BORDER DILEMMAS

Racial and National Uncertainties in New Mexico, 1848–1912By Anthony Mora

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4783-5

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..ixINTRODUCTION. Local Borders: Mexicans’ Uncertain Role in the United States………………………………………………………………………………1CHAPTER 1. Preoccupied America: Competing Ideas about Race and Nation in the United States and Mexico, 1821–1851……………………………………….23CHAPTER 2. “Yankilandia” and “Prairie-Dog Villages”: Making Sense of Race and Nation at the Local Level, 1850–1875……………………………………..66CHAPTER 3. “Enemigos de la Iglesia Católica y por consiguiente de los ciudadanos Mexicanos”: Race, Nation, and the Meaning of Sacred Place…………………103CHAPTER 4. “Las mujeres Americanas est? en todo”: Gender, Race, and Regeneration, 1848–1912………………………………………………………….135CHAPTER 5. “It Must Never Be Forgotten This Is New and Not Old Mexico”: Local Space in Euro-American Knowledge and Practice, 1880–1912……………………172CHAPTER 6. “New Mexico for New Mexicans!”: Race and the Redefinition of Regional Identity for Mexicans, 1880–1912………………………………………223EPILOGUE. “Neath the Star Spangled Banner”: Multiculturalism and the Taxonomic State……………………………………………………………………..274NOTES……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………291BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..345INDEX……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………367

Chapter One

Preoccupied America: Competing Ideas about Race and Nation in the United States and Mexico, 1821–1851

La Mesilla and Las Cruces, two towns whose founding and subsequent histories illuminate nineteenth-century struggles over race and nation, emerged in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Mexico. In the summer of 1846 Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny, commanding the “Army of the West,” entered New Mexico without encountering any military opposition. Rumors that New Mexico’s Mexican governor, Manuel Armijo, accepted a bribe and abandoned the territory persist as legends. Whatever the case, he did make a hasty departure that left the people of New Mexico without an organized defense and few options as the United States Army appeared on the horizon. Kearny claimed Santa Fe on behalf of the United States on August 18, 1846, and officially declared the military occupation of the territory. New Mexico, for all intents and purposes, was a colony of the United States in everything but name.

Pointing out that “New Mexico fell without a single shot,” U.S. histories of this conflict tended to present the invasion in triumphal terms. This version of events ignores the real anxiety, confusion, and animosity that existed among Mexicans. Even reports by U.S. soldiers in Santa Fe, who presumably had no motivation to exaggerate the nationalist sentiments of the Mexican population, noted that the local women covered their faces and sobbed aloud as the U.S. flag replaced the Mexican flag above the plaza. Wild rumors circulated that, among other things, Euro-Americans planned to brand US on Mexicans’ cheeks.

Colonel Alexander Doniphan continued Kearny’s campaign and solidified the military’s control of the territory shortly thereafter. He marched a portion of the United States Army south, through a brutal trek across New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto, capturing the town of Doña Ana. Doniphan garrisoned 850 troops in the small farm town, commandeering food and supplies from the Mexican settlers. This military occupation in southern New Mexico quickly overtaxed the meager resources of Doña Ana residents. As a result two groups of Mexican settlers migrated from Doña Ana, establishing the competing towns of La Mesilla and Las Cruces. These two towns became local manifestations of the uncertainties underlying the newly drawn U.S.-Mexican border. Out of this flux Cruceños and Mesilleros came to conceive of the relationship between race and nation in opposing ways. Cruceños eventually adopted a U.S. model, configuring Mexicanness as a distinctive and immutable racial identity. Mesilleros, in contrast, defined mexicanidad (Mexican identity) as more transient. For them it did not necessarily imply any particular racial category but did require enactments of certain cultural markers.

This chapter charts the development of Mexican and American nationalisms as imagined associations that were unremittingly redefined and reshaped during the nineteenth century. The same eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century liberal philosophies underpinned republican ideals in both Mexico and the United States. The two nations each claimed that a good government must recognize full citizens as equal before the law and must rest on the consent of the people. Who qualified as full citizens or even “the people,” however, was hotly contested. Notions of innate inequalities proved consistent stumbling blocks in securing either nation as an idealized republican state. The status of “Indians,” in particular, became crucial to determining Mexican and American notions of full citizenship. Mexico and the United States, as we will see, ultimately diverged in their solutions to these questions.

