“I am 100% Mexican” said Mark Sanchez, American citizen and New York Jets quarterback. It was at a press conference before the Super Bowl, attended in part by Mexican reporters.[Yo Soy Mexicano : Mark Sánchez,El Universal, Feb. 6th, 2010]

Joe Guzzardi has written about Sanchez, who is U.S.-born and a native speaker of English. On one side anyway, it was his great-grandparents who immigrated.

What does Sanchez mean by calling himself 100% Mexican ?

At the press conference (90% of which was in Spanish) Sanchez said that

“I need to learn more Spanish because I want to talk with the Mexican fans that have supported me much. I am 100% Mexican”.

This is the same guy who said that growing up he “never thought much about being Mexican.” But he sure thinks about it now that he’s quite successful.

So it sounds like some sort of awakening.

It’s really obvious when you think about it, and a major leftist/Latino leader Eliseo Medina has boasted about it.

World Net Daily reported a speech by Medina, international executive vice-president of SEIU (Service Employees International Union). See Obama Adviser: Amnesty To Ensure ‘Progressive’ Rule (Aaron Klein, Feb. 2nd,2010) which includes a video of Medina’s comments, delivered in June of 2009 at an “America’s Future Now!” conference. Medina is an amnesty booster and during the presidential campaign was a member of Obama’s National Latino Advisory Council .

Why does Medina want amnesty? Because, he says,

We reform the immigration law, it puts 12 million people on the path to citizenship and eventually voters.

And what kind of voters? The speaker pointed out that in the 2008 election, immigrants and Latinos “voted overwhelmingly for progressive candidates. Barack Obama got two out of every three voters that showed up.”

Thus Medina sees the great possibilities of an amnesty:

Can you imagine if we have, even the same ratio, two out of three? Can you imagine

8 million new voters that care about our issues and will be voting? We will create a governing coalition for the long term, not just for an election cycle.

Yes, Medina gets it. Why doesn’t the GOP leadership get it ?

She said this several weeks ago, but I never saw anybody else on VDARE.COM bring it up. You can hear it for yourself here and the segment to which I refer begins at 7:30.
Interviewed by Glenn Beck, and with the Statue of Liberty as a backdrop, Sarah was asked about illegal immigration but immediately started talking about legal immigration. Her answer sounds like the standard boilerplate that any mainstream politician of either party would deliver:

Let me address legal immigration. We need to continue to be so welcoming and inviting of those who are represented there by our Statue of Liberty. The immigrants, of course, built this country, and I think Republicans, conservatives, are at fault when we allow the other side to capture this immigration issue and try to turn this issue into something negative for Republicans. I think we need to recognize that, again, immigrants built this great country. There are rules to follow if you want to be part of this great country–let’s be sure people are following those rules–but let’s welcome this.

Has Sarah Palin ever seriously thought about immigration, the National Question and the demographic transformation facing our country? It sure doesn’t appear that she has.

California´s chief executive Arnold Schwarzenegger recently shared the off-the-wall proposal of housing illegal alien prisoners in Mexico .

According to the article entitled Governor Looks South of the Border for Prisons (San Francisco Chronicle, Wyatt Buchanan, January 26th, 2010):

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Monday that the state could save $1 billion by building and operating prisons in Mexico to house undocumented felons who are currently imprisoned in California. The governor floated the idea during an appearance at the Sacramento Press Club in response to a question about controlling state spending.

Here’s how Governor Schwarzenegger described it:

“We pay them to build the prisons down in Mexico and then we have those undocumented immigrants be down there in a prison. … And all this, it would be half the cost to build the prisons and half the cost to run the prisons,” Schwarzenegger said, predicting it would save the state $1 billion that could be spent on higher education.

Hold it right there! Isn’t Schwarzenegger admitting that illegal aliens put a financial strain on California?

Maybe the real solution would be simpler - keep illegal aliens out of California to begin with?

When my family and I lived in Mexico, we would usually travel to the U.S. for Christmas vacation. But now that my family and I have moved to the U.S. we have begun going to Mexico for Christmas vacation. In fact, we just got back from our trip .

In both this year´s Christmastime trip, and that of a year ago, it took us hours to cross the border from Mexico back into the U.S. There were just so many vehicles. These vehicles, most of which are pretty nice, belong to Mexicans resident in the U.S. who, like us, were visiting Mexico at Christmastime and were returning to the U.S.A . So it takes hours.

As we traveled through northern Mexico and across the border, I took a mental note of the U.S. license plates on northbound vehicles. I saw more Texas license plates than those belonging to any other U.S. state, but the Illinois plate contingent came in second place. There were other states represented, from the east coast to the west coast. Today’s Mexican Diaspora is no longer limited to the Southwest and the license plates verify that fact.

My grandfather Ephraim Wall recently passed away at the age of 95. I was hoping he would reach the century mark, but he didn’t quite make it. Plus, as long as my grandfather was alive, I couldn’t have been that old, right? Still, 95 years is a long time, and he was healthy and active for most of it.

My grandpa led an interesting life and was a remarkable person. Born in Oklahoma in 1914, he attended elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse and went on to earn his Doctor of Education. He was both a teacher and a farmer.

At different times in his career, he taught high school vocational agriculture, junior high and high school science, and physics, chemistry and physical science at the university level (including twelve years at a predominantly black university). He also spent a year as a traveling teacher with the National Science Foundation.

He was a farmer for most of his life, working on the same family farm which is still in the Wall family. (My dad inherited most of the property).

My grandfather was in his 60s when he took up the personal computer, which was new then anyway, proving that an old dog can learn new tricks. He used Apple computers, and my first computer was one of my grandpa’s old Apples.

