Bill: Rod, here's my question about your column: How many other kids at the South Dallas school said the same thing about Santa Anna? Two? Five? Twenty? I'm curious.
None, Bill -- but the class wasn't polled on that issue, and that's not really the point of my column. My column was about the overlooked cultural dimension of the immigration story -- about how the mass Mexican immigration is changing our culture in Texas, and in America, in ways that are unsettling to people, but in ways we in the media find difficult to talk about. This is not about the No. 1 favorite dish becoming enchiladas instead of chicken fried steak. This is about the changing story we tell ourselves about who we are as a people.
The larger point I wanted to make was that this is by no means just a story of immigrants coming here and displacing long-cherished myths. It's about how the economic system that has brought us our middle-class prosperity is driving this change. Because that's what capitalism does, for better or for worse. I had a throwaway line in the piece about how the myth of the Old South, which had been cherished by generations of white Southerners, has all but disappeared because of the cultural changes since the civil rights era -- changes that were driven in part by economics. The business leaders in the South decided at a certain point that holding onto those myths, which had become inextricably linked to white supremacy, was holding back Southern economic progress. Cultures change in part because myths that worked for them once no longer do. One can praise or lament the loss of those myths, but the fact is they change.
Think about how Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity is becoming ever more powerful in Latin America. You and I have both heard plenty of stories about how this kind of Christianity meets the emotional and social needs of the people there -- a rapidly urbanizing population -- in ways that the older form of Christianity, Catholicism, is not currently doing. Again, one might lament this development or praise it, depending on whether or not one is a Catholic or a Protestant, but if we neglect the sociological facts -- including economic -- that help explain this massive cultural shift, we are missing a big part of the story.
The point I was hoping to leave readers with is that these wrenching cultural changes in Texas are happening right in front of our eyes, and we have to confront that. But they're being caused in part by an economic system that middle-class white Texans have benefited from, and would no doubt be loath to give up. The cultural changes are not just about "Them." It's also about "Us." You know?
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