Naturalizing Mexican Immigrants : A Texas History

Introduction

The aim of this book is to examine the naturalization history of Mexican immigrants in Texas. A large body of literature exists on Mexican immigration , yet the study of their incorporation as U.S. citizens has been largely neglected. I seek to understand how Mexican immigrants became incorporated as citizens of the United States and to explore their exodus from one country and entry to another. My work is strategically situated in Texas because of methodological and historical constraints. To conduct a historical analysis of the Mexican’s naturalization process it was necessary to focus on one state because most naturalization records prior to 1906 are not centralized . Rather, they are located in county, state, or federal regional archives. In the case of Mexican immigrants, the records are scattered throughout the United States, and I am the first scholar to examine a statewide database . Focusing on Texas was also necessary because during the nineteenth century Texas federal courts resolved the philosophical debates over denying or granting all Mexicans the right to naturalize. Therefore, to unravel how these events unfolded it is imperative that I examine the political action of the Tejanos since they were actively engaged in their struggle for inclusion . Although my study is centered on Texas, it provides an overview of how U.S. naturalization laws impacted Mexican immigrants in the United States. In the concluding chapter I also offer a nationwide analysis of the contemporary obstacles Mexican immigrants face in their pursuit of membership in the U.S. polity. A shift to a nationwide analysis was necessary because Mexican immigrants are now no longer concentrated in Texas, as they were in the past. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century approximately one-half to two-thirds of the Mexican immigrant population of the United States resided in Texas (U.S. Census 1922a: 302–303). By the year 2000, Mexican Tejanos continued to constitute a large percentage of Introduction 2 Naturalizing Mexican Immigrants the Mexican immigrant population, numbering 21 percent of the total. The rest are scattered throughout the United States, with 43 percent residing in California (U.S. Census 2003: 7). Theoretical and current concerns on citizenship formation inspired me to write this book and to take a historical approach in doing so. Following in the anthropological tradition of Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995), I concur that history is central to understanding and theorizing how the present is shaped by the past. By employing Trouillot’s historical approach I will revisit many national immigration events. I will, however, reexamine them from a critical perspective and explore how international relations between Mexico and the United States influenced the closure and opening of opportunity structures given to Mexicans to become U.S. citizens. Furthermore, in unfolding my narrative I will emplot events that have been ignored or treated as insignificant. I agree with Trouillot that when staging a historical narrative the selection of events influences how one views the actors. By taking this approach, I hope to portray the significant roles ordinary Mexican immigrants played in shaping their political destiny. My intent is to illustrate that Mexicans, notwithstanding the fact that most were from the laboring classes, were people with dignity who were aware that choosing one’s citizenship was a political act. My anthropological gaze into this process also follows in the historical tradition of Eric Wolf (1982) and Sidney Mintz (1985), who for generations have influenced anthropologists to historicize the past by examining the political and economic bases of the societies under study. Throughout my book I unravel the Mexican immigrants’ citizenship incorporation in the United States by exploring the political and economic conditions that forced them to leave their homes. Likewise, I critically examine their reception in Texas by looking at national and state events as well as the racial ideologies of the period, which often made it very difficult for them to be accepted as U.S. citizens. This project is also highly motivated by personal concerns over U.S.Mexico relations. As a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, I am highly concerned with the ongoing portrayal of Mexicans in the news media as parasitic people who invade this nation, take its resources, and feel no moral obligation to give anything in return because allegedly their political allegiance is to Mexico and not to the United States. Television programs like The O’Reilly Factor and, in recent years, Lou Dobbs Tonight and his series “Broken Borders” and the...