The Emergence of Mexican America

Recovering Stories of Mexican Peoplehood in U. S. Culture

John-Michael Rivera

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780814776193
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the 2006 Thomas J. Lyon Book Award in Western American Literary Studies, presented by the Western Literature Association

In The Emergence of Mexican America, John-Michael Rivera examines the cultural, political, and legal representations of Mexican Americans and the development of US capitalism and nationhood. Beginning with the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 and continuing through the period of mass repatriation of US Mexican laborers in 1939, Rivera examines both Mexican-American and Anglo-American cultural production in order to tease out the complexities of the so-called “Mexican question.” Using historical and archival materials, Rivera's wide-ranging objects of inquiry include fiction, non-fiction, essays, treaties, legal materials, political speeches, magazines, articles, cartoons, and advertisements created by both Mexicans and Anglo Americans. Engaging and methodologically venturesome, Rivera's study is a crucial contribution to Chicano/Latino Studies and fields of cultural studies, history, government, anthropology, and literary studies.

1

Don Zavala Goes to Washington

Translating U.S. Democracy

Two things have caused me to write of this journey. The first is that I have believed that nothing can give more useful lessons in politics to my fellow citizens than the knowledge of the manners, customs, habits, and government of the United States, whose institutions they have so serviley copied. Secondly, since I offered in my Historical Essay to publish my memoirs, it is now time that I begin, although it may be in incoherent bits and pieces as circumstances permit.

Lorenzo de Zavala, Prologue to Viage de los Estados Unidos
del Norte América, 1834; English translation in
Journey to the United States of America, 2005

In 1830, the Mexican exile Lorenzo de Zavala made a historic journey to the United States. A product of this journey is an important, although little known, travel narrative, Viage de los Estados Unidos del Norte América (Journey to the United States of America), a meticulously written narrative about U.S. democratic cultures and institutions. Zavala’s narrative stands as a major document of early Mexican letters in the United States, as well as one of the first theoretical and ethnographic examinations of democracy as a political and cultural institution. Thus, Zavala’s book challenges the widespread acceptance by American scholars that Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835) is the first book to take United States democracy as a focus of political and cultural study.¹ With the inclusion of Zavala’s narrative into the series called Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, Zavala’s story of democratic peoplehood will no doubt, in time, be read as one of the founding political texts of U.S. and Mexican democratic culture. As such, he should be placed alongside such political thinkers as Jefferson, Prieto, Hidalgo, Madison, Mill, and Tocqueville.

Equally important is that Zavala wrote his narrative to represent and participate in a story that he hoped would help in the creation of a liberal national identity for the Mexican people. Published in limited numbers in Paris in 1834 and posthumously for the first time in Mexico on the eve of the U.S.-Mexico War in 1846,² Zavala’s book stands as one of the first texts to investigate the early relationship between not only the constitutions of Mexico and the United States but also of the two peoples themselves. Standing as a cultural mediator between the two, Zavala was fostering comprehension of the foundations of Mexican and American democratic peoplehood during the years that led up to the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846–1848. Indeed, Zavala’s text renders a complicated portrait of U.S.-Mexico relations and the colonial contact between the two nation-states that began in 1821–1824—the monumental period when the colonized people of Mexico broke away from Spanish despotism and created a national, democratic constitution under the United States’ imperial gaze at Mexican lands to the west.

Zavala’s narrative, therefore, extends our modern understanding that narratives of Chicano peoplehood begin with the conquest of 1846 and the U.S.-Mexico War.³ As Carl Gutiérrez-Jones argues, Chicano historians assert that Mexican American communities grew out of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which ended President James Polk’s aggressive expansion into Mexico.⁴ Juan Gómez-Quiñones argues that this document and this year would mark the liminal moment when the racialization of Mexicans that occurred in the language of the treaty would lead to a distinct minority collective consciousness.⁵ Gómez-Quiñones’ and Gutiérrez-Jones’s arguments lead me to explore the cultural forms in the public sphere that historically led to the racialization of the Mexican people. However, I think we also need to consider the seeds of imperialism that led to the war, the U.S.-Mexico War, and the collective self-understanding of Mexicans as a racialized and bifurcated minority people in the United States. According to historian Emma Pérez, although the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 is an extremely important marker for understanding the racial and political constitution of Mexican American peoplehood, the reliance on 1848 as a liminal marker for the sole emergence of Chicano identity inevitably conflates the Mexican and U.S. period between the years 1821–1836 and does not consider the historical significance of this period and how these fifteen years set the stage for the U.S.-Mexico War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and Mexican American political subjectivity (E. Pérez 8).

