Mexifornia: A State of Becoming
Apr 2016 · Encounter Books
5.0star
3 reviews
Ebook
150
Pages
About this ebook
Victor Davis Hanson locates the cause of our immigration quagmire in the opportunistic coalition that stymies immigration reform and, even worse, stifles any honest discussion of the present crisis. Conservative corporations, contractors and agribusiness demand cheap wage labor from Mexico, whatever the social consequences. Meanwhile, “progressive” academics, journalists, government bureaucrats and La Raza advocates see illegal aliens as a vast new political constituency for those peddling the notion that victimhood, not citizenship, is the key to advancement. The troubles Hanson identifies may have reached critical mass in California, but they also affect Americans who inhabit “Mexizona,” “Mexichusetts” and other states of becoming.
Hanson follows the fortunes of Hispanic friends he has known all his life—how they have succeeded in America and how they regard the immigration quandary. But if Mexifornia is an emotionally generous look at the ambition and vigor of people who have made California strong, it is also an indictment of the policies that got California into its present mess. In the end, Hanson is hopeful that our traditions of assimilation, integration and intermarriage may yet remedy a predicament that the politicians and ideologues have allowed to get out of hand.
Hanson follows the fortunes of Hispanic friends he has known all his life—how they have succeeded in America and how they regard the immigration quandary. But if Mexifornia is an emotionally generous look at the ambition and vigor of people who have made California strong, it is also an indictment of the policies that got California into its present mess. In the end, Hanson is hopeful that our traditions of assimilation, integration and intermarriage may yet remedy a predicament that the politicians and ideologues have allowed to get out of hand.
Ratings and reviews
5.0
3 reviews
John Schmidt
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July 23, 2019
Part a childhood memoir of growing up in 1960s California and part an elegy to a California that is being systematically transformed by illegal immigration from Mexico. You feel the sympathy that the author has for the illegal campesino worker as well as the contempt for the various institutions that work to delay assimilation and further their impoverishment.
About the author
Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist at California State University, Fresno, is author most recently of "Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power" and "An Autumn of War: What America Learned from September 11 and the War on Terror."
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