Acknowledgments
Although I completed this book in Albuquerque, where I have lived and taught at the University of New Mexico for the past few years, its genesis was at two earlier points in my life, when living away from New Mexico provided me with different perspectives about my home state. The first was more than twenty years ago at Harvard College, when I tried to understand New Mexico’s racial dynamics by taking African American and Latin American studies courses (there were no courses on Chicanos or Latinos, nor were there any Chicano faculty) and writing a senior thesis called “What’s in a Name? The Politics of Hispanic Identity.” The second point was about a decade ago when, in the wake of California voters’ ban on affirmative action, a group of law school faculty formed the Critical Race Studies Concentration as a way to consolidate our intellectual interests and attempt to recruit students of color to UCLA. I began teaching a course on comparative racialization and the law in the United States, which, in retrospect, started me thinking along the lines developed in this book. At both of these points, it proved intellectually fruitful to have been in a milieu outside New Mexico; I had to work harder to define and explicate those features of the New Mexico social landscape that might have otherwise seemed deceptively obvious.
To give birth to this book, however, I ultimately returned to New Mexico, where my perspective again shifted. During the 2004–5 academic year, I was fortunate to hold a residential fellowship at the School for American Research (now the School for Advanced Research on the Human Experience) in Santa Fe. On weekly drives to Albuquerque to visit family, I marveled at the tangible difference perspective makes in simple, everyday ways—like how the Sandia Mountains look when viewed from Albuquerque’s North Valley, where I grew up, as opposed to how they look driving south on Interstate 25 from Santa Fe. Like differences resulting from viewing the Sandias at different times of day or different seasons of the year, various geographic perspectives highlight different peaks, crags, or tree lines in the mountain range. On those drives I would ponder the meaning the Sandias must have had for the various pre-nineteenth-century communities along the route from Santa Fe to Albuquerque—Las Golondrinas, Santo Domingo Pueblo, San Felipe Pueblo, Bernalillo, Sandia Pueblo. In this book, I have tried to be true to my perspective on events—as a sociologist and a legal scholar, as a Chicana whose roots in New Mexico range from three to eight generations—even though I do not claim my perspective is “representative” in any sense.
I owe a large debt to UCLA, my intellectual home for so many years, and, in particular, to the School of Law (and Deans Prager, Varat, Abrams, and Schill), the Sociology Department, the Institute for American Cultures, the Center for the Study of Women, the Chicano Studies Research Center, and the colleagues in those departments who supported me and my research. In addition, I received great research assistance from the staff of the Hugh and Hazel Darling Law Library.
I am grateful to the Stanford Humanities Center (1996–97) and the School for American Research (2004–5) for providing me with generous in-residence fellowships—the former as I was beginning research related to this book and the latter as I was starting to write. Just as important, each of these institutions provided a working environment where I found invaluable intellectual stimulation and collegiality.
I received valuable feedback from presentations related to this work from the following audiences: School of Law (King Hall), University of California, Davis; UCLA School of Law; School of Law, University of Colorado Boulder; University of Houston Law Center’s Conference on Hernandez v. Texas; Institute for Legal Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison; New York Law and Society Colloquium (co-sponsored by New York Law School and New York University); and annual meetings of the Law and Society Association, the American Sociological Association, and LatCrit, Inc.
As with raising a child, it takes a village to produce a book. For the past few years, my village has been the University of New Mexico. I have received generous support from UNM’s Center for Regional Studies (Tobias Durán, director), the College of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Law (including Dean Suellyn Scarnecchia and the Keleher and McLeod Professorship). I have also benefited from presentations of this work to the American Studies Department, the Anthropology Department, the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute, and the School of Law. I am grateful to my colleagues at the Law School who have not tired of hearing the various iterations of this project as it has evolved (or, if they have grown weary of it, have kept me blissfully ignorant). A special thanks to the entire staff of the UNM School of Law Library, especially Eileen Cohen, Barbara Lah, Lorraine Lester, Michelle Rigual, Alexandra Siek, Sherri Thomas, and Ron Wheeler. I am grateful to Barbara Jacques and Melissa Lobato for assisting me with preparing the manuscript and for their good cheer. Thanks also to other UNM support staff who were generous with their time. Amy Lammers, Adolfo Méndez, and Michael Wilson provided excellent research assistance.
Over many years, I have relied on the expertise of librarians and archivists to find and access various government documents and special collections. I thank the staffs of the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives, the Office of the State Historian of New Mexico, and the Center for Southwest Studies at UNM’s Zimmerman Library.
