Absolut canard

If I didn’t already prefer Ketel One vodka in my martinis, I might very well call for my own boycott against Absolut.

Not because I agree with the knuckleheads who fear that the Swedish company’s advertisement featuring a map of the American Southwest as Mexican territory is fueling ethnic secessionism, but because, in its attempt to lure upper-middle-class consumers in Mexico, the company played on an age-old canard that has historically been used to justify discrimination against Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans here in the United States.

Last week I was in Las Vegas, and I found myself having a depressing chat with a Croatian maid at the Mandalay Bay hotel. “Your name is Rodriguez, are you Spanish?” she asked. “No,” I told her, “I’m Mexican American.” To which she responded glumly, “then pretty soon, this land will be yours. You are taking over.”

I tried to explain to her that I was an American, and that we all have modifiers. But she wasn’t having any of it. Where she’s from, ethnicity and nationality are one and the same. Croatia is for Croats, Serbia for Serbs. Having suffered the dismantling of her native Yugoslavia, which once stood as a functioning multiethnic state, she thought she knew better than to think nationality could be organized around anything other than a single, shared ethnicity and heritage.

Here in the U.S., our nationality is not supposed to be defined by ethnicity or race. But for much of our history, it was. Despite our diversity, the U.S. was long in the grip of white racial nationalism, which held that only whites were true citizens of this land. By the early 19th century, many white Americans believed that they were members of a superior Anglo-Saxon “race” destined to shape the world. The nonwhites they encountered on their way were deemed inferior and doomed to subordination or extinction.

It so happens that it was during early conflicts with Mexico that Americans began to understand territorial expansion in racial terms. Rather than view the Texas Revolution of 1836 as a struggle by aggrieved American colonists against tyrannical rule in Mexican territory, white Americans largely saw it as a racial clash. As historian Reginald Horsman has written, even Sam Houston saw the struggle, which resulted in the creation of a short-lived Texas Republic, “as one between a glorious Anglo-Saxon race and an inferior Mexican rabble.” Likewise when considering the U.S. annexation of Texas in 1845, James Buchanan, President Polk’s secretary of State, argued that “our race of men can never be subjected to the imbecile and indolent Mexican race.”

And almost as soon as the U.S. won the next round with Mexico, the Mexican American War in 1848, in which California and much of the Southwest ended up in U.S. hands, there were those who worried that Mexicans, who presumably also had racially inspired territorial desires, would take it back. And that Mexican Americans would help them do it.

But in the 160 years since, there has not been one single significant, broad-based movement by Mexican Americans or Mexicans to return territory to Mexican rule.

Sure, you may have heard that in 1969 a motley crew of Chicano activists at the Youth Liberation Conference adopted a manifesto they called the Plan Espiritual de Aztlan, which called on young, politically conscious Mexican Americans to “spiritually” reclaim the land of their birth. But as the title suggests, the plan was more a cultural than a political statement.

Otherwise, the most prominent incident that anyone can point to occurred in 1915, when Texas authorities uncovered a mysterious document, the Plan de San Diego, describing a Mexican scheme in the Southwest meant to wrest control of the territory from the U.S. Its origins are unclear; scholars believe that it may have been inspired by anarchists from south of the border. Although it came to nothing, its discovery, coupled with brazen cross-border raids by revolutionary Pancho Villa, intensified hostility and suspicion toward Mexican Americans north of the border.

In Los Angeles, 120 miles from the border, the Police Department imposed restrictions on Mexican American neighborhoods. Chief of Police Clarence E. Snively (honest, that was his name) organized a special force to keep an eye on Mexicans in the city and tripled patrols in the neighborhood known as Sonoratown. The Los Angeles Times was convinced that at least 10% of ethnic Mexicans were “rabid sympathizers with the outlaw, Villa.” The paper editorialized that “firebrands -- and they are not few -- must be watched and snuffed out.”

Absolut’s ad lifted a glass to lost empire but it didn’t advocate or predict reconquista. And even though it was Swedes who were in some way or another promoting olden Mexican times, that was enough for folks like columnist Michelle Malkin to suggest that a takeover by non-Swedes was imminent. She characterized the immigrant marches of the last two years as “ethno-supremacist” rallies whose cry is: “This is our continent, not yours.” Scores of bloggers and anti-immigration reform activists agreed.

But there is as little chance of ethnic secession today as there has ever been. Latter-generation Mexican Americans have never been more involved in U.S. civic life than they are today, and far from planning a territorial takeover, the marching immigrants actually wanted to be become U.S. citizens.

The raw fear of Mexican secessionism is unfounded, code for racial fear and enmity. That’s what the Absolut controversy means, and it’s enough to drive you to drink.

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grodriguez@latimescolumnists.com