In 1519 a group of Spanish soldiers who had been sent to explore Mexico heard an extraordinary rumour. A sailor, Gonzalo Guerrero, had drifted there on a wrecked ship eight years earlier and was living among the Indians. He had married an Indian woman, with whom he had raised three children, and was tattooed and pierced. Odder still, he intended to stay put. Hernán Cortés, the leader of the expedition, was furious. "It will never do to leave him here," he scowled.

What Cortés took to be a slight against Spanish civilisation, Gregory Rodriguez hails as a vision of America's future. Guerrero was the first Mexican settler and his children were the first mixed-race Mexicans. But only narrowly: Cortés himself soon took an Indian lover, as did many of his men. Gradually Spaniards and Indians (and later blacks) blended to create a mongrel nation. Mexico became a counterpoint to the caste society that developed in its northern neighbour. Then it began to permeate and change that society.

By 2001 Latinos, most of them Mexicans or descended from Mexicans, had become the second-biggest ethnic group in America. This worried African-Americans, who were thus relegated to third place. It also alarmed some whites, who felt that Latinos were failing to conform to American mores. In an influential book "Who Are We?" published in 2004, Samuel Huntington, a Harvard University professor, argued that Mexicans threatened Anglo-Protestant traditions. "Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds" is a much shrewder, less paranoid work. Yet, in some ways, it reaches a similar conclusion. ...

For the complete article, please follow this link. Gregory Rodriguez is director of the California Fellows Program at New America Foundation and is an Irvine Senior Fellow.