{"id":59496,"date":"2025-04-24T10:00:49","date_gmt":"2025-04-24T15:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=59496"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:10:19","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:10:19","slug":"borders-may-change-but-people-remain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/borders-may-change-but-people-remain\/","title":{"rendered":"Borders May Change, But People Remain"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Quiero recordarle al gringo<\/p>\n

Yo no cruc\u00e9 la frontera<\/p>\n

La frontera me cruz\u00f3<\/p>\n

Am\u00e9rica naci\u00f3 libre<\/p>\n

El hombre la dividi\u00f3<\/p>\n

\u2014Los Tigres del Norte, \u201cSomos mas Americanos\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Drafted to fight in America\u2019s war in Vietnam in 1969, Manuel G\u00f3mez refused induction into the US Army. However, he refused not because of the war\u2019s imperialist aims but because of his understanding of Latinx history in the United States. The young man invoked a 19th-century conflict, the Mexican-American War (1846\u20131848) to refuse his draft notice. \u201cThe memory of the Mexican-American War,\u201d G\u00f3mez proclaimed in rejecting service, \u201cis still an open wound in the souls of my people.\u201d Over 120 years later, G\u00f3mez now leveraged the collective war memories of the US invasion of Mexico to protest another invasion in Vietnam. G\u00f3mez\u2019s \u201cwound\u201d was not just Mexico\u2019s loss of lands\u2014which today comprise California, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming\u2014it was the estimated 100,000 Mexicans and Hispanicized Indians who remained in the United States in the annexed territories. These Mexicans now found themselves a colonized people who had lost their land and their political rights and were now socially subordinated to whites. That\u2019s why, even today, it is still popular among Latinx Americans\u2014some whose families have lived on the same land for centuries\u2014to proclaim \u201cWe didn\u2019t cross the border, the border crossed us.\u201d<\/p>\n

These collective war memories were ingrained into the family of University of Texas at San Antonio historian Omar Valerio-Jim\u00e9nez. A \u201cMexican American worker with limited English proficiency,\u201d Valerio-Jim\u00e9nez\u2019s father lived in Matamoros and commuted into the United States for work with his plastic-encapsulated birth certificate in hand. When a Border Patrol officer, in the 1960s, questioned his father about whether his birthplace of Hills Prairie, Texas, was, in fact, in Mexico, his father invoked the legacies of conquest, explaining that \u201cHills Prairie was in Texas, but Mexico owned Texas at one time, so perhaps he was born in Texas when Mexico still owned it?\u201d His father was subsequently refused entry and traveled to a different bridge to cross into the United States. This sarcastic reply expressed defiance to the officer and a clear example of recalling memories of conquest as a \u201cweapon of the weak.\u201d Politicizing the history of conquest served as not only a form of resistance, but, in retelling this story to Valerio-Jim\u00e9nez, his father contributed to the active remembering of the conquest and its legacies.<\/p>\n

Exactly how this war has been remembered within the United States is the core of Valerio-Jim\u00e9nez\u2019s new book Remembering Conquest:<\/em> Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship, <\/em>which explores how these memories of war inspired later generations in their fight for civil rights. Valerio-Jim\u00e9nez suggests that this politics of remembering how borders changed\u2014while people remained\u2014crucially aided ethnic Mexicans in advancing their agendas for inclusion and civil rights across the Southwest. In doing so, Valerio-Jim\u00e9nez writes that an \u201calternative view\u201d of the conflict arises, which \u201ccenter Mexican Americans\u2019 experience by acknowledging the failure of the United States to enforce the citizenship guarantees in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war.\u201d In particular, article 8 of the treaty allowed Mexican citizens in the ceded territory to retain their Mexican citizenship and return to Mexico at any time, to become US citizens, or to delay their choice for a year. After one year, individuals would collectively naturalize as US citizens. Most of these former Mexican citizens remained on their land in the annexed territories, resulting in this form of \u201cmass naturalization\u201d at the treaty stipulated date of February 2, 1849. However, while the 1790 Naturalization Act intertwined citizenship with whiteness, the citizenship associated with Guadalupe Hidalgo represented a failure, as subsequent generations of Mexican Americans were relegated to a second-class status. The treaty\u2019s failed guarantees for property rights, education, and safety led to generational poverty, disenfranchisement, and systemic inequalities for Mexican Americans.<\/p>\n

