Mexifornia: A State of Becoming

By Victor Davis Hanson

Part history, part political analysis, and part memoir, Mexifornia is an intensely personal work by one of our most important writers. Victor Davis Hanson, known for his military histories and his social commentary, is a fifth-generation Californian who lives on a family farm in the Central Valley and has written eloquent elegies on the decline of agrarianism, Fields Without Dreams and The Land Was Everything. Here too, he ponders what has changed in California over the past quarter century, examining how the state and the Southwest more broadly—indeed, the entire nation—have been altered by hemorrhaging borders.

Hanson admires the ambition and vigor of immigrants who have helped make California strong, but he indicts the disordered immigration policies that led to the present mess. He also illuminates the ways those policies are harmful to people who have come from Mexico and Central America seeking a better life in the United States.

Nearly twenty years after the first publication of Mexifornia, Hanson offers an update on the continuing tragedy of illegal immigration. At the same time, he remains hopeful that our traditions of integration, assimilation, and intermarriage may yet remedy a predicament created by politicians and ideologues.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Release date: Jul 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781641771276

Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is Professor of Classics at California State University, Fresno, and author of The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (1986), The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (1995), and Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea (1996).

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Preface to the Second Edition

Mexifornia IS AN EXTENDED essay akin to a memoir, not a scholarly, footnoted study of the economics and demography of illegal immigration. Yet nothing I have seen or experienced or read in the academic literature since the book’s first publication has made me regret a single argument. On the contrary, much that has transpired in that time has bolstered what I learned firsthand growing up and living in central California.

Mexifornia came out during California’s gubernatorial recall campaign of autumn 2003. The public was furious about massive debts, but also angry that the embattled Governor Gray Davis had appeased both employers and the more radical Hispanic politicians of the California legislature on the issue of illegal immigration. His legislation allowing driver’s licenses for illegal aliens had already passed both houses of the state government. So it was no wonder that the book sometimes found its way into political debate, in both its high and low forms. For example, circulating on the Internet was a close facsimile of a California driver’s license with a picture of a Mexican bandit (the gifted actor Alfonso Bedoya in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre). The mock license had a demeaning height (5'4), weight (too much), and sex (mucho). Mexifornia was emblazoned across the top where California" usually is stamped on the license.

Since the publication of Mexifornia, I have discussed the book’s merits in hundreds of radio appearances, and in formal debates with reasonable critics such as Bernardo Mendez, the Mexican trade and press consul in San Francisco, and the essayist Richard Rodriguez. At lectures on university campuses, I have been shouted down by disruptive hecklers. There was an especially unpleasant experience at the University of Oregon on February 11, 2004, when protestors took over the first row of seats, waving placards during my speech and blocking the audience’s view—without any remonstration from university officials.

In heated debates, I was often asked, Why did you have to write this book? We now forget that just a few years earlier—in the age of rolling amnesty, bilingual education and NAFTA exuberance—the status of millions of Mexican nationals in our midst was mostly a taboo subject. Anyone who wrote a book with a title like Mexifornia would have been considered an unhinged zealot, or at best a nagging Cassandra. Mexifornia, in fact, was originally a term of approbation used by activists who were enthusiastic about California’s changing demography; yet the left considered the book’s title, as well as its arguments, to be unduly harsh to newcomers from Mexico. The right, on the other hand, welcomed the book as giving long-overdue attention to a scandal ignored by the mainstream Republican