It was during these years that Mexico emerged as a nation by breaking away from more than three hundred years of Spanish colonial rule, wrote a democratic constitution modeled on the liberal and federalist traditions of the Enlightenment, and began to feel the effects of the expansionist U.S. policies of the Monroe Doctrine that the United States guised as democratic protectionism. This colonial and imperialist background in U.S.-Mexico relations was the foundation for the politically constituted Mexican Americans who, Gómez-Quiñones argues, emerged in 1848. Gilbert González and Raúl Fernández point out that we need to historicize the period prior to 1848 in order to account for the complicated and contradictory manner in which Mexicans in the United States imagined their political, racial, and economic identity (González and Fernández 1–23). The Monroe Doctrine’s neocolonial rhetoric and the contemporaneous constitution of the nation of Mexico, written in 1824, had a great influence on how Mexican Americans and Chicanos would later imagine their social imaginary and democratic collectivity, as well as on how Anglo-Americans would racialize Mexicans and Mexican Americans.⁶ Zavala’s Journey stands as a representative cultural text of this early and dynamic period in American and Mexican histories and renders a more complete and complicated portrait of the contradictory but interconnected making of the Mexican national, the United States Anglo-American, and the bifurcated people who are now defined as “Mexican Americans.”

As one of the principal architects of the Mexican Constitution of 1824, Zavala argued that the U.S. Constitution and its liberal principles could be translated to the people of Mexico, who had just emerged from Spanish colonialism. In part, then, Zavala’s Journey is a panegyric look at U.S. democracy, a utopian primer of liberal democratic mores. Indeed, as the epigraph to this chapter indicates, Zavala’s interest lies in both the government and manners of the United States precisely because he feels they serve as representative examples of democracy. Through a travel narrative that reads like an ethnography of democratic mores and governance, he attempts to render a detailed portrait of the United States for a newly constituted Mexican people, one that he feels has not yet fully fostered the manners, norms, and ideals to sustain a democratic political system. For the liberal Zavala, U.S. democracy and its norms and ideals are the cornerstone of individual Enlightenment, political autonomy, and cultural organization.

And yet, an adverb in this opening paragraph of the Journey deeply contradicts the panegyric aspects of his travels, for he emphatically writes in a qualifying end clause that the Mexican people have “servilely” copied the democratic institutions of the United States. That Zavala conjures a word that connotes the “spirit of slavery” to describe the relationship that the newly formed democratic nation has with the United States undoubtedly reveals Zavala’s own complicated understanding of U.S.-Mexican political and cultural relations in the early nineteenth century. As we know, slavery was a system of extreme personal and collective domination in which a slave had no relationship that achieved legal or political rights or recognition other than with the master. In other words, slavery was an institution that prevented the emergence of autonomous and liberal political peoplehood precisely because the representation of the people, the demos, was the normalized white colonial master. As I discuss in the following pages, Zavala’s reference to “the spirit of slavery” to describe U.S.-Mexico relations serves as the narrative’s political leitmotif and speaks to the contradictory rhetoric that emerged in the wake of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, a document that awakened the United States’ own “spirit of slavery” toward Mexico.

From the above quote we can infer two interrelated yet contradictory logics that inform Zavala’s travel narrative: on the one hand, it is a call for the making and establishing of a collective Mexican peoplehood that develops from his utopian representations of the mores and liberal governance of U.S. democracy; on the other hand, he qualifies his story by insinuating that Mexicans should not form their peoplehood with the “spirit of slaves,” as imitative subjects who have become dependent on U.S. institutions. In this, Zavala’s Journey reveals a contradiction that develops from both a desire to erase the legacy of Spanish colonialism and a desire to build a liberal Mexican state ironically based on an emerging American empire that coveted Mexico’s lands.

It is this contradiction concerning the modeling of U.S. democracy—Zavala’s translating of its norms and liberal ideals in his travel narrative for both the democratic constitution and colonial emancipation of Mexican peoplehood—that I take as the departing point for my own journey into the related colonial and democratic contradictions of Mexican and U.S. people-making that develops in the pages of the Journey. Buried within the representational subtext of his travel narrative of U.S. democracy lies the contradictory logic that presupposes the Enlightenment’s universal, colonial, and racial legacy that has underwritten Mexican national and then, after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexican American people-making.

