Mexican-American War Research Articles

Fighting Stock: “Rip” Ford of Texas (review)

Reviewed by: Fighting Stock: “Rip” Ford of Texas James Smallwood, Emeritus Fighting Stock: “Rip” Ford of Texas. By Richard B. McCaslin. (Fort Worth: TCU Press, 2011. Pp. 408. Illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780875654218, $29.95 cloth). Many historians with a passing acquaintance with Texas history remember “Rip” Ford (1815–97) as a Texas Ranger, but few non-specialists know that he was a man of many talents, a Renaissance man—Texas-style. Originally from South Carolina, he moved to Texas in 1836, just missing the battle of San Jacinto by about ten weeks. Even so, he joined Texas’s revolutionary army and served from 1836 and [End Page 310] 1838 under John Coffee “Jack” Hays. After his military service, he moved to San Augustine where he practiced medicine. Later he also practiced law. In 1844, he won political office and served a term in the Republic House of Representatives. He had the honor of being the man who introduced a resolution to accept the United States’ terms of annexation. In 1845, Ford moved to Austin where with a partner he bought and became editor of the Austin Texas Democrat. When the Mexican-American War (1846–48) broke out, he immediately joined the Texas Rangers and served under Jack Hays again. By 1849 high command promoted him to captain of the Rangers. He served in South Texas from the Nueces River to the Rio Grande. In 1852 South Texas voters sent him to the Texas State Senate. When he moved to Austin, again with a partner he founded a new paper, the State Times, which lasted until 1857. In 1858 Ford sought and won a commission to lead a contingent of the Texas State Troops, a command that sent him to South Texas again. He and his men campaigned against Indians, as well as Juan Cortina when he raided north of the Rio Grande. Later, he was elected to the Secession Convention and voted with the majority. Once the Civil War became a reality, Ford volunteered for service by joining the Second Texas Cavalry whose men elected him as its colonel. In May 1865 he gained a type of immortality by fighting and winning the last battle of the Civil War at Palmito Ranch. After the war, Ford returned to the newspaper business when he moved to Brownsville in 1868. He bought and became editor of the Brownsville Sentinel. He continued his interest in politics, and voters made him a delegate to the National Democratic Convention in 1872 and in 1875 to the Texas Constitutional Convention. From 1876 to 1879, he returned to the Texas Senate. In 1879, state leaders appointed him to his last public position, superintendent of the state’s Deaf and Dumb School (later called the Texas School of the Deaf). In his sunset days, Ford became something of a historian and wrote his memoirs. He became a charter member of the newly founded Texas State Historical Association and supported the new association’s journal. Indeed, he penned one of the first articles to appear in the new journal. He died in San Antonio on November 3, 1897. In the running theme of the narrative, McCaslin notes several times that both of Ford’s grandfathers fought in the American Revolution and did their part to secure American independence. As a youngster and later as a mature adult, Rip Ford became determined to emulate both of them, with locations like Lexington and Concord replaced by the broad expanse of Texas. McCaslin has produced a meaningful volume and has done an excellent job. And, yes, when I use the words “McCaslin” and “excellent” in the same sentence, I know that I am being redundant. James Smallwood, Emeritus Oklahoma State University Copyright © 2012 The Texas State Historical Association

Gender, Literacy, and Sovereignty in Winnemucca's <em>Life among the Piutes</em>

Arming themselves with “manifest destiny” rhetoric, which claimed divine Anglo-Saxon superiority as justifi cation for the conquest of Indigenous and Mexican peoples and the land they occupied, white settlers forcefully pushed into California territory. The two-year-long MexicanAmerican War resulted in the acquisition of the present-day states of California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada. However, Native tribes and landed Mexicans continued to stand in the way of not only “civilized progress” but the vast riches that gold and the California soil offered the ever-growing numbers of US citizens. Relationships with the Paiute Nation became key to movement into the area as their lands stood directly in the path of settlers and miners moving toward California through the Sierra Nevada. Paiutes were subject to various methods of removal and attempts at assimilating or civilizing the Indian, then became wards of the state through the Indian Appropriation Act of 1871. Daughter to the chief, Sarah Winnemucca witnessed and engaged in her tribe’s struggles to remain in their ancestral lands and maintain sovereignty while attempting to build balanced relationships with their white relatives according to her cultural traditions. Her Life among the Piutes, Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) is the fi rst autobiographical account written by a Native woman and reveals valuable information regarding this history and confl ict. However, her autobiography focuses less on her life and more on the trials and tribulations of her tribe’s relationship with the United States. Born around 1844, Winnemucca learned to read and write English while a domestic worker for a white woman after expulsion from a convent school for being Indian. Furthermore, her birth coincided with the politiciza-

