Texas

by James A. Michener

  Señorita Múzquiz did not have clear sailing in her program, for SMU had a charismatic professor of history who had worked for five years in the Peace Corps in various South American countries, and he had come home with a few hard-won conclusions about life in that world. His name was Roy Aspen—University of Texas, Stanford, University of Hawaii—thirty-seven years old and iron-tough. He first attracted Señorita Múzquiz’s attention in 1983, when he gave a widely discussed lecture, ‘The Error of Bilingualism,’ in which he pointed out with scholarly precision the dangers inherent in establishing even accidentally a two-language nation.

  Had he kept to the main point his lecture might have gone unnoticed, but at the end he added two unfortunate paragraphs, which aroused unnecessary antagonism:

  ‘A major corollary to this problem can be expressed in a question which we consistently avoid: “Why did those parts of the Western Hemisphere which fell under Spanish control fail to develop rational systems of self-government? And why did those regions falling under English control succeed? The facts are overwhelming. No American nation deriving from a Spanish heritage, except possibly Costa Rica, has learned to govern itself in an orderly and just manner. Those with a different heritage have.

  ‘Now, you may not want to admit that the non-Spanish nations have achieved responsible government and a just distribution of wealth, while the Spanish-speaking nations never have, but those are the facts. So to encourage a bilingualism which might bring into Texas the corrupt governmental systems of our neighbors to the south would be folly, if not suicide.’

  When she left the lecture hall, Señorita Múzquiz was trembling, and to the fellow Hispanics she met that night, she said: ‘We must declare war on this racist pig. He’s reviving the Black Legend that was discredited a century ago.’ And she drafted a letter to the editor, which surprised readers with its daring argument:

  I am sick and tired of hearing that Spanish-speaking nations cannot govern themselves. Since Lázaro Cárdenas was elected President of Mexico in 1934, our well-governed nation to the south has had an unbroken sequence of brilliant leaders, each of whom has served his full six years without incident. In that same period the United States has had Roosevelt die in office, Truman, Ford and Reagan attacked by would-be assassins, Kennedy murdered, Nixon expelled, and Johnson, Ford and Carter denied reelection.

  Mexico is the stable, well-governed nation. The United States terrifies its neighbors by its reactionary irresponsibility.

  And as for the vaunted American system of distributing income fairly, we who live in South Dallas see precious little of either generosity or reward.

  Her assault was so bold and her data so relevant that she was encouraged by her Hispanic friends to keep fighting, and when Dr. Aspen ended the session with the acerbic comment that Señorita Múzquiz should remember that a return passage to Mexico was always easier than an infiltration of our border, her infuriated sympathizers urged her to initiate what developed into the notorious Múzquiz-Aspen Debates of 1984. They focused on bilingual education—and generated intense partisanship.

  The protagonists were evenly matched: this dedicated, attractive young woman of Mexican derivation opposing an able professor of Swedish heritage who knew the Latin countries better than she. Each spoke from the most sincere conviction, and neither was reluctant to lunge for the jugular.

  She made two points which gave thoughtful Texans something to chew on, and she did so with enough insolence to command attention and enough validity to command respect:

  ‘Let’s look at this anglo charge of cultural impoverishment in Mexico. Where in the United States is there a museum one-tenth as glorious as the new archaeological one in Mexico City? It celebrates with explosive joy the glories of Mexico. And where can I go in the United States to see the grandeur of your Indian heritage? Are you ashamed of your history?

  ‘Don’t tell me about the Metropolitan Museum in New York or the Mellon in Washington. They’re fine buildings, but they’re filled with the work of Europeans, not Americans. Impoverished intellectually? Who is impoverished?’

  Her second bit of evidence received wide circulation and verification from various social agencies:

  ‘If you check with social services here in Dallas, you will find that they carry on their books three hundred and sixteen otherwise responsible anglo men who ignore court orders directing them to help support children whom they have abandoned, while your post office reports that Mexican workers in this metropolitan area, poorest of the poor and under no compulsion other than human decency, send home to their families south of the border more than four hundred thousand dollars monthly. Which society is more civilized?’

  Dr. Aspen, realizing that he could not best Señorita Múzquiz in the disorderly brawling at which she excelled, sought to bring the debate to a higher level by convincing SMU to organize a powerfully staffed symposium entitled ‘Bicultural Education, Fiction and Fact.’ From the moment the brochures were printed, everyone could see that this was going to be an explosive affair, and experts from many states crowded into SMU, filling the university dormitories and occasionally standing at the rear of conference halls in which every seat was taken.

  The United States as a whole had a profound interest in this subject, and national newspapers carried summaries of the opening address, in which a United States senator said:

  ‘I voted for the legislation which spurred the initiation of bilingual education, and of course I applauded the Supreme Court decision of Lau v. Nichols. I did so because I believed that all young people in this country, whether citizens or not, deserved the best education possible, the soundest introduction to our system of values.

