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SAN DIEGO — Now that both sides have had their bouts of deflection and denial, we must untangle the mess at the U.S.-Mexico border.

As you know, a big part of that mess is that — before they could plead their case for refugee status — more than 2,500 children were separated with no plan to reunite them with their families.

America doesn’t play fair. It insists that those who seek refuge follow the rules — then it changes the rules. It tells the desperate to only come through designated ports of entry; but, when people do so, it turns them away.

We say that asylum-seekers must show “credible fear” of persecution, then we declare — as the Trump administration did recently — that victims of anti-LGBT abuse, domestic assault and gang violence need not apply.

Before liberals get all high and mighty, a similar crackdown occurred in 2014. The Obama administration made it harder for those seeking refugee status to get asylum by narrowing the definition of what it means for someone to face a “significant possibility” of persecution.

This much we learned in the last few weeks: Neither of the two major political parties cares about immigrants or refugees. They only care about their own interests.

After all, fear is a bipartisan affliction. Democrats are afraid that foreigners will take jobs from their union buddies. Republicans worry that newcomers — as Fox News host Tucker Carlson said last week — want to “change your country forever.” So everyone’s first instinct is to pull up the drawbridge, some more obnoxiously than others.

At least the media is paying attention to the evil done by government — if, that is, the evil is committed by Republicans. Contrary to what uninformed and dishonest reporters and anchors told you about how all this inhospitableness toward foreigners began two months ago, it was more like 200 years ago.

We should also have learned this: Families have been separated at the border, in one form or another, for the last 25 years under presidents from both parties. Consider how the federal government works. Presidents, senior staff, and Cabinet officers come and go. But career bureaucrats can stay in these agencies for life. So policies can remain the same no matter who occupies the Oval Office. There’s your deep state.

Another lesson: Border enforcement is not child’s play. The Department of Homeland Security is a blunt instrument that isn’t equipped, or inclined, to run daycare centers for children — whether unaccompanied or separated from their parents.

Yet the political extremes are no more equipped, or inclined, to engage in much personal introspection.

Liberals have a lot of emotion invested in the narrative they’ve created over the years that claims they’re better, more enlightened and more compassionate than conservatives; and if you challenge them on any of that by pointing out their indifference to the abuses committed just a few years ago by Barack Obama’s administration, they’ll come out swinging. They won’t defend immigrants or refugees, but they will defend their pride.

Meanwhile, conservatives are advancing a narrative of their own and hoping images of brown-skinned foreigners entering the United States will scare people into voting for the GOP in November. Instead of offering a solution to the current crisis, Trump simply accuses Democrats of wanting an “open border” and being eager to — as he recently told delegates at the Nevada Republican Party convention — “let MS-13 all over our country.”

The left needs to stop running away from recent history and accept that it only cares about refugees from Central America when it uses them as a club to bludgeon the right. Conservatives need to stop deflecting attention away from what Trump is doing wrong by pointing to earlier wrongs committed by Obama — which, by the way, those same conservatives said nothing about at the time.

Whether Obama supporters will ever admit it or not, the 44th president was a restrictionist who resorted to racist imagery (the word “gang-banger” for instance) to facilitate massive numbers of deportations — many without due process. On the border, he carried out many of the same abusive policies toward refugees as his successor, albeit more discreetly and less abrasively. He damaged our nation’s reputation as a haven for the persecuted and picked on. Those are the facts.

Obama failed at the border, but at least he seemed to aspire to what he promised the American people: hope and change. All the GOP offers, when uninvited guests arrive at the front door, is terror and nightmares.

SAN DIEGO — It’s not often that President Trump finds the courage to do the right thing when it comes to immigrants and refugees. In fact, he usually does the wrong thing — and sometimes for a ghastly reason.

That’s what happens when you spend your days pandering to the racist sliver of America worried that immigration threatens the culture, demographics, identity, and language of the United States.

So it is worth taking a moment to note Trump’s wise decision this week to sign an executive order that is supposed to keep immigrant families at the border together.

But how the Department of Homeland Security handles families — something it was never designed to do — isn’t the only thing that is broken. After a couple of weeks of hearing Americans talk about this issue, in ways that were either hyperbolic or hateful, it’s clear that the national conversation is also badly in need of repair.

