Manifest Destinies, Second Edition

by Laura E. Gómez

  The third theme of Manifest Destinies is that the construction of Mexicans as an American racial group proved central to the larger process of restructuring the American racial order in a key period stretching from the war to the turn of the twentieth century. Ironically, the emphasis on white-over-black relations during this period (due to the Civil War and Reconstruction) has obscured the significant role played by Manifest Destiny and the colonization of northern Mexico in the racial subordination of black Americans. The absorption of the Mexican Cession brought to a head the question of whether slavery would be allowed to expand beyond the South. In the infamous Dred Scott case, the Supreme Court answered this question in a way that made the Civil War all but inevitable. After the Civil War, black slaves were emancipated and, through the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution, African American men were endowed with political rights. During this period, the majority of Mexican American men, who had received federal citizenship under the peace treaty of 1848, held a kind of second-class citizenship in which their rights were limited because Congress refused to admit New Mexico as a state due to its majority Mexican and Indian population.

  Moreover it was dual, if nearly opposite, ideologies of race that helped enshrine the twentieth-century racial hierarchy that placed African Americans at the bottom with Mexican Americans above them so that, in the national racial hierarchy, Mexican Americans became a wedge racial group between whites and blacks. While Mexican Americans were relegated to second-class citizenship in virtually all areas, they had access to legal whiteness under a kind of reverse one-drop rule: one drop of Spanish blood allowed them to claim whiteness under certain circumstances. The separate racial ideologies that developed with respect to Mexican Americans and African Americans highlight the complexity and contradictions within white supremacy. Whereas the racial ideology that we most commonly associate with this period of American history resulted in the hardening of categories that governed African Americans (under the one-drop rule), with respect to Mexican Americans a racial ideology emerged that depended on those boundaries being flexible and inclusive. Both ideologies reproduced the racial subordination of blacks and Mexicans, but they did so in very different ways. Without understanding how they worked—and how they worked in tandem—we cannot fully understand racial dynamics in the twentieth century and beyond.

  I intend this book to be an antidote to collective amnesia about the key nineteenth-century events that produced the first Mexican Americans—the U.S.–Mexico War, the Mexican Cession, and the peace treaty that extended American citizenship to Mexican citizens living in what is today the American Southwest. Placing Mexican Americans at the center of the analysis reveals how their entrance into the United States shaped the larger racial order. Mexican Americans interacted with and impacted the destinies of American Indians, African Americans, and Euro-Americans, and these interactions, in turn, shaped the destiny of Mexican Americans. Excavating the nineteenth-century history of Mexican Americans as a racial group erases their racial invisibility and thereby reveals the complex, sometimes contradictory evolution of nineteenth-century racial dynamics as involving both multiple racial groups and competing racial ideologies.

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  The Mexican Cession consisted of Tejas, Alta California, and Nuevo México. A year before the start of the war, in 1845, Texas had joined the Union as a slave state. California joined the Union as a free state in 1850, soon after gold had been discovered there. This book principally focuses on the remainder of the newly annexed territory, New Mexico, which at the time was much larger than Texas and California combined, including all of present-day New Mexico as well as all or part of eight other U.S. states.19 New Mexico’s Mexican population was also far larger than those of California and Texas combined, with nearly two-thirds of Mexicans in the Mexican Cession living there.20 Although Congress would eventually divide New Mexico into smaller components, the vast majority of the non-Indian population living in this vast region in 1848 resided in what is today north-central New Mexico.21

  To speak of the nation’s first Mexican Americans, then, is to speak substantially about Mexicans living in New Mexico.22 It was not, however, raw numbers alone that made New Mexico’s Mexican population significant—it was numbers coupled with the proportion of Mexicans to Euro-Americans and Indians, especially Pueblo Indians. At the outset of the war with Mexico, fewer than a thousand Euro-Americans lived in New Mexico. In contrast, Euro-Americans outnumbered Mexicans in Texas as early as 1830, due to Mexico’s liberal immigration policies (that is, liberal relative to the restrictive policies of Spain prior to 1820).23 And, due largely to the discovery of gold in California in 1848, Euro-Americans outnumbered Mexicans there by 1850.24 The small number of Euro-Americans in New Mexico allowed Mexican Americans to remain demographically dominant well into the period of American rule, and led the American colonizers to devise ways to incorporate and co-opt them.

