Latin American Migrations to the U.S. Heartland: Changing Social Landscapes in Middle America

Chapter 1. Mexicans in the United States: A Longer View

Chapter 1 Mexicans in the United States A Longer View Andrew Grant Wood Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations. —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass Like the Indians, the Mexicans “were here first.” —Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico The making of the United States as a modern nation was realized through a creative combination of violence, primitive accumulation, diplomacy, and engineering undertaken by powerful elites headquartered in eastern cities. During the first half of the nineteenth century, those directing the fate of the United States set out to incorporate vast tracts of middle and western North America into its national territory. In this process, areas formerly claimed by French, British, Russian, and Spanish (and then Mexican) authorities gradually gave over to Anglo-American conquest. The year 1845, for example, saw the young nation add the breakaway Republic of Texas as a state. A year later, the United States and Mexico went to war. The resulting Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo caused Mexico to cede approximately half its national possession to the American juggernaut. War between Europeans and Native American groups over the next three decades brought to a conclusion a long process that cost aboriginal peoples much of their land and way of life. “The Indians were victims not only of American avarice,” wrote historian Ray Allen Billington years ago, “but of the age in which they lived [for] with the momentum of expansion well es- 26 . Andrew Grant Wood tablished and, with the nation’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ to control the continent clear, all who stood in the way of white conquest were doomed” (Billington 1974: 578). Yet this making of “America”—decimation of native peoples notwithstanding —proved perhaps not as dire as Billington suggests. Nevertheless, it was a process realized largely under the aegis of Anglo conquest and neocolonialism such that those “who stood in the way of white[s]” were indeed forced to come to terms with Anglo power and privilege (namely, accept secondclass , marginal classification) or face extinction. Then, as today, people of color—including those of Mexican descent—suffered a similar fate at the hands of unsympathetic law enforcement, immigration officials, individuals, and groups ignorant of our highly contested continental history. Colonial Conquests In light of our Anglo-dominated media and political power structure, it is an ironic fact that it was the Spanish who proved the first European colonizers who asserted claims (however tenuous) over much of North America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As is well known, their colonizing efforts reached to the southernmost tip of South America and north above the Sonoran Desert and well beyond. For more than one hundred years before any rival European power mounted colonial challenge, the Spanish had staked out their territorial ambitions by establishing presidios (military outposts), towns, ranches, and missions. Life was rustic at best on the frontier as northernmost New Spain was populated by only a modest number of settlers. In the seventeenth century, the most important settlement was the New Mexican town of Santa Fe, which had been founded in 1610. Then, after much delay, the eighteenth century saw the rise of several new centers, including Albuquerque (1706), Nacogdoches (1716), San Antonio (1718), San Diego (1769), Tucson (1776), San José (1777), and Los Angeles (1781). Still, New Spain’s periphery remained underdeveloped for most of the colonial period, and it was not until the late 1770s when the Bourbon Reforms served to intensify commercial relations in the north. Increasingly, those living in the frontier area gained access to foreign trade from the growing French Louisiana territory and points east where Spain’s rivals the English had insinuated themselves along the eastern littoral, taken part in a revolutionary war, and gave birth to a new, independent republic. Before long, open contest for control of North America would play out between these three European powers and their social and cultural inheritors. For their part, Anglo-American expansionism into middle and western North America accelerated significantly with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Mexicans in the United States . 27 Ensuing treaties such as the U.S.-Spanish Adams-Otís accord of 1819 ceded Florida to the Americans while at the same time designated a boundary between (rapidly weakening) Spanish and U.S. claims after several years of heated dispute. Two years later, Mexico—after nearly a decade of struggle —finally gained independence from Spain in 1821. Shortly thereafter, U.S. President...