The United States and Mexico: Close Neighbors with Different Goals

It would be hard for most U.S. citizens to imagine their country without the area known as the Southwest. The states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California (as well as the southern parts of Nevada and Utah) make up an important, colorful, and much treasured corner of the United States. In the Southwest exists a blend of traditions that can be found nowhere else and that grew out of the intermingling of the different peoples who have lived in the region.

During the sixteenth century, European explorers began arriving in the southern part of the North American continent. Native Americans were already in the area following their own traditions. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the Southwest would be dominated by the Spanish, who conquered Mexico, which then included territory that later became part of the United States. When the Spanish arrived in the area in the early 1500s, they brought their own language, customs, and religion with them, adapting these things to this new environment. Later, people from the eastern and southern United States also settled in the Southwest. As far as most them were concerned, they had little in common with the Mexicans or Native Americans already inhabiting the region, yet they, too, had to adapt to the place, and they, too, were changed by it.

The unique southwestern tapestry

Over the years, these strands of different people came together in a tapestry as bold as the blankets woven by the southwestern Native Americans, as rugged as the worn hat of a vaquero (cowboy), and as delicate as the silver comb in the black hair of a woman on a Mexican hacienda (ranch). According to U.S. Census Bureau figures collected in 2000, close to twenty one million people in the United States (or 7.3 percent of the total population) claim Mexican heritage, and Spanish is the nation's second most widely spoken language. Mexican food is enjoyed by Americans from coast to coast, and teenagers dance to Latin-flavored music. Tourists from all fifty states (as well as other countries around the world) travel long distances to view the dramatic geography of the Southwest: from the towering redwood trees of California to the rolling ranch lands of Texas, and from the lonesome spread of Death Valley to the awesome depths of the Grand Canyon.

There are probably few U.S. citizens who have never tasted a tortilla or heard "La Bamba" (an old Mexican folk song made popular in the late twentieth century by several U.S. singers). But many more have never heard the story of how their nation acquired this unique part of its territory and culture. Although the story begins earlier and continues later, it centers on the Mexican American War, a relatively short, but very bloody conflict that took place between 1846 and 1848. When it was over, Mexico had given up two-fifths of its total territory to the United States, land that was gradually divided into the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California (as well as the southern parts of Nevada and Utah).

A controversial conflict

In some ways, the Mexican American War brought positive results for the United States. Yet it was and continues to be a controversial conflict that highlights troubling issues. On the U.S. side, the war was viewed by most as necessary if the young and growing nation was to push its boundaries westward. Most U.S. citizens believed it was the "manifest destiny" (the God-given right and duty) of white Americans to take over this vast, resource-rich land, even if it meant taking land from the Mexicans or Native Americans who had been living there for hundreds, and even thousands, of years.

Mexicans, on the other hand, had lived on and ruled over this area for centuries. They believed that it belonged to them, and that the United States was simply trying to steal their land. A notable minority of U.S. citizens agreed with the Mexicans, including a young Illinois congressman and future U.S. president named Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865); a passionate New England idealist named Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862); and an army lieutenant named Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885), who fought in the war but later condemned it. (Grant later gained fame as one of the most important generals on the Union side in the American Civil War [1861-65].)

Despite this controversy, most U.S. citizens supported the Mexican American War. A little more than one hundred thousand of them fought for the United States, while an even larger number took up arms in defense of Mexico. As in all wars, there was bravery and sacrifice as well as death and brutality on both sides. But it seems that it is the Mexican people, perhaps because the outcome was tragic for them, who have most nurtured the bitter memory of this war, and best honored their fallen soldiers.

A variety of problems lead to war

The Mexican American War took place at an important moment in U.S. history, when a whole variety of problems were about to reach a boiling point. Immigrants were streaming into the United States (often to be greeted with resentment and even discrimination), and this resulted in a rapid growth of the U.S. population. This growth made economic pressures more intense and created a need for more space and new opportunities.

Another problem facing the United States was the issue of slavery. It was at this time that people were becoming more and more divided on the issue, with southerners set on defending their way of life, which was dependent on slave labor, and northerners just as set on ending a practice that many viewed as inhumane. The Mexican American War would take its place in a chain of events that finally led to the American Civil War (1861-65), when U.S. citizens fought each other over the issues of slavery and the rights of individual states.

In addition, when the Mexican American War was over, the United States acquired more than 50,000,000 square miles of land, which created a whole new set of issues. These included how to manage the region's plentiful mineral resources (including gold, silver, copper, and uranium), how to deal with hostile Native American populations, and how to integrate the Mexicans who were now living within the United States' borders into U.S. society. In Mexico, the political instability and widespread poverty that had plagued the country before, during, and after the Mexican American War would eventually erupt into the Mexican Revolution (1910-11). Existing side by side in an uneasy relationship, both the United States and Mexico would face struggle and hardship in the years to come. Certainly both had some inkling of this future as they began a war played out amidst the arid landscapes and graceful Spanish architecture of Mexico and Texas.

Americans are eager to settle the West

In 1776, the residents of Great Britain's thirteen North American colonies (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia) declared their independence and began the Revolutionary War, in which many lost their lives in pursuit of freedom. The 1783 signing of the Treaty of Paris ended the war, but brought a whole new set of difficult tasks to the new United States of America. The government of this young nation had not only to protect and govern the citizens of the first thirteen states, but it also had to shepherd the country into a period of rapid expansion.

Due to immigration and a high birth rate, which was nurtured by the belief that families needed many children to keep their farms and businesses afloat, the U.S. population grew rapidly during the early nineteenth century. In fact, it expanded from five million in 1800 to more than twenty-three million by 1850. And all those people needed space! As a result of this growth, many people began moving past the country's original borders into the vast territory that lay west of the Appalachians (the mountain chain that runs north to south through the eastern United States). Between 1790 and 1803, Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio became states, and settlers began pouring into them.

Another large chunk of western land opened up for settlement in 1803, when the United States signed the Louisiana Purchase. This area, totaling about 800,000 square miles, was to become the states of Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Colorado and included parts of western Minnesota, eastern Montana, and western Louisiana as well as most of Kansas and the city of New Orleans. Long held by Spain, this territory had been taken over by France at the end of the eighteenth century. Strapped for cash to support his war against his European neighbors, especially Great Britain, French emperor Napoleon I (1769-1821) offered to sell this land to the United States for $15 million. This was an incredibly good bargain, and President Thomas Jefferson jumped at the chance to double the size of the United States.

The Louisiana Purchase added fuel to an already burning expansionist fire. Things heated up even more nine years later when the United States went to war once again with Great Britain. Although the War of 1812 (1812-14) was supposedly fought over the issues of trade and sailors' rights, some who supported the conflict hoped it would allow the United States to acquire both Canada and Florida.

The war did not actually accomplish this, but it did secure the Northwest Territory (now the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan) for settlement by U.S. citizens. In fact, all of the West became safer for white settlers after the War of 1812, for the great Native American leader Tecumseh (c. 1768-1813), a Shawnee war chief who had tried to convince Indian tribes to join together to resist white settlement, had been killed in the war. After the War of 1812, Native Americans would continue to be pushed off their traditional lands, despite treaties made with the U.S. government, and forced to move farther and farther west. Eventually, most Native Americans would be required to live on reservations, blocks of land designated for their use and often located far from their original homes and in undesirable locations. It is estimated that between 1820 and 1850, almost four million white settlers moved west.

A newly divided society

The United States was becoming a much different place from that created by the first colonists. Once the nation's life had been concentrated on the East Coast, where farmers, artisans, and traders had all lived and worked together. As the nineteenth century progressed and people spread out across a rapidly expanding country, U.S. society split into three main regions. One was the West, with its frontier settlements and emphasis on hard work and self-reliance. Another was the South, where the owners of large plantations used slave labor to maintain a lifestyle that imitated that of the British upper class. The third region was located in the northeastern states, where residents had turned from farming to fishing, shipbuilding, and trade to support themselves. These divisions in livelihood and outlook would become more pronounced in the decades just before and just after the Mexican American War.

"Manifest destiny" is used to justify U.S. actions

Several important factors drove the expansionism of the early nineteenth century. One was the hardship suffered by many citizens during the economic depressions of 1818 and 1839. Western lands were cheap, and sometimes even free to those willing to settle and cultivate them, and to many Americans, land ownership signified wealth, self-sufficiency, and independence. It took a great deal of courage and optimism for U.S. citizens to pack up their families and belongings and head west toward a future in which the only certainty was a lot of back-breaking work and hardship. Yet these white settlers also were armed with their own arrogance. Most of them believed that people of European ancestry were superior to others. These settlers believed that this cultural superiority was simply a fact upon which everyone, even God, agreed. The idea that people of Native American, African, Mexican, or mixed heritage deserved equal rights or equal respect was alien to them.

