McFarland, California used to be a white town. Like much of America, it is now Mexican (92% Latino according to 2010 census). Why a white American would cheer for his country turning into an extension of Mexico is beyond me.
Mexicans are the heroes of this movie. Whites are portrayed as ignorant and bigoted and scared, wanting to hole up in their precious country clubs and keeping brown people as far away as possible.
I don’t hate Mexicans. I wish Mexicans well. They should live prosperous lives in Mexico. Most of the Mexicans in the movie seem like good people. I just don’t want them illegally entering America and then sucking down welfare. I don’t expect Mexicans enjoy being subjected to tidal waves of illegal immigration from Central America. No country likes to be occupied by foreigners.
How does the movie conform to the truth? Liberties were taken to make whites look bad:
Were their opponents really snobby rich kids who looked down on them?
Likely not. Local photojournalist John Harte, who followed the team at the time, says that he witnessed opposing teams offer genuine handshakes of good luck. This included members of the Bakersfield High Drillers. In the least, such scenes seem to have been exaggerated by the filmmakers.
The movie says implicitly that if only Mexican-Americans were given a chance, they would thrive at college just like white and asians. The reality is very different as Steve Sailer noted in 2013:
The sociologists who authored the major Generations of Exclusion study tracking two generations of Mexican-American families in Los Angeles and San Antonio from 1965 to 2000 (which I reviewed for VDARE) wrote to the New York Times.
Their second paragraph is an important social science finding and should be cited in immigration debates.
To the Editor:
Re “Hispanics, the New Italians,” by David Leonhardt (Sunday Review, April 21), and “When Assimilation Stalls,” by Ross Douthat (column, April 28):
In our book “Generations of Exclusion,” we show that the descendants of Mexicans do not experience the steady progress into the third and fourth generations that has been documented for those of European ancestry. [Bold added]
Throughout the 20th century, Mexicans immigrated primarily to fill low-wage jobs and have been held in low regard, a status shared by many of their descendants. Although many Mexican-Americans do well, too many do not pursue education because they attend low-quality schools or receive the brunt of negative expectations by educators.
Mexicans and other Latinos — especially Salvadorans, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans — also appear to share similar experiences and a nonwhite status that in effect racializes them and channels them into the lowest sectors of our society.
The solution to poor treatment of immigrants is not to exclude them but to improve educational conditions for all!
VILMA ORTIZ
EDWARD TELLES
Los Angeles, April 28, 2013The writers are professors of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Princeton, respectively.
In their sizable sample, fourth generation Mexican-Americans (i.e., people who had a grandparent born in American) had only a 6% college graduation rate. My recollection is that their preliminary data on the educational attainments of young fifth generation Mexican-Americans was also unpromising.
Everyone across the political spectrum admits that the white-black test score gap is a major social problem, but nobody is thinking about the white-Hispanic test score gap, even though we have much more influence through immigration policy over whether Hispanics will be a large or huge proportion of the American population in the future. Fortunately, the facts are available, but they take a lot of digging to uncover.
Here’s the best estimate I’ve yet seen: A 2001 meta-analysis of 39 studies covering a total 5,696,519 individuals in America (aged 14 and above) came up with an overall difference of 0.72 standard deviations in g (the “general factor” in cognitive ability) between “Anglo” whites and Hispanics. The 95% confidence range of the studies ran from .60 to .88 standard deviations, so there’s not a huge amount of disagreement among the studies.
One standard deviation equals 15 IQ points, so that’s a gap of 10.8 IQ points, or an IQ of 89 on the Lynn-Vanhanen scale where white Americans equal 100. That would imply the average Hispanic would fall at the 24th percentile of the white IQ distribution. This inequality gets worse at higher IQs Assuming a normal distribution, 4.8% of whites would fall above 125 IQ versus only 0.9% of Hispanics, which explains why Hispanics are given ethnic preferences in prestige college admissions.
In contrast, 105 studies of 6,246,729 individuals found an overall white-black gap of 1.10 standard deviations, or 16.5 points. (I typically round this down to 1.0 standard deviation and 15 points). So, the white-Hispanic gap appears to be about 65% as large as the notoriously depressing white-black gap. (Warning: this 65% number does not come from a perfect apples to apples comparison because more studies are used in calculating the white-black difference than the white-Hispanic difference.)
Source: Roth, P. L., Bevier, C. A., Bobko, P., Switzer III, F. S. & Tyler, P. (2001) “Ethnic group differences in cognitive ability in employment and educational settings: a meta-analysis.” Personnel Psychology 54, 297–330.
This fits well with lots of other data. For example, Hispanics generally do almost as badly on the National Assessment of Educational Progress school achievement tests as blacks, but that average is dragged down by immigrant kids who have problems adjusting to English. The last time the NAEP asked about where the child was born was 1992, and Dr. Stefan Thernstrom of Harvard kindly provided me with the data from that examination. For foreign-born Hispanics, the typical gap versus non-Hispanic whites was 1.14 times as large as the black-white gap. But for American-born Hispanics, the gap between non-Hispanic whites and American-born Hispanics was 0.67 times as large as the gap between non-Hispanic whites and blacks, very similar to the 0.65 difference seen in the meta-analysis of IQs.
