New Mexico Reservations

The first time a fellow Southwesterner told me that people often mistook her state for a foreign country, I found the story difficult to credit. After all, even the most geographically illiterate Americans recognize my own Southern California as firmly American. Chronic eruptions of anti-immigrant xenophobia suggest that my home state has the opposite problem: a large percentage of Americans have no idea that California was ever part of a different country.

But my fellow Southwesterner was not Californian, she was New Mexican, and her experience is one shared by many from her state. For over forty years, a column in New Mexico Magazine titled "One of Our Fifty is Missing" has highlighted "rueful anecdotes about New Mexico's mistaken geographic identity."¹ One could blame the unwillingness to accept New Mexican statehood on its name, but when was the last time a New Englander was asked what it was like growing up under a monarchy? Mexico ceded both Alta California and Santa Fe de Nuevo México to the United States in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. What accounts for the differing fates of these two portions of the Mexican Cession? Two recent and radically divergent syntheses of nineteenth-century territorial expansion ask readers to reconsider the historical fate of territorial New Mexico, and suggest some reasons why some Americans may still have reservations accepting the Land of Enchantment as fully American.

William Kiser's Coast-to-Coast Empire purports to be the first history to place New Mexico at the center of Manifest Destiny. Not literally, of course. For generations, textbook narratives of antebellum territorial expansion explained New Mexico's annexation as necessary because it stood at the center of a contiguous continental empire between U.S. territory and the real prize of California. When diplomat John Slidell traveled to Mexico to negotiate with President José Joaquin Herrera in November of 1845, he was authorized by President James K. Polk to offer Mexico $25 million for California, an affront so damaging to Mexican pride that scholars have since debated whether Polk intended it to provoke a war. What generally goes unnoted in narratives of the meeting was that Slidell was also authorized to offer $5 million for New Mexico. This story raises many questions, such as whether the New Mexico offer was as low as it seems, and why scholars so rarely mention it. The bigger question, of course, is whether the inclusion of New Mexico in this story changes its meaning.

While acknowledging that Polk and other expansionists "needed New Mexico as a connecting thoroughfare in their nation-building project," Kiser sees broader significance for the often-overlooked territory. Tracing the political evolution of New Mexican territory between Lieutenant Zebulon Pike's 1807 expedition through the Civil War, Kiser argues that New Mexico "was much more important to nineteenth-century U.S. expansion and the evolving sectional crisis than historians have previously appreciated" (p. 7).

On the surface this is an appealing argument, and a plausible one, given how little attention the territory has garnered in previous histories. But Kiser's volume never quite delivers on its promise. Six clearly written and roughly chronological chapters detail New Mexico's place in the Santa Fe trade, the U.S.-Mexican War, Indian Wars and contest for control of the Southwest, the role of slavery in the territories and the crisis of the 1850s, attempts by Southerners to find a southern route for a transcontinental railroad, and finally Union victory over both the Confederacy and the Navajos in the 1860s.

These are well-trod topics addressed in classic works by scholars including David Weber and William H. Goetzmann, as well as some of the finest monographs of recent decades, including Andrés Reséndez's Changing National Identities...