THE RIGHT BOOKS

Thomas Weyr’s Hispanic U.S.A.: Breaking the Melting Pot (Harper & Row, $19.95) conveys a spirit of benign approval, of an enlightened confidence in the unfolding, inescapable developments of a fundamentally progressive world. In working on this book, Weyr apparently found nothing much to disturb his equanimity. Readers with different perspectives, however, may react otherwise; it is perhaps they, paradoxically, who will carry away the most food for thought from this essentially superficial and insipid volume.

Weyr explains that his intention to produce a “general book about Hispanic-Americans” was formed in the early 1980s, in response primarily to their numbers (which “were climbing out of sight”) but also to their uniqueness in the history of immigrant groups in the United States, from whom they differ in not considering themselves “immigrants” at all, owing to a history that Weyr concedes to be as much myth and legend as fact. “They have been here for 450 years and for 45 seconds. They may number 18 million or 20 million or 23 million, even 30 million. They are establishing Spanish as a second language [in the U.S.] alongside English. They have built a new and vibrant [read “progressive”] Hispanic Catholic Church, and encouraged Protestant sects to compete for their souls. They are constructing a new culture and a new consciousness. They are changing the country. They are breaking the melting pot.” Here Weyr might have paused to reflect that the United States—a country riven by ethnic and racial resentments incurred by previous waves of immigrants to the point where the (liberal) historian Andrew Hacker announced in 1970 its demise as a nation-state—is already afflicted by more “new cultures” and “consciousnesses” than it can successfully deal with. Instead, he proceeds blandly: “They want to assimilate and to remain separate, to be part of the mainstream and to retain their own identity. Not . . . another Quebec, but identity conferred by a larger culture of history, myth, geography, religion, education, language, and affairs of state.” (Reading that sentence, I was reminded of the incident described by Mark Twain in Roughing It, in which one homesteader’s ranch slides downhill in an avalanche and lands on top of his neighbor’s, giving rise to strongly disputed questions of property rights.)

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Thomas Weyr’s Hispanic U.S.A.: Breaking the Melting Pot (Harper & Row, $19.95) conveys a spirit of benign approval, of an enlightened confidence in the unfolding, inescapable developments of a fundamentally progressive world. In working on this book, Weyr apparently found nothing much to disturb his equanimity. Readers with different perspectives, however, may react otherwise; it is perhaps they, paradoxically, who will carry away the most food for thought from this essentially superficial and insipid volume.

Weyr explains that his intention to produce a “general book about Hispanic-Americans” was formed in the early 1980s, in response primarily to their numbers (which “were climbing out of sight”) but also to their uniqueness in the history of immigrant groups in the United States, from whom they differ in not considering themselves “immigrants” at all, owing to a history that Weyr concedes to be as much myth and legend as fact. “They have been here for 450 years and for 45 seconds. They may number 18 million or 20 million or 23 million, even 30 million. They are establishing Spanish as a second language [in the U.S.] alongside English. They have built a new and vibrant [read “progressive”] Hispanic Catholic Church, and encouraged Protestant sects to compete for their souls. They are constructing a new culture and a new consciousness. They are changing the country. They are breaking the melting pot.” Here Weyr might have paused to reflect that the United States—a country riven by ethnic and racial resentments incurred by previous waves of immigrants to the point where the (liberal) historian Andrew Hacker announced in 1970 its demise as a nation-state—is already afflicted by more “new cultures” and “consciousnesses” than it can successfully deal with. Instead, he proceeds blandly: “They want to assimilate and to remain separate, to be part of the mainstream and to retain their own identity. Not . . . another Quebec, but identity conferred by a larger culture of history, myth, geography, religion, education, language, and affairs of state.” (Reading that sentence, I was reminded of the incident described by Mark Twain in Roughing It, in which one homesteader’s ranch slides downhill in an avalanche and lands on top of his neighbor’s, giving rise to strongly disputed questions of property rights.)