  Another key aspect of New Mexico’s demographics was the size and diversity of its Indian population at the time it was annexed to the United States. New Mexico’s population included fifteen thousand Pueblo Indians and perhaps sixty thousand other Indians.25 Mexicans and Pueblo Indians had much in common culturally and geographically, even though they shared a long history of conflict in New Mexico. When Euro-American colonizers arrived in New Mexico, one of their goals was to cement the divide between Mexicans and Pueblo Indians. One strategy was to give Mexican American men political rights that Pueblo men were denied (see Chapter 3).

  Two-thirds of Mexicans in the Mexican Cession lived in New Mexico, making it a target for U.S. military occupation during the war and, later, establishment as an American colony. Although New Mexico became a federal territory in 1850, its status was in many ways different from that of noncontiguous U.S. colonies such as Puerto Rico and the Philippines. One of the chief differences is that Puerto Rico and the Philippines were not seen as colonies in which Euro-American “settler citizens” would eventually predominate, and therefore were not seen as candidates for statehood.26 In contrast, both New Mexico and Hawaii were seen as places where white settler citizens eventually would outnumber the non-white native population (settler colonialism), thereby facilitating statehood. At the same time, the racial complexion of New Mexico and Hawaii caused Congress to delay statehood, keeping these regions in a colonial status for many decades.27 These demographic and political realities make New Mexico the central focus of this study.

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  Manifest Destinies reflects my efforts to engage three distinct disciplines. In terms of methodology, this book is grounded in history: it draws heavily on data from primary historical documents and from secondary studies of archival materials. Yet I have approached these documents (or studies of them) as types of social facts, within a broader empirical emphasis that stems from my training in sociology. I tell a story drawing on historical documents that is analytically driven by sociological concepts and understandings of race and racial ideology, politics, and colonialism.28 The third disciplinary home of this book is law, defined broadly to include positive law (“laws” themselves, enacted by legislatures or made by courts); legal institutions such as the police, the courts, and trial by jury; and actors in the legal system such as lawyers, prosecutors, judges, and jurors. Manifest Destinies, then, is a sociological study of race that focuses on law, legal institutions, and legal actors in the nineteenth-century Southwest.

  This book started to take shape in the late 1980s, when I began an archival project on the legal system in nineteenth-century New Mexico. By this time, I had lived away from my home state of New Mexico for almost as many years as I had lived in it. My time away increased my awareness of the region’s peculiar racial dynamics, or what can be described as New Mexico’s exceptionalism within the Chicano experience. As someone who possessed a dual vantage point as both insider and outsider, I was aware of flaws in the exceptionalism thesis. The notion that New Mexico’s Mexican Americans are a breed apart from other Mexican Ame
ricans remains robust not only in scholarship from diverse disciplines, but also in popular culture. In a nutshell, the exceptionalism thesis emphasizes New Mexico’s unique status among southwestern states—as having, for example, a long history of Mexican American elected officials at all levels of government, relatively low levels of overt racial oppression of Mexican Americans (compared to Texas and California), and an intense, long-standing claim to Spanish, rather than Mexican, heritage.29

  The exceptionalism thesis often attributes these facts to New Mexico’s relatively limited Mexican immigration in the twentieth century (compared to California, Texas, and Arizona) and to the related persistence of cultural and other characteristics of the Spanish settlers of the region. An additional dimension of the exceptionalism thesis has been the marked tendency to view Mexican Americans as regionally distinctive, rather than as a group with one national history.30 Local social histories in Chicano studies have contributed to the notion that there is not a coherent national story to be told about Mexican Americans. To be sure, there is much to be learned from highly localized studies, but it is also important to see the connections between local, regional, national, and even transnational levels of analysis.31 This study situates New Mexico in a national and hemispheric context, contending that the Mexican American experience should be conceived as national rather than regional.

