“In the Name of Civilization and with a Bible in Their Hands:” Religion and the 1846–48 Mexican-American War

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 342-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Guardino
Keyword(s):  
Mexican American ◽  
Mexican American War ◽  
Religious Attitudes ◽  
The U.S

Religion was crucial to how Americans and Mexicans saw their enemies and motivated themselves to contribute to the 1846–1848 war. The very strength of religious attitudes made controlling their effects difficult. Some U.S. troops attacked Mexican Catholicism, inspiring Mexican resistance. Conversely, Mexican authorities sometimes sought to limit religiously inspired resistance. Furthermore, at a key moment some Mexicans felt their religious concerns required them to violently oppose their own government. Mexican negotiators gained protections for Catholics in the territory transferred by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, but anti-Catholic politicians in the U.S. Senate eliminated these protections before ratifying the treaty. La religión constituyó un factor crucial en la manera de concebir al enemigo y de animarse a participar en la guerra de 1846–1848 entre estadounidenses y mexicanos. La misma fuerza de las actitudes religiosas dificultaba el control de sus efectos. Algunas tropas estadounidenses atacaban el catolicismo mexicano e inspiraban así la resistencia. A su vez, las autoridades mexicanas a veces buscaban limitar la resistencia inspirada por la religión. Además, en un momento clave, algunos mexicanos sintieron que sus preocupaciones religiosas les exigían oponerse violentamente a su propio gobierno. Los negociadores mexicanos obtuvieron protección para los católicos en el territorio transferido mediante el Tratado de Guadalupe Hidalgo, pero los políticos anticatólicos del Senado de Estados Unidos suprimieron esta protección antes de ratificar el tratado.

Unsettling Subjects

2018 ◽  
pp. 109-135
Author(s):  
Sharada Balachandran Orihuela
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Land Occupation ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Mexican American War ◽  
American Citizenship ◽  
The U.S

Though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) ostensibly extended American citizenship to the Mexican landed class at the conclusion of the Mexican American War and ensured their property rights despite the transfer of land to the U.S., they were nonetheless stripped of formal claims to their property and forced to enter into lengthy and costly legal battles to regain possession of these ranches. Hidalgos had to compete with Anglo agricultural settlers (or squatters), as well as with the railroad barons looking to expand railways in the newly annexed territories. Women are able to best navigate the unstable political economy of the borderlands through the act of squatting, understood broadly to mean the settlement of “unoccupied” land. Read alongside the significant historical events including various land laws and pre-emption acts of the mid-nineteenth century, hidalgo women perform forms of ownership that upend the racialized and gendered logics of citizenship, and the intimate ties between property and rights. The Squatter and the Don recasts the “problem” of Mexican land occupation as U.S. anxiety over territorial expansion and colonization made more complex by the presence of differently racialized populations along the borderlands.

Indian Raids in Northern Mexico and the Construction of Mexican Sovereignty

2020 ◽  
pp. 153-174
Author(s):  
Marcela Terrazas y Basante
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Northern Territory ◽  
Free Movement ◽  
American Population ◽  
Mexican American War ◽  
Northern Mexico ◽  
The U.S

This essay focuses on the borderlands of Mexico and the United States in the decades following the Mexican-American War. There, American, Apache, Comanche, and Mexican inhabitants came into contact with one another and their distinctive and sometimes conflicting understandings of sovereignty led to significant discord. In different ways, Mexico and the U.S. sought to assert control over part of these borderlands, which included restricting the movement of outsiders within their territory. Apache and Comanche peoples, on the contrary, regarded free movement across the region as “irrevocable.” The increasing American population both provided demand for livestock that drove indigenous raids into Mexico and curtailed access to land and resources, promoting migration across the border and making it exceedingly difficult for Mexico to assert sovereign control over northern territory.

Engendering the Archive

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen R. Roybal
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Land Ownership ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Mexican Women ◽  
Mexican American War ◽  
The U.S

This chapter presents an overview of land ownership/property laws pre- and post-Mexican-American War (1846-1848). Drawing on historical and legal data, the chapter outlines the ways in which Mexican women, specifically, were impacted by a new U.S. legal system and makes the claim that in order to fully understand and appreciate the making the U.S. Southwest, gender must be a primary category of inquiry. The chapter calls for an in-depth and feminist examination and reconceptualization of the "official" archive to rethink: (a) what is considered "archival" and "historical," (b) who should be considered as "archiveable," or a legitimate actor in the production of historical narratives, (c) the ways in which testimonios provide primary source material that offer an alternative narrative of dispossession.

Religion, Anti-Catholicism, and the Mexican-American War

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. Pinheiro
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Effective Means ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican American War ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
Mormon Battalion ◽  
The U.S

