Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
Michael Ennis
North Toward Home
Nothing will stop illegal immigrants from pouring into this country. So instead of pushing useless legislation, politicians in Washington should look at what Texas has done to turn the problem into a blessing.
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The crime many people are really worried about is national identity theft. We might be a nation of immigrants, but we’ve always had a last-one-in-bar-the-door attitude about the next immigrant wave. Even before we became a nation, it was the Germans who threatened to overwhelm the English-speaking colonists, as Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Franklin noted in 1750: “This will in a few Years become a German Colony: Instead of their Learning our Language, we must learn their’s, or live as in a foreign Country.” Throughout much of the nineteenth century, nativists feared that Irish and Italian Catholics would subvert democracy and surrender the republic to the pope, a fear that dogged John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, in 1960. Today’s chimera is the Latino laborer hunkered down in his Spanish-only enclave, his children coddled in bilingual public schools, patiently waiting for the restoration of Mexico’s pre-1848 borders.
It’s a fear played out against a very real demographic revolution: Hispanics became the nation’s largest minority three years ago and are projected to be a quarter of the U.S. population by 2050. Academics like Hoover Institution Fellow Victor Davis Hanson (Mexifornia: A State of Becoming) and Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington (Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity) argue that America’s cultural integrity and Anglo-Protestant values are under broad assault by Latino immigrants who, they say, refuse to assimilate, retaining their allegiance to Mexico and its culture. Voters in California and Arizona have fought back with referendums mandating “English immersion” as an alternative to bilingual instruction; other popular weapons are measures to bar immigrants from state aid and vouchers primarily intended to rescue Anglo kids from heavily Hispanic public schools.
But the funny thing is, the state that occupies half of the two-thousand-mile front line in this clash of civilizations—and is projected to have a Latino majority no later than 2035— has resisted the temptation to go nativist. California voters scrapped bilingual classes eight years ago, while in Texas, where the passage of state-mandated bilingual education in 1973 was a watershed for long-neglected Hispanic kids, there has yet to be a concerted campaign for the English-only approach. No one would suggest that we Texans are all that welcoming when we feel our values are threatened; we’re the state whose governor recently warned gay American veterans that they’d be better off locating elsewhere. But Texas is so hospitable to immigrants that we’re one of only eight states to offer in-state college tuition rates to undocumented students.
As surprising as our immigrant-friendliness may be to many, it speaks to who we are. To be a Texan is to inhabit a vast bicultural frontera, one that extends far beyond the Rio Grande and is far more profound than popular expressions like Tex-Mex cuisine and conjunto music. Not so much a boundary as it is the absence of one, that frontera has made us hemispheric citizens, plugged into a culture older, more complex, yet more distinctly American than that of Puritan New England or the Anglo-Protestant South. We’re part of the original America, the new world named after a Florentine explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, an America shaped when the rapidly modernizing culture of Renaissance Europe collided with the sophisticated ancient empires of the Western Hemisphere, powerful indigenous cultures that still live on in the language, religion, and art of the campesinos who make up a large portion of our most recent arrivals. One artifact of that enduring hybrid culture is that shrine of everything Texan (and American), the Alamo; its eighteenth-century facade combines Spanish baroque architecture with an Aztec-influenced ornamental style introduced by mestizo stonecutters.
Our relationship with this culture has always been as complicated as it is passionate. As Texans, we’ve fought two wars with Mexico, in the 1830’s and 1840’s, and a third, undeclared border war in the early twentieth century, a conflict that saw the Texas Rangers commit brutal atrocities against innocent Tejanos. Texas historians like Walter Prescott Webb often saw the border as a sharp dividing line in a Manichaean struggle between barbarism and civilization. But when Texas artists and writers started defining a uniquely Texan culture back in the twenties and thirties, they immersed themselves in the culture of Mexico, mining its architecture and folk art and studying at the feet of the Mexican muralists; it’s no accident that J. Frank Dobie’s 1929 Texas literary landmark was titled A Vaquero of the Brush Country, not A Cowboy of the Brush Country. Today the University of Texas at Austin turns out more graduate and postgraduate degrees in Latin American studies than any U.S. university; it was UT scholars who cracked the code that enables us to read ancient Mayan hieroglyphs, opening the book on the epic history of the New World’s old world. From think tanks to our major art museums, today we have a panoply of institutions that have already made Texas an important player in a truly hemispheric American culture.
Not only does that intellectual capital promise to continue our cultural enrichment, but as free trade sweeps the Americas, it also promises to make us rich. Our nation’s exports to Latin America, the majority of them to Mexico, are already almost equal to our exports to the European Union, despite our having neglected our hemispheric partners as we focus on the Middle East. (Just six days before September 11, President Bush declared that “the United States has no more important relationship in the world than the one we have with Mexico.”) Amid a rancorous national immigration debate that will have little practical result, Texans can profit by tuning out the boneheads in California, Arizona, or that great border state of Colorado, where Congressman Tom Tancredo has emerged as the nation’s fence builder. We’ve been in the middle of this collision of cultures a lot longer than they have, and we’ve learned enough to tell the rest of the country the truth about the other side: They will become us, and we are already them.
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