  In short, the claim of New Mexico’s exceptionalism has obscured these larger dynamics. For example, the historical record suggests that New Mexico was deeply Mexican in the late Spanish period, during the twenty-five-year Mexican period (1821–46), and well into the American period. Why have proponents of the exceptionalism thesis—and the historical actors whom they studied—downplayed New Mexico’s Mexican legacy in favor of its Spanish heritage? In addition, in both historic and contemporary contexts, the degree of racial oppression of Mexican Americans by whites and the level of racial conflict between Hispanics and Anglos (as Mexican Americans and Euro-American whites are more commonly referred to in New Mexico today) were and are actually much greater than typically acknowledged. What historic factors and dynamics led and continue to lead us to systematically understate the level of racial conflict in New Mexico?

  In answering these questions, I have continually been drawn back to the early decades of the American colonization of northern Mexico. American colonization was most visceral in New Mexico as measured by the intensity of the Mexican resistance to the Americans and the sheer brutality of the American military and legal responses. Moreover, anti-Mexican racism was most evident in the refusal of Euro-American elites to annex New Mexico as a state precisely because of its majority-minority population. These factors, coupled with the fact that most Mexicans who joined the United States in 1848 lived in New Mexico, suggest that if New Mexico is in fact exceptional, its exceptionalism works in the other direction. In other words, if New Mexico is unique it is precisely because its large Mexican population, coupled with the Pueblo Indian population, warranted particular tactics on the part of the American colonizers and how the original Mexican Americans responded in turn. Viewed in this way, we might well see New Mexicans’ continuing claims to “Spanish” heritage as a tactic that evolved from the intense anti-Mexican racism of the 1800s. In this respect, then, New Mexico is exemplary rather than exceptional, as this book will show.

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  Manifest Destinies tells the story of how Mexican Americans became an American racial group. The first chapter begins with the American colonization of northern Mexico, focusing on the American invasion of the vast region known as New Mexico. It reveals that ideas about Mexicans’ racial inferiority animated the American war against Mexico and the later efforts to colonize New Mexico under civilian authority. At the same time, the chapter brings to light the unique features of New Mexico that led to the enfranchisement of Mexican men and, thus, the legal construction of the first Mexican Americans as “white” rights-holders. In short, the Americans had no viable alternative to allowing Mexican elites to share in governing this vast region because the American military presence in New Mexico was too small to sustain martial law and because there were too few Euro-American immigrants to implement a civil government without Mexicans’ participation.

  Chapter 2 focuses on how, in the decades following the initial American occupation, the question of where Mexicans fit in the American racial order was negotiated among Euro-American elites. The dominant view, articulated by most congressmen and the national press, was that Mexicans were a racially inferior people, no better than blacks and Indians and, thus, unfit for self-government. Adherents of this position vigorously opposed admission of New Mexico as a state until Euro-Americans outnumbered Mexicans. What I term “the progressive view” was developed by some Euro-American elites living in New Mexico as a counternarrative to the dominant racial story and, specifically, as a strategy to achieve statehood. Proponents of the progressive view posited a notion of race that emphasized culture over biology and harmony over conflict and sought to rehabilitate Mexican elites as the descendants of the initial European colonizers of the region. The progressive view fostered an unprecedented level of incorporation of a non-white racial group, but it also served to promote white supremacy.