Liberal Democrats have been on an emotional roller coaster. One minute, they’re weeping at images of families being divided in a way they never did four or five years ago when President Obama was the one doing the dividing. The next minute, they’re flying into a rage at the mere insinuation that they’re not as bighearted as they pretend to be, because where is the fun in being a liberal if you can’t feel morally superior to others?

Conservative Republicans have spent the last several days reflexively circling the wagons in defense of the Trump administration. They should simply say: “We support the president, and he has done a great job cutting unemployment, reconfiguring trade and handling North Korea. But he was wrong to separate immigrant families at the border.” Instead, their instinct is to downplay the negative impact of the policy.

Although the president made clear at the signing ceremony that his administration would continue its “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting everyone who crosses the border illegally, Trump also said he didn’t like seeing families separated.

“Anybody with a heart would feel this way,” he insisted

Of course, when it comes to brown-skinned foreigners trying to gain entry to the United States, there are many Trump supporters out there — camped out in the GOP’s “Tin Man” wing — who don’t have hearts. They’re too busy being afraid of immigrants, or looking down on them, to muster any compassion.

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter accused the toddlers who cried for their mommies of being “child actors,” while Fox News host Laura Ingraham glibly described the horror these kids were put through as being like “summer camp.”

And when it comes to immigrants and refugees, there are also more than a few right-wingers — in the Republican Party’s “Scarecrow” wing — who don’t have a brain. Even with polls showing up to two-thirds of Americans opposing the idea of separating refugee families at the border, some conservatives tried to defend this indefensible policy of government-orchestrated kidnapping by doing something that wasn’t smart: blaming the parents for putting their kids at risk.

Here’s a fact of life: Desperate parents do desperate things. During the Cold War, when parents in East Germany helped their children cross the Berlin Wall so that they could live free even if it meant never seeing them again, was that a form of child abuse? I don’t think so. In fact, even 60 years later, we applaud their sacrifice and marvel at their strength.

Maybe those mothers from Central America need a better publicist so they can tell (BEG ITAL)their(END ITAL) story.

Or maybe we just shouldn’t judge people until we’ve carried on our shoulders the burden they must carry on theirs.

Still, even as he signed the executive order to keep families together, Trump vowed to “maintain toughness” so that the country is not “overrun by people, by crime, by all of the things that we don’t stand for, that we don’t want.”

If we’re making a list of things Americans don’t stand for and don’t want, I would include a few lines about the dysfunctional way in which we talk about a crisis like this: Everyone covers their backside, and no one admits fault. It’s not enough to attack the other camp, you’ve got to portray your side as pure and innocent of any wrongdoing. It’s a dishonest mess.

Unfortunately, our defective national dialogue cannot be fixed with the stroke of a pen.

— Ruben Navarrette’s email address is ruben@rubennavarrette.com. His daily podcast, “Navarrette Nation,” is available through every podcast app.

(c) 2018, The Washington Post Writers Group

Who would have guessed that Mexico — with its persistent racism against dark-skinned indios and its habit of electing light-skinned presidents — would turn for its salvation to a political party named Morena?

The word refers to a dark-skinned woman, evoking images of the beloved patron saint of Mexico — the Virgen de Guadalupe.

The acronym refers to El Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (The National Regeneration Movement), which has — in just four years — matured into Mexico’s most exciting political party.

In June 2017, in the gubernatorial election in the state of Mexico — home to one-fifth of the Mexican electorate and Mexico City — Morena candidate Delfina Gomez came in a close second.

Now, Morena is the favorite to win the whole enchilada — the presidential election on July 1. The candidate is also its founder and top promoter — Andrés Manuel López Obrador better known as “AMLO” to journalists and voters alike.

An unapologetic leftist who ran for president twice unsuccessfully — in 2006 and 2012 — under the banner of the radical Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), López Obrador has shrewdly rebranded himself as a pro-Mexican nationalist. He used to be considered a joke, a clown who amused the elite ruling class of Mexico more than frightened them. He liked stunts. After his loss in 2008, AMLO refused to concede and set up a symbolic shadow government complete with phony cabinet members.

