Monday, June 27, 2011

'José, Can You See?' U.S. Soccer Team Booed at Gold Cup Final, Rose Bowl, Pasadena

You get used to it. You're a foreigner in your own country sometimes. You get the feeling in many parts of Southern California. And in some of the small agricultural towns in the Central Valley you might as well be in Mexico. Democrats and progressives don't care, except to the extent that it keeps them in power, but we've long ago basically undergone a foreign invasion of people whose primary loyalty remains to the countries of their origin. The Los Angeles Times has the report, from Bill Plaschke, "In Gold Cup final, it's red, white and boo again." The U.S team was booed. Here's a quote from the piece (via Memeorandum):
Most of these hostile visitors didn't live in another country. Most, in fact, were not visitors at all, many of them being U.S. residents whose lives are here but whose sporting souls remain elsewhere.

Welcome to another unveiling of that social portrait known as a U.S.-Mexico soccer match, streaked as always in deep colors of red, white, blue, green … and gray.

"I love this country, it has given me everything that I have, and I'm proud to be part of it," said Victor Sanchez, a 37-year-old Monrovia resident wearing a Mexico jersey. "But yet, I didn't have a choice to come here, I was born in Mexico, and that is where my heart will always be."
Right.

This is an old debate, largely taboo for discussion in polite company, like academic departments. But it's not a new thing, at all. Recall Samuel Huntington's seminal essay in 2004, "The Hispanic Challenge"
Massive Hispanic immigration affects the United States in two significant ways: Important portions of the country become predominantly Hispanic in language and culture, and the nation as a whole becomes bilingual and bicultural. The most important area where Hispanization is proceeding rapidly is, of course, the Southwest. As historian Kennedy argues, Mexican Americans in the Southwest will soon have “sufficient coherence and critical mass in a defined region so that, if they choose, they can preserve their distinctive culture indefinitely. They could also eventually undertake to do what no previous immigrant group could have dreamed of doing: challenge the existing cultural, political, legal, commercial, and educational systems to change fundamentally not only the language but also the very institutions in which they do business.”

Anecdotal evidence of such challenges abounds. In 1994, Mexican Americans vigorously demonstrated against California's Proposition 187—which limited welfare benefits to children of illegal immigrants—by marching through the streets of Los Angeles waving scores of Mexican flags and carrying U.S. flags upside down. In 1998, at a Mexico-United States soccer match in Los Angeles, Mexican Americans booed the U.S. national anthem and assaulted U.S. players. Such dramatic rejections of the United States and assertions of Mexican identity are not limited to an extremist minority in the Mexican-American community. Many Mexican immigrants and their offspring simply do not appear to identify primarily with the United States.
Déjà vu.

RELATED: At Pamela's, "US SOCCER TEAM VICIOUSLY BOOED IN L.A. -- MEXICO WAS "HOME TEAM" - ENEMEDIA CALLS IT "UNIQUELY AMERICAN'."

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