The Whiteness of Statehood: A Review of Arizona and New Mexico 1848–1912

In 1848, thousands of miles away from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo negotiations that would end the Mexican-American War, Senator John C. Calhoun, famous for his insistence on slavery and white supremacy, argued that the United States must not incorporate too much Mexican territory:

[W]e have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race—the free white race. To incorporate Mexico would be the first instance of the kind of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sirs, is the Government of the white race.

(Congressional Globe 1848: 98; Nieto-Phillips 2000)

Calhoun was arguing that Mexican people were not white, and that their incorporation into the U.S. could threaten the freedom of the white race. As such, the freedom to govern was reserved for whites, while nonwhite others must submit to governing. This logic, rooted in U.S. colonialism and white supremacy, would continue to haunt the nation as territories in the Southwest began the arduous process of applying for statehood.

Sixty years later in Arizona, a predominately white crowd rallied at the Phoenix fairgrounds to voice their objection to joint statehood with New Mexico. One protestor exclaimed that 95 percent of the people of Arizona, who were Americans, opposed this venture because the people of New Mexico were of Spanish descent, and thus racially different from the people of Arizona (Biggers 2012). Yet, several years later, on the eve of statehood in 1912 for New Mexico, Judge Lebaron Bradford Prince declared that “July 12, 1598, may be considered as the birthday of European settlement in New Mexico; and its anniversary should be celebrated in the southwest, as the date of the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers on Plymouth Rock…is annually observed wherever the memory of the founders of New England is venerated” (Gómez 2007). In Arizona, people of Spanish descent were identified as nonwhite others and yet in New Mexico, the Spanish colonization of the region was identified as a moment connecting the territory’s history directly to the rest of the nation’s history of European colonization. How is it that those of Spanish descent could be at the same time nonwhite others and inheritors of a colonial lineage—and why was this so important to the issue of statehood?

Statehood formations have so often been discussed as a linear chain of events that mark progress in the United States (Pry 1995; Nieto-Phillips 2000; Gómez 2007; Noel 2011). Yet when we take into account the integrated nature of race, gender, and class formations, alongside the development of the U.S. as a settler colonial racial capitalist state, we can better understand statehood as an extension of these systems. Indeed, although Arizona and New Mexico became states only a month apart, their Mexican American populations shared similar and yet quite different experiences. Amidst widespread racial discrimination, nativos in New Mexico were able to claim a Spanish American identity that justified their positionality in government and as landowners, while the working-class Mexican American population in Arizona was subject to domination by white workers and their employers. As this review of Arizona and New Mexico statehood literature will reveal, the vulnerability of Mexican American populations at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War in 1848 drew upon various formations of white identity to further the U.S. settler colonial project.

Mark Pry (1995) argued that movements for statehood, in general, were often about the dissatisfaction that territorial governments had with colonial status and federal supervision. Territorial governors, secretaries, and supreme court justices were appointed by the U.S. president, and Congress had substantial power over territorial economies through mechanisms of appropriation. He noted that the territorial system was very much like the British system of colonialism, except that U.S. territories were promised eventual admission on equal footing with other states. Both Arizona and New Mexico entered the U.S. as territories around the same time...