Extract from Mexican American Colonization during the Nineteenth Century: author, José Angel Hernández
Relationship between Mexico and Its Diaspora: Postwar Mexican American Colonization during the Nineteenth Century
The literature dealing with the relationship between states and their diasporas has seen an increase in production due largely to the economic, political, and social impact of the immigrants who have left their homelands for other places of residence. Due in large measure to their own economic and political influence in the countries where they reside, immigrant lobbies and the billions of dollars in remittances that contribute to the fledgling economies from whence they originated, are directly tied to this growing literature.
In the case of Mexico, which shares a longer history with its diaspora, at least since 1848, this evolving rapport has occurred in both directions. The following historiography traces this evolution by examining a number of recent studies before going into a general overview of the same set of questions on the American side of this equation.
Hence, literature on the relation between Mexico and its diaspora emerged in a dialectical link that had much to do with the country’s neglect of its citizens abroad, not to mention the historic disdain that it openly expressed for Mexicans who had opted to reside in the United States – the very nation deemed responsible for the loss of much of Mexico’s claimed northern territories just prior to the Mexican American War.
This disdain was initially articulated by military officials in Mexico that employed the term “Bad Mexicans” to describe those individuals who often threatened to secede from the splintered nation or who on their own accord convinced others that joining the United States would be more to their advantage than if they opted to remain citizens of the republic of Mexico. The term “Bad Mexicans” was coined during the war and signified those who encouraged “Good Mexicans” (read loyal) to secede from Mexico and therefore served as the antithesis of Mexican identity during a period of “changing national identities.”
This continued disparagement of ethnic Mexicans in the United States also has a very long literary history in Mexico proper, and today one can still read such sentiments in the writings of several authors, most notably by intellectual and novelist Elena Poniatowska. In a speech presenting her new novel in Caracas, Venezuela in early July 2001, this prominent Mexican author referred to Mexican migrants as “cockroaches” and “lice ridden” individuals who were in the process of reclaiming the southwest for Mexico. According to her speech, which was carried by the Venezuelan magazine El Imparcial, “the common people – the poor, the dirty, the lice ridden, the cockroaches are advancing on the United States, a country that needs to speak Spanish because it has 33.5 million Hispanics who are imposing their culture.”
This disdain has a longer history than one might care to resuscitate, but one that would ultimately require an extended study of its own. To cite just one nineteenth-century example as background for Poniatowska’s chauvinism: Guillermo Prieto noted this derision for the diaspora during his exile to the United States when describing the Mexican populace of California in 1877. According to his memoirs, written as he traveled throughout the United States, this intellectual and statesman commented on Californios (Mexicans from California) in the following manner:
He uses strong boots, wields a stupendous knife, with which he polishes and sharpens his nails, he whittles sticks and then cleans his teeth, he speaks little and then always in English, almost always goes to bed face up and then fixes his feet upon a table, or a bar, or the wall, drinks whiskey, chews tobacco, gives a hard squeeze of the hand to the first individual that speaks to him and then sprinkles his conversation after the greeting with shamelessness, calling attention to his battered and disheveled hat.
For Poniatowska these “cockroaches” are imposing their language on the United States; for Prieto U.S. influence has “contaminated” the Californios. Prieto and Poniatowska apparently shared the notion that Mexicans who leave, those who live outside of the national territory, somehow lack the culture of those from the center of the republic, namely Mexico City.
Prieto’s description of a California Mexican’s mimicry of a stereotypical cowpoke is reminiscent of Octavio Paz’s understanding of “duality” and the “extremes” at which the Mexican in the United States can arrive due to continued contact with American culture and modernity. In his illustration of the infamous pachuco, for example, this 1990 Nobel Laureate and Mexico’s most celebrated intellectual noted that this individual was an “impassive and sinister clown whose purpose is to cause terror instead of laughter.”
His “will-not-to-be” converted the pachuco into a “symbol of love and joy or of horror and loathing, an embodiment of liberty, of disorder, of the forbidden.” In short, “he is someone who ought to be destroyed.” Much like Prieto’s and Poniatowska’s description of diasporic Mexicans, the pachuco is “also someone with whom any contact must be made in secret, in the darkness.” For these intellectuals, all “common people” outside the center are “the poor, the dirty, and the lice ridden, the cockroaches [that] are advancing on the United States. . . . ”
Recalling these “cockroaches” that Poniatowska described, it seems that the discourse of “darkness,” the fear of “cockroaches” and “lice,” and the loss of the Spanish language share a number of common characteristics that have subsequently been appropriated by the very individuals demeaned in these literary productions. For all these particular critiques, however, it is patently clear that the diaspora in the United States not only played a significant role in the formation of nineteenth-century Mexican national identity, but historically has begun to occupy (slowly) the center of this imaginary since the end of the Mexican American War.