The chapter then turns to the ways those divergent nationalisms collided at midcentury as the United States invaded Mexico. The brokering of a treaty to end the war left both an uneasy peace and unanswered questions about the relationship between race and nation in New Mexico. Mesilla and Las Cruces, born from military occupation and dispossession, were implicated in ongoing struggles in both Mexico and the United States to reconcile liberal theories of nation with exclusionary practices based on race, gender, and other factors.

Nineteenth-Century Euro-American Understandings of Race and National Identity

Traditional discussions about U.S. imperialism tended to disconnect later nineteenth-century U.S. ventures into the Caribbean and Asia from histories of westward expansion into places like New Mexico. Under that interpretation the 1901 Supreme Court case Downes v. Bidwell was a key moment when U.S. imperialism emerged or, at least, changed significantly. Ostensibly about tariffs, this case was thought to represent a major shift in U.S. imperialism from “absorbing new territories into the domestic space of the nation to acquiring foreign colonies and protectorates abroad.” Indeed, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution did not extend to Puerto Rico or its inhabitants because Puerto Rico was merely a “possession” of the United States. Yet this ruling only codified existing notions that places could be part of the United States in terms of international and national boundaries, even as the residents of those places remained “foreign” to the U.S. national community (usually imagined as Euro-American). Euro-Americans had long taken advantage of these possessions’ resources, cheap labor, and land while excluding the colonized people in those places from the national community.

Rather than seeing Downes as a sudden rupture in U.S. policy, more recent scholarship has reoriented our view to see it as one step in an ongoing process of U.S. imperialism that had been at play since the invention of the nation. We should not forget that the United States had not at all “absorbed” all the territories and people within its continental borders at the time of the Downes case. Nor did certain colonies’ location on the North American continent make them a natural or obvious part of the United States. Native Americans had an uncertain role in the nation as their lands became ever smaller. In the 1831 case Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, Chief Justice John Marshall foreshadowed the notion that some groups could be “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense” seventy years prior to Downes. He argued that Indian tribes were “domestic dependent nations” that “occupy a territory to which we assert a title independent of their will…. They are in a state of pupilage. Their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian.”

Likewise, New Mexico and Arizona (which had been carved out of New Mexico) were still territories without full congressional representation at the time of Downes. It would be another eleven years before either became a state (if statehood is to be considered the marker of absorption or the end of colonialism, a condition about which I have some doubts based on New Mexico’s twentieth-century history). Indeed, as I will discuss later, Puerto Rico and New Mexico became mutually reinforcing examples of the necessity of keeping the U.S. community “pure” by restricting either’s full incorporation into the nation owing to their “mixed” populations.

The dilemmas Euro-Americans confronted in 1831, 1846, 1854, and 1898 were the same as dilemmas faced by Dutch, French, and British imperial authorities everywhere in the nineteenth century. Asserting colonial authority over a place simultaneously incorporated that space into the metropolitan community even as it distanced that space from the metropolitan center. Colonial governments often claimed that the existing inhabitants’ racial inadequacies (whether Native American, Mexican, African, or Asian) resulted in an alleged “misuse” of local resources that demanded their intervention. Those people and places needed the European and Euro-American intercession to “advance” to the next stage of civilization and capitalist production. Nineteenth-century colonial governments therefore wrestled with the same philosophical and legal questions in terms of race and citizenship. What role and rights did colonized people have? If European and Euro-American colonizers were caretakers of “lesser” races, just when would certain groups be ready for full citizenship? What were the appropriate mechanisms to allow their full incorporation into the national community?

Enlightenment discussions of republicanism always stipulated that certain individuals lacked sufficient “reason” and therefore were incapable of expressing their consent. Children or the insane, for instance, could be governed without their consent because they did not have the ability to govern themselves. That same logic permitted race, gender, and cultural markers to serve as evidence of a lack of reason, which excluded certain individuals from equal participation in either Mexico or the United States.

Other scholars working on nation and empire have found the notion of “interior frontiers” useful in discussing this complexity. National frontiers mark sites of enclosure, exclusion, contact, exchange, passage, and difference. The concept of interior frontiers pays attention to the dilemmas and compromises created when imaginings of a “pure” national community face internal ruptures. New Mexico became a site of such ruptures because most Euro-Americans presumed that race was a key marker that defined the national difference between Mexico and the United States in 1846.

My temptation at the start of this project was to assume that most nineteenth-century Euro-Americans believed that American citizenship connoted whiteness exclusively. This seemed self-evident for a society that condoned race-based slavery and the genocide of indigenous people. It turns out, though, that the trajectory of U.S. national and racial ideologies was more complicated and contradictory than one might expect.

