NOW THEY TELL US! WHAT HISPANIC IMMIGRATION MEANS FOR AMERICA

Heather Mac Donald:

Looking for an insider’s view of the “Hispanicization” of the United States? Pick up the recently-released Translation Nation, by journalist Hector Tobar. Tobar’s celebratory account of what the Hispanic influx means for the U.S. is more troubling than the most xenophobic ravings that a close-the-border extremist could ever come up with.

Tobar leaves no doubt that immigrants are having a greater impact on American culture than American culture is having on them. The ubiquitous Che Guevara graffiti stenciled throughout Los Angeles symbolizes the new “anti-WASP republic,” he says, a republic which values “the dissembling force of rebellion and the idea of strength in collectivity.”

Tobar’s revelations about the 1992 Los Angeles riots are worth the price of the book alone. The riots are celebrated in the city’s Mexican enclaves as the quemazones, “the great burning,” revenge for the U.S. conquest of California. The 1992 riots, though triggered by the acquittal of the LAPD officers in the Rodney King beating, did not follow the usual black-white script, Tobar says: they “evolved into a parallel immigrant looting festival that would in a matter of hours become much bigger in breadth and scope than its African-American twin.” The “frenzied spectacles of running crowds and exploding glass” were the first “Latin-American-style class uprising in United States history, the same kind of visceral expression of rage that over the centuries had led peons to burn down the hacendado’s home.”

Tobar has no doubt that such rage is merited. Readers, however, may wonder how people who have snuck into a country against its laws, are working against its laws, collecting welfare in accordance with its laws, committing crime against its laws, and earning so much as to rebuild whole towns in their corrupt and mismanaged patrias can have a gripe so great against this country as to justify trying to burn it down.

Translation Nation

The Hispanic remaking of America

The invisible, 3-story tall dinosaur