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1 Negotiating the Border Race, Coloniality, and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century California The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture. —Gloria Anzaldúa The signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848, marked the formal end to a two-year war between the United States and Mexico. This war is known in the United States as the Mexican-American War (which connotes a fair war among equals justly won) and by some in Mexico as la intervención norteamericana en México, the North American intervention into Mexico, (connoting imperialism and conquest). Though it lasted only a few short years, nevertheless the war, and the treaty that marked its ending, helped to cement the United States’ position as an ascending global power. Through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States won a vast swath of territory (most or all of the land that now constitutes California , Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and Wyoming) and gained control of the territory’s Mexican and indigenous inhabitants, who became subjects of the U.S. government. Apart from (or perhaps because of) these monumental changes, the treaty is also important because it helped give birth to the contemporary U.S.-Mexico border and the border “problem.” As Richard Griswold del Castillo shows, colonial relations influenced the drafting of the treaty, which the United States “virtually dictated,” contributing to ongoing relationships of imperial control and dependence. This is why Gloria Anzaldúa refers to the U.S.-Mexico border as an open wound, “una herida abierta,” where the violence of conquest and colonialism continually “hemorrhages” the “lifeblood” of two nations and peoples.1 Anzaldúa’s quotation in the epigraph raises questions of the border’s crossing and 20 | Chapter 1 of the borders of citizenship that took shape after the Mexican-American War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo represents what in the introduction we referred to as a moment of rhetorical and material bordering. Though this is obvious in the sense that the treaty redrew the territorial border between the United States and Mexico, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo also bordered the U.S. civic imaginary, reconstituting the legal and figural borders of citizenship in light of an influx of new Mexican (American) citizen-subjects. Specifically, the treaty guaranteed access to U.S. citizenship to all colonized Mexicans contingent on their renunciation of Mexican citizenship . That is, Mexicans could choose to remain Mexican citizens and forego the rights and protections of U.S. citizenship, becoming marginalized inhabitants of the nation, or they could take on the mantle of “Americanism” to receive (provisional) recognition . As we shall see below, this bordering took shape under the racialized contours of U.S. citizenship at the time, which extended only to white males. Thus the border was drawn not only across a territory but also across a colonized group of people (themselves part of a colonial society), who had to choose between assimilation into the conqueror’s society or face exclusion. The border’s crossing took shape through rhetorics of race and gender, coloniality, and nationality. It is this same legacy of bordering that shapes contemporary economic, political, cultural, and migratory relationships between the United States and Mexico. If we wish to understand the contemporary practices of bordering U.S. citizenship and identity, then the nineteenth century is a crucial starting point.2 Thus far we have approached the border as a dividing line or demarcation. However , the quotation by Anzaldúa in the epigraph also suggests that the border can be thought of in another way. Anzaldúa claims that the border(lands) not only create exclusion and division but spur connection and crossing and can give rise to a “border culture.” Though we have emphasized how the borders and/of U.S. citizenship work to divide the citizen and the alien, border rhetorics can also entail the contestation and regeneration of identity. Anzaldúa, then, inaugurates a notion of the borderlands as a space of division as well as contact and crossing. Though borders create “hatred, anger, and exploitation”—in Anzaldúa’s case the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, as well as borders of citizenship, race, gender, and sexuality—borderlands are also a space of contradiction in which individuals cultivate new identities and mold “ambivalence into something...

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