''The best Indian in a dead Indian.'' ''The best Negro is the Negro slave.'' ''The yellow peril.'' ``The red menace.''

The puritanism that is found at the base of the WASP culture is manifested every so often with attractive colors. To the ones I mention above can now be added ``The brown danger.''

Its proponent is Samuel P. Huntington, a tireless crier of alarms about the dangers that ''the other one'' represents to the founding soul -- white, Protestant and Anglo-Saxon -- of the United States. The fact that an indigenous ''America'' existed (and exists, because Huntington identifies the United States with the name of an entire continent) before the European colonization is of no concern to him. The added fact that before Anglo-America there was a French ''America'' (Louisiana) and even a Russian one (Alaska) is of no interest to him.

The cause of his concern is Hispanic America, the America of Rubén Darío, the one that speaks Spanish and believes in God. This is the indispensable danger for a nation that, in order to exist, requires an identifiable external danger. Moby Dick, the white whale, is the symbol of this attitude, which fortunately is not shared by all Americans, including John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the North American nation, who warned his country not to ``go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.''

In his book The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington found his necessary external monster (after the USSR and ''the red menace'' had disappeared) in an Islam willing to assault the frontiers of the West, surpassing the prowesses of Saladin, the sultan who seized Jerusalem in 1187, as he, Huntington, surpassed the Christian campaign of Richard the Lionhearted in the Holy Land five years later.

The anti-Islamic campaign of Huntington the Lionhearted showed his heart to be profoundly racist and also profoundly ignorant of the true Kulturkampf within the Islamic world. Islam is not preparing to invade the West. Islam is living, from Algeria to Iran, its own cultural and political combat between Islamic conservatives and liberals. It is a vertical combat, in depth; not horizontal, in breadth.

Huntington's new crusade is directed against Mexico and the Mexicans who live, work and enrich the nation up North. To Huntington, Mexicans don't live, they invade; they don't work, they exploit; and they don't enrich, they impoverish, because poverty is within their very nature. All this, added to the number of Mexicans and Latin Americans in the United States, would constitute a threat to the culture that, in Huntington's opinion, does dare speak its name: the Protestant, English-speaking, white-race Anglo-America.

Are the Mexicans invading the country? No, they're obeying the laws of the labor market. There is a Mexican labor offer because there is a U.S. labor demand. If someday full employment came into existence in Mexico, the United States would have to find in another country the cheap manual labor for jobs that the whites, Saxons and Protestants -- in Huntington's words -- don't want to do because they have ascended to higher levels of employment, because they grow old, because the U.S. economy passes from the industrial era to the post-industrial, technological and informational era.

Are the Mexicans exploiting the United States? According to Huntington -- as he himself exploits California's infamous Proposition 187, which aimed to exclude the children of immigrants from education and their parents from all medical and social benefits -- Mexicans constitute an unfair burden for the economy of the North: They receive more than they give.

That's not true. California spends $1 billion per year to educate the children of immigrants. But if it didn't -- pay attention, Schwarzenegger -- the state would lose $16 billion per year in federal aid to education. And Mexican migrant workers pay $29 billion more in taxes, every year, than what they receive in services.

The Mexican immigrant, far from being the impoverishing ballast that Huntington assumes him to be, creates wealth not only at the lowest level but also at the highest. At the humblest labor level, his expulsion would mean ruination for the U.S. economy. John Kenneth Galbraith (the North American Huntington can never be) writes: ``If all undocumented people in the U.S. were expelled, the effect on the North American economy . . . would be almost disastrous. . . . Fruits and vegetables in Florida, Texas and California would not be harvested. The price of food would skyrocket. The Mexicans want to come to the U.S., they are needed and add visibly to our well-being.''

At the highest labor level, the Hispanic migrant -- says Gregory Rodríguez of Pepperdine University -- has the highest number of wage earners per family of all ethnic groups and enjoys the greatest family cohesion. The result is that, although the father arrives here barefoot and wetback, the descendant of immigrants achieves levels of income comparable to those of the Asian or Caucasian worker. By the second and third generation, 55 percent of all Hispanics own their homes, compared with 71 percent of whites and 44 percent of blacks.

Let me add to the data provided by Rodríguez that just in Los Angeles County the number of businesses created by Hispanic migrants leaped from 57,000 in 1987 to 210,000 last year. That the purchasing power of Hispanics has increased by 65 percent since 1990. And that the Hispanic American economy in the U.S. generates almost $400 billion. That's more than Mexico's gross domestic product. Do we exploit or contribute, Mr. Huntington?

