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BORDER DILEMMAS

Duke University Press

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.....................................................................................................................................................ixINTRODUCTION. Local Borders: Mexicans' Uncertain Role in the United States..........................................................................................1CHAPTER 1. Preoccupied America: Competing Ideas about Race and Nation in the United States and Mexico, 1821–1851..............................................23CHAPTER 2. "Yankilandia" and "Prairie-Dog Villages": Making Sense of Race and Nation at the Local Level, 1850–1875............................................66CHAPTER 3. "Enemigos de la Iglesia Católica y por consiguiente de los ciudadanos Mexicanos": Race, Nation, and the Meaning of Sacred Place.....................103CHAPTER 4. "Las mujeres Americanas est? en todo": Gender, Race, and Regeneration, 1848–1912...................................................................135CHAPTER 5. "It Must Never Be Forgotten This Is New and Not Old Mexico": Local Space in Euro-American Knowledge and Practice, 1880–1912........................172CHAPTER 6. "New Mexico for New Mexicans!": Race and the Redefinition of Regional Identity for Mexicans, 1880–1912.............................................223EPILOGUE. "Neath the Star Spangled Banner": Multiculturalism and the Taxonomic State................................................................................274NOTES...............................................................................................................................................................291BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................................................345INDEX...............................................................................................................................................................367

Chapter One

La Mesilla and Las Cruces, two towns whose founding and subsequent histories illuminate nineteenth-century struggles over race and nation, emerged in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Mexico. In the summer of 1846 Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny, commanding the "Army of the West," entered New Mexico without encountering any military opposition. Rumors that New Mexico's Mexican governor, Manuel Armijo, accepted a bribe and abandoned the territory persist as legends. Whatever the case, he did make a hasty departure that left the people of New Mexico without an organized defense and few options as the United States Army appeared on the horizon. Kearny claimed Santa Fe on behalf of the United States on August 18, 1846, and officially declared the military occupation of the territory. New Mexico, for all intents and purposes, was a colony of the United States in everything but name.

Pointing out that "New Mexico fell without a single shot," U.S. histories of this conflict tended to present the invasion in triumphal terms. This version of events ignores the real anxiety, confusion, and animosity that existed among Mexicans. Even reports by U.S. soldiers in Santa Fe, who presumably had no motivation to exaggerate the nationalist sentiments of the Mexican population, noted that the local women covered their faces and sobbed aloud as the U.S. flag replaced the Mexican flag above the plaza. Wild rumors circulated that, among other things, Euro-Americans planned to brand US on Mexicans' cheeks.

Colonel Alexander Doniphan continued Kearny's campaign and solidified the military's control of the territory shortly thereafter. He marched a portion of the United States Army south, through a brutal trek across New Mexico's Jornada del Muerto, capturing the town of Doña Ana. Doniphan garrisoned 850 troops in the small farm town, commandeering food and supplies from the Mexican settlers. This military occupation in southern New Mexico quickly overtaxed the meager resources of Doña Ana residents. As a result two groups of Mexican settlers migrated from Doña Ana, establishing the competing towns of La Mesilla and Las Cruces. These two towns became local manifestations of the uncertainties underlying the newly drawn U.S.-Mexican border. Out of this flux Cruceños and Mesilleros came to conceive of the relationship between race and nation in opposing ways. Cruceños eventually adopted a U.S. model, configuring Mexicanness as a distinctive and immutable racial identity. Mesilleros, in contrast, defined mexicanidad (Mexican identity) as more transient. For them it did not necessarily imply any particular racial category but did require enactments of certain cultural markers.

This chapter charts the development of Mexican and American nationalisms as imagined associations that were unremittingly redefined and reshaped during the nineteenth century. The same eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century liberal philosophies underpinned republican ideals in both Mexico and the United States. The two nations each claimed that a good government must recognize full citizens as equal before the law and must rest on the consent of the people. Who qualified as full citizens or even "the people," however, was hotly contested. Notions of innate inequalities proved consistent stumbling blocks in securing either nation as an idealized republican state. The status of "Indians," in particular, became crucial to determining Mexican and American notions of full citizenship. Mexico and the United States, as we will see, ultimately diverged in their solutions to these questions.

The chapter then turns to the ways those divergent nationalisms collided at midcentury as the United States invaded Mexico. The brokering of a treaty to end the war left both an uneasy peace and unanswered questions about the relationship between race and nation in New Mexico. Mesilla and Las Cruces, born from military occupation and dispossession, were implicated in ongoing struggles in both Mexico and the United States to reconcile liberal theories of nation with exclusionary practices based on race, gender, and other factors.

Nineteenth-Century Euro-American Understandings of Race and National Identity

Traditional discussions about U.S. imperialism tended to disconnect later nineteenth-century U.S. ventures into the Caribbean and Asia from histories of westward expansion into places like New Mexico. Under that interpretation the 1901 Supreme Court case Downes v. Bidwell was a key moment when U.S. imperialism emerged or, at least, changed significantly. Ostensibly about tariffs, this case was thought to represent a major shift in U.S. imperialism from "absorbing new territories into the domestic space of the nation to acquiring foreign colonies and protectorates abroad." Indeed, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution did not extend to Puerto Rico or its inhabitants because Puerto Rico was merely a "possession" of the United States. Yet this ruling only codified existing notions that places could be part of the United States in terms of international and national boundaries, even as the residents of those...