This paper explores the implications of the United States' declining place in the capitalist world-system for the recently achieved political accommodation between Chicano middle-class politicians and the Anglo business and political establishment in the Southwest. Two scenarios are discussed within the context of a possible future of economic stagnation. On the one hand, a renewal of the ethnic/class conflict and repression that characterized Anglo-Mexican relations in the decades before WWII, or conversely, enlightened leadership from the Anglo and Mexican American communities that works out mutually beneficial policies to prevent the growth of a Chicano underclass. The article concludes by arguing that the worst-case and best-case scenarios presented within, which remind us of the indeterminate or “open’ nature of the future, force us to keep our perspective: to make us realize that despite the advances of the last twenty years, despite the apparent climate of “integration,” that the struggle between inclusion and exclusion continues.

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