California Resettled

The future of California, according to Census 2000, will not look like a scene from “Gidget” or the cover of a Beach Boys album. Rather, it will look like a Benetton commercial or a clip from the music video “We Are the World.” It will, in cultural terms, be predominantly Latino and Asian. In chronological terms, it will be the Millennial Generation. All this could change should there be a surge in immigration from one part of the world or another. But there is little chance that this surge would come from Ireland, Norway or Sweden. If it comes, the likely source would be Mexico, Central America or Asia and would thus intensify the Latino-Asian dominance in the emerging culture of the Golden State.

Because it is possessed of such racial and ethnic clarity, this up-and-coming Latino, Asian and young California prompts an obvious question. What will California be like when they come of age? What will California be like when they come into dominance?

Certainly, we have evidence aplenty with the baby boomers as to how a generation can dominate its era. As a member of the pre-boomer Silent Generation, squeezed between the Depression-World War II generation and the baby boomers, I have had ample experience of the power of generational identity. Only within the last decade has the Depression-World War II generation begun to let go, and this only because it is reaching the end of its allotted life span. Ever since the 1960s, the baby boomers have taken for granted that the central generational drama of American life has been them. If it weren’t for 60-year-old Vice President Dick Cheney, my Silent Generation would have never gotten near the White House, which passed from a Depression-World War II president (George Bush the elder) to baby boomer Bill Clinton.

The baby-boomer phenomenon was significantly, but not exclusively, white. It was also significantly, but not exclusively, middle class in orientation. It was baby boomers, after all, who fought the Vietnam War as grunts on the ground and protested it back home on campus. Yet, there is little in the baby-boomer phenomenon to suggest color, ethnicity and the working and lower-middle classes, despite the fact that so many Americans born between 1946 and 1964 were people of color and blue-collar whites.

The current Generation X, by contrast, which is just ahead of the under-18 Millennial Generation, is not only more conservative (or should we say realistic?) than the baby boomers, it is also more racially and culturally diverse. It represents a demographic transition from the white-dominated baby-boomer generation to the Latino-Asian-dominated Millennial Generation. It also shows characteristics that will intensify when the Millennial Generation comes into its own.

First, young California, Latinos and Asians especially, will sustain a certain bipolar cultural identity and style. Since there will be a less powerful white culture to assimilate to, as was the case when whiteness dominated the mainstream, Millennial Generation California will not feel the pressure to assimilate that second-generation Irish, German, Slavic, Italian, Greek and Jewish young Americans experienced in an earlier era. Their cultural styles and identities, in other words, will remain more discernibly rooted in their prior cultures and heritages. Nearly everyone--and this includes a growing number of whites-- will be bi- or even tri-lingual.

Mainstream culture will not only reflect the diversity of the population, it will also reinforce this growing condition of bipolar, or even tripolar, identities. A few years ago, certain Anglo Southern Californians were shocked when Mexican Americans cheered for Mexico’s team, as opposed to America’s team, at the 1999 World Cup soccer championship games in Pasadena. For the Millennial Generation, such dual or even triple responses will be commonplace.

Will there be a common culture, a common California? Yes, but it will be on a different model. Certainly, interacting cultural identities will affect and flavor each other. Already, Southern California can boast Korean American bagpipe players, Japanese American surfer dudes, white homeboys, Latinos who do stand-up shtick. Already, we Californians are beginning to resemble each other. Even our bloodlines are coalescing, as indicated in Census 2000, which reveals a growing number of Californians, especially the 7.3% in the under-18 category, who see themselves as a blend of two, sometimes three, racial and ethnic identities. Given Hawaii, can California be far behind?

But lest we fear a “Blade Runner” scenario--a racial, cultural and ethnic diversity that does not fully cohere, that threatens to fall apart at any moment--signs are evident that this shared California, this one culture in common, will not create another Tower of Babel. Politically, for example, Latino lawmakers, especially in Sacramento, have thoroughly resisted the Quebec temptation: an ethnocentric politics verging on irredentism. Far from it. The Latino lawmakers have been on the cutting edge of holding California together. In general, they have used their newfound near-majority status to organize themselves around a cluster of California-wide and California-oriented issues and programs. As politics go more local, turf becomes more highly contested. Yet, even here, the center, while strained, is holding.

Besides, it is not certain whether the Millennial Generation will be interested in politics. If it is, one can expect a politics in which entertainment values and formats will further infiltrate political culture. It was the young who ultimately put Jesse Ventura into the Minnesota governorship, according to pollsters. As it is, state politics remain conventional (in comparison with its total culture) because it is, by and large, the conventional older generation that votes and donates to campaigns. At any one moment, however, the Minnesota-Ventura option could surface when the Millennial Generation comes into voting age.

In the case of recent school shootings, we have evidence that the Millennial Generation is under a certain kind of stress. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among others, has suggested that the large public high school is not meeting the needs of Millennial Generation students. A fragmented, complex, violent and otherwise morally ambiguous society, in other words, does not have either the authority or the expertise to handle large numbers of adolescents in large-scale universalized environments. There is a movement underway to create smaller education units within large public high schools to better meet the needs of the especially challenged Millennial Generation.

Will this generation go violent? Is that what the school shootings indicate? The Silent Generation settled its high school disputes in fistfights after school. What does this new trend of murderous school violence indicate? A dystopian scenario might fear that a Millennial Generation of young men, raised on an entertainment imagery of violence, with parental guns around the house, might be especially liable to a culture of violence as it enters those tumultuous years just before and just after sexual maturity. Confronting this fear, however, is the bipolarism, the multiple identities, that will characterize young California in the years to come. The intensity of ethnic identity, which usually accompanies a more traditional view of society, could come forward to assist young California in resisting the imagery and practice of violent behavior. The closer a young person is to his or her religious, cultural and familial identity, the less likely is that young person to become an offender. It is the breakdown of culture, not its coherence, that nurtures crime and other forms of moral and social dysfunctionalism.

The ecumenism of California, finally, may emerge as the No. 1 blessing of the Millennial state and its Millennial Generation. Human civilization--the peoples and cultures of the world--is creating the new California. The Millennial Generation is experiencing an unprecedented experiment in world culture. It is called California. It is called the United States, with California on the leading edge of the American experiment. Nurturing this generation, educating it, helping it to resist the crass and violent temptations of our society has correctly become the top priority of government, at least in terms of stated vision. Here, then, is the fundamental wealth of California. Here is its future. Speaking personally, I prefer the feel-good optimism of “We Are the World” or a Benetton ad, even though I’m ignoring the dark possibilities, such as the spectacle of a less-than-100-pound 15-year-old shackled in an orange jumpsuit who came to California just a short time ago and found not a new beginning but the end of the world.