And yet—to anticipate the thesis of the essays I am working on—the massive immigration of Mexicans to the United States will be our final undoing. There are several reasons for this, some of them as obvious as the fact that most of the immigrants come from this poorest, least-educated, least “Europeanized” segments of Mexican society. Others are more subtle. Let us grant the most extravagant claims for the virtues of the Mexicans—and the more I see of Mexico the more I am wiling to grant them. Nonetheless, these virtues are, for the most part, not quite our virtues (such as remain to us), and even where we use the same language, we mean something different by such terms as courage, honor, manliness, chastity, and marital fidelity. They are Latin and Indian—brave, Stoical, and passionate—but they also exhibit a tendency toward irrational violence, inertia, and erotic melodrama. Octavo Paz, in his famous musings on the “Pachuco” phenomenon, thought Anglo-Americans were frightened by these dandy hoodlums. Perhaps we were not frightened, but we were and are profoundly disturbed by a people far more alien than any European. ~Thomas Fleming

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Fleming and Scott Richert in Rockford about this, among many other things, and I found Dr. Fleming’s impressions of Mexico very instructive. A long-time New Mexican, I have never gone to Mexico, mainly because I never saw much reason to go, so these impressions were very helpful in fleshing out a picture of what Mexico is like today. I highly recommend the entire article.