Manifest Destinies

The Making of the Mexican American Race

Bibliographic Data

ID2803663
AuthorsBrian D Behnken (Iowa State University, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume89
Issue3
Pages559-561
Publication date2009-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-2009-040
OpenAlexW2037079515
LanguageEN
Citations received8

Laura E. Gómez’s Manifest Destinies offers a new interpretation of the ideology of Manifest Destiny and how that ideology worked to create a Mexican American race in New Mexico. Gómez states that “more than a century-and-a-half ago, a series of events occurred that resulted in the formation of Mexican Americans as a racial group in the United States” (p. 1). Such a statement invites criticism from Mexican American historians who, like me, were trained to consider the terms “Mexican” and “Mexican American” as ethnic or national designations. While Gómez’s thesis is not without problems, she stands on firmer footing than some scholars might suppose. After all, race is socially constructed. Gomez explores the ways in which Anglo politicians, court officials, settlers, and the Mexican Americans who had long called New Mexico home constructed the racial identity of Mexican Americans.Gómez traces the racial history of New Mexico from Spanish colonization to the present, although she primarily concentrates on the nineteenth century. She first examines colonialism, which set the stage for Anglo-American identification of Mexican Americans as a distinct racial group. Indeed, Spanish colonization of the region and later the American takeover, a process the author accurately refers to as “double colonization,” worked to shape Mexican Americans racially. A second theme is how the law served to mold Mexican Americans into a racial group. Finally, Gómez traces how “the construction of Mexicans as an American racial group proved central to the larger process of restructuring the American racial order in a key period stretching from the [Mexican American] war to the turn of the twentieth century” (p. 5).Once the United States wrested what became the American southwest from Mexico in 1848, U.S. officials debated how (or if) Mexicans could (or should) be absorbed into the American body politic. This proved problematic in New Mexico because the government refused to allow the territory to become a state due to its large Mexican-origin population. White racial sentiment generally equated Mexicans/Mexican Americans with Indians or African Americans, who were not citizens. To fight for statehood, Anglos in New Mexico understood that they had to increase the number of whites in the territory; they achieved this by positioning Mexican Americans as white. Mexican Americans benefited from what Gómez calls the “reverse one-drop rule . . . one drop of European ancestry (Spanish in this case) was sufficient to confer some modicum of white status, and thus a host of corresponding legal rights” (pp. 142 – 43). Gómez demonstrates this racial positioning with a number of examples. For instance, in the quest for statehood, Mexican Americans opposed slavery before 1850 but shifted to a racist, pro-slavery position shortly before the Civil War. “Mexican Americans took up American racism by claiming whiteness . . . and seeking to distance themselves from other non-white groups,” Gómez writes (p. 114). Their attitudes toward slavery had as much to do with obtaining statehood as with acquiring white rights.In attempting to establish Mexican Americans as a racial group, Gómez enters controversial territory. For example, while she correctly shows that the creation of the new category “Mexican American” was very much akin to the social construction of race, Gómez does not adequately acknowledge that the focus on whiteness did not fragment, but rather strengthened, the existing black/white racial binary. When Mexican Americans (and some Anglo allies) pushed for white rights, they became a part of the white race, not a separate racial group. Further, whiteness had a powerful social, economic, and political attraction that most likely influenced Mexican Americans at all socioeconomic levels. Gómez claims that this attraction appealed only to elites, but whiteness surely appealed to nonelite Mexican Americans. Moreover, I would suggest that many elites disliked white racial positioning and chose to embrace their mestizo heritage. Additionally, while some Anglos appeared receptive to granting Mexican Americans white status, others were not. Race involves both how a dominant society perceives a group and also how that group perceives itself. In New Mexico, both Anglo and Mexican American perceptions of Mexican American racial status simultaneously undermine and reinforce Gómez’s argument. For such a complex racial history, the author needed a more nuanced, critical analytical focus. Yet, given the dearth of scholarship on Mexican Americans in the nineteenth century and in New Mexico, Gómez goes far in complicating the historical discussion on Mexican Americans and race in the United States. Ultimately, this book should reignite the debate about whether ethnic or racial analyses work best for investigations of Mexican-origin people

Aesthetics · Art · Colonialism · Culture of the United States · Destiny (ISS module) · Ethnic group · Ethnology · Genealogy · Identity (music) · Ideology · Manifest destiny · Mexican americans · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · Theme (computing) · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub