What barely-closeted racists^{1, 2, 3} have called the “crisis” of the United States’ “broken borders” has become a major issue for the 2008 presidential election. Should English be made the official language of the United States? All the current Republican candidates support such a measure—and most Americans, thinking they’re supporting a recognition of their national language, say they support a very different thing, an official language (the difference, put simply, is that where a national language acknowledges a demographic reality, an official language is being a jerk about it—making it illegal to use other languages in any kind of government-issued communication). Should a giant fence be built along the Mexican border, emulating the smashing historical successes of projects like the Maginot Line or the Berlin Wall, at enormous expense?

The United States has a long and ignoble history of virulently racist treatment for any new immigrant group. As Miami’s former mayor, Maurice Ferre, put it as he mocked American racism:

Look, okay, I understand. It was just us Americans before. We had to accept those damn Jews and then we had to accept those damn Catholics, and even the blacks got in. And the Indians made their pitch with Wounded Knee, then came the youth movement, and now we got all these crazy kids and they’ve got rights. And now you got gray power to counteract black power, and Claude Pepper is passing bills left and right that say you can’t discriminate against an American just because he happens to be old.

In that, today’s Hispanics are simply the latest in the line following blacks, Irish, Jews, German “Krauts”, Italian “Dagoes”, and even Catholic “Papists.” In another sense, however, today’s Mexicans have more in common with Native Americans. In one segment aired by the Colbert Report covering some citizens setting up a shabby fence along the border, an elderly woman says, “This is my country. I’m not going into your country. Please don’t come into mine.” That might be a reasonable sentiment, except for its complete ignorance of history. She did go into their country; we all did, in one of the most shameless and unjustifiable acts of American imperialism before the invasion of Iraq—the Mexican-American War. At the heart of the entire “Mexican Debate” lies an historical truth few U.S. citizens are willing to admit to: we invaded Mexico, stole the southwest by force, and have ever since been struggling to keep a natural bioregion divided. The waves of “illegal immigrants” are in their country; it’s the gringos that are the invaders.

Native Culture: Aztlán

The name of “Aztlán” comes originally from the ancient Nahuatl origin myth that they came from Chicomoztoc, the place of the seven caves, and each cave was the birthplace of one of the seven Nahuatl tribes: the Xochimilca, Tlahuica, Acolhua, Tlaxcalan, Tepaneca, Chalca, and Mexica. The tribes left the caves, and founded the city of Aztlán. In some tales it is a paradise, analogous to Eden; in others, the Aztecs (named for Aztlán) are tyrannized by the Azteca Chicomoztoca, whom they escaped and fled south. The god Huitzilopochtl forbade them from calling themselves Aztecs anymore, and instead they called themselves Mexica; it was 19th century scholars who resurrected the term “Aztec.” The legend of their migration to Tenochtitlán (now underneath Mexico City) is the central Mexica foundation myth. It remains essential to Mexican identity today; the vision of the eagle alighting a cactus that marked the location of Tenochtitlán as blessed by Huitzilopochtl still adorns the Mexican Flag, and the very name of “Mexico” derives from the Mexica.

When the legends are traced back, the location of Aztlán generally falls in what is now the southwest United States. This area has always functioned as a single bioregion with northern Mexico and Baja California—a single desert bioregion bound by the same seasonal cycles and the same flora and fauna. Before the Mexica, the Toltecs similarly migrated south into the ruins of the Teotihuacano empire from regions generally around the southwest United States, while the native cultures of the southwest, like the Hohokam and the Anasazi, show evidence of significant cultural diffusion from Mexico’s civilizations.

Anglos with a stereotype of persons of Mexican ancestry as pickers of fruit and drawers of water like to forget history. Americans who mutter darkly about “alien hordes” ignore the fact that, like the French of Quebec, the Spanish-speaking people of the Southwest were here first. MexAmerica bulges hundreds of miles north of the border into New Mexico, Colorado, and California, because, for example, a flourishing Spanish civilization existed at Santa Fe before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. The Santa Fe Trail was important to Missouri frontiersmen in the early 1800s, because it opened up trade to a city then already two hundred years old. Place names, from San Antonio to Los Angeles, bespeak the ancient Spanish presence. The northern borders of California, Nevada, and Utah are at the 42nd parallel, because that’s where the Spanish empire of Alta (Upper) California (as opposed to Baja [Lower] California) ended.

