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Last week, the Los Angeles Times dispatched a sobbing girl reporter to sympathetically cover the pending deportation of a divorced, illegal Mexican immigrant father, thereby tragically and unfairly depriving a 10-year-old boy of a desperately needed parent.
This week, the Los Angeles Times dispatched a sobbing girl reporter to UCLA to present a sympathetic portrait of academic America’s hot new export, “undocumented graduates.” In the stirring locution of the Times, the occasion was described as “a ceremony for graduating UCLA students, both documented and undocumented.”
You don’t detect a pattern here, do you?
It is entirely fitting, in this manipulated, deliberately confusing, stringently politically correct atmosphere that one of the two major Presidential candidates is half black and half white, instead of a single race, even though he daily winks at the truth when he declares himself to be of a single race.
Where Do You Line up?
One of the least noticed conflicts in our country today is the debate over how deeply the Spanish language and Spanish culture should be allowed to penetrate official America. Separate from the equally heated debate over the practice of living Spanishly is the argument over whether Spanish and English should be formally recognized as the co-equal languages of America.
Person-to-person testiness has risen to record levels in the last 15 years because of the tens of millions of illegal immigrants, heavily Latin, who have steadily leaked through America’s shores, gradually and drastically altering the academic atmosphere in all 50 states, while simultaneously weakening the stitching that binds our cultural values. Latinos may become the majority culture, later rather than sooner, unless Mexico becomes the 51st state.
The Mexican-centric Mayor of Los Angeles, as disrespectful of the law as his counterpart in San Francisco, proudly marches with illegal immigrants. He proclaims, in Spanish and English, that they should be as welcome here as legal immigrants, that no distinction must be drawn by those white or black bully bigots. Many Americans agrees.
The nationwide debate chokes a little more on Saturday. Barack Obama and John McCain will don their pandering clothes and sit down in San Diego for I Love You More Than My Wife testimony before the vicious Mexican equivalent of Ku Klux Klan, the National Council of La Raza (The Race). Partisans who criticize the other side for catering to special interest groups make an exception when the special interest is their own.
Choosing Sides
Ruben Navarette is a young columnist with the San Diego Union-Tribune for whom his Latin ethnicity and the accompanying emotions are always within reach. His work is worthy of your study because he usually is sensitive, thoughtful, instructive and not at all predictable.
Mr. Navarette grew up in the Central Valley, and in his latest essay, he reflected on a conflict at graduation.
“On the night I graduated from high school, one of my co-valedictorians wrote into his speech a single sentence welcoming his grandparents, who had traveled to the United States to attend the ceremony. The sentence was in his grandparents' native language.
“The night before, at the eighth-grade graduation across town, a young girl, another valedictorian, did something similar. She included a single sentence thanking her parents – in their native language – for their support.
“The line in the high school speech was in German; the one in the speech for the junior high school was in Spanish. Guess which speech caused a fuss?”
Since Germans are not sneaking across our leaky borders and Latinos are pouring through, sometimes Mr. Navarette is naive.
Why Are You So Upset When I’m Not?
As an Hispanic, he reasons, illogically, it is folly to become so petulant about language, especially the language whose unchallenged acceptance he is promoting.
“The language wars flare up whenever insecure Americans worry that English is becoming passe,” Mr. Navarette said. “It's a cultural paranoia that is laughably off the mark. According to research, children of immigrants stand a better chance of losing their native language and speaking only English than never learning English at all. Still, it's a fear that is resistant to facts.”
Mr. Navarette’s paranoid conclusion is disappointing. “I don't like that language has become a proxy for the immigration debate and the anxiety that some people feel over a changing cultural landscape,” he says. But don’t give up on him.
