Mexico’s Chinaco Guerrillas During the French Intervention

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Mark Moreno
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Rural Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
Guerrilla Warfare ◽  
Mexican War ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Us ◽  
Major Loss

Chinacos were mounted guerrillas of the War of the Reform and the French Intervention (1857–1860, 1862–1867) who fought on the liberal republican side, operated out of central Mexican regions, and were known for their wide-brimmed sombreros and battle lances. What is known about them is largely the product of popular perception shaped by print depictions, some of which were created long afterward. They first appeared in the press when the War of the Reform was winding down and the victorious Juárez government, in carriage and on horseback, prepared to enter Mexico City in January of 1861. Before the French invasion that began in October of 1861 with the naval landing at Veracruz, the “chinaco” designation applied to irregular fighters. The newspaper and propaganda organ La Chinaca gave such fighters an image and narrative that endures to the present day. Still known among many Mexicans, their appearance in print media resulted from times of crisis as Mexico, after a military defeat by the United States and a major loss of territory, encountered the French Intervention in the 1860s. Chinacos as symbolic figures on horseback exemplify a historic pattern of guerrilla warfare in Mexico, dating at least to the US-Mexican War. There are different versions of the label chinaco, although there is strong evidence that it has roots in the chino designation assigned to Afro-Mexicans during the colonial era. It is also linked to “china,” or rural women known for their distinctive attire as depicted in popular reading.

Freedom of Communication in the US and Europe

ICL Journal ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro Tenorio
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Burden Of Proof ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
The United States ◽  
Constitutional Court ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Us

AbstractThis paper compares the freedom of communication in the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of the United States and the European Court of Human Rights, departing from the judgments of the Supreme Court of the United States. It is noted that there are differences, as specified herein. Regulatory texts invite to speak of two distinct models, though this may be a far-fetched statement. This paper makes the following concluding remarks: 1) There are many concepts of freedom of expression that are compatible with democracy; the one derived from the Sullivan Judgment in the US (and in Europe from the Lingens Judgment) is not the only one, although it is currently considered the most consist­ent with democracy. This point is not discussed here. 2) Major changes sometimes occur through seemingly small details. In this sense, the shift of the burden of proof in defama­tion cases (Sullivan) has created an earthquake in the legal regime governing the press. The Sullivan doctrine can be summarized as follows: first, errors are inevitable, as freedom of speech requires ‘breathing room’; second, the malice of those accused of defamation must be proven; third, it is necessary to prove the lack of veracity of the slanderer. This doctrine allows the press to play its role as the watchdog of freedom. 3) In Spain, the press also appears to play this role, thus requiring us to ask whether there is, or ever was, a Sullivan Judgment in Spanish jurisprudence. We tend to attribute the privileged position of the press in Spain to the fact that the Constitutional Court has given preferential consid­eration to freedom of speech when it is in conflict with honor, intimacy and self-image privacy. This preference is justified by its connection to democracy. Since the judgment of the Spanish Constitutional Court (STC hereafter) 6/1981 of 16 March, the Spanish Consti­tutional Court has stressed the importance of freedom of information for democracy, and since the STC 159/1986 of 16 December, the Constitutional Court has suggested the pref­erential position of freedom of expression. However, the incorporation of the Sullivan doc­trine into the Spanish system occurred through STC 6/1988 of 21 January, almost ten years after the passage of the Constitution into law.

The Limits of Sympathy: The United States and the Independence of Spanish America

1992 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 481-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piero Gleijeses
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Significant Loss ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Congressional Debates ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Us ◽  
Private Collections

Sir, is there to be no limit to our benevolence for these People? There is a point, beyond which, even parental bounty and natural affection cease to impose an obligation. That point has been attained with the States of Spanish America.1Of course there was sympathy for the Spanish American rebels in the United States. How could it have been otherwise? The rebels were fighting Spain, long an object of hatred and contempt. This alone justified goodwill, as did the hope for increased trade and the prospect of a significant loss of European influence in the hemisphere.2 But how deep did this sympathy run?In the Congressional debates of the period there was much more enthusiasm for the cause of the Greeks than that of the Spanish Americans.3 Similarly, the press referred frequently to private collections of funds (‘liberal donations’) for the Greek fighters – not for the Spanish Americans. This is not surprising. The US public could feel a bond with the Greeks – ‘it will become even quite fashionable to assist the descendants of those who were the bulwark of light and knowledge in old times, in rescuing themselves from the dominion of a barbarian race'.4 Unlike the Greeks, however, the Spanish Americans were of dubious whiteness. Unlike the Greeks, they hailed not from a race of giants, but – when they were white – from degraded Spanish stock.5 Some US citizens felt for them the kinship of a common struggle against European colonial rule; others agreed with John Quincy Adams: ‘So far as they were contending for independence, I wished well to their cause; but I had seen and yet see no prospect that they would establish free or liberal institutions of government.

The US–Mexican War

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Winders
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North American ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Southwest ◽  
Mexican War ◽  
The Us ◽  
Political Boundary ◽  
The Relationship

Usually thought of as a two-year-long conflict between the United States and Mexico, the US–Mexican War (1846–1848) represents the culmination of a much longer struggle over the control of what became the American Southwest. Years before Mexico declared its independence, early citizens of the United States resolved to seize Spain’s North American possessions. Devastated by a decade of revolt, Mexico lacked the unity needed to halt American efforts to acquire land at its expense. The US–Mexican War revealed an important divide among Mexicans over the issue of federalism. In the end, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo defined the modern political boundary between the two nations. Far from bringing peace to either nation, though, the war generated internal strife for both the United States and Mexico. The historic conflict still affects the relationship between the two nations.

