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| CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH | |
 September 28, 1999 
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RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: On a winter morning in California of 1848, a man named James Marshall spied something bright in a riverbed. Gold. It was gold he lifted from the cold water and America would never be the same. Today business school professors and self-styled futurists like to proclaim the global economy as though they invented it. But the global economy is at least as old as the California Gold Rush. And it was Karl Marx, not any C.E.O., who said the smartest thing I have ever heard about the discovery of gold in California. In the history of the world, Karl Marx said, the California gold rush would outrank the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus. In 1492, the European met the Indian; two races, two civilizations confronted one another. But the discovery of gold in California gathered the entire world in one place for the first time in history. It took several months for the rumor of gold to spread down from the foothills to San Francisco then across America then around the world. But within a year of Marshall's discovery, by 1849, America saw the largest land migration in its history. Illiterate peasants they were, those teenaged boys, those '49ers who came to California from all over the world, from Australia, from France, from Japan, from China, from Mexico, from Peru. We speak today with surprise and astonishment because there are schools in Virginia or Illinois where students come from 40, 50, 60 different language groups. But in the muddy California gold fields, in the words of J.S. Holliday, the world rushed in. To mark the 150th anniversary of that epic event, all around California in recent months there have been museum shows and lectures and books published. We Californians all are agreed that the Gold Rush was the making of us. But what might that mean? Researchers at Harvard the other day reported that nationwide nearly 70 percent of Hispanic students and 75 percent of African American students attend predominantly minority schools. In California, the researchers found, the segregation of black and Hispanic students to be even more pronounced. Middle-class Californians, pity the parochialism of inner-city teenagers who might end up in gangs, bounded by several blocks. But many of those same middle-class Californians live today by choice in gated communities, lives as enclosed as any inner-city gangster. Is it possible that as more and more of the world gathers outside our front door, that we may end up organizing ourselves in smaller ways? Might there be more Quebecs in the future as there are more NAFTAS, or, as metropolitan Los Angeles spreads ever vaster, could there end up being more chapters of the Crips and the Bloods? As a result of the California Gold rush, America became the world's first truly global nation. Now, however, we are troubled by our globalism. Clearly, there is a human need in us to find some space apart or some intimacy or some separation in a world grown so large and ever-present. That can be a bad or a good thing, I think. It is humane and good for us to yearn, for example, for the intimate tie, the local, a neighborhood, as the great world grows more indistinct from the freeway. Do not be surprised when the computer you purchase to give your daughter the world becomes a technology by which she seeks in chat rooms the company of people exactly like herself. In the global America predicted by the California Gold Rush, we are puzzled to ourselves, more global and more withdrawn both. I know a skinhead who loves sushi. The white policeman accused of beating a black prisoner is dating a black woman. And the Cambodian teenager who tells me he hates Mexicans speaks English with a Spanish accent. I'm Richard Rodriguez. |
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