Mexicans in the Making of America

Neil Foley

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674744837
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the YearAccording to census projections, by 2050 nearly one in three U.S. residents will be Latino, and the overwhelming majority of these will be of Mexican descent. This dramatic demographic shift is reshaping politics, culture, and fundamental ideas about American identity. Neil Foley, a leading Mexican American historian, offers a sweeping view of the evolution of Mexican America, from a colonial outpost on Mexico's northern frontier to a twenty-first-century people integral to the nation they have helped build."Compelling…Readers of all political persuasions will find Foley's intensively researched, well-documented scholarly work an instructive, thoroughly accessible guide to the ramifications of immigration policy."
— Publishers Weekly "For Americans long accustomed to understanding the country's development as an east-to-west phenomenon, Foley's singular service is to urge us to tilt the map south-to-north and to comprehend conditions as they have been for some time and will likely be for the foreseeable future…A timely look at and appreciation of a fast-growing demographic destined to play an increasingly important role in our history."
— Kirkus Reviews

1

THE GENESIS OF MEXICAN AMERICA

Generations of Americans grow up learning about the voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1492 to the islands of the Caribbean, although no American can recall Columbus ever having set foot anywhere in present-day United States. That’s because he never did. We learned in elementary school that the Pilgrims arrived somewhere on the coast of Massachusetts in 1620 (near a commemorative stone called “Plymouth Rock”), and that the first permanent English settlement was established in 1607 in Jamestown. We may recall that the Vikings, or Norsemen, explored and for a brief time settled parts of Canada around the year 1000, but our knowledge of what happened between 1492 and 1607 is often a bit nebulous, although the history of Spanish exploration and settlement in what is now the United States is well documented. So why do we learn about the late-arriving pilgrims and virtually nothing about the earlier explorations of the Spanish, let alone the earlier settlements of mixed-race “mestizos,” in North America?¹

Before Canada, the United States, and Mexico existed as modern states, their first peoples took shape in bands, clans, tribes, towns, and cities. These peoples made kingdoms, nations, and empires. Of course, these social and political entities rested on materials that indigenous peoples had discovered, invented, cultivated, and developed as they migrated across the continent. When the English founded Jamestown, they survived because of Indian corn, a food discovered and cultivated in central Mexico, then dispersed throughout North America, through informal and commercial exchange over hundreds of years. On first contact then, the ancestors of Anglo Americans encountered Mexican food—turkey, squash, beans, tomatoes, chocolate would follow in both the near and distant future. The native ancestors of mestizo Mexicans made these foods, foods their Spanish ancestors encountered even before their entry into the Aztec empire.²

Spanish Exploration, 1513–1543.

The first European to set foot on what was to become the United States was Ponce de León, who landed somewhere on the eastern coast of Florida in 1513—over three hundred years before the United States acquired Florida from Spain—and christened the region “La Florida” for the abundance of colorful and fragrant flowers there. During the next three decades Spanish explorers and conquistadors like Hernando de Soto, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Baca, and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado were the first Europeans to traverse the Appalachian mountains, the Mississippi River, the Grand Canyon, and in the case of Coronado, the high plains of central Kansas where he thought he might find the fabled city of Quivira and all the gold that the Spaniards expected to find there. In 1565, over fifty years before the Pilgrims made landfall, Spaniards founded St. Augustine, the first permanent settlement in the United States (on the Florida coast) and explored much of the present-day U.S. South and Southwest, as well as the shoreline from Bangor, Maine to Florida, and the Pacific Coast as far north as Oregon. By 1600, the American empire of imperial Spain had become, according to one geographer, “a prodigious creation … extending from the Río Grande del Norte to the Río de la Plata at the southern portal to Peru.”³ In other words, as the Mexican novelist and essayist Carlos Fuentes put it, “the Hispanic world did not come to the United States, the United States came to the Hispanic world.”⁴

It is not surprising that U.S. history privileges the English colonizers over the Spanish, but it is nevertheless important to recall that much of what we call the American Southwest was permanently settled by Spaniards, mestizos, and their Indian allies centuries before the arrival of westward-moving Anglo Americans in the 1820s. Even before the United States took the northern half of Mexico in the 1848 U.S.-Mexican War, Anglo colonists (some with their slaves) began pouring into the territory from Texas to California where they first encountered Mexican people. From the start Anglo Americans regarded the Mexicans as little better than Indians and utterly incapable of becoming civilized members of the Anglo-American republic. Of course, Mexicans as a whole were principally of indigenous origin, a biological and visible fact that stoked the fears many Anglos had of racial intermixing. Although anti-immigrant rhetoric today has changed over the last 200 years, many of the anti-Mexican sentiments Anglos expressed in Texas in the 1820s continue to inform the fears of Americans today who worry that Mexicans are “reconquering” the Southwest and potentially every major city in the United States.⁵ The origins of Mexicans in the Making of America begin with “first contact” between Anglos and Mexican citizens in Texas in the 1820s and the annexation of the northern half of Mexico in 1848.

The signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 ending the U.S.-Mexican War resulted in the social, political, and economic displacement of Mexicans throughout the Southwest, despite U.S citizenship conferred by the treaty and guarantees to respect their property rights. Conquest meant that American racism against blacks in the South would be extended to Mexicans and other “foreigners,” like the Chinese, as well as to the original inhabitants of the land, the numerous Indian tribes of the American West.⁶ The consequences of the war were disastrous for Mexico, and its effects are still being felt today as Mexicans continue to immigrate to the United States across a border imposed on their country by war—a border recently militarized with high-tech surveillance technology, including the use of unmanned aerial drones, and the construction of a 700-mile barrier fence, all poignant reminders of conquest.

The long history of Spaniards, Christianized Indians, and Mexicans in the United States begins with a prior conquest—the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire almost 500 years ago and the northward expansion of colonial New Spain into the present-day Southwest, a conquest that set the stage for the making of Mexican America. Spain’s colony in North and Central America, New Spain, endured for three hundred years—from 1521, when Hernán Cortés presided over the defeat of the Aztec empire, until 1821 when Mexico achieved its independence from Spain. While the history of the native peoples of Mexico—among them the Olmecs, Toltecs, Maya, Aztecs, to name a few—stretches back many thousands of years, most historians trace the beginning of modern Mexico to the first encounter between Cortés and the Aztec emperor Moctezuma. Cortés had come to the New World in search of rank, fame, and wealth, particularly gold, as had most Spaniards. A Spanish soldier who fought in the conquest of Mexico explained that he came to the New World “to serve God and his Majesty, to give light to those who were in the darkness and to grow rich as all men desire to do.”⁷ With candor and clarity, he expressed the dual purpose of Spanish conquest: to convert the Indians to Christianity and to extract from their labor the wealth in the mines and soil of the New World. Through the violence of conquest, a people would evolve who expanded northward as they fashioned the “Spanish” borderlands.

The Aztecs, a warrior band of nomadic tribes from the coastal region of Nayarit in northwestern Mexico, were relative newcomers to the Valley of Mexico, having consolidated their power over the region only a few decades before the arrival of the Spaniards. The Aztecs demanded tribute from the natives they conquered, which included human sacrifices to their god Huitzilopochtli. Because of their very dominance, the Aztecs constructed the foundation of cultural and political unity on which the Mexican nation would later be built. With the help of a captured Indian slave, Malintzin (“La Malinche”), who served as Cortés’s interpreter and mistress, the Spaniards were able to form important political and military alliances with Indian tribes, such as the Tlaxcalans, who hated the Aztecs more than they feared the Spaniards. For good or ill, Malintzin would symbolize the intermixture of Spaniard and Indian that would make the Mexican nation.⁸ Like some of the coastal tribes near Veracruz, the Tlaxcalans welcomed the Spanish as allies against their Aztec overlords. In the fall of 1519, when Cortés marched on Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital and future site of Mexico City, he was accompanied by thousands of Indian allies determined to end their vassalage under the Aztecs.⁹

Cortés’s march inland to Tenochtitlán revealed a great deal about the violence that begot New Spain and the Mexican people. In Cholula, a large city about sixty miles from the Aztec capital, the Cholulan caciques (tribal chiefs) welcomed the Spaniards and their Indian allies, but secretly had plotted, apparently on orders from Moctezuma himself, to trap and destroy the invaders. Malintzin learned of the plot from a Cholulan woman and promptly warned Cortés, who devised a plan to teach the Cholulans—and the Aztecs—a lesson in Spanish retribution. With the aid of his Tlaxcalan and Cempoalan allies, Cortés ordered the wholesale slaughter of over 6,000 Cholulans, among them many of their priests and caciques. Upon hearing the news, Moctezuma believed, according to one chronicler, that further resistance was futile and reluctantly admitted Cortés and his men into the capital city of the Aztec empire, a city soon made the capital of colonial New Spain and later Mexico, including the states that would become the “Southwest.”¹⁰

