portes, Robert L. Bach. Latin Journey: Cuban and Mexican Immigrants in the United States.
(Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1985): p 114.
18
Joseph Contreras. In the Shadow of the Giant: The Americanization of Modern Mexico. (New Brunswick,
NJ, Rutgers University Press, 2009): p 61.
19
Ibid, p 79.
20
Sing C. Chew. Ecological Futures: What History Can Teach Us. (Lanham MD, Altamira Press, 2008): p
45.
21
Stephen Mumme. “Mexico‟s New Environmental Policy: An Assessment.” In Donald Schulz et al eds.
Mexico Faces the 21st Century. (Westport CT, Praeger, 1995): p 98.
22
Joel Simon. Endangered Mexico: An Environment on the Edge. (San Francisco, Sierra Club Books,
1997): p 36.
23
Introduction,‟ in Scott Whiteford and Roberto Melville, eds. Protecting a Sacred Gift: Water And Social
Change in Mexico. (San Diego, CA, Center for U.S. – Mexican Studies, 2002): p 9.
24
Ibid.
25
Cynthia Hewitt de Alcantara. Modernizing Mexican Agriculture: Socioeconomic Implications Of
Technological Change 1940-1970. (Geneva, UN Research Institute for Social Development, 1976): p 310.
26
Leo R. Chavez. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens and the Nation. (Stanford, CA,
Stanford University Press, 2008): p 30..
27
Ibid, p 177.
28
James Lincoln Collier. The Rise of Selfishness in America. (New York, Oxford University Press, 1981): p 27

29
Jorge Castenada, Ex Mex; From Migrants to Immigrants. (New York, The New Press, 2007): p 135-6.

30
Joseph Contreras. In the Shadow of the Giant: The Americanization of Modern Mexico. (New Brunswick, NJ,
Rutgers University Press, 2009): 23.

31
Judith Adler Hellman. The World of Mexican Migrants: The Rock and the Hard Place. (New York, The
New Press, 2008); pp143-3.

153
 154

32
Ibid. p 143.
33
Sam Quinones. Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration (Albuquerque
NM, University of New Mexico Press, 2007): p 209.
34
Ibid, p 213.
35
Ibid, p 215
36
Ibid, p 213.
37
Ibid, p 218.
38
Sam Quinones. Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration (Albuquerque
NM, University of New Mexico Press, 2007): p 70.
39
Ibid, p p 70-73.
40
Ibid, p 100.
41
Ibid.
42
Ibid, p 75.
43
Joseph Contreras. In the Shadow of the Giant: The Americanization of Modern Mexico. (New Brunswick,
NJ, Rutgers University Press, 2009): p 61.
44
Sam Quinones. Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration. (Albuquerque,
University of New Mexico Press, 2007): All material concerning the corruption scandal of Albert Robles in
South Gate is taken from Quinones‟ pages 65-116.
45
Leo R. Chavez. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens and the Nation. (Stanford, CA,
Stanford University Press, 2008): p 154.
46
Ibid, p 160.
47
Ibid, p 164.

48
Ibid, p 165.
49
This is a pretty well documented fact. See for example William Frey‟s “Metropolitcan Magnets for
International and Domestic Migrants‟ in Bruce Katz et al, eds., Redefining Urban and Suburban America:
Evidence from Census 2000, Vol 1, (Washington DC, Brookings Institute, 2005): p 9, 17; Arthur Laffer et
al,eds. The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes will Doom the Economy-If we let it happen. (New York,
Simon and Schuster, 2008): p 161; Frank Bean, et al eds. Immigration and Opportunty: Race Ethnicity and
Employement in the United States. (New York, Russell Sage, 2003): p 324.
50
This is a pretty well documented fact. See for example William Frey‟s “Metropolitcan Magnets for
International and Domestic Migrants‟ in Bruce Katz et al, eds., Redefining Urban and Suburban America:
Evidence from Census 2000, Vol 1, (Washington DC, Brookings Institute, 2005): p 9, 17; Arthur Laffer et
al,eds. The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes will Doom the Economy-If we let it happen. (New York,
Simon and Schuster, 2008): p 161; Frank Bean, et al eds. Immigration and Opportunty: Race Ethnicity and
Employement in the United States. (New York, Russell Sage, 2003): p 324.

154
 155

51
Peter Schrag. California: America’s High Stakes Experiment. (Berkeley, Univeristy of California Press,
2006): p 109.
52
Norris Hundley. The Great Thirst: Californians and Water: a history. (Berkeley, University of California
Press, 2001): p 44.

155