Manifest Destinies, Second Edition

by Laura E. Gómez

  2 See, generally, Williams, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought. For analyses of the complexity of Indians’ status as a racial group and as members of sovereign nations in the contemporary context, see Goldberg, “Descent into Race”; Valencia-Weber, “Racial Equality.”

  3 See, generally, Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America; McClain, In Search of Equality; Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore; Yamamoto et al., Race, Rights and Reparations.

  4 Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 50.

  5 In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law a major immigration reform bill that lifted many long-standing race-based restrictions on immigration, thereby opening the door to legal immigration from Asian and Latin American countries. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 259–62.

  6 These estimates are based on the number of Mexican-origin persons compared to the number of persons born in Mexico reported in the 1970 and 2000 censuses; the Census Bureau did not directly report these figures.

  7 While I might use the term “off-black” to describe Mexican Americans’ in-between status, the term “off-white” invites a focus on Mexicans’ striving (but rarely succeeding) for white status and equality with whites; there was no similar striving for black status (see Chapter 2).

  8 Cornell and Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race, xvii.

  9 Ibid., 25.

  10 Ibid., xvii.

  11 On the social construction of race, see, generally, Cornell and Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race; Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters; Haney López, White by Law; Omi and Winant, Racial Formation.

  12 For book-length studies, see Allen, Invention of the White Race; Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks; Fine et al., Off White; Foley, White Scourge; Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters; Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness; Roediger, Wages of Whiteness.

  13 Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 4.

  14 Foley, White Scourge, 7.

  15 “To many Americans then and since, the ‘manifest destiny’ years stand out as a happy interregnum between more troubled times: the expansion during the mid-1840s followed the economic distress touched off by the Panic of 1837 and preceded the tumultuous sectional strife of the 1850s that climaxed in the Civil War.” Hietala, Manifest Design, 10.

  16 Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 1–2; see also Gutiérrez, “Significant to Whom?,” 521 (referring to “the cluster of racist and nationalist ideas collectively known as Manifest Destiny”); Cartwright, “Reconsidering Race and Manifest Destiny,” 292.

  17 See Francaviglia, “Geographic and Cartographic Legacy”; Zoraida Vázquez, “Causes of the War.” As early as 1835, and several times between then and 1846, U.S. presidents attempted to purchase Alta California from Mexico. Smith, War with Mexico, 324; see also Fehrenbacher, Basic History of California, 24, 27.

  18 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 9 Stat. 922 (1848). For a history of the peace treaty, see Griswold del Castillo, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. On the size of the Mexican Cession, see U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, 428 (“Territorial Expansion and Land and Water Area of the U.S.: 1790–1970”); Brack, Mexico Views Manifest Destiny, 2; Fehrenbacher, Era of Expansion, 135, 138. I include Texas in the Mexican Cession since Mexico did not relinquish its claims to Texas until the ratification of the peace treaty. Fehrenbacher, Era of Expansion, 138; Brack, Mexico Views Manifest Destiny, 135. The United States added another 45,000 square miles of Mexican territory in 1853 with the Gadsden Purchase. 10 Stat. 1031 (1853).

  19 As this region was defined by Spain and later Mexico, it included all or part of Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. See Beck and Haase, Historical Atlas, map 19 (“Boundaries of New Mexico during the Spanish and Mexican Periods”).

  20 Whereas an estimated 75,000 Mexicans lived in New Mexico in 1850, 23,000 lived in Texas and only 14,000 in California. Martínez, “On the Size of the Chicano Population,” 49, 54–55. In the most comprehensive demographic analysis of the region, historian Oscar Martínez considers a range of census and other population estimates to conclude that the American census data underestimated the Mexican population in New Mexico by about 20 percent, and in California by 40 percent. He estimates that at midcentury, there were 7,800 to 14,300 Mexicans in California and 13,900 to 23,200 in Texas (excluding Indians). Ibid. Other estimates of New Mexico’s Mexican population prior to the American occupation range from a low of 60,000 (Lamar) to a high of 160,000 (Weber). See Lamar, Far Southwest, 92; Weber, Foreigners in Their Native Land, 140.