Valerio-Jim\u00e9nez shows how, in the 1960s and \u201970s, Chicano and Chicana activists deployed memories of the \u201cconquest\u201d in the wake of the Mexican-American War as a way to exert their cultural pride, advocate for farmworkers\u2019 rights, reconceptualize their educational opportunities, and reassert their ties to the land. The Brown Berets traversed former Mexican territories in their Caravana de la Reconquista (1971\u201372) from California to Texas, all former Mexican territory lost in the first half of the 19th century. Famed New Mexican civil rights activist Reies Lopez Tijerina popularized the language of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to invoke linguistic and cultural rights for New Mexicans. One journalist even invoked this historical linkage when he wrote, \u201cThe Spanish-Americans involved in the land-grant controversy are not recent immigrants from Mexico, but descendants of Spanish settlers who changed from Mexican to American citizenship after the Mexican War in 1848.\u201d Chicano students resisted the Vietnam War and the mandatory draft with historical parallels to the Mexican-American War based on the disproportionate casualties for Chicanos and the unjust nature of the conflict. Lea Ybarra and Nina Genera argued that both the Vietnamese and Chicano communities were \u201coppressed by the same imperialist system.\u201d When Chicano activists of the 1960s are invoking a conflict from over a century before, they are deliberately combating the failed promises of the Treaty of Guadalupe and the assurances of protection granted in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War. Each of these groups and individuals understood the broader institutional and structural inequalities they faced as intrinsically linked to the failure to enact the treaty for resulting generations.<\/p>\n

This conflict from over 170 years ago reverberates across time, remaining ever present. Valerio-Jim\u00e9nez\u2019s task throughout the book is to convince readers that a vernacular form of this history\u00a0collectively informed the social transformation of generations of Mexican Americans. Combing through oral tradition, newspapers, speeches, and, to a lesser extent, literature, Valerio-Jim\u00e9nez documents how collective war memories were transmitted across five generations of Mexican Americans (1840s\u2013\u201960s, 1870s\u2013\u201990s, 1900s\u2013\u201920s, 1930s\u2013\u201950s, and 1960s\u2013\u201970s). The tangible and immediate impacts of violence by the first generation of Mexican Americans \u201creverberated among succeeding descendants by influencing their identity and political activism.\u201d When the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo failed to protect the property and political rights of the Mexicans who remained on the land now under US control, subsequent generations reaped the incrementally devastating consequences of disenfranchisement, dispossession, and violent repression. How subsequent generations chose to remember these lineages of conquest informed their advocacy as they pushed against their characterization as the perpetual stranger to full citizens. While the conquest was singular, the remembrances of it were myriad.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cHistory can either oppress or liberate a people,\u201d Rodolfo Acu\u00f1a, the founder of Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University Northridge, proclaimed in the opening line to his 1972 classic, Occupied America: The Chicano\u2019s Struggle Toward Liberation.<\/em> Writing in the throes of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, or El Movimiento, Acu\u00f1a argued that \u201cMexicans in the United States are still a colonized people, but now the colonization is internal<\/em>\u2014it is occurring within<\/em> the country rather than being imposed by an external power.\u201d The remembrance of conflict informed Acu\u00f1a\u2019s internal colonization theory, which defined his seminal text. Since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which ended the Mexican-American War, the colonization of Chicanos was one within borders instead of outside of them.<\/p>\n

Simply, memories matter\u2014for history and the people who invoke them. The act of remembrance is more than just nostalgia or an individual recollection of the past. Beyond our personal experiences, we create and contribute to collective memories, which are influenced by learning about the past from our families and friends and, in turn, share those memories with others. Each generation remembers and invokes aspects of the past to their present. Memories encapsulate the contested visions of history. Historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage reminds us that memories involve the \u201cactive labor of selecting, structuring, and imposing meaning on the past.\u201d In choosing to remember certain events at specific times, seemingly uncontroversial facts become subjects of politicization. Collective remembrance illustrates the opportunity to build awareness. As Acu\u00f1a contended, \u201cAwareness will help us take action against the forces that oppress not only Chicanos but the oppressor himself.\u201d Central to this awareness becomes the act of remembering, or \u201crefusing to forget<\/a>,\u201d the past injustices against Mexican Americans in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War. In the case of the generations of Mexican Americans in the decades after the conflict, this awareness was tied to offering alternative views of the conflict.<\/p>\n

Historically, Valerio-Jim\u00e9nez unravels how scholars, journalists, and activists \u201cdeployed collective war memories in varied and often contradictory ways to push their political agendas.\u201d While the physical consequences of the war\u2019s aftermath lessened and became less prominent after the initial generation, the influences remained in the second-class citizenship that defined Mexican Americans throughout the Southwest. While Valerio-Jim\u00e9nez utilizes the book\u2019s first chapter to summarize the events leading to the Mexican-American War, the negotiations surrounding the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and the immediate aftermath of the conflict, the following five chapters proceed chronologically across approximately 30 years each. How, then, did Mexican Americans still utilize the event, even as time granted them distance from the traumatic conflict?<\/p>\n\n

\n\n
Related readings<\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n
\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n Interviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n Humor and Fear, Kings and Soldiers: Jason De Le\u00f3n on the Untold Story of Human Smugglers<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"Catherine <\/a>\n \n Catherine S. Ram\u00edrez <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

In the late 1840s through 1860s, after the Mexican-American War, a cohort of \u201corganic intellectuals\u201d responded (mostly) peacefully to the failure of the United States to honor the treaty. While granted citizenship, this generation leveraged the treaty\u2019s language to criticize the federal government\u2019s inaction in the wake of violence and the encroachment on Mexican American land. Journalists publicized the plight of Mexican Americans, documenting the vigilante violence against working-class communities in gold mining and ranch work. Elites invoked the treaty to protest the gradual land loss of their estates. At the same time, consuls attempted to leverage the treaty in their diplomatic relationships with the United States on behalf of Mexican Americans. These initial assaults on their property and livelihoods revealed the stark limitations to their citizenship under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.<\/p>\n

These methods clarified how the first generation transmitted these collective memories to the second generation. Newspapers reprinted articles about the war from Mexican newspapers, participating in a \u201ctransnational circulation of war memories,\u201d and Mexican immigrants brought with them starkly different memories of the war across the border. In their path toward statehood, Mexican Americans in New Mexico, or Hispanos, reflected the regional variations in remembering the war. While Mexican Americans in New Mexico, California, and Texas all cited the treaty to gain confirmation of their land grants, Hispanos also remembered the treaty promises of statehood and protection from Indigenous raids. This new generation turned to the institutions of the United States to advocate for civil rights. Mexican Americans worked to elect municipal and, to a lesser extent, state legislators, filed lawsuits to protect their treaty rights, and issued appeals to political leaders.<\/p>\n

The act of collective remembering proved prone to various discrepancies. The increased immigration of Mexicans into the United States presented the opportunity for memories to \u201cintermingle and reinforce each other.\u201d Invoking the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans intermarried, socialized, and engaged with one another, all while forging movements for civil rights struggles against educational segregation, criminalization of Mexicans, poll taxes, boundary issues, and the lynching of Mexicans. In particular, mutual aid societies, or mutualistas<\/em>, helped establish transnational ties as nationalistic alternative views of the conquest spread across the border, forming a \u201ctransnational circulation of memories.\u201d However, as organizations developed to advocate for civil rights through remembering the treaty, no singular collective memory of the conquest emerged. Scholars, activists, and organizations \u201cselectively remembered\u201d the conflict \u201cto suit their political goals.\u201d<\/p>\n

As fledgling organizations used their memories of the treaty to varying degrees, memories became politicized and depoliticized. Valerio-Jim\u00e9nez showcases this by examining the differences between two leading organizations of the 1930s\u2013\u201950s, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and Mexican American National Association (ANMA). While some LULAC members remembered the treaty to use its guarantees to lay claim to whiteness, others expressed a clear connection to their Indigenous heritages. LULAC members depoliticized their past as a method to gain acceptance. In contrast, other LULACers and many ANMA members drew a clear lineage from the treaty\u2019s failure to the discrimination they encountered. In defining these differing remembrances, Valerio-Jim\u00e9nez noted the class differences between the mainly university-educated LULAC and working-class organizers associated with ANMA. Despite these conflicts of memory, this generation lay the foundation for the legacies of the Mexican-American War\u2014such as poverty, criminalization, and political disenfranchisement\u2014that the Chicano Generation used to inform their activism two decades later.
\n<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Valerio-Jim\u00e9nez\u2019s intervention is a timely reminder of the enduring legacies of conflict stemming from war memories.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n


