IT TAKES no great imagination for a visitor to Southern California to feel witness to a great tide of history. Heading south toward Los Angeles on U.S. 101, a valley opens up near Oxnard: with coastal mountains surging magnificently on the left, and the Pacific on the right, a driver can see flat green fields stretching for miles. There, stooped at the waist in orderly lines, are hundreds and hundreds of Mexican laborers.

Such a scene, with the mountains and speeding cars and lush fields, was visible thirty years ago as well, but without the same resonance. Americans could think, and many did, about the tedium and difficulty of the farm work and the poverty of the workers, all in a state of such plenty. But today this tableau gives rise to more powerful interpretations. These are more often explored by Mexican intellectuals or Mexican-American activists, but they should be in our minds as well.

Listen to the late Carlos Loret de Mola, writing in Excélsior, one of Mexico's leading newspapers: ``A peaceful mass of people, hardworking, carries out slowly and patiently an unstoppable invasion, the most important in human history. You cannot give me a similar example of such a large migratory wave by an ant-like multitude, stubborn, unarmed, and carried on in the face of the most powerful and best-armed nation on earth.'' The result of this migration, he continues, is to return the land ``to the jurisdiction of Mexico without the firing of a single shot.'' For despite the wealth of the United States and its historic ability to absorb immigrants and convert them into Americans, these workers ``continue to be Mexican and even to impress their personality on their surroundings.'' The American upper classes live ``in increasing splendor, [but] their luxury . . . marks the beginning of their decadence.'' The land, Loret de Mola concludes, ``ends up in the hands of those who deserve it.''

An exaggeration? A flight of romantic nationalist rhetoric? One would like to think so. But it cannot be shrugged off as easily as it might have been 15 years ago, when it was first published.

Since then, the immigration debate in the United States has grown from infancy to adolescence. Legislation to curb illegal (primarily Mexican) passage across the southern border has been introduced, debated, and passed -- with little decisive effect. Competing lobbies battle in Washington. Many politicians huddle somewhere in the middle and, if asked to speak out, stick to well-worn grooves.

Usually, a congressman or senator will oppose illegal immigration -- at least in principle. As for legal immigrants, the congressman will tell you, they should assimilate. Assimilation has become the new magic word in the immigration debate, brandished like a cross before a vampire at those who worry out loud about the impact on American national cohesion of large numbers of newcomers from not always compatible cultures. Assimilation evokes the misty past of Ellis Island, through which millions entered, eventually seeing their descendants become as American as George Washington. For those who insist on viewing the present through the Ellis Island prism, today's immigration is full of promising parallels. David Rieff, in his insightful book, Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World, tells of the West L.A. bourgeois who sees in today's Mexican immigrants a likeness to the Italians who came through New York early this century. Meanwhile, the simile goes, the well-educated and highly entrepreneurial Koreans and Chinese resemble the Jews (the speaker's own forebears) from Poland and the Pale of Settlement. It is such a reassuring comparison, and these days one hears it often.

But such analogies prove shaky if examined. This one in the first place suffers from a pronounced lack of historical imagination -- as if there could be no other relevant model for a mass migration of peoples than the one which took place from Europe to the United States between 1880 and 1924. Furthermore, it ignores such fundamental factors as today's vastly different American economy, with its narrower paths to upward mobility. It gives short shrift to the history and geography of the American Southwest, and to the proximity and population of Mexico today, as compared to Italy then. Most negligently, it ignores the ideas and attitudes of the Mexican and Mexican-American politicians and activists who speak to -- and on behalf of -- the new immigrants.

Some who tout assimilation at least acknowledge how large is the wager being placed on it. Peter Salins, whose Assimilation, American Style has become a lodestar for Republican advocates of high immigration, admits that intergroup harmony in a multi-ethnic state is fragile and, historically speaking, rare. Only through vigorous assimilation of new immigrants has the United States avoided the strife which has plagued multi-ethnic states throughout history. Meanwhile, not enough assimilation is taking place, Salins contends; the process needs reinvigoration.

He recommends a retreat from bilingual education and re-emphasis on teaching English in the schools, a rooting out of multicultural curriculums to encourage immigrants to adopt a primarily American political identity, and a reinvigoration of the Protestant ethic -- which he boils down to a readiness to work hard, make money, and get ahead. Worthy goals all, but given the circumstances of today's immigration, far more easily proposed than accomplished.