Harry Bridges’s Australia, Australia’s Harry Bridges

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Cherny
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Business Groups ◽  
The United States ◽  
Similar Process ◽  
Early Experiences ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War

Harry Bridges, longtime leader of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU, representing Pacific Coast workers), was born in Australia in 1901 and came to the United States in 1920. Bridges brought Australian concepts of labor and politics to the docks of San Francisco in the early 1930s and injected Australian examples into his discussions of US working conditions and politics thereafter. When faced in 1939-1955 with deportation for being a Communist, he always attributed his political outlook to his early experiences in Australia. Bridges was frequently demonized in the US press, and a similar process occurred in Australia as the press there drew upon the US press in presenting Bridges. Just as business groups and conservatives in the United States saw Bridges as a dangerous radical, so too did conservative Australian politicians let their fear of Bridges carry them into a Quixotic campaign to prevent him from sneaking into their country. However, the Australian dockworkers’ union, the Waterfront Workers’ Federation, looked to Bridges and the ILWU as inspiration and exemplar, and Bridges and the ILWU worked closely with their counterparts in Australia. With the thaw in the Cold War aecline in anticommunist rhetoric in both nations, Bridges could be celebrated in both places as a “labor statesman.”

Evening in America

2020 ◽  
pp. 69-92
Author(s):  
Dan Sinykin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican War ◽  
Blood Meridian ◽  
The Us ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Economic Imperialism ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

James Baldwin’s observation that “American investments cannot be considered safe wherever the population cannot be considered tractable” could serve as a précis for Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I show how McCarthy’s novel traces US scalp hunters in northern Mexico in the aftermath of the US-Mexican War as they clear the land of intractable Indians—i.e. slaughter them for cash—so the United States can pivot from settler colonialism to economic imperialism. The scalp hunters prove as bad for capital as the Indians they decimate, debauching cities, taking Mexican scalps that might pass as Indian, and destroying the means of production. Writing from late twentieth-century capitalist crisis, McCarthy depicts a constitutive violence that capitalism has unleashed, but cannot control. What remains, for McCarthy, beyond capitalism is the excess that fells it, a drive to violence.

The US–Mexico War

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Omar Valerio-Jiménez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Mexican Americans ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican War ◽  
Mexican American War ◽  
The Us ◽  
Northern Territories ◽  
United States Mexico ◽  
The U.S

The United States–Mexico War was the first war in which the United States engaged in a conflict with a foreign nation for the purpose of conquest. It was also the first conflict in which trained soldiers (from West Point) played a large role. The war’s end transformed the United States into a continental nation as it acquired a vast portion of Mexico’s northern territories. In addition to shaping U.S.–Mexico relations into the present, the conflict also led to the forcible incorporation of Mexicans (who became Mexican Americans) as the nation’s first Latinos. Yet, the war has been identified as the nation’s “forgotten war” because few Americans know the causes and consequences of this conflict. Within fifteen years of the war’s end, the conflict faded from popular memory, but it did not disappear, due to the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War. By contrast, the U.S.–Mexico War is prominently remembered in Mexico as having caused the loss of half of the nation’s territory, and as an event that continues to shape Mexico’s relationship with the United States. Official memories (or national histories) of war affect international relations, and also shape how each nation’s population views citizens of other countries. Not surprisingly, there is a stark difference in the ways that American citizens and Mexican citizens remember and forget the war (e.g., Americans refer to the “Mexican American War” or the “U.S.–Mexican War,” for example, while Mexicans identify the conflict as the “War of North American Intervention”).

The Monarchist Plot and the US Invasion

2021 ◽  
pp. 592-610
Author(s):  
Eric Van Young
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Us ◽  
Political Stance

Against the background of the disastrous war with the United States and his own earlier political stance as a conservative centralist republican, Alamán is seen founding two highly conservative Mexico City newspapers in which increasingly extreme political positions are argued in the late 1840s and early 1850s. He is involved with the Spanish ambassador in a pro-monarchical “conspiracy” to place a Bourbon prince back on the throne of Mexico, although in the end the plot did not flourish.

The United States and the Iranian Nuclear Programme

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Hurst
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nixon Administration ◽  
Comprehensive Plan ◽  
The Us ◽  
Nuclear Issue ◽  
The Relationship

The United States, Iran and the Bomb provides the first comprehensive analysis of the US-Iranian nuclear relationship from its origins through to the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015. Starting with the Nixon administration in the 1970s, it analyses the policies of successive US administrations toward the Iranian nuclear programme. Emphasizing the centrality of domestic politics to decision-making on both sides, it offers both an explanation of the evolution of the relationship and a critique of successive US administrations' efforts to halt the Iranian nuclear programme, with neither coercive measures nor inducements effectively applied. The book further argues that factional politics inside Iran played a crucial role in Iranian nuclear decision-making and that American policy tended to reinforce the position of Iranian hardliners and undermine that of those who were prepared to compromise on the nuclear issue. In the final chapter it demonstrates how President Obama's alterations to American strategy, accompanied by shifts in Iranian domestic politics, finally brought about the signing of the JCPOA in 2015.

‘To see oursels as ithers see us’: Reflections on Scottish Independence from the United States

2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Euan Hague ◽  
Alan Mackie
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Us ◽  
Scottish Independence ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Scottish Diaspora

The United States media have given rather little attention to the question of the Scottish referendum despite important economic, political and military links between the US and the UK/Scotland. For some in the US a ‘no’ vote would be greeted with relief given these ties: for others, a ‘yes’ vote would be acclaimed as an underdog escaping England's imperium, a narrative clearly echoing America's own founding story. This article explores commentary in the US press and media as well as reporting evidence from on-going interviews with the Scottish diaspora in the US. It concludes that there is as complex a picture of the 2014 referendum in the United States as there is in Scotland.

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