"Mi Casa Es Su Casa" (1981)

Fernandomania, Ronald Reagan, and "a nation of immigrants."

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I.

In June of 1981, amid the the fever pitch of a cultural phenomenon, a 20-year-old Mexican pitcher named Fernando Valenzuela flew to Washington, D.C., to attend a luncheon featuring the president of the United States. Valenzuela didn’t speak much English, but it didn’t really matter. He had been invited to the White House because this was an event honoring the Mexican president, Jose Lopez Portillo, at the conclusion of talks between Portillo and Ronald Reagan. And at that moment, Valenzuela was the most popular Mexican immigrant in the United States. Alexander Haig, the secretary of state, saw Valenzuela, draped an arm around him, and declared himself “an admirer of this man.”

There was a beauteous art to the way he pitched, to the way he corkscrewed his considerable midsection, to the way he cast his eyes skyward as if casting about for evidence of a higher power, to the way his screwball moved in ways that seemed almost unnatural. It didn’t matter what he said or didn’t say; it didn’t matter if you cared little about the Dodgers, or even if you cared little about baseball. Fernandomania was real; Fernando Valenzuela, who died this week at age 63, was an overwhelmingly charismatic crossover figure, by sheer virtue of his mechanics. And that made him an ambassador for a growing population of Mexican-Americans who had long subsisted in the shadows of American politics.

A couple of days after that luncheon, Reagan and Portillo concluded their talks on a hopeful note. Portillo was hoping to alter Mexico’s relationship with the United States, particularly when it came to immigration; Reagan, who had witnessed the broad impact of immigration while serving as governor of California, told Portillo. “mi casa es su casa.” His administration vowed to work with Portillo on a revised immigration process for Mexicans entering the United States. A month later, Reagan delivered a statement on immigration that feels downright progressive in retrospect.

“Our nation is a nation of immigrants,” Reagan began. “More than any other country, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands. No free and prosperous nation can by itself accommodate all those who seek a better life or flee persecution. We must share this responsibility with other countries.”

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II.

It took five years, but in 1986—the same year Valenzuela won 21 games for the Dodgers and finished second in the Cy Young Award voting—Reagan worked with Congress to pass a sweeping immigration reform bill that granted amnesty to nearly three million people who were in the country illegally.

It’s not as if Valenzuela made this happen single-handedly by his sheer presence at that 1981 luncheon; in fact, much of the credit is due to Reagan, who viewed the issue of immigration differently than many members of his own party had in the decades before he came to power. But maybe the sheer joy of Fernandomania nudged the country in the direction Reagan hoped to take them; maybe, as The Los Angeles Times speculates in this video, his magnetic presence was enough to humanize the issue.

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III.

At some point over the course of Valenzuela’s lifetime, the conversation about immigration changed. A large segment of the country, many of whom had once voted for Reagan, reverted to their xenophobic past. And at a moment when the specter of mass deportation is being utilized as a political cudgel, it is worth noting that Reagan himself most likely would have been repelled by the precepts of the party that has come to lionize him. It makes you realize, at this moment, just how far that party has strayed from its own history.

“It was in Ronald Reagan's bones -- it was part of his understanding of America -- that the country was fundamentally open to those who wanted to join us here,” one of Reagan’s speechwriters, Peter Robinson, told NPR in 2010. “You couldn't live in California ... without encountering over and over and over again good, hard-working, decent people -- clearly recent arrivals from Mexico.”

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