Conclusion
Racism and the ideology of white supremacy were bound up with colonialism in New Mexico. The American colonizers needed a native governing elite, both because they had insufficient numbers of Euro-American settlers in the region and in order to legitimize the military occupation. The latter was especially important given extensive Whig criticism of the war with Mexico and of imperialism more generally. Americans did not want to see themselves as a colonial power. One of the striking features of the standard American history of this period—of the U.S.–Mexico War and the subsequent annexation of more than half of Mexico’s territory—is the sheer absence of colonialism as a topic or theme. In the national mythmaking constituted by this conventional history, this encounter of peoples is not presented as one of conquest and colonialism. Instead, most histories of U.S. imperialism begin in 1898, with the end of the Spanish–American War and the U.S. acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines and annexation of Hawaii.153 But we cannot fully understand the second imperial moment of the 1890s without understanding what occurred in the first imperial moment in the 1840s, in what is today the American Southwest.
Even as American colonizers tapped a native elite to govern in a region with far more Euro-American soldiers than civilians, they also needed to keep Mexican Americans and Indians in their racial place. For Mexican Americans, as the native elite in the colony, the distinction between political and social equality became paramount, if not always openly discussed. Though Euro-American men ceded formal political equality to Mexican American men, this did not translate into social equality between Euro-Americans and Mexican Americans. An essential element of the colonial strategy hinged on breaking up the military alliance and cultural affinity between Mexican Americans and Pueblo Indians. The lure of whiteness proved an ideal tool. With it, the American colonizers could, in one move, co-opt Mexican Americans willing to trade on their mestizo, part-European heritage and divide Mexican Americans from their Pueblo neighbors.
The power of racism is ideological, achieving its apex when racially subordinated groups themselves help to reproduce racism. As historian George Lipsitz has noted, “Aggrieved communities of color have often curried favor with whites in order to make gains at each other’s expense”; as examples he lists American Indians’ ownership of black slaves, black soldiers’ roles in the Indian wars, and Mexican American and Chinese efforts to claim “whiteness.”154 I have shown how this worked by describing situations in which Mexican Americans gained the upper hand over non-white groups lower on the racial hierarchy, including Pueblo Indians, free and enslaved blacks, and nomadic Indians. Despite evidence of ambivalence in the law—both on the books and in action—during the early years of the American occupation, Mexican American men disenfranchised their Pueblo brothers so that they were virtually excluded from the new American polity in New Mexico. Acting in symbolic terms because of the small numbers of African Americans in the region, Mexican American elites sided with proslavery and scientific racism to enact draconian black and slave codes in the 1850s. At least partly in order to affirm their whiteness, Mexican American elites sought to continue the enslavement of nomadic Indians during the first twenty-five years of the American occupation.
Mexican Americans took up American racism by claiming whiteness and seeking to distance themselves from other non-white groups. But Mexican Americans paid a price for the legal fiction that they were “white”: they ultimately were co-opted by the American colonizers. By the end of the nineteenth century, we begin to see shifts reflecting Euro-Americans’ ascendancy and the end of the period of power sharing with Mexican American elites. In all of these contexts, the divisions between Mexican Americans and other subordinated groups gave tremendous power to the American colonizers, increasing divisions among potential allies in an anti-American campaign, legitimizing the American presence as “protector” of Indians, and entrenching the American legal system as a neutral, fair forum for dispute resolution.
At the same time, conquest was not a totalizing experience. At the edges of a system of co-optation and colonial authority, Mexican American elites exercised more self-determination than other non-white racial groups in New Mexico and, perhaps, anywhere in the United States at the time. Given their control of judicial forums such as the justice of the peace and probate courts, Mexican American men exercised considerable control over disputes among themselves, with Euro-American merchants and ranchers, and with members of various Indian communities. Although these victories were sometimes overruled by the Euro-American controlled district courts, Mexican Americans held the balance of power even in those forums, where they were the majority of grand jurors checking the power of Euro-American prosecutors and the majority of petit jurors checking the power of Euro-American judges.
Ultimately, Mexican Americans’ claim to whiteness simultaneously ruptured and buttressed white supremacy. It ruptured, and therefore destabilized, white supremacy by exposing the fluid and flexible nature of the category “white.” If Mexican Americans were sometimes considered white, or could sometimes persuade others that was so, what did it mean to be white? Might not other groups potentially assert rights based on claims to whiteness? The racial hierarchy was less stable when groups could proactively negotiate and transform their status within it. Yet the ability of Mexican Americans to at times succeed in claiming whiteness led them into a perverse trap. To solidify their classification as white, they had to act like whites, especially with respect to non-white groups. Mexican American elites, in particular, acted in ways that shored up their whiteness, at the expense of every non-white group below them in the racial hierarchy. Intentionally or not, they became agents in the reproduction of racial subordination.
