When back in the USA a few weeks ago I attended a fund raiser for a local girls gymnastic team (all under 12) so they could travel and compete in Washington DC. All the cute little gymnasts were blonde and white as snow. However, all of them had Hispanic last names except one. Despite the fact my county in Nevada votes red, Latinos make up more than a third of the population. I sat across from my favorite gossip, a Shoshone woman who works at the local post office and commented, "Looks like you're the only minority here." She took it in stride, noting that it was impossible to get most of the tribe living on or around the local reservation to attend anything that didn't have the words "pow wow" attached to it. There were plenty of retired "white folks" in attendance. These are the types who can quote Limbaugh and Fox Not News scripture and verse. So, imagine the irony of seeing so many of them turn out -- at $25 a ticket -- for the wine tasting and Mexican food buffet held at a casino/bar/restaurant owned by an old ranching family originally from Puerto Rico. All the nice old white ranching families seem to have finally accepted that their off spring are pretty much homogenized into a mostly Latino population with Hispanic last names. All, that is, except for a small hold out of old mormon families. One of those hold out families includes our famously racist County Commissioner, who was in attendance. He's a firm believer that Obama is not a legal citizen and that the wall being built between Mexico and the USA should be "three times taller." He's not the brightest bulb in the community, which means he's rather easy to control. But more amusing is that the almost majority Latino community puts up with his racist rants about the extinction of the white/judeo-christian families "that founded this part of the West."
Well, point of fact, with the exception of some white mormon pioneers who got stuck in the area, Elko county was built by Chinese who worked to build the trans-continental railroad. And hoards of Mexican families invaded the area from 1870 to 1950 from Zacatecas, Mexico, to work in the newly discovered gold, silver, and copper mines. They were miners who needed to find work because the mines in Zacatecas were being played out. Then there was the huge influx of over 20,000 Basque from 1900 to 1940 who immigrated and moved to North Eastern Nevada to buy ranches and herd sheep. These immigrants stuck around while the few white folks moved on to Reno, Sacramento, or back to Salt Lake City.
Anyway, reverse discrimination? The general makeup of Elko County's population has been -- at times -- mostly Latino. And then there are all of the Italians that migrated to Elko via San Francisco. Still, the county votes red for the GOP -- even in the last election. The topics of conversation at the fundraiser were about the price of hay, carpet baggers such as myself coming in and buying up all of the land available during the economic downturn while locals can't get loans, and how just about every man and woman in the place had a better recipe for Chile Verde than the version offered at the buffet. And everyone, including myself, complained about the local Sheriff, his minions, and the Nevada Highway Patrol who have started pulling everyone over to see if they can turn some coin for the county by giving out tickets for not driving with headlights on during the day (it's mandatory of Highways, but not on the Interstates), not wearing seat belts, and now they even give out tickets if you're going 4 miles over the 75 mph speed limit. The temerity. It's hard to complain of racial profiling because half the Nevada Highway Patrol is Latino. And by now, most 'Mericuhns have a feel for northern Nevada police. For many living in Reno and Sparks, the show Reno 911 is not a joke, but a coy play on the truth.
The one giant value held in common by everyone -- the glue, so to speak -- was how to get the Federal Government off our collective backs. Taxes we can live with, but no one can put up with the EPA showing up at a ranch and checking the surface and ground water, then write up reports so privately owned water can be taken over and controlled by The Department of the Interior. Color, race, and ethnicity tend to melt away when we're faced with the Federal Government trying to pass legislation to take away and manage our local water rights. You see, Las Vegas, the largest city in the State needs more water, despite two thirds of the 10% unemployment in the State is in Las Vegas. People talk about the Owens River Valley in California that was turned into a desert so all the runoff from the Sierras could be diverted for more than 200 miles to water the lawns of Los Angeles.
So, when you hear of an uprising in the northern "heart land" of Nevada, don't think for a minute that it will be about race or bigotry. No, it will be over the Feds taking away local water rights and stressing the local ranchers into bankruptcy. You want to complain about racial profiling, bigotry, and racism in general you have to go to Reno or Las Vegas where there has been a steady inmigration of folks from the Eastern Seaboard (New York and New Jersey, in particular), the importation of organized crime into these two large communities which still exists supporting the so-call "vice" industries, and the general lack of cohesion in these cities because of the vagrant population (not the vagrants, just those who show up from out-of-State and stay for two or three years helping turning the new suburbs into the new slums) with its tendency to bring with it and leave illicit drugs and gang members from LA who cannot find employment.
However, in little old Wells, where the fantasy among the few whites is that it is a "white" community, one thing that was interesting to hear was that most everyone was behind the idea of Sotomayor being appointed to the Supreme Court. Oddly enough, even our local Republican-Obama-is-not-a-legal-citizen County commissioner was heard to laud the virtues of having a Latino as a Supreme Court Justice. All this ballyhoo about Latina women being wiser than an old white guy? Well, it wasn't said as much as implied that having a Latina on the Supreme Court was a good thing, even though she might end up making Scalia look like a liberal.
Reverse racism? Means a whole different thing out there in the wild and woolly West. :tongue: