Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States

Abstract

The contributors to this timely volume reject political and public discourse, which too often characterizes Mexicans as invaders or as the Other. Rather, the authors argue that, historically and culturally, Mexico and Mexicans were key participants in the construction of the United States. Moving from the Hispanic capitalism of northern New Spain to the claims of superior “Yankee patriarchy” and finally to the murky state of race and the persistence of mestizaje in the twenty-first century, this collection offers engaging essays that emphasize an integrative history of the two countries.John Tutino provides a sweeping overview that links New Spain, Mexico, and the United States from the sixteenth century to the present. As Europeans, Mesoamericans, and Africans moved to northern New Spain, drawn by the promise of silver, farming, and grazing, what emerged was an ethnically complex and economically stable region. Even when the border moved south, Hispanic capitalism and Mexican migration continued north. Through wars and marriages, Anglo-Americans adopted New Spain’s northern capitalism and laid the foundation for a dynamic US West. At the same time, the United States was not the only beneficiary of this capitalist system. As David Montejano demonstrates, during the US Civil War Mexican teamsters and merchants like José San Román controlled the import and export of goods like “Mexican cotton” that were vital to the functioning of the trans-Mississippi Confederacy (p. 152). Rather than take this as evidence of Mexican sympathies with slavery or the Confederacy, Montejano argues that these entrepreneurs simply took successful advantage of economic opportunities. In the post– Civil War period, Mexico’s economic integration into the United States accelerated so that, as Tutino points out, “Mexicans increasingly engaged the world through the United States” (p. 68). Ties intensified further after World War II, when population growth and urbanization in Mexico prompted more Mexicans to migrate north. In the last few decades, sectors of the US economy have become dependent on poorly paid and exploitable Mexican workers. As Tutino states, “mutual dependence has become a symbiosis” (p. 23).Hispanic North American capitalism was adopted by Anglo-Americans who articulated a “superior Yankee patriarchy” (p. 32). Shelley Streeby examines how nineteenth-century wars, mass media, and popular literature reframed the United States’ relationship with Mexico. Mexican culture and Mexican men were problematized and portrayed as failed patriarchs and as exceptionally violent. Although President James Monroe envisioned the newly independent American republics as brothers, popular novels reimagined Mexico as a woman in need of saving. In this way, the “gendered power dynamics that figured the United States as a man and Mexico as a woman worked to naturalize US dominance and Mexican subordination” (p. 117). The United States was the heroic white male while Mexico was considered incapable of republicanism because it was too racially mixed and feminine. This gendered construction of Mexico, Streeby argues, helped build a powerful self-image of white “USAmericans” (p. 127).Katherine Benton-Cohen also examines the construction and fluidity of race by focusing on the copper-rich and racially complicated Cochise County, Arizona, from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Here, the defeat and removal of indigenous groups such as the Chiricahua Apaches and later the Chinese ended the camaraderie between Mexicans and Anglo-Americans. Racial categorization changed when Mexicans replaced Chinese and Indians at the bottom of labor and racial hierarchies. In this way, Mexicans were pushed further toward the margins to become “others” in a binary racialized world. At the same time, as Ramón Gutiérrez notes, rapid demographic transformations challenge binary racial understandings of white and nonwhite in the United States. In what Gutiérrez calls the “vibrant postnational spaces” (p. 264), “Mex-America” represents a place where “peoples, cultures, and ideas can move in complicated ways, defying linearity” (p. 281).This is a solid collection of essays that makes a convincing case that the past and present of Mexico and the United States are inseparable. As Tutino argues, Mexicans and Americans “are not long separate and ultimately different peoples struggling to merge; [they] are peoples emerging from long interactions, struggling with the separating claims of nations and nationalisms” (p. 77). As is often the case with collected essays, some chapters are more engaging than others. While the arguments presented are not necessarily new, the collection thoughtfully and critically examines not only the complex themes that link Mexico and the United States but also the concrete ways that Mexico and Mexicans constructed the economy and the national and racial identity of the United States. In that way, this collection represents an excellent contribution to the ongoing public and academic debate.