  21 New Mexico remains the U.S. state with the largest proportion of Hispanics (43 percent). U.S. Census Bureau, “Race and Hispanic Origin,” 7. Congress carved out from New Mexico three additional federal territories that eventually became states in the 1860s: Colorado (1861), Arizona (1863), and Nevada (1861). Beck and Haase, Historical Atlas, map 32 (“Division of New Mexico”).

  22 Technically, Texas’s 23,000 Mexicans who became U.S. citizens in 1845 by virtue of Texas statehood might be considered the first Mexican Americans. However, since Mexico did not concede its claims to Texas until 1848, in the peace treaty, I include Texas Mexicans in the general category of Mexicans who became Mexican Americans in 1848. For a history of Mexican Americans in Texas, see Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans.

  23 A Mexican official visiting Texas in 1834 estimated that American immigrants outnumbered Mexican settlers four to one (and that an additional 2,000 black slaves were owned by the Americans—about half the total Mexican population in Texas). Weber, Foreigners in Their Native Land, 89; see also Foley, White Scourge, 18; Langum, Law and Community, 4.

  24 Before the outbreak of war, there were fewer than 700 Euro-Americans living in Alta California; after gold was discovered in 1849, 10,000 miners entered the state. In that year, California’s non-Indian population climbed from 20,000 to 100,000 (the vast majority Euro-American). Fehrenbacher, Basic History of California, 27, 33–34.

  25 Lamar, Far Southwest, 92. There is reason to believe these numbers underestimate New Mexico’s Indian population; given the diversity and geographic dispersion of Indian nations, they would have been especially hard to count. New research on California Indians after annexation puts the Indian population there at 150,000 in 1846 and finds, horrifically, that 80 percent were murdered or massacred during the first three decades of American rule of California. See Madley, American Genocide.

  26 Legal scholar Ediberto Román makes this point in the following way: “The importance of an influx of white settler citizens into a nonstate territory should not be underestimated because their presence underscores the early American expansionist ideology that nonwhite, non-European peoples were inherently foreign—and thus inferior—and could not therefore constitute a populace prepared for the Anglo-Saxon notions of democracy and civilization that were appropriate for achieving statehood.” Román, Other American Colonies, 25.

  27 Hawaii became the fiftieth U.S. state in 1959; New Mexico became a state in 1912, sixty-four years after the war ended (only Arizona had to wait as long). The following other states were admitted in part or in full out of the Mexican Cession in the year indicated: Kansas, 1861; Nevada, 1864; Colorado, 1876; Wyoming, 1890; Utah, 1896; Oklahoma, 1907; Arizona, 1912. On the American colonization of Hawaii, see Merry, Colonizing Hawaii.

  28 As sociologist David Montejano put it in his landmark study of race in Texas, “A commitment to history meant, among other things, portraying the possibilities that human actors have at any particular moment, understanding their society as they did, and preserving the integrity of situations and events as much as possible. A commitment to sociology, on the other hand, meant teasing out patterns and sequences from a number of unique cases and moments in order to arrive at some general conclusions about society and social life.” Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 318.

  29 For some prominent examples of the exceptionalism thes
is, see Acuña, Occupied America; Gómez Quiñones, Chicano Politics; McWilliams, North from Mexico.

  30 This was brought home to me when an accomplished scholar expressed surprise that I was discussing a legal case from Texas in a book about New Mexico. For accounts of similar reactions to a study comparing the American economic penetration of New Mexico and Texas, see Reséndez, Changing National Identities, 8.

  31 I am not averse to local studies, and, indeed, have focused on local and regional data in the past. See Gómez, “Race, Colonialism, and Criminal Law.”

  32 On the controversy over ethnic labels, ethnic identity, and the Mexican American population, see Gómez, “Birth of the ‘Hispanic’ Generation”; Gonzáles, “Political Construction of Latino Nomenclatures”; Oboler, Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives; Padilla, Latino Ethnic Consciousness.

