The Taco Truck DelusionSix months in Mexico taught me what a Latin American future for the USA really entails.
Christopher Brunet
Apr 17, 2023
Five years ago, a 20-year-old college student in Iowa named Mollie Tibbetts vanished while jogging. Police soon found her decomposing body in a cornfield, stabbed to death. A 24-year-old illegal farmhand from Mexico was convicted for the murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole, even though his trial was moved from where the murder occurred in Poweshiek County (3 percent Hispanic) to nearby Woodbury Count (19 percent Hispanic) to provide him with a more sympathetic jury.
Mollie’s father went out of his way to deny any racial angle to the murder, famously maintaining that Hispanics are “Iowans with better food.” Mollie’s father fell for the taco truck meme, the belief that open borders will just mean more taco trucks and otherwise no major changes to the American quality of life.
The problem with the taco truck meme is that it isn’t true. I just spent six months living in Mexico. It’s a failed state. The country is ranked number one in the OECD for child abuse, number one in the world for dead journalists, and number four in the world for murder. It is also ranked number three in the world for animal abuse, which, judging from my experience, is no surprise.
Mexico is bursting at the seams with dogs. These dogs are not family members. They are alarm systems, beasts of burden to be used, abused, and thrown away. Locals will sometimes say, “They are working dogs,” but this is not a good enough reason to chain your dog to your roof and neglect it for years. Walking down streets full of starving, chained-up dogs exposes one to a constant stream of psychic pain much like that which famously drove Friedrich Nietzsche insane. As the story goes, one day in 1889, Nietzsche saw a horse beaten to death in the streets of Turin. He lost his mind, had a mental breakdown in the street, and never wrote again. (Of course, Nietzsche may have actually lost his mind because untreated syphilis ate his brain.)
* * *
Travel blogger Jake Nomada affectionately refers to the “lack of common sense found in many areas throughout the region” as “the Latin Hammer.” Some examples he lists include getting stuck in traffic for hours because road workers were on a siesta break, getting scammed by landlords, and bribing narcos.
For me, the Latin Hammer manifested itself in power outages, ant infestations, and a lack of hot water. I lived in three different AirBnBs; at each one I had to wait for several hours to check in because the host forgot about me. My early attempts at ordering Amazon failed, with packages usually failing to arrive at all, so I quickly abandoned e-commerce altogether.
* * *
Auguste Comte apocryphally said, “Demography is destiny.” In 2022, illegal crossings at the Mexican border broke the previous annual record by over 1 million. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, “The Hispanic population is expected to reach about 106 million in 2050, about double what it is today.” America’s destiny, then, is barbed wire—or, just as often, crushed beer bottles—adorning every fence in every neighborhood.
* * *
Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-taco-truck-delusion/
