An American Language

Rosina Lozano

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780520969582
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

"This is the most comprehensive book I've ever read about the use of Spanish in the U.S.Incredible research. Read it to understand our country.Spanish is, indeed, an American language."—Jorge Ramos An American Language is a tour de force that revolutionizes our understanding of U.S. history. It reveals the origins of Spanish as a language binding residents of the Southwest to the politics and culture of an expanding nation in the 1840s. As the West increasingly integrated into the United States over the following century, struggles over power, identity, and citizenship transformed the place of the Spanish language in the nation. An American Language is a history that reimagines what it means to be an American—with profound implications for our own time.

PART ONE

A Language of Politics

1848–1902

CHAPTER 1

United by Land

Los habitantes de California no habiendo tenido otra cosa à que dedicarse mas que à la vida campestre y pastoril, . . . oyeron con sorpresa y desmayo que por una acta del Congreso, se nombrò una Comision con la facultad de examinar todos los títulos, confirmar ò desaprobar . . . ha producido el efecto mas desastroso.*

—Antonio Ma. Pico et al., Petition, “Al Honorable Senado y Casa de Representantes, de los Estados Unidos de America,” February 21, 1859

When José M. Gallegos, the first nuevomexicano terrritorial representative elected to Congress from New Mexico, took office in 1853, he resembled the vast majority of the citizens he sought to represent, in that he spoke only Spanish. Upon Gallegos’s reelection in 1856, Miguel A. Otero, his bilingual and U.S.-educated opponent, appealed the results to Congress. Otero emphasized his ability to speak English, noting his willingness to address the legislature “in the language of its laws and its constitution.”¹ Gallegos’s impassioned self-defense was translated and read from the floor by Georgia representative Alexander H. Stevens. Gallegos protested the “sneers and jests” of “certain honorable members of this body” inflicted simply because he wished to “be heard by counsel (because of [his] inability to make a formal discourse in English).” He noted the “painful disappointment at these exceptions to the generous spirit which [he] had been encouraged to expect from all the representatives of a free and magnanimous people.”² Otero emerged victorious from his appeal and began a five-year run as New Mexico’s congressional representative.³

Gallegos, like other nonindigenous Spanish-speaking nuevomexicanos, had been granted citizenship in the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. As a member of a new class of treaty citizens, Gallegos had expected better treatment, both for himself and for his constituents. His treatment by Congress, however, suggests that those in the federal government had a more limited understanding of treaty citizens’ rights and obligations.

In California, new treaty citizens encountered even more limits to their participation in political life. Nevertheless, they overwhelmingly chose to remain on their land after the U.S. takeover. As landowners, the treaty citizens—the majority of whom were Spanish speakers—required access to the language of power. Their desire to retain their privileges deepened their investment in the U.S. territorial or state system even as the English dominance of such a system led to loss of land and disrespect from Anglos.⁴

Never before had the U.S. government offered so much power to people who did not speak English or whose whiteness was in question. With the end of the U.S.-Mexican War, the United States acquired 525,000 square miles encompassing deserts, mountains, and canyons and populated largely by autonomous Indians. In New Mexico, nuevomexicanos comprised almost the entire settler population. In Northern California, californios found themselves overrun by Anglo settlers, whereas in Southern California they made up most of the settler population. The United States needed these treaty citizens to maintain control of the vast new territories it had acquired. These conditions permitted treaty citizens to establish social and political institutions that operated in Spanish—sometimes exclusively so.

This chapter explores the logic and limitations of treaty citizens’ claim to Spanish through their fights to retain their land—a proxy for power. But because an understanding of their claims depends on their legal status, the chapter opens with a brief account of how the situation of Spanish-speaking citizens differed from that of other persons living in territories acquired by the United States. Even within the category of treaty citizens, however, landowners’ experiences varied dramatically between California, which became a state immediately after its incorporation into U.S. territory, and New Mexico, which remained a territory until 1912. Treaty citizens in both California and New Mexico went to great lengths to retain their holdings, but their attempts to do so under different federal land confirmation criteria produced markedly different results.

A NEW KIND OF CITIZEN

The presence of a Spanish-speaking citizenry who preceded Anglos remains obscured in many stories of westward expansion. Rather than a “triumphant” story of inevitable national homogenization, that the United States set up territorial governments suggests regional fragmentation and disconnection. Granting citizenship through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to former Mexican citizens is one major example of this diversity. This result was not predetermined. Uncertainty ruled all aspects of former Mexican citizens’ lives as the war ended. What would happen to their land and possessions? Would they receive rights under the new government? How would they function in an English-speaking society? The nation could have imposed an English-language mandate as a prerequisite for holding office or for statehood. Instead, Congress legally incorporated former Mexican citizens based on geography.

