Mexicans in California: Transformations and Challenges

7. The Quebec Metaphor, Invasion, and Reconquest in Public Discourse on Mexican Immigration

7. The Quebec Metaphor, Invasion, and Reconquest in Public Discourse on Mexican Immigration Leo R. Chavez Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington caused quite a stir when he raised the alarm about Mexican immigration in a 2004 article in Foreign Policy: “In this new era, the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America’s traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico, and the fertility rates of those immigrants compared to black and white American natives” (Huntington, 2004). Huntington’s statement is all the more remarkable given the historical context in which it was made. At the time, the United States was waging war in Iraq, deeply involved in the war on terrorism in Afghanistan, and still searching for bin Laden and al Qaeda operatives worldwide. And yet amid all these crises, Huntington chose Mexican immigration to single out as America’s most serious challenge. But this was not the first time Huntington had made such pronouncements. In an article in American Enterprise magazine, Huntington (2000) warned about the threat to the nation posed by Mexican immigration to the United States: “The invasion of over 1 million Mexican civilians is a comparable threat [as one million Mexican soldiers] to American societal security, and Americans should react against it with comparable vigor. Mexican immigration looms as a unique and disturbing challenge to our cultural integrity, our national identity, and potentially to our future as a country.” The cover image of the American Enterprise magazine complements Huntington ’s message but in more iconic terms. The headline reads: “Fixing Our Immigration Predicament.” To the right is a photograph of two young Latinos, who look like gang members, in front of a wall covered in graffiti. Below the 134 leo r. chavez photograph is the text: “This is the problem.” Another photograph sits below this one, and features six young people of various backgrounds, all of whom look clean-cut, with one woman holding a book with “SAT” in big letters across the cover. None of the individuals in the photograph appear to be Latino, although the woman may be. Below this photograph is written: “This is the solution.” Because the young Latino males in the first photograph are no longer represented in the second photograph, their absence or removal is suggested as the solution. Huntington is not alone in singling out Mexican immigration as a particularly insidious threat to the nation. In 1994, Patrick Buchanan (1994), a nationally recognized conservative commentator, wrote an opinion article in the Los Angeles Times in which he expressed a deep concern for the future of the American nation. His concern was with the very real possibility that, sometime in the near future, the majority of Americans would trace their roots not to Europe but to Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, or the Pacific islands. He thus asked: What would it mean for “America” if, for example, south Texas and southern California became almost exclusively Latino? He provided the following answer: “Each will have tens of millions of people whose linguistic, historic and cultural roots are in Mexico,” and thus Figure 7.1. The American Enterprise, 2000. The Quebec Metaphor, Invasion, and Reconquest 135 “like Eastern Ukraine, where 10 million Russian-speaking ‘Ukrainians’ now look impatiently to Moscow, not Kiev, as their cultural capital, America could see, in a decade, demands for Quebec-like status for Southern California” (Buchanan, 1994:B11). Echoes of Buchanan’s and Huntington’s discourse are found in many places (Chavez 2008). Indeed, a veritable publishing industry has emerged to play to the public’s fears of immigration, especially Mexican immigration. Among the many books on the topic that have appeared since the early 1990s are Peter Brimelow’s (1995) Alien Nation; Arthur Schlesinger’s (1992) The Disuniting of America; Georgie Anne Geyer’s (1996) Americans No More; Patrick J. Buchanan ’s (2002) The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization; Victor Davis Hanson’s (2003) Mexifornia: A State of Becoming; Tom Tancredo’s (2006) In Mortal Danger; Jim Gilchrist’s and Jerome R. Corsi’s (2006) The Minutemen; and Buchanan’s (2006) second book on the topic, State of Siege. These works often explicitly refer to the Quebec metaphor and the reconquest of the U.S. Southwest by Mexican immigrants. In this chapter, I trace, in genealogical fashion, the development of the Quebec...