For providing suggestions at various stages of this project, I thank the following people: Rick Abel, Kip Bobroff, Carole Browner, Devon Carbado, Ernie Chávez, Sam Deloria, Toby Durán, Lawrence Friedman, Eileen Gauna, Carole Goldberg, Alyosha Goldstein, Em Hall, Joel Handler, Cheryl Harris, Sandra Jaramillo, Susan Johnson, Jerry Kang, Ken Karst, Jake Kosek, Gillian Lester, Ian Haney López, Alex Lubin, Roberto Martínez, Joe Masco, Margaret Montoya, Maria Montoya, Alfonso Morales, Rachel Moran, Michael Olivas, David Reichard, Sylvia Rodríguez, Manuela Romero, Mark Sawyer, Rebecca Schreiber, Clyde Spillenger, Quiche Suzuki, Eddie Telles, Gloria Valencia-Weber, Leti Volpp, and Jessica Winegar. I am especially indebted to the following people for extensive feedback: Antonio Gómez, Felipe Gonzáles, Jerry López, Estévan Rael-Gálvez, Sherene Razack, and Mary Romero. My thanks go out to the entire staff at New York University Press but especially to Deborah Gershenowitz, whose insight has improved this project at every step of the way.
I have been lucky in many ways, one of which has been to be surrounded by caring friends and relatives; for the good food and wine, babysitting, and good company, thanks to Miguel, Mitchie, Kip and Michele, Camille, Manuela and Alfonso, Quiche, Juan and Estévan, Cristina and Gabriel, Juli, Kat, Kris, Aunt Elida, Aunt Naomi, Aunt Virgie, Aunt Norma, Tina and Michael, Vilma, Lorie, Lillie, Jessica and Hamdi, Marina, Margaret and Charles, and the families of the Alameda Avengers. For providing constant support of every imaginable variety, I am forever grateful to my parents, Eloyda and Antonio Gómez. Special thanks to my father, for encouraging my sociological imagination and taking my ideas seriously. My deepest thanks go to my son Alejandro, who keeps me focused on the important things in life and whose hugs matter more than he can know.
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Many thanks to the great librarians at the UCLA School of Law for research assistance; to Amanda McAlpin, who helped in ways big and small with the second edition; and to Dr. Celia Lacayo for insights into the original edition and how it intersects with subsequent scholarship in Chicana/o and Latina/o studies. I’m grateful to the entire staff at New York University Press and to two anonymous reviews they solicited for the second edition. Many scholars have trying experiences with publishers, but I simply cannot identify with them; it has been a pleasure to work on both editions with the professionals at NYU Press. Finally, I dedicate the second edition of this book, like the first, to my twenty-one-year-old son Alejandro; mijo, I love you with all my heart.
Introduction
More than a century and a half ago, a series of events occurred that resulted in the formation of Mexican Americans as a racial group in the United States. For complex reasons that I explore in this book, Mexican Americans often have been portrayed (and sometimes have portrayed themselv
es) as an ethnic group that eventually will assimilate into American society, just as European immigrant groups once did. I will argue that given the early history of Mexicans in the United States, it is more accurate to treat Mexican Americans as a racial group.
Two common misconceptions lie at the root of what most people take for granted about Mexicans in the United States. The first is that Mexican Americans are not a racial group at all, but instead merely an ethnic group. Race in the United States has historically been viewed as a matter of black/white relations and, more specifically, as about white subordination of African Americans. Despite the fact that the United States has always been a racially diverse society, non-white groups other than blacks often have been overlooked.1 Although Indian tribes were recognized as constituting independent nations (who could, for instance, freely enter nation-to-nation treaties with the United States until 1871), Indians were just as surely recognized as a racial group and as racially inferior to Euro-Americans.2 The arrival of more than four hundred thousand Chinese immigrants in the first century of the nation’s existence added to America’s racial diversity.3 The United States has always been a multiracial nation, even though it has become popular only in the past twenty-five years to talk in those terms.
The second misconception is that Mexican Americans are a “new” group that consists primarily of recent immigrants and their children. Mexican Americans have been a significant part of American society since 1848, when more than 115,000 Mexicans became U.S. citizens. It was well into the twentieth century before the U.S. government seriously regulated Mexican immigration to the United States.4 For 160 years, the Mexican American population has been continuously replenished with new immigration from Mexico, with the pace especially strong since 1965.5 Consider that in 1970 less than 20 percent of Mexicans in the United States were born in Mexico—in other words, more than 80 percent of Mexican Americans were American-born. Today, just over half of Mexicans in the United States were born in Mexico and just under half of them were born in the United States.6 While the Mexican American group continues to grow due to ongoing immigration from Mexico, it includes a large proportion of people whose American roots go back many generations.
The status of Mexican Americans as a racial group is rooted in their long history in this nation. In making this argument, I draw heavily on the experiences of the first Mexican Americans, those who joined American society involuntarily, not as immigrants, but as a people conquered in war. As Mexican Americans sometimes say, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” Moreover, Mexicans joined American society at that time as citizens, albeit, as second-class citizens in many respects. Manifest Destinies excavates the history of Mexican Americans as an American racial group that was uniquely situated as “off-white.”7 It analyzes the larger American racial order as it evolved in the late nineteenth century and the social process of racialization—or how groups come to be identified and to identify themselves in racial terms and learn their place as deserving or undeserving in the racial hierarchy.
