Manifest Destinies, Second Edition

by Laura E. Gómez

  Ultimately, however, the nature of “citizenship” rights conveyed to the Mexicans under Article VIII was, at best, legally vague and, at worst, a deliberate attempt to mislead the Mexican negotiators. With the citizenship provision, the Mexican legislature believed it had protected the rights of its citizens to retain Mexican citizenship or elect American citizenship. What the legislators probably did not understand, however, was that federal citizenship was inferior to state citizenship in the United States.154 Writing in 1828, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall distinguished between the rights of federal citizens and state citizens: those citizens who held only federal citizenship (this case dealt with citizens of the Florida Territory) had the protection of the Constitution (“the enjoyment of the privileges, rights, and immunities of the citizens of the United States”), but they did not have political rights. Political rights, Marshall wrote, would not accrue to Florida’s citizens until they became state citizens as well.155 By 1870, when the American citizenship of Pablo de la Guerra, a Mexican American living in California, was challenged, Marshall’s distinction had become settled law and was applied to the former Mexican citizens incorporated under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The California Supreme Court candidly acknowledged that the treaty provided only federal citizenship. Federal citizenship extended the protections of the Constitution and provided “a shield of nationality” abroad, but it did not convey political rights. Instead, political rights stemmed only from being a citizen of a state.156

  Under Article IX, the treaty left it to Congress to determine the political status of the former Mexican lands, which left the question of Mexicans’ access to full political rights, as state citizens, subject to politics. Congress’s first move was to divide the ceded territory into two parts, California and New Mexico. As noted previously, it was the acquisition of California that largely fueled U.S. military aggression against Mexico in the first place. When gold was discovered there in early 1848, near the end of the war, it became obvious that California would be admitted as a state. California’s statehood was made part of the so-called Compromise of 1850, which bundled together a variety of congressional measures related to the former Mexican territories and to slavery. With California’s fate sealed, the remainder of the ceded territory was organized into a federally controlled “New Mexico Territory.”157 The newly created federal territory was a vast area including almost all of present-day New Mexico and Arizona, as well as substantial portions of present-day Colorado, Nevada, and Wyoming.158 Territorial status, rather than statehood, proved an effective way for the federal government to establish political authority over New Mexico, while extending the bare minimum of the right of self-governance to the majority-Mexican and Indian population and the small (but growing) minority of Euro-American residents of the region.159

  There were three profound ways in which New Mexico’s status as a territory shaped its history as part of the United States. First, New Mexico’s status as a federal territory meant that its residents held a hollow federal citizenship. They were governed by the federal government, but they had no voting representatives in that government. Under the act creating the territory, New Mexicans elected a nonvoting delegate to Congress. Second, territorial status precluded New Mexico’s population from controlling the territorial government. Instead, New Mexico’s governor, three Supreme Court justices, and about a dozen additional territorial officials were appointed by the president (subject to approval by the Senate). Over the course of New Mexico’s sixty-four-year territorial period, these appointees were overwhelming Euro-Americans.160 The congressional legislation creating the New Mexico Territory provided for the establishment of a territorial legislature, which was dominated by Mexican men well into the American period of rule. Finally, territorial legislation was subject to nullification by Congress. Congress rarely overrode the territorial legislature, but it is reasonable to conclude that majority-Mexican territorial legislatures sometimes decided to forego or to enact legislation to appease Congress Congress (see Chapter 3).

  By 1860, it became clear that New Mexico’s status as a federal territory placed it in a kind of political limbo. In the Compromise of 1850, when New Mexico was declared a federal territory, Congress admitted California as a free state. Five years earlier, Congress had admitted Texas as a state in which slavery was allowed. In the coming decades, New Mexico would be carved into a variety of additional regions, including Arizona and Colorado, and several parts of the Mexican Cession would become states. Although some Mexicans and Euro-Americans repeatedly argued for New Mexico’s admission as a state throughout the territorial period, New Mexico’s status differed strikingly from that of its neighbors in the West. New Mexico existed for sixty-four years in an ambiguous political relationship with the United States, part colony and part territory-to-be-annexed.161

  More than anything, it was New Mexico’s racial makeup that accounted for its lengthy status as a federal territory. Though substantial numbers of Indians lived in the region, they were disenfranchised. It was the majority-Mexican federal citizens whom Congress objected to including as state citizens. Although Congress allowed Mexican men to enfranchise themselves as “white” rights-holders, it would not yield to the notion that Mexicans were true Americans, entitled to state citizenship alongside federal citizenship. Instead, Mexican Americans entered the nation as second-class citizens very much identified as racially inferior to white Euro-Americans, a process considered in Chapter 2.

  2

  Where Mexicans Fit in the New American Racial Order

  The stock story of westward expansion portrays Americans as courageous settlers welcomed by the Mexican people living in what would become the U.S. West and Southwest. The previous chapter provided a very different history of the American encounter with the native Mexican and Indian peoples of the region. Instead of peaceful annexation and conflict-free settlement, the Southwest came to be part of the United States via violent conquest, with law playing a central role in perpetuating that violence. Moreover, the American conquest, as well as the specific violence inflicted by troops and by law, reflected and expressed Americans’ convictions about white superiority and about the racial inferiority of everyone else, including Mexicans.