American nationalism developed as a set of everyday practices used at the local level. Public performance was a crucial component of those practices. The historian David Waldstreicher argues that such performances “empowered Americans to fight over the legacy of their national revolution and to protest their exclusion from that Revolution’s fruits.” Groups of Americans used public events and occasions that forged a sense of national identity and eased divisions created by unavoidable regional, class, or political differences. Community celebrations, parades, and various other cultural events became a means for individuals to imagine themselves as defining and partaking in American nationalism during the early years of the republic. Yet questions persisted about the consequences of such participation by nonwhite bodies, whose mere presence sparked contentious debates about the meaning of race and citizenship.

The 1787 Constitution provided few answers. Drafters of that cherished document did not give a great deal of consideration to citizenship and intentionally evaded discussions of race in the republic. Only a few mentions of racial identities appear in the document, such as the exclusion of “Indians not taxed” from full citizenship and representation. Aside from that, even the infamous “three-fifths” clause lacked any explicit mention of race. Although the Constitution had been unclear about the necessity of one’s being white to claim full citizenship, the first federal legislation on naturalization, drafted in 1790, restricted the process to “free white persons.” Such restrictions kept African American men from full citizenship until 1870 and excluded people of East and South Asian birth until 1952. Nonetheless, such legislation provided no criteria for deciding who would count as “white.”

Given that the federal guidelines on citizenship were often ambiguous, it fell to individual states to determine the qualities one needed to claim full citizenship until the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. Race, gender, property ownership, religious affiliation, and place of birth all became important qualifications for full citizenship in various state laws and common practices. Creating common cultural acts might have eased regional or political differences, but racial distinctions proved too deeply rooted in most Euro-Americans’ vision of their national identity.

By 1848 many believed that numerous interior frontiers defined the limits of full American citizenship and national identity (that also signaled the right to vote, own land, participate in the military, carry a gun, and so forth). Creating such interior frontiers, however, did not mean that Euro-Americans could not also claim other groups as “American.” Women, children, and free nontribal racial minorities would all have been construed as American citizens, but not full citizens. Rather than figuring that these groups could not be “American,” the government stipulated that they were particular types of Americans (who did not have equal status and needed the rational oversight of white American men).

Defining a stylized repetition of acts specific to each type of American helped institute these categories in daily practice. All identities—racial, national, and gender—have elements of cultural performance that solidify their legitimacy and uphold the illusion of their stability. Racial and gender performances depend on a presumption of an interior and organizing core that is thought to be natural to particular types of bodies. Racial and gender categories are imagined to exist transnationally and transhistorically. National identities, therefore, depend more heavily on the presumed stability of race and gender than vice versa. They frequently become the constitutive building blocks for imagining the nation and distinctions between nations. European, Euro-American, and Latin American notions of national identity were fragile because these nations (and empires) necessarily comprised heterogeneous racial and gender groups.

In the United States racial restrictions precipitously narrowed access to full citizenship over the course of the nineteenth century. By 1857 the Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that the progeny of African slaves did not derive from “the people” who founded the United States and, therefore, could be excluded from the rights of full citizenship. The growing difficulty faced by Native Americans who tried to claim full citizenship from 1789 to 1820 is instructive in understanding how thinking about race, cultural performance, and nation changed in the United States. That story is actually critical to understanding what would happen to Mexicans and other nonwhite groups who also became enmeshed in this nationalist discourse.

Because the Constitution excluded only “Indians not taxed,” it implicitly left open the possibility that tax-paying Indians could be construed as equal citizens. Indeed, some Euro-Americans imagined that erasing the social and civic gap between Native Americans and whites could be achieved if the former simply reconciled themselves to “American” customs, behaviors, and “civilization.” In 1789 George Washington initiated such a civilization program, which promised the full integration of Indians east of the Mississippi within fifty years. To do so required that Native Americans disavow their identity within a tribe or nation and adopt the stylized repetition of acts and cultural markers that Euro-Americans deemed “civilized.” Native Americans had to construe themselves exclusively as individuals, eliminate tribal titles to lands, learn English, and denationalize their communities. Comparable federal versions of these plans would continue to reappear through the nineteenth century, including the Dawes Act of 1887, which provided tracts of land and the promise of equal citizenship for individual Indians who willingly disavowed tribal membership. These actions almost always accompanied the sale of millions of acres of tribal lands to white settlers. Such civilizing efforts attempted to reconcile Enlightenment ideals of egalitarian republican citizenship with the status of colonized peoples within U.S. boundaries. These federal initiatives, however, frequently fell apart in local contexts, where racial status increasingly trumped cultural performances.

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