Holiday in Mexico: Critical Reflections on Tourism and Tourist Encounters

Mexico is indelibly imprinted in the collective imagination of the United States as a romantic playground and land of the exotic otherness. Neither the intensity of transnational migration of Mexican workers living in the United States and Mexico, nor the now millions upon millions of American tourists who have traveled, toured, and played in Mexico’s Spanish colonial cities, indigenous markets, pre-Columbian sites, and long tropical beaches have dulled these attitudes. How this came to be is a fascinating story that Dina Berger and Andrew Grant Wood begin to answer in their edited volume Holiday in Mexico: Critical Reflections on Tourism and Tourist Encounters.Berger and Wood’s volume counteracts the overwhelming tendency of tourism scholars to focus their research on contemporary, synchronic case studies. Certainly there are exceptions, but most research fails to address tourism from a historical perspective. Over the course of the well-written and interesting chapters, the authors remind us that not all was as new as the first tourism scholars in the 1970s implied. These chapters are bracketed by an introduction and conclusion in which the editors contextualize the contributors’ theoretical perspectives and their specific historical cases.One of the strengths of these essays is that neither the editors nor the chapter authors try to present a unified vision of tourism history and development in Mexico. What they do is present a panorama of Mexican tourism, not an exhaustive study of all kinds of tourism, but a diverse collection of specific tourism histories that tell as much about international politics between the United States and Mexico as about tourism in Mexico. Collectively, the authors illustrate the particular kinds of tourists and the shifting representations of Mexico that are cultivated by the Mexican state as well as regional and local community civic leaders and private entrepreneurs. As Berger’s chapter illustrates nicely, American tourists and Mexican hosts fit into the US “Good Neighbor Policy” of the 1930s, in which tourism played a strong role in fostering positive relations between the two countries. Other essays, notably chapters by Eric M. Schantz (about vice), Jeffrey M. Pilcher (about touristic consumption), and Barbara Kastelein (about ecological and social decline), show some of the darker sides of tourism in Mexico.Indeed, tourism development and its history is both positive and negative as tourists themselves engage in contradictory behaviors, the US and Mexican governments inject their political agendas in the mix, and businesspersons small and large try to gain an advantage and make a profit. Andrea Boardman shows how US soldiers in the US-Mexican War acted like tourists, setting the stage for the tourism growth that followed their return home. While Boardman shows proto-tourist soldiers, other authors show how tourism became democratized, at least for US tourists, following World War II.Essays by Christina Bueno on the reconstruction of Teotihuacán, by Wood about improving health conditions in Veracruz, and by Alex Saragoza about resort development on the Pacific coast describe the monumental acts and finances of the state to develop and promote tourism. Other authors show how tourism politics play out among local businesspersons, the state, and foreigners: Andrew Sackett on the politics of tourism development in Acapulco, Lisa Pinley Covert on transforming San Miguel de Allende into a cultural center, and Mary K. Coffey on the resignification of folk art. Collectively these authors illustrate how massive state capital investment was related to private investment and fostered tense public-private unions.In various essays, notably Wood’s chapter on Carnival in Veracruz and, especially, M. Bianet Castellanos’s chapter about Maya service workers, the authors take a contemporary tourism site or associated tourism activity and then describe the politics that led up to the contemporary situation. Relying primarily on oral histories, Bianet Castellanos reconstructs labor regimes and tourism in Yucatán from the perspective of workers who try to comprehend tourism work, which does not come under ritual control like corn farming. Castellano shows the development of mutual dependency and economic support that exists between a Maya community and Cancún tourism resorts.Berger argues significantly that the tourism gaze is not one way and imperial, and that tourism politics, development, and practices are dialectical. By considering tourism development as representative of power relations — between states, between tourists and hosts, and among politicians and businesspersons — the authors here deepen our knowledge of the history of tourism in Mexico.