  In describing the military and political conquest of New Mexico by the United States, I have emphasized the region’s status as an American colony. However, the American colonization of the region in the nineteenth century was grafted onto the Spanish colonization of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The Southwest developed in what I term a “double colonization” context. Both the Spanish and American colonial regimes imposed a system of status inequality grounded in racial difference. While a central aspect of both the Spanish and American conquests was a racial ideology of white supremacy, the particular variants of the ideology differed under the two regimes.

  Double colonization meant that the various racial groups who inhabited the region in the mid-nineteenth century were forced to navigate two different racial regimes simultaneously. For example, those native to New Mexico—the Mexican, Pueblo Indian, and other Indian communities—negotiated the American racial order in the shadow of the Spanish-Mexican racial order. Similarly, white Euro-Americans who immigrated to New Mexico, as well as those who lived elsewhere, experienced the addition of Mexicans and Indians to the nation against the backdrop of the prior Spanish-Mexican racial order. Double colonization resulted in a situation in which everyone, including elites of all races, jockeyed for position and defined themselves and others in an undeniably multiracial terrain. To fully grasp the nature of the changes in the racial order after the American occupation, we must first come to terms with the prior Spanish-Mexican racial order. Only then can we explore how the two systems of racial subordination interacted with each other to produce the new American racial order.

  The First White Man Was a Black Man

  Pueblo oral history tells of their first encounter with non-Indians. In 1539, the Spanish Cr
own sponsored an expedition led by Fray Marcos de Niza. De Niza was dependent on the linguistic and geographical knowledge of a man named Estevan, who had amassed experience from earlier Spanish expeditions to Florida, Texas, and central Mexico.1 Spanish accounts describe Estevan as dark-skinned and, often, as an African slave.2 Jemez Pueblo historian Joe Sando relates that Pueblo Indians today often say, “The first white man our people saw was a black man.”3 Indeed, Jemez Pueblo still commemorates the encounter with a dance that includes roles for Estevan and De Niza. According to Sando’s description, De Niza is portrayed by a dancer with his face painted white who wears “a long black coat with a knotted white rope tied around his waist in the fashion of a Franciscan priest,” while Estevan is portrayed by a dancer with his face painted black—a “black sheep pelt covers [his head] to indicate curly hair.”4

  There are multiple and conflicting accounts of Estevan’s death at the hands of the Zuni people. According to the most frequently cited account (that of De Niza), Estevan led an advance party traveling about two days ahead of De Niza. Arriving at Zuni Pueblo, Estevan was warned to turn back; when he did not do so, and when he informed the Zunis that the rest of his large, well-armed party would soon be joining him, he was killed in the hope that word of his death would discourage the rest of his party from approaching further.5 In one Zuni telling of the story, the Zunis were awed by Estevan’s size and various powers and so decided to cut off his feet so that he would be unable to flee and would live among the Zuni people, eventually dying there as “an old deity.”6 Some anthropologists have attributed the Hopi and Zuni story about a man known as Nepokwa’I to that of Estevan, noting that the former is portrayed as a black-colored katsina who was stoned by the Zunis for seeking sexual relations with Zuni women.7

  The story of Estevan as the first non-Indian to explore New Mexico and meet the Pueblo Indians evokes the complexity of the Spanish conquest of New Mexico. From the Pueblo point of view, the story illustrates the irony and confusing nature of Spanish racial categories. To the Indians, the Spanish were “white men,” and yet their ranks included “black men” whom the Spanish had enslaved. In the Pueblo world of today, they are neither white nor black and thus wear “whiteface” or “blackface” to underscore their exclusion from these racial categories in their contemporary dance marking the infamous encounter.

  From another point of view, Estevan’s story raises more questions than it answers about his slave status. Anthropologist Martha Menchaca has concluded that Estevan was an African slave (probably, she says, brought to New Spain by his owner, Andres Dorantes, who was part of the Florida expedition of 1528).8 Based on circumstantial evidence, she believes he came from Africa’s west coast, from which Spain was heavily importing slaves in the early sixteenth century.9 Another account suggests different African origins for Estevan. According to an exhibition on the first Arabs in North America at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, Estevan’s Arabic name was Zammouri, which means a person from Al-Zammour, a city in Morocco.10 The exhibit reports that Estevan was captured in 1511, when Portugal invaded Morocco, and then likely sold into slavery, along with more than twelve million North African Arabs.11

  Yet another account argues that Estevan was not a slave at all, but should be characterized as “a political or economic refugee” who probably fled Morocco during the early sixteenth century, when sixty thousand Moroccans went to Spain or Portugal.12 Anthropologist Hsain Ilahiane cites Spanish accounts describing Estevan as a Moor born in Morocco, concluding that the Spanish would not have given such latitude (and the concomitant opportunity to escape) to a slave.13 Ilahiane goes so far as to dispute that Estevan was black, concluding that he was most likely “an Arab Muslim.”14 Of course, it is possible he could have been both black and an Arab Muslim. At least some of the confusion results because Estevan did not tell his own story—we do not have his written account, as we do that of De Niza. That significant limitation has been compounded because the nomenclature used to describe Estevan has varied. First, racial terms have been inconsistently translated from Spanish to English. For instance, various English translations of Spanish descriptions of Estevan use the terms “Negro,” “black,” “brown,” “Moor,” and “North African Arab” to describe him. In addition to the considerable problem of reliable, contextualized translation, there is the dilemma of the nomenclature of racial categories themselves, which have been contested in both Spanish and English.

