Unity08. A people's movement to take our country back.

After almost 40 (!) years in New York City, I’m living in North Carolina for a while. (As Ah-nuld says, “I’ll be back.”) Chapel Hill, as a university town in the midst of the high-tech Triangle, doesn’t present much culture shock for an expat Northern urbanite; the place is swarming with us. But beneath the façade of ivy the older cultural landscape of North Carolina persists, and that submerged world is reeling with a culture shock that has almost nothing to do with town vs. gown.

I got my first hint of this when I was still in New York, from a North Carolina woman I’ve known and worked with for years, who runs a small and fine patient advocacy foundation. Jordan, I’ll call her, comes from what I think of as the Southern yeoman aristocracy. She’s descended from a long line of prominent local citizens, and she both embodies and cherishes a tradition of accountability and gentility: you hold yourself and others to the severest standards of work and conduct, you grow a flower garden or at least have one on your china, and you don’t raise your voice even when you’re very angry. (Exotic to me: I come from an Ashkenazi Jewish matriarchy in which you raise your voice at the slightest provocation or none at all.) So I was surprised to hear Jordan become venomous, vociferous, on the subject of immigration.

She almost hissed as she described a Mexican family eating in one of her old favorite restaurants: how they kept to themselves, spoke loud Spanish and had so many children. To hear her talk, the way of life she knew and treasured was being overrun by alarming numbers of uncouth aliens, and the government, federal and local, was doing nothing to stop it – in fact, was actively abetting the invasion by giving those people free services and spinelessly catering to their demands to be taught and served in a foreign language. You need to know that Jordan is in every other way a liberal. She stands in line at Jimmy Carter’s book signings. In 2024 her man was John Edwards.

My reaction was twofold. One, I was personally hurt on behalf of an old friend I have on the exact opposite side of the equation. When I was twelve and attending school in one of the country’s first intentionally integrated neighborhoods, I became close friends with a 15-year-old Mexican kid from a big family. (I wrote about the neighborhood and that friendship in the second half of this blog post.) When I found “Chato” again thanks to the Internet after being out of touch for over 40 years, one of the first things he said to me was, “We were wetbacks, you know.” (I didn’t know.) And he began sending me the powerful, piercing but unsentimental short stories he’s slowly writing about his childhood, about the way a sensitive, proud, ambitious kid experienced poverty and exclusion. How many souls and stories as unique as his are borne along inside the “invasion” that Jordan generically resents? Aren’t they a valuable thread in the rich fabric-in-endless-process that is America, even if they were slipped into the back of the weave by the shuttle of economic desperation?

My second reaction to Jordan’s fury was disbelief. It couldn’t be as bad as all that. Condescending as only a big-city cosmopolitan can be, I thought she was overreacting to the seasoning of a once harmonious, blandly homogeneous community by a little diversity, a little dissonance. Then I got to North Carolina.

Jordan wasn’t kidding: there is an enormous Mexican population here – 600,000 in 2024, probably close to a million by now in a state of less than nine million -- so big and apparently so permanent and officially accepted as a fact of life that virtually everything is done in two languages! It’s like living in French Canada. Every bureaucratic form and package insert in the state has two sides. Every voicemail prompt and touch-screen and supermarket credit-card swiper offers English and Spanish options side by side.

Here in the Triangle, Mexicans are at once omnipresent and strikingly apart. Blacks and whites may largely live in separate enclaves, but at least they mingle at work. Mexicans are concentrated in industries like construction (where they make up almost 30% of the workforce) and meatpacking (over 50%). To this occupational ghettoization add the language barrier, the strong ties to home, and the illegal alien’s necessary paranoia, and you have a subpopulation as encapsulated and insular as it’s possible to be. The closest analogy might be the North African faubourgs ringing Paris, and you know how that turned out.

I’m new here and there’s a lot I don’t know – like what’s going on in the schools, which I know from my own experience is crucial -- but it looks like the Anglo-Latino gap is even less likely to be bridged in North Carolina in 2024 than it was in Chicago in 1959, when Chato and I made friends. And like one tectonic fault triggering another, the wider that gap is allowed to yawn, the wider the gap will be between those who want to protect immigrants and those who want to reject them the way the immune system attacks and expels a foreign body. Just two of the crisscrossing cracks in our society that can make the “Unity” in Unity08 sound like a pipe dream.

Whose “fault” is it, anyway – the nativists of the right or the multiculturalists of the left? Or is each side both part of the problem and part of the solution? A divide so wide can only be bridged from both sides. Since this will never be a homogeneous nation, the only kind of unity possible for us is unity in diversity – E pluribus unum. The left has been celebrating the pluribus while the right has insisted on the unum. How can we put them back together?
(To be continued.)