“Growing up, I saw marriage as stressed-out, sexually frustrated people worrying about bat mitzvahs,” says Victoria, 31, from a “comfortable” New Jersey suburb. “Part of the attraction to Nacho was that it’d be impossible for us to be that.”
Nacho, 25, started working in agave fields in his Mexican hometown at age 6. “I grew up really simple,” Nacho, a farm worker, says. “I was the oldest, so I had to support my family. When I was a child I thought I’d have a wife at home to cook for me, but Victoria is the opposite of that.”
They met working on a farm. Both say that they fell for each other right away. As they waited for his visa, she visited him in Mexico. “Our base level of comfort is so different,” Victoria says. “He slept on a mattress in the kitchen. There was black mold everywhere. But I believed our love could get around it.” After they decided to get married, their differences seemed bigger. “We have different ideas about everything from how to talk to a little boy who’s crying to whether to save money,” Victoria says. Nacho concurs, “I live in the moment. She worries. The first problem was her asking about the future, talking about children.”
Now they’re separated but friends. “Working on the visa, the importance of everything outside the goodness of our fantastical love became more glaring,” Victoria says. “I know I have privilege. My kids don’t need new clothes, but I don’t want them to struggle, to have so much uncertainty. It was hard to have all this stuff come up and not just hate myself. I’d judge myself and think, ‘Are you saying he’s not good enough because he was born poor and Mexican?’ It’s sad. I know I have all these expectations, so I have a lot more room to be uncomfortable. He doesn’t get nervous. He’s survived a lot, so he knows he’s going to be okay.”
High IQ people tend to think more about the future while blacks and Mexicans tend to live more in the present moment.
While upwardly mobile Mexican-Americans marry blonde Anglos, downwardly mobile white men wed Mexicans. Now, there is no doubt plenty to be said for getting hitched to a Mexican lady. They probably tend to make better mothers, homemakers, and cooks than the leggy blonde careerists who, however, are so much more in demand in Southern California. But sadly, there is a big social cost to Anglo-Hispanic marriages—which raises severe doubts about America’s ability to assimilate Latino immigrants. As pro-immigration/pro-assimilation researcher Gregory Rodriguez admits, “Surprisingly, in most homes headed by an Anglo/Latino couple, Spanish becomes the household language.”
Thus, those L.A. blue-collar whites who don’t flee to Utah will tend to assimilate genetically and culturally into Latino culture.