In addition, most U.S. citizens believed that God had put the continent of North America in the possession of white people, and that it was not only their right to expand across its vast reaches, but their duty. They had come to "civilize," or in other words, to reshape according to their own ideas and customs, this land and the people already living in it. They believed that all countries and peoples should adopt the U.S. form of democratic government, in which power is held by the people and not by a supreme ruler. (It is important to remember, though, that they did not believe that people of non-European descent, including blacks and Native Americans, were capable or deserving of this kind of self-government.) Described as the "manifest destiny" of the United States in an article published at the time of the Mexican American War (see Chapter 3), this concept of superiority would be used to justify the nation's aggression toward its neighbor to the south.

Mexico's colonial background

While the nineteenth century found U.S. citizens feeling confident and eager to expand their borders, Mexicans of the period were struggling with poverty and political instability. These conditions had resulted from forces put in motion several centuries earlier.

European explorers who arrived in Mexico during the first quarter of the sixteenth century found not only an inviting landscape, but also a rich, thriving civilization of the Aztec people. The Aztec empire was crushed when, from 1519 to 1521, Spanish forces under Hernán Cortés (1485-1547) conquered those lands of the Aztec king Montezuma (c. 1480-1520). Spain's New World colony continued to grow during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the Spanish conquered the areas that are now New Mexico and California. In the early 1700s, they also took control of land occupied by the Tejas Indians, which became the Mexican state of Tejas y Coahuila. It was a dispute about the ownership of this area that would set off the Mexican American War in the mid-nineteenth century.

A rigidly stratified, Catholic society

In the Mexico (then called New Spain) that took shape during the 1700s, the Spanish culture and traditions were dominant while those of the Native Americans, along with their rights, were oppressed. Mexican society was, in fact, rigidly stratified or divided into five layers. At the top were the gachupines, Spaniards who had been born in Spain and who now ran the colonial government of Mexico. Next came the criollos, people of unmixed Spanish heritage who had been born in Mexico and who were often frustrated by their lack of power. Mestizos, people of mixed Spanish and Native American blood, had even less status. Next came Native Americans, whose miserably paid labor supported those above them on the social and economic scale. On the bottom rung were black slaves and free blacks (who had never been slaves, had paid their way out of slavery, or had been released by their masters) as well as those called zambos (a mixture of Native American and African heritages). Even after Mexico gained its independence from Spain, this social hierarchy would remain in place, with a small number of wealthy people living in luxury while the vast majority of Mexicans worked for little or no pay, endured harsh living conditions, and received no education.

Another fact of life in colonial Mexico was the Roman Catholic Church. One of the most important aspects of their culture that the Spanish had brought with them from the Old World was their religion, which dominated life in Mexico as it did in Spain. The church was state-sponsored, which meant that it took an active part not just in people's private lives but in public matters, such as education and law. Mexicans were required to be members of the Catholic Church. (By contrast, the political system of the United States calls for a strict separation of church and state and upholds the value of freedom of religion.)

The seeds of rebellion

During the American Revolution, Mexicans supported the colonists' war for freedom and even lent them some assistance. In turn, the Mexican people were influenced by the independence ideals expressed not only in the United States but in France, where a revolution against the ruling monarchy took place from 1789 to 1799. All over the world, the concept of the republic—in which power is held by all of a nation's citizens who elect representatives to pursue their interests—as the most just form of government was being discussed and even put into practice. At the same time, Mexico's criollos were increasingly resentful of the power and status held by the gachupines and by Spain's tight control of the colony's politics and economy.

This rebellious mood was heightened in 1808, when Napoleon invaded Spain and replaced its ruling monarch, King Ferdinand VII (1784-1833), with his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte (1768-1844). Mexicans cheered when the Spanish revolted. Ferdinand would be returned to his throne six years later, but in the meantime, the spark of revolution had been lit in Mexico. Soon an on-again, off-again war for independence had begun there.

This rebellion started with an 1810 revolt led by a Catholic priest, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (1753-1811), who managed to gather an army of sixty thousand mestizos before he was captured and executed by the Spanish. Despite his fate, Hidalgo became a popular folk hero, and the first day of his revolt, September 16, is still celebrated as Mexico's independence day, even though independence had not yet been achieved. From 1813 to 1815, another priest emerged to lead a rebellion against the Spanish. Like his predecessor, Father José María Morelos de Pavón (1765-1815) was eventually put to death by the Spanish.

