“patriotism”
8 posts under this tag.
English first names might be all the rage in MexicoELZR, but haven’t you noticed how American Hispanic last names are starting to sound? I’m not just taking about Jennifer Lopez, Cameron Diaz, or Ricky Martin, I’m talking biotechnologist Juan EnriquezWP, essayist Richard RodriguezWP, ELZR, dancer David BernalYT, WP, Google’s George ReyesWP, ABC’s Elizabeth VargasWP, filmmaker Robert RodiguezWP, Synopsys’s Brian CabreraF, cartoonist Michael RamirezWP, YouTVPC’s Sam MartinezWSJ, actresses Sara RamirezWP and Michelle RodriguezWP, jurist Alberto GonzalesWP. It is not my intention to give a Hispanic hit paradeWP, my only point here is how through habituation these most Latin of last names are getting an English ring to them.
I knew Luis González de Alba for his controversial, non-PCWP opinions and that’s why I bought a popular science book of his in the last Spanish bookfair here in Guadalajara. The essays I have read have so far been overly digressive and frankly tedious overall, but there have been several fascinating insights here and there. My favorite of all:
La psicologÃa social mexicana tiene un magnÃfico tema de investigación en nuestra identificación con los vencidos y no con los vencedores, siendo hijos de ambos. Decimos que “ellos”, los españoles, legaron y “nos” conquistaron. ¿Por qué nos llamamos conquistados si también somos conquistadores? ¿No tenemos ojos de todos los colores y pieles de todas las tonalidades? ¿No nos llamamos Carlos, Miguel, Antonio, MarÃa, Carmen? Nos apellidamos González, López, Payán, Cárdenas, Aguilar, Toledo, Segovia, Cortés [!]. La idÃlica y tonta visión que tenemos del imperio azteca la pensamos en español y cuando insultamos a España la insultamos en español.
Luis González de Alba, Los derechos de los malos y la angustia de Kepler: Las mentiras de mis maestros p151
Mexican social psychology has a wonderful subject of investigation in our identification with the vanquished and not the vanquishers, being children of both. We say “they”, the Spaniards, came and conquered “us”. Why do we call ourselves conquered if we are conquistadores too? Don’t we have eyes of every color and skins of every tone? Aren’t we named Carlos, Miguel, Antonio, MarÃa, Carmen? Our surnames are González, López, Payán, Cárdenas, Aguilar, Toledo, Segovia, Cortés. The idyllic and foolish vision we have of the Aztec empire we think in Spanish and when we insult Spain we insult her in Spanish.
I remember Andrea cringing when I read this to her, denying any link with the brutish Spaniards—Andrea, my beautiful, western-named, Spanish-surnamed, milk-white, hazel-eyed Mexican friend.
Ayn Rand’sWP, ELZR Atlas ShruggedAM is on the wishlist. I’ve read a sketch of the plot and as soon as I get my hands on it, it’ll be the first book I read. It was a tortuous decision though. I tend to anguish over negative criticism and she’s a woman with her fair share of it. People talk jadedly about “growing out of Rand’s idealism.” They compare her with Herman Hesse, good for rebel-without-a-cause teenagers but pity the adult that still believes them. And so on.
The thing is her radical capitalism and love for America are exactly where I am at.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these the homeless, tempest-tossed to me;
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Verse engraved on the base of the statue of liberty.
Until the middle of the 1920s,this country followed a general policy of unrestricted immigration; except for some exclusion of orientals, anyone who wanted to come was welcome. From 1905 to 1907, and again in 1910, 1913, and 1914, ,over a million immigrants a year came. They and their descendants have created a large part of our economic and cultural wealth. It would be hard to find any major public figure willing to argue that this policy was a mistake.
It would be almost as hard to find a major public figure who would advocate a return to that policy. Recent debates have been on how we should allocate and enforce our limited immigration quota among different nationalities, not on whether the quota should exist
In my opinion, the restriction on immigration is a mistake: we should abolish it tomorrow and reopen the most successful attack on poverty the world has ever seen.
