Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her

by Dinesh D'Souza

  It seems easy for an armchair progressive activist to deplore Columbus’s legacy. I see the sadness in the eyes of a Charmaine White Face, and I am tempted to agree. Then I ask myself: What would have happened if Europeans never came to America? Would the Indians have developed their own modern civilization? Would they have adopted Western ways? Or would they have continued living as before, and what would that look like? I suppose it would look like the lifestyle of aboriginal tribes that we see today in Australia or Papua, New Guinea. Essentially they would be living characters out of National Geographic. No Western clothes, no Western medicine, no Western technology. If I wanted to be blunt about it, I’d throw in rotting teeth, high infant mortality, and low life expectancy. Imagine people still living in tepees and chasing animals for their meals.

  I know, it sounds wonderful as an idea—perhaps even as a short vacation. But try living like that; it would be almost as strange as trying to jump around all day like a frog. The native Indians know that, which is why none of them live like that. They could—the reservations are huge, and the Indians could create a simulacrum of their original lifestyle if they wanted to. But they don’t. In refusing to do so, they are voting for their current life over their ancestral life. The choice is not without its regrets. They have endured great hardships over the years, and they will never stop mourning the legacy of Columbus. Even so, they have no interest in going back to the National Geographic life. They would rather live in modern America and enjoy the fruits of the civilization that Columbus and his successors brought to the continent.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE MYTH OF AZTLAN

  I’d like to see the United States disappear. I’d like to see it become part of Mexico, part of a huge new nation dominated by a Chicano majority.

  CHICANO SCHOLAR AND ACTIVIST CHARLES TRUXILLO

  Some years ago, I witnessed a demonstration in southern California by a group of American Latinos waving Mexican flags. Clearly these Americans identified more with Mexico than with the United States. I was initially puzzled about why Americans felt this way. If they wanted to move to Mexico, they certainly could. I was not aware of any border restrictions preventing Americans from getting into Mexico. Then I realized why these Latinos don’t make the move. They think they are living in Mexico—the part of Mexico that was illegally seized and occupied by the United States. For many Americans, the Mexican War in the mid-nineteenth century may seem like ancient history. But just as some Southerners haven’t gotten over the Civil War, these Hispanics haven’t gotten over the Mexican War. Unlike the Southerners, who seem reconciled to having lost their war, the Hispanics want to undo the effects of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the treaty that ceded half of Mexico to the United States. Even so, they don’t want to become Mexicans again. Rather, these American Latinos seek to create a new country, encompassing northern Mexico and the southwestern United States, a place they call Aztlan. “Aztlan” is derived from Aztec, and is supposed to recall the land where the great Aztec empire once thrived.

  During that demonstration, I engaged in conversation an illegal immigrant from Mexico, and he made a passionate plea that has stayed with me since. He said, “The United States grabbed half of Mexico out of a pure lust for land. Most of what we call the Southwest—Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and parts of Utah, Nevada, and Colorado—was part of Mexico. We are Mexican people and this used to be our land, before the United States invaded our country and took it. We still consider the land to be ours by right. Yet the Americans won’t let us return and do agricultural labor on land that once belonged to us. How wicked can people be that they take something that is yours and then they won’t even let you work and support your family on the land of your fathers?”

  I still recall the wistful face of the man who said that. The issue he raised wasn’t one I’d considered before, nor has it gone away since. Today leading Hispanic intellectuals and activists form part of a progressive coalition that presses the same argument. These Hispanics, however, are not wistful; they are angry. And they are here not to beg but to insist. Contemporary activists like Angel Gutierrez, Rodolfo Acuna, and Armando Navarro attribute America’s size and wealth to its lust for conquest. Acuna’s standard textbook, assigned in numerous American schools and colleges, is titled Occupied America. The title refers to America’s acquisition of half of Mexico, and also to Hispanic reoccupation of America. What these activists want is a restoration of land that was taken, not necessarily to Mexico but to American Hispanics. And if the whites don’t give it, these activists believe that the Hispanic population will soon become the majority group in the Southwest. Then it will be in a position to take it. Immigration—legal and illegal—is the mechanism that today’s progressive organizers are counting on to undo the consequences of the Mexican War, and make the dream of Aztlan a reality.

  Hispanic activists offer different versions of the Aztlan solution. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, I met Charles Truxillo, a former professor at the University of New Mexico, to interview him for the America film. Truxillo conceded that, strictly speaking, the Aztlan idea is a myth. The Chicanos of the 1960s, he says, talked about how they were originally Aztecs and how they wanted to recover the territory of the Aztec empire. Even today, he says, many Hispanics get together to do Aztec dances and re-live the Aztec fantasy. But the Aztecs, Truxillo points out, did not inhabit what is now the southwestern United States. They were farther south, in present-day Mexico. Yet Truxillo says Aztlan represents a “metaphorical” truth. The Southwest—what Americans call the Southwest—is actually El Norte, the northern part of Mexico that America stole by force.

