InMexicans in the Making of America, historian Neil Foley reconceptualizes Manifest Destiny, not as the glorious westward push of European Americans, but as their arrival on the doorstep of Mexican America. He argues that the United States came to Mexico, and we must reimagine this moment as an entry into an established New World where negotiation, conquest, and possession were already in play among various peoples and nations. The diversity of this nineteenth-century world is often absent in the ways that we have been trained to teach students in our first-year courses, and this absence, in turn, extends into our twentieth-century and contemporary discussions of race and race relations where binary comparisons dominate. Using educational and legal case studies from a variety of communities has allowed me to expand analyses in the U.S. history survey and to broaden students' conceptualizations from a singular white or binary black/white experience into a unified multilingual, multicultural, and transnational America. More importantly, this shift creates space for diverse groups of students to reconsider their own historical significance in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and the relevance of local historical narratives in the scope of American history.
Civil Rights, Educational Inequality, and Transnational Takes on the U.S. History Survey