Remembering Conquest

In Remembering Conquest, Omar Valerio-Jiménez surveys the ways in which, for over 150 years, Mexican Americans have remembered the US-Mexico War and the treaty that put an end to it—how they have strategically deployed these memories to set the record straight, reinforce community ties, construe identities, and fight for rights. The first Mexican Americans, Valerio-Jiménez points out, were “literally created by the war” (p. 13), and this conflict's consequences and reverberations have marked their descendants’ lives and experiences. In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo redrew the border between the victorious nation and its defeated neighbor and turned Mexicans living in the far north “into a conquered people” (p. 46): in the conflict's drawn-out aftermath they suffered dispossession and discrimination, and their relationship to the nation would be persistently construed as deficient and suspect. The treaty also turned these conquered subjects into US citizens.Remembering Conquest examines how five generations of Mexican Americans have acted on this contradictory legacy to reclaim their version of the past, defend their real and cultural patrimony, and secure their right of place as they called for the fulfillment of the promises formally made in 1848, repeatedly broken, and then forgotten. The book carefully chronicles Mexican Americans’ protracted struggles for full citizenship. It is attentive to the ways in which historical context, circumstances, and race, class, and gender shaped the different aspirations of remarkably diverse communities, and Valerio-Jiménez ponders the weight of geography and demographics on determining the nature of these communities’ efforts and their reach. The book shows how Mexican Americans have drawn from personal experience, family and collective memories, the Spanish-language press on both sides of the border, and the work of Mexican and Mexican American historians to censure the war as an unjust invasion. Their visions have fueled an expansive, variegated set of actions—resistance, protest, rebellion, border crossings, rallies, appeals to authorities and public opinion on both sides of the border, litigation, boycotts, marches, land invasions, alternative histories, and antimonuments—as Mexican Americans mobilized and organized to stake out what was rightfully theirs.Thus, despondent patriot Juan N. Seguín defended the contributions made by Tejanos to Texas's history—including its war against Mexico—as would, 50 years later, schoolteacher Adina de Zavala. Elite Nuevomexicanos strove to hold on to political power and secure statehood while their Californio compatriots fought for land, as did, even after a century had passed, Reies López Tijerina's Alianza Federal de las Mercedes. To defend his “race” and denounce his fellow Americans’ hypocrisy and bad faith (p. 170), Juan Nepomuceno Cortina took up arms, while novelists, journalists, and historians used their pens. In 1970–71, the Brown Berets’ Marcha de la Reconquista took them from California to Texas as they protested white supremacy, demanded civil rights, and reminded “local communities of their ancestors’ resistance to the US invasion” (p. 226).Valerio-Jiménez scrutinizes the strategic, convoluted construction, alteration, and undoing of the multiple identities embraced by these citizens by treaty as they battled disenfranchisement, discrimination, and economic woes. Mexican Americans would claim to be Spanish, white, native, heirs to the valiant conquistadores who had introduced “civilization” into what would become the US Southwest; and alternately the victims and foes of the fearsome Native American nations or the descendants of a proud people, whose dispossession they hoped to redress with the creation of a Chicano homeland. Some insisted on their white, middle-class respectability to both condemn the segregation of Mexican children in schools and distance themselves from poor, uneducated Mexican migrants. Some applauded Mexican Americans’ tradition of military service; in the 1970s, others lambasted their overrepresentation among soldiers dying in Vietnam and described the people of this beleaguered Asian nation as “brothers involved in the same struggle for justice against a common enemy” (p. 16).In contrast with these nimble, versatile processes of identity building, continuity marks how memories of the war and references to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were deployed. As strategies evolve, rather static visions remain of the war—as unprovoked attack and unconscionable land grab—and of the treaty—as at best ineffective, treacherous at worst. One especially misses a more consistent, comprehensive analysis of how the treaty was read and interpreted in courts of law, the place where its precepts would be fulfilled, contravened, ignored, or broken. But as a “cultural and intellectual history” of how “memories spurred . . . actions” (p. 4), Remembering Conquest is an exciting invitation to rethink the complex, sometimes contradictory relationship between history and memory, and to reflect on the ways in which how we remember the past conditions the present and shapes how we imagine and build the future

Ancient history · Citizenship · CONQUEST · Ethnic group · Mexican americans · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Psychology