4
Manifest Destiny’s Legacy
Race in America at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
This chapter elaborates on the three central themes of this book as they relate to the national scene: (1) the centrality of colonialism in constituting Mexican Americans as a racial group, (2) the important links between the experience of Mexican Americans and the broader patterns of racial formation and racial ideology in the United States, and (3) the crucial role of law in the social construction of race.
One of the major effects of the American colonization of Mexico was to transform property ownership and the regime of property law itself.1 These effects of colonialism led to the loss of the land base on which both elite and lower status Mexicans had depended (in the latter case, for subsistence farming and ranching). Although some Mexicans either held onto their land or gained new opportunities for ownership under American rule,2 the vast majority of land that previously had been owned collectively by Mexicans—via community land grants awarded by the Spanish or Mexican governments—came to be owned by the U.S. government or by Euro-American individuals or corporations. The process by which this massive transfer of property occurred is illustrated with the story of one Mexican American community’s forty-year legal struggle to retain its land. Their lawsuit eventually ended in failure in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1897.3
The formation of Mexican Americans as a racial group was closely linked to the broader evolution of the American racial order in the nineteenth century. This process worked in two directions: Manifest Destiny was an important factor driving broader changes in the racial order, and the larger racial order in turn shaped the particular trajectory of Mexican Americans. Usually, the Civil War and Reconstruction are viewed as the key events shaping the nineteenth-century racial order because they so fundamentally transformed the black experience. However, we cannot fully comprehend those events without understanding their links to the earlier conquest of northern Mexico. Manifest Destiny was a catalyst for the Civil War in that the acquisition of the vast Mexican Cession brought to a head the question of whether black slavery would be allowed to expand beyond the American South. Specifically, the question of the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise—which had banned slavery in the northern
section of the new lands, but allowed it in the southern section—gained urgency once the United States had taken control of more than one million square miles of Mexican territory. We explore these connections by examining the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling in the Dred Scott case,4 as well as the ways in which the subordination of blacks and Mexican Americans was intertwined.
Manifest Destinies has developed a third theme centered around the law’s role in the social construction of race and racial ideology. We continue that discussion by returning to the phenomenon of the legal definition of Mexican Americans as white. Whereas we previously examined legal whiteness in the context of the early processes that incorporated Mexicans into the United States—such as the collective grant of American citizenship to more than 115,000 Mexicans and the extension of the franchise to Mexican men in New Mexico, this chapter considers the later consolidation of the legal definition of Mexicans as white at the turn of the century. Using the context of a federal immigration case,5 we explore the larger tapestry of racial ideology, the law, and the social construction of race. On the one hand, at this time, the one-drop rule for African Americans was coming into being: one drop of black ancestry made someone black. On the other hand, with respect to Mexican Americans, a kind of reverse one-drop rule was emerging: one drop of Spanish ancestry made someone white. At the end of the day, these very different racial ideologies worked together to entrench white supremacy and to facilitate the racial subordination of African Americans and Mexican Americans, even as they promoted a gulf between these two groups. Only by looking at the history of Mexican Americans alongside that of African Americans can we see the full arc of the American racial order as it existed at the outset of the twentieth century.
Colonialism and the Property Rights of Mexican Americans
Exactly a century after Spanish authorities had given their ancestors title to the community land grant known as San Miguel del Vado, Julian Sandoval, Gregorio Roybal, José Angel Dimas, Catarino Sena, Tomás Gonzáles, Juan Gallegos, and Román Gallegos petitioned the U.S. Court of Private Land Claims to ask for American recognition of their collective ownership of 315,000 acres in northeastern New Mexico.6 In 1894 when they went before the court, these men were the elected representatives of more than a thousand families who lived on the grant started with thirteen families in 1794.7 In 1846, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of New Mexico, Kearny delivered one of his rooftop speeches in San Miguel—the largest village located on the grant—promising to protect the civil, religious, and property rights of the native people. The San Miguel petitioners claimed ownership of land given by the Spanish Crown that included small, individually allotted plots of land for subsistence farming (less than 5,000 acres) as well as more than 300,000 acres reserved for use in common such as timber cutting, sheep grazing, and the like.
