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Don Zavala Goes to Washington Translating U.S. Democracy Two things have caused me to write of this journey. The first is that I have believed that nothing can give more useful lessons in politics to my fellow citizens than the knowledge of the manners, customs, habits, and government of the United States, whose institutions they have so serviley copied. Secondly, since I offered in my Historical Essay to publish my memoirs, it is now time that I begin, although it may be in incoherent bits and pieces as circumstances permit. Lorenzo de Zavala, Prologue to Viage de los Estados Unidos del Norte América, 1834; English translation in Journey to the United States of America, 2005 In 1830, the Mexican exile Lorenzo de Zavala made a historic journey to the United States. A product of this journey is an important, although little known, travel narrative, Viage de los Estados Unidos del Norte América (Journey to the United States of America), a meticulously written narrative about U.S. democratic cultures and institutions. Zavala’s narrative stands as a major document of early Mexican letters in the United States, as well as one of the first theoretical and ethnographic examinations of democracy as a political and cultural institution. Thus, Zavala’s book challenges the widespread acceptance by American scholars that Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835) is the first book to take United States democracy as a focus of political and cultural study.1 With the inclusion of Zavala’s narrative into the series called Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, Zavala’s story of democratic peoplehood will no doubt, in time, be read as one of the founding political texts of U.S. and Mexican democratic culture. As such, he 1 24 should be placed alongside such political thinkers as Jefferson, Prieto, Hidalgo , Madison, Mill, and Tocqueville. Equally important is that Zavala wrote his narrative to represent and participate in a story that he hoped would help in the creation of a liberal national identity for the Mexican people. Published in limited numbers in Paris in 1834 and posthumously for the first time in Mexico on the eve of the U.S.-Mexico War in 1846,2 Zavala’s book stands as one of the first texts to investigate the early relationship between not only the constitutions of Mexico and the United States but also of the two peoples themselves . Standing as a cultural mediator between the two, Zavala was fostering comprehension of the foundations of Mexican and American democratic peoplehood during the years that led up to the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846–1848. Indeed, Zavala’s text renders a complicated portrait of U.S.-Mexico relations and the colonial contact between the two nationstates that began in 1821–1824—the monumental period when the colonized people of Mexico broke away from Spanish despotism and created a national, democratic constitution under the United States’ imperial gaze at Mexican lands to the west. Zavala’s narrative, therefore, extends our modern understanding that narratives of Chicano peoplehood begin with the conquest of 1846 and the U.S.-Mexico War.3 As Carl Gutiérrez-Jones argues, Chicano historians assert that Mexican American communities grew out of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which ended President James Polk’s aggressive expansion into Mexico.4 Juan Gómez-Quiñones argues that this document and this year would mark the liminal moment when the racialization of Mexicans that occurred in the language of the treaty would lead to a distinct minority collective consciousness.5 GómezQui ñones’ and Gutiérrez-Jones’s arguments lead me to explore the cultural forms in the public sphere that historically led to the racialization of the Mexican people. However, I think we also need to consider the seeds of imperialism that led to the war, the U.S.-Mexico War, and the collective self-understanding of Mexicans as a racialized and bifurcated minority people in the United States. According to historian Emma Pérez, although the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 is an extremely important marker for understanding the racial and political constitution of Mexican American peoplehood, the reliance on 1848 as a liminal marker for the sole emergence of Chicano identity inevitably conflates the Mexican and U.S. period between the years 1821–1836 and does not consider the historical significance of this period and how these fifteen years set the Translating U...

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