I met Santiago Lara over twenty years ago. On a late March morning in 1982 he pulled into the orchard, jumped out of a broken-down station wagon filled with seven kids, caught me on the tractor and asked whether he could thin some plums until he found a new job. I had no idea who he was or where he came from. He looked exhausted—red-eyed, unshaven, in dirty clothes. I gave him what work I had, a temporary job for two days. Two decades later I still see him occasionally, and he still doesn't look good. Now over sixty, with white rather than raven-black hair, he continues as an occasional farm laborer and walks permanently stooped. He neither speaks a word of English nor has a single child who graduated from high school, although he has many children and grandchildren, some on various forms of disability, welfare and unemployment, others successful and gainfully employed, and a few who have been jailed.

When he left Mexico years ago his government wanted citizens like Santiago gone lest he agitate over his poverty or the bleak future looming for his children. In turn, he and millions like him were welcomed by Americans who wanted such immigrants to work cheaply for them. Liberals and ethnic activists wanted Santiago too, either as a future "progressive" voter or as another statistic in their loyal ranks of needy constituents. The rest of us didn't much care whether he came or stayed—as long as the economy remained strong and he avoided welfare and ensured that his kids graduated from high school. In fact Santiago, though he worked very hard, did neither.

Santiago Lara professes that he will die in Mexico, but there is something about the United States—or at least the mostly Mexican United States in which he lives—that makes even a visit home across the border almost unnecessary. We Americans, for our part, are unsure whether we want more, fewer, or no such Santiagos inside our borders, because we are confused over exactly what we are becoming. People from the rest of the country look at the eerie, fascinating thing that California is becoming, and they wonder about their own destiny.

I once thought Santiago and his children were going to become like us, but now I am not so sure. Instead, I think our state is becoming more like the Laras—or at least like something in between. In my small hometown of Selma in the middle of California's Central Valley, more people now speak Santiago's language than my own. The city's schools are more segregated than when I attended them forty years ago and their scholastic achievement is far lower. There are now more overt signs of material wealth among Selmans—new cars, cell phones, CD players, VCRs, color televisions—but also much more anger that "aliens," even if their fortunes have greatly improved in the United States, remain still poorer than the native-born. At the corner store there are more signs in Spanish than in English. And the government-subsidized apartment building two miles away is full of small children, baby carriages and young pregnant women—all evidence that someone at least still thinks big families are good in a world where many childless natives deem them bad.

So are we now a Mexifornia, Calexico, Aztlán, El Norte, Alta California, or just plain California with new faces and the same old customs? Many of us think about this in the abstract. Charles Truxillo, a Chicano studies professor at the University of New Mexico, for example, promises that some day we will all be part of a new sovereign Hispanic nation called "Republica del Norte" encompassing the entire Southwest. "An inevitability," Truxillo calls it, and it will obtain its sovereignty, he warns, "by any means necessary" as "our birthright."

What is the nature of California, traditionally the early warning sign to the rest of the nation, and what will be its eventual state of being? After September 11, 2002, the question of secure borders and a unified citizenry no longer stands afar in the future or remains a parlor game of academics and intellectuals, but is a matter of everyone's concern right now, both in and out of California. In a nation now at war and beset with new enemies who wish to destroy us, do we have common values and ideas that unite more than divide us? If our fundamentalist adversaries see us Americans of all colors, ethnicities and religions, without exception, as infidels deserving of death simply by virtue of being Americans, do we likewise see ourselves as a united people?

Is America, as our medieval foes assert, a single culture? Or are we, as many of our sophisticated, homegrown social critics allege, many cultures of many races? If snipers, suicide bombers and poisoners wish to kill indiscriminately black, brown, yellow and white Americans because they are alike, why do many professors, journalists and politicians claim that we are, and should be, different and separate? And in a world of sectarian killing—in Bosnia, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, India—is it wisdom or folly to emphasize our differences over our similarities, to champion separatism as preferable to assimilation, and toy with the principle that the law matters only according to the ephemeral circumstances and particular interests involved?

Our immigration dilemma is a simple but apparently unsolvable calculus: Americans want the work they won't do to be done cheaply by foreigners who, they wrongly assume, will inevitably transform themselves into Americans. In turn, the downtrodden Mexicans who come here and their elite advocates in America romanticize Mexico, a nation that brought them the misery they fled, while too often deprecating the place that alone gave them sanctuary. Everyone sees this—at least in the abstract—and can probably agree on the appropriate remedy: far less illegal immigration and a more measured policy of legal immigration, along with a stronger mandate for assimilation. But caught in a paralysis of timidity and dishonesty, we still cannot enact the necessary plans for a workable solution. To do so, after all, entails confronting a truth that is painful and might displease thousands who have grown comfortable with the present chaos. Who wants to be called an isolationist or a nativist by the corporate Right, and a racist or a bigot by the multicultural Left?