But with the excitement that Morena is stirring amongst the Mexican people, and polls showing AMLO in first place, no one is laughing. The ultra-wealthy are afraid that he might levy extra taxes on the rich, or even confiscate property. But part of the middle class seems to be onboard because it wants change.

This could be the Morena moment. Mexican voters seem to be in a mood to gamble. A lot of them are disgusted with both major parties — the National Action Party (PAN), which started a drug war that killed more than 100,000 people, and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) whose corruption looted the country for most of the 20th century, and which produced the failed presidency of Enrique Pena Nieto. Many people seem willing to take a chance, and Morena could be the beneficiary.

And what about López Obrador’s two previous defeats? Voters don’t care. After a string of failed presidents who had experience, connections and pedigrees, being a career politician has gone from asset to liability.

Any of this sound familiar?

How about this? AMLO is also — in a sense — making the United States into a convenient villain and promising to make Mexico great again.

You got it. López Obrador is the Mexican Donald Trump. He has many of the same gifts, and a similar appeal to Mexicans who feel left behind — and picked on by their neighbor.

But AMLO is also the anti-Trump to those Mexicans who are tired of being the U.S. president’s piñata on issues ranging from NAFTA and drugs to immigration and crime.

In an op-ed last year for The Washington Post, AMLO bashed Trump as a propagandist who took advantage of “the frustrations of sectors of U.S. society burdened by unemployment, poverty and creaky, inefficient public institutions.” As López Obrador saw it, Trump did this to “deflect attention from those very real problems and focus instead on imaginary enemies.” He accused Trump of cynically “promoting racial hatred, mass paranoia and an imperial arrogance that is obsolete in today’s world.”

Americans should have known this storm was brewing south of the border. When Trump speaks to white voters in Ohio, Wisconsin, or Michigan — people who watched factories relocate to Mexico and now fear losing jobs to Mexican workers — he often portrays Mexicans as takers and predators.

Even from thousands of miles away, Mexicans hear those dog whistles loud and clear. They responded by making Trump persona non grata in Mexico. And now they could double down on their anger by electing a Trump of their own.

For Mexicans who want to push back against the Americans, and fight demagoguery with demagoguery, AMLO could be the vehicle to do just that.

But this latest Mexican revolution isn’t all about Trump.

López Obrador is also demanding that Mexico create more jobs and improve offerings so that its citizens no longer have to flee to the United States. “To do this,” he wrote in his op-ed, “Mexico must restart economic growth, create jobs and improve general living conditions. This means taking steps to reenergize agricultural production, boost the productive sectors and raise wages if we hope to make a dent in the migrant flow.”

This would be an improvement over Mexico’s current economic plan, which revolves around oil, tourism, and remittances from expatriates in the United States. And that’s about it.

AMLO, eh? Hang on tight, folks. This could be yuuuge.

Ruben Navarrette, a contributing editor to Angelus News, is a syndicated columnist with The Washington Post Writers Group, a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a Daily Beast columnist, author of “A Darker Shade of Crimson: Odyssey of a Harvard Chicano,” and host of the podcast “Navarrette Nation.”

SAN DIEGO — In the words attributed to the great Panamanian boxer Roberto Duran: “No mas!” I can’t take it anymore.

Even as a Mexican-American “Never Trumper” who has been attacked for three decades by racists and restrictionists for defending illegal immigrants, I’ve had my fill of the recent surge of convenient and politically driven outrage over the policy of separating families.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, as many as 2,342 children were taken into custody from May 5 to June 9.

It’s tempting to join the liberal media chorus and blame the ghastly practice of separating families solely on President Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy. The administration’s “axis of evil” — White House aide Stephen Miller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House chief of staff and former Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly — have made it clear that they wanted to punish parents who come here illegally by confiscating their children at the border as a form of deterrence.

If only life were that simple. I’ll admit that it’s not exactly responsible parenting to bring your child with you while entering the United States illegally, if you’ll admit that neither is leaving your child to the tender mercies of ruthless and violent gangs in Central America.

If you never have to make that choice, be grateful. And — if you host a talk show on Fox News — you should also be quiet.

And yet, those of us who follow the immigration debate closely year in and year out — and not just when there’s a Republican in the White House — and who remember the atrocities committed by the Obama administration will have difficulty pinning the current border crisis entirely on President Trump.

