Saturday, November 03, 2007

Gregory Rodriguez lends a scholarly voice to the national shouting match over immigration, and anyone interested in historical context should listen to him. Context has taken a back seat to demagoguery when the topic is immigration, but our country is going to have to pay attention to both if there is to be any hope of resolution.

Provocatively titled "Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America," Rodriguez's book was released this week, and like all good history, it shows that the current furor over immigration is nothing new. The Aztecs and other tribes living in what we now call Mexico were first ambivalent about the arrival of newcomers from Spain and later became downright hostile.

Meanwhile, Spanish officers, soldiers and the priests who accompanied them started cohabitating with the Indians, and from those unions sprang a people who would forever defy racial categorization. Their descendants eventually mingled their blood with that of blacks and whites who ventured into what is now the American Southwest.

Blacks brought into Mexico as slaves — slavery was eventually outlawed in the Republic — virtually disappeared as a race after intermarrying or cohabitating with the whites and the Indians and mestizos, Rodriguez writes. He is in town today to read from his work at the Texas Book Festival.

Rodriguez, director of the California Fellows Program and an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, contends that questions about Mexican immigration have an underlying issue of race, and that's not really new, either.

Nonetheless, Rodriguez skillfully delves into the history that made Mexicans — and Mexican Americans — a people who aren't easily categorized by blood or culture, despite mighty efforts by the courts, academia and the media. Not only does that inconvenient truth cause headaches for census takers, but mestizos — a mixture of bloodlines — have been trouble for jurists in Mexico and in the United States through the years as both court systems tried to adjudicate property disputes in the days when white meant right.

Rodriguez cites the case of Timoteo Andrade of Jalisco who petitioned for U.S. citizenship in 1935. The First Federal Circuit Court in Buffalo, N.Y., denied the petition because Andrade was a "Mexican Indian" and ineligible for citizenship. According to the U.S. Code at the time, only "free white persons" could become citizens. Following a rather contorted judicial examination of Andrade's bloodline, the court adjudged him white and he became a citizen in 1936.

The case was important because the nativists of the era insisted that Mexican blood lines were racially polluted and allowing them into this country would muddy Anglo-Saxon blood. That has a familiar ring to it.

Rodriguez takes careful aim at sacred cows found in a variety of pastures in the immigration debate and deftly pulls the trigger. He explodes the notion that immigrants won't learn English, the linguistic fiction that conveniences not only immigration opponents, but also owners of Spanish media conglomerates. The latter have a vested interest in convincing advertisers that the only way to reach Latinos is through Spanish-language advertising. Learning the language is essential to survival in the U.S.

Rodriguez also gets off a round at Chicano Studies scholars who, he says, love to portray Mexican Americans as eternal victims.

Quoting a study by former University of Texas history professor David Montejano, Rodriguez notes, "In 1930, unskilled rural land urban workers comprised two-thirds of the Texas Mexican labor force. Fifty years later, the number with unskilled jobs dropped to 29 percent with the remaining 71 percent in white collar or skilled occupations." Things have changed since the study was published in the mid-1980s, but the larger point is that the shift would not have been possible had Latinos remained monolingual.

Rodriguez also dispatches the "they won't assimilate myth" with studies and accounts of Mexican assimilation that date back to the 19th century.

My favorite: "After the 1880s, all of the Southwest — and northern Mexico as well — became increasingly Americanized, and Mexican Americans did not hesitate to adopt new consumer products, foods, fashions and recreational forms."

Rodriguez offers no easy answers to the immigration question, but neither does anyone else. His book is aimed a providing historical perspective and context to a contentious contemporary issue.

In that he succeeds and admirably.

Rodriguez is scheduled to read from and discuss "Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds" at 10 a.m. today in Room E2.012 of the Capitol Extension.