Mexico achieves independence

Morelos's uprising had involved people from many different levels of Mexican society, including Native Americans and mestizos. The revolution that finally did liberate Mexico from the Spanish, however, was dominated by the criollos. Led by Agustín de Iturbide (1783-1824), a former officer in Spain's army, it took place in 1821. Weakened by its own troubles at home, Spain had no choice but to sign Mexico's declaration of independence. Iturbide became president but soon declared himself emperor of Mexico. In 1823, Gaudalupe Victoria (1785-1843) led a successful revolt against the very unpopular Iturbide, and by the next year Mexico had a constitution that established the country as a republic. This still did not mean that all Mexicans were better off, however, for only criollos (who made up 10 percent of the nation's population of seven million) could vote.

The new country's borders stretched from what is now the country of Panama in the south to the present-day state of Kansas in the north. The area contained 1,000,000 square miles of diverse landscapes and climates, including jungles, deserts, plains, and fertile farmland. The years of war had left Mexico drained both socially and economically, and its new leaders had little experience in running such a large, troubled nation. As a result, two groups formed and now vied for dominance. One group, known as the conservatives, believed that political power should reside in a strong, centralized government that worked side by side with the Catholic Church. The other group, the liberals, thought that power should be spread across the separate Mexican states and that the church's influence should be limited. The liberals also advocated public education and social reforms that would benefit more ordinary people. It was these two very different outlooks that would lead to turmoil in the days to come.

A national hero emerges

In 1829, the liberal Vicente Guerrero (1783-1831) was elected president. He oversaw the abolishment of slavery in Mexico, but was soon killed by forces loyal to the conservative Anastasio Bustamente (1780-1853), who then became president. Meanwhile, Spain made one last attempt to recapture its lost colony by attacking Mexico at the coastal city of Vera Cruz in 1829. Mexico's successful resistance to this attack was led by Antonio Lopéz de Santa Anna (1794-1876; see biographical entry), a general who quickly became a national hero, and who would play an important role in the nation's later war with the United States.

Santa Anna was a criollo born in Vera Cruz in 1794. He had joined Spain's colonial army at the age of sixteen, and spent a decade as a cavalry officer. In Mexico's war for independence, he had first fought on the Spanish side but for unknown reasons joined the rebels in 1821. Two years later, he led the revolt that ousted the dictatorial Iturbide from power. Santa Anna's strong leadership during Spain's attempt to recapture Mexico was much appreciated by the Mexican people, and he made as much of their adoration as he could. For example, during the fighting, Santa Anna had received a severe leg wound and the leg had to be amputated, so he arranged to have his severed limb buried with full military honors! Dressed in fancy uniforms bedecked with shining metals and parading astride a powerful horse, Santa Anna established himself as a grand figure in the public eye.

After Bustamente became president, conditions in Mexico grew even worse than before. Santa Anna helped to overthrow Bustamente in 1832, and in the next year elections were held. Santa Anna was elected to the presidency and, backed by the conservative faction, spent the next few years stripping away any remaining traces of liberal reform. In 1835, Mexico's 1824 constitution was abolished and a strong centralist government was established. This meant that the individual Mexican states were now under the control of the federal government, which was based in Mexico City. It also meant trouble for the large, thriving colony of U.S. settlers who were living in the area called Tejas y Coahuila, (called Texas by U.S. citizens) some 800 miles north of Mexico City.

For More Information

Books

Frazier, Donald, ed. The United States and Mexico at War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

George, Isaac. Heroes and Incidents of the Mexican War. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1982.

Meyer, Michael C., and William L. Sherman. The Course of Mexican History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Nardo, Don. The Mexican-American War. San Diego, CA: Lucent Books,1991.

Nevin, David. The Mexican War. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1978.

Web Sites

Descendants of the Mexican War Veterans. The U.S.-Mexican War: 1846-1848. [Online] Available http://www.dmwv.org/mexwar/mexwar1.htm (accessed on January 31, 2003).

PBS Online. U.S.-Mexican War: 1846-1848. [Online] Available http://www.pbs.org/kera/usmexicanwar/ (accessed on January 31, 2003).