My very first trip to Mexico was with my grandfather and my brother. And going to Mexico eventually led to my becoming a VDARE.COM columnist.

I’m glad that my two sons (ages 10 and 7) and their cousins were able to know their great-grandfather. It’s a real link with their heritage.

I don’t know if I’ll make it to the age of 95 or anywhere near it, Then again, I just wonder what the United States will be like if I get that old. The America of 1914 was quite different from the America of 2009.

My grandfather’s funeral was memorable. A lot of relatives, including some I hadn’t seen in years, attended. The oldest relative was Uncle Paul, my grandpa’s first cousin, also 95. Many citizens of my hometown attended.

The customary funeral procession was impressive. The local police force and the local Indian tribes police force blocked off traffic so a proper funeral procession could take us to the town cemetery.

In times of loss, there’s nothing like a funeral with relatives and people who have known your family for years. It drives home to me the value of Red State Rural Small Town America and its traditions. It’s a way of life. Like the rest of America, it’s worth defending.

Allan Wall has an interview scheduled on the Mancow Muller show, at 6:10 a.m. Central Time, on Friday, December 18th. Click here for the program’s stationfinder.

My son David is in the fifth-grade and is taking an American history class. I´m obviously interested in the subject matter and how the class is taught. The fifth-graders just completed a study of the 13 colonies.

I looked over his textbook, and though I wouldn’t have written it exactly the same way, it was pretty well-done. It did mention the Lost Colony, though it didn’t make mention of Virginia Dare.

David’s teacher is a believer in the importance of the colonial era in American history, which is good. She even got to go to Virginia on some sort of teachers’ trip, where she visited Williamsburg and Jamestown.

At the end of the colonial section, the teacher had the students give individual presentations related to colonial history. One option was to impersonate a colonial American. So David impersonated Isaac Wall, my great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather (and thus David’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather) who lived in Virginia in the early 1700s. David wore a period costume, discussed agricultural techniques of the era with the aid of a plowshare and sickle, and pointed out that Isaac Wall was the ancestor of contemporary 5th-grader David Wall. My wife, who attended, said David did well on his presentation, and I was glad to hear that.

I retired from the Army National Guard last year, and in one of my last drills, I had to submit to something that I’d never had to in all my 20 years in the Guard. I had to get checked for tattoos. No, not the traditional military tattoos that soldiers or sailors used to get - an anchor, an Airborne symbol, a heart with the girlfriend’s name. No, the tattoos they were looking were gang tattoos.

Because the U.S. military now has gang members in the ranks.

Well, guess what? Angela Kochera writes in“Mexican Cartels Looking to Exploit Gang Connections in U.S. Military” that

The ties between drug cartels and street gangs in Mexico are well-established.

But now, there are signs the cartels are looking to exploit gang connections in the U.S. military.

The article highlights the recent case of Michael Jackson Apodaca, a soldier who is “now facing capital murder charges for the contract killing of a drug cartel informant in El Paso.”

Apodaca’s grandfather, former border patrol agent David Jackson , thinks his grandson is innocent. Well, what do you expect ?

How bad is the gang problem in the U.S. military ? The article reports that

The Department of Defense doesn’t deny there are gang members in the military ranks, but stresses they’re a small percentage of the troops.

That reminded me of an old Monty Python sketch I’d seen years ago. So I looked it up and it does bear a certain resemblance . It’s the sketch in which

“Vice Admiral Sir John Cunningham” is being interviewed. (See video here). Sir John says

… may I take this opportunity of emphasizing that there is no cannibalism in the British Navy. Absolutely none, and when I say none, I mean there is a certain amount, more than we are prepared to admit, but all new ratings are warned that if they wake up in the morning and find any toothmarks at all anywhere on their bodies, they’re to tell me immediately so that I can immediately take every measure to hush the whole thing up.

Speaking of Monty Python, could Sarah Palin’s husband Todd be related to to Monty Python’s Michael Palin?

Do you suppose that the recent Major Hasan jihad attack at Ft. Hood has prompted our military to reconsider its promotion of diversity, as least as far as a certain religion is concerned? Of course not. Our PC military has not been dissuaded from the active recruitment of Muslims, including non-citizens, into our armed forces.

An article in USA Today reports on the military’s Muslim recruitment emphasis. Besides the usual multicultural rhetoric, some of the justifications given are to “add troops who speak Arabic and understand Middle Eastern culture…” [Fort Hood Ups Challenge to Recruit Muslim, Arab Troops,  by Kathleen Gray and Donna Leinwand, December 10, 2009]

The article says the Army actually has two programs which recruit Middle Easterners, including many Muslims. One is the recruitment of native speakers of Arabic, Pashto, Dari and Farsi, so they can be interpreters. Another program actually “targets non-citizens who have been in the U.S. at least two years and have special language and cultural skills from the Middle East, China and Korea…” That particular program is set to expire at the end of this month, but what do you want to bet it gets renewed?

As far as the languages go, if we need more interpreters, why can’t the military just train more at its already existing Defense Language Institute? When I was deployed to Iraq I was able to use the rudimentary level of Arabic I had acquired, and I wasn’t even officially trained in the language by the military. Actually no human language is inscrutable and they all can be acquired with work (and in the military with extra bonus money).

In fact, a good case can be made for our public school students to study a wider variety of languages, not just Spanish, which is now the #1 foreign language being taught in our schools. American students ought to be exposed to a variety of foreign languages; they all shouldn’t be required to learn Spanish. And I say that despite the fact that as a new Spanish teacher myself, high demand for Spanish is great job security for me!