Mexifornia
A State of Becoming
Chapter One
What Is So Different
about Mexican Immigration?
Despite its Statue of Liberty, recitations of
Emma Lazarus's poetry, and melting-pot imagery,
America has always struggled with issues of immigration-mostly
when it was a matter of the poor,
dispossessed non-Anglos or non-Protestants coming in by the millions.
Boatloads of refugees were denied entrance to the United
States during the Holocaust. Starving Irish were compared to
lower primates and denied employment; Italians were demeaned as
little more than criminals; Poles were dismissed as stupid menials
fit only for unskilled labor. As for "Oriental" immigration, there is
no need to talk of it, since whole university departments now exist
to explore the racism of the "Yellow Peril."
North America was originally settled largely by northern
Europeans-English, Germans, Scandinavians, French and
Dutch-who came as farmers and settlers in the late seventeenth
through the early nineteenth centuries and set the cultural protocols,
so in effect they ... read full excerpt from Mexifornia: A State of Becoming ebook
