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April 17, 2004
Silly Mexicans
By Raoul Lowery Contreras
Well, how silly of Mexicans to have not
forged institutions in the United States.
Steve Sailer of Vdare.com (an officially
listed “hate site” by the
Southern Poverty Law Center) writes,
“Walking around downtown
Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago, it
occurred to me that Ben Franklin started
more civic institutions than have all
three million people of Mexican descent
in Los Angeles County.”
He quotes writer Greg Rodriquez from an
Op-Ed piece in the Los Angeles Times
(Feb. 29), “…in Los Angeles,
home to more Mexicans than any other city
in the U.S, there is not one ethnic
Mexican hospital, college, cemetery or
broad-based charity.”
“This lackadaisical record,”
Sailer writes, “at
institution-building suggests that the
danger of Mexican immigrants getting well
enough organized to pose a credible
threat of secession from America may not
be high.”
Oh, my, here we go again, Mexicans are
inferior and Anglo-Protestants are
superior to Mexicans.
What is more interesting than this pure
racist drivel is that when Mexicans try
to organize, they are confronted by
Anglo-Protestants like Sailer who attack
them for “segregating”
themselves.
When Mexicans started complaining about
that the largest hospital in Los Angeles
was dominated by Black political
appointees and staff while the clientele
was mostly Hispanic, they were accused of
being racists.
When they started grumbling about the
Archbishop being Irish and not Mexican
when Los Angeles is the largest diocese
in Roman Catholic America because it is
primarily Hispanic, they were accused of
being racist.
When they form groups to promote
education and to raise scholarship funds
for Mexican American students, they are
assaulted for being racist.
When they elect people like themselves to
the state and federal legislatures, they
are accused of being racist.
When 65 percent of them voted for Al
Gore, they were accused of being racist
even as 75 percent of Whites in Florida
voted for George Bush.
When they organize to politically
confront the old, incompetent hospital
administration at the mislabeled Martin
Luther King Jr. Hospital in Los Angeles,
they are accused of racism.
When they point out that people are dying
needlessly at the King hospital due to
bad administration by political hacks,
they are accused of racism.
When historians point out that the Los
Angeles Mexican was kept down under the
heels of the Midwestern Anglo-Protestants
who ran the town until Black Tom Bradley
was elected Mayor in the 70s, they are
accused of historical revisionism.
When historian’s point out that
Mexicans were not allowed, along with
Blacks, to work as police officers,
firemen, or as civil servants until the
middle of the 20th Century, they are
accused of racist attacks on the kindly
White folks who ran Los Angeles.
Institution building, surely Sailer
jests. The University of Mexico
was founded (1532) a hundred years before
Harvard College. Hospitals in Mexico City
were founded before Jamestown was
founded. Vaqueros--Cowboys were herding
cattle in Mexico decades before the
Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts.
Poets were competing for prizes in Mexico
City in 1525.
Hospitals and medical care were available
to the first American to visit Los
Angeles, as was irrigation and
sophisticated systems of agriculture and
oenology. Roman Catholic churches led by
Franciscan Junipero Serra raised money to
pay soldiers to fight for American
Independence. Americans were
welcome, if they could make it around the
Horn, or across the plains, mountains and
desert.
Americans did arrive, of course, and took
California by force of arms over a border
dispute in far-away Texas. But no matter,
Sailer still rips Mexicans for not being
good at self-organizing well enough to
start institutions they started five
hundred years ago.
In his favorable article on the
disastrous flop movie, THE ALAMO, he even
mentions the “horrendous Goliad
massacre when Mexican dictator Santa Anna
treacherously murdered 400 American POWs”
after the battle of the Alamo, as if
Mexicans are not only a treacherous
people, but evil murderers of innocent
Americans.
Maybe next time he’ll write about
the murders of 2,300 Black Union
soldiers, Americans, at Ft. Pillow by
White Confederate rebels. They were under
the command of one of the most evil men
in American history, White,
Anglo-Protestant, General Nathan Bedford
Forest, founder of the Ku Klux Klan, who
was never tried as a war criminal and
executed, as he should have been.
Both Rodriguez and Sailer are, of course,
wrong not on specifics but on
generalities.
Why start a new hospital in Los Angeles
when they can take the largest one over
politically and staff it correctly with
qualified people?
Why start a new college when the city is
full of public colleges built with their
tax money over the years, even as they
were not allowed to attend unless they
met requirements set by the power
structure that didn’t include any
Mexicans?
Why start a new charity when the power
structure has maintained total control of
such rich schemes to live off of as
tax-free havens for the super rich?
No Mexican American won statewide
political office in California from 1875
until 1998; no Mexican American won any
significant political office in Los
Angeles since it became an American city
in 1850 until 1954, 104 years later.
That was not an accident.
What Sailer refers to as a “lackadaisical
record of institution-building” had
a lot of help from a racist political
infrastructure, an all White police
department and a Los Angeles press that
hated Mexicans. Specifically, the
hate was intentionally directed by the
Los Angeles Times, still the most
prominent newspaper in the city.
Sailer is young enough that he will be
able to see the changes a-coming.
He will continue to whine even as the
700,000 Hispanics in California public
colleges today graduate and move into the
economy and send more Mexicans to college
to produce more graduates who will, in
turn, produce more and more college
graduates. Even the Los Angeles Times
will have to notice the changes a-coming.
_________
Raould Lowery Contreras is a weekly
contributor to HispanicVista.com (www.hispanicvista.com).
He is the author of 3 books -- THE NEW
AMERICAN MAJORITY, HISPANICS, REPUBLICANS
AND GEORGE W. BUSH; A
HISPANIC VIEW OF AMERICAN POLITICS AND
THE POLITICS OF IMMIGRATION, and,
JALAPENO CHILES, MEXICAN AMERICANS AND
OTHER HOT STUFF... books are available at
www.amazon.com,
www.barnesandnoble.com
and in most books stores. Contact Raoul
at: sdraoul@att.net
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