  Chapter 1. The U.S. Colonization of Northern Mexico and the Creation of Mexican Americans

  1 Wheeler Peak, in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, is 13,160 feet above sea level. Webster’s New Geographical Dictionary, 1332.

  2 Tórrez, “New Mexican ‘Revolt,’” 12. Former New Mexico state historian Robert Tórrez’s unpublished writing on the 1847 trials is the most thoroughly researched, drawing on government documents, newspapers, church records, and secondary literature. What we know about these events remains sketchy, partly because, as the saying goes, history is written by the victors.

  3 Garrard, Wah-to-Yah, 195–96. The hanging scaffold was built to be seen from near and far, and an eyewitness described the rooftops as “covered with women and children,” but noted that “no men were near; a few afar off stood moodily looking on.”

  4 The eyewitness was Lewis Garrard, a young American adventure seeker who inadvertently ended up in New Mexico at the outset of the U.S.–Mexico War. He kept a diary of his travels that was first published in 1850. Garrard, Wah-to-Yah, 196–98.

  5 For accounts of Bent’s assassination, see Keleher, Turmoil in New Mexico, 116–18n24; Lamar, Far Southwest, 60–61; Weber, Foreigners in Their Native Land, 98.

  6 Montejano notes the simultaneous presence of “a popular and romanticized awareness of southwestern history” and the “absence of a sociological memory” about the Southwest. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 2.

  7 Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, 27.

  8 Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 182.

  9 Weber, Foreigners in their Native Land, 89; Foley, White Scourge, 12.

  10 See, for example, Merk, Manifest Destiny, 151–52 (quoting editorials in the Louisville Democrat and Washington Union).

  11 During the early 1830s in Mexico, there were frequent expressions of concern about immigration policies, with fear that the plan to settle Mexico’s northeastern region with American immigrants would backfire. For a general discussion, see Zoraida Vázquez, “Causes of the War,” 28–37.

  12 Foley, White Scourge, 18; see also White, “It’s Your Misfortune,” 65.

  13 Acclaimed Mexican historian Josefina Zoraida Vázquez notes that most of the American settlers in Texas were southerners and that “for the most part, they were racists and slave owners, who were uneasy with Mexican abolitionism from the outset.” Zoraida Vázquez, México al Tiempo, 29 (author’s translation).

  14 Ibid.

  15 From 1850 to 1860, Texas’s population of slaves grew from 58,000 to 180,000. Koch, “Federal Indian Policy.”

  16 Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 213 (emphasis added); see also Eisenhower, So Far from God, xviv.

  17 Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 215.

  18 Ibid.

  19 Chávez, “Introduction,” 10–16. For additional insight on Mexico’s claims to Texas and the war generally, see Chávez, “Introduction,” and Gonzáles, Política, chap. 2.

  20 For an analysis explaining how “the far-flung boundaries of Texas” today came to exist, see Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 16–19.

  21 Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 7; Brack, Mexico Views Manifest Destiny, 115–17.

  22 The declaration passed 174 to 14 in the House (with 20 abstentions), despite John Quincy Adams leading the antiwar faction. The Senate endorsed the declaration on May 13, with 40 votes in favor and only 2 against (with 3 abstentions). Bauer, Mexican War, 68–69.

  23 As quoted in Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 236–37.

  24 Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 12; see also Fehrenbacher, Era of Expansion, 132.

  25 Fehrenbacher, Era of Expansion, 134.

  26 See ibid., 133 (regarding California); Bauer, Mexican War, 106 (regarding Mexico’s eastern coast).

  27 Fehrenbacher, Era of Expansion, 132.

  28 Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 12.

  29 Ibid., 115.

  30 Ibid., 116.

  31 Ibid., 12.

  32 DeVoto, Year of Decision, 207. In promotional literature today, West Point acknowledges the central role of the U.S.–Mexico War in allowing the academy to achieve national recognition. “Brief History of West Point.”

