The Border is Vanishing as Mexico Pushes North

Sep 10, 2012  Thedailybeast.com (Part II of III)

Northern Mexico contains its own geographical divisions. The lowlands and desert of Sonora in the west are generally stable; the Rio Grande basin in the east is the most developed and interconnected with the United States—culturally, economically, and hydrologically—and has benefited the most from NAFTA. In the center are mountains and steppes, which are virtually lawless: witness the border city of Ciudad Juárez, the murder capital of Mexico, where 700 people were killed in the early months of 2010 alone.

In 2009 more than 2,600 died violently in the city of 1.2 million; some 200,000 more may have fled. In Chihuahua, the state where Ciudad Juárez is located, the homicide rate was 143 per 100,000—one of the worst in the Western Hemisphere. The northern mountains and steppe have always been the bastion of Mexico’s tribes: the drug cartels, Mennonites, Yaqui Indians, and so forth. This harsh frontier was difficult for the Spanish to tame. Later on, in the 1880s, it was a lair for Geronimo and his Apaches.

Think of other remote highlands that provided refuge for insurgents: the Chinese communists in Shaanxi, the Cuban revolutionaries in the Sierra Maestra, and al Qaeda and the Taliban in Waziristan. The drug cartels come out of this geographical tradition.

Most of the drug-related homicides have occurred in only six of Mexico’s 32 states, mostly in the north. That’s another indicator of how northern Mexico is separating out from the rest of the country (though the violence in Veracruz and the regions of Michoacán and Guerrero is also notable). If the military-led offensive to crush the drug cartels completely falters, and Mexico City goes back to cutting deals with the cartels, then the capital may in a functional sense lose control of the north, with grave implications for the United States.

If that happens, writes Robert C. Bonner, former administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, “the United States will share a 2,000-mile border with a narcostate controlled by powerful transnational drug cartels that threaten the stability of Central and South America.”

The late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, who made a career out of clairvoyance, devoted his last book to the challenge that Mexico posed to the United States. In Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, Huntington posited that Latino history was demographically moving north into the U.S. and would consequently change the American character. Huntington argues that it is a partial truth, not a total truth, that America is a nation of immigrants: America is a nation of Anglo-Protestant settlers and immigrants both, with the former providing the philosophical and cultural backbone of the society. For only by adopting Anglo-Protestant culture do immigrants become American. Dissent, individualism, republicanism ultimately all devolve from Protestantism.

“While the American Creed is Protestantism without God, the American civil religion is Christianity without Christ.” But this creed, Huntington reasons, might be subtly undone by an advancing Hispanic, Catholic, pre-Enlightenment society. “Mexican immigration is leading toward the demographic reconquista of areas Americans took from Mexico by force in the 1830s and 1840s, ” Huntington writes. “It is also blurring the border between Mexico and America, introducing a very different culture.”

Boston College professor Peter Skerry writes that one of Huntington’s “more startlingly original and controversial insights” is that while Americans champion diversity, “today’s immigrant wave is actually the least diverse in our history. To be sure,” Skerry continues, paraphrasing Huntington, “non-Hispanic immigrants are more diverse than ever. But overall, the 50 percent of immigrants who are Hispanic make for a much less diverse cohort than ever.

For Huntington, this diminished diversity makes assimilation less likely.” And as David Kennedy observes, “the variety and dispersal of the immigrant stream” smoothed the progress of assimilation. “Today, however, one large immigrant stream is flowing into a defined region from a single cultural, linguistic, religious, and national source: Mexico ... The sobering fact is that the United States has had no experience comparable to what is now taking place in the Southwest.” By 2050, one third of the population of the United States could be Spanish-speaking.

Geography is at the forefront of these arguments. Here is Huntington: “No other immigrant group in American history has asserted or has been able to assert a historical claim to American territory. Mexicans and Mexican-Americans can and do make that claim.” Most of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah were part of Mexico until the 1835–36 Texan War of Independence and the 1846–48 Mexican-American War.

Consequently, as Skerry points out, Mexicans arrive in the United States, settle in areas of the country that were once part of their homeland, and so “enjoy a sense of being on their own turf” that other immigrants do not share. Huntington points out that a nation is a “remembered community”—that is, one with a historical memory of itself. Mexican-Americans are for the first time in America’s history amending our historical memory. By 2000, six of 12 important cities on the U.S. side of the border were more than 90 percent Hispanic, and only two (San Diego and Yuma, Ariz.) were less than 50 percent Hispanic.