Northern Mexican territorial residents encountered two distinct paths to U.S. citizenship. Tejanos, former Mexican citizens who had lived in tenuous settlements along the Río Bravo since 1749, received citizenship when Texas became a state in 1845.⁵ By this point, however, the tejanos made up only one-tenth of Texas’s population. The empresario system—which aided tejano economic ambitions and ensured their safety from autonomous Indians—brought an influx of Anglo and European settlers in the 1820s that left tejanos greatly outnumbered. Tejanos nevertheless survived through a set of rapidly shifting national allegiances to the Spanish Empire, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the United States, the Confederacy, and finally the United States again. Upon its founding in 1836, the Republic of Texas swiftly dismantled Spanish and Mexican land grants, redistributing land based on length of occupancy. Many tejanos received the maximum allotment only to sell their properties to secure cash from speculators or rebuild after the war.⁶

Tejano appeals for the republic to recognize Spanish as a language of governance ended in frustration. The republic’s governing structure included some tejanos—including three signatories to its constitution—who sided with Texas over Mexico.⁷ During its second legislative session, a joint resolution requested that the Spanish language be used so as to accommodate “our fellow citizens” who were left “wholly ignorant” of laws for “which their obedience was required.”⁸ By the time the U.S. government ratified Texas statehood in 1845, the republic had experienced ten years of English-language rule disrespecting tejanos and their land rights.⁹ The following year, the state legislature allowed Spanish translations of certain laws selected by the governor.¹⁰ These realities of landownership and language separated the experience of tejanos from other residents of the Mexican northern territories.¹¹

A year after Texas joined the nation, the United States began its military quest to take over Mexico’s land. The campaign targeted a twenty-five-year-old nation whose adult citizens had lived through a major shift from the Spanish Empire to the Mexican nation.¹² In the generation following Spanish rule, land passed from Catholic missions to settler ranches that often extended beyond initial Spanish settlement. Californios received larger land grants, but female mission workers and neophyte Indians also received small grants.¹³ In New Mexico, land grants clustered around access to waterways, with select individuals receiving large parcels that also housed non–grant holders. The Spanish crown and the Mexican government also deeded communal land grants to settlers and genizaros (culturally more Spanish Indians). The best and safest land often went to male settlers of higher status, though genizaros and women received grants too.¹⁴

In 1846, when U.S. general Stephen Kearney entered New Mexico, he placed a couple of nuevomexicanos in positions in the military government—a decision that appeased residents and foreshadowed future U.S. policy. His first public speech to residents reinforced the validity of an official use for Spanish. To assuage nuevomexicano fears, Kearney promised that “el fuerte, y el debil; el rico y el pobre; son iguales ante la ley[;] protegeré los derechos de todos con igualdad” (the strong and the weak; the rich and the poor; I will protect the rights of all with equality).¹⁵ At first, New Mexico accepted the military occupation without armed resistance, but its residents reconsidered within a year. Nuevomexicano Pablo Montoya and Taos Pueblo member Tomás Romero led a revolt in 1847 resulting in the execution of Governor Charles Bent, his brother-in-law Pablo Jaramillo, Taos sheriff Stephen Lee, Judge Cornelio Vigil, attorney J.W. Leal, and a youth, Narciso Beaubien.¹⁶ The presence of both Anglo and Spanish surnames among the dead shows how quickly nuevomexicano elites had become symbols of the new U.S. leadership system. Similarly, Southern California fought into 1847 as californios defended their autonomy. Both efforts ultimately failed.¹⁷

On February 2, 1848, Mexico ceded its northern region, which would become the U.S. Southwest, in the process creating a new class of U.S. citizens. Congress ratified the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on March 10, with Article IX stipulating, “The Mexicans . . . in the territories aforesaid, shall not preserve the character of citizens of the Mexican Republic, [but] shall be incorporated into the Union[,] . . . [with] enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the United States.”¹⁸ This was hardly the first time that the United States had absorbed another empire’s citizens in the process of its own territorial expansion—the Louisiana Purchase had, after all, offered U.S. citizenship to “inhabitants” (as determined by Congress) who lived in the 828,000-square-mile territory.¹⁹ The administration of the treaty and its use by the former citizens differed drastically, however. Louisiana had a brief, twelve-year territorial status. Louisiana’s state constitution only gave white male residents full political and voting rights.²⁰ As citizens of a fully incorporated state, Louisiana’s white residents had no need to secure their rights through a treaty and those deemed nonwhite by the state had little recourse. For those granted citizenship by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, even those deemed white often held an ambiguous racial status. U.S. government and elected officials portrayed the vast majority of treaty citizens as mixed race rather than white. The 1790 Naturalization Act limited naturalization to “free white” individuals, suggesting that treaty citizens sidestepped a more fraught naturalization process by being legally categorized by the federal government as white.²¹ Treaty citizens became the first group of people considered ambiguously white to gain collective citizenship in the United States.

The Mexican government ratified the treaty on May 19 without seeking clarification on whether the treaty applied to all of its citizens or merely all white persons.²² Mexico included indigenous peoples in their designation of citizenship, but the United States did not.²³ The ramifications of this choice emerged quickly when federal officials actively discouraged Pueblos from participating in territorial elections in exchange for allowing them to retain their culture and customs.²⁴ The United States consistently refused to view the Pueblos and autonomous Indians living in the region as worthy of citizenship, despite th...