Originally Posted by ilbegone
Another post on the whim of the moment, what results from baggage people from other nations bring with them. Might ramble a little ... but there's a point.
There are plenty of examples in America from the very beginnings of English colonialism to a couple of centuries after independence. For example, consider the San Patricios - Irish immigrants who deserted the American Army to fight on Mexico's side during the Mexican American war. I believe the desertion had more to with the fact that America was founded on English Protestant dissident values while Ireland was a Catholic Island. There had been centuries of blood spilled between Irish and English, including massacres perpetrated by both sides, before there was potential invasion of England from Ireland founded on a pact between Irish Catholics and English royalists after the English Civil War. Puritan Oliver Cromwell wielded a heavy protestant hand in a 1649 invasion of Catholic Ireland killing non combatants as well as executing captured prisoners.
Protestant America was engaged in war with Catholic Mexico in 1846 and Irish immigrants who had no loyalty to Anglo America switched sides. Irish Catholic nationalism and cultural memory much more than any number of exaggerated tales of fire breathing atrocity spun by modern Hollywood screen writers was primarily the reason for Irish immigrant desertion.
Which brings me to modern America.
A woman who was born into the upper class in El Salvador has a last memory of El Salvador of their house being bombed and the family fleeing to the United States when she was about 11 years old.
The woman is now middle aged, has a lucrative income, is much more familiar with Pinot Noir than Pupusas, and is very Americanized. Her uneducated and ignorant yet high class El Salvadoran mother lives with her.
They have a maid from El Salvador who is from the bottom class. The mother runs roughshod arrogant over the maid, treating her like shit. The maid, used to being treated like shit in El Salvador takes it. Often, while "mom" is finding something more for the maid to do, the daughter will send the maid home for having done enough to clean the house.
The maid likes to graze while cleaning and found the daughter's stashed marijuana cookies, secretively eating 13 when two will do (maid didn't know what they were and thirteen were missing from the hidden stash) before she left. The next time the maid came back she talked about losing her brains on the way home from the last visit and had been to a curando who blew smoke on her and gave her a magic hat to keep her brains from flying out of her head. She wears that hat everywhere she goes, might even wear it while she's sleeping.
The daughter, having had access to money and education, is American. The maid's children, who will probably grow up in relative poverty and superstition, will also become Americanized to a great degree while being propagandized into class warfare (not a great leap due to parental origins) and have a "Latino" political consciousness drummed into their heads by an American educational system co-opted by "diversity". Note that people who are described as "Latino" (without regard to personal national origin) have the highest drop out rate as a group.
Last night I asked a kindergartener what she was learning in school. She counted to twenty in Spanish, recited the tens to cien, and sang a couple of songs in Spanish. Her family hasn't spoken Spanish in the home for four generations. This little girl is like a grand daughter to me, what is her future?
I am somehow reminded of the City of Bell scandal. The city is crammed full of people born in Latin America who are used to being fleeced and taken advantage of by politically corrupt governments, there is no other political system where they come from. Until outsiders intervened, the City council and city administrators siphoned off millions of dollars while perpetrating voter fraud and all the rest. It was primarily possible by baggage the city of immigrants brought with them.
Now consider that "the path to citizenship" leads directly to Democrat voter registration without having to know much if anything at all about American democracy, American history, America itself, or even the English language.
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