The conquistadors and the padres saw this region whole, without imaginary lines creating divisions between the state of Sonora and the state of Arizona. The desert was the same, the cactuses were the same, the climate was the same, and the people were the same. And the descendants of the conquistadors are still here. Hispanics in New Mexico still refer to themselves as Spanish, rather than Mexican-Americans, partially out of snobbery, but also out of a sense of historical accuracy. In Santa Fe, because of intermarriage, the lineage is thoroughly European. Mexican-Americans, by contrast, claim a far more indigenous North American ancestry. Their forefathers may have been European, but their maternal ancestors were Aztec and members of the other highly developed nations of Central America that flourished before the white man came.

The Anglo world is the latest invader of these parts, not the Indian, Mexican, and Spanish. It’s the borders that have moved, not the founding cultures. There are great numbers of Hispanics in the Southwest who can’t be told by ignorant Anglos to go back where they came from. They are where they came from.⁴

The border as we have it today was drawn by the Mexican-American War. Looking to expand into what is now the southwest, Andrew Jackson sent his good friend Sam Houston to provoke a war, so that Texas could gain its independence, and then cede that independence to the United States. Houston was the terrorist of his day, but he succeeded in his mission, and in 1845, Texas was annexed by the United States. Mexico never recognized Texas’ seccession, so the United States’ annexation was an invasion of Mexico. The war was as divisive then as the Iraq War is today, and for many of the same reasons. Proponents supported the war for grasping America’s “Manifest Destiny” by sweeping out the inferior races and establishing an American Empire that would rule with an iron, blood-stained fist. Critics assailed it for many of the same reasons that critics assail today’s Iraq War: as an unjustifiable, imperialist act of aggression. In his classic essay, “On Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau argued that while asking Americans to do the right thing was obviously asking for far too much, that we could at least refuse to do the wrong thing, or to aid our government in the commission of evil. The two, co-equal evils of the United States government that Thoreau turns to, again and again, are slavery, and the war in Mexico. After the U.S. army burned Mexico City to the ground, the Mexican government signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, granting the United States the territory that would eventually become California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, and parts of Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. The remainder of Arizona and New Mexico (south of the Gila River) was bought from Mexico five years later in the Gadsden Purchase.

If we look at the pattern of Hispanic immigration into the United States, it becomes clear that the driving force is basically the nonsensical nature of the border itself, drawn by an unjustifiable war. Mexicans are simply moving back into their own country. The concentrations of Hispanic population shown by the 2000 Census do not follow the arbitrary borders drawn by imperialist conquests, but they do follow the boundaries of the actual bioregion of Mexamerica.

It’s mostly extreme right-wing, neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups that bring up Aztlán today. They speak also of a Reconquista that Mexican immigration represents. These elements do exist among Mexicans, but they are extremely marginal, and also largely right-wing, militant, nationalistic movements. They share many points in common with neo-Nazis, including a perverse preoccupation with “purity” and a vicious homophobic streak. The Reconquista, sadly, exists mostly in the rabidly racist imaginations of avid white supremacists. When Lou Dobbs aired a piece on Aztlán on CNN, he used a map from a white supremacist group.⁵

It is not entirely a fantasy, though; a fringe of militant Mexicans do espouse a dream of restoring Aztlán and reuniting the Mexamerican bioregion.

There’s a legend that has acquired popularity among some of today’s young Chicanos. The origins of the great Indian civilizations like the Toltec and the Mayan have always been shrouded in mystery. But the first Aztec said they came from Aztlán, and their descriptions of it tally with what today is the United States Southwest. Azdan literally means white earth, and when a bulldozer flattens the top of a hill for a San Diego subdivision, white earth is what it’s pushing. The legend continues that Aztlán will someday be regained by the sons of the Aztec, and a new civilization will flourish. The land will once again be regarded as holy, and oppression be brought to an end.

Already, there are Mexican-Americans who refer to the five-state region of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Texas as Aztlan.⁶

There seems to be more than a little self-fulfillment to such a prophecy; the restoration of Aztlán would erase the nonsensical border drawn by the Mexican-American war, and when borders align with real, bioregional boundaries, everything becomes much, much easier. It’s trying to divide in half what functions as a single, ecological whole that invariably runs into trouble—and nowhere is that trouble more evident in North America than in Mexamerica.