I’ll leave that trick to partisan Democrats with bad memories. For instance, it was priceless to see what California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said about the border crisis of summer 2014, when more than 100,000 women and children from Central America came across the U.S.-Mexico border. Feinstein claims she was totally unaware that President Obama had reinstated a policy of incarcerating immigrant families at the border. That story was hard to miss.

Now, with Trump in the White House, it’s a new day. Who knew that liberals, Democrats and Trump-haters cared so much about the well-being of immigrant and refugee children who get separated from their parents?

Especially given how indifferent many of those same folks seemed just four or five years ago when the president doing the separating was a Democrat.

Of course, there is a difference — location. Donald Trump likes to divide families when they first cross the U.S.-Mexico border; Barack Obama preferred to let them get settled in the interior and then send ICE agents to arrest mommy or daddy at home or work, leaving the children behind.

During the Obama years, more than 40,000 U.S.-born kids whose parents had been deported were dumped into foster care.

Ironically, it was Obama who — in addressing the National Council of La Raza on July 15, 2008, in San Diego — decried “when nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing.”

Now liberals — late-night talk-show hosts, Hollywood celebrities, media commentators, Democratic politicians, et al — who have discovered the immigration issue are up in arms because that sort of thing is happening again.

It never stopped happening. The Border Patrol has more than its share of burned out, tunnel-visioned, sadistic bullies who are often indifferent to human suffering and play God with desperate immigrants.

These civil servants didn’t do all this during the George W. Bush administration and then go on an extended vacation for the eight years of the Obama administration. They were on the job from 2009 to 2017. You just weren’t paying attention.

One person who did pay attention was Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, who recently told CNN’s Fredricka Whitfield that, while immigrant families were separated during the last crisis, “the Obama administration was trying to keep this quiet.”

Unfortunately, you won’t stay woke. If Democrats retake the White House, you’ll go back to ignoring what happens on the border.

In criticizing the Trump administration for separating families — a righteous beef, if you ask me — liberals have gone from sanctimonious to silly.

Still, I guess that’s an improvement over what they were the last time this happened: silent.

In the words attributed to the great Panamanian boxer Roberto Duran: No mas! I can’t take it anymore.

Even as a Mexican-American “Never Trumper” who has been attacked for three decades by racists and restrictionists for defending illegal immigrants, I’ve had my fill of the recent surge of convenient and politically driven outrage over the policy of separating families.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, as many as 2,342 children were taken into custody from May 5 to June 9.

It’s tempting to join the liberal media chorus and blame the ghastly practice of separating families solely on President Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy. The administration’s “axis of evil” — White House aide Stephen Miller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House chief of staff and former Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly —have made it clear that they wanted to punish parents who come here illegally by confiscating their children at the border as a form of deterrence.

If only life were that simple. I’ll admit that it’s not exactly responsible parenting to bring your child with you while entering the United States illegally, if you’ll admit that neither is leaving your child to the tender mercies of ruthless and violent gangs in Central America.

If you never have to make that choice, be grateful. And — if you host a talk show on Fox News —you should also be quiet.

And yet, those of us who follow the immigration debate closely year in and year out —and not just when there’s a Republican in the White House — and who remember the atrocities committed by the Obama administration will have difficulty pinning the current border crisis entirely on President Trump.

I’ll leave that trick to partisan Democrats with bad memories. For instance, it was priceless to see what California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said about the border crisis of summer 2014, when more than 100,000 women and children from Central America came across the U.S.-Mexico border. Feinstein claims she was totally unaware that President Obama had reinstated a policy of incarcerating immigrant families at the border. That story was hard to miss.

Now, with Trump in the White House, it’s a new day. Who knew that liberals, Democrats and Trump-haters cared so much about the well-being of immigrant and refugee children who get separated from their parents?

Especially given how indifferent many of those same folks seemed just four or five years ago when the president doing the separating was a Democrat.

Of course, there is a difference: location. Donald Trump likes to divide families when they first cross the U.S.-Mexico border; Barack Obama preferred to let them get settled in the interior and then send ICE agents to arrest mommy or daddy at home or work, leaving the children behind.

