“The ground is littered with hypodermic needles, plastic garbage bags, diapers and soda cans. Human and dog excrement attracts flies in hardening piles. … The blackened vegetation suggests that someone built a fire that later raged out of control. … Hansen Dam also suffers illegal incursions by all-terrain vehicles.”
By Steve Sailer
One of the most overused clichés of contemporary journalism is that massive Mexican immigration will make American life more “vibrant”. This is especially true of Eastern Seaboard pundits, who have typically spent less time in a Mexican-American neighborhood in the U.S. than they have vacationing in Mexico.
After all, the plaza at the heart of an old colonial Mexican town like Veracruz can be a delightful place to while away an evening on holiday—sitting in a café under the arcade, listening to the brass band play in the park while watching pedestrians promenade.
Unfortunately, outside of perhaps San Antonio’s Riverwalk tourist zone, this experience has seldom been replicated in Mexican neighborhoods in the U.S. They tend to be depressing, if not downright dismal—not as ominous and nightmarish as many black neighborhoods, but that’s setting a rather low standard.One reason: the incompatibility between traditional Mexican lifestyles, which center around going down to the town square and hanging out, and sprawling American cities and suburbs, which seldom provide central focal points.
From the Mexican point of view, the problem with most American Sun Belt cities is the one noted by Gertrude Stein about Oakland: “There’s no there there.”
For example, Los Angeles notoriously lacks a central place to gather. There is, indeed, a tiny old plaza downtown, next to kitschy Olvera Street. But it is on a scale appropriate for the dusty pueblo that LA was before 1848—not for the megalopolis of the 21st Century. So it is of negligible use.
Accordingly, therefore, Mexicans in Los Angeles take over public parks to picnic. For example, at the big Hansen Dam Recreation Center in the northeast San Fernando Valley last Sunday afternoon, a couple of thousand people were assembled. This was no special occasion, just a normal Sunday.
The crowd was virtually 100% Latino. Before I arrived with my family, a friendly African-American guy selling funnel cakes was the sole non-Hispanic.
Although we are constantly lectured about the wonders of “diversity,” the plain fact is that Mexicans seem to prefer ethnic homogeneity and monoculturalism. Indeed, the scene was identical to ones taking place a thousand miles to the south. And the picnickers couldn’t be happier about that.
http://vdare.com/sailer/070722_picnic.htm