America 2.0: The Threat of Neotribalism

Collin Woodward wrote The American Nations,which was reviewed in the Washington Post last year. He divides the country (plus Canada and adjacent bits of Mexico) into eleven regions (he places South Florida outside of our country) based on their history, demographics and politics. I have a map but I can't get it in a format to post here.

Having spent most of my life in "El Norte" (southern Arizona and California, connected to the northern region of Mexico), I very much resonate with his sloganeer's description of the place and its culture: "It resembles Cold War Germany: one people divided by politics and a large wall."

• New Netherland. The New York City metropolitan region. A Dutch-founded global trading society, highly tolerant of ethnic and religious diversity, committed to freedom of inquiry and conscience.
• Yankeedom. New England and New York state, spreading to Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Founded by Puritans who sought to create a more godly society on Earth through social engineering and public institutions. Commited to protecting freedom of the community, even if it requires individual self-denial.
• The Midlands. Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa; northern Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri; bits of Maryland and Delaware; New Jersey; the urban south of Manitoba and Ontario; eastern Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas; southwestern tendril into bits of Oklahoma, Colorado, Texas and New Mexico. Eventually Yankeedom spread into much of this area. Founded by English Quakers and characterized by ethnic and religious pluralism. The great “swing region” believes that society should serve the ordinary people, but is politically ambivalent and suspicious of government intrusion.
• Tidewater. The coastal regions of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina. Founded by younger sons of English gentry as an aristocratic manorial society. High respect for authority and religion, low value on equality and wide public engagement in politics. The most powerful “nation” in the 18th century, now retreating before an expanding Midlands and the federal enclaves around Washington and Hampton Roads.
• Greater Appalachia. The hilly region from southern Pennsylvania through southern Illinois, southwest to Texas, including much of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri and North Carolina, all of Virginia and West Virginia, bits of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Kansas. Founded by immigrants from the war-ravaged borderlands of Scotland and northern Ireland and England, ferociously committed to individual liberty and personal sovereignty. Mostly fought with the Union in the Civil War, but aligned with the Deep South since Reconstruction.
• Deep South. Almost all of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, parts of Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee. Founded by Barbados planters as a West Indies-style slave society modeled on the slaveholding republics of antiquity in which only a small elite enjoyed the privilege of democracy. Authoritarian and organized around a racial caste system, it tolerates wide differences in wealth and opportunity. Champions rollbacks of federal powers, social programs, taxes, and labor and environmental regulations. Fought with the Confederacy against its archenemy, Yankeedom.
• New France. Quebec and southeastern Louisiana. Egalitarian, consensus-driven. Mixes traditions of ancient regime of northern French peasantry and Native Americans of St. Lawrence region.
• El Norte. Southern California and Arizona, much of New Mexico and western Texas, the border states of Mexico. The northern borderlands of Spain’s American empire, always a place apart from both the rest of the USA and central Mexico. Rapidly growing in strength and influence. It resembles Cold War Germany: one people divided by politics and a large wall.
• Left Coast. The coastal regions of California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. Colonized by Yankee traders and missionaries and farmers and frontiersmen from Greater Appalachia, combines utopianism and faith in public institutions with a culture of fulfillment and individual discovery. Closest ally of Yankeedom.
• Far West. The non-coastal, non-hispanic west. Run as a resource colony by external corporations and the federal government, it has in turn been hostile to each. Individualistic, but dependent on infrastructure built and maintained by its oppressors. Populist in the 1940s, but opposed to the federal government today.
• First Nation. The northern regions of Canada. Controlled by indigenous people with their culture largely intact. Working to reclaim sovereignty and political power.
• * South Florida. An extension of the Spanish Caribbean region, a maritime culture historically hubbed in the old imperial port of Havana. Outside the scope of this project, not counted as one of the American “nations.”

 

I've never been able to move or copy a screen shot into my SciForums composition panel.

This is a Macintosh, that may have something to do with it. Maybe I'll try it at the office on my Windows box.

 

The map doesn't show the East Side. That's where all the great Mexican and Chinese places are! Or at least where they were fifteen years ago when we still lived there.

Last time we went back it seemed like all the great Jewish places in the San Fernando Valley had become either Korean or Arabic.

And all the signs in the entire city of Glendale were in Armenian.

 

Well Mexico is a big country and there are many different styles of "Mexican food." In L.A. and southern Arizona you're in El Norte, as Woodward calls it, an almost integral part of Mexico (except for that pesky large wall) contiguous with its northwestern states. So we have the cuisines of Sonora and Baja California, which are built around pork and seafood.

Texas is right across the border from the cattle-ranch states, Chihuahua and Coahuila, the only place in Mexico where beef is affordable, so their cuisine is built around beef. That's why chile con carne is called Tex-Mex.

You go down the Gulf coast toward Veracruz and you get more seafood, although a much different menu from the Pacific seafood of Sonora, Baja California, Sinaloa, Jalisco, etc.

And then there are places where cabrito, goat meat, is the delicacy.

Corn and wheat flour tortillas are the Mexican staple starch, but they're not used the same everywhere. There are lots of places where people don't have any idea how to fold a burrito.

China is a huge country and every region, every district, every family has its own favorite recipe for chow mein. It's not even defined the same way in different restaurants in the USA. In Cantonese cooking (the Hong Kong region, influenced by British culture), chow mein is crispy fried noodles and lo mein is soft steamed noodles. But in some Chinese-American restaurants their chow mein (chao mien in Mandarin) noodles are soft.

When I was a kid, Hong-Kong style Cantonese food was the only Chinese food in America. Today we have Sichuan, Hunan, Fujian, Shanghai and Beijing style restaurants as well.

And China has been a cosmopolitan country for thousands of years, trading culture with its neighbors. Since it opened up after Mao's death, its cuisine has resumed absorbing foreign influences, and there are dishes on Chinese menus (both in China and here) that no one ever heard of in the 1950s.

I had a Chinese girlfriend from Sichuan in the early 1970s, and her family ran a restaurant. I was introduced to an entire new spectrum of Chinese cuisine. And I swear their main ingredient is chile peppers, at least it always felt like it. Hunan-style restaurants have most of the same dishes on their menus, but they just don't taste the same.

As I said, it's full of beef instead of pork. And if you're ordering seafood it's warm-water Gulf species, not cold-water Pacific species.

(The Coriolis force spins water clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, so our Atlantic and Gulf coasts are warmed by tropical water coming north, whereas the American and Mexican Pacific coast is cooled by arctic water from Alaska.)

 

I spent eight miserable years in that godforsaken shit-hole when I was a kid. It should be illegal to force children to live in a place where the temperature rises above 95F/35C more than once or twice a year!

And that "dry heat" thing? That's just a joke they made up to tell out-of-towners. It sucks the moisture out of your body and leaves you feeling like a dead leaf.

I suppose it might be bearable now that all houses and cars have air conditioning, but 60 years ago none of them did. It was a prison sentence. When I was accepted by a university in L.A. (hot as that place is!), I felt like I'd been pardoned from Death Row.

I have a couple of high school buddies who still live there, and they evacuate from May to October. One of them actually spends the summer in Minneapolis, which is so hot they built giant Habitrails for people to walk in downtown, because it's still nicer than Tucson and it's where his wife's family lives. The other one goes to Portland and lives it up.

The last time I was there was 45 years ago. It was already 95 in April!