Invasive Culture: The Sun Belt

From space, the city of Phoenix resembles nothing quite so much as a vast, infected wound, with its sprawling squares of gray and green going on for miles. Phoenix has some of the worst sprawl in the country, devouring roughly an acre of fragile desert ecosystem every hour. It takes huge amounts of water from the Colorado River and even more petrochemicals to make Phoenix’s lawns green. There’s an irony here even thicker than the humidity that so many sprinklers and so much pavement trap inside the city, making its sprawling suburbs even hotter than the surrounding desert. The city was named by the self-styled “Lord” Darrell Duppa because it was built on the ruins of an ancient city of the Hohokam—a civilization that used equally intricate aqueducts and irrigation to defy the desert, and then collapsed so thoroughly that the tribes that succeeded them would not even remember them in their legends. The city of “Phoenix” would arise from the ashes of a fallen civilization, “Lord” Duppa said; and then proceed to follow the exact same folly.

It’s a familiar story throughout the “Sun Belt.” Phoenix takes the trend to some extremes, but it is not unique. The invasive culture of Mexamerica doesn’t come to live in the Mexamerican bioregion; they come, in general, to try to defy the bioregion, and impose their own concepts upon it. For many people in Phoenix, defying the ecology is a founding principle of who they are as a community.

But with drought persisting through a fifth year across most of Arizona, some Valley cities have asked residents to save water by forgoing winter lawns this year. And a few are even talking up the mostly grassless desert-style xeriscapes.

Although no one’s making the request mandatory and likely won’t anytime soon, just raising the issue raises the hackles of everyone from homeowners to lawn care companies to real estate agents, who all say going green for winter is just part of living in Phoenix.⁷

Green lawns cover Phoenix’s ever-growing sprawl, and golf courses are beginning to proliferate as well. In an ecology where water has always been a scarce resource, and where water conflicts are already building, the invasive lifestyle is hopelessly unsustainable. The central tenet of Mexamerica’s invasive culture is to remake the desert in the image of the northeast, and to never, under any circumstances, allow your culture to reflect that it’s in a desert. Though the price of water remains cheap enough to allow the practice to continue for now, it is already stopping water from reaching more southerly points—something that desert city dwellers are unlikely to consider at all, and if they do, more likely than not shrug off as Mexico’s problem.

In desert cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, outdoor use accounts for two-thirds or more of residents’ water consumption. And though agricultural demand still dwarfs residential water use in California and other Western states, urban appetites are growing much more quickly than rural ones. Twenty-five years ago, the water utility in Denver foresaw statistics like these. Its response? Throw a garden party. “We advertised it as an X-rated party,” chuckles landscape architect Ken Ball. The most risque guests were a few exotic plants: The X stood for xeriscaping. The word, the brainchild of a Denver Water employee, described a new sort of landscaping, one designed to extend long-term water supplies for the city and suburbs.

Xeriscaping, as defined by Ball and his Denver Water colleagues and demonstrated by a garden at utility headquarters, includes the use of low-water plants, efficient irrigation and “practical” turf areas. (Contrary to popular belief, xeriscaping does not forbid turf, and it does not specifically endorse native plants.)⁸

Phoenix’s sprawl has aggrevated water problems, created pollution problems, eliminated the possibility for pedestrian travel or even mass transit. You can call it “Sprawl City, U.S.A.” The automobile and the air conditioner are actually considered necessities in Phoenix; “Someone once wrote that if it weren’t for cars and air conditioning, Phoenix would be hardly more than a hay camp.”⁹ Grant Cogswell described the environment, and the kind of society it engenders, saying, “Imagine a place where the climate is so hostile that only the most desperate travel on foot—what few sidewalks that exist are as dusty as the hallways of a haunted house. Nowhere is there a place not designed strictly for access by car; because of the traffic, tempers run so high the radio advises drivers not to make eye contact with one another lest they get shot.”¹⁰

Over the last decade, studies have linked suburban sprawl to increased traffic and air pollution as well as the rapid loss of farmland and open space. Sprawl also threatens water quality. Rain that runs off roads and parking lots carries pollutants that poison rivers, lakes, streams, and the ocean. But sprawl not only pollutes our water, it also reduces our supplies. As the impervious surfaces that characterize sprawling development—roads, parking lots, driveways, and roofs—replace meadows and forests, rain no longer can seep into the ground to replenish our aquifers. Instead, it is swept away by gutters and sewer systems.¹¹

Downriver, things are already starting to change—in no small part because of the well-manicured hell that Phoenix has created. Tucson has already begun to experience some water shortages, as Phoenix, upriver, drains the Colorado River. The federal government has had to intervene in inter-state disputes over the water of the Colorado River and escalating tensions, but just downriver from Phoenix to Tucson, a bitterness is already brewing between the cities. Forced to deal with the consequences of Phoenix’s water use, it’s more common to find people beginning to adapt in Tucson.