According to Huntington, the number and habits of Mexican migrants will end up balkanizing the United States. North American unity has absorbed the European immigrant (including Jews and Arabs, not mentioned selectively by Huntington) because the immigrant of old -- like Chaplin in the movie by that name -- came from Europe, crossed the ocean and, because he was white and Christian (what about the Jews, the Arabs and now the Vietnamese, the Koreans, the Chinese, the Japanese?), he immediately assimilated into the Anglo-Saxon culture and forgot his native language and customs, something that must come as a surprise to the Italians in The Godfather and the Central Europeans in The Deer Hunter.

No. Only we Mexicans and Hispanics in general are the separatists, the conspirators who want to create a separate, Spanish-speaking nation, the soldiers in a reconquest of the territories lost in the war of 1848.

If we flipped this omelet, we'd find that the most widely spoken Western language is English. Does Huntington believe that this fact bespeaks a silent North American invasion of the entire world? Would we Mexicans, Chileans, French, Egyptians, Japanese and Indians be justified in forbidding the use of English in our respective countries? To stigmatize the Castilian tongue as a factor of a practically subversive schism reveals, more than anything else, the racist and truly divisive and provocative animus of Huntington.

To speak a second or third or fourth language is a sign of culture throughout the world, except, it seems, in the monolingual Eden Huntington has invented. To impose the requirement of a second language (as happens in Mexico or France) would reduce the Satanic effects Huntington attributes to the language of Cervantes.

Spanish-speakers in the United States do not form impermeable or aggressive blocs. They adapt quickly to English and sometimes retain Spanish, enriching the accepted multiethnic and multicultural nature of the country. In any case, monolingualism is a curable disease. Many of us Latin Americans speak English without fear of contagion. Huntington presents the United States as a giant that trembles under the onslaught of Spanish. It's the tactic of instilling the fear of ''the other one,'' which was so favored by the fascist mind.

No, Mexicans and Hispanics in general contribute to U.S. wealth, give more than they receive, wish to integrate into the North American nation and attenuate the cultural isolationism that has led governments in Washington to so many international disasters. They also propose a political diversification to which Afro-Americans and ''native'' Americans, Irish and Poles, Russians and Italians, Swedes and Germans, Arabs and Jews have contributed and continue to contribute.

Huntington updates an old anti-Mexican racism I knew all too well as a young man studying in the U.S. capital. The Volume Library, a one-volume encyclopedia published in 1928 in New York, said verbatim: ''One of the reasons for Mexico's poverty is the predominance of an inferior race.'' Also, ''No dogs or Mexicans allowed,'' proclaimed signs outside numerous Texas restaurants in the 1930s. Today, the Latin voter is courted in poorly spoken Spanish by many candidates, among them Al Gore and George W. Bush in the last election. It's a vote-getting tactic (like Bush's immigration proposal some weeks ago).

To us Mexicans, Spaniards and Hispanic Americans, our language is a reason for pride and unity. The fact is that 500 million men and women throughout the world speak it. But it is not a factor of fear or threat. While Huntington fears a Hispanic balkanization and alleges that Latin America has minimal aptitude for democratic government and economic development, we have coexisted without nationalistic separatism since the dawn of independence.

Perhaps we're united by what Huntington sees as a source of disunity: the multiculturalism of the Castilian tongue. We Hispanic Americans are Indo-Europeans and Afro-Americans, as well as Spanish-speakers. And we descend from a nation, Spain, that would be incomprehensible were it not for its racial and linguistic multiplicity, going back to the Celts, the Iberians, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Arabs, the Jews and the Goths. We speak a tongue with Celt-Iberian roots that later became Latin, was enriched with a large portion of Arab words and was fixed by the Jews in the 13th century court of Alfonso the Wise.

With all this, we win, not lose. The loser is Huntington, isolated in his imaginary parcel of racist purity -- English-speaking, white and Protestant -- although his generosity extends it graciously to ''Christianity.'' Because surely Israel and Islam are dangers as reprehensible as Mexico, Hispanic America and, by extension, today's Spain itself, guilty -- according to Huntington -- of undesirable incursions into the ancient territories of the Crown.

An idle question: Which will be Captain Ahab Huntington's next Moby Dick?

Carlos Fuentes is a Mexican novelist and critic.

© 2004 The Miami Herald and wire service sources

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