March, Conquest, and Play Ball

It could have been the perfect story, worthy of being told again and again. That kind of short tale that explains it all-that of Abner Doubleday in Mexico.The alleged inventor of baseball passed 17 months fighting a war in his busier hours, while delineating baseball diamonds in his leisure time among spines of saguaros in the deserts of northern Mexico. At least, that is what the perfect myth would tell.In 1846 a war started between the United States and Mexico, leading American troops to invade their neighbor country. As part of the 1st US Artillery, Abner Doubleday saw combat for the first time in his military career, attacking the west side of Monterrey and then spending the rest of the war stationed in Saltillo. Just seven years had passed since Doubleday had allegedly invented baseball in Cooperstown. According to the Doubleday legend, he was, at this point, in Saltillo surrounded by native children teaching them how to play the game-his game.1A daguerreotype that survived the war features a young Abner Doubleday striking a perfect pose. Elegant, thin, and with his emblematic curly hair barely contained under his cap, Doubleday is captured in the company of several native Saltillans. This document would seem to corroborate the Doubleday-in-Mexico story, were it not for the inconvenient fact that Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball. He died unaware that, for many decades, he would be considered the father of the game despite the voluminous evidence proving the existence of baseball since 1744, evidence that defies any creationist myth.As soon as historical records emerged about the presence of Abner Doubleday in the war, mythical stories of baseball pioneering began to be fabricated. For example, in Port Isabel, Texas, there is a modern unsubstantiated legend that Doubleday out to organize an inter squad baseball game that was played outside the walls of Fort Polk.2 In Saltillo, local historians assume that in 1847, after the Battle of Buena Vista, Doubleday remained in town until the end of the war among the Saltillan natives explaining the rules and basics of the game, creating a pair of nines and playing several friendly games.3 Another apocryphal tale was published in 1974 in a Mexican newspaper where Jose Luis Juarez, a former player, claimed to have evidence that the American soldiers played baseball in Churubusco, Mexico, with Abner Doubleday participating in the game. But Doubleday never was in Churubusco.4Doubleday had, in fact, fought in Mexico during that war; that much is beyond doubt. But he did not go into every battlefield carving baseball diamonds. Actually, Doubleday wrote a vivid account of his experience in the Mexican-American War, recalling in great detail his experiences in Point Isabel and Saltillo without any comment about baseball or ballplaying.5Regardless of the Doubleday myth, contemporary accounts and oral tradition indicate that ball games such as baseball and town ball were played during the Mexican- American War by encamped soldiers.In the fall of 1845, while diplomatic tensions between both countries made the war imminent, in New York, the Knickerbockers Base Ball Club drafted a set of 20 rules to play baseball, laying the groundwork for organized baseball. In those days, the several variations of baseball were popular pastimes in the American Northeast and Midwest, regions in which large numbers of soldiers were recruited to go to the war-some of them taking the game with them.There are only three contemporary sources documenting the practice of ball games by soldiers in the camps during the war, but they offer clear evidence of an increasingly popular pastime. Additionally, there are four accounts published many years after the event that have not been confirmed with contemporary support, but still retain some degree of credibility.It is in 1846, as soon as the American troops initiated their advance and occupation of northern Mexico, that first-hand accounts of ballplaying by soldiers in their camps emerge. …

Going Wendigo: The Emergence of the Iconic Monster in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Antonia Bird's Ravenous

Margaret Atwood's interpretation of the concept of becoming or going Wendigo, discussed in her work Strange Things (1995), is useful to a reading of Antonia Bird's film Ravenous (1999). This essay will first investigate Atwood's novel Oryx and Crake (2003) as an application of her own conclusions regarding the Wendigo as a cultural metaphor. Then the essay will analyze Bird's deployment of the Wendigo in her film—which, unlike Oryx and Crake , directly establishes a specific temporal and geographical setting, during the Mexican-American war in the wilds of northern California—in order to consider how the iconic Wendigo serves as a symbol for a critique of Manifest Destiny and military resistance.