After seeing such a disdain for the very people who merely seek to better their lot, it comes as no surprise to learn that some of the first studies to examine this relationship between Mexico and the United States emerged among the very population that bore the brunt of this disparagement: the Mexican American community situated in the United States.
A 1976 publication of Juan Gómez-Quiñones, titled “Piedras Contra La Luna, México en Aztlán y Aztlán en México,” serves as the ideal point of departure. One of the first articles to examine the relationship between Mexico and its diaspora during the twentieth century, the appearance of “Piedras Contra la Luna” marks a turning point in the field of Mexican American studies. Examining the role of the Mexican consulates situated within the territorial confines of the United States, Gómez-Quiñones opens his article with a very loaded title indeed. The “moon of Anahuac has been a loadstar for the peoples of Aztlán,” he states, yet the Mexican intelligentsia shares a “disdain for the Chicano.” Although some exceptions to this disdain do exist, like the Flores-Magón brothers who were exiled to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, the overall effort to protect Mexican citizens in the United States was not the Mexican consulates’ primary duty. By approaching his article as one that is “casting rocks against the moon [of Mexico]” Gómez-Quiñones maintains quite explicitly that the relationship between the state of Mexico and its diaspora “has not been equal or felicitous.”
Four years after the publication of Gómez-Quiñones’s article, political scientist Rodolfo O. De La Garza published “Chicanos and U.S. Foreign Policy: The Future of Chicano-Mexican Relations.” De La Garza followed this 1980 publication with several others throughout the next two decades, making him, in my estimation, the leading scholar in the area of Chicano–Mexican relations. Given the numerous articles that this author has published since the early 1980s, I will only touch on the main themes of his arguments and then segue into my final historiographical contribution before discussing these questions among intellectuals in North America.
In De La Garza’s first publication, he posed the question of a potential lobby by Mexicans in the United States and what this acercamiento could mean for the Chicano community and the Mexican government. In other words, his 1980 study examined the “foundation on which such a relationship might be built, what Chicanos might gain and lose from it, and, if it were established, what impact Chicanos might have if they became a lobby for the Mexican government.”
Mexico’s recent oil finds, its rise in international stature, and the increased migration of undocumented workers to the United States, according to De La Garza, “have led to the speculation that conditions are now propitious for creating a close relationship between Chicanos and the Mexican government.” What effects could such a relationship have on U.S. domestic and foreign policy? Diasporic lobbies, as the literature demonstrates thus far, are often the source of conspiracy theories and of homegrown suspicions regarding ethnic loyalties vis-à-vis U.S. citizenship and belonging.
De La Garza ultimately concluded that “it is unlikely that a Chicano lobby would be very successful.” Neither the United States or Mexico, it seems, are willing to aid the Mexican American community and the author believes that it would be “naïve” for Chicanos to believe otherwise. In this particular context, De La Garza ended his study with a telling and critical position reminiscent of the cultural and linguistic position of Chicanos during this period: that they are neither Mexican nor American but something in between and a little of both. Or, to follow the author:
Neither government has a history of being concerned about Chicanos, and there is no reason to expect that either will change its policies for altruistic reasons. If a strong Chicano-Mexican relationship is to develop, therefore, it would behoove Chicano leaders to pursue it with a clear understanding of the gains and risks involved, and it would be presumptuous to assume either that such a relationship will necessarily serve Chicanos better than would involvement with the American political process, or that it will be built easily and automatically on cultural foundations.
Thus, although the “moon of Anahuac has been a loadstar for the peoples of Aztlán” in the past – and one could make the argument it still is for many Chicanos today – the evidence presented by De La Garza in this and other articles contradicts this potential acercamiento via contemporary surveys and studies. In fact, the author goes further in subsequent journal pieces by pointing out historical instances when the Mexican government manipulated Mexicans in the United States for their own ends, as in the case of the 1915–1916 Tejano uprisings in south Texas.
Although some may debate the veracity of this claim, De La Garza’s more contemporary examples are not as debatable, like the fact that the “unofficial policy” of Mexico was to not accept a “Chicano ambassador from the United States until 1979.” If we are to discuss the relationship between the state (Mexico) and its diaspora (Mexicans in the United States), then these latter examples are part of that historical narrative, and as such, merit a historical analysis.
