If we were less afraid of one another, we would recognize that the growing interest in politics among Latinos and Asians -- evident in California's recent campaign -- is the key to our reconciliation, not the obstacle to it. PNS editor Richard Rodriguez, author of "Days of Obligation" writes for the Los Angeles Times Sunday Opinion section, Harper's and other publications and is a regular essayist on PBS's "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer."

SAN FRANCISCO -- After Tuesday's primary, political pundits are saying that Californians voted for the past -- familiar political faces. But the most important people in California's primary were not running for office, did not even vote. They were standing off-stage. "They" are young, often immigrant, poor. And they are everywhere in California -- the future, el futuro.

A few weeks ago, at a debate among the four leading candidates for governor, the questions were more interesting than the answers. The answers seemed canned. The questions concerned California's coming majority: first-grade, assimilation, diversity.

Not coincidentally, it was Proposition 227, the initiative against bilingual education, that attracted the most attention and acrimony in the months leading up to the primary. Clearly, Californians were less worried about which candidate would occupy the governor's office in Sacramento than about uncharted cultural changes awaiting us in the new California.

In truth, there is nothing very "new" about today's multi-racial, multi-lingual, multi-cultural California. As U.S. territory, California was born from the collision of Latin and Anglo America. Then, after gold was discovered in 1848, desperate men from every part of the world -- from Australia, from China, from Peru, from Scotland -- rushed here. California became the crossroads of the world as men jostled in the mud for the chance to spin the wheel of fortune.

Today, one hundred and fifty years after gold was discovered, Californians say (often with foreboding) that we have "suddenly" become a world society. That notion would be unsettling enough for many Californians; what's worse is the realization that California has "suddenly" become the nation's largest Hispanic state, and Los Angeles a Latin American capitol.

This season, Hollywood's middle-aged adolescents are spinning tales of tumbling comets and Godzilla run amok in New York. California's political scientists speak, meanwhile, of a "sleeping giant" stirring, by which they mean Latinos are finally waking up to the implications of their numbers, finally voting.

The most telling moment of the governor's race came when the four major candidates stood before an assembly of Latino fat cats. Though everyone in the audience doubtless spoke English, political theater required a debate "in Spanish." What debate? The candidates merely rivaled each other with adjectives praising immigrants, praising Latinos. And then, each candidate, in English, denounced Proposition 227 (with simultaneous Spanish translation).

As it turned out, the vote in favor of Proposition 227 -- against bilingual education -- was the most lopsided in the California primary. While left-wing civil rights groups would now like you to believe that the vote was "anti-immigrant," exit polling suggests that a large number of Hispanics and an even larger number of Asians rejected bilingual education and were furious at the incompetence of the state's public school system.

The debate over bilingual education is destined to turn national. In coming months, Americans will publicly argue pedagogy: How best to teach an immigrant child? More privately, screeches will sound from the extremes on both sides -- garish neo-nationalism from one corner, xenophobia from the other.

The best word, the polite word, we use to talk about what is going on in California today is "diversity" -- a shrink-wrapped word, a meaningless word, a Canadian platitude. In Canada, multiculturalism is official government policy. The "mosaic" has become the favored metaphor (many colors, each separate, united to form a beautiful nation). Diversity is the flag flying over all.

Is California becoming Canadian? Our academics and politicians, certainly, sound the Canadian anthem with their praise of diversity. My suspicion, however, is that Mexico, not Canada, holds the key to California's future.

Mexico has no notion of multiculturalism. Mexico is a nation formed by the mestizaje. From its birth, despite violence and death, Mexico was created from a literal mixing of blood. Indian marrying European marrying African marrying Asian. Mexicans today speak of themselves as "la raza cosmica" -- it is their proudest boast.

Mexican California? A few weeks ago, editors at the "New Yorker" magazine put blond surfers on the cover of their "California issue." What anyone living west of the Hudson River knows is that a different California, more complex, is forming. Today's surfers in Huntington Beach are as likely to be Filipino as blond, and they are, in any case, dating Chinese. They are, in other words, modern mestizos.

The sleeping giant may, indeed, be stirring. If we were less afraid of monsters in the dark, we would recognize that the growing interest in politics by Latinos and Asians is the key to California's reconciliation, not an obstacle to it. Latinos and Asians no longer want to be left on the outside.

Racial and ethnic identity politics may, indeed, sound divisive, but its intent is social mobility. And the result of that mobility will be inclusion and mixture. Just as the Irish used identity politics in the nineteenth century to get inside the door, so today's Latinos will use their ethnic badge to get noticed in Sacramento and Washington.

The paradox is that Latinos as a political force will diminish as the U.S. becomes more culturally Latin American. Precisely as California becomes more Mexican (more mestizo), a distinct Latino political agenda will become impossible to sustain because we Californians will be too mixed, too inter-married to entertain separate racial/ethnic categories.

What will remain, finally, will be economic class. That's the issue no one ever raises, despite all the chatter about diversity. In California's debate over bilingual education, for example, no one ever troubled to distinguish between middle-class bilingualiam and the dilemma of the poor who need to learn how to use public language.

During the last weeks before the primary, journalists from all over the world stopped by my house with microphones and note pads. They came to ask me about the new California. German TV. Australian radio. Canada phoned to ask if southern California is becoming "the new Quebec."

I told them, whether or not there is bilingual education, children of poverty, whatever their race, will continue to receive inferior schooling. Poor whites will have more in common with poor Latinos in the new California than poor Latinos have with me. I told them that Spanish will remain the language of cheap labor. And I told them that my nephew, with his Scottish surname, goes to a fancy prep school where he learns three languages, Spanish among them. He looks Italian, dates blond, and calls himself (and truly is!) Latino in the new California.