The U.S.-Mexican War: A Binational Reader (review)

Reviewed by: The U.S.-Mexican War: A Binational Reader Raúl Ramos The U.S.-Mexican War: A Binational Reader. Edited with an introduction by Christopher Conway, translations by Gustavo Pellón. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2010. Pp. 240. Illustrations, maps, suggested readings, index. ISBN 9781603842211, $42.00 cloth; 9781603842204, $14.95 paper.) Christopher Conway’s excellent primary documents reader provides scholars and teachers interested in telling a transnational story of American imperialism and westward expansion with an invaluable collection of sources to tell that story. Conway delves deeply into Mexican sources, not to provide “balance,” but rather to reorient our perspective and understanding of the events in the nineteenth century that continue to shape the region. He uses the documents to expand the context of the war by taking an expansive view of the period he draws from and the types of documents used. Conway provides a concise overview of the events and politics leading up to the war, during the war, and its aftermath. This narrative and the subsequent documents follow along with the recent move established by historians to include the events in Texas as part of the war and American westward conquest. In this sense, historians of Texas will find numerous documents from both Anglophone and Hispanophone sources to provide a more useful context to their work. All the Spanish language documents are presented in English thanks to Gustavo Pellón’s excellent translations. The reader’s strength comes from choosing both Mexican and American documents that paint a complex narrative of the diplomatic and political impact of the war in Texas and Mexico. The reader charts the ways the Texas issue appeared in political discourses in both Mexico City and Washington, D.C., Conway includes both Mexican internal debates around the legitimacy of Texas independence and Polk’s mention of the annexation of Texas as reunification in his inaugural address. In a subsequent section, both American and Mexican participants describe the war itself. For instance, he includes reports on the Battle of Palo Alto by Mexican General Mariano Arista and American General Zachary Taylor. Other documents detail very extensive political debates in the respective capitals, such as the All-Mexico advocates in Washington and or the so-called Polkos Revolt in Mexico City, an insurrection sprung from Santa Anna’s absence. The last sections of the reader begin to trace the broad impact of the war and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Conway chose documents highlighting the increased violence experienced by Mexican people on the American side after the treaty. These sorts of documents can also be useful in the context of understanding the formation of Mexican American identity. A section on culture and literature adds yet another dimension to our views of the war period by including poetry, songs, and other fiction from both nations. Overall, this is a handy resource for those teaching courses in American, Mexican, Texas, and Chicano/a history. As the book stresses the politics of the war, it is harder to come by the views and participation on both sides of the conflict by Mexican people living in the states that straddle the future border. Recent work on New Mexico by Laura Gómez on the war’s impact (Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race, 2008) and on indigenous communities by Brian DeLay (War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the Mexican American War, 2009) point to additional places documents could one day be added to get a deeper [End Page 85] sense of the local social and ideological shifts from this watershed event in American history. Raúl Ramos University of Houston Copyright © 2011 The Texas State Historical Association

Navigating the Fluid Boundary: The Lower Colorado River Steamboat Era, 1851-1877

In the aftermath of the Mexican-American War, steamships plied the Lower Colorado River from the Gulf of Mexico to the present site of Hoover Dam. They were instrumental in fortifying southern Arizona and southeastern California, displacing the region's native inhabitants, facilitating westward migration, and appraising the terrain. During these years, steamship owners, operators, and passengers announced, enforced, and negotiated peripheral conflicts attending continental expansion. The Colorado River demarked a line of sovereignty and a line of defense, as well as a line of commerce. The relatively unexplored history of steamship navigation consequently illuminates the river's role in solidifying and regulating the borderlands, and, more significantly, its centrality to the river's larger narrative.

History of Ecological Sciences, Part 38B: Naturalists Explore North America, 1838–1850s

History of Ecological Sciences, Part 38B: Naturalists Explore North America, 1838–1850s

The cultural roots of isolationism and internationalism in American foreign policy

This article examines the question: why have Americans supported both internationalist and isolationist foreign policies at various points in history? It argues that part of the answer to this question can be found in the structure and nature of American political culture. American political culture frames the terms in which the programmes and plans debated by political leaders ‘make sense’ to the ordinary people whose consent is fundamental to the making of a democratic foreign policy. The article offers an account of the central components of American political culture that are shown to frame four core cultural orientations towards foreign affairs: Liberal Internationalism, America-as-Model, Nativism and Triumphalism. Two dimensions, Liberal Internationalism and America-as-Model, are illustrated through a discussion of contemporary arguments in favour of and opposed to the 1848 Mexican—American War. The article then offers suggestions of how the four categories of American foreign policy orientations can be applied in cases beyond the Mexican—American conflict. Both isolationism and internationalism are shown to be core components of American political culture. They are, as a consequence, eternal features of American foreign policy.