  Seen through a wider lens still, Estevan’s story opens the door to a conversation about African slavery in the Americas more generally. The Spanish importation of African slaves into Mexico began in the mid-sixteenth century, almost as soon as the Spanish colonization did; indeed, African slavery was part and parcel of Spanish colonialism. During the first century of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, there were as many African slaves as Spaniards, about two hundred thousand in each category.15 Over time, African slaves mixed with Spaniards, Indians, and mestizos (people of Indian and Spanish ancestry) in Mexico to produce a racially mixed population. From the beginning, then, the racial encounter between Spaniards and Indians was ambiguous and nuanced, even as it was eerily clear in terms of who occupied positions of domination and subordination. What is crucial to understand is that both the Spanish and the American regimes of colonization imposed a hierarchy grounded in race, and, thus, each heralded a new system of racial inequality.

  The two hallmarks of the Spanish racial order as it was expressed in the “New World” were, first, the identification of the indigenous population as “savage” others and, second, the use of the first claim to legitimize Spanish conquest. As historian Ramón Gutiérrez has concluded, the moment of Spanish conquest in New Mexico in 1540 was marked with racist claims by the Spanish that the Pueblo Indians of the region were uncivilized, unintelligent, and “a people without capacity.”16 These racist conclusions, based on virtually no significant encounters with the Pueblos, allowed the Spanish to justify their wholesale appropriation of Pueblo property, their execution of Pueblo men, and their sexual exploitation of Pueblo women at the moment of initial Spanish–Pueblo contact.17 The key distinction in the Spanish racial cosmology was one between Spaniards (in general) and Indians (in general), which corresponded to other key binaries: civilized/savage, Christian/heathen, pure/impure, honorable/shameful, European/indigenous. At the same time, the Spanish early came to distinguish among Indians—between those whom they felt they could colonize (“civilized Indians” or neophytes, referring to their conversion to Christianity) and those over whom they did not hope to assert authority (“barbarous Indians”). In New Mexico, Pueblo Indians were “civilized Indians,” while the Apaches, Navajos, Comanches, and other tribes that refused to submit to Spanish authority were considered “barbarous.”

  But the dilemma for the Spanish colonizers in New Mexico, as it had been throughout Mexico and Latin America, was the almost immediate social-sexual interaction and blending between colonizers and natives. The result was an elaborate hierarchy of race-based inequality built around combinations and degrees of racial mixture among Spaniards, Indians, and African slaves who had been brought to the Americas. The foundation for this régimen de castas (caste regime) was phenotype, expressed as difference, most importantly in skin color, but also in hair type, eye shape, facial structure, and the like. These external differences among a population rapidly mixing “became the visible indexes of what were construed as natural inequalities of social being,” according to anthropologist Ana María Alonso.18 She describes the end result as a system of race-based inequality in the Spanish colonies:

  A hermeneutics of descent based on a calculus of types and mixtures of pure and impure blood, specified the quality (calidad) of social subjects and endowed them with a differential value that defined their place in society. Religion, color, blood, and descent became fused in the calculation of status and in the determination of class membership. . . . Through this logic of racial difference, power was personified and
embodied; relations of domination and exploitation were produced, naturalized, and legitimized.19

  While specific categorizations were complex and localized, the general hierarchy placed Spaniards at the top, Indian/Spanish mestizos in the middle, and Indians, blacks, and Indian/black mestizos at the bottom.

  In Mexico (including “New Spain,” as New Mexico was then known), the demographics of racial mixture overwhelmed the system, causing the formal regime to collapse of its own weight. Consider that, in 1646, Mexico’s population contained roughly equal numbers of people claiming Spanish descent (a minority of whom had been born in Spain) and those persons identified as black, but ten times as many mestizos and Indians as either of those groups, so that an inevitable mestizo population eventually resulted.20 Historian Alan Knight has noted that, in Mexico, “miscegenation proceeded apace” so that “no rigid apartheid could be sustained, and the sheer proliferation of ‘racial’ subtypes attested to the impossibility of thorough categorization.”21 Partly because of the dearth of pure Spaniards and partly because of mestizos’ demands for greater civil and economic rights, the turn of the nineteenth century was a period in which the Spanish racial legacy was softening, so that some mestizos were able to claim entitlement to the privileges of whiteness formerly limited to Spaniards. Spanish racial categories became increasingly fluid throughout the former Spanish colonies, so that in colonial Latin America, white skin, wealth (including land ownership), and other attributes of social mobility (such as occupation) were perceived as being able to “whiten” otherwise disadvantaged mestizos.22