One danger in this policy is that poor immigrants might come with the intent of somehow surviving until they became citizens, and then going on welfare. I therefore include in my proposal the condition that new immigrants should face a fifteen year ‘resi¬dency’ requirement before they become eligible for welfare. I also suggest that the federal and state minimum wage laws be altered so as not to cover new immigrants, or, better yet, be repealed.
We would receive a vast flood of immigrants, probably more than a million a year, possibly several million. Most would come from Asian and Latin American countries. Most would be poor. Many would work as unskilled labor for the first generation, as did most of the previous immigrants. They would bring with them levels of education, nutrition, and health, which would appall our social workers; they would live, by our standards, very badly, but they would live well by their former standards, and that is why they would come.
Unrestricted immigration would make us richer, as it has in the past. Our wealth is in people, not things; America is not Kuwait. If a working wife can hire an Indian maid, who earned a few hundred dollars a year in India, to work for her at six thousand dollars a year, and so spend her own time on a 30 thousand a year job, who is worse off?
As long as the immigrants pay for what they use, they do not make the rest of the society poorer. If increased population makes the country more crowded, it does so only because the immigrants produce wealth which is worth more to the owners of land than the land is worth, and the immigrants are able to use that wealth to buy the land. The same applies to whatever the immigrants get on the free market; in order to appropriate existing resources for their own uses, the immigrants must buy them with new goods of at least equal value.
The immigrants will get some governmental services for which they will not pay directly. They will also pay taxes. Given present conditions, I see no reason to expect that they will cost government more than government will cost them.
The new immigrants will drive down the wages of unskilled labor, hurting some of the present poor. At the same time, the presence of millions of foreigners will make the most elementary acculturation, even the ability to speak English, a marketable skill; some of the poor will be able to leave their present unskilled jobs to find employment as foremen of “foreign” work gangs or front men for “foreign” enterprises.
More important than any of these economic effects is the psychological effect on the present poor; they will no longer be the bottom of the barrel, and as Liberals have pointed out with some justice, it is where you are, not what you have, which defines poverty. Mobility will be restored; each generation of immigrants will be able to struggle up to a position from which to look down on their successors.
A policy of unrestricted immigration would bring us more than cheap unskilled labor. It would bring a flood of new skills, not least among them the entrepreneurial ability that has made Indian and Chinese emigrants the merchant classes of Asia and Africa. Once the new citizens become familiar with the language and culture of their adopted country, they will probably work their way into the great American middle class just as rapidly as did their predecessors of eighty years ago.
It is a shame that the argument must be put in terms of the economic or psychological “interest” of the present generation of Americans. It is simpler than that. There are people, probably many millions, who would like to come here, live here, work here, raise their children here, die here. There are people who would like to become Americans, as our parents and grandparents did.
If we want to be honest, we can ship the Statue of Liberty back to France or replace the outdated verse with new lines, ”America the closed preserve/That dirty foreigners don’t deserve.” Or we can open the gates again.
David Friedman, The Machinery of FreedomAM – Open The Gates
The American flag.. is worthless except as a symbol, a symbol of men achieving their ends by voluntary association, cooperating through mutual exchange in a free society. Capitalism.
David Friedman, The Machinery of FreedomAM – Might have been
No me llames extranjero, porque haya nacido lejos
o porque tenga otro nombre, la tierra de donde vengo.
No me llames extranjero, porque fue distinto el seno
o porque acunó mi infancia, otro idioma de los cuentos.
No me llames extranjero, ni pienses de dónde vengo
mejor saber dónde vamos, a dónde nos lleva el tiempo.
No me llames extranjero, porque tu pan y tu fuego
calman mi hambre y mi frÃo, y me cobija tu techo.
¡No!
No me llames extranjero,
traemos el mismo grito
el mismo cansancio viejo que viene arrastrando el
hombre desde el fondo de los tiempos,
cuando no existÃan fronteras, antes que vinieran ellos,
los que dividen y matan
los que roban, los que mienten
los que venden nuestros sueños.
