REMEMBERING THE FORGOTTEN WAR: The Enduring Legacies of the U.S.–Mexican War by Michael Scott Van Wagenen (review)

The United States invasion of Mexico in 1846–1848 was key to the development of both countries, among other things taking about half of Mexico’s territory and thus greatly expanding the United States. On both sides of the Río Bravo, the war exacerbated political instability, leading to civil wars in both countries. However, the two countries have dealt with the war differ markedly: in the words of Michael Van Wagenen, “the memory of the U.S.–Mexican War” is “indelibly etched in the minds of Mexicans and . . . easily overlooked by Americans” (2). Remembering the Forgotten War traces the public memory of the war in both countries, from the immediate postwar period to the present. The book’s goal is “to understand how and why Americans and Mexicans have constructed and reconstructed, time and again, the collective memory of the war 160 years after it ended” (4).

A strength of this book is its binational approach, based on extensive research in both countries. (Although, this makes a neat summary nearly impossible.) The chapters alternate between looking at how public memory of the war was constructed during a period on one side of the border and the process on the other. Although in both Mexico and the U.S. the memory of the war has been crafted to reflect contemporary concerns, north of the border, this usually has been the result of private initiatives. In Mexico, since at least the Porfiriato in the late-nineteenth century, the national government has seized upon the war as part of an official patriotic narrative.

The chapters on the United States are the strongest, with a broad examination of the interplay between remembering the war, foreign policy, racial shifts, and cultural history. The chapters on the immediate postwar period (before the Civil War) and the late-nineteenth century (after the Civil War) are fascinating syntheses. Van Wagenen then traces how the view of the war in the U.S. has been connected with the broader question of U.S.-Latin American relations, from World War II, to the Cold War, to the current era of NAFTA and free trade.

The Mexican chapters begin by analyzing how “the years between 1848 and 1866 were marked by political instability and intermittent warfare, preventing Mexicans from widely remembering and commemorating their conflict with the United States” (58). Much of the section on Mexico focuses on the evolving mythology of the niños héroes (boy heroes)—six young military cadets who in September 1847, rather than surrender, wrapped themselves in the Mexican flag and jumped from the roof of Chapultepec Castle they were defending. Van Wagenen shows how successive regimes in have converted the heroes into secular saints, making them the cornerstone of the official Mexican view of the national defeat. While fascinating, the section on Mexico tends to reduce that country’s vision of the war to the boy heroes. The section also lacks the nuanced understanding of Mexican society that the part on the U.S. shows and at times seems to underplay the importance of nationalism in Mexican culture and politics.

While one may have criticisms of this or that portion of the book, it is important to keep in mind the difficulty of the task that Van Wagenen set for himself—the material on the war in Mexico and the U.S. are not only in different languages, but often seem to be apples and oranges—and the degree to which he succeeds. There is much rich material that a short review cannot do justice to (such as the role of Mormonism or the San Patricio brigade). Remembering the Forgotten War makes fascinating reading; students and scholars of public memory, as well as of the Southwestern U.S. and U.S.-Mexican relations, will find much of this book thought-provoking and useful.