  A central part of the second chapter is its analysis of nineteenth-century New Mexico as the product of a unique process of “double colonization,” first by the Spanish and later by the Americans. Significantly, both the Spanish and the American colonial enterprises were grounded in racism, though their precise ideologies of white supremacy differed. American colonizers in New Mexico thus did not start with a clean slate, but rather developed a racial order in the looming shadow of the Spanish-Mexican racial order. American sociologists who study race often have cited Latin American contexts as illuminating counterexamples to American racial dynamics, but these studies have overlooked the substantial ways in which American racial dynamics are themselves substantially evolved from Spanish colonial models of race. The myopic tendency to view American race relations as about white-over-black relations and as centered on a North/South axis has obscured the ways in which Latin American–style race relations have existed historically in the United States and continue to exert a powerful legacy.

  The third chapter highlights the actions and motives of Mexican American elites, from whose ranks the majority of the elected officials in New Mexico came, making them the co-citizens who governed the region with Euro-American officials appointed by the American president. With the quiet blessing of Congress, Mexican elites defined themselves as white rights-holders, even as they often were politically subordinate to the Euro-American appointed officials sent by Washington to govern the region. This chapter explores the fragility of Mexican Americans’ legal whiteness, in a context in which both Mexican Americans and Euro-Americans understood that Mexicans occupied a racially inferior niche in American society. I argue that Mexican elites struggled mightily with this tentative off-white status, constantly seeking to shore up their whiteness by distancing themselves from other non-white groups. One result was Mexican elites’ disenfranchisement of Pueblo Indians, despite the many commonalities Mexicans and Pueblo Indians shared and despite their history of alliance against the American colonizers. A second dynamic was Mexican elites’ antiblack and proslavery actions, despite their earlier antislavery positions. I close the third chapter by looking at Mexican elites’ moves to protect their ideological and material interests in enslaving Indians captured or traded from the various non-Pueblo tribes in the region.

  The final chapter considers how New Mexico’s racial dynamics fit within the larger picture of American race relations as they evolved in the middle to late nineteenth century. It explores each of the book’s three themes in a national context. First, the centrality of colonization in the Mexican American experience is explored through the lens of land and the transition from a Spanish-Mexican to an Anglo-American property regime. Second, the racialization of Mexican Americans is linked in important ways to
the racial subordination of blacks by examining the connections among Manifest Destiny, the infamous Dred Scott case, and the Civil War. The book’s third theme, law’s key role in the social construction of race and racial ideology, is explored by contrasting the legal definition of Mexicans as white under naturalization laws with the consolidation of black subordination in the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson opinion of 1896. I explore the coevolution of opposite “one-drop” rules that governed African Americans and Mexican Americans: for blacks, one drop of African ancestry justified legal disabilities, while for Mexicans, one drop of Spanish ancestry at times conferred legal rights.

  The original edition closes with an epilogue in which we travel forward one hundred years from the study’s end at the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. I move from a focus on the macrohistorical context to the question of racial identity, both collective and individual. I consider the legacy of Mexican Americans’ off-white status for understanding Mexican American identity today. This includes a discussion of how Mexican Americans compare to other Hispanic subgroups and how the increasing proportion of Mexican immigrants affects Mexican American identity. The second edition ends with a postscript that takes Manifest Destinies to the present moment, making the claim that Mexican Americans and other Latinos have moved definitively into the non-white category and away from a liminal off-white or in-between racial status.

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  In this study, I use the terms “Mexican” and “Mexican American” to describe the people of mixed Spanish, Indian, and African ancestry who lived in the Spanish colony of New Spain known today as the American Southwest. I intend to distinguish Mexicans from Euro-Americans (white Americans of European origin, both citizens and noncitizen immigrants, who were not black, Indian, Asian, or Mexican), African Americans, Indians, and Asians. When talking collectively about groups other than Euro-Americans, I sometimes use the term “non-white” in contradistinction to Euro-Americans whom I consider “white,” despite the various contests over these terms. Although the meaning of these various labels or their application in particular situations was hardly simple and uncontroversial, the adoption of consistent terminology facilitates our discussion.