Ellos son los que inventaron esta palabra: Extranjero.
Facundo Cabral, No me llames extranjero ( mp3)
Una cancion en contra del “otro” acusa al “otro” de inventar al “otro”!
Somo nosotros los que dividimos y matamos, los que robamos, los que mentimos, los que vendemos nuestros sueños. Somos nosotros los que inventamos la palabra extranjero. No es autoflagelacion, es solo reconocer que somos parte del problema.
Muhammad Waqar, Avi Wolfman-Arent, Yiran Xia, Victoria Sandoval, Jacqueline Orellana-Flores, Elizabeth Packer, Ramona Singh, Anuja Shah, Mayra Ramos, Emily-Kate Hannapel, Natasha Perez, Samir Paul, Ekta Taneja, Linden Vongsathorn, Michael Tsai, Nardos Teklebrahan, Matiwos Wondwosen…
I went to [my daughter Natalie’s] high school graduation Monday and a United Nations meeting broke out..
..If there is one reason to still be optimistic about America it is represented by the stunning diversity of the Montgomery Blair class of 2006. America is still the world’s greatest human magnet. We are not the only country that embraces diversity, but there is something about our free society and free market that still attracts people like no other. Our greatest asset is our ability to still cream off not only the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world but the low-skilled-high-aspiring ones as well, and that is the main reason that I am not yet ready to cede the 21st century to China. Our Chinese will still beat their Chinese.
This influx of brainy and brawny immigrants is our oil well—one that never runs dry. It is an endless source of renewable human energy and creativity. Congress ought to stop debating gay marriage and finally give us a framework to maintain a free flow of legal immigration..
It is hard to watch a graduation like this and not think about our enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan—the Taliban, Islamo-totalitarians like bin Laden and Zarqawi, and the retrograde regimes that support them. Their whole mind-set is about how to purify their world from “the other,” from diversity, from “infidels.” With enough brutality, they may win in Iraq. I still hope not.
But they will never win the future—because as soon as their oil wells run dry, their societies will be as barren, bland and unproductive as their deserts.
Our oil wells, by contrast, will still be pumping. They’re right there, hiding in plain sight, in the Blair commencement book:
Yueyang Li, Kenia Lopez-Reyes, Lucy Fromyer, Raya Steinberg, Zahra Gordon, Sreva Ghosh, Juan-Jesus Louis, Yendil Furcal, Yenusa Eke, Sofonias Frezghi, Yohanes Dejen, Edra Comegys-Brisbane, Yoel Castillio-Ortiz, Elijah Zuares, Placido Zelaya, Mimi Zou. And Jessica Smith.
I love Friedman. This is one of his best pieces ever.
The subject of the U.S.-Mexico migration (the biggest in the world, one hears) is everywhere right now. But unfortunately, almost all one always hears is pessimism, fear, nationalism, and prejudice. Most people don’t realize there’s something new and wonderful emerging. It’s a shame one doesn’t hear more often from Richard Rodriguez, a profoundly polemical Mexican-American writer. In his books, his essays, and his interviews he reinvents the concept of being Mexican. He lies about it, of course (he is the first to acknowledge it), but his is a fiction that describes me, his is a fiction I want to believe in.
You’ll have to excuse me but I’ve never felt as a victim of the US, I am American! I’ve been devouring the US all my life! But then again, that’s just weird old me—always suffering from multiple-nationality-disorder, from dislocation (I’m of the web! How could it be otherwise? “My kingdom is not of this world”); perpetually naive, perpetually “falling in love with cultures not my own”, perpetually imbued with the “arrogance” that “the individual is in control of the culture.”
I’ve compiled here a long list of quotations from several of Rodriguez’s interviews and articles. I tried to stick with the topic of migration but I did a lousy job at that, this man is too interesting.
|
RSS
email
