Remembering the Forgotten War

The U.S.-Mexican War holds an anomalous position in U.S. history: it is customarily remembered as the “forgotten war.” Despite that eventual classification, from the conclusion of Primera Intervención Estadounidense en México (United States' first intervention in Mexico) in 1848, Mexican historians joined with Spanish-speaking artists, writers, poets, and denizens of the borderlands between the United States and Mexico in a collective effort to fashion artworks, historiographical frameworks, and analytical narratives that articulated countermemories of the conflicts' purpose and outcomes. Rather than engaging these countermemories or representing the ideological controversies surrounding the remembering and forgetting of the war, however, Michael Scott Van Wagenen has attributed these mnemonic disparities to the different roles played by the Mexican and U.S. governments in memorializing the war. The U.S.-Mexican War was the most decisive historical event in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the spring of 1848 the United States and Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo requiring Mexico to cede over a half million square miles of northern California. Arguments over the political dispensation of the newly acquired territories brought to the forefront of national debate the vexing problems of immigration, race relations, chattel slavery, interhemispheric rivalries and the issue of whether the United States was a republic or an empire

Ancient history · Art · Economic history · Empire · Historiography · Humanities · Ideology · Immigration · Political science · Politics · Spanish Civil War · Asian American and Pacific Histories · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law

• We knew no North, no South”

  ALYS D BEVERTON, Alys Beverton•American Nineteenth Century History•2016

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• Drawn to history

  Open Access•Michael Scott Van Wagenen•The Journal of American Culture•2024

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• Fiestas transfronterizas y representaciones espaciales en la frontera México-Texas

  Open Access•Xavier Oliveras González, Xavier Oliveras-Gonzalez•Economía Sociedad y Territorio•2015

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