Why We Fought: America's Wars in Film and History

WHY WE FOUGHT: AMERICA'S WARS IN FILM AND HISTORY Ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor, University Press of Kentucky, 2008, 624 pp. Eschewing psychoanalytic, formalist, and auteur critical approaches in favor of one that privileges simultaneously the internal and the external contexts of cinematic narratives, Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor have long insisted that films must be read for both their historical and their aesthetic elements. Their recent co-edited collection, Why We Fought: America's Wars in Film and History, offers a number of essays exemplifying their unique interdisciplinary approach. Its twenty-three selections, most of which were initially presented at the Film and History Conference in 2005, examine a widely disparate though representative selection of important films from the American war genre through a self-avowed film and history lens that views movie, newsreel, and television productions as historical documents that are as deserving of close, scholarly, and contextual analysis as other primary and secondary historical resources. Inspired by the prevailing tenets of scholarship and social and cultural history, most contributors combine relatively cursory readings of a film's cinematographic and aesthetic elements with more detailed analysis of the historical accuracy of its content and the sociocultural contexts of its production, distribution, and reception. Indeed, whether assessing a as a propaganda vehicle or determining the role of government sponsorship or censorship in pre- and postproduction, the collection as a whole tends to see war films as cultural texts that not only record events but also influence perceptions about the events depicted while simultaneously reflecting the values, morals, and ideals of both the era in which the events purportedly happened and the era in which the was produced and released. Thus, depending on its particular mode of historical inquiry, each essay examines the genre's films within a rubric defined by four frameworks identified in the collection's expansive introduction, assessing each as a representation of history, as a document of social or cultural history, as a representation of a particular moment in history, or as actual historical fact. Though the editors' introduction and John Shelton Lawrence's excellent filmography and bibliography sections are invaluable in their own right for their precision and concision, the collection's true strength lies in its comprehensive assessment of the genre, from feature films and documentaries to newsreels and television miniseries. Extensive and inclusive with respect to content as well, its essays consider mediated depictions of almost every one of the United States' armed conflicts since the Revolutionary War. Indeed, one of its most compelling arguments, written by Frank Thompson, deals with problematic cinematic depictions of the battle of the Alamo; yet another powerful essay assesses the heavily mediated and interpretive mythic condensation (443) at the core of Ridley Scott's powerful adaptation of Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down (2001). This is not to say, of course, that Rollins and O'Connor ignore the nation's involvement in large-scale warfare. In an effort to ensure both breadth and historical context, the editors have adroitly organized their collection into four parts. Part 1 assesses films dealing with the nation's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wars, to include the American Revolution, the MexicanAmerican War, and the Civil War. Part 2 examines cinematic representations of World War I and World War II. Part 3 appraises films dealing with the paradox of limited warfare, to include the Cold War and Vietnam, and Part 4 considers contemporary filmic narratives dealing with the nation's more recent asymmetric conflicts. In addition to O'Connor's and Rollins's lucid contributions, the collection's strongest essays, such as those by Gary Edgerton, Robert Myers, Ian Scott, Robert Brent Toplin, and John Shelton Lawrence and John McGarrahan, clearly and explicitly model the film and history approach. …

“I am the hero of a fairy tale”: The US-Mexico War and American Manhood in E. D. E. N. Southworth's <em>The Hidden Hand</em>

