Manifest Destinies, Second Edition

by Laura E. Gómez

  112 Prince, Historical Sketches of New Mexico, 349.

  113 Ibid.

  114 Ibid., 351.

  115 Ibid.

  116 Stratton, Territorial Press, 129; see also ibid., 111.

  117 Ibid., 132.

  118 Ibid.

  119 For discussions of the role of the Santa Fe Ring—which included Prince and Catron as core members—in advocating for statehood, see Durán, “‘We Come as Friends,’” 88; Lamar, Far Southwest, 121–46; Larson, New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood, 142–46.

  120 Larson, New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood, 145 (quoting an 1896 letter written by Catron).

  121 Ibid., 143.

  122 In addition, during this time several bills were introduced that concerned New Mexico statehood, some of which aroused anti-Mexican sentiment. For example, in 1889, when New Mexico was included in an omnibus statehood bill with Washington, Montana, and South Dakota, several newspapers responded by attacking New Mexico’s Mexican population. Ibid., 148. According to the Chicago Tribune, New Mexico’s people were “not American, but ‘Greaser,’ persons ignorant of our laws, manners, customs, language, and institutions” who were “grossly illiterate and superstitious.” Prince responded to press reports such as these, as well as to a congressional report very critical of the New Mexican population. Ibid., 151.

  123 See ibid., 117, 332.

  124 According to Larson, only the “occasional article” in the national press said something favorable about New Mexico, and then it was “usually brief and unenthusiastic.” Ibid., 131.

  125 Ibid., 123–24.

  126 Ibid., 124 (quoting a March 3, 1875 article). The Cincinnati Commercial noted disapprovingly in the same article that court proceedings were conducted in English in only two of fourteen counties. Ibid.

  127 Ibid., 125.

  128 Ibid., 119.

  129 Ibid., 126.

  130 Ibid.

  131 Ibid., 128, 130.

  132 New York Times, November 7, 1876.

  133 Ibid. (emphasis added).

  134 New York Times, May 19, 1876.

  135 Ibid.

  136 For a discussion of Beveridge’s role as leader of the opposition to New Mexico statehood, see Larson, New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood, 207–10; see also Bowers, Beveridge and the Progressive Era, 182, 193–97.

  137 Weston, Racism in U.S. Imperialism, 48 (quoting a 1901 Senate speech by Beveridge). Anthropologist and legal scholar Mark Weiner has drawn similar conclusions about Beveridge in a different context: “American imperialist policy, for Beveridge, thus arose ‘not from necessity, but from the irresistible impulse, from instinct, from racial and unwritten laws inherited from our forefathers.’” Weiner, Americans without Law, 66 (quoting Beveridge).

  138 Weiner, Americans without Law, 51 (quoting a 1900 Senate speech by Beveridge).

  139 Larson, New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood, 207.

  140 Ibid., 68 (quoting a campaign speech by Beveridge). Bowers’s biography celebrates Beveridge as the leading national proponent for imperialism: in Beveridge, he concludes, “imperialism, defiant, unafraid, had found a voice.” Ibid., 70. “He alone, among Republican orators, took imperialism as his theme [and] it was his first speech in the Senate on our Philippine policy that made him a national figure.” Ibid., v–vi.

  141 Summarizing Beveridge’s conclusions about the Philippines, Bowers reports: “He had convinced himself . . . that the [Filipino] people were unfit for self-government, that their country was enormously rich with resources scarcely touched because of the lack of capital; that commerce would thrive under a stable government; that the climate was fit for American occupation.” Ibid., 109.

  142 Weston, Racism in U.S. Imperialism, 47 (quoting a 1901 article written by Beveridge).

  143 Larson also notes Beveridge’s close ties to President Roosevelt as a factor in his assumption of the committee chairmanship. Larson, New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood, 207.

  144 The House passed the bill on May 9, 1902.

  145 Bowers, Beveridge and the Progressive Era, 197.

  146 Bowers reports that, prior to undertaking the hearings, Beveridge had tried to line up witnesses calculated to interest eastern newspaper editors—professors from Columbia, Yale, and Harvard who would testify about New Mexico’s poor agricultural potential, and novelists and artists who would interest “the public in the fight.” Ibid., 193.

  147 Larson, New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood, 209–13 (describing Beveridge’s direct communication with editors of the Saturday Evening Post, Washington Times, Outlook, and Review of Reviews). Moreover, there is evidence that Beveridge got the idea for the whistle-stop from anti-statehood newspapermen. Ibid., 209.

  148 On a fourteen-day tour, the subcommittee held hearings in three Oklahoma cities (over two days), two Arizona cities, and five New Mexico towns (over the course of nine days in the territory).

  149 See “New Statehood Bill”; see also Larson, New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood, 213.

  150 In Las Vegas, thirteen of the twenty witnesses had Spanish surnames; in Santa Fe, twelve of eighteen witnesses had Spanish surnames. “New Statehood Bill,” 309 (Index of Witnesses).