  This theft, Truxillo says, has to be rectified. For many years he flirted with a land grant solution. This would require the United States to restore to Mexicans the lands originally granted by the Spanish government when Spain ruled Mexico. Essentially Hispanics would be given large tracts of land in the United States, similar to Indian reservations. Hispanics, like native Indians, would become an autonomous “nation within a nation.” Today, however, Truxillo has a new solution. His new solution is for the United States and Mexico to combine into a single great nation. Over time, he excitedly says, this would become a Hispanic nation, not an Anglo or white nation. Moreover, this solution doesn’t require a war; it is, in a sense, happening naturally, through immigration and higher Hispanic birth rates. Truxillo assures me that eventually the border between the United States and Mexico will simply disappear. History, he concludes, has a way of settling old scores.

  Armando Navarro is chairman of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California at Riverside. He sports a drawing of Che Guevara in his office, and also a photo of him posing with Fidel Castro. In 2001 Navarro led a group of Chicanos and Mexicans at the Zapatista March into Mexico City. He said he wanted to “demonstrate our solidarity with the indigenous people of Mexico.” Navarro argues that Mexicans “were victims of an imperialism by which Mexico lost half its territory.” Today, he says, the Latino vote is powerful enough to be the swing vote in elections; tomorrow, it will be in a position to realize Aztlan. After all, the end of the Soviet empire created new possibilities, from the breakup of Yugoslavia to reassertions of Chechen independence. The same could happen here. “Imagine the possibility that Mexico recovers the lost territories, or that a new Republic of Aztlan is established.”

  Navarro calls for Hispanics to do to the Americans what the Americans did to their Mexican ancestors. The Americans took the land by force, and now the Hispanics can take it back. Navarro does not consider himself a secessionist. His point is that the Mexicans, unlike the Southerners, never agreed to join the American union. Since the original conquest was illegitimate, the establishment of Aztlan is justified, however it is obtained. Hispanics are not seceding from America; they are simply getting back what originally belonged to them. America is the usurper that is being compelled to return its stolen territory.

  There is, however, an irony to these calls for land repat
riation. I alluded to it in my chapter on native Indians, but it re-emerges here even more strongly. America, in a sense, is being accused of a double theft. Allegedly we stole the country from the Indians, and then we stole a large part of Mexico from the Hispanics. Yet if the two continents of North and South America once belonged to the native Indians, then how did the Hispanics become owners of that land? There is a simple answer: they conquered it. Historian Patricia Limerick points out in The Legacy of Conquest that “the Hispanic presence in the Southwest was itself a product of conquest. The Pueblo Indians found themselves living in Occupied America long before the Hispanics did.”1 The term “Hispanic” refers to Spain, and “Latino” derives from the term Latin. So these terms refer to Spanish people from Europe who see themselves as descended from the Latin-speaking Romans. These Spanish then interbred with the locals, producing a mestizo or mixed-race Latino group. Hispanics, or Latinos, are a mixed-race people who trace their ancestry to the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Yet if the Spanish illicitly seized the land from the Indians, then the land doesn’t actually belong to them. If America cannot claim title to land by conquest, then neither can the people from whom it was taken, who themselves took it from someone else.

  We often think of the Mexican War as one between the powerful Americans and the poor, defenseless Mexicans. In this progressive narrative, the Americans are intoxicated by the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny, seizing land as they expand west, building the new country through the age-old mechanism of seizure and confiscation, and then dominating and exploiting the other nations of Central and South America. In his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama railed against the Monroe Doctrine, which he defined as “the notion that we could preemptively remove governments not to our liking.” And recently Secretary of State John Kerry announced in a speech to the Organization of the American States that, as far as the Obama administration was concerned, “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.”2

  Both Obama and Kerry seem ignorant of what the Monroe Doctrine really means, or the context in which it was articulated. In reality, America, having freed itself from British colonial rule, had to contend with a continent that was the playground of empire, with the British, the French, and the Spanish all vying for land and supremacy. The Monroe Doctrine was a defense of the independence of the nations of the Americas from new attempts at European colonial rule, the doctrine stating that the United States would consider such impositions of foreign rule as belligerent actions to which the United States would have to respond. It was not an assertion of United States ownership of the Americas, but rather a warning to the European powers to leave the New World alone.

  Progressives insist that, in practice, the United States became the behemoth of the Western hemisphere, regarding the Caribbean and Latin America as its “backyard.” Yet if this is so, why does America have so little control over its backyard? Why are there so many independent nations in Central and South America—not to mention Mexico itself—that enjoy full sovereignty and frequently defy their powerful neighbor to the north? By the end of the Mexican War, American troops had captured Mexico City. The whole country was in the possession of the United States. So from one perspective the United States took half of Mexico; from another, the United States returned half of Mexico which it could have kept for itself. We cannot assess the legitimacy of these actions—and the claims for reparations that inevitably accompany them—without examining what really happened. And recalling our effort to do “history from below,” we must throughout these inquiries concentrate on the fate of the little guy.

