Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the lowest of all immigrant groups. Huntington points out that a nation is a “remembered
community,” that is, one with a historical memory of itself. Mexican Americans, who ac-
count for 12.5 percent of the U.S. population, not counting other Hispanics, and are, more
or less, concentrated in the Southwest, contiguous to Mexico, are for the first time in Amer-
ica's history amending our historical memory.
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University of New Mexico professor Charles Truxillo predicts that by 2080 the South-
western states of the U.S. and the northern states of Mexico will band together to form a
new country, “La República del Norte.” By 2000, six of twelve important cities on the U.S.
side of the border were over 90 percent Hispanic, and only two (San Diego, California, and
Yuma, Arizona) were less than 50 percent Hispanic.
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The blurring of America's Southwestern frontier is becoming a geographical fact that
all the security devices on the actual border itself cannot invalidate. Nevertheless, while
I admire Huntington's ability to isolate and expose a fundamental dilemma that others in
academia and the media are too polite to address, I do not completely agree with his con-
clusions. Huntington believes in a firm reliance on American nationalism in order to pre-
serve its Anglo-Protestant culture and values in the face of the partial Latinoization of our
society. I believe that while geography does not necessarily determine the future, it does set
contours on what is achievable and what isn't. And the organic connection between Mex-
ico and America—geographical, historical, and demographic—is simply too overwhelm-
ing to suppose that, as Huntington hopes, American nationalism can stay as pure as it is.
Huntington correctly derides cosmopolitanism (and imperialism, too) as elite visions. But
a certain measure of cosmopolitanism, Huntington to the contrary, is inevitable and not to
be disparaged.
America, I believe, will actually emerge in the course of the twenty-first century as a
Polynesian-cum-mestizo civilization, oriented from north to south, from Canada to Mex-
ico, rather than as an east to west, racially lighter-skinned island in the temperate zone
sprawling suburban city-states, each in a visual sense progressively similar to the next,
whether Cascadia in the Pacific Northwest or Omaha-Lincoln in Nebraska, each nurtur-
ing its own economic relationships with cities and trading networks throughout the world,
as technology continues to collapse distances. America, in my vision, would become the
globe's preeminent duty-free hot zone for business transactions, a favorite place of residen-
ce for the global elite. In the tradition of Rome, it will continue to use its immigration laws
to asset-strip the world of its best and brightest, and to further diversify an immigrant pop-
ulation that, as Huntington fears, is defined too much by Mexicans. In this vision, nation-
alism will be, perforce, diluted a bit, but not so much as to deprive America of its unique
identity, or to undermine its military. In short, America is no longer an island, protected by