When one of Cortés’s soldiers, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, first laid eyes on the Aztec capital as he entered the city from the causeway of Iztapalapa, he was struck by its immense size and grandeur, comparing it to “the enchanted scenes we had read of in Amadis of Gaul, from the great towers and temples and other edifices … that seemed to rise out of the water … for … never yet did man see, hear, or dream of anything equal to the spectacle which appeared to our eyes on that day.”¹¹ With about a quarter million inhabitants, Tenochtitlán was larger than any city in Spain, and only four European cities—Naples, Venice, Milan, and Paris—had populations larger than 100,000 in the early sixteenth century.¹² Moctezuma’s offer of friendship and gold to the Spaniards triggered a gold rush that would bring thousands of Europeans to Mexico and the Americas.

After formal exchange of greetings, Cortés and his men moved into the emperor’s palace and quietly held him prisoner. Relations between the Spaniards and the Aztecs grew increasingly difficult, particularly among the Aztec nobles who deeply resented the house arrest of their emperor. In the spring of 1520, while Cortés was away from the capital, his first officer, Pedro de Alvarado, suspected that the nobles had plotted against them. He decided upon the same course of action as had Cortés in Cholula: he surrounded thousands of them, unarmed, in the courtyard of the temple during a religious ceremony, and on Alvarado’s signal the Spaniards massacred them. Unlike the Cholulans, however, the Aztecs rose up in rebellion, killed a number of Spaniards, and laid siege to the palace where the Spaniards retreated and were essentially trapped. Cortés managed to fight his way back into the palace and, under the cover of darkness, the Spanish force fled the city, losing more than half its men, including many of its Tlaxcalan allies. In many ways, the creation of New Spain owes as much to indigenous peoples as the Spaniards whose Indian allies vastly outnumbered them.¹³

A year later, Cortés returned with reinforcements and retook the city in August 1521 after a spirited defense led by Moctezuma’s nephew, Cuauhtémoc. Moctezuma was killed the year before, although whether his death was at the hands of the Spaniards or the Aztecs has never been established. What is clear, however, is that a relatively small band of Spaniards was able to maintain control over the vast Aztec empire in part because of deadly microbes they carried with them from across the ocean—small pox, measles, and other contagious diseases endemic to Europe but unknown in America. With no prior exposure, Indians had not acquired immunities against them. Eight million Indians, about one-third of the native population, perished within a decade of the conquest, prompting many Indians to believe that their gods had abandoned them. Their defeat, in other words, owed as much to infestation as invasion. Without the plagues, the Spanish demographic imprint on modern Mexico would have been minimal—not unlike the impact of the Dutch on South Africans.¹⁴

News of Cortés’s victory over the Aztecs emboldened other Spanish opportunists to undertake expeditions in search of gold and glory. Many medieval legends circulated among the Spaniards about the existence of the Seven Cities of Cíbola and Quivira, mythical places of fabulous wealth that many Spaniards believed lay in the vast uncharted region to the north of Tenochtitlán, including Aztlán, the Edenic place of origin of the Mexica (Aztecs). Cortés himself believed in the existence of a northern province of Amazons, “inhabited by women, without a single man, who have children in the way which the ancient histories ascribe to the Amazons.” These fantasies would take the Spaniards and their more numerous mestizo and indigenous allies into what is now the southwestern United States.¹⁵

The most famous of these expeditions culminated in the failure of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado to find the mythical Quivira in what is now the heartland of America. Coronado organized his expedition based on a report of Fray Marcos de Niza, a friar who claimed to have seen one of the fabled Seven Cities (in present-day Arizona) and reported that it was larger and more magnificent than Mexico City. Coronado set out from Compostela in the northwestern region of New Spain in 1540 with a large force of over a thousand natives and about 335 Spaniards.¹⁶ In New Mexico Coronado’s men encountered a native called the Turk, who told them of the fabulous wealth of Quivira where “pitchers, dishes, and bowls were made of gold.”¹⁷ The Turk and Pueblo Indians had apparently deceived Coronado about the existence of Quivira in order to lure him into leaving their villages and never returning. Indeed he took the expedition as far as the present-day town of Lyons in central Kansas. As far as the Zuni and Pueblo Indians were concerned, the Spaniards demanded so much food, clothing, and shelter that they were themselves in danger of starvation and exposure to the elements. They understood well that Spaniards would do anything and go anywhere to find cities of gold, and it required no great strategic plan to tell the Spaniards that great wealth lay a little farther away—as far away from the Pueblo settlements as possible. The Pueblo Indians had asked the Turk, as Coronado later learned, to ta...