Since the late 1940s, the percent of new homes with lawns has generally been declining in Tucson. A 1983 random survey revealed that about half of the homes built prior to World War II had lawns. The percentage of homes with lawns declined gradually though the mid-1970s, and then declined steeply about the time of the 1975-76 water crisis in Tucson. Most evidence indicates that roughly 20 percent of homes built in the late 1980s and early 1990s have lawns.

Lawns are rarely removed once they are installed. Converting lawns to desert landscaping, however, became more common in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A sample of Tucson households in 1979 showed that up to 20 percent of households surveyed had removed their front lawns, while 15 percent had removed their backyard lawns between 1976 and 1979. This compares to essentially no lawn removal in the several years before the crisis. Average lawn size also has declined from a peak of about 2,000 square feet for homes built around 1960 to around 600-800 square feet for homes built since the mid-1980s.¹²

Even in Tucson, though, the commitment to invasive culture remains; consider the case of Kathleen Manton-Jones, born in Cleveland, who moved to Tucson with her first husband, an Air Force man who chose their $118,000 house in Tucson’s Winterhaven neighborhood, a neighborhood built specifically to emulate Cleveland’s Shaker Heights suburb. After their divorce, Kathleen decided that a green lawn in the Sonoran desert was an absurd waste of water and energy that could hardly be justified, especially since she was having such trouble keeping it up on her own. She redesigned the lawn with low-water plants and a more desert-adapted appearance. On 30 January 2004, Manton-Jones recieved a $350 fine from the Winterhaven board for “landscape noncompliance” and “unpaid late fees on unpaid fines.”¹³ In Winterhaven, just a touch of ecological sanity is a violation of bylaws adopted for the “mutual benefit of all Winterhaven lot owners.”

Of course, the situation is even more dire further downstream. The Colorado River no longer reaches the Gulf of California. Overuse has left its lower reaches dessicated; it is entirely used up before it reaches the sea. The “Sun Belt” cuts off the water supply from the Rockies; the result is that farmers in Mexico are losing their livelihoods, and they’re going to where the water is—north. One of the driving factors in the tide of Mexican immigration is not just U.S. economic prosperity or even the continuous bioregion they inhabit, but the fact that the invasive culture of the “Sun Belt” is making life south of the “border” difficult, and sometimes even impossible. The consequences of this invasive, maladapted way of life has forced many Mexicans north of the “border,” back into occupied Mexican lands, further assaulting the Sun Belt’s dream of a northeastern transplant into the southwestern deserts: after all, replicas of northeastern suburbs should be populated with lily-white residents, not swarthy Chicanos. And so, largely motivated by barely-concealed, raw racism, the so-called “immigration crisis” has taken center-stage in American politics, and one of the best ideas the invasive culture has come up with has been “the border fence”—a 2,000 mile fence to try to mark out the arbitrary boundaries drawn by nineteenth-century American imperialism.¹⁴

Historically, such walls have consistently failed, and always for the same reason. Today, we marvel at the expense and effort put into each of these, but also the matching ignorance, racism, and naked imperial ambition that the very notion carried with it.

• 208 BCE. The first Chinese emperor begins construction of the Great Wall of China to keep out the Mongols. Genghis Khan and his sons conquer China a thousand years after construction begins. They walk around it.
• 122 CE. Construction begins on Hadrian’s Wall, 80.5 miles of walls and fortifications from Carlisle to Corbridge, to keep the Picts out. When the Romans withdraw in 410 CE, the Picts sail around it, and do so much damage to the British heartland that they pay off Anglo-Saxon mercenaries to fight the Picts. The Anglo-Saxons then turn on their employers, take over the island, and call it “England.”
• 1930 CE. After World War I, France builds the Maginot Line to defend itself if there is another war with Germany. There is another war with Germany, in 1940, in which Hitler has his Axis juggernaut walk around it. France is conquered in a few weeks.
• 1961 CE. Soviet East German puts up the Berlin Wall to stem the tide of people fleeing East Germany into West Germany. During its existence, there were 5,000 successful escape attempts. In 1989, the wall was dismantled.

