?Quíen es estranjero ilegal?

Carlos de Borbón observes from his pedestal in the Presidio Real de Santa Barbara—

While royally touring my Alta California I read Señor Alcorn's rant in the Santa Barbara Noticias-Prensa against migrants crossing from Mexico—"illegal aliens." At San Diego I revisited my first Royal Presidio, founded in 1769 when my Captain de Portolá and Padre Serra marched the Sacred Expedition colonists up from Mexico. In 1776 Captain de Anza sucessfully marched a couple hundred colonists gathered from the Sonoran coast into Arizona and then across the deserts and mountains to San Francisco, anticipating a similar colony sent to Los Angeles.

Excepting a few Spanish leaders, these Mexican settlers were mestijos, Indians with a bit of Spanish intermarriage. These aboriginals of America Septentrionalis have wandered throughout the continent for thousands of years. If you take my Camino Real from Santa Barbara to the Pueblo de los Ángeles you will pass into the one-time lands of the Gabrieliño, whose tongue was akin to that of the Aztecs of Central Mexico. The arbitrary border that rewarded the U.S. aggression of the Mexican War has not, and it will, not stop migration toward opportunity.

The pathetic Anglo nativism such as Señor Alcorn (with whom we do not always disagree) and others much more odious display makes one wonder what boat the ancestors come over on, and what Indians met them with welcome gifts and flowery words, these first of the "illegal aliens" to today's United States.

Yo el Rey