Mexican American
War
| Mexican American War | Displacement of Chicanos from their Land |
Spanish settlements in the Southwest go back to the
late 16th and early 17th centuries. The earliest settlements were in
Santa
Fe, which was founded in 1609.
Over the next 200 years additional settlements
were established; by the early 19th century, three major Spanish settlements
were found in New Mexico territory, southern and southeastern Texas,
and along the California coast.
With Mexican independence from Spain in 1821, these three frontier settlements became part of the new Mexican republic.
These Spanish areas started having contact with parts of the United States, particularly with Missouri merchants in St. Louis, with the opening of the Santa Fe Trail in 1822. While Anglos traded and engaged in land speculation in New Mexico and later in California by following the overland Old Spanish Trail, Texas received the most "American" settlers.
In Texas, Spain and later
Mexico used land grants to encourage both Hispanic and Anglo settlements -- the
biggest of the latter was the Austin Colony. By 1830s only the areas
around
and south of San Antonio were distinctively Mexican. In the 1830s, Texas contained
25,000 Anglos and only 4,000 Spanish-speaking Mexicans.
In 1830, Mexico abolished slavery and passed the Colonization Law which prevented slaves from being imported into Texas by Anglo landowners.
Anglo settlers also wanted to engage in free trade with the United States and resented Mexican customs laws. When internal conflict broke out in Mexico, Anglo settlers revolted at the Alamo and other places and created the Republic of Texas in 1836. Texas wanted to be annexed to the United States, but the issue of of slavery in this area had to clarified before Texas was admitted in 1845.
Mexico never recognized the independence of Texas and broke its diplomatic relationship with the United States when the United States admitted Texas to the Union.
The U.S. government tried to purchase the areas of New Mexico and California from Mexico, but Mexico refused.
An armed clash between Mexican and U.S. troops along the Rio Grande River provided the impetus for the U.S. government's declaration of war against Mexico! The Mexican American War lasted from 1846-1848 and resulted in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) which transferred one million square miles of Mexican land (equivalent to Western Europe), absorbed 100,000 Mexicans and 200,00 Indians and all or part of ten states: California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Kansas, southern Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas) to the United States.
Displacement of Chicanos from their Land
The governments of Spain and Mexico made land grants that included common lands to communities. The community grants contained tracts of individual land for housing sites and gardens with the remainder of the land being used in common by the community for forestry resources and grazing. These common properties grants were the equivalent of the Mexican ejidos.
After the Mexican American War, Mexican Americans in New Mexico and southern Colorado began to lose their land to Anglos even though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo guaranteed the new citizens the security of their properties. Although the pace of dispossession varied from state to state, the general trend was consistent everywhere. Mexican Americans lost their land holdings to Anglos by U.S. legal means, land sales which brought on economic distress, land seizures, fraud, and force. For example, without compensation, the U.S. National Forest Service took millions of acres from northern villages for national forests. Chicanos were forced to pay grazing fees on land that once belonged to their villages. Lawsuits in Vallecitos, NM and the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado demanded that these common lands be returned to local Chicano communities for their economic and cultural survival. U.S. courts initially ruled that communal property must be divided into individual plots. As with the Indian allotment system, people in financial need are "forced" to sell their land, mostly to Anglo ranchers. Later the U.S. courts reversed their rulings and even required compensation to be made to those wrongfully treated. Very little compensation was made and, as so often in U.S. history, the initial wrongs were not righted!
The dispossession from the land depleted the economic base of Chicanos and put them in an even less favorable position to exercise their influence over the political process. Without a land base, Chicanos increasingly turned to wage labor in agricultural, industrial, and service professions.
Source:
1) Mario Barrera, Race and Class
in the
Southwest: A Theory of Racial
Inequality. 1979. Chapter 2, pp. 7-33.
2) Center for Land Grant Studies,
P.O. Box 342, Guadalupita, NM 87722.
3) Marc Simmons, New Mexico. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico,
1988.
Also read Malcolm Ebright, Land Grants and Law Suits
in Northern New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
1995.
Timothy Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexican Border,
1978-1992. Austin: Center for Mexican American Studies, University of
Texas, 1996.