The 2,000 mile Mexican border fence would be half the size of the Great Wall of China, but 4 times the length of the Maginot Line, 20 times the length of the Berlin Wall, and 30 times the length of Hadrian’s Wall. It would cost $2-7 billion, and even in the best case scenario, it would simply move Mexican immigration to the Pacific and Gulf coasts, just like the Picts skirting Hadrian’s Wall. This is not the first time the United States has tried to “seal” its southern “border,” but the lessons of earlier attempts have not been considered in the present debate.

Operation Intercept was an attempt to seal hermetically the United States-Mexican border against drug smuggling. It succeeded most markedly in displaying a complete lack of understanding of the geography of MexAmerica on the part of the authorities who thought it up. Operation Intercept coincided with a dramatic rise in the sale of four-wheel-drive vehicles along the border. Local teenagers, who knew the desert areas of the borderlands as well as they knew their own backyards, soon realized that one quick smuggling run through the vast desert, bypassing the newly toughened road checkpoints, could pay for a brand-new truck outright. Thus, what had once been a tight-knit, controllable drug-distribution network was transformed overnight into a wild, every-man-for-himself collection of individualistic and hitherto law-abiding entrepreneurs. The new arrangement exists to this day.¹⁵

If we’re worried about “border security,” then the problem is not too many Mexicans, but knowing who crosses the border. Illegal immigrants do not live easy lives; given the chance to honestly enter the country, the vast majority would take it. But because we enforce quotas on immigration, playing by the rules simply means you’ll never get in. Our punishment-obsessed culture considers “amnesty” a dirty word, but have we ever examined the immigration laws that “illegal immigrants” break? Our first immigration laws were passed, much like our first drug laws, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was fielding presidential candidates and eugenics was popular and widely believed. In both cases, drug laws and immigration laws were made specifically to be unfair to minorities, and considered invaluable in preserving the sanctity of the pure white race. Eugenicists, the Klan and other racist organizations drafted them, passed them, and praised them for helping stomp out inferior, dark-skinned races in the United States. Illegal immigrants are breaking laws, of course, but the laws they’re breaking were written at the same time, and by the same men, who wrote the Jim Crow laws in the South. If our concern is “border security,” then there should be no problem discarding such antiquated and loathsome laws, and allowing as many Mexicans to enter the U.S. as would like to, so long as they pass through the system so we can keep track of them. If obeying the law still permitted a fair chance, the problem of illegal immigration would disappear overnight. But if the real worry is that there are too many “darkies” in our transplanted slice of invasive culture, making the southwest desert a little too southwestern, then, and only then, do our laws make any sense at all.

The folly of “Operation Intercept” remains the same folly of the “border fence.” Mexamerica operates as a single region. That is the underlying reason why the fence poses such an environmental problem for animal populations.¹⁶ This is the same reason that Mexamerica has historically operated as a single region, why Mexico once claimed the southwestern states, why Mexicans will continue living in the southwest no matter what efforts we undertake to stop them, and why all such efforts are doomed to failure. Mexamerica is a single bioregion, and trying to cut a boregion in half takes a massive amount of energy. Such an expenditure of energy cannot be sustained forever, and when that energy begins to fail, the bioregion will quickly reassert its wholeness.

Syncretic Culture: Mexamerica

What threatens the invasive culture’s dream most is the fact that a syncretic culture is already developing in the bioregion. Mexican culture had already achieved much of the bioregional syncretic ideal by mixing indigenous and Spanish elements to create a new, creative whole; that it is now so quickly absorbing the invasive culture of Phoenix, Tucson and Los Angeles testifies to the power of the Mexamerican bioregion, and the previous success of the Mexican culture as a syncretic experiment. And what better symbol could there be for the Mexamerican culture than the image of Our Lady of Guadelupe, patron saint of the Americas?

