Commentary: What Steve Hilton doesn't get about Xavier Becerra's parents

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Set us as preferred My maternal grandmother, Marcela Miranda, was born in Arizona’s copper country in 1914 and lived in the United States until she was about 7.She was part of a generation whose parents were from the rancho of El Cargadero, Zacatecas, and started families in el Norte while waiting out the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s and the Cristero Revolt in the 1920s.

Many returned to their home village when things calmed down.After growing up in Mexico, my grandmother moved to California with my grandfather and their children in the 1960s.Only the American government considered her a native-born U.S.

citizen, while society dismissed her as a Mexican.We grandchildren always considered our Mama Chela a doña — a grand Mexican dame who never wore pants and frequently covered her hair with a veil out of modesty.

All she remembered from her early childhood in Arizona were snippets of the nursery rhymes “Did You Ever See a Lassie?” and “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.”The El Cargadero diaspora, which mostly settled in Anaheim, saw our forebears’ American birth as a stroke of provenance allowing them to legally enter the U.S.and give their progeny a head start that other Mexicans could only dream of.

It’s a story I’ve repeatedly told over my decades-long journalism career, and no one has yet challenged my description of my grandmother as an immigrant.If they did, I’d think they had too much time on their hands, or maybe that they were a wackjob contrarian.Cue Steve Hilton.California Democrat Xavier Becerra, the frontrunner to become the state’s next governor, often invokes the story of his parents’ humble beginnings as immigrants from Mexico who, through hard work, built happy and productive lives in California.

The Republican candidate for California governor is trying to make a scandal out of hi...