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manufacturing and 85 percent of all U.S.-Mexico trade. The northeastern
Mexican city of Monterrey, one of the country’s largest, is intimately connected
with the Texas banking, manufacturing, and energy industries. David Danelo, a
former U.S. Marine now working for U.S. Customs, who has studied northern
Mexico extensively, and has traveled throughout all six Mexican border states,
told me he has yet to meet a person there with more than one degree of
separation from the United States. As he told me, “Northern Mexico retains a
sense of cultural polarity; frontier
norteños
see themselves as the antithesis of
Mexico City’s [city slicker]
chilangos
.” Still, northern Mexico contains its own
geographical divisions. The lowlands and desert in Sonora in the west are
generally stable; the Rio Grande basin in the east is the most developed and
interconnected with the United States—culturally, economically, and
hydrologically—and has benefited the most from NAFTA.
18
In the center are the
mountains and steppes, which are virtually lawless: witness the border city of
Ciudad Juárez, across from El Paso, Texas, wracked by running gun battles and
serial killers. Ciudad Juárez is the murder capital of Mexico, where 700 people
were murdered in the early months of 2010 alone. In 2009, more than 2,600 died
violently in a city of 1.2 million; some 200,000 more may have fled.
19
In
Chihuahua, the state in which Ciudad Juárez is located, the homicide rate was
143 per 100,000—one of the worst in the Western Hemisphere. The northern
mountains and steppe have always been the bastion of Mexico’s tribes: the drug
cartels, Mennonites, Yaqui Indians, and so forth. This harsh frontier was difficult
for the Spanish to tame. Later on, in the 1880s, it was a lair for Geronimo and his
Apaches. Think of other remote highlands that provided refuge for insurgents:
the Chinese communists in Shaanxi, the Cuban revolutionaries in the Sierra
Maestra, and al Qaeda and the Taliban in Waziristan.
20
The drug cartels come
out of this geographical tradition.
The fact that most of the drug-related homicides have occurred in only six of
Mexico’s thirty-two states, mostly in the north, is another indicator of how
northern Mexico is separating out from the rest of the country (though the
violence in Veracruz and the regions of Michoacán and Guerrero is also notable).
If the military-led offensive to crush the drug cartels launched in 2006 by
conservative president Felipe Calderón completely falters, and Mexico City goes
back to cutting deals with the cartels, then the capital may in a functional sense
lose control of the north, with grave implications for the United States. Mexico’s
very federalism—a direct product of its disjointed and mountainous geography
—with 2 federal, 32 state, and over 1,500 municipal police agencies, makes
reform that much harder. Robert C. Bonner, former administrator of the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration, writes that if the gangs succeed, “the United
States will share a 2,000-mile border with a narcostate controlled by powerful
transnational drug cartels that threaten the stability of Central and South
America.”
21
The late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, who made a career out of
clairvoyance, devoted his last book to the challenge that Mexico posed to the
United States.
22
In
Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity
,
published in 2004, Huntington posited that Latin history was demographically
moving north into the U.S., and would consequently change the American
character.
23
Huntington argues that it is a partial truth, not a total truth, that America is a
nation of immigrants; America is a nation of Anglo-Protestant settlers and
immigrants both, with the former providing the philosophical and cultural
backbone of the society. For only by adopting Anglo-Protestant culture do
immigrants become American. America is what it is, Huntington goes on,
because it was settled by British Protestants, not by French, Spanish, or
Portuguese Catholics. Because America was born Protestant, it did not have to
become so, and America’s classical liberalism emerges from this very fact.
Dissent, individualism, republicanism ultimately all devolve from Protestantism.
“While the American Creed is Protestantism without God, the American civil
religion is Christianity without Christ.” But this Creed, Huntington reasons,
might be subtly undone by an advancing Hispanic, Catholic, pre-Enlightenment
society.
24
Huntington writes:
Mexican immigration is leading toward the demographic
reconquista
of areas Americans took from Mexico by force in the 1830s and
1840s, Mexicanizing them in a manner comparable to, although
different from, the Cubanization that has occurred in southern Florida.
It is also blurring the border between Mexico and America,
introducing a very different culture.
25
Boston College professor Peter Skerry writes that one of Huntington’s “more
startlingly original and controversial insights” is that while Americans champion
diversity, “today’s immigrant wave is actually the
least
diverse in our history. To
be sure,” Skerry continues, paraphrasing Huntington, “non-Hispanic immigrants
are more diverse than ever. But overall, the 50 percent of immigrants who are
Hispanic make for a much less diverse cohort than ever. For Huntington, this
diminished diversity makes assimilation less likely.”
26
And as David Kennedy
observes, “the variety and dispersal of the immigrant stream” smoothed the
progress of assimilation. “Today, however, one large immigrant stream is
flowing into a defined region from a single cultural, linguistic, religious, and
national source: Mexico … the sobering fact is that the United States has had no
experience comparable to what is now taking place in the Southwest.”
27
By
2050, one-third the population of the United States could be Spanish-speaking.
28
Geography is at the forefront of all these arguments. Here is Huntington: “No
other immigrant group in American history has asserted or has been able to
assert a historical claim to American territory. Mexicans and Mexican-
Americans can and do make that claim.” Most of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona,
California, Nevada, and Utah were part of Mexico until the 1835–1836 Texan
War of Independence and the 1846–1848 Mexican-American War. Mexico is the
only country that the United States has invaded, occupied its capital, and
annexed a good deal of its territory. Consequently, as Skerry points out,
Mexicans arrive in the United States, settle in areas of the country that were once
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