  ‘I now realize that I made a dreadful mistake and that the Supreme Court decision, Lau v. Nichols, is one of the worst it has made in a hundred years. Together we have invited our beloved nation to stagger down a road which will ultimately lead to separatism, animosity and the deprivation of the very children we sought to help. I hereby call for the revocation of the system we so erroneously installed and the abolishment of the legislation sponsoring it.’

  There was an outcry from the floor, and a man from Arizona who supported Señorita Múzquiz’s theories demanded the podium for an immediate rebuttal, but with a calm which infuriated, Professor Aspen ignored the clamor and called for the second speaker, an elderly Jewish professor from Oregon, who gave a most thoughtful analysis of past American experience:

  ‘I will be forgiven, I hope, if I draw upon my family’s experience, but my grandfather came to New York in 1903 from the Galician region of what was then Austria but which had through most of history been Poland. He landed knowing not a word of English, and when in 1906 he was able to send to Galicia for the rest of his family, his wife and three children, including my father, landed at Ellis Island, again with no English.

  ‘My grandfather spoke abominable English, my grandmother never learned. But the three children were thrown into the American school system and within four months were jabbering away. Both my father and my aunt Elzbieta were writing their homework in English by the end of that first year, and both graduated from grade school with honors.

  ‘That was the grand tradition which produced a melting pot from which poured an unending stream of Italian, German, Polish, Slavic and Jewish young people prepared to grapple on equal terms with the best that Harvard, Yale and Chicago were producing. In fact, my father went to Yale, and others from the various ghettos went to Stanford and Michigan and North Carolina.

  ‘To change a system which has worked so well and with such honorable results is a grave error and one which, having been made, requires immediate reversal.’

  Again there was an outcry from those whose careers had been enhanced by the introduction of bilingualism, but once again Professor Aspen ignored the hullabaloo, taking the podium himself to speak of his experiences:

  ‘If one looks at the linguistic tragedy that impends in Canada, where French speakers want to fracture the nation in def
ense of their language, or in Belgium, where French speakers fight with Walloons who speak Flemish, or in the Isle of Cyprus, where Turk and Greek quarrel over languages, or in South Africa, where a nation is rent by language differences, or in India, where thousands are slain in language riots, or anywhere else where language is a divisive force, one can only weep for the antagonisms thus inherited.

  ‘These countries bear a terrible burden, the lack of a common tongue, and more-fortunate nations ought to sympathize with them and give them assistance in seeking solutions to what appear to be insoluble problems. Charity is obligatory.

  ‘But for a nation like the United States, which has a workable central tongue used by many countries around the world, consciously to introduce a linguistic separatism and to encourage it by the expenditure of public funds is to create and encourage a danger which could in time destroy this nation, as the others I spoke of may one day be destroyed.

  ‘India inherited its linguistic jungle; it did not create it willfully. History gave South Africa its divisive bilingualism; it did not seek it. Such nations are stuck with what accident and history gave them, and they cannot justly be accused of having made foolish error, but if the United States consciously invents a linguistic dualism, it deserves the castigation of history.

  ‘Let us focus on the main problem. If we continue to educate our Spanish-speaking immigrants and native-born in Spanish for the first six years of their education, and if we teach the vital subjects of literature and history in that language, we will see before the end of this century exactly the kind of separatism which now plagues Canada, but our example will be much worse than theirs, because our sample of the disaffected will be larger and will have on its southern border a nation, a Central America and an entire continent speaking that language and sponsoring that separatism. Let us face these ominous facts and see what we can do to counteract and forestall them.’

  At the close of his address, reporters immediately crowded about Aspen: ‘Do you oppose Miss Músquiz personally?’ and he replied amiably: ‘Not at all. She serves a most useful purpose in providing Mexican immigrants with leadership. Texas profits from its Mexican workers, and they’re entitled to her guidance. But when her ideas are so erroneous that they might lead our entire nation into irreversible error, they must be corrected.’

  ‘What did you think of her statement that if history had been just, Los Angeles and Houston would now be Mexican cities?’

  He considered this for a moment: ‘Interesting speculation. The cities might be Mexican but they would not be Los Angeles and Houston. Under traditional Mexican mismanagement, they’d be more like Guaymas and Tampico.’

  When Señorita Músquiz gained the floor to counteract the strong points made by Professor Aspen, she controlled her seething fury and gave one of the better presentations of the symposium. She denied that teachers like her kept their students imprisoned in Spanish when they must lead their adult lives in English; she denied that she ever taught Mexican imperialism; she denied that the Supreme Court case infringed in any way on American rights. Since she really believed that she acted only in the best interests of her pupils, she had no hesitancy in denying that she or teachers like her kept their students from learning English.

  Then, in sober terms, she reminded her audience of the grave disadvantages Mexican immigrants had suffered in Texas, the cruel way in which their culture had been abused, the remorseless way they had been handled by Rangers along the border, and the thoughtless contempt with which they were so often treated:

  ‘We have lived side by side with the North Americans since 1810, and we have made every concession to their superior power. They had the votes, the guns, the law courts and the banks on their side, and we bowed low in the gutters and allowed them to usurp the sidewalks. But when they now demand that we surrender our language and our patterns of life, we say “No.” ’

  She gave a stirring defense of bicultural life, which she refrained from equating with bilingual education paid for by the host state, and in the end, in a peroration that brought tears to some, she shared her vision of a de facto state along the border, from Brownsville to San Diego, in which the two cultures, the two economic systems and the two languages would exist in a mixed harmony.