TO SEE why a revival of ``traditional'' assimilation practices will hardly suffice, examine California. The 1990 Census indicated that 38 per cent of America's foreign-born are from Latin America, and well over half of those are from Mexico. The real percentages are probably higher, since illegal aliens avoid the Census, and most illegals come from those regions. If assimilation can be revived it has to be revived among Latinos. The obstacles are daunting.

Economic and material conditions cannot account for the politics of individuals, or of larger groups. But they give important clues. About the circumstances of Mexican-Americans and other Latinos, two points stand out, plain to any observer in Los Angeles, and buttressed by reams of recent social-science data: as a group Latinos are hard-working; also, they are poor. Last year, federal data showed that, for the first time, the Hispanic poverty rate had begun to exceed that of American blacks. In 1995, in the midst of a powerful economic recovery, household income rose for every ethnic group except Hispanics, for whom it dropped 5 per cent. Latinos (the terms Latino and Hispanic are used interchangeably) now make up a quarter of the nation's poor people, and are more than three times as likely to be impoverished than whites. This decline in income has taken place despite high rates of labor-force participation by Latino men, and despite what some researchers hopefully describe as an ``emerging'' Latino middle class. In California, where Latinos are now approaching one-third of the population, a recent Rand study, Immigration in a Changing Economy, reached gloomy conclusions about the economic prospects of immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Their education levels were far lower than those of other immigrants, and they earned about half of what native-born Californians earn.

Thus, for the first time in the history of American immigration, hard work is not leading to economic advancement. Why? Immigrants in service jobs face unrelenting labor-market pressure from more recently arrived immigrants, invariably eager to work for less. In clothing and furniture manufacture, where Mexican immigrants are concentrated, wages have dropped $6,000 a year in real terms since 1970; they are dropping for truck drivers and janitors as well. The warnings of the Rand report are echoed by a new Urban Institute study on farm workers, which concluded that ``rural poverty in California is being re-created through immigration'' and that a constant flow of new low-skilled workers pouring into California's labor camp ``colonias'' would make such poverty more difficult to root out than in the past. (Both Rand and the Urban Institute have long been enthusiasts for immigration.)

The narrowing of the pathways of upward mobility has implications which immigration analysts are only beginning to come to terms with. The Rand study is one of several recent volumes to express worry about the so-called ``second generation'' -- the children of recent immigrants. Alejandro Portes, editor of a just-published book on the subject, asks whether ``today's children of immigrants will follow their European predecessors and move into the middle-class mainstream, or whether, on the contrary, their ascent will be blocked and they will join children of earlier black and Puerto Rican migrants as part of an expanded multi-ethnic underclass.'' Portes's insinuation that it is the responsibility of the host society if immigrants fail to advance (``their ascent will be blocked'') is not unusual in this literature, and indeed some scholars recommend that the United States adapt its economy to the needs of the Latino immigrant stream (e.g., by creating more jobs for uneducated workers) rather than shape its immigration policies to American needs.

Nonetheless, the problem of blocked upward mobility is real. Portes and his colleagues argue that the modern American economy is shaped like an hourglass -- there are a good number of jobs for unskilled people at the bottom, and a fair number of jobs for the educated at the top. But for those without a college education or special skills, jobs in the middle are scarce. Historian Fred Siegel, in his recent study of three American cities (Los Angeles among them), The Future Once Happened Here, notes that first-generation immigrants compare their circumstances to what they left. In the case of those who came from grinding poverty they adjust to the falling wages, sometimes making heroic efforts to hold families together with two or three menial jobs.

But their children and grandchildren will not compare themselves to those they left behind in Michoacan or the slums of Santo Domingo, but to other U.S. groups. They are unlikely to be content as maids, gardeners, or fruit pickers. But unionized factory jobs, which once provided a step up for the second generation of past waves of immigrants, have been disappearing for decades. Rand, pointing to a growing divergence between skilled and unskilled wages, forecasts that 85 per cent of California's new jobs will require post-secondary education.

And although many Latino immigrants possess an impressive work ethic, the pursuit of higher education has not been a strength of theirs. The Hispanic high-school dropout rate nationwide is 30 per cent -- three times the rate for whites and twice the rate for blacks. This has puzzled researchers. Perhaps language is the problem -- either failed bilingual-education programs or (as others argue) an insufficient number of them. But the dropout rate for Hispanics born in the United States is even higher than for young immigrants. Among Mexican-Americans, high-school dropout rates actually rise between the second and third generation. This is an astonishing fact, which portends that Hispanic poverty rates will not diminish as the immigrants ``assimilate.'' Scholars who have done field work among young Latinos say that many in the second and third generations see themselves as locked in irremediable conflict with white society, and are quick to deride successful Mexican students as ``wannabes.'' For them, to study hard is to ``act white'' and exhibit group disloyalty.

