Return of the Native: America's Mestizo Futurethe (return of the native)

Wonderful essay.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-gardels/return-of-the-native-ame_b_21294.html

Nathan Gardels

05.19.2006
Return of the Native: America's Mestizo Future

In a world of hybrid cultures, there is room for everything except the dream of purity. It is the fear of impurity in our globalizing societies that links the reactionary ideology of political Islam with nativist anxiety. Abiding impurity is at the core of what liberal civilization is all about.

No one understands the impure mestizo future emerging in America better than Richard Rodriguez, who last book was entitled "Brown" -- the color of impurity.

By Richard Rodriguez

SAN FRANCISCO - The United States today is facing the return of the native. In the American scheme of things, the Indian had disappeared from history - reluctantly, sadly, tragically, he was eliminated. He had gone into retreat in our memories.

Suddenly, spilling out from over our southern horizon are people who were supposed to no longer exist.

The discomfiting thought occurs to us that history has not ended. That, instead, we are in the middle of another turn of the wheel our words can't describe. We are facing a future we can't name. So we have decided to call these immigrants "Hispanics" in reference to the Spanish king who once ruled Mexico and the American Southwest. But most of these faces that are coming toward us are people of mixed blood - mestizos.

Clearly the imprint of the Indian is on their faces. It is on my face! The long struggle between the U.S. and Mexico began as a fight over land in the 19th century. Mexico used to be the larger of the two countries but lost its enormous northern lands - now the U.S. Southwest, from Texas to New Mexico to California - when America began to expand westward......

"...Truly, in America today, the past and the future are meeting each other. It is at this border of time that the United States now plans to put tanks and soldiers, and there is talk of a wall..."

This would be a great afticle for the GD forum, too

I'm surprised to see so much hostility and anger in comments on Huffington Post.


another snip from the essay>

The immigrant experience in the U.S. is profoundly different than that in Europe. For example, Arabs and North Africans in France confront a completed country and culture every day in the subway, on television, in a bakery, on the radio. France, like the rest of Europe, has a long-formed and finished culture that does not need them.

In the U.S., we have a long tradition of immigrants being the very ones who forge the American identity. There was no identity here when the first immigrants arrived - except that of the Indian faces now coming back. In this country, the immigrant, at least theoretically or mythically, has a possibility of adding to the country.

Of course, there are those in America who now say, "We are a complete nation. We don't need any more immigrants." But by and large, the idea that immigrants contribute to the formation of a work in progress still dominates the American imagination.

Truly, in America today, the past and the future are meeting each other. It is at this border of time that the United States now plans to put tanks and soldiers, and there is talk of a wall.

snip>

are putting in bids already!

......and there is talk of a wall.

essay.

...Clearly the imprint of the Indian is on their faces. It is on my face! The long struggle between the U.S. and Mexico began as a fight over land in the 19th century. Mexico used to be the larger of the two countries but lost its enormous northern lands - now the U.S. Southwest, from Texas to New Mexico to California - when America began to expand westward.

There remains an anxiety on the part of both countries about this memory. Mexicans have a sense that this is a land that ancestrally was Mexican, although there is a recognition that it is no longer. But for the U.S. to see that land being populated again by Spanish-speaking people is to remember that extinguished part of its history.

That unsettles many Americans because they're not used to this repetition of history. They do not have a circular sense of time in which events repeat themselves, but a linear sense of history going one direction only - into the future.

This most recent wave of immigration is likely to change not just the destiny of the United States but of Latin America as well. The "Hispanic" population in the U.S. is now over 40 million people. That is equivalent in size to one of the largest countries in Latin America.

or so called -- much of that population will be mestizo.

heavily indian.

i find the circular nature of this kind of wonderful.

but i'm one of those progressives who hasn't had a problem with this ''immigration'' debate -- for me these really are people who have always been here.

did you happen to see the rodriguez essay on the arabization of america that will happen as a result of our war with iraq?

he points out how eventually bin laden -- and george bush looses.
our soldiers are becoming -- whther they like it of not -- arabized -- sensitive and carriers of arab culture.
we will have more arab immigrants, etc

it happens in every war -- there will be mixed babies, marriages, etc -- sort of an unnoticed force of nature.