  “Manifest Destiny” was a term first used by John O’Sullivan in 1845 in the Democratic Review. Sullivan argued that if America expanded from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, this would increase both its security and prosperity. Sullivan said it was America’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” Sullivan’s point was that tens of millions of people were being ejected from Europe as a consequence of famine and hardship, and they were landing in America in search of a better life. Why, he asked, did these teeming millions from Ireland, Scandinavia, and elsewhere have any less right to land than the Spanish whose only claim was that they conquered it first? Admittedly at the time Sullivan wrote this, Mexico had fought off the Spanish and won its war of independence. Still, Mexico was controlled by mestizo oligarchs, themselves of partial Spanish descent. Abraham Lincoln described the Mexican government as a mixture of tyranny and anarchy. The life of the ordinary Mexican was difficult and insecure, not only because of poverty but also because of government-sanctioned corruption and seizure of land and goods. Property rights were based on an anti-quated land grant system that was capriciously enforced. Political rights were few, and Civil Rights non-existent. So despite Mexican independence, the Mexicans themselves had virtually no rights that they could count on.

  The Mexican War began with Texas. Since gaining its independence from Spain in 1821, the Mexican government had through land grants and other incentives encouraged Anglo settlers and traders to relocate to Texas. Many people from the American South and West did so. The Mexicans wanted the Anglos to help revitalize the economy and—as they were reputed to be rough, combative types—to help them fight the Comanches and other warlike Indian tribes. The Anglos did all that but they also brought with them their own sense of political and legal rights. Mexican attempts to encroach on those rights they regarded as tyranny.

  In 1830, the Mexican government halted Anglo immigration into Texas, imposed customs duties, reorganized the governmental structure of Texas, and set up new military garrisons there. By this time, a majority of the people in Texas were Anglos, not Mexicans. Historian Daniel Walker Howe estimates that in 1830 “Anglos in Texas outnumbered Hispanic tejanos by more than two to one.”3 Sam Houston, who had emigrated to Texas from Tennessee, wrote President Andrew Jackson about the difficulty of dealing with the Mexican government. “Mexico is involved in civil war. The federal constitution has never been in operation. The government is essentially despotic.” Led by Houston, the Texans decided to break away from Mexico. They weren’t being ornery or recalcitrant. Historian H. W. Brands reminds us that the Americans who moved to Texas had been induced to do so as settlers. Mexico’s ban on new immigration meant that “Texas could remain a frontier society indefinitely.” But according to Brand, “Very few Americans—even among westerners—loved the frontier for its own sake. They migrated to the unsettled regions because they could afford land there, but no sooner did they purchase their plots than they wanted the frontier to look like the settled regions back east… . Nearly all the Americans in Texas had assumed that more of their compatriots would follow them there, and that the Texas frontier would fill with towns and eventually cities and the rising standard of living towns and cities entailed.”4 In sum, these were poor settlers who were looking for a better life, and that prospect seemed thwarted by the actions of the Mexican government, which was centralizing authority at the expense of Mexico’s states.

  In 1836, the Texans revolted, proclaiming Texas the “Lone Star Republic.” This wasn’t purely a white or Anglo rebellion. Historian David Montejano points out the rebellion was “brought about through an alliance of the newcomer Anglo colonists and the established Texas Mexican elite.”5 Originally the Texan revolt was not an attempt at secession. Rather, the rebels demanded that Mexico live up to the Mexican constitution of 1824, which granted the states a large degree of autonomy. But General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, Mexico’s dictator since 1829, was not about to do this. It was only when Mexico ignored the Texan demands, responding with force, that the Texans decided on a complete separation from Mexico. There is an interesting echo here of the American Revolution which began as a protest against British misrule—the deprivation of “the rights of Englishmen”—but eventually became a movement for full independence and to affirm the universal “rights of man.” In the same vein, the Texans started ou
t by trying to be good Mexicans and when that didn’t work they broke away and drafted a new constitution modeled on that of the United States.

  The Texans petitioned the United States for help in their war against the Mexican government. Oddly enough, none came. President Andrew Jackson—despite his reputation as an expansionist—rejected intervention on behalf of the Texans. Even when the Texans won and became a republic, the U.S. refused to admit Texas as a state, largely because of Northern concerns that the admission of Texas would strengthen the slave power of the American South. So Texas remained an independent republic for about a decade. Finally in 1845 Texas received admission into the United States. Now it was a matter of settling the border between Texas and Mexico.

  It was the disputed claims between the Texans and the Mexicans—over where Mexico ended and Texas began—that set off the Mexican War. Mexico claimed the border was the Nueces River, while Texas insisted it was the Rio Grande. On balance, the Mexicans appear to have had the stronger case, yet for almost a decade they made no effort to enforce it, allowing Texas free access to the larger territory it claimed. Upon admitting Texas as a state, President Polk sent a delegation of U.S. troops to the Rio Grande to “inspect” the border. The Mexicans ambushed an American patrol, thus precipitating the Mexican War.