The literature on Mexican–Chicano relations, though, has lacked a more concrete historiography that would lend more weight to some of the assessments shared by De La Garza and other political scientists and sociologists. To his credit, De La Garza’s historical analysis in his “Texas Land Grants and Chicano-Mexican Relations: A Case Study” is one of the only pieces that examines this relationship during the nineteenth century. Where I would disagree is his assessment that Mexico showed “great concern” for citizens left in the ceded territories after the end of hostilities. According to his own wording, “After their disastrous defeat and huge territorial losses in the US-Mexican War, Mexican officials showed great concern for the well-being of those Mexican citizens who chose to remain in the lands annexed by the United States.”
In the author’s defence, nonetheless, De La Garza is not a historian and all of the research required to examine this question empirically are located in Mexico proper. In other words, research in Mexico would be required to accurately determine whether or not “Mexican officials showed great concern for the well-being” of those individuals who opted to remain in the lands now ceded to the United States. Given the postwar environment, foreign intervention, the Wars of Reform, a depleted treasury, and the continued war against “Indios Bárbaros,” perhaps more pressing concerns impeded such policies.
Much like the various historical cases in which a large number of immigrants provoked fears and stirred nativist hysteria, today’s increase in Mexican migration contributes to some of the questions raised by De La Garza, and this structural shift also influences related xenophobic writings in the U.S. academy. If contemporary studies of the period are any indication of this “social phenomenon,” contact between Mexican American and Mexican migrants has now given rise to accusations of disloyalty, potential secession, and a fear that radical reconquista nationalists will foment discord in the community in order to “take back” the lands lost by Mexico. In the middle of June 1979, for instance, former CIA director William Colby was quoted in the Los Angeles Times asserting that Mexican migration – and the rise of a “Spanish-speaking Quebec in the US Southwest” – represented a greater future threat to the United States than did the Soviet Union. North American academics like Samuel P. Huntington added to this discourse of disloyalty and subversion, lending academic credence to unfounded fears of a reconquest, and by extension, disloyalty.
In May 2004, noted Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington wrote an article titled “The Hispanic Challenge” in Foreign Policy, a journal of international affairs he had founded. In that article, Huntington argued that Mexican migration to the United States was different from past immigrations (read “European”). If this migration continued, he added, it could undermine the United States’s cultural hegemony and also parts of its territory, most notably the southwestern sectors that were “lost” during the Mexican American War over 150 years earlier. His main thesis is summarized in the following manner:
The persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves – from Los Angeles to Miami – and rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream. The United States ignores this challenge at its peril.
In short, Mexican migration threatens to create a society that is bicultural and bilingual lest the United States either assimilate or thwart this mass migration to those areas already thoroughly under “Latino control.”
This fear of Mexican migration had led Pat Buchanan, the well-known conservative commentator and three-time presidential candidate, to publish his own theories a few years earlier, but his and Huntington’s theses are almost identical. In The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, Buchanan dedicates a chapter to the problem of Mexican migration titled “La Reconquista.” Mexicans, he believes, have a legitimate historic grievance with the United States, and his five-point outline regarding this question is identical to Huntington’s: (1) The numbers are greater than those of past migrations and they are mostly from one country and concentrated in specific areas; (2) Mexicans come not only from another culture, “but millions are from another race”; (3) Millions are here illegally and have already broken the law; (4) Unlike past immigrants who were separated by the seas from their homelands, Mexicans enjoy the proximity of their homeland and feel no need to learn English; and (5) current Mexican immigrants are different from past immigrants because they come with the idea of racial rights and ethnic entitlements, an attitude “encouraged by cultural elites who denigrate the melting pot and preach the glories of multiculturalism.”
Huntington’s chapter on immigration is similar to Patrick Buchanan’s outline in “La Reconquista.” According to Huntington, “Mexican immigration is leading toward the demographic reconquista of areas Americans took from Mexico by force in the 1830s and 1840s, Mexicanizing them in a manner comparable to, although different from, the Cubanization that has occurred in Southern Florida.” Furthermore, Mexican immigration is “different” from past immigrations because of (1) its continuity, (2) its numbers, (3) its illegality, (4) its regional concentration, (5) its persistence, and (6) a historical claim to lands lost in 1848.
With respect to the last reason outlined by the author, Huntington believes that Mexican Americans enjoy a sense of “being on their own turf that is not shared by other immigrants” and this concept of “turf” takes “human form in the some twenty-five Mexican communities that have existed continuously since before the American conquest.” These two paragraphs sum up the content and contention of Who Are We? and Death of the West. Beyond some well-known demographic data on Mexican migration, neither of these authors explains how the reconquista will evolve, and neither has provided any concrete piece of evidence of any such movement – in the past or in the present.
José Angel Hernández, is an Associate Professor of History, University of Massachussetts. Footnotes for this extract can be found in the full text of the book. Mexican American Colonization during the Nineteenth Century is available from Cambridge University Press and from the usual online booksellers.