Mexican American Colonization during the Nineteenth Century: A History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands by José Angel Hernández (review)

American newspapers have started reporting on the difficulties faced by “repatriated” long-term residents of the United States deported to Mexico. Mexican American Colonization during the Nineteenth Century, an account of Mexican responses to Mexican repatriation efforts, provides a backstory to contemporary issues of migration, displacement, and repatriation that are reshaping popular understandings of citizenship and belonging around the world. Although the institutional scale and geographic range of these transnational removal and repatriation programs have expanded since the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Patriot Act, the politics of removal and repatriation were central to community formation in the northern Mexican borderlands after 1848. This book makes a strong argument that Mexican authorities aimed to capitalize on the skills and resources developed by Mexicans in the United States to build communities that would help demarcate and defend the Mexican border against United States and American Indian encroachment.

Hernández’s historical analysis begins with organized attempts to help bring Mexican communities back to the Mexican fold after 1848. His historical intervention is fascinating, as Mexican American Colonization places the coerced and recruited movement of Mexicans to Mexico within larger debates over nation-building in the Americas. The author argues that the establishment of Mexican communities in northern Mexico should be understood alongside the establishment of Seminole and European religious and ethnic communities in the states of Coahuila, Nuevo León, Chihuahua, Sonora, and Baja California. Here he emphasizes that Mexicans moved to populate most of northern Mexico, and the drama of multi-ethnic European, American, and indigenous settlement has mistakenly overshadowed this larger assertion of Mexican control and community formation in this borderlands. This settlement in this multi-ethnic region made it difficult for competing European and American migrants to establish themselves and helps explain why Mexico managed not to become a popular destination during the peak period of European migration and commercial expansion. To me, this is the key insight: Mexico’s relative lack of European settlement is evidence of successful nation-building, not a failure to whiten or modernize according to American norms.

Hernández maintains a keen focus on the Mexican side of the repatriation question after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This is where the narrative is both dramatic and engaging. In Gold Rush California, Francisco Ramírez, the editor of El Clamor Público, encouraged Mexicans and Latin Americans to seek their fortune in Sonora, a place far less politically hostile to their presence. In territorial New Mexico, Mexican emissaries like Father Ramón Ortiz sought to recruit Hispanic ciboleros experienced in trade and conflict with Comanche and Apache communities. In post-annexation Texas, families like the Menchacas led families from East Texas to colonias in northern Coahuila. This drama continued in Mexico, where many of the colonias almost never received proper titles or guarantees to the land and resources that they helped transform into productive rural communities.

Hernández effectively moves repatriates from the dustbin of Mexican history and makes their experience of displacement, recruitment, and mobilization central to understanding key processes in Mexican and world history. In this sense, José Angel Hernández’s stark portrayal of displacement stands as a counterpoint to the blurry and unequal situations analyzed in American border towns in Anthony Mora’s Border Dilemmas: Racial and National Uncertainties in New Mexico and Omar Valerio-Jiménez’s River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands. I strongly recommend this book.