San Antonio, Texas: The Public Library

Here’s a good time for a book (and what a title): Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America by Gregory Rodriguez.

It's a panoramic history of the 500 years of cross-cultural mingling, encounters, marriages, and quarrels, leading from the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire through to today’s debates about Mexican Americans in the US.

Rodriguez focuses mainly on the emergence of two new peoples—first Mexicans, arising from the conflation of dozens of formerly distinct native tribes under the conquerors’ caste system (along with generous servings of Spanish and African DNA)—and later Mexican Americans, an indefinite but very big subset of the US-American population.

Rodriguez has one overarching goal here: to demonstrate what he calls the mongrel nature of Mexican America—these are children of many nations, created largely by mixed marriages, and held together by family ties, rather than any racial, linguistic, religious, national or social glue.

The Spanish language doesn’t seem to hold after a few generations; race never made sense anyway; the rise of Pentecostalism has brought an end to religious homogeneity among Mexicans and Mexican Americans alike—it’s family relationships that define these millions of Americans.

And as with all extended families, the boundaries are extremely fuzzy. This is mongrel America, and this is the case Rodriguez is brilliantly building: Mexican Americans, by their very mixed nature, have a hugely important gift to give the US at large: the gift of becoming a mixed people.

Mexican American history, he argues, has developed a few tools that could be put to use in overcoming American racial problems. The most basic and radical of these is intermarriage (as distinct from loveless interracial procreation: he’s talking about homes and families). Left unspoken but implied here is the idea that the US at large can become a mongrel people, for whom race is not significant.

What’s not unspoken is Rodriguez’ contempt for Mexican American race-making projects, like Aztlan and Chicanismo. These, he argues, are misguided attempts to pound the square plug of Mexican America into the round hole of the American racial hierarchies. Rodriguez sympathizes with college students looking for their roots, but has no time for Chicano Studies departments, which he calls all range of dismissive names.

What Rodriguez fails to adequately address is classism. Class predates race by millennia, and will probably outlast it, as a means of social status. Strategic marriage-making has been a pastime of parents around the world and for many a generation. Intermarriage may be a means for overcoming race, but it won’t solve our fundamental human problems of human divisiveness.

But this is petty, because Rodriguez isn’t out to solve the world’s problems. He is convincing in his primary goal, and his prose is great. Look up this book if you can. It's worth the time.

[photo credit: flickr user teachandlearn, under a creative commons licence]