On one side of a column, there is a thirty-foot-tall Virgin of Guadelupe, the brown-skinned Madonna who, 450 years ago, only a few years after the Spanish started their New World conquest, appeared to an illiterate Mexican Indian with the revolutionary message that the poor were her people, whom she would protect. Her image is inextricably, and purposefully, bound to the flip side of the pillar, on which is a stylized rendition of the pagan earth goddess Tonantzin, whose veneration the Virgin superseded.¹⁶

The apparition of Guadelupe occured on Tepeyac hill, where there once stood a Mexica pyramid honoring Tonantzin, whom the Mexica called, “Our Mother,” because she made humans in the Fifth Sun along with the plumed serpent, Quetzalcoatl, who has often been compared to Jesus. The plumed serpent is sometimes described with white skin and a beard; he opposed human sacrifice, was a symbol of death and resurrection, and born of a virgin. Like the Virgin, the serpent also winds its way through modern Chicano murals with a mixture of Christian and Mexica symbolism.

Serpents rear their heads on these murals and scream in a style reminiscent of the horse in Picasso’s Guernica. The snake was venerated by the Central American Indians, to the horror of the first padres, who saw it as a symbol of evil. But to the Indians, the earth was holy, and the snake was the being always closest to it, and as a result, he was a symbol of wisdom. A thoughtful mural dedicated to a gunned-down farm laborer depicts, in Dali-like fashion, stoop-laborers chained to the cornucopias of vegetable crates they fill.

On another column Cuauhtemoc, the last emperor of the Aztec, and an eagle both fall. The artist has played complicated tricks with perspective and light to make his point about the ancestor of today’s Chicanos.

And all the while, the cars roar overhead, on the way to Coronado Island.¹⁷

Language is an important part of relating to a bioregion; Mexican Spanish diverged from regular Spanish thanks to the stabilizing linguistic influence of Mexico City, where Mexica outnumbered Spaniards. As a result, Mexican Spanish is marked by a large number of hispanicized Nahuatl words. Mexican Spanish already emobides an invasive language that became native. Today, that syncretic language is influencing English in the southwest, as well.

In MexAmerica, languages are converging, so that an Anglo may be asked to presta mi su credit card. But also, a Mexican-American is confronted by a used-car-dealer whose sign says: COMPRO Y VENDO CARROS. Buy and sell cars is what it means., but “carros” is not a Spanish word. Like the commonly heard “truckos” and “hamburgesa,” it’s an adaptation of English. The question “Where do you work?” can even come out “Donde puncheas?” That lifts not only an English word, but a labor concept that certainly did not originate in rural Mexico. The question, in effect, is “Where do you punch (your time clock)?” …

It’s come to the point where a weary official of the Mexican American Cultural Center in San Antonio told me he’d just come from an organizational meeting for a new weekly at which a ferocious argument had been waged over which of three languages the paper should be printed in.

One possibility was English. The second was traditional Mexican Spanish, which holds in high esteem a richly colored, quasi-poetic, Cervantesque style of writing. But the most controversial choice was, for lack of a better word, MexAmerican. This language, built on Spanish, not only relies on adaptations of English words for much of its vocabulary, but, most important, has a fast-paced, direct, United States style that says what it has to in a hurry. “Those Mexicans!” said the Hispanic official with a sigh. “They want to make a minor point, and they build up to it, and build up to it, and build up to it, and it can bore your ass off.”¹⁸

Even in matters like cuisine, fashion and music, there is a fusion that is beginning to incorporate invasive culture in Mexamerica.

The growing Mexican influence is evident in food, fashion, and music. Dos Equis and Carta Blanca are offered as premium imported beers in California clone bars. The standard alternative to a roadside steakhouse in the Southwest is a Mexican restaurant, exactly the role Italian restaurants play in the Foundry. Tacos and burritos are as common as lasagna and ravioli elsewhere, although Mexicans view the spreading of hot sauce over everything as an American—and especially Texan—habit as barbarous as the suggestion that pizza was invented in Rome.

White, cotton Mexican dresses with meticulous, colorful embroidery are gaining favor among Anglo women during the long, hot southwestern summers. Anglo men becoming bored with oversized Texas cowboy hats are discovering that there are dozens of styles of Mexican broadbrimmed hats—each of them specific to a Mexican state—which are at least as rakish as anything Dallas can produce.¹⁹

A binational, bilingual, bicultural region is not stable; the real problem agitating so many closeted white supremacists, lurking behind the “border fence” squabbles and the question of “immigration reform” is the understanding that the invasive culture is horrifically unsustainable. Mexican culture has already set a high bar for syncretic, adaptive culture in the Mexamerican bioregion, having incorporated Spain’s invasive culture long ago. Now, it is beginning to incorporate America’s invasive culture. What the gringos are afraid of is precisely the truth: when a sustainable, syncretic culture does eventually emerge, it’s going to have far more in common with the indigenous cultures before the invasion. They still eat the tortillas invented in ancient Teotihuacan. The Virgin of Guadelupe became a superficial mask for Tonantzin. The old gods of Mexamerica are still the Catholic saints venerated by Chicanos today; and it is not a secret continuity. It is understood, and even celebrated. The virulent racism reflects the growing awareness that the invasive gringo culture will simply become the latest palette of colors in which Mexamerica’s natives will paint the same murals they’ve always painted: the murals that express Mexamerica’s genius loci.