The parallels to the well-chronicled cultural patterns in African-American ghettoes are plain enough. And it is worth remembering that it was not generally the black Americans who migrated from the rural South to Northern cities who took part in riots and civil insurrections in the 1960s, but their children and grandchildren.

STILL, the assimilation problem is not simple economics. Even if it were possible to ensure that Latino immigrants would experience the upward mobility that equally unschooled European immigrants managed a hundred years ago, their political assimilation would by no means be assured. The Latino sense of the United States has always been different. As David Rieff puts it, Mexicans arrive with the title-deeds to the land already in their pockets; someone fresh off a pick-up truck in Los Angeles comes to a city where a main boulevard is named for a former Mexican governor, and where most place names reflect the state's Hispanic past. Earl Shorris, in his eloquent panegyric, Latinos: A Biography of the People, writes, with evident satisfaction, that Latinos have been more resistant to the melting pot than any other group. Their entry en masse into the United States will ``test the limits'' of the American experiment -- a forecast which is hard to dispute.

Two words, ``Aztlan'' and ``Reconquista,'' hover over the Mexican immigration issue, sometimes at a safe height, sometimes swooping uncomfortably low. Generations of American children have skipped over the Mexican - American War of 1846 - 48 as a brief skirmish, a blip in a history that includes the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, two World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam. But for Mexicans and Mexican-Americans with a sense of history it was a monumental event. Mexico lost half of its territory to a self-confident and expanding United States. It is true that the territory ceded by Mexico in the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was barely populated, and not really administered by Mexico City; it is also true that Mexico itself was a chaotic despotism in 1848.

Nevertheless, Mexicans know in a way that few Americans do that California, Arizona, and New Mexico were lost to them through that treaty; Texas had won its independence 12 years before. The opening pages of Rodolfo Acuna's Occupied America -- probably the most widely assigned text in the nation's burgeoning Chicano Studies programs -- displays a map showing ``the Mexican republic'' in 1822 reaching up into Kansas and Oklahoma, and including within it Utah, Nevada, and everything west and south of there. The United States' rapid victory in the war has left a mark between the two nations which, as Shorris puts it, few Americans think about and few Mexicans are able to forget. For the latter the conflict is a ``devastating loss of face'' -- in the aftermath of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Americans would speak of Mexicans as docile, and the latter would describe themselves as a people able to endure. To ``correct'' these perceptions, writes Shorris, has been the primary task of every Mexican-American social activist.

In the late 1960s, a nascent Mexican-American movement adopted for itself the word ``Chicano'' (which had a connotation of low class) and broke forth with surprising suddenness. Compared to Black Power and to the white New Left, the Chicano movement was a small part of 1960s radicalism (and it has been virtually ignored in many of the recently published histories of that era). But ``Chicanismo'' left its mark on today's Mexican-American leaders -- a group whose power has grown rapidly as their community has swollen in numbers. <>P In 1968, tens of thousands of Chicano students walked out of barrio high schools in East Los Angeles. It was widely believed that the Brown Berets, a militant group styled on the Black Panthers, had organized the walkout. Similar protests soon followed in Colorado, Texas, and Arizona. This was a new kind of Mexican-American politics, with demands and rhetoric neither linked to the power struggles within Mexico nor focused simply on securing civil rights for Mexican-Americans. Instead, the Chicanos were developing a politics of ethnic and racial identity with a territorial edge. Rejection of assimilation into the American cultural mainstream was its main point. Chicano activists took pride in denying that Columbus ``discovered'' America; they held up the Aztecs and Mayans as their founding fathers. In 1967, the former professional boxer Rodolfo ``Corky'' Gonzales published an epic poem, I Am Joaquín, a telescoped rendering of thousands of years of Chicano history. Read out loud at meetings throughout the Southwest, its message was: ``I will never be absorbed.'' In 1969, the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference convened in Denver; there, amid a flurry of nationalist rhetoric and manifestos, Gonzales declared in defiance of the archaeological evidence that Aztlan, the mythical homeland of the Aztecs, was in the American Southwest.

