FOUR MYTHS ABOUT 'AMEXICA'

Samuel Huntington is best known for his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, which forecast a global showdown between the West and radical Islam. Now the Harvard political scientist has his eye on another culture clash, this one on a smaller scale and closer to home. In his new bookWho We Are: The Challenges to America's National Identity, which is excerpted as the cover story of the current issue of Foreign Policy, Huntington argues that Mexican immigration is profoundly altering American culture and identity. Half of all immigrants to the U.S. in 2000 were Hispanic, he notes, and fertility rates for U.S. Hispanics far exceed those of U.S. whites (3.0 to 1.8). By 2010, half of the population of Los Angeles is predicted to be Hispanic. The result, Huntington says, is a "most immediate and most serious challenge to America's traditional identity."

To be alarmed by Huntington's book, however, you have to accept four dubious assumptions.

1) There is a coherent American identity. Huntington's excerpt in Foreign Policy begins with a preamble on how America was formed as an Anglo-Protestant nation. Had the U.S. been settled by French or Spanish Catholics rather than British Protestants, Huntington says, "It would not be the United States; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil." As such, Mexican immigration is "a major potential threat to the country's cultural and political integrity."

But by leaving the vague terms "traditional identity" and "cultural and political integrity" undefined, Huntington allows them to sound more meaningful than they are.  In fact, you could say America's WASP character faded during the waves of immigration of European Jews and Catholics at the turn of the twentieth century, or during the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, or throughout the rise of mass culture and the mass media. By now, talking about America's Protestantism sounds quaint; the dominant American values of consumerism, individualism, and belief in human goodness fundamentally contradict Protestant values of self-denial, communalism, and belief in human depravity. Meanwhile, other significant fault lines—between Blue and Red America, black and white America, religious and secular, rich and poor—cast doubt on the notion of a monolithic "traditional American identity" that is prone to topple at the arrival of Mexican immigrants.

2) Whites have dibs on the Southwest. The entry of Southwestern states into the Union was the result of conquest, not birthright. To conceive of Mexican immigrants as aliens in these areas is to ignore history. Huntington acknowledges this fact for the purpose of saying that immigrants think of the Southwest as their home turf that was taken away, and that their growing numbers thus make for "serious potential for conflict." But to gloss over the region's Mexican roots—and the fact the nation's largest city, Los Angeles, has a Spanish name—fuels the folly that whites "belong" in the Southwest and Mexicans are outsiders.

3) Whites are losing power in America.  This is the subtext of Huntington's argument. Because he lets "traditional identity" and "cultural integrity" dangle, Huntington implies that whites are threatened by foreigners. But what exactly is being threatened? What are whites losing? The vast majority of CEOs and Congressmen, for example, are white males. Almost all TV and movie stars are white or black. Huntington says, in a sidebar to the cover story, that the risk of "White Nativism"—a backlash by white males demanding special rights—is high. "As more Hispanics become citizens and politically active, white groups are likely to look for other ways of protecting themselves." Protecting themselves from what? If anything, immigration facilitates the imbalance in society that favors whites. Latino immigrants flip the burgers and burp the babies of rich whites, while Latinos remain entrenched in the lower class. 

4) Latinos are reluctant to learn English. Huntington lists statistics on the retention of Spanish by first- and second-generation immigrants, few of which seem to support his thesis that Mexican immigrants fail to assimilate and are "contemptuous of American culture." According to one study he cites, more than 90 percent of second-generation Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles speak English "fluently." Huntington says it's too early to tell whether third-generation immigrants will embrace English in the same way, but he provides nothing to suggest they won't. In a rebuttal in the New York Times , David Brooks says that 60 percent of third-generation Mexican-Americans speak English exclusively at home. Huntington does say that Mexican immigrants and their descendants are more likely to be bilingual, and that eventually this will put pressure on Americans to be bilingual. But he doesn't add that if this happens, it will only make the U.S. more like the rest of the world.

Related:
First Things on the fate of 'Mexifornia'
Timeon 'Amexica'
From For A Change magazine: Why Americans should learn Spanish
Excerpt and discussion of Clash of Civilizations (more)
Earlier:'Hispanic' or 'Latino'? (fifth item)

PLACES & CULTURE

From the Melbourne Age:

• Jimmy Pham has all the sunny friendliness of his hometown, Sydney, and the mountainous determination of his birthplace, Saigon. He has needed both in great measure since establishing KOTO, Hanoi's internationally acclaimed restaurant staffed by former street kids. … Since its establishment in September 2000, KOTO—the initials stand for Know One Teach One—has trained 100 kids as skilled hospitality professionals, hosted international dignitaries including U.S. president Bill Clinton (who dropped in for lunch with 80 reporters in 2001) and won the backing of the Australian Embassy among others. Pham and two KOTO graduates, Hoang Thy Hue and Nguyen Thuy Ha, are in Australia to demonstrate their skills at the Melbourne International Food and Wine Festival at Federation Square and to raise funds for a second KOTO restaurant next year.
• In many ways, Inti-Illimani's own history—one that now spans three decades—is a mirror of the recent history of Chile and many other Latin American nations. Formed in the mid-'60s, the group was one of the first to revive the use of traditional music and instruments, which had been all but forgotten in contemporary culture. Inspired by artists such as Victor Jara and Violeta Parra, Inti-Illimani became part of a revolutionary movement known as Nueva Cancion (New Song), which championed the lives of ordinary people and signalled its opposition to social inequality and political injustice. … The coup of 1973 resulted in repression of the New Song movement and exile for Inti-Illimani. Its members were not allowed to return to Chile for 14 years. By the time they were welcomed home in the late 1980s, they had not only become musical ambassadors for the people of Latin America, but respected artists with a popular profile around the world.

WEEKLY DIGEST

• As the Supreme Court ponders the phrase "one nation under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, consider the book A Stone of Hope by David Chappell. The book is about the civil rights movement, not the Pledge of Allegiance, but it puts in perspective the paranoia about religion "tainting" politics, says David Brooks in the New York Times . "If you believe that the separation of church and state means that people should not bring their religious values into politics, then, if Chappell is right, you have to say goodbye to the civil rights movement," Brooks says. "It would not have succeeded as a secular force." Secular members of the civil rights movement held too optimistic a view of human nature, Chappell argues; religious members of the movement, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., had a more sober view of human depravity and realized what they were up against. "Whether you believe in God or not, the Bible and commentaries on the Bible can be read as instructions about what human beings are like and how they are likely to behave," Brooks writes, adding that this is an improvement over "the secular social sciences, which often treat human beings as soulless utility-maximizers, or as members of this or that demographic group or class." Brooks' focus on the pragmatic benefits of religious teaching is less than inspiring, but his column (and his earlier essay on secularism) does provide relief from the mainstream media's presumption that religious political involvement necessarily means fanaticism. Full story

Related: Review of Stone of Hope in the Atlantic Monthly

• Lance Ledbetter, a twenty-seven-year-old Atlanta software installer and former DJ, spent five years collecting scratchy recordings of early-20th-Century sacred music. The result is a treasure—a six-CD set entitled Goodbye, Babylon, says Matt Labash in the Weekly Standard. "What he came up with is 135 songs and 25 sermons—the largest collection of American sacred music ever assembled," Labash writes. "What these salvagers have preserved is a gospel hodgepodge, everything from Sacred Harp singing to hillbilly romps to field-holler prison chants to front-porch blues to jubilee quartets to old-timey country to Sanctified-congregational singing to Pentecostal rave-ups." Not only does the music sound more pure than today's thoroughly packaged Christian music, Labash says, but Goodbye, Babylon features the kind of passion and verve he never associated with the Gospel while being raised as a Baptist. Full story 
• Speaking of singing: When a soprano soars up the octaves at the opera, the audience is inclined to admire her range while abandoning hope of understanding what she is singing. Even if the opera is sung in a familiar language, the very vocal machinery required to ascend to the higher registers of the human voice makes enunciation more difficult, a new study shows. Australian researchers, working with a physics student who sings soprano, came up with a sophisticated method of studying this phenomenon, as can be seen (but not comprehended by this non-scientist) in Physics Today. (But the charts sure are colorful.) Full story
• Before there were video games, there were board games. But in their earliest days, board games were not just idle diversion, they could be political propaganda or moral preaching, says a Cornell University exhibit called Pastimes and Paradigms: Games We Play. There was The New Game of Human Life in 1790, in which a player would advance after landing on "Benevolent Man" but retreat after landing on "Negligent Boy." The Game of Secession engendered loyalty to the Union. Pank-a-Squith advocated women's suffrage. With postwar prosperity came imitations of Monopoly, all odes to capitalism. The Cornell exhibit looks at these and other sources to find the cultural meaning of games. Overview
• Beavers are vital to wetlands, functioning (as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency says) as "nature's kidneys." But more people are finding that beavers can be major pests now that the creatures are making a comeback, says Time. "Once driven nearly to extinction by rampant fur trapping and forest clearing, beavers are colonizing large swaths of North America where people don't remember seeing them," Time says. The result is flooding and felled trees (an adult beaver can chew through a tree six inches in diameter in 15 minutes) in unwanted places. "Keeping beavers at bay isn't as simple as it was 40 or 50 years ago, when trapping was a popular hobby and wetlands were disdained as swamps," says Time, which notes that the resurgence of beavers is giving environmentalists mixed feelings. Full story
• Miscellaneous:Mobile phones helping Ugandan farmers - Nigeria's spam czar - Women now comprise half of mortuary students—Four-day weeks for some rural schools—The last trolley tracks in Washington, D.C.

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Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant atBooks & Culture. He writes the weekly "On Language" column for the Chicago Tribune.