During the Obama years, more than 40,000 U.S.-born kids whose parents had been deported were dumped into foster care.

Ironically, it was Obama who — in addressing the National Council of La Raza on July 15, 2008, in San Diego — decried “when nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing.”

Now liberals —late-night talk-show hosts, Hollywood celebrities, media commentators, Democratic politicians, et al — who have discovered the immigration issue are up in arms because that sort of thing is happening again.

It never stopped happening. The Border Patrol has more than its share of burned out, tunnel-visioned, sadistic bullies who are often indifferent to human suffering and play God with desperate immigrants.

These civil servants didn’t do all this during the George W. Bush administration and then go on an extended vacation for the eight years of the Obama administration. They were on the job from 2009 to 2017. You just weren’t paying attention.

One person who did pay attention was Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, who recently told CNN’s Fredricka Whitfield that, while immigrant families were separated during the last crisis, “the Obama administration was trying to keep this quiet.”

Unfortunately, you won’t stay woke. If Democrats retake the White House, you’ll go back to ignoring what happens on the border.

In criticizing the Trump administration for separating families — a righteous beef, if you ask me —liberals have gone from sanctimonious to silly.

Still, I guess that’s an improvement over what they were the last time this happened: silent.

What does it mean to be Mexican-American?

A few years ago, a regular reader of my column sent me an email that contained this gem: “You write like a Mexican, you need to write like an American.”

If he only knew what a hornet’s nest he was stirring.

You see, around my house — with my Mexican-born wife, and me born in the United States to parents who were also born here — the issue of whether one identifies as a “Mexican” or an “American” has more ingredients than the recipe the Mayans handed down for mole. And the conversations can be just as spicy.

The chasm between Mexicans and Mexican-Americans isn’t often talked about in mixed company. But take it from me, it’s real. And the struggle is real too. Heritage and ethnicity are fine. But nationality counts for a lot.

Consider what I often refer to as my “mixed marriage.”

My wife is a legal immigrant from Mexico who came to the United States as a child and became a U.S. citizen. She speaks, writes, and reads both English and Spanish fluently. At heart, she considers herself Mexican. You know what they say: You can take the girl out of Guadalajara, but you can’t take Guadalajara out of the girl.

Well, if they don’t say that, they should.

For my part, I’m a Mexican-American Yankee Doodle Dandy. Born in Fresno, California — and raised nearby in a small town called Sanger — I have always viewed the world through the eyes of an American. Mexico is a foreign country where I never feel totally comfortable. It might as well be Belgium. I speak Spanish, but, when I do, I’m usually self-conscious.

And like most husbands, I’ve been known to say things that my wife contends are dumb even ridiculous.

About ten years ago, when watching a news report about Mexicans protesting their government, I channeled Thomas Jefferson and said something like: “Well, why don’t people just organize and replace it with a government that works better?”

My wife shook her head and said: “You’re such an American. You think anything is possible, and change is easy. Yeah right! This is Mexico. The people there have no power.”

I shrugged and changed the subject.

Even our taste in food is different. My wife could eat ceviche and enchiladas every day of the week, while I’m just as partial to hamburgers and hot dogs. And when we do manage to agree on one kind of food, there are still cultural variations in how we expect it to be prepared. Growing up, my idea of what a taco looked like was a hard shell, ground beef filling, lettuce, tomato and cheese. My wife is horrified by the mere thought of such a thing. For her, a taco is a small corn tortilla with meat, onions, and cilantro served open face. Anything else is what “gringos” eat.

And yet I like to think I’m not completely whitewashed. In fact, I cling to my hyphen.

Don’t misunderstand. I have no beef with those Americans of Mexican origin — a group numbering about 30 million in the United States — who think of themselves simply as “American” or, at the other extreme, as “Mexican.”

But I want to have my flan and eat it too. I like my hyphen. I’m a Mexican-American. Though at times, to be honest, I do feel more like an American-Mexican. There is a difference, you know. It comes down to how you see yourself. I have friends who consider themselves half-American, half-Mexican.

Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s not put the cart before the burro.

When the reader accused me of writing “like a Mexican,” I had to stop and wonder what that meant. I imagined myself in a sombrero and serape, pecking away at my laptop with a burro named “Pepe” at my side.

