The Real Cultural Divide in America.

NRO has an interview with Victor Davis Hanson on his new book, Mexifornia. The interview contains this observation:

The result is that we are seeing in the area the emergence of truly apartheid communities — like nearby Orange Cove, Parlier, Mendota, and Calwa — that resemble Mexican rather than American societies, and that are plagued by dismal schools, scant capital, many of the same social problems as Mexico, and a general neglect by the larger culture, including prosperous and successful second- and third-generation Mexican Americans who would never live there.

I think this is the first time that I have read anything like this in print. I wonder how many people have noticed this or reflected on its significance.

My soon-to-be-ex-wife was a elementary school teacher at Mendota Unified. My oldest - Boff - went to to kindergarten in Mendota. On Back to School Night, it was an easy matter to pick her blonde self-portrait out of the self-portraits of the other thirty children. The times that I went to Mendota, it was obvious that Mendota is largely a "Mexican" town. "Mexican" in the sense of being populated by people who are Mexican nationals. Mendota is a town of under 10,000 in rural Fresno county. My visits to Mendota and to other small Valley towns have caused me reflect on an odd sociological fact: it appears that the rural towns in the Central Valley are largely Mexican, again in the sense of being populated by people who are Mexican nationals. On the other hand, the larger towns - the county centers of population up and down the Highway 99 corridor - are substantially more heterogenous and filled with American nationals of whatever national origin.

Has there ever been a time when there has been a similar population pattern of centralized administrative centers being held by one population while the countryside is held by another population? I can think of several, all usually involve patterns of conquest. After the Norman Conquest in 1066, for example, the Normans would build castles in Anglo-Saxon areas in order to maintain control. On the other hand, some scholars think that the biblical conquest of Israel by the proto-Hebrews actually involved the expansion of a Hebrew rural population around Caananite urban areas.

These precedents are not reassuring.

For the record, I favor immigration. I have zero xenophobia about Mexicans coming to America and joining our population. As hard-working, rural Catholics, their values would probably approximate Republican values. [I'll also point out that I have had a couple of cases where there has been an undercurrent of prejudice and discrimination by native-born Mexican-Americans against Mexican-born Mexican-Americans, so one should take care before lobbing any charges of racism with respect to these observations. "Hispanics" are in no way a homogenous, undifferentiated group.] I think that foreign-born Mexicans in these rural areas should assimilate, though, and that state programs that retard assimilation are pernicious. (Incidentally, the stbe was a bilingual teacher.) I also recognize that the historic patterns of assimiliation mean that America, California and Catholicism will have a distinctly Mexican tilt. For example, the Virgin of Guadalupe will be a dominant religious motif and Cinco de Mayo will replace St. Patrick's Day.

But that's life.