Prospects: Going the Way of the Anasazi

As already discussed, water wars are already heating up in the Mexamerican bioregion. The conscious, deliberate and even principled rejection of bioregionalism by the invasive “Sun Belt” culture brings with it a reckless and utterly unsustainable kind of water use and urban sprawl that is exacerbating the underlying tensions of the region. The growing debate over “illegal immigration” is just one aspect of this conflict, which will no doubt continue to grow as the “Sun Belt” races towards its ultimate choice: to give up its way of life and become native, or perish altogether.

For much of the past decade, the southwest has been caught in an historic drought that has shattered all their previous records. It began in 1998 with La Niña, and continues into the present. It’s not yet a once in 500 years affair; tree rings reveal that there have been a dozen or so other droughts in the past 500 years of such magnitude. But scientists are also predicting that this drought has only just begun.²⁰ The southwest is expected to become as dry as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and with global warming exacerbating the situation, it could last for decades to come.²¹ Meanwhile, the seven states that drain the Colorado River have already seen their plans fail.

The states insist they are making progress on a plan aimed at avoiding shortages and don’t intend to let the government take over. Representatives of the seven states have met several times and believe they can move quickly now.

“People ask why we don’t already have a plan,” said Sid Wilson, general manager of the Central Arizona Project, which carries Colorado River water to Phoenix and other cities. “Well, all the information the states have relied on is based on about 100 years of record, and now we’re in a drought more severe than anything in those 100 years would indicate.”

“We always thought we wouldn’t have to worry about a shortage for 20 or 30 years,” Wilson added. “It’s a whole new ballgame.”

Hydrologists say that if the drought persists and runoff into the Colorado continues at such low levels, Lake Powell could virtually dry up by the end of 2007. That would pit the seven states against each other in a bitter water war.²²

This is a pattern Mexamerica has seen before. The ancient Pueblo peoples—the Hohokam, the Anasazi, the Mogollon and others—built enormous cities fed by intricate irrigation works. They built elaborate civilizations, largely inspired by the Mesoamerican neighbors to the south. And when similar “mega-droughts” hit their civilizations, pushing their complexity beyond the point of diminishing returns, they collapsed.

Consider the Chaco Canyon scenario—a classic example of hierarchal civilization serving as the redistributor of risk. Because the central Chacoan complex gathered and redistributed agricultural product from a surrounding network of producers, when one or a few producers failed because of drought, the system could absorb the shock—the central Chacoan complex would redistribute some of the excess to the failed sites. But at some point, when population demands had grown enough and a sufficiently severe series of droughts hit the whole network, the redistributive mechanism actually ensured that the whole complex collapsed, not just those sites hard hit by drought.²³

The city of Phoenix takes its name from the Hohokam ruins it’s built upon, and the same water problems that now plague Mexamerica brought down these same civilizations centuries before. But that bit of history is not being told.

Chaco seems relevant to today for so many reasons that I made the trip to see it first hand. I even sat down to watch the movie in the park’s visitor center. It was a complete whitewash—and I quickly began to realize that the entire NPS treatment of Chaco was a whitewash. The word collapse, or any reference to the whole concept of collapse, is not mentioned in the movie. It is not in any of the museum displays, informational booklets, nowhere. Instead, fluffy explanations about Chaco’s ruined status abound: “the Pueblo people’s spirituality means that we are like the clouds, always changing. After some time, the Pueblo people decided to move on.” No, what actually happened is that the Chaco civilization collapsed because of diminishing marginal returns, environmental stress and an ever-intensifying hierarchy and aristocracy. But we wouldn’t want to scare people…