  As the symposium wound to a close, argument over the Simpson-Mazzoli Bill erupted, shattering her carefully nurtured impression of reasonableness. Simpson-Mazzoli was an effort by a Republican senator and a Democratic representative to stanch the hemorrhaging along the Mexican border and to bring order among the estimated ten million illegal immigrants who had drifted north and who existed in a kind of judicial no man’s land. The bill offered three solutions: halt further illegal entry, grant generous amnesty to those well-intentioned and well-behaved Mexicans already here, and penalize American employers who hired illegals. It was a good bill, basically, but Hispanic leaders like Señorita Múzquiz opposed it vehemently on the dubious grounds that it would require immigrants like her who had later obtained legal status to carry identification cards. ‘Am I to wear a yellow star, like Hitler’s Jews?’ she shouted. ‘Must I carry proof that I’m a legal resident? What anglo employer will run the risk of hiring me when he can hire a fellow anglo with no danger of breaking the law?’

  Professor Aspen dismissed such reasoning with one compelling question: ‘Can a sovereign democracy control its borders or can’t it?’ Without waiting for an answer, he added: ‘The incessant flow of illegals from Mexico and Central America must be halted, or the United States will be engulfed by hordes of uneducated persons who will try to convert it into just another Hispanic dictatorship.’

  Señorita Múzquiz opposed the bill for defensible reasons, but there were other Hispanic leaders who fought it for personal gain: they wanted either an assured supply of cheap labor or a constant inflow of potential voters to bolster Hispanic claims. To all opponents of the bill, Dr. Aspen asked: ‘Are you recommending a completely open border across which anyone in Mexico can come as he or she wishes?’ and the Señorita replied: ‘You’d better keep the border open, because Texas and California prosper only because of the profit they make on this guaranteed supply of cheap labor. Stop the flow, and Texas will collapse in depression.’

  A television newsman, overhearing the argument, asked her: ‘But if the Mexicans and Central Americans keep pressing in, won’t this mean that eventually most of Texas will become Mexican?’ and she said, looking defiantly into the camera: ‘If Hispanic mothers in Central America have many babies and anglo mothers in Texas have few, I suppose there will have to be an irresistible sweep of immigrants to the north. Yes, Texas will become Spanish.’

  And even as she spoke, the American Congress, debating in Washington, refused to pass the reasonable Simpson-Mazzoli Bill, thus destroying any attempt by the United States to control the influx of illegals across its borders. For the most venal reasons the citizens of Texas were in the forefront of this cynical rejection of common sense; they were willing to accept immediate profits while ignoring future consequences. As a result, the Immigration authorities along the Rio Grande stopped trying to stem the unceasing inflow of illegals, turning their attention rather to keeping them out of the larger cities like Dallas and Amarillo; the creation of the ipso facto Mexican-American nation along the Rio Grande was under way. So the embittered Múzquiz-Aspen Debates ended with a rousing victory for the Señorita. And the well-intentioned peasants from Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador, yearning for freedom and a decent life, continued to stream across the Rio Grande.

  When Señorita Múzquiz heard on the evening news that Simpson-Mazzoli was dead, she cried in Spanish to those who were listening with her: ‘Hooray! We’ll win back every bit of land Santa Anna gave away. And we won’t have to fire one shot.’

  Professor Aspen, when he heard the same news, told his students: ‘Before the end of this century Texas will start contemplating her privilege of breaking into smaller states. There’ll be a movement to create along the Rio Grande a
Hispanic state.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ they asked.

  ‘Doesn’t matter whether I am or not. The unquenchable flood of immigration will determine it.’

  Sociologists called them ‘rites of passage,’ and this theory enabled them to predict certain inevitables which had to occur in any society, no matter how primitive or advanced. At age two, babies would begin to assert their own personalities, often with reverberations that altered family relationships; at fifteen, young males would begin to concentrate on girls, who had been concentrating on boys since thirteen; and at about twenty-seven, men would begin thinking about challenging the older leaders of the tribe, with similar inevitables trailing a man to his grave.

  In Houston comparable rules dictated behavior. Among society’s more fortunate few, men in their early thirties, like Roy Bub Hooker, Todd Morrison and their two friends, the oilman and the dentist, would want to find themselves a quail lease somewhere to the south along the borders of the great King Ranch; in their late thirties they’d want an airplane to fly them quickly to their preserve; in their early forties they’d begin to do what all sensible Texans did, aspire to take their vacations, summer or winter, in Colorado; and in their late forties, sure as thunder after a lightning stab, they’d want to find themselves a ranch in that glorious hill country west of Austin; and when this happy day occurred they would almost certainly switch to the Republican party.