The grant received its name because the word vado means “ford” in Spanish, and, as lawyer Malcolm Ebright has described it, the center of the San Miguel del Vado grant crosses the Pecos River into New Mexico’s eastern plains “[along] the trail to the plains, used by comancheros [Comanche Indians] and ciboleros [buffalo hunters].”8 When Spanish authorities issued the grant in 1794, this region of New Spain was controlled not by the Spanish Crown but by the Comanche Indians. The San Miguel grant was awarded at the apex of Comanche control of northeastern New Mexico, roughly a decade and a half after the peak of hostilities between the Comanches and the Mexican settlers and Pueblo Indian communities.9 As folklore scholar Enrique La Madrid puts it,
The Comanches had the future of the province in their hands. The economic and political hegemony they established on the southern plains was without parallel. . . . Better armed than the presidial soldiers, the militia, and the Pueblo [Indian] auxiliaries, it was within their power to have driven everyone from their homes and destroyed the province completely had they so desired.10
The Spanish strategy was to give community land grants to mestizo settlers and Pueblo Indian communities willing to live in areas like these, where Spanish authority was precarious at best.11 When the Spanish returned to power in 1692 after the Pueblo Revolt, they could not continue to exploit the Pueblos on encomiendas (large agricultural production sites that depended on coerced Pueblo labor), but instead turned to a system that provided the various Pueblo communities with substantially more autonomy than prior to the revolt.12 The new system hinged on increasing the number of mestizo settlements in the outlying regions, where they could be a buffer to potentially hostile Pueblo and other Indian communities. The grants were attractive to mestizo settlers seeking upward social mobility and, especially, to genízaros—the nomadic Indians who had joined, voluntarily or by force, mestizo communities. In exchange for land and the opportunity for social and ethnic mobility (as previously noted, over time and sometimes rapidly genízaros moved into the general mestizo population), the genízaro or mestizo grantees organized militias to defend against Indian attacks. Anthropologist Claire Farago notes that genízaro settlers “established themselves as an upwardly mobile social class consisting of farmers and artisans in Abiquiu, Carnuel, San Miguel del Vado, Belén, Tomé, and elsewhere.”13
The five conditions attached to the San Miguel grant in 1794 reveal the challenges anticipated by both the grantors and the grantees.14 First, unlike grants awarded by the Spanish and Mexican governments to individuals (sometimes as rewards for military service or political patronage), the San Miguel grant was awarded “in common” to fifty-two male heads of household and to all future settlers of the grant.15 Private grants would have been unreasonable on New Mexico’s eastern plains at this time, given the Comanches’ control of the region. As legal scholar Placido Gómez has noted, community grants also reflected the melding of Spanish and indigenous systems of settlement in the arid northern territories of New Spain.16 In this circumstance, community land grants had to be more extensive in regions like New Mexico, where they were centered in valleys with narrow strips of land attached to a water source that could be allotted to individual families for a dwelling and a small farming plot, and the surrounding mountains could be used collectively for hunting, fishing, woodcutting, and grazing.17
The second condition of the original grant is equally revealing: the settlers had to agree to equip themselves with firearms and bows and arrows to defend the new settlement from Indian attacks. In 1794, the settlers mustered twenty-five firearms and an unrecorded number of bows and arrows to defend themselves.18 The third condition was that the settlers build a fortified plaza, or town center; before this ambitious construction was completed, they were to reside at the largely vacant Pecos Pueblo.19 By 1811 the settlers had built a church, and shortly thereafter the priest at Pecos Pueblo requested permission to move to the new church in San Miguel.20 The fourth condition, read together with the first, clearly indicates the fact that the grantees collectively owned the vast majority of the land: individually owned land was strictly limited to allotments to the leader (alcalde) and to future leaders of the community. Similarly, the fifth condition emphasizes the point: all work, from building the plaza to digging and maintaining the acequias (irrigation canals), was to be done “by the community with that union which in their government they must preserve.”21 Read together, the grant conditions established a political community as much as they constituted a contract for property transfer from the Crown to the settlers.
The surviving written records tell us relatively little about the original thirteen grantees or the fifty-two families listed as maintaining the grant a decade later. The 1805 families included thirteen male heads of household who were formally designated as genízaros (which probably means that there were other genízaros among the group, who were not officially designated as such).22 As noted in Chapter 2, genízaros made up a significant portion of the eighteenth-century settler population, and they were, as a class, at the bottom of New Mexico’s racial hierarchy.23 This provided them with strong incentive to participate in the high-risk but potentially high-yield investment as s
ettlers in frontier regions still controlled by nomadic tribes. Anthropologist Paul Kraemer has estimated that marital ties and economic success (linked in some cases to settlement on a community grant) allowed many genízaros to achieve upward mobility by changing their status to mestizo during the late colonial period, when the San Miguel grant was formed.24
The San Miguel grant was one of more than 150 community land grants awarded in New Mexico by the Spanish or Mexican governments.25 Although the federal government eventually certified many of these grants, it generally did so by confirming only the small, individually owned plots of land and rejecting the notion of communally owned property.26 This is precisely what occurred in the case of the San Miguel grant—the petitioners claimed collective ownership of 315,000 acres, and the U.S. Court of Private Land Claims agreed with their claim; but the Supreme Court disagreed and confirmed a mere 5,000 acres.27 The Court reasoned that the other 310,000 acres belonged to the sovereign—the Spanish government as the original grantors, the Mexican government when it controlled the region, and now the U.S. federal government. The result was that this massive acreage became part of the “public domain,” owned and operated by the federal government.
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