The future of the coming Mexifornia actually started 186 years ago, with Monterey as Ground Zero. That’s when and where a Yankee named John B.R. Cooper asked for the hand in marriage of Encarnación Vallejo, sister of the mighty General Mariano Vallejo. Cooper was one of the first of many gabachos to come who realized the lay of the land: If they wanted to attain any power in California, they’d have to become Mexican.
Chicano scholars tend to view the marriage of the daughters of Californios to gabachos as yet another example of American imperialism, but they can’t see the burrito for the beans. These Americans took on the trappings of the Californio dons and learned Spanish, sometimes going as far as using the Spanish equivalent of their names.
Their children were the first Chicanos – wholly Mexican and American at the same time. This was an era very much like the one we live in now, where multiculturalism wasn’t a bizarre ritual but the norm, a time where the future looked beautiful in its brown-and-white potential.
Of course, that Eden didn’t last. It was the Gold Rushers, the Pikers and all the other Americans who came after the Mexican-American War that finished off the grand Yankee-Californio mestizo experiment. They derided the mixed Yankee-Californio families as mongrels, drove off the Californios from their lands via the courts or the gun and treated anything Mexican so ruthlessly that this heritage was not only completely wiped from our historical memory, but rebranded as a “Spanish” heritage ever since – anything but Mexican.
Remnants of that xenophobia continue to this day – you hear it in the rhetoric of pendejo politicians, read it in the letters-to-the-editor section, hear it when a neighbor calls code enforcement when their Mexican neighbor parks a Ford F150 on the front lawn.
Hating Mexicans is indelibly Californian.
Chicano scholars tend to view the marriage of the daughters to Californios to gabachos as yet another example of American imperialism, but they can’t see the burrito for the beans.
But I always take the long view of society, and becoming Mexican is an older Californian concept – and it’s the one that ultimately won. Yes, there are more Mexicans in California than ever before – but the rates of intermarriage are at a level not seen since the reign of the Californios. And even if you don’t marry a dashing don or a spicy señorita, your lives here in the Golden State are all Mexican: from the tacos we obsess over to the campesinos who pick the crops that feed you to the blue-collar workers that make this state hum, always in the shadows.
I am a descendant of those Mexican hordes. My mother picked garlic in Gilroy and Hollister as a preteen, as a legal immigrant; my father came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy in 1968 to cut carpet for a living. Neither finished elementary school, yet their kids – myself and my three siblings – have two master’s degrees and four full-time jobs between of us. Our California has always been that of the Land of Eternal Sunshine – we have never lost track of that dream, like so many gabachos – because we know it’s our California, and everyone gets to align themselves with it.
And while I can’t say I’ve ever been to Monterey (does Watsonville count?), I also know that all of the Mexicans who live among ustedes are like my type of Mexicans, like the Mexicans who came here over 200 years ago: ambitious and ready to mold the state to our vision.
Who cares if some of us are poor right now? Those Mexicans will move up in the world, as every generation in this state has. Their children are friends with your children – and some of them will marry, producing the beautiful brown-in-various-shades Californians that, since our collective beginning, have set the table for the greatest state in the land.
And if you don’t like this glorious future? Idaho is thataway.