Back up: driving the last 100 miles to Chaco we passed through the Farmington, New Mexico area. This is the center of Southwest oil and gas… isolated trailer shantys, strip mall “puebloesque” development and oil and gas wells and industry pock mark the scrub brush landscape as far as the eye can see. Despite—or in spite of—New Mexico’s natural beauty, we’re doing a pretty good job making the place ugly. Chaco canyon is a parable for our peak oil times. Too bad it isn’t being told…²⁴

It is even more important for what happened next, because the Pueblo Indians who survived are perhaps our best models for how to survive the global collapse of civilization, and a return to bioregional tribalism. They developed horticultural, tribal cultures adapted to the Mexamerican bioregion, that didn’t rely on the ever-increasing complexity of the older civilizations. The collapse of those civilizations was gruesome, resulting in war, cannibalism and terrible environmental destruction. Yet the survivors were not those who won the wars, but those who had left the entire mess behind to find a new way of life as the opporunities arose. The rise of kachina ceremonials replaced the appeal of a tightly centralized distribution hierarchy with an egalitarian spirituality, and those who survived the fall of the southwestern civilizations did so by being the first to create egalitarian, tribal, sustainable, rhizome cultures. They became the ancestors of the Hopi, the Zuni, and other Pueblo Indians who created role models of egalitarian elegance in culture, art and religion, based on horticultural practices.

Today, Mexamerica’s history is repeating itself. If the gringos who live there hope to be part of Mexamerica’s future, they’ll need to take the Mexicans’ lead, and begin moving towards a syncretic culture that is rooted in Mexamerica’s unique ecology. They already have a pattern before them to inspire them. The Pueblo Indians emerged from collapse to inherit a better way of life. Modern Mexamerica can do it again. There is a Phoenix Permaculture Guild, and downriver you’ll find Tucson’s DAWN SouthWest. The seeds are there, and the pressure is just starting to build.

Energy descent will squeeze the “Sun Belt” harder than most areas of the country, where air conditioners are considered “necessities,” in a landscape that can hardly be navigated without a personal automobile. The sprawl will become ghost town, and quickly reclaimed by the desert—in some places, you can already see this starting. With so many white Americans living in the southwest now, it seems unlikely that they would disappear entirely, but it also seems unlikely that they would remain the majority. Undoubtedly, the Mexamerican language would take hold—mostly Mexican Spanish, but with generous loans from English. Of course, Mexicans, too, will have to adapt; traditional agriculture will not work in the southwestern states anymore than it did in northern Mexico. The agricultural failures there are the first tremors of agriculture’s global failure. What will remain of the “Sun Belt,” and what will emerge throughout Mexamerica, will undoubtedly be small, cooperative communities based around shared gardens, producing the kind of social pressure that inevitably pushes societies towards a tribal mode of organization.

Horticulturalists typically do well co-existing with hunter-gatherers, and Mexamerica has traditionally been home to such peoples, particularly the tribes we lump under the heading of “Apache.” The Apache have inspired some of the most prominent primitive skills educators of our day, including Tom Brown, Jr., who attributes his education to his “Grandfather,” the dubious “Stalking Wolf,” who is said to have been an Apache scout. Many doubt that “Stalking Wolf” ever really existed, but no one can deny the inspiration of the Apache to Tom Brown’s program, which has trained an entire generation of primitive skills enthusiasts. As a result, Mexamerica has a significant population of primitive skills enthusiasts. Can they push beyond the technical mentality of focusing on skills, and build communities as the Apache did? That will be the challenge, but it seems likely that at least some will rise to meet it, and populate Mexamerica with a feral hunter-gatherer culture.

Of course, there are quite a number of Native Americans themselves in the southwest, as well, including the Hopi, the Zuni, and other Pueblo Indians. We can certainly expect some of them to blend into some of the aforementioned trajectories, but it seems likely that given the opportunity presented by a failure of federal enforcement, many of these tribes would begin living in their traditional manner once again. The similarities between their traditional way of life and the permacultural communities will no doubt appear as a great revelation at that point, and swapping of ideas and techniques could begin. It may take some time, but Mexamerica’s future will no doubt look much like its past—villages of horticultural tribes, bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers, and the elegance and egalitarianism that emerges after collapse. Clear evidence of the Spanish and American experiences will remain in the language, in the art, in styles and fashion and cuisine. And yet, the soul will always be that of Mexamerica. The basic mode of life will be distinctly Mexamerican. The old gods will still live in Mexamerica, whatever masks they were.

Of course, with all that gardening, you’re going to need some Mexicans…