Mexico and Mexicans
by Fred Reed
Phred1@fredoneverything.net

Please do not consider this letter derogatory; it is not meant to be so, but simply explains the relationship between Mexico and the US for what it truly is
; and I find it extremely poignant and blatantly accurate based upon my four years of living in Mexico. Personally I find the Mexican people friendly, willing to help whenever they can, as honest as most Americans, and I have found NO racism here. They can't say the same when they come to America. I would not call most Mexicans who travel north losers, as Fred does below;  they have the same hopes and dreams of financial survival and providing a better life for their families as  the rest of us; but he is correct in stating it is not the educated who are travelling north. Why would they? Other than economics, I feel the US has little to offer compared to here. I prefer the lifestyle, climate and relationships here better myself.  We have gained much more than we have given up in the move , I feel. Yes, they have different priorities, and I don't find many bad and yes, most have no concept of timeliness; a four o'clock meeting, party,  or potluck starts between 5 or 6. .   Ber

Fred's letter
When I write that I like Mexico, that it enjoys much that we have lost, that
Latin societies are more livable if less prosperous than ours, dismissive
letters arrive. They amount to the same letter: "If Mexico is so great, how
come they all want to come to the United States?" The writers invariably
believe that they have made a telling point.

Mexico is not so great, of course. It has plenty of problems. But why do
Mexicans swim the river? Money. Period. If asked, an immigrant will usually
say that he seeks "una vida mejor," a better life. He means "Money."

Mexicans and gringos have distinctly different views of the United States.
An American explaining the attractiveness of his country will usually say,
"I have a big house in the suburbs, three cars, a home theater, and 300
channels on the cable. I can drink the water, and in the mall I can buy
anything, absolutely anything." He may talk of freedom and democracy, often
having only the vaguest idea of whether he actually has them or what
conditions might be in other countries.

A Mexican is more likely to say, "They are such a cold people. They don't
know their neighbors. They don't know their children. They have no fiestas.
Rules and being on time are more important to them than other people. They
have no religion." (To a robust Catholic, bland agnostic Protestantism isn't
detectibly a religion.) Democracy means little to an illegal with a
second-grade education; in any event, Mexico is probably as democratic as
the United States. He knows the government left him alone in Mexico, which
is his definition of freedom. And mine.

But money counts when you don't have any. It counts a lot. And so they come
whether they like the country or not. Very often they do not. This is going
to matter.

Now, do the "all Mexicans" of my mail want to emigrate, to attach themselves
to the northern nanny's promiscuous dugs? No. Few do. Who then are the
emigrants?

For starters, they are not doctors, chemists, and airline pilots. Successful
Mexicans do not want to go to the United States. Mexicans who are merely
comfortable do not want to go to the United States. They like Mexico. This
is very difficult to explain to most Americans, who know beyond doubt that
Mexico has lesser malls. But it is a fact.

The Mexicans who go north are the losers, the failures, the barely if at all
literate, those with little to offer. They go because the Mexican economy is
wretched, because the jobs that left the United States for Mexico are now
leaving Mexico for China. Money. The United States can run a first-world
economy. Mexico cannot. Why is debatable. The fact isn't.

While Mexicans are good people, their dregs often are not. On average the
immigrants are uncultivated, uneducated, and of low intelligence. One may
not mention the matter of intelligence, but it is well known among people
who pay attention to such things, and has implications for the future.
America is getting those Mexicans least worth getting, the least
assimilable, and getting them in circumstances that do not encourage
assimilation. Unlikely to prosper, they show signs of becoming another
unsalvageable underclass.

Being Latins, they are not comfortable in an impersonal, technological
northern European culture that values performance, competition, efficiency
and punctuality. It isn't their way. Often they plan to make money and
return to Mexico; many then develop ties and remain. Yet even then they stay
among their own. Their numbers as they swarm across the border are such that
they can do it. If they don't want to assimilate, don't have to assimilate,
and don't have the wherewithal to assimilate-don't expect assimilation.

Further, Latin Americans resent the United States for its great wealth and
for their own poverty, which they tend to blame on exploitation by American
corporations. Whether this characterization is correct (it isn't) doesn't
matter. The resentment does.

Mexicans know that much of the American southwest was once part of Mexico,
taken from them by force of arms. Americans, having been the victors and in
any case being historically illiterate, know little of this. Mexicans do.
Few know the dates or the politics, yet they have a sense of grievance, a
sense that these states are really theirs. They are getting them back. They
know it. They view the reconquista with the relish with which they watch a
Mexican soccer team beat the US.

Their envy, their sense of inferiority and of failure, breeds hostility in
the southwestern barrios. This is far less true of Mexicans in Mexico. In a
couple of years in the interior, I have found people to be friendly and
courteous. The only exceptions, apart from my experiences during a couple of
unwise forays into seriously low bars, have involved males who clearly had
spent time in the US.

Comparisons are made between Mexican immigrants and, say, Italians, a Latin
people who melded well into American society. A word of caution here:
Assimilation is proportional to contact. When a minority population is
sufficiently large, and sufficiently concentrated, the consequence is not
assimilation, but the establishment of a sort of country within a country.
There are for example countless huge black regions of the cities where one
can go for days without seeing a white face. Whites barely know that these
places exist. The inmates are not assimilating. The same appears to be
happening with the Mexicans.

Perhaps as important, past immigrants have cut their ties with their native
countries, and have arrived with the conscious desire of becoming Americans.
Mexicans, very often, do not want to be Americans, and the mother country is
right across the border. The phrase "trans-border de facto semi-sovereignty"
is not Milton. It merits thought.

Worse for America, much worse, is that far too many of them perform terribly
in school. Dropout rates are very high, auguring ill for the future.
Mexicans are not an academic people (as, increasingly, neither are
Americans). In the barrios, their Spanish is barbarous. So is their English.
Crime is high. The press will not talk much about crime, but the police
know.

And-here I am on statistically shaky ground, as there are no statistics-the
young too often seem to be assimilating to the black underclass rather than
to the central white current. Mexican machismo and the ghetto strut of the
black underclass have much in common. Rap is popular among low-class Mexican males. It is the music of defiant losers, of macho swagger and rejection of white America.

Black and Mexican won't unite. They don't like each other. Anger will come
when the growing and better organized Mexicans take the southwestern cities
from the blacks. One country, three nations, little compatibility, and no
love lost.

September 13, 2004