The death and carnage that accompany war usually lead participants to seek transcendent meaning in their suffering as well as in their defeat or victory. This was especially true of the Mexican War, a conflict that deeply affected the growth of civil religion in the United States even as it tested the limits of religious pluralism. Religion gave Americans the most effective means of making sense out of their conflict with Mexico, even as it helped them solidify a national identity as a providentially blessed republic of Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The Mexican-American War of 1846–1848 was tremendously consequential for both countries. Its immediate cause lay in a dispute over territory claimed by both countries along the border of the newly annexed American state of Texas. Mexican and American troops clashed there on April 25, 1846. The U.S. Congress, though not without some grumbling, quickly responded to a request by President James K. Polk and declared war on Mexico. In the war, the U.S. Army invaded Mexico by land and sea, taking the capital on September 14, 1847. Other than a few skirmishes and scattered guerrilla attacks, the fighting war was over. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the conflict, Mexico ceded nearly its entire northern frontier—one-third of its territory—to the United States. The war occurred on the heels of the Second Great Awakening and amid the westward migration of the new, much-persecuted Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or Mormons. At the same time, heavy Irish immigration had reawakened a latent anti-Catholicism, resulting in new political parties, fights over religion in public schools, and deadly anti-Catholic rioting. While evangelical Protestants got to work refining a civil-religious discourse that depended for its intelligibility on anti-Catholicism, nativist politicians began adopting Christian terminology. Thus, the war between the overwhelmingly Protestant United States and Catholic Mexico became the means by which anti-Catholicism emerged as integral to American identity and American belief in a God-given, special mission to the world: spreading liberty and republican government, along with their prerequisite, Protestant Christianity. Religion impacted the war in other important ways. The U.S. Army sponsored the Mormon Battalion, the only regular U.S. Army unit ever organized along religious lines. Religion also played a role in the formation by American deserters of the Mexican army brigade known as the San Patricios. And despite U.S. government policy to the contrary, a few U.S. soldiers, inspired by recruiters and derogatory descriptions of Mexican religion by American writers and preachers, vandalized and robbed Mexican churches and committed other atrocities. Meanwhile, the war challenged Protestant pacifists and abolitionists, who wondered whether an otherwise evil war could produce the good fruit of opening Mexico to Protestant missionaries or excising Catholicism from the continent. As a result of the brief but far-reaching Mexican-American War, Americans now possessed a civil religious sentiment and common identity that was intelligible only within a Protestant milieu and through a distinctively American anti-Catholic discourse.

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”).

Latino Catholics in the Southwest

2019 ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Timothy Matovina
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican American War ◽  
Church And Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
The U.S

This chapter summarizes new trends in scholarship on the U.S. Southwest by expanding and refining the three-era schema of Southwest history illustrated in the book of Francis Baylies, who accompanied the victorious U.S. forces on their march through Mexico following the Mexican–American war. The book reflected U.S. views on the history of the region and the U.S. takeover of the former Mexican territories. The chapter divides Latino Catholicism in the Southwest into a thematic schema: colonial foundations, enduring communities of faith in the wake of the war between Mexico and the United States, the rejuvenation and diversification of Latino Catholic communities with the arrival of numerous immigrants from Mexico and throughout Latin America, and the struggle for rights in church and society that accelerated during the second half of the twentieth century.

“The Magna Carta to Liberate Our Cities”

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-398
Author(s):  
Casey D. Nichols
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Chicano Movement ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Model Cities ◽  
Lyndon Johnson ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The U.S

Starting in 1964, the U.S. federal government under President Lyndon Johnson passed an ambitious reform program that included social security, urban renewal, anti-poverty initiatives, and civil rights legislation. In cities like Los Angeles, these reforms fueled urban revitalization efforts in communities affected by economic decline. These reforms closed the gap between local residents and government officials in California and even subsequently brought the city’s African American and Mexican American population into greater political proximity. Looking closely at the impact of the Chicano Movement on the Model Cities Program, a federal initiative designed specifically for urban development and renewal, this article brings the role of U.S. government policy in shaping social justice priorities in Los Angeles, and the U.S. Southwest more broadly, into sharper view.

Concrete Biodeterioration in the U.S.-Mexico Border Region

2010 ◽  
Vol 1278 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. E. Rendon ◽  
M. E. Lara ◽  
S. K. Rendon ◽  
M. Rendon ◽  
X. Li
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Arid Region ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Groundwater Resources ◽  
The United States ◽  
Border Region ◽  
Hardened Concrete ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Sewage Systems

AbstractConcrete biodeterioration is defined as the damage that the products of microorganism metabolism, in particular sulfuric acid, do to hardened concrete. In Canada and in the northern part of the United States, sewer failures from concrete biodeterioration are almost unknown. In the southern part of the United States and in Mexico, however, it is a serious and expensive problem in sewage collection systems, which rapidly deteriorate. Also, leaking sewage systems result in the loss of groundwater resources particularly important in this arid region. Almost every city in the Mexican-American border region, who's combined population is more than 15 million people, faces this problem. The U.S. cities have made some provision to face these infrastructure problems, but the Mexican cities have made less effort. We recommend here the Mexican norm (NMX-C-414-ONNCCE-2004) [1] to be reviewed, or at least that a warning be issued as a key measure to avoid concrete biodeterioration.

scholarly journals Peter Guardino. The Dead March. A History of the Mexican-American War. Cambridge y Londres: Harvard University Press, 2017, 502 p. ISBN 9780674972346

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (153) ◽  
pp. 375
Author(s):  
Claudia Guarisco
Keyword(s):  
Mexican American ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
Mexican American War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Sobre Todo

The Dead March es un libro de historia social y cultural sobre la guerra entre México y Estados Unidos (1846-1848), que se enfoca sobre todo en las experiencias de soldados, así como en la población civil mexicana expuesta a la violencia del ejército estadounidense. 

New Mexican Catholicism in Transition

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brett Hendrickson
Keyword(s):  
Mexican American ◽  
New Order ◽  
Mexican American War ◽  
New Mexican ◽  
War For Independence

Soon after the Santuario’s construction was completed in 1816, Spain was defeated in Mexico’s war for independence (1821). In 1847 the regime once again changed, with the arrival and takeover by the Americans during the Mexican-American War. This chapter shows how New Mexican Catholics, especially in and around Chimayó, adapted to the changes in both political and ecclesiastical oversight that occurred in these tumultuous decades. Other topics are the 1837 Chimayó Rebellion; the difficulties and conflicts that resulted from Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy’s tenure; and the challenge by Padre Antonio José Martínez and other local Hispano leaders to the new order imposed by Archbishop Lamy.

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