  33 Winders, Mr. Polk’s Army, 72; see also Fehrenbacher, Era of Expansion, 133.

  34 Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 25–26; see also Smith, War with Mexico, 286.

  35 Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 13 (noting that volunteer units went so far as to elect their commanding officers).

  36 Ibid., 58.

  37 Streeby, “American Sensations,” 13.

  38 Foos, Short, Offhand, Killing Affair, 13.

  39 Kearny’s troops were accompanied by a thousand mules carrying supplies and, on about the last half of their trip, by four hundred civilian wagon trains heading to New Mexico on their annual Santa Fe Trail caravan. Bancroft, History of the Pacific States, 409; Bauer, Mexican War, 130.

  40 On these facets of the war, see Bauer, Mexican War, 164–231; Smith, War with Mexico, 333–44. Both Bancroft’s and Smith’s studies of the war have been frequently criticized by contemporary scholars because of their anti-Mexican bias. Yet both remain important sources due to their heavy reliance on primary documents, including some no longer available.

  41 Marcy, who was in direct and constant communication with Polk, made this statement in a July 9, 1846, letter to Kearny. President’s Message of 1846, 7.

  42 Marcy’s June 3, 1846, letter to Kearny further emphasized the necessity of getting to California before the winter storms so that the Sierra Madres would be passable. President’s Message of 1846, 5–6.

  43 In the June 3 letter, Marcy promised Kearny the promotion, and he later made good on that promise, as shown by subsequent communications from Marcy to “General Kearny.” President’s Message of 1846, 5–6, 13.

  44 Kearny made this claim in an August 22, 1846, letter to Marcy. President’s Message of 1846, 21.

  45 Bancroft, History of the Pacific States, 416. The view that the American conquest of New Mexico was accomplished without violence largely remains dominant in both academic and popular histories. See Eisenhower, So Far from God, 209–10; Lamar, Far Southwest, 55 (reporting that Kearny “had taken New Mexico without firing a shot”) and even tourist brochures in New Mexico (New Mexico State Department of Tourism, Official 2004 Brochure, 26).

  46 Durán, “‘We Come as Friends,’” 43–47.

  47 President’s Message of 1846, 17–18, 20–21; see also Bancroft, History of the Pacific States, 415–16; Bauer, Mexican War, 134.

  48 The Americans were worried that priests might play a central role in leading resistance to the invasion, given their prominence in Mexican politics and government. In a July 9 letter, Marcy provided Kearny with a tutorial on the history of Catholic clergy in Mexican politics and, particularly, in the Mexican independence movement. President’s Message of 1846, 7–9.

  49 Ibid. The administration’s plan for California was the same, with Marcy emphasizing “the great importance that the good will of the people towards the United States should be cultivated. This is to be done by liberal and kind treatment. They should be made to f
eel we come as deliverers.” President’s Message of 1846, 11–12.

  50 Kearny explained his homage to Marcy in a September 16, 1846, letter. President’s Message of 1846, 25.

  51 President’s Message of 1846, 5–6.

  52 Ibid., 21.

  53 Kearny informed Marcy of these appointments on the day he made them, September 22, 1846, but the administration in Washington did not receive them until November 23, due to the length of time it took mail to reach Washington from Santa Fe. President’s Message of 1846, 26–27.

  54 See Bauer, Mexican War, 135; for the most detailed secondary account of the congressional inquiry, see Thomas, “History of Military Government,” 106–13.

  55 For example, in a November 3, 1846, letter, Kearny was warned not to overstep his authority in California (as he had in New Mexico): “You will not, however, formally declare the province to be annexed. Permanent incorporation of the territory must depend on the government [i.e., Congress] of the United States.” President’s Message of 1846, 15. Kearny was again warned, in a January 1847 letter from Marcy (which Kearny likely did not receive before late February), that, in New Mexico, he had gone “beyond the line designated by the President” in promulgating laws and courts. President’s Message of 1848, 13–14.