Telles and Ortiz believe that a “Marshall Plan” that invests heavily in public school education will address the issues that disadvantage many Mexican American students.

“For Mexican Americans, the payoff can only come by giving them the same quality and quantity of education as whites receive,” they said. “The problem is not the unwillingness of Mexican Americans to adopt Americans values and culture but the failure of societal institutions, particularly public schools, to successfully integrate them as they did the descendants of European immigrants.”

I’d have to read the book to understand this view, but this sounds to me like the typical liberal academic solution to every educational problem: throw more money at it. By now we know well that more educational spending is no panacea at all for chronic educational underachievement. Part of the problem is no doubt structural (that is, badly run school systems). But part of it is also surely cultural — “mind-forg’d manacles,” to use Blake’s term. Not having read the book, obviously, I don’t know to what extent, if at all, the authors examined non-material (e.g., cultural) reasons behind the failure of Mexican-Americans to thrive educationally, but this 1995 Atlantic Monthly essay by the Mexican professor and diplomat Jorge Castaneda strongly suggests that cruel and dramatic social and economic inequality in Mexican society has created a culture of fatalism within the Mexican poor, one that is incommensurate with North American ideas of self-betterment and self-empowerment through education. Castaneda writes:

But the inequality is not simply economic; it is also social. A government undersecretary (one level down from the top echelon of public service) earned in 1994 (prior to devaluation) approximately $180,000 after taxes, excluding health insurance and perquisites but including all sorts of bonuses, premiums, and expense accounts — almost twice what his U.S. counterpart earned before taxes. His chauffeur (provided by the government, of course) made about $7,500 a year. The official addresses the employee with the familiar “tu,” while the latter must speak to the former with the respectful “usted.” The official and his peers in the business and intellectual elites of the nation tend to be white (there are exceptions, but they are becoming scarcer), well educated, and well traveled abroad. They send their two children to private schools, removed from the world of the employee. The employee and his peers tend to be mestizo, many are barely literate, and they have four or five children, most of whom will be able to attend school only through the fifth grade.

Certain equalizing institutions that reduced injustice and segregation in the United States for many years, before they ran into nationwide resistance, have never really existed in Mexico.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it can’t be that Asian immigrants to the US are coming out of societies that were relatively just and socially egalitarian, hence their ease of assimilation (relative to Mexican immigrants and their children). Can it be?

I sent Sailer’s link to an old friend who teaches public school in California, and who was telling me 15 years ago that unchecked Mexican immigration was wrecking California schools. Why? It’s not because the immigrant children were less capable than any other kids, in her view. It’s because they came from families where education was not valued. She said any progress she and her colleagues made in educating these kids would inevitably be sabotaged by parents who would withdraw their children from school for weeks at a time for long visits back home to Mexico. That, and the almost complete lack of parental support for the mission of educating kids (e.g., parents didn’t expect their kids to do homework). My friend surmised that there must be something very deep in the culture of Mexico that holds education to be something for the wealthy, and in fact an impediment to doing “real” work, which is manual labor. By contrast, the kids in her classes who came from Asian immigrant families were strongly dedicated to their schoolwork, and were pushed down this path by their parents, many of whom spoke almost no English (cliches come from somewhere).

The late Samuel Huntington pointed out that Mexican immigrants to the US and their children live with certain facts that no other immigrants have done. For example, the country they leave behind is not across an ocean, but right next door. Mexican immigration to the US did not come in a single big burst, but has been continuous. Mexican immigrants largely settled in the American Southwest, creating a large communal concentration that worked, and works, against assimilation to American norms. And there’s this from Huntington:

The persistence of Mexican immigration into the United States reduces the incentives for cultural assimilation. Mexican Americans no longer think of themselves as members of a small minority who must accommodate the dominant group and adopt its culture. As their numbers increase, they become more committed to their own ethnic identity and culture. Sustained numerical expansion promotes cultural consolidation and leads Mexican Americans not to minimize but to glory in the differences between their culture and U.S. culture. As the president of the National Council of La Raza said in 1995: “The biggest problem we have is a cultural clash, a clash between our values and the values in American society.” He then went on to spell out the superiority of Hispanic values to American values. In similar fashion, Lionel Sosa, asuccessful Mexican-American businessman in Texas, in 1998 hailed the emerging Hispanic middle-class professionals who look like Anglos, but whose “values remain quite different from an Anglo’s.”