Zavala’s journey to translate the manners, norms, and ideas of U.S. democracy for Mexican Enlightenment presents us with a way to reexamine what Mary Louis Pratt refers to as the “transcultural” logic of travel narratives. For Pratt, travel narratives enact an ethnographic function of “transculturalization,” which is the process whereby subordinate or marginal groups select and invent materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture (1–11). Transculturalization occurs within the narrative and historical space of colonial encounters, a public space in which people who are geographically and politically separate come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually under conditions of coercion, racialization, radical inequality, and intractable conflict. Transculturalization is what occurs in the contact zone, or “colonial frontier of the Southwest,” for it is in this space where political peoples constitute one another, although this subjectification is usually asymmetrical (Pratt 6). My contention is that we need to look at the narrative act of transculturalization not simply as a by-product of nationalism but, rather, as the core cultural logic of democracy. For it is through acts of transculturalization that democratic knowledge and peoplehood emerge. However, because this occurs through asymmetrical and colonial relations, the emergence creates a democratic ideal of peoplehood that is based on colonial presuppositions and radical inequality. Understanding democracy as a political system that emerges from colonial relations, as well as from legislative and political doctrines, lets us understand that the democratization of people develops through a process in which the metropolitan center of colonial power bestows “enlightenment” and political norms on another colonized country.

This idea of transculturalization renders for us a very complicated and succinct portrait of the cultural and political function of Zavala’s travel narrative in his attempts to forge a Mexican nation. According to political philosopher Rogers Smith’s recent look at the foundational role that narrative plays in the emergence of a political collectivity, “stories of peoplehood” are narratives that constitute a given group as a political and organized body, an autonomous collective democratic people (Stories of Peoplehood 8–9). In effect, Smith is trying to locate the embedded constitutive stories (cultural forms) that enable the social imaginary, which are cultural ways of creating and understanding peoplehood, to become collective entities themselves, mediating collective life. In Zavala’s story of peoplehood, the idea of a “national people” is a paradigm of the modern social imaginary. As Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Benjamin Lee argue, a nation’s distinctive features include its representation as “we”; its transparency between individual and collectivity; its agential subjectivity, in which a people acts in time; its unfolding in progressive history; and its posited environment of mutuality with other national peoples (5).

Zavala’s story of peoplehood is complicated in that its presupposes a complex transnational matrix of democracy and colonialism—informed by the legacy of imperial Spain, the emerging nation of Mexico, and, most immediately, the United States’ expansionist gaze toward Mexico. What further complicates Zavala’s narrative is that it is written in a complex period of Mexican and American nation-building, a period when the emergence of both nations is interrelated. In the 1830s, Mexico and the United States were both in the early foundations of their respective nations and struggling to find a collective political identity. Mexico was a newly formed nation that within a decade had gained its independence from Spain and created a democratic constitution. The United States in 1834 had been a democratic nation for only forty-six years, after the states had ratified the Constitution in 1788. However, the process of nation-building for the United States was by no means complete. In fact, it was only in the 1830s that the United States would begin to promote its “Manifest Destiny” as a nation with stories of peoplehood that would help (re)define its national borders; its expansionist rhetoric, in fact, justified and motivated the conquest and colonization of Mexican and Native American lands.

Within this complex matrix of nation-building, Zavala first attempts to create a national “we” in “We the people of Mexico,” only to find himself thereafter living in exile in Paris and then Texas, trying to come to terms with his own transnational search for peoplehood. Zavala’s Journey is a story of peoplehood that attempts to resolve the contradictions of creating a national people that emerged from Spanish colonialism only to find Mexico in an asymmetric relationship with a Jacksonian America forging its own story of peoplehood by expanding into Mexico’s borders and Texas. Zavala’s Journey illustrates his contradictory desire for the creation of Mexican and then Texan peoplehood in the wake of imperialism and his own contradictory colonial social imaginary.

