May 26, 2006
By Richard Rodriguez

The United States is facing the return of the native. In the American scheme of things, the Indian disappeared from history: reluctantly, sadly, tragically, he was eliminated. He went into retreat in our memory. Yet, suddenly, spilling out from over our southern horizon are people who were supposed to no longer exist.

The discomfiting thought occurs to us that history has not ended. Instead, we are in the middle of another turn of the wheel our words can't describe. We are facing a future we can't name.

So we have decided to call the newcomers "Hispanics" in reference to the Spanish king who once ruled Mexico and the American Southwest. Although most of these faces coming toward us are Mexicans of mixed blood – mestizos – the imprint of the Indian is clearly on their faces. It is on my face!

The long struggle between the U.S. and Mexico began as a fight over land in the 19th century. Mexico used to be the larger of the two countries but lost its enormous northern lands – now the U.S. Southwest, from Texas to New Mexico to California – when Americans began to expand westward.

There remains an anxiety on the part of both countries about this memory. Mexicans have a sense that this is a land that ancestrally was Mexican, although there is a recognition that it is no longer. But for the U.S. to see this land being populated again by Spanish-speaking people is to remember an extinguished part of our history.

This unsettles Americans because they're not used to the repetition of history. They do not have a circular sense of time, in which events repeat themselves, but a linear sense of history going one direction only – into the future.

The most recent wave of immigration is likely to change not just the destiny of the United States but of Latin America as well. The Latino population in the U.S. is now more than 40 million people. That is equivalent in size to several of the largest countries in Latin America.

A new Latin American sensibility is being born – here, in the U.S.! One of the things I've seen in the huge pro-immigrant demonstrations is not simply families walking together – the son walking with the father, the mother with her babies – but also Colombians walking alongside Mexicans, walking alongside Dominicans, walking alongside Guatemalans. These people are no longer members of their ethnic or national groups; they're marching as some new nation of the "Hispanic" world. That is quite revolutionary.

The full article may be found at http://www.episcopalchurch.org/3577_74964_ENG_HTM.htm.

Episcopal News Service
This opinion article is reprinted by ENS with permission of the author, Richard Rodriguez, who has addressed numerous Episcopal Church groups, including the House of Bishops, the National Association of Episcopal Schools, Episcopal Communicators, and various cathedrals, parishes and diocesan convention meetings. Rodriguez, a Sacramento-born Mexican American, has been a regular essayist on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and is the author of three books, Hunger of Memory, Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father, and Brown: The Last Discovery of America." The article also appeared in the Los Angeles Times on May 19, 2006.