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Surrounded by Mexican businesses, the Italian American Laborers Social Club is now calling itself "ALAMO." Within the last decade, there has been a great influx of Mexicans into Philadelphia. Like previous immigrants, including the Vietnamese and Chinese, they gravitate towards the Italian Market. Where else can you buy food so cheap, tripes, goat meat or even a live chicken? Long standing Italian stores are benefitting from many new Mexican customers, but that hasn't prevented old farts at the Italian American Social Club from lamenting the "Mexican invasion." "They're going to turn this place into Chihuahua," I overheard on the street.

The paradox about Italian-American bigotry is that it is mostly talk. They are, in fact, extremely tolerant. I speak from having lived in the Italian Market neighborhood for a decade altogether. I also spent two years in Italy. My landlord is Italian. Philadelphia' Italian Market is the most racially mixed part of town. It is also, not uncoincidentally, the most lively. Splitting the intake, Mexican hairdressers and barbers are working inside Chinese-American owned stores, which now sport "Se Habla Espanol" in their windows. Italian-American butchers advetise "chorizo."

The Mexicans are not just reviving the Italian Market, they're making the neighborhood safer. Before, this block would be mostly empty after dark, for example. There is no evidence of Mexican gangs as yet, no tattoed and bandana wearing cholos ambling down the sidewalk, though a building on my block is likely a Mexican whorehouse, judging from the traffic that goes in there.

You can remember the Alamo, or you can recall Matamoros. In any case, most Americans haven't thought too deeply about why so many Mexicans are here. A while back, I wrote:

What’s so bad about NAFTA anyway? Isn’t that “free trade”? It meant we got to dump our subsidized corn onto the Mexican market, bankrupting their farmers, forcing many to sweat inside American owned maquilladoras along the border, until these shut down, leading a bunch to cross into the U.S., where they became the main workforce of our housing bubble. This influx hurt working Americans, of course, including a schmuck like me who house painted for nine years, but it was great for business, and that’s all that mattered from the perspective of Washington and Wall Street.

And why do we subsidize corn? Because it benefits Coke, Pepsi, McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken, etc. Our livestock are stuffed with almost nothing but corn and corn syrup has become ubiquitous in this land of 30% obesity, highest in the known and probably unknown universe. Maize welfare also fattens Monsanto, maker of Agent Orange, PCBs and rBGH growth hormones, among other toxic goodies.

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