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Kathleen Weber's avatar

I've lived for many years in two cities where I encountered Hispanic immigrants. Both experiences cemented my great respect for immigrants.

In the 70s in New York City, I worked with Dominican kitchen help in my job as a waitress. Most of the time I was the only person in the restaurant who could interact with the kitchen help in Spanish. I also interacted with many Spanish speaking immigrants during my five years as a receptionist. My impression was that they were strangers in a strange land struggling hard to figure things out.

When I arrived in Houston, the situation was very different. Here, the border with Mexico has been porous for centuries. There are Tejanos in Texas whose ancestors lived here for centuries before Esteban Austin (that's Stephen to you) Arrived on the scene. Thus, there is a whole matrix of Hispanic culture into which new arrivals fit seamlessly. They have all kinds of formal and informal support systems to facilitate their integration into the economy whether their participation is strictly legal or not. They don't have to depend on a woman with one year of college Spanish to act as their interpreter, as the New York immigrants did when I was a receptionist.

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FrigidWind's avatar

I’m thinking of writing an article about this (have a draft saved, just need to flesh it out adequately) about how the usual suspects (guilt ridden whites + various “POC” hoping for their acceptance and aggrieved blacks, both fixated on “oppression”) are trying to replace a dying white monoculture with not an emerging multicultural society but a system of ethnic competition mediated through political, economic and cultural institutions. I’d rather we not end up with a Lebanon/Fiji style conflict, but if we do I’ll ensure my “people” get theirs.

My hope was that Asian and Hispanic immigrants would be a large enough bloc to disrupt the racial pathologies on both sides - on the right, a yearning for a homogenous white monoculture and on the left the melding of white guilt and black grievance demanding ever more special privileges. This article has given me some pause. We may still avoid replacing a monoculture with racial composition and moving to true multiculturalism, but I’m not sure how.

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