\nPolitically, Remembering the Conquest<\/em> highlights the contested nature of memory. Invoking the failure of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Chicano activists of the 1960s and 1970s established a nearly exhaustive list to add to the collective memory of conquest. Antiwar protestors echoed the previous generation\u2019s positions (espoused by ANMA), concerning the hypocritical nature of the United States\u2019s foreign involvement in promoting democracy. How could the United States, which long oppressed Mexican Americans, support democracy abroad? At the same time, marginalized communities continued to advocate for civil rights domestically. For 24 days, members of the Brown Berets occupied Santa Catalina Island, part of the Channel Islands off California\u2019s coast. The activists argued that article 5, which demarcated the new boundaries of the US and Mexico, did not include the Channel Islands. From the island, the activists argued that the subordination of Mexicans was the result of a failure to enforce the treaty and lent justification to their continued struggle for civil rights.<\/p>\n

However, this strategic deployment of the trauma of the conflict was highly selective. In remembering themselves as the conquered, Mexican Americans often omitted their role in removing\u2014often forcibly\u2014Indigenous communities on the far northern frontier of Mexico. In their testimonios<\/em>, Californian elites\u2014or Californios\u2014recalled the treaty\u2019s failed promises as they witnessed their estates and influence dwindle. But in remembering their experiences as conquered people, these elites expressed a \u201cstrategic amnesia\u201d in their positions \u201cas conquerors of Indigenous nations.\u201d This amnesia extended into contradictory actions for generations as well. While critical of US expansionism, novelist Ruiz de Burton married a military officer and active participant in the system that Burton admonished. As Valerio-Jim\u00e9nez argued, de Burton\u2019s literary career highlighted the conflation of class and the contradictory notion of the failure of the treaty while retaining an opportunity for integration as full citizens.<\/p>\n

While some individuals leverage the treaty to argue for their belonging in the United States, the war is also invoked to decry the \u201cinvasion\u201d and \u201creconquest\u201d of the Southwest by immigrant restrictions and xenophobic forces domestically. Anthropologist Leo Chavez documented the prolonged rise of what he termed the Latino threat narrative, or the presentation of Latino immigrants as a fundamental threat to US society. In remembering the war, these anxieties view the changing demographics of the United States as the next battle in the \u201cunending\u201d Mexican-American War.<\/p>\n\n

\n\n
Related readings<\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n
\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n Essays<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n From Suspect to Perpetrator: How History Shaped the Modern U.S. Border Patrol Agent<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n Ervin A. Zubiate-Rocha <\/a>, et al.\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

Today, immigrant rights advocates continue to invoke the experience of conquest in advocating for their belonging to the United States. However, it is also a historically rich invocation of the collective war memories of 1848. As Valerio-Jim\u00e9nez documented, these invocations represented \u201cunfulfilled promises\u201d for Mexican Americans.<\/p>\n

Valerio-Jim\u00e9nez\u2019s intervention is a timely reminder of the enduring legacies of conflict stemming from war memories. In 2023, Joe Sacco\u2019s graphic novel Palestine <\/em>was rushed back into the press as readers drew connections to the ongoing conflicts in Gaza with the memories documented in the aftermath of the first intifada. When he returned to do Footnotes in Gaza<\/em>, Sacco even commented, \u201cThings had seemed very bad\u201d when visiting in the early 1990s, \u201cbut things were\u00a0very much worse 10 years later.\u201d In documenting over 70 years of violence and trauma, psychologist Iman Farajallah\u2014herself a witness to the first and second intifadas\u2014remembers that \u201cThe experience was so vicious, so scary, so harmful that there are no words that you can actually describe it.\u201d However, the witnesses to this era of immense violence do remember these experiences and themselves participate in the ongoing dissemination of collective war memories. These invocations join the rich lineage of collective memories of conflict to protest war. The legacies of conflict\u2014and their increasingly accessible images in a global age\u2014frame the shared bonds of trauma in keeping the memories of these conflicts alive, often through offering a human consequence to these periods of intense violence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The legacies of conflict\u2014and their increasingly accessible images in a global age\u2014frame the shared bonds of trauma in keeping the memories of these conflicts alive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":59568,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497],"tags":[1691,1481,14,148,161,174,1244,2436],"pbpartner":[],"section":[1467],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-59496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-borderlands","tag-colonization","tag-history","tag-memory","tag-mexico","tag-migration","tag-university-of-north-carolina-press","tag-us-mexico-border","section-borderlands"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBorders May Change, But People Remain - Public Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The legacies of conflict\u2014and their increasingly accessible images in a global age\u2014frame the shared bonds of trauma in keeping the memories of these conflicts alive.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/borders-may-change-but-people-remain\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Borders May Change, But People Remain - 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