  151 The 225-page report was followed by an additional 100 pages of appendices, including lists of jurors and other documents submitted by district court clerks—documents Beveridge relied on to conclude that Mexican Americans dominated New Mexico’s legal system. For example, Exhibit H consisted of a series of form documents used in the justice of the peace courts, all written in Spanish. “New Statehood Bill” (Exhibit H). The five index topics (listed in order from highest to lowest number of witnesses testifying) were the following: “Census—Language and Racial Division” (twenty-one witnesses); “Population, Racial Division and Language” (sixteen witnesses); “United States Courts—Language, Crimes, and Interpreters” (twelve witnesses); “Petty Courts (Justice of the Peace and Police)—Language Used, Crimes Charged, etc.” (twelve witnesses); “Newspapers (Spanish and English)” (nine witnesses). A total of seventy witnesses testified in the hearings, with only thirty-five persons testifying about topics that did not include race or language. These topics were the following: “Schools” (fifteen witnesses); “General Statements—Occupation, Resources, Development” (ten witnesses); “County and Municipal Government Offices” (six witnesses); “Irrigation”(three witnesses); “Banks” (one witness). At least two of these topics—schools and government offices—involved questioning witnesses about racial demographics and language usage, suggesting that these themes were even more pervasive than this analysis suggests. “New Statehood Bill” (Index of Topics).

  152 Larson, New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood, 211–12, 217.

  153 In his history of the statehood fight, Robert Larson calls Quay “a shrewd and unscrupulous politician” and points to earlier charges of abuse of his position to further his financial holdings in sugar stocks. Larson, New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood, 208.

  154 Ibid., 213 (quoting a 1902 letter from Beveridge to a newspaper editor). See also Bowers, Beveridge and the Progressive Era, 182, 193.

  155 Larson, New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood, 213.

  156 Bowers’s celebratory biography clearly takes this view. See, generally, Bowers, Beveridge and the Progressive Era. The portrayal of Beveridge as an anticorruption reformer is prevalent, though less central, in Larson’s study. See, generally, Larson, New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood.

  157 Bowers, Beveridge and the Progressive Era, 194 (quoting a letter written by Beveridge, November 29, 1902); see also Larson, New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood, 214–15.

  158 See Larson, New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood, 141–42 (citing Democratic governor Edmund G. Ross’s 1885 essay on New Mexico politics).

  159 For a general discussion that does not focus on race, see Melzer, “New Mexico in Caricature.”

  160 See also ibid., 340.

  161 Bowers, Beveridge and the Progressive Era, 217 (quoting a 1905 Senate speech). />
  162 Melzer, “New Mexico in Caricature,” 345.

  163 Larson, New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood, 267.

  164 See ibid., 267–68; see also Melzer, “New Mexico in Caricature,” 354.

  165 Larson, New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood, 279.

  166 Ibid., 296.

  167 For an analysis that links Prince’s racial ideology to a concerted effort to draw tourists and immigrants to New Mexico, see Nieto-Phillips, Language of Blood, 163–65.

  168 Rodríguez, “Tourism, Whiteness, and the Vanishing Anglo,” 196. Whereas Rodríguez traces the tricultural harmony myth to the New Deal period, I have argued here that its origins are in the late nineteenth century.

  169 Anthropologist Sylvia Rodríguez has noted the dynamic in contemporary race relations in Taos: “While racism as an issue has surfaced as such during the past two decades, there is nevertheless a strong taboo against discussing it openly in public or ethnically mixed company, although thinly veiled allusions and pointed insinuations are often made.” Rodríguez, “Land, Water, and Ethnic Identity in Taos,” 358. Over the past few years, however, a more open conversation about the impact of history on contemporary lives has been raised in Taos in the context of debate over the name of Kit Carson Park. I participated in a public forum on the Taos Revolt, organized by Rodriguez as part of her series New Perspectives on Taos History, on October 8, 2015, in which these concerns were raised. See www.taoslecture.com (including a link to videos from “The 1847 Revolt: The Beginning of Modern Taos”).

  170 Stratton, Territorial Press, 117.

  171 Larson, New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood, 1.

  Chapter 3. How a Fragile Claim to Whiteness Shaped Mexican Americans’ Relations with Indians and African Americans

  1 Prince, Concise History, 95.

  2 Ortiz, “Pueblo Revolt,” 50.

  3 There were significant differences within each stratum, of course, but here my focus is race, rather than status, class, or other differences.

  4 A contemporary scholar contends, “Because Mexico had recognized Pueblo Indians as citizens, it follows that under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Pueblo Indians became citizens of the United States.” Newton et al., Cohen’s Handbook, 322.

  5 Merry, Colonizing Hawaii, 12.

  6 Most scholars trace the gap between Mexican Americans’ legal status as white and their social status as non-white to the post–World War II period, but I argue here that it is rooted in the mid-nineteenth-century conquest of Mexico. See Gross, “Texas Mexicans and the Politics of Whiteness”; Haney López, “Retaining Race”; Martínez, “Legal Construction of Race”; Martínez, “Legal Indeterminacy”; Sheridan, “Another White Race”; Wilson, “Brown over ‘Other White.’”