Domino Renee Perez, Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, writes:
Unlike Spare Parts, where the students are undocumented, McFarland’s champions are American boys, whose families came from Mexico. As proof of their American citizenship status, they all know the words to the national anthem, and the camera is careful to linger on their mouths as they sing the words before the big race.
Based on a true story, the film is set in the 80s, providing a comfortable distance between the racial politics of then and now that allows audiences us to believe what separates the well meaning Mr. Whites of the world and Mexicans is not so great or so complicated that it can’t be fixed with a backyard quinceañera.
The young men in Spare Parts live in constant fear of deportation. The state of their lives as undocumented American teenagers speaks directly to current immigration debates, which some may find too political, too Latino.
Maybe Disney is exactly what Latinos need right now need to market our stories to the mainstream, to show that we are not a threat to the fabric of American life, but very much a part of it.
Will Hispanic family values save us? Are Mexicans a threat to the white American way of life? Heather Mac Donald writes some uncomfortable truths in 2006:
Unless the life chances of children raised by single mothers suddenly improve, the explosive growth of the U.S. Hispanic population over the next couple of decades does not bode well for American social stability. Hispanic immigrants bring near–Third World levels of fertility to America, coupled with what were once thought to be First World levels of illegitimacy. (In fact, family breakdown is higher in many Hispanic countries than here.) Nearly half of the children born to Hispanic mothers in the U.S. are born out of wedlock, a proportion that has been increasing rapidly with no signs of slowing down. Given what psychologists and sociologists now know about the much higher likelihood of social pathology among those who grow up in single-mother households, the Hispanic baby boom is certain to produce more juvenile delinquents, more school failure, more welfare use, and more teen pregnancy in the future.
The government social-services sector has already latched onto this new client base; as the Hispanic population expands, so will the demands for a larger welfare state. Since conservative open-borders advocates have yet to acknowledge the facts of Hispanic family breakdown, there is no way to know what their solution to it is. But they had better come up with one quickly, because the problem is here—and growing.
The dimensions of the Hispanic baby boom are startling. The Hispanic birthrate is twice as high as that of the rest of the American population. That high fertility rate—even more than unbounded levels of immigration—will fuel the rapid Hispanic population boom in the coming decades. By 2050, the Latino population will have tripled, the Census Bureau projects. One in four Americans will be Hispanic by mid-century, twice the current ratio. In states such as California and Texas, Hispanics will be in the clear majority. Nationally, whites will drop from near 70 percent of the total population in 2000 to just half by 2050. Hispanics will account for 46 percent of the nation’s added population over the next two decades, the Pew Hispanic Center reports.
But it’s the fertility surge among unwed Hispanics that should worry policymakers. Hispanic women have the highest unmarried birthrate in the country—over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly one and a half times that of black women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Every 1,000 unmarried Hispanic women bore 92 children in 2003 (the latest year for which data exist), compared with 28 children for every 1,000 unmarried white women, 22 for every 1,000 unmarried Asian women, and 66 for every 1,000 unmarried black women. Forty-five percent of all Hispanic births occur outside of marriage, compared with 24 percent of white births and 15 percent of Asian births. Only the percentage of black out-of-wedlock births—68 percent—exceeds the Hispanic rate. But the black population is not going to triple over the next few decades.
As if the unmarried Hispanic birthrate weren’t worrisome enough, it is increasing faster than among other groups. It jumped 5 percent from 2002 to 2003, whereas the rate for other unmarried women remained flat. Couple the high and increasing illegitimacy rate of Hispanics with their higher overall fertility rate, and you have a recipe for unstoppable family breakdown.
The LA Weekly review is explicit that the movie’s theme is making whites comfortable with being displaced by Mexicans:
How will Costner’s White go from queso-fearing gringo to a man so in touch with his community that, at the climax, he’ll confess to the sons of fruit pickers that there’s “a kind of privilege that someone like me takes for granted”? (Lay down some tarp at Fox — Bill O’Reilly’s head is gonna kaboom like a Death Star.) He gets there through inspirational sports action, of course, and the cross-cultural celebration of hard work — and a shared disdain for the prep-school have-it-alls of Palo Alto.
Also, a sweet abuelita gives White a live chicken, and everyone in town gets together to throw his daughter a surprise quinceañera, so even the build-a-fence! crowd in Costner’s fan base might go along with this. After all, the trick with most fearful old white folks is that they quite like the minorities they know and work with — it’s the ones they haven’t met who must be massing together to destroy everything that once was great about America…
The film is like a two-hour version of a Brad Paisley hit: It’s well-crafted fluff that’s actually quite serious, an attempt at easing the discomfort of its target audience about the ways our lives are changing. That means it will look hokey — even, perhaps, racist itself — to the people it’s not made for, those of us who groan when White discovers that Mexican food is wonderful, that Mexican-American family life is rich and loving, or that picking cabbages is excruciating work. Of course it is, you yutz! But before chucking fruit at it, remember that McFarland is part of something truly rare in world history: Here is a drama crafted to help a jittery majority accept that life is better once they stop pretending the minority is other.
