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Are Hispanics Westerners? The debate continues

Howard Sutherland, who knows Mexico well, makes a mighty contribution to the debate on whether Hispanics are Westerners. Since his e-mail is too long to be included among the other comments in that thread (which is still ongoing), I am putting it here in its own entry.

Are Hispanics Western? The answer depends upon which Latin American one is talking about. Borges? Yes. Villa-Lobos? Yes. In Mexico, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz? Yes. Octavio Paz? Yes. Vicente Fox? Yes, even him, although he is a traitor (but so is GWB: living proof that Western-ness is no proof against folly). The tens of millions of mestizos and indios invading the United States? NO! They are the descendants of pre-Columbian Indian slave-states, not of Spain or anywhere else European. Their Christianity (often nominal to begin with) is a veneer over an ancient and, frankly, dark Indian heritage (are your critics familiar with the religious and social customs of pre-Columbian cultures?). “Hispanic” is a grossly misleading euphemism anyway. Orwell would have used it in his essay had he known of it. I actually think I read once that real Spaniards, as white Europeans, are not “Hispanics” as defined by our welfare state. The term lumps together masses of unrelated people from a score of countries, where far more languages than Spanish are spoken. I take it you are using Hispanic as a proxy for our current invaders from Mexico and her neighbors. That is what I am talking about, although most of this could apply to West Indian Hispanics as well—just substitute “African” for “Indian.”
I wonder if any of your correspondents who say that Mexican and Central American mestizos and indios are Westerners have spent any time in Mexico or Central America. Do they know those peoples’ homelands; have they ever seen them at home? In the 1970s I lived and worked in Mexico, in the state of Guanajuato (Fox was the state’s governor in the 1990s), out in the country in an old mining town whose remaining inhabitants were mestizo peasants. The Guanajuato peasantry is mestizo overall. Mexico’s old colonial cities, especially Guanajuato, are Spanish jewels (at least in the old parts) with mostly white elites. Outside the colonial heart of the old city, Guanajuato is not very European at all, but it is less Indian than more southerly states like Guerrero, Oaxaca and Chiapas—increasingly the states sending illegal aliens our way. Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras resemble Chiapas. To the limited extent that the Spaniards succeeded in creating a New Spain, they did it in places like Guanajuato. Still, it is a very thin Spanish skin over a beating Indian heart. As an admirer of ancient Rome and also of the conquistadores and imperial Spain, I went to Mexico wanting to believe that there was an unbroken chain of European civilization running from Roman Hispania through mediaeval Spain through the empire Spain made in the New World to modern Mexico and Latin America. I wanted badly to believe that Western civilization had truly brought Latin America into its orbit. I tried to see continuity with ancient Rome and old Spain in the old churches and colonial ruins that I saw. When I became a Roman Catholic, I had even more reason to want to believe that, of course.

I can remember, about ten years after I had worked in Mexico, flying from San Antonio, Texas to Oaxaca. Flying over the altiplano of northern Mexico, looking down at the sere landscape and the geometrically laid-out villages with wide-open fields between them, I thought that must be what Roman Hispania, with its coloniae, looked like (the Mexican altiplano bears a passing resemblance to the altiplano of Old Castile). Maybe so, but I now think the resemblance is almost entirely physical. The culture of rural Mexico is far more Indian than European—almost completely Indian, with telltale traces of Western consumerism sprinkled about. It is the Third World; more like the Philippines or Africa than Spain. Mexico (and I suspect every Latin American country except perhaps Argentina, Uruguay and—to some extent—Chile) is totally unlike the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Those British foundations had European settling populations that mostly displaced the natives, fairness of the displacement notwithstanding. European colonists created European polities that they settled themselves. In Mexico, Peru and elsewhere, there were very large Indian populations. Although many died, the native populations of Mexico, Central America and northern South America always remained a majority, ruled in every case by white oligarchies that rarely mix with the mestizos and indios and have never tried to make Westerners of them. The racial mixing that produced the mestizo happened a long time ago, and did not create a new breed of Westerner in any case. Mexico and other Latin American countries are more like an informal apartheid, with a white upper caste over mixed-race and Indian peasant populations that have little to do with what high culture there is. Those oligarchs are European in heritage (mostly Spaniard, of course, in Mexico), and it is easy, if one thinks only of them, to make the mistake of thinking of Latin America as Western in the sense that the British-heritage nations are. Of course, except for their children who are preferred to Americans by Harvard, Yale, Princeton, et al., it is not white oligarchs who are flooding America!

After years of thinking about it, more travel in Mexico, and watching first California and Texas and now the whole United States transformed by the weight of all those mestizos and indios, I abandoned the illusion that the Spaniards had made a new European nation in the Americas. They had not—in fact, they really didn’t try. Those old Mexican churches I loved are just that—old, and largely empty. Those colonial ruins I wandered around in are ruins. Mexico, in fact as well as law, has turned her back on what Western heritage she has, precisely in order to worship the Other (which isn’t Other in Mexico, although the pretense of the oligarchs pretending to revere those they rule is amusing). Montezuma, a feckless loser, is a national hero because he is an Indian; Cortés, who was not a simple bloodthirsty conqueror, is the ultimate villain because he is a Spaniard. The Hispanics we are talking about are anti-Westerners, foot soldiers of the campaign to sever America from the West and “return” it to Indians. Adding to the outrage is the fact that that the invading mestizos’ and indios’ ancestors were never up here. The reconquista claims are lies, but especially with respect to our uninvited guests from points south. There never was an Aztlán where the American Southwest is today. I pray there never will be.