Later that year MEChA, or Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan -- a group which exists today on college campuses in ten states -- was established. In 1970, in one of the most concrete manifestations of the movement's aims, a political party called La Raza Unida won control of the small town of Crystal City, Texas. As Ignacio Garc&iaacute;a, a sympathetic observer, describes its reign in Chicanismo (a new text for Chicano Studies courses): ``Bureaucrats, clerks, teachers, administrators, policemen, and a host of other governmental and educational professionals lost their jobs and were replaced by Chicanos sympathetic to the new party. Army recruiters were unwelcome, only UFW lettuce was eaten.'' After one of the party's leaders won a county judgeship in 1974, court sessions were conducted in Spanish and criminals were given lenient sentences. The courts also harassed non-supportive Mexican-Americans and intimidated Anglo farmers and businessmen.

La Raza Unida did not last, and, like many other radical movements, Chicanismo fell plague to personal rivalries and ideological splits. Its greatest institutional legacy may be the Chicano Studies departments now sprinkled around the country. Radical works like Acuna's Occupied America (now in its third edition) are read (in English) by Chicano students; it is rare to find a Chicano Studies text today that does not treat the decline of the movement with remorse.

Some Chicano leaders migrated to the Democratic Party, where, to be sure, they toned down their ethnic rhetoric. But who can doubt that the sentiments expressed in I Am Joaquín -- which reach deep into the wellsprings of group memory and pride, while rubbing salt into old wounds left by the Anglos -- are more alive today than the Port Huron Statement or anything said by Abbie Hoffman? Why should those sentiments evaporate as Latinos see their share of California's and America's population rise? In 1970 Latinos made up 12 per cent of California's population, and Hispanics were not even counted as a distinct category in the national Census. In 1990, Hispanics made up 9 per cent of the nation, and they are expected to be more than a quarter of the U.S. population in two generations. More than 30 per cent of the population of California -- the key electoral state -- are Latinos; the figure will rise to 40 per cent within this decade.

And, sure enough, among both activists and elected leaders, a good deal of Chicanoist rhetoric lives on. Peter Skerry, one of the country's shrewder analysts of contemporary Mexican-American politics, has labeled Mexican-Americans ``the ambivalent minority.'' He describes them as torn between the impulse to organize and present themselves as an aggrieved racial group, following the model of African Americans, and the countervailing impulse to view themselves as part of the American immigration story, as an ethnic group that will blend in its own way into the United States, as Italians and Irish have. In purely political terms, the aggrieved-minority position has won hands down; one is hard put to find a Mexican-American political leader of consequence who rejects racial quotas for Hispanics, for instance.

But the legacy of Chicano nationalism and Mexican history raises a third possibility: that Mexican-Americans will see themselves as part of the continuum of Mexican civilization. Mexico's proximity makes this a plausible option, in a way that it really is not for American blacks vis-a-vis Africa.

CERTAINLY mainstream Mexican-American politicians use rhetoric laced with a racialism that no Anglo politician these days could get away with. Former State Senator Art Torres paid no great price in public obloquy when he deemed California's Proposition 187 ``the last gasp of white America.'' Torres, now chairman of the state Democratic Committee, had long been viewed as one of the more moderate of Latino politicians -- chosen, for instance, as statewide spokesman for the Mondale presidential campaign.

In a way, such rhetoric may be simply common sense: why should a Latino politician, representing a district heavily populated with non-citizens who speak little or no English and who have flouted American laws to enter the country, identify with the retreating Anglo culture? Already by the late 1980s, the concept of ``MexAmerica'' had acquired a certain legitimacy in academic circles; the term underscored an uncertainty about where Mexico ended and Southern California began. Politicians like Torres began speaking of ``reclamation'' -- asserting that ``our modern metropolis is returning to the enduring Pueblo of Los Angeles of years past.'' Was this not a more realistic assessment of the meaning of the Latino migration than the sunny talk about ``assimilation''?

Other leaders speak even more aggressively. Rodolfo Acuna is given to referring to Anglos as Nazis. At a MEChA conference last year, he told listeners, ``Right now you are in the Nazi United States of America.'' His textbook, which dresses up such sentiments in Marxist language, shows that the nation's changing demographics makes America-bashing good business for publishers. Elsewhere on California campuses, the descendants of the Chicanismo generation keep the flames alive. Last year the MEChA student publication, Voz Fronteriza, greeted the Republican Convention in San Diego by observing that ``a large gathering of racist/fascist European settlers'' is planning to convene, in order to forge plans for ``genocide and deportation of the Mexicano, African, and other oppressed people.'' The authors declaimed: ``Every Mexicano must become an enemy of the colonial settler state.'' Voz Fronteriza gloats when Border Patrol officers are killed in the line of duty; it refers to them as ``migra'' pigs trying to defend ``la frontera falsa.'' So speaks the state-funded Latino student press in the California university system.