To be sure, as Harvard University political scientist Jorge I. Domínguez has pointed out, Mexican Americans are more favorably disposed toward democracy than are Mexicans. Nonetheless, “ferocious differences” exist between U.S. and Mexican cultural values, as Jorge Castañeda (who later served as Mexico’s foreign minister) observed in 1995. Castañeda cited differences in social and economic equality, the unpredictability of events, concepts of time epitomized in the mañana syndrome, the ability to achieve results quickly, and attitudes toward history, expressed in the “cliché that Mexicans are obsessed with history, Americans with the future.” Sosa identifies several Hispanic traits (very different from Anglo-Protestant ones) that “hold us Latinos back”: mistrust of people outside the family; lack of initiative, self-reliance, and ambition; little use for education; and acceptance of poverty as a virtue necessary for entrance into heaven. Author Robert Kaplan quotes Alex Villa, a third-generation Mexican American in Tucson, Arizona, as saying that he knows almost no one in the Mexican community of South Tucson who believes in “education and hard work” as the way to material prosperity and is thus willing to “buy into America.” Profound cultural differences clearly separate Mexicans and Americans, and the high level of immigration from Mexico sustains and reinforces the prevalence of Mexican values among Mexican Americans.

I found that Robert D. Kaplan article from The Atlantic Monthly (1998) that Huntington references. It’s worth quoting at length. Kaplan interview Alex Villa, a “semi-retired” gang leader who lives on the impoverished south side of Tucson:

“The schools have made things worse [said Villa]. In high school, in the Mexican areas we were taught about Latino history and pride, while the blacks were taught about black history and pride. What the teachers never emphasized was respect for each other’s cultures, or how to think like an American. My sophomore year blacks and Mexicans had a full-fledged riot.”

“What about your old gang?”

“It’s a subcell of what had been a larger gang.” Villa went on, talking about gang “empires” and “territories,” including one controlled by Yaqui Indians — “tough little guys whose territory was surrounded, yet they were able to hold off other groups.”

“You don’t talk like you look,” I remarked. Villa again stared at me hard, and then said, “You cannot believe how easy it is to be trapped by your surroundings, how the world beyond the South Side of Tucson is not real. When I was in criminal court, I listened — really, for the first time — to how educated people speak. That’s when I realized how dumb I sounded. Thanks for the compliment. I’m still working on myself.”

Villa told me that he reads often in libraries. “I’ve learned to start sentences without saying ‘You know.'” He had arrived on time for our lunch — but for gang members it is a matter of pride to arrive late, to let the other fellow wait. I suspected that he was truly retired.

Villa had served a total of sixteen months, in a juvenile prison and in what he called an adult facility, for assault and battery. “In the adult facility I learned how to hot-wire cars, get through home alarm systems, and make silencers,” he said. He told me about “night crawlers” — gang lookouts who flash Bic cigarette lighters to indicate Tucson street corners where cocaine is for sale. I was also told by people in the area that cops are protected by gang members if “they let a certain amount of crime happen.”

Villa is a third-generation Mexican-American, born December 30, 1969. “I was a tax deduction,” he joked. His now deceased father was a roofer, his mother a medical assistant. “Because of my size, I was a natural leader in junior high school. Gangs are the most copycat of subcultures. It used to be zoot suits; now it’s tattoos. When I was thirteen, I got a tattoo” — he pulled up his T-shirt and showed me a big tattoo, which read CHICANO — “so the other kids had to get a tattoo also.” Villa continued, broadening the picture. “If you chicken out when it comes to committing a murder, all your friends from your entire life in the neighborhood will reject you — it’s like excommunication. Tell me, what law or punishment could be worse than that, especially since none of the hard-core gang members expect to live beyond twenty-one?”

According to Alex Villa, the real Mexican-U.S. border runs between south and north Tucson. “The South Side is the Old World. In the Old World if a car passed by floating on air, people would fear it, then worship it. In the New World they would dissect it to see how it works. In the Old World, even with the worst poverty, there is an extended family which provides stability. But in the New World, if there is no economy, there is no culture either, no family, nothing to hold people together. Just look at the poor whites and blacks. For South Side Mexicans to go into north Tucson for work is a death march. They hate north Tucson and envy it at the same time. South Side Mexicans have no idea of gradually accumulating wealth. What they know from their own experience is ‘If I could only sell a bunch of keys [kilos of cocaine], I could move to north Tucson.’ To think in terms of education and hard work as a way into north Tucson is, in fact, to buy into America. I know almost nobody in south Tucson who has bought into America.”

Fascinating stuff, the way the mentality of the “Old World” versus “New World” sets people’s expectations, and the trajectory of their lives. It is also fascinating, in a way not complimentary to our New World culture, that the fragmentation of our familial systems has left us all so vulnerable to the economy. Yet Villa — who, note well, is a third-generation Mexican-American — appears to suggest that the persistence of the familial system is also part of the problem within Mexican immigrant culture. This stuff is complicated.

What do you readers think? What have you seen where you live? Educate me. If you Google Huntington’s stuff on this topic, you get tons of liberals screaming racist racist racist racist racist. Of course that is par for the course when people are confronted with facts they don’t want to acknowledge. Nevertheless, there is a such thing as racism, and I am going to work hard to keep the discussion thread from being polluted by it. Help me out here, would you?