Tamaulipas, South of Decatur

Given my political bent,* it would seem apparent that I would welcome any kind of socio-demographic change visited upon the red map swath from Georgia to Louisiana. Any stray bit of color to break up the albino thicket covering what I like to think of as America's Mons Pubis** should be more than welcome. Anything other than gray, of course.

But I don't know, I kind of like the South as it is. As a hack writer, the cosmopolitanization of the Deep South threatens my wellspring of lazy characterizations of stupid, backward, civilization-averse, anti-book, pro-Book, tight-ass, bigoted, churched-up people easily identifiable by their quaint dialectical phraseology, y'all. And it's not like if the South suddenly became Berkeley 1970 that my need for a go-to demographic is just going to go away. I'd just have to relocate it and I feel like we're already asking the Mormons to do too much.

So at first, I was worried when I heard that Mexicans were invading the South in alarming numbers and threatening to upend its centuries-long tradition as America's last genuinely racist cultural stronghold. I mean sure, we have bigots out here on the Left Coast as well, but we don't go out of our way to institutionalize it. Well, not as blatantly. It's in the police training, obviously, but just about anyone can eat at the diner counter.

I calmed down a bit when I remembered the population I was talking about: the kind of people who form organizations to celebrate the war they lost to defend slavery and won't drink iced tea without it being fortified with enough sugar to shrivel the average pancreas. These are not a far-sighted or forgiving people.

But I dug a little deeper and I saw this article about how Mayans used to live in Georgia and I thought: oh no.

With anti-immigration being one of the three solid planks holding up modern American conservatism,*** I think the door just swung wide open for la raza in el Belt de la Biblia. I mean, who are the immigrants now?

The root of conservatism is not really resistance to change, but an active call to restoring the imagined order of a past delicately constructed from judiciously selective memory. It is a seemingly contradictory reactionary impulse to total social revolution; a drive to re-implement a society based on structures that never were. And shit, the farther back the better, right? So if 1950s America is legitimate, Mesoamericans in Hotlanta a thousand-plus years ago must be just about unassailable. The horseshit-ness of it is always less of a deterrent and more of kind of totally the fucking point.

Plus, it's 2012. It's the Mayans' big year. And Southern Christianists eat all that eschatology up with a spoon. Is it still the Rapture if it was predicted on pre-Christian advanced math? It's all how you spin it. If you can sell the idea that the feathered serpent is just Jesus in drag, you don't have to apologize to anyone. Well, except maybe the transgender community, but let's be honest, they earned that from you a long, long time ago.

In the meantime, I guess all I can do is stand back and watch as the red is engorged with the influx, blushing to ever darker shades of crimson as it struggles against the gush of new life until it is tinged with an almost imperceptible hint of shimmering, vibrating purple.




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*slightly but noticeably left, becoming more pronounced depending on levels of arousal

**you know, the area just above our junk

***the other two are obviously anti-abortionism and I think bow hunting