Hispanic U.S.A.: Breaking the Melting Pot.

THOMAS WEYR'S Hispanic U.S.A.: Breaking the Meting Pot (Harper & Row, $19.95) conveys a spirit of benign approval, of an enlightened confidence in the unfolding, inescapable developments of a fundamentally progressive world. In working on this book, Weyr apparently found nothing much to disturb his equanimity. Readers with different perspectives, however, may react otherwise; it is perhaps they, paradoxically, who will carry away the most food for thought from this essentially superficial and insipid volume.

Weyr explains that his intention to produce a "general book about Hispanic-Americans" was formed in the early 1980s, in response primarily to their numbers (which "were climbing out of sight") but also to their uniqueness in the history of immigrant groups in the United States, from whom they differ in not considering themselves "immigrants" at all, owing to a history that Weyr concedes to be as much myth and legend as fact. "They have been here for 450 years and for 45 seconds. They may number 18 million or 20 million or 23 million, even 30 million. They are establishing Spanish as a second language [in the U.S.] alongside English. They have built a new and vibrant [read "progressive"] Hispanic Catholic Church, and encouraged Protestant sects to compete for their souls. They are constructing a new culture and a new consciousness. They are changing the country. They are breaking the melting pot." Here Weyr might have paused to reflect that the United States-a country riven by ethnic and racial resentments incurred by previous waves of immigrants to the point where the (liberal) historian Andrew Hacker announced in 1970 its demise as a nation-state-is already afflicted by more "new cultures" and "consciousnesses" than it can successfully deal with. Instead, he proceeds blandly: "They want to assimilate and to remain separate, to be part of the mainstream and to retain their own identity. Not . . . another Quebec, but identity conferred by a larger culture of history, myth, geography, religion, education, language, and affairs of state." (Reading that sentence, I was reminded of the incident described by Mark Twain in Roughing It, in which one homesteader's ranch slides downhill in an avalanche and lands on top of his neighbor's, giving rise to strongly disputed questions of property rights.)

After rehearsing a few statistics on immigration, legal and illegal, to this country over the past twenty years, he concludes that there is, after all, nothing much to be done about it: "These are the numbers that will assure Hispanic separateness far into the future because they promise a constant renewal and a growing diversity among the various Hispanic communities. . . . Geography gives Hispanics the option of life in both Americas, in two places and in two cultures, something earlier immigrants never had."

Apparently blind, throughout much of Hispanic U.S.A., to the implications of his own work, Weyr unconsciously suggests possible answers to questions currently of interest to politicians and academicians alike, the most important being why the immigrants of the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, the majority of them Latins and Asians, have failed to conform to the historical pattern of assimilation established by earlier immigrants to this country. The obvious explanation is the cultural one that provides Weyr with his thesis; yet certainly it is significant that the Latin/Asian immigrant wave is the first to have arrived on these shores after the elaborate apparatus of the liberal welfare state was in place. When the Irish, Germans, Italians, Greeks, Serbo-Croatians, and Jews got here in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was do-or-die, with no bureaucratic officials to insist that public-school children be tutored in their native languages by specially recruited teachers, or that election ballots and municipal signs be printed and lettered in alien tongues. The other question upon which Weyr throws unintentional light is the failure of the amnesty plan mandated by the Simpson-Mazzoli-Rodino Immigration Reform Act -a failure Weyr attributes to the inability of the INS to "communicate the reality of amnesty" to eligible illegals highly suspicious of the bona fides of la Migra, but one which, on his own evidence, can more reasonably be seen to reflect a profound disinclination on the part of the majority of Hispanics to incorporate themselves in the polity of a country that represents for them no more than a cornucopia of economic benefits and free social services.

"The movement of peoples," writes Weyr-who seems to accept in part the "myth" underlying the Reconquista -"once unleashed, has a logic of its own that pays little heed to legal niceties." Well, perhaps. But it is for God to orchestrate patterns of historical irony, while man's duty remains to protect and preserve that which he has and has made.