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  • Remembering the Forgotten War: The Enduring Legacies of the U.S.-Mexican War by Michael Scott Van Wagenen
  • José María Herrera
Remembering the Forgotten War: The Enduring Legacies of the U.S.-Mexican War. By Michael Scott Van Wagenen. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013. Pp. 348. Illustrations, notes, index.)

A book about memory and mythmaking, Michael Scott Van Wagenen’s Remembering the Forgotten War: The Enduring Legacies of the U.S.-Mexican War takes the reader on a chronological journey that explores the development of the war’s aftermath in chapters that alternate between the American and Mexican perspectives. Useful for public, period, and diplomatic historians, Van Wagenen’s book would be a welcome addition to any graduate class that examines the construction of public memory.

Beginning with the United States, Van Wagenen sets the stage for how the War with Mexico gradually drifted from the American consciousness. While commemorations and enthusiasm for the accomplishments of the American forces [End Page 438] were high after the war, the coming Civil War would soon overshadow and complicate its legacy. Notably, Van Wagenen belies the contention that opposition in the United States to the War with Mexico was confined to a few eggheads in New England. The complications concerning the war’s legacy, its connection to the Civil War, and sectional political issues led to a general amnesia at the federal and state level, leaving its memory to be kept alive mostly by a dwindling group of aging veterans and their descendants. The one exception to this rule is the members of the Church of Latter Day Saints and how they used the participation of the Mormon Battalion to reaffirm their place in American society.

In Mexico the war’s legacy had an opposite effect, as in time the loss became a tool of nation building. The cornerstone was the mythology centered on the boy heroes of the Battle of Chapultepec and the theme of sacrifice for the nation. The image of the boys and their selfless actions served as an example for the people of a nation that in the mid-nineteenth century existed more in name than in reality. In selecting child heroes to represent the nation, Mexican mythmakers created an allegory that served as a reminder that there is no shame in losing when you stand up to a larger and more powerful foe. Their images were generally supported by various regimes and were exploited both for political gain and as exemplars in civic education. The fact that the very existence of the boy heroes was disputed was overridden by their greater value as a national symbol.

Van Wagenen states that the object of his book is to “understand how and why Americans and Mexicans have constructed and reconstructed, time and again, the collective memory of the war in the 160 years after it ended” (4). For Mexicans the mythology of a noble defeat salved the wound of an ignoble reality: their inability to function as a coherent and united nation led to a humiliation that continues to be perpetuated up to the present day. For the United States, obliterating memory is one of the ways to deal with morally ambiguous wars. If part of the myth is that Americans only get involved in wars for the right reason, then the various Indian Wars, the Spanish American War, and the War with Mexico require a certain degree of moral gymnastics to maintain that posture. If a nation consciously neglects to teach these events in depth, then the paper-thin exculpations for American involvement cannot be critically examined and the myth is safe for another generation. Thus Van Wagenen suggests that myths can be constructed both through omission as well as distortion.

José María Herrera
University of Houston-Downtown
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