  7 Gómez, “Race, Colonialism, and Criminal Law,” 1143–44.

  8 On the history of Mexican Americans in Las Vegas, see Arellano, “Through Thick and Thin.”

  9 As late as 1880, thirty-four years after the American occupation, no county had more than two thousand Euro-American residents, and many had only a few Euro-American residents. Using census data, I have estimated that the proportion of Euro-Americans in New Mexico counties in the late nineteenth century ranged from a low of 3 percent (in Valencia County) to a high of 57 percent (in Grant County, a mining district). Since the census counted Mexican Americans as “white” at this time, there is no official tally of Euro-Americans and Mexican Americans. I used census data and other data to estimate the figures.

  10 For example, in my research on nineteenth-century court proceedings in Doña Ana, San Miguel, and Taos counties from the 1850s to the 1880s, I encountered no more than a handful of Mexican American lawyers who practiced in the territorial courts. In the almost seventy-year period between the end of the war with Mexico and when New Mexico became a state, six hundred lawyers practiced in New Mexico; among these, Euro-American men outnumbered Mexican American men five to one. Reichard, “Paternalism, Ethnicity,” 10.

  11 Williams, “Dependency Formations,” 157–60.

  12 Ibid.

  13 The first Mexican American generation with a sizable bilingual segment came of age in the 1880s and 1890s—the same generation that gave birth to Mexican American literary and press expression in New Mexico. See Meléndez, So All Is Not Lost; Meyer, Speaking for Themselves. In addition, several Mexican American witnesses at the 1902 hearings of the Senate Committee on Territories (the so-called Beveridge Committee) were born in the late 1850s and had learned English as young adults (Enrique Armijo, school principal; Enrique H. Salazar, newspaper editor), whereas justice of the peace Jesus María Tafolla, who was born in 1837, spoke no English. “New Statehood Bill.” See also Gómez, “Race, Colonialism, and Criminal Law,” 114n31.

  14 On the role of language in anti-Mexican racism, see, generally, Perea, “Demography and Distrust,” 269; see also Delgado and Stefancic, Latino Condition, 557–624.

  15 In using the phrase “psychological inducement,” I am borrowing from sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of “the psychological wages of whiteness.” In his monumental study Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois argued that white workers earned, in effect, “a sort of public and psychological wage” in the form of “public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white,” which proved a palatable substitute for wages that had been undercut by the reliance on black labor made cheaper because of racial discrimination. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 701; see also Roediger, Wages of Whiteness.

  16 In the 1849 U.S.-led campaign against the Navajos, for instance, six different Pueblos (Cochiti, Jemez, San Felipe, Santa Ana, Santo Domingo, and Zia) contributed between five and fourteen volunteers to the Pueblo Militia. McNitt, Navaho Expedition, lxxix.

  17 Ortiz, “Pueblo Revolt,” 50.

  18 I do not intend to overstate the extent to which multiple, diverse Pueblo communities resembled Mexican village society in the region. I agree with Hall and Weber that “the two societies coexisted but were separate in many ways. Since 1598, when Spanish-Mexicans first began to settle among them, the Pueblos had borrowed new kinds of animals, foods, technology, and ideas from their neighbors, but they had borrowed selectively. The essentials of Pueblo culture—language, religion, society—had remained intact.” Hall and Weber, “Mexican Liberals,” 5. An additional, important point is the extent to which Pueblos resisted hispanicization; these resistance strategies were violent and overt in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, but they existed in myriad other ways both before and after that time. My objective here is merely to emphasize that the new, American colonizers would have seen significant similarities between the two groups.

  19 Prior to the 1870s, most New Mexico counties had little court activity. In San Miguel County, for example, there were few criminal prosecutions prior to 1870; in Taos County, there were even fewer—only a handful between 1855 and 1866. These conclusions are based on my review of docket records. San Miguel County District Court Records and Taos County District Court Records, New Mexico State Records Center and Archives. See also Gómez, “Race, Colonialism, and Criminal Law,” 1136; Lamar, Far Southwest, 108; see also, generally, Hunt, Kirby Benedict.

  20 See Gómez, “Race, Colonialism, and Criminal Law,” 1147.

  21 Ibid., 1147–48; Reichard, “Justice Is God’s Law,” 139 (table 5).

  22 These positions tended to be filled by Mexicans. Gómez, “Race, Colonialism, and Criminal Law,” 1173.

  23 Similarly, in his analysis of the Spanish-language press in New Mexico, Gabriel Meléndez has argued that the formation and maintenance of newspapers in Spanish, under the leadership of Mexican editors, played an important role in affirming Mexicans’ cultural and political resistance to American domination. Meléndez, So All Is Not Lost, 7.

  24 In some counties, Euro-American defendants also were overrepresented, compared to Mexican Americans. See Gómez, “Race, Colonialism, and Criminal Law,” 1158–64.

  25 For example, between 1876 and 1883, every sheriff of S
an Miguel County was Mexican American. Ibid., 1171.

  26 Ibid., 1172.

  27 Ramirez, “Hispanic Political Elite,” 214.