Brian Wilson’s California Died Decades Ago
John Daniel Davidson Visit on Twitter @johnddavidson
Mass immigration from Mexico, legal and illegal, transformed California and created a fractured, riotous, and unstable polity.
The sad news that Brian Wilson, the musical genius behind the Beach Boys, died last week at 82 carried with it a strange and foreboding symbolism. His death came as Los Angeles was reeling from a series of riots — and poised to plunge into a period of sustained civic unrest.
The immediate cause of the unrest is violent opposition to the legitimate enforcement of federal immigration law, especially among Mexican nationals and Mexican-American residents of Los Angeles. In recent days we’ve all heard impassioned declarations from anti-ICE protesters, rioters, and many in the corporate press along the lines that “Los Angeles belongs to Mexico,” or that California was “stolen” from Mexico.
At the heart of these protests and riots we have seen, in short, the assertion of a specifically ethnic and Mexican national identity over and against an American national identity — immortalized in the striking images of masked rioters waving the Mexican flag amid burning vehicles, rubble, and beleaguered police.
That all this was happening in California, and that Wilson passed away in the middle of it all, underscores just how much California has been demographically and culturally transformed by mass immigration from Mexico since the 1960s. Put bluntly, the California that Wilson sang about died long before he did. Through the mass immigration regime established by the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, what was once a stable bastion of American life and culture — that for many people epitomized the American dream — was replaced by an inherently volatile and fractured polity built on the unstable foundation of multiculturalism and competing ethnic identities.
When the Beach Boys released their first album Surfin’ Safari in 1962, and in quick succession released follow-ups Surfin’ USA, Surfer Girl, and Little Deuce Coupe in 1963, California was about 90 percent white and its Hispanic population was rather small, about 7 percent (today those shares are 34 and 40 percent, respectively). The culture, industry, and infrastructure of California were the creation of non-Hispanic whites who settled there from the late-19thto early-20th century. Neither Los Angeles nor California at large in any sense “belonged to Mexico” or was even Mexican in a cultural sense.
California in the 1960s was more racially and ethnically diverse than many other states, owing partly to its geographical size and unique history, but it was nevertheless overwhelmingly white and Christian — like the rest of America at the time. In contrast to the fractured identities and split loyalties of our time, mid-century Americans had a shared identity and culture — and shared loyalties and loves.