Race and ethnicity overlap in important ways—and, in fact, race as it operates in the United States generally subsumes ethnicity. For example, black Americans are a racial group composed of a variety of ethnic groups, including African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, African immigrants from various African countries, and Afro-Latinos. Of course, race and ethnicity are used in varied ways across many disciplines. I employ them here in a conventional way to emphasize the quality of assignment associated with race—racial group membership is assigned by others, and particularly by members of the dominant group—and the quality of assertion associated with ethnicity—ethnic group membership is chosen by members of the ethnic group.8
Used in this way, race involves a harder, less voluntary group membership (though, as we shall see, not as inflexible as is typically assumed). By using race rather than ethnicity to describe the Mexican American experience, I intend to invoke what sociologists Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann have called the legacy of race as “the most powerful and persistent group boundary in American history, distinguishing, to varying degrees, the experiences of those classified as non-white from those classified as white, with often devastating consequences.”9 While ethnicity has been and continues to be an important marker of difference and inequality, especially outside the United States, it pales in comparison to the role race has played and continues to play in American society in shaping both group relations and individual life chances.10
Racial categories and racial difference are socially constructed; rather than having inherent significance, race is historically contingent and given meaning by persons, institutions, and social processes.11 In recent years, a growing body of scholarship has explored how specific groups have become white, as well as the larger significance of white racial identity.12 As historian Matthew Jacobson has put it: “[R]aces are invented categories. . . . Caucasians are made not born. White privilege in various forms has been a constant in American political culture since colonial times, but whiteness itself has been subject to all kinds of contests and has gone through a series of historical vicissitudes.”13 Yet the literature has implied that the process of becoming white is relatively straightforward—once a group is on the path to becoming white, whiteness becomes inevitable and occurs within a matter of decades. For Mexican Americans, as historian Neil Foley has explained in a study of Mexicans, blacks, and poor whites at “the fringe of whiteness,” the process has been more complex and less straightforward.14
Manifest Destinies illustrates that complexity as a byproduct of Mexican Americans’ relationships with whites, Indians, and blacks, examining these relationships from 1846 to the turn of the century to reveal the dynamic, nonlinear nature of Mexican Americans’ off-white status.
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Many Americans view the concept of Manifest Destiny positively, as a shorthand reference to a period in history (the 1840s) during which Americans’ unbounded hunger for national growth was satiated by the acquisition of the Oregon Territory, Texas, and the Mexican Cession, including California as its jewel. For many, Manifest Destiny conjures a moment of national triumph before the dark years of conflict over slavery that culminated in the Civil War.15 This book views Manifest Destiny quite differently—as a cluster of ideas that relied on racism to justify a war of aggression against Mexico. As historian Reginald Horsman has observed,
In the middle of the nineteenth century a sense of racial destiny permeated discussions of American progress and of future American world destiny. . . . By 1850 the emphasis was on the American Anglo-Saxons as a separate, innately superior people who were destined to bring good government, commercial prosperity, and Christianity to the American continents and to the world. This was a superior race, and inferior races were doomed to subordinate status or extinction.16
Manifest Destinies, as used in this book’s title, embraces the idea of Manifest Destiny as inexorably entwined with race and racism. At the same time, it refers to how the competing destinies of many groups ultimately produced the Mexican American race and fundamentally changed the American racial order in the half century following the U.S.–Mexico War.
Three themes drive this book. The first is that colonialism was central to the origin of Mexican Americans. Manifest Destiny fueled American imperialism and the expansion west and south into Mexico. Acquisition of northern Mexico, and especially of Alta California, now the state of California, was essential to several goals: securing massive amounts of mineral and other natural resources, acquiring land to expand the public domain and to construct a transcontinental railroad for transporting goods and people, and accessing Asian economic markets by way of the Pacific Ocean.17 If Manifest Destiny was the ideology that justified the American colonization of Mexico; its material consequence was the military occupation of New Mexico, California, and Mexico City. More specifically, it was that military occupation and Mexico’s subsequent surrender that led to the 1848 treaty by which Mexico ceded more than half
its territory to the United States. Consider the enormity of this territory, its natural resources, and coastal access. The Louisiana Purchase of 1804 already had more than doubled the landmass of the United States. Now, forty-four years later, an area 50 percent larger than that, approximately 1.3 million square miles, was again added to the young nation. This additional territory eventually included all or parts of eight states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming—all of them among the U.S. states largest in area.18
This book’s second theme is the central role that law played in the creation of Mexican Americans as a racial group. Manifest Destinies illustrates the larger process of the social construction of race, focusing specifically on how law fundamentally created and expressed race, racial categories, and racial dynamics as they affected Mexican Americans. The central paradox was the legal construction of Mexicans as racially “white” alongside the social construction of Mexicans as non-white and as racially inferior. The book explores how these contradictory legal and social definitions coexisted and how the legal definition of Mexicans as white affected other non-white racial groups, eventually helping to entrench white supremacy in the United States. Following the U.S.–Mexico War, Euro-American elites actively contested and negotiated racial categories among themselves and with Mexican elites, who in turn accommodated, contested, and negotiated their position in the new American racial order, often navigating legal institutions to do so. Ultimately Mexican Americans in New Mexico became a wedge racial group, between Euro-Americans above them and Pueblo Indians below them in the racial hierarchy.
Manifest Destinies, Second Edition Page 3