The Spectacle of Lorenzo de Zavala

One of the most revealing instances of Zavala’s own social imaginary and his motivations to look at the spectacle of U.S. democracy is the following quote:

I was leaving the anarchy of Mexico where I had seen myself so often exposed to being the victim of parties. . . . Oh Niagara! With my eyes fixed upon your swift currents, they seemed to indicate that I was completely engrossed in the grandiose spectacle, I was seeing in you the most melancholy representation of our disastrous revolutions. I was reading in the succession of your waves the generations that hasten on to eternity, and in the cataracts that proceed to your abyss the strength of some men that impels others to succeed them in their places. (Journey 57)

Leaving the unrest of a newly formed Mexican nation, Zavala ponders the spectacle of Niagara Falls and sees Mexico’s “disastrous revolution” and his own inability to succeed as a liberal statesman in the country he ironically helped to free from the despotism of imperial Spain. Zavala’s personal reminiscence of Mexico while looking at the natural spectacle of the United States is paradigmatic of his own journey toward Mexican selfhood in his travels. Indeed, as he notes, Zavala wrote his travel narrative, in part, as a personal memoir, the autobiographical self-fashioning of a Mexican political statesman. It is worth detailing the autobiographical self he creates in this collective story of Mexican peoplehood, for both are constructed through the journey and descriptions of the mores and governance of the United States.

Zavala’s travel narrative presents us with a bifurcated spectator whose experiences in the United States are “transferred” to the newly constituted Mexican self that has emerged from imperial Spain, thus converting the journey to a mode of both individual and collective introspection. Here we have, in part, a narrative where the inner and outer historical worlds collide from the legacy of Spanish colonialism. This collision is complicated by Zavala’s national and cultural subjectivity as part of the still unsolidified collectivity of Mexico and the outer United States world he observes in his travels. Zavala’s complicated “self-interrogation” finds its impetus through what Pratt refers to as the intersubjective logic of travel narratives, which are mediated through the colonial worlds the subject is viewing. For Pratt, these “autoethnograhic expressions” are instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms (7, 9, 102). In the case of Zavala, his Journey can be read as an autoethnographic story of peoplehood that responds to or engages in dialogue with the U.S. metropolitan political institution of democracy.

Nevertheless, Pratt’s notion of autoethnography does not neatly fit the political and cultural figure of Lorenzo de Zavala. Although I began this section by pointing out that Zavala is trying to come to terms with the “spirit of slavery” that underpins Mexico’s relations with the United States, I am not willing to label Zavala a colonial subject of the United States, at least not in his own eyes or in a strict postcolonial sense. Indeed, before he began to self-fashion himself as a Mexican politico in the United States, under Spanish colonial rule, he was a Creole. As Ralph Bauer argues in The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures, Creoles occupied an “ambiguous” political space, neither colonized nor colonizers but, rather, colonials who often stood apart from the geopolitical interests of the Spanish imperial metropolis (15–23). What the complicated figure of Zavala represents is an ambivalent Mexican self-fashioning that develops first under the rule of imperial Spain as a Creole, a subjectivity that would affect the writing of his Journey.

When Zavala was born in Yucatan in 1788, Mexico (New Spain) was under Spanish rule, and the Gachupines—the immigrant Spaniards, who were the representatives of the crown in New Spain, were in political control. Under Spanish rule, only the elite Spanish-born immigrants were able to hold any significant political office. The remainder of the population of New Spain was composed of Creoles like Zavala, who was a third-generation Yucatecan. Under Spanish colonial rule, the Gachupines controlled the economy, education, and the Roman Catholic Church. Although Zavala attended school, the Spanish colonial ideologies discriminated against Creoles, and inequality affected their ascendance in the political and religious hierarchy. Creoles like Zavala, however, desired to improve their conditions. Having no political ties to Spain, the Creoles considered New Spain their homeland and saw the people inhabiting the provinces as their compatriots. The Spanish monarchy and the Gachupines considered Creoles subjects of the crown whom they exploited and racialized for political control and for the crown’s economic gain. Moreover, Creoles like Zavala did not share the conviction that the Gachupines should remain as the sole representatives of a Mexican people who were struggling for their own autonomy from Spain; they were people who found themselves creating a social imaginary tied to Mexican lands rather than to Spain. In this way, the Creole collective self-concepts that emerged in New Spain threatened the crown’s dominance in the Americas.

The Spaniards viewed the Creoles, who had lived in New Spain for generations, in thoroughly negative terms. Indeed, a number of Spanish natural historians and ethnographers argued that the savagery of the lands affected the character and disposition of the Creoles in the New World. In other words, the Spanish were creating their own imperial stories of peoplehood that imagined the savage environment and the Indians who inhabited the lands as markers for collective Creole racialization (creolization). Creoles were collectively seen as a distinct racial type sepa...