Reconquista: Taking back the American Southwest

What if there was a reconquista and Americans didn’t notice until it was too late? It was all moving along quite swimmingly before the recent immigration rallies when most Americans wouldn’t have known a reconquista from a chimichanga. But the word is out thanks to those rallies where hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Hispanics filled American streets waving Mexican flags, displaying insulting banners and making incredibly brazen demands of the country.

For anyone who hasn’t been paying attention, the reconquista is a radical movement calling for Mexico to “reconquer” America’s Southwest, which proponents claim is land that was stolen from Mexico. But that’s not all. Reconquista propaganda also claims that the “stolen” land happens to sit on the territory of the ancient “Nation of Aztlan,” which was supposedly the cradle of Aztec civilization.

Hmm, that’s odd. I’m looking at a World Book Encyclopedia map of the Aztec empire as it existed at the height of its power and it was totally confined to parts of southern Mexico, hundreds and hundreds of miles south of the Mexican-American border. Looks like this Aztlan thing can be dismissed out of hand as the nonsensical poppycock that it is.

And even if Aztlan had been real and had stretched from Cancun to Spokane, so what? The only argument that could possibly advance would be to give it all back to the Aztecs, an even more ridiculous notion.

But forget about Aztlan. Let’s get back to the idea that the American Southwest rightfully belongs to Mexico. Balderdash! The United States didn’t unjustly steal land from Mexico. Rather, land was legally ceded to the United States by Mexico through the Treaty of Guadalupe de Hidalgo which ended the Mexican-American War in 1848.

Yes, the United States won that war and you could say that California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas were the spoils of war, but that doesn’t make it unjust. It certainly wasn’t unjust for the people who lived in those lands because it saved them from being a part of the eternally corrupt, unstable, poverty-ridden country of Mexico.

But that undeniable fact doesn’t mean squat to the illegals and illegal sympathizers who were displaying this popular banner during the recent immigration rallies: “If you think I’m ‘illegal’ because I’m a Mexican, learn the true history because I’m in my homeland.”

So sorry, señor, but no you’re not. And here’s the main thing you need to realize. If the American Southwest had stayed a part of Mexico, then you’d be trying to slip into the American Midwest, or the American Southeast, or the American Northeast, or the Pacific Northwest, or the Mid-Atlantic, or the Rocky Mountain West, or the Great Basin, or the Northern Plains, or anywhere other than the “homeland” you’re now making claim to. That’s because if the American Southwest had stayed a part of Mexico, then it would be just as miserable as the rest of that country.

See, it wasn’t some sort of natural, Edenic utopia where the living was intrinsically easy and the type of governance didn’t matter. The reason the American Southwest is prosperous is because it is part of America and not part of Mexico. America has the kind of political, social and economic system that generates prosperity. Mexico, on the other hand, doesn’t. Despite its beauty, vast natural resources and oil wealth, it’s a miserable basket case of a country.

But the profoundly arrogant and ignorant marchers who carried banners like the one described above have zero interest in trying to fix what’s wrong with their real homeland. It’s so much easier to just sneak into a large successful country to the north than it is to hang around and try to turn Mexico into a decent place.

So, the justification for the desired reconquista is a crock, and an illogical one at that. Nonetheless, it could still happen simply as a result of demographic trends. As Jose Angel Gutierrez, political science professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, has so aptly pointed out, “We are millions. We just have to survive. We have an aging white America. They are not making babies. They are dying. It’s a matter of time. The explosion is in our population.”

In other words, the fecund Hispanic masses are going to out-multiply the withering white masses and pull off a de facto reconquista, assuming current trends continue. It’s pretty cut and dry for the good professor who, by the way, doesn’t sound too broken up over the prospect of a dying white America.

White Americans who express the slightest anxiety over the continuation of such demographic trends or who ask their leaders to enforce the nation’s immigration laws will naturally be branded racists. Accusatory banners were all over the place during the demonstrations.

But in reality, the main concern isn’t over race, it’s over culture. If a demographic reconquista were to occur and if Hispanics fail to assimilate and Americanize themselves sufficiently, then the American Southwest becomes the cultural equivalent of northern Mexico and it ain’t racist to not want that to happen. Just ask the reconquista and open borders crowd to name a country in the world whose people would happily stand by and watch their culture be overrun by another.

The average illegal immigrant from Mexico probably doesn’t consider himself part of a vast reconquista conspiracy. He just wants a better life for himself and his family. But that doesn’t mean that he and half of Latin America should just be able to waltz across the border whenever they please.

If the day ever comes when Hispanics outnumber native-born Americans because of a demographic reconquista fueled largely by illegal immigration, will those Americans then be able to complain about their own stolen homeland? Sure, but not without being called racist.

Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/