Of course, I know what he really means. He had obviously just read a column I’d written on immigration, one that he probably disagreed with. He attributes his views to the fact that he considers himself a red-blooded, clear-thinking American. And since we disagree, and I have a Spanish surname, that must mean that I’m less American than he is, and that my true loyalty lies with Mexico. Ergo, as far as the reader is concerned, I write “like a Mexican.”

It wasn’t really about how I looked or dressed. It wasn’t even about what language I spoke. It was about my national fidelity, my world view, my frame of mind, my love for America.

The reason for the hornet’s nest has a lot to do with a subject that baffles many Mexican-Americans: identity.

Several years ago, on a trip to Mexico City, I had just made my way down the concourse at Benito Juarez International Airport and arrived at the immigration processing area when I got stumped by what should have been a simple question.

Signs pointed to two lines: for “Mexicanos” (“Mexicans”) and “Extranjeros” (“Foreigners.”) I stood there for a few seconds, unsure of where to go. Growing up in the brown-and-white world of Central California, I had been called a “Mexican” my entire life. But I feel 100% American, especially when I’m on foreign soil. Hence, “Mexican-American.”

After a few minutes of indecision, I took my U.S. passport and discreetly got in the line for Extranjeros.

Here’s where the story gets weird. Long before I met my wife, while I was growing up in Central California, I never considered myself anything but a Mexican. Not a Mexican from Mexico, like my grandpa who was born in Chihuahua and came here as a child with his family. But a Mexican living in the United States.

Just as importantly, it was how, it seemed, others saw me and people like me. Adults referred to the “Mexican” part of town or bragged about the high school’s first “Mexican” quarterback or first “Mexican” homecoming queen.

During my senior year in high school, when I was admitted to Harvard, jealous white classmates kindly informed me: “If you hadn’t been Mexican, you wouldn’t have gotten in.”

Note: They did not say Mexican-American. Just Mexican. It’s ethnic shorthand.

Even today, many of my readers take the cue. Years ago, one accused me of supporting “the Mexican invasion … because you’re Mexican.”

OK, so we’re back to that? Now I’m Mexican — again. Just like my friends in Boston call themselves Irish, and my friends in New York call themselves Italian, and my friends back home in Fresno refer to themselves simply as Armenian.

I’m Mexican, right?

Wrong, my wife insists. Many years ago, when we first started dating, she was on the phone with an old friend from Mexico who asked about me. “He’s American,” she told her friend.

I was offended. “Why didn’t you tell her I’m Mexican?” I asked her later.

She laughed and said, “If I had done that, she would have asked me what part of Mexico you were from. And I would have had to have said, ‘Fresno.’

Good point.

The whole story reminds me of the old saying that a Mexican-American is seen as an “American” everywhere in the world except America, and a “Mexican” everywhere except Mexico.

That’s me. I’ve spent my entire life feeling a little too Mexican to be 100% American and a bit too American to be 100% Mexican. I’m a man without a country. And yet I feel firmly rooted in one country, and faintly connected to another.

But it’s when I go to Mexico and encounter the “elites” — who essentially ran my grandfather and his family out of their own country by not providing enough opportunities to stay — that things get really interesting. We’re like oil and water. Nothing unites us but mutual contempt for one another.

I’ve always thought it odd that aggrieved Mexicans in Mexico can remember every detail of the American land grab in 1850. Yet they’re hazy on how people like them have abused and neglected other Mexicans at least since the Mexican Revolution, which occurred more recently from 1910 to 1920.

To think that there are nativists in the United States who believe that Mexican-Americans are in cohorts with our distant relatives to the south to retake the Southwest in a planned “reconquista.” What is wrong with some people?

Comically, some of the cultural tension between Mexicans and Mexican-Americans was captured in a memorable scene in the film, “Selena,” a biopic about famed Tejano music sensation, Selena Quintanilla. The singer’s father, Abraham, who was played by Edward James Olmos, talks about the difficulty of being too much of one but not enough of another.

