Hispanics, in Changing, Change America

The sea is blue. A dusty road leads through eucalyptus, past the cemetery, to the village. The house is empty, shuttered, locked. The clay stove is cold enough for spiders, which spin and twirl like angels. The echo answers all questions.

What will happen if Latin American civil war spreads? What will happen if the Mexican government explodes from bloated corruption? Where is the end to the line of illegal immigrants?

It is 1986, and the border does not hold. Entire families are coming. America is no longer the male’s solitary journey as it was in the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s. More of the family is now here than there.

America wants to tell the new immigrants that it is sorry--and it is sorry--but there is not enough space, air, welfare, not enough America for all who would come. But then Americans take the Mexicans up on their offer of cheap labor. Mexicans are all around the neighborhood on Saturday, buzzing, chopping, mowing. They have become the new Americans, busy at a time when we grow more leisured, Latin.

I can imagine a drama, perhaps a tragedy, an outburst of xenophobia played out in the Southwest. Because the poor have the most to lose from uncontrolled immigration, I imagine Mexican Americans resisting illegal immigration.

For the time being, Mexicans continue to arrive with punctual innocence. No intention to be disrespectful of American laws, senor , but necessity is necessity. The past meets the future in an opposing glance.

Mexican Americans have become a people whose future gets told in numbers. In the 1970s our population nearly doubled. We are now 8 million officially; unofficially (guessing at those illegally here) we are 11 million, maybe more. We are 60% of the nation’s Hispanic population, and have the highest fertility rate of any ethnic group.

A commonplace of recent articles about us is that, along with other Hispanics, Mexican Americans are destined to “displace” blacks as America’s largest minority group by the year 2020 or sooner. This prediction is nonsensical in that Hispanics are an ethnic group, not a racial group; many Hispanics are black. The dangerous future I envision is one in which Hispanic numbers will be used as a way of evading the black in America.

The danger commonly conjured is that the numbers portend an American Quebec. And while we talk, the numbers race, the odds change like digits on a bookie’s marquee. The United States is now the fifth-largest Spanish-speaking country.

Most articles on Mexico end up in a jumble of numbers, unreadable, usually accompanied by photographs that will casually break your heart. In one such photograph I see the teen-aged father walking with three children, and only here can I read the writing on the wall.

I am unmarried, barren. My life is spent with you; we are neighbors. As much as you could be, I am awed by the generosity of the Mexican immigrant’s embrace of his child. I have heard these new immigrants sing hymns on Sundays, hymns sung with stunning faith. The future is theirs. Their ascendancy has nothing to do with borders. I, meanwhile, have cast my lot with you in the America of Time magazine, the Time that had a cover story on Mexico titled “The Population Curse,” as though life, and not illness and poverty and death, were the true enemy.

In his office the Catholic bishop, a Mexican American, points over my shoulder to a mosaic image of Our Lady of Guadalupe on the wall. “That is the way I think of American society,” the bishop says. “America is not a melting pot. America is more like that, a mosaic made up of different colors, each beautiful, but united to produce a work of art.”

America’s bishops have made headlines with their opinions about the MX missile and the morality of capitalism. Less publicized is their “Pastoral Letter on Hispanic Ministry” issued in 1984, wherein the bishops announced themselves to be against assimilation as a social goal for Hispanics. They wrote: “The Church shows its esteem for the dignity of Hispanic culture by working to ensure pluralism, not assimilation and uniformity.”

But while the bishops piously fret with the thought that Hispanics may be changed too much by America, Hispanics are destined to change America. I am speaking of assimilation. I am not speaking of tacos or bilingual ballots. I am speaking of the soul, the real soul, which surpasses matter. The residue of the past is told in a mood, a gesture of hands, a tone of voice. A man who knows my family well tells me today that when I write in English he can recognize the sound of my father speaking in Spanish. This is the way Mexico will influence America in the future: American English will be changed by the Mexican immigrant children who put it in their mouths. Optimism will be weighted, in time, by some thicker mood.

Meanwhile, I am about as much of Mexico as you are going to get on paper. Diluted: a second-generation American, a middle-class man, born to the city. The obvious truth about assimilation is that it is never even. The advantage goes to the more numerous, the longer-settled, the wealthy. The child of immigrant parents goes off to school and comes home knowing more about British kings than about his grandfather’s travail. (So it was that America happened to me. I turned into you.) But if assimilation is never equal, assimilation is always reciprocal.

Mexican Americans are destined to become your neighbors, your boyfriends, your wives, your uncles. We will change you. Mexico will change you. But Mexico’s greatest influence will be carried by an Americanized middle class and not by the less assimilated working class.

“Mexican American” as a political category, an idea, is being transposed to “Hispanic.” The same has happened to other immigrant groups in the country. Think of Jewish immigrants or the Italians. Many came, carefully observing the Old World distinctions and rivalries. German Jews distinguished themselves from Russian Jews. The Venetian was adamant about not being taken for a Neapolitan. But, to America, what did such claims matter? All Italians sounded the same. A Jew was a Jew. And now America shrugs again. Palm trees or cactus, it’s all the same. Puerto Ricans, Central Americans, Cuban Americans, all are becoming Hispanic. A new group consciousness is being forged, with a new accent, a uniform American Spanish. Politicians already have gotten the point. There is strength in Hispanic numbers, and there is bound to be influence. The Mexican American activist (once the Chicano) is now the Hispanic politician.

A century ago “Spanish” was the acceptable term. To those Mexican Americans who claimed to be Spanish came admission to circles of civility. Spanish meant light skin, of course, though it was not always an exact racial designation. To be Spanish meant that one had money or the memory of money or pretense to money. Spanish meant land. Today’s term is Hispanic. It signals a movement out of the barrio, the wider view taken. The smart coinage. The adjective that fits an emerging middle class of business executives and lawyers and doctors and writers like me.

But at the very moment of our numerical celebrity we may be about to disappear into the melting pot. My youngest nephew stares at me with dark eyes. He has blond hair. I think it is Mexico I see in his eyes, the unfathomable regard of the past, while ahead of him stretches Sesame Street. What will he know of Mexico except to know that his ancestors lived on land he will never inherit? What Mexico bequeaths to him passes silently through his heart, something to take with him as he disappears, as my father did, into America.