[On Valentine’s
Day, I gave a Fitchburg
State University Harrod Lecture on my book in progress: Exclusion & Inclusion: The Battle to
Define America. These histories and stories couldn’t be more important
to me these days, so I wanted to spend the next couple weeks highlighting some
of them. Starting with this year’s version of my annual
non-favorites series, focused on exclusionary moments from across American
history. Add some of your least favorite histories, stories, or figures for a
crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances!]
On the treaty
that displaced and excluded, psychologically but also in many cases physically,
a foundational American community.
While there
remain many significant gaps in our national narratives about and inclusions of
Native Americans, I think we’ve gotten a lot better in the last few decades at
recognizing a couple core realities of Native American experience: the history
of unbalanced and broken treaties that defined the government’s relationship
with native tribes; and the removals from and losses of homelands and homes
that said history produced. As I wrote in this
post on the Trail of Tears, those narratives don’t do anything like full
justice to Native American histories, nor do they help us much to engage with contemporary
native issues, identities,
and perspectives;
but they’re definitely better than nothing. And when it comes to another
community that saw their homes and homelands significantly altered by both
federal action and encroaching Anglo settlers, Mexican Americans in the mid to
late 19th century, “nothing” is about the extent of what our
national narratives include.
As I wrote in
this post, the most significant and troubling aspect of our national
misunderstandings of the Mexican American War isn’t related to the war
itself—it’s about the longer histories and communities that we fail to
recognize and incorporate into our narratives as a result. Without an awareness
of the many, longstanding and deeply rooted Mexican American communities and
identities in the Southwest and California, homes and homelands that went back in
many cases to the first
16th and 17th century arrivals of Spanish explorers and settlers,
it’s certainly impossible to understand with any complexity the war itself, and
specifically how much it pitted American communities against one another, at
least as much as it represented two distinct nations in conflict. But without
such awareness it’s even more difficult to recognize how much the war’s
conclusion, and the terms and effects of the Treaty
of Guadalupe Hidalgo with which it closed, changed for those longstanding
Mexican American communities and individuals.
Far from
representing a negotiated peace settlement, the Treaty’s terms were mostly
dictated by the US representatives—who were occupying Mexico City at the
time—and the imbalance is obvious: the treaty is more exactly a land transfer,
one equal to the Louisiana Purchase in its immediate
and sweeping addition of an enormous area (comprising more than 500,000 square
miles) to the United States. When it came to the many communities of
Mexican Americans present within that region, the Treaty was in its official terms
quite generous, granting citizenship to them and expressing support for their
maintaining of their lands and homes. Yet precisely as was the case with the
aforementioned treaties with native tribes, the Treaty was immediately and
consistently broken: both by arriving Anglo settlers who treated Mexican American
land as available for the taking; and by subsequent legal decisions and
governmental policies, which tended to side consistently and overwhelmingly with
those Anglo settlers. Much of María
Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s historical novel The
Squatter and the Don (1885) focuses precisely on that history of broken
promises and lost homelands; the book’s second chapter, “The
Don’s View of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,” should be required reading
for all Americans if we are to understand the perspectives and experiences of
Mexican Americans over these dark decades of displacement and exclusion.
Next
anti-favorite tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other anti-favorites you’d highlight?
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