“Being Mexican-American is tough. Anglos jump all over you if you don’t speak English perfectly. Mexicans jump all over you if you don’t speak Spanish perfectly. We have to be twice as perfect as anybody else…We must know about John Wayne and Pedro Infante. We must know about Frank Sinatra and Agustin Lara. We must know about Oprah and Cristina…We must prove to the Mexicans how Mexican we are. Prove to the Americans we’re American. We must be more Mexican than Mexicans, more American than Americans…both at the same time! It’s exhausting.”

You bet it is. No wonder that — when my wife corners me after one of our cultural skirmishes and puts me on the spot with a pointed question — I’ll be glib, if it will shut it down.

“Exactly what kind of Mexican are you?” she’ll ask.

With a smile, I respond, “The American kind.”

Ruben Navarrette, a contributing editor to Angelus News, is a syndicated columnist with The Washington Post Writers Group, a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a Daily Beast columnist, author of “A Darker Shade of Crimson: Odyssey of a Harvard Chicano,” and host of the podcast “Navarrette Nation.”

Wisdom is born of suffering. It comes from what the Greek playwright Aeschylus called “pain that cannot forget,” the trials that transform wretched souls into better people “through the awful grace of God.”

There is nothing more awful, more cruel or more unnatural than a parent burying a son or daughter. It’s a wound that never heals.

So it was that I found myself spending the lead-up to Father’s Day thinking about a wise man I met recently with strong opinions on child rearing.

Who better to explain the meaning of fatherhood than the dad of a dead Marine?

Socrates Peter Manoukian is a Santa Clara County Superior Court judge. With fatherhood weighing on my mind, I called him up and asked for his thoughts about the one thing that matters most to him: family.

“You know, there’s that old saying,” he said. “Any man can be a father but it takes a real man to be a Daddy.”

This is going to be a tough interview, I think to myself at this point as my eyes well up with tears.

As he warms up, Manoukian mentions how every father should listen to and take to heart Harry Chapin’s classic 1974 folk song “Cat’s in the Cradle” about a father who was too busy for his son until one day when his son was too busy for him.

The judge recalled the years he spent in juvenile court where people came before him who could have had better lives if they’d had better parents. Then there was the stint in family court, where parents fighting over custody of their kids sometimes stooped to making false allegations of child abuse to hurt their former spouse.

Born in Lebanon to parents of Armenian ancestry, Manoukian explained that both of his parents grew up without fathers — one of them felled by cancer, the other by genocidal Turks.

Manoukian’s father, who was born in Syria, started out a carpenter and soccer player and wound up a doctor who spoke five languages and served as an interpreter for the British army.

When I asked Manoukian what his father taught him about being a dad, he rattled off a list: “Take care of your kids. But don’t spoil them. Make sure they go to work and go to school. Make sure they take up honorable professions.”

Like what? I asked.

“Priests or teachers,” he said. “He used to say that one holds the book of God, the other the book of knowledge.”

On the day he graduated from law school, Manoukian recalled, his father literally punched him in the gut and he gave him marching orders: “Your job is not to make as much money as you can; it’s to do good things for people.”

Manoukian and his wife, Patricia, who is an appellate court judge, were blessed with three sons: Michael, an attorney; Martin, who enrolled in medical school before joining the Navy; and Matt, the Marine.

While the boys were growing up, Manoukian was still a lawyer working long hours and he missed a lot of school activities. He made a change. Suddenly, he was coaching soccer games.

When I told him that I’m struggling to find a balance between being too strict or too lenient, he advised: “You’re better off being too strict. If you’re going to make a mistake, make it in that direction.”

After graduating from college, Matt joined the Marines, completed Officer Candidate School and infantry training, and served his first deployment in Iraq as a platoon commander. He rose to the rank of captain and became what his comrades-in-arms call “a Marine’s Marine.” Whether in a firefight, or on patrol, he protected his men by being the first into harm’s way.

Matt later did two tours in Afghanistan with special ops. Sadly, he didn’t complete his second. He was killed by a Taliban fighter in August 2012.

“To say I’m proud of him doesn’t quite capture it,” Manoukian said, choking up. “I’m proud of all my boys and what they’ve done with their lives.”

This American family has come a long way, and it has paid a heavy price for the trip. No one knows that better than a certain judge who, while already an immigrant success story, wanted simply to be a good dad — and pulled it off.

Navarrette’s email address is ruben@rubennavarrette.com.