Slightly bowdlerized, the same attitudes are spread in high-school textbooks. One such work, Five Hundred Years of Chicano History in Pictures, edited by Elizabeth Martinez, is used in over three hundred schools throughout the West. Written in Spanish and Spanglish, the work seeks to ``celebrate our resistance to being colonized and absorbed by racist empire builders.'' The authors reserve special venom for the Border Patrol and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, described as ``the Gestapo for Mexicans.'' Nevertheless, the book is optimistic about the future: ``Latinos are now realizing that the power to control Aztlan may once again be in their hands.''

Two teachers in rural New Mexico were fired this fall for using this textbook and propagandizing in a local MEChA club they had started. (There are Latino communities resistant to this kind of anti-Americanism.) But the book's widespread use in California has gone unchallenged.

IF Chicano activists find solace in the rising numbers of Latinos in ``Aztlan,'' they can also draw satisfaction from the Mexican government's growing reach across the border (unrestrained, apparently, by its financial dependence upon Washington). Mexico once disdained its northward migrants as ``pochos'' whose culture had been coarsened by residence amidst the Anglos. No longer. Mexico's major political parties agree in principle that migrants should no longer forfeit their citizenship by becoming U.S. citizens; they are taking steps to let them vote in Mexican elections. President Ernesto Zedillo recently warned that Mexico will not tolerate ``foreign forces enacting laws on Mexicans'' -- an apparent reference to stepped-up efforts by the U.S. to prevent illegal border crossings. Latinos are responding. California politicians now lead delegations to Mexico City, where they echo such complaints about efforts to stem immigration.

Picture a large and growing population, predominantly Spanish-speaking, wooed by the politicians and voting in the elections of two countries. It is hard to see where this might fit into the assimilation paradigm celebrated by those who favor continued mass immigration.

Even where politics plays no large role, assimilation is slowing or reversing itself. In Los Angeles, immigrant neighborhoods that were once stepping stones into the broader United States are being ``re-Mexicanized'' (in Fred Siegel's phrase) by a continuing flow of new immigrants, as long-established Mexican-American residents are forced to adapt to the newcomers. This re-Mexicanization is a cultural fact, involving things like the language spoken in public and the music played in the streets. It proceeds without the hard edge of anti-Anglo resentment, but this is often not the case amongst the more Americanized, English-speaking Latino politicians and educators. Assimilation is by no means a one-way street.

A recent study of undergraduates at Berkeley -- a group which necessarily includes some of California's most academically successful Latino students -- bears this out. The Berkeley report found that many young Latinos, having grown up assimilated in predominantly white neighborhoods, lacked any sort of strong Chicano/Latino identity before entering college. Berkeley changed that -- spurring a process of racialization and reawakening ethnic consciousness. Some Latino students described themselves as being ``born again'' as Chicanos, and finding themselves resentful over what they had lost of Mexican language and culture. Such remorse among third- and fourth-generation immigrants has ample precedent in American history, and need not have political implications. What is new is that such feelings are reinforced and given a political twist by organizations like MEChA, by Chicano Studies departments, by the intrusions of Mexican politicians, and above all by an unceasing flow of new immigrants.

The assimilation of a wave of new immigrants would seem to require that several things go well at once. Upward mobility may be a necessity. In this century at least, material advancement has become an inextricable part of the ``American Dream.'' Assimilation also requires (as writers like Peter Salins acknowledge) that immigrants and particularly their children use English as a primary language, give their political loyalties to the United States, and embrace the ideals of the Founding Fathers as their own.

THIS triple bankshot was pulled off brilliantly with immigrants from Europe, in a different era. Perhaps it could happen again. But the gradual ascendancy of Spanish over English in East L.A., the declining wages in jobs held by immigrants, and the culture of resistance forged by Chicanos all suggest that something quite different from the old American pattern of assimilation is taking place. Even in relatively mainstream political venues like the National Council of La Raza, delegates courted by leading national Democrats and Republicans chant ¡Viva Mexico! No one blinks when a moderate like Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, points to our changing demographics and says, ``We will overwhelm.''

And indeed such expressions are, in their way, the most normal and predictable of political sentiments; nationalism after all has been history's vital engine for centuries. What seems off key and nearly inexplicable is the insistence of so many of America's political and intellectual elite that such phenomena are really just an updated version of the Ellis Island experience.

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