Mexifornia is about the nature of a new California and what it means for America—a reflection upon the strange society that is emerging as the result of a demographic and cultural revolution like no other in our times. Although I quote statistics gleaned from the U.S. Census and scholarly books on Mexican immigration into the United States, this is not an academic study with the usual extensive documentation. I write instead of what I have seen and heard living half a century in California's Central Valley, at the epicenter of the upheaval. Most of the children I went to school with were Mexicans or Mexican-Americans. Many of them remain my close friends today—inasmuch as I live on the same small farm south of Fresno where I grew up, 130 years after my great-great-grandmother built our present home. Those who speak of an explosion of illegal immigration into California usually cite the counties of Fresno, Kings and Tulare surrounding me and the nearby towns of Selma, Dinuba, Sanger, Parlier, Orange Cove, Cutler and Reedley as examples of California's radically changing demography and its attendant social and economic challenges.

For those of you who live outside of California, far away from Mexico, and sigh that the problem is ours, not yours: be careful. California has always been an idea, not merely a place. Our climate, social volatility and an absence of anything farther west always put us on the cutting edge. After all, we gave America Hollywood and with it the tabloid popular culture that rules our contemporary worldview. The modern protest movement began in Berkeley. Gay rights called San Francisco home. Theme parks were born in southern California. Bikinis, bare navels, the dyed-blond look—they all showed up here first.

Wherever you live, if you want your dirty work done cheaply by someone else, you will welcome illegal aliens, as we did. And if you become puzzled later over how to deal with the consequent problems of assimilation, you will also look to California and follow what we have done, slowly walking the path that leads to Mexisota, Utexico, Mexizona or even Mexichusetts—a place that is not quite Mexico and not quite America either.

Many see a poetic justice in all this, a nemesis at work that clears the ledger of past transgressions. That at least is the attitude of many Hispanic activists. I have read dozens of their Chicano memoirs and scholarly studies that offer a vast compendium of racism and white prejudice. I offer the following recollection not to deny that such pathologies existed and were hurtful, but to suggest that the story was, and is, far more complex and not nearly so one-sided as they think. For every two ethnic slurs, there was an instance of enlightened kindness; for every bigoted teacher, there was someone who went out of her way to help illegal aliens; for every purportedly grasping corporate mogul, there were small farmers of Japanese, Armenian or western European background who worked alongside their laborers. And as someone who for the first six grades of school found himself part of a very tiny minority of rural whites at predominantly Mexican-American Jefferson and Eric White Schools on the west side of Selma, California, I remember ethnic tensions as being typically spawned by weak people of all backgrounds, rather than a comfortably familiar melodrama of predictable racial heroes and villains.

The people who jumped me as an eight-year-old from the blind side were often Mexican. Those who threatened to knife me at fourteen for no reason other than because I was white were Mexican. And the three youths who tried to break into my home and assault my family when I was forty were all Mexicans. But then so were all the friends who helped me fight back in grade school; who have lived on our farm for forty years; and who as sheriffs and police come out to protect us today when there are problems.

I have been upset that drivers who have ruined my vineyard were illegal aliens with false identification. But then I also suspect that the immigration certificates of those who have harvested our grapes at the eleventh hour, when no one else would, were counterfeit as well. Immigration, assimilation and the entire dilemma of the Mexican border are insidious problems—a moral quagmire in which any posing as ethical instructors had better take care that they themselves, either implicitly or overtly, do not in some way benefit from the presence of unassimilated illegal aliens.

In some sense, I know Mexican-Americans perhaps better than I do so-called whites. I confess—not out of any racialist feeling, but simply because of habit and custom—that I feel more comfortable with the people I grew up with—a population of mostly Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and whites who were raised with nonwhites. I have Mexican-American nephews, nieces, sisters-in-law and prospective sons-in-law as well as neighbors. My older brother married a Mexican-American; my twin brother married a high school friend who was divorced from a Mexican illegal alien. I married someone from Selma High School whose family had left Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl depression. The neighboring farmhouse to the west is home to resident Mexicans; so is the one immediately to the east. My two daughters are going steady with Mexican-Americans who grew up nearby in Selma; and the people I eat lunch with, talk with and work with are all either Mexican or Mexican-American. And so I have come to the point where the question of race per se has become as superficial and unimportant in my personal life as it has become fractious and acrimonious on the community, state and national level. Some of the paradoxes, hypocrisies and hilarities that characterize California as a result of changing attitudes and more immigrants are subjects of this book.

Two themes dominate most of what has been written about Mexicans in California, and I have tried to avoid both. On the one extreme, we hear scary statistics that "prove" California will become part of Mexico by the sheer fact of immigration. On the other, we are told that either nothing much is changing, or that what alterations are occurring in the fabric of our social life are all positive. The truth, as always, is in between: California is passing through tumultuous times, but there is no reason to anticipate that it must become a de facto colony of Mexico. More importantly, I do not believe all that much in historical determinism—the idea that broad social, cultural and economic factors make the future course of events inevitable and render what individuals do in the here and now more or less irrelevant.

My main argument instead is that the future of the state—and the nation too, as regards the matter of immigration—is entirely in the hands of its current residents. California will become exactly what its people in the present generation choose to make it. So it is high time for honest discussion, without fear of recrimination and intimidation. How else are we ever going to sort out the various choices that will decide our collective fate—especially at a perilous time when we find ourselves at war with those who kill us as Americans regardless of accent, skin color or origin? That many in the business community will consider what follows naïve or dub me a protectionist/isolationist worries me as little as the critical voices I am sure to hear from an academic elite whose capital remains largely separatist identities and self-interest. Both parties, after all, did their part to get us into this predicament and have so far escaped accountability for the harm they have done.