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.MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 94MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 95temperate climate; much of Mexico was nearly tropical.We kickedthe English and French out early; Mexico had Spanish and Frenchin their country even in the nineteenth century.American settlersfrom all over Europe swarmed into a largely uninhabited, but Mex-ican, Southwest; adventurous Mexican families and homesteadersin covered wagons did not then venture into a largely uninhabitedOregon, Montana and Wyoming.We fought Germans; Mexicointrigued with them.American society at its best was a societyof three classes, not two; in Mexico it was mostly a war betweencampesinos and their patrons, as society from the very beginning ofthe Spanish conquest was to be defined as the private property ofthe elite hidalgos and caballeros.Ours was not so much a patriarchal society, at least in com-parison with Latin America or the Arab world.Women were morevisible, often worked outside the home, and were active in protests;not so much in Mexico, at least in times of peace.In the UnitedStates, private property, deeds and title searches were de rigueur;the rule of property law was not so sacrosanct in Mexico.A manfinding his newly built house on someone else’s lot made headlinesin America; in Mexico it raised not an eyebrow.Florida, a longpeninsula with an inhospitable climate, was settled and its swampsdrained as it became a successful multiracial state; Baja California,about the same size and shape and also blazing hot, until recentlyremained mostly a parched wasteland.There was no siesta in America; more likely you ate yourfatty foods while driving to and from work.Various strains of ourheritage, some of them pernicious and neurotic—from the WASPethic to German Mennonite and Scandinavian habits of constantwork—made us pay more attention to our jobs and income thanto our families and recreation.Americans, it seemed, lived to work;Mexicans worked to live.All that and more made America, ratherthan Mexico, an often cut-throat economic powerhouse, where thesystem protected capital and property, the government dispensedlargess at the will of the people, and a person was judged on his
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