Few things are in worse taste than for man needlessly to busy himself in women's work; and yet man never appears in more interesting attitude than when, by skill in such matters, he can save mother or wife from care and suffering. Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman's Home A few short chapters after Capitola Black defends her honor in duel with Craven Le Noir and captures the local bandit Black Donald in E. D. E. N. Southworth's The Hidden Hand, another young and young adventurer, Traverse Rocke, fights valiantly in the US-Mexico War (449, 432). When his fellow soldier falls in siege, Traverse takes the American flag from him and march[es] into the very mouths of the cannon that were vomiting fire upon [him]. Facing brutal Mexican army, he does not turn away; instead, springing upon one of the guns which continued to belch forth fire, he thrice wave[s] the flag over his head, and then plant[s] it upon the battery! (425). The moment is one of heroic triumph for man who had earlier, on a weary day when hope and faith beneath the weight gave way, abandoned his dreams of becoming doctor and joined the army, but who has also quickly realized that as soldier he is entirely out of his vocation (344, 400). In Mexico, Traverse endures the rough life of soldier__the poor quality of the uniforms, the drilling, close quarters, coarse food__and, hounded by Colonel Le Noir and his cronies, nearly dies at the hands of military tribunal (343). As he explains to his friend and fellow soldier Herbert Greyson, he is not even sure why American men are fighting in Mexico: If foreign foe invaded her shores, yes; but what had I to do with invading another's country?__enlisting for war of the rights and wrongs of which I know no more than anybody else does! (345). A moment of crisis in Traverse's life, the US-Mexico War is also one of redemption: He eventually returns to his hometown decorated war hero and becomes successful doctor, rescuing Capitola's mother from asylum and marrying his sweetheart. In novel where geographical location and setting are significant__the gothic plantation in Virginia, for example, is far from Edenic paradise and is instead associated with images of darkness, evil, and turmoil (Jones, This Dainty Woman's 7o)__these moments in Mexico have not been adequately studied. Christopher Looby indicates that the scenes were likely Southworth's nostalgic nod to the romanticized Mexican War stories that frequented Robert Bonner's New York Ledger during the initial serialization of The Hidden Hand in 1859 (206).(1) Looby notes, though, that [w]hatever the intrinsic interest of these scenes in Mexico, they are strictly unnecessary to the central plot, and he suggests that Southworth's decision to include them was ploy to [stall] for time until fresh inspiration came (204, 2o4n34). But such analysis overlooks the fact that The Hidden Hand opens on the eve of the Mexican conflict and the same year as Texas's annexation__a cold, dark, and stormy Halloween night in 1845__and closes three years later, shortly after the signing of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Peace, too, appears on the domestic front, as the novel closes with happy series of reunions and double set of marriage vows. The United States' declaration of war on Mexico fed women writers' growing and widespread concern for the failures of American manhood. As the atmosphere of war and unrest worsened during the 184os, many Americans began to fear that there might be no peaceful solution to the Mexican conflict and that their nation could well be speeding toward civil war. Men were held responsible for this degeneration, and, in literature, increasing number of female characters, like Cap, learn to rely on themselves and God for spiritual, physical, and financial support. Women, Robin Miskolcze explains, presented an alternative vision of nation untainted by men's selfishness, greed, or desire to move west (133). …

<i>Melodramatic Landscapes: Urban Parks in the Nineteenth Century</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Melodramatic Landscapes: Urban Parks in the Nineteenth Century Eliza Earle Ferguson (bio) Heath Massey Schenker Melodramatic Landscapes: Urban Parks in the Nineteenth Century Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009. 232 pages. 75 black-and-white illustrations. ISBN 9780813928425, $35.00 (HB) Heath Schenker’s highly readable comparative study of nineteenth-century parks in Paris, Mexico City, and New York brings together a wealth of information concerning why and how these parks were created. Schenker finds that in all three cities, plans for massive new parks were informed by notions of melodrama, with the landscape designed to communicate clear moral messages about social harmony and the benefits of contact with nature for the edification of the lower classes. Drawing on primary sources such as contemporary guidebooks and published memoirs written by park planners, together with a range of secondary material, Schenker constructs a convincing case for the reformist intentions of park planners and government officials. However, the book also promises to investigate “how the public received and responded to those messages” of moral reform (19), and on this point of great social historical interest, the book is ultimately more suggestive than conclusive. The book’s three main chapters take each city and its parks in turn, beginning with the Parisian parks of the Second Empire. In Schenker’s analysis, Napoleon III was motivated to create or renovate large parks throughout Paris in order to placate various political constituencies, whom Schenker identifies by their class status rather than their political views. While members of the bourgeoisie profited immensely through real estate speculation and enjoyed displaying their wealth on promenades in the parks, the working people of Paris were pushed to the [End Page 114] periphery of the city, far from the nicest of the new parks. Schenker agrees with Zola’s assessment in his 1872 novel La Curée, in which the parks are nothing more than a false backdrop for the empty ideals of the regime. The political spectrum of the Third Empire was far more nuanced than Schenker indicates, however, and the commitment of Napoleon III to improving the lives of the workers in his capital city was more sincere. The discussion of the Haussmannization of Paris would have been enriched by engagement with more recent scholarship as well as now-classic works dealing with Third Empire Paris by authors like François Loyer and David Jordan, not to mention the field of social history, which is represented here by outdated texts from the mid-twentieth century. How the parks of Haussmann’s Paris inspired the renovation of Chapultepec Park in Mexico City is an intriguing story outlined in chapter 2. The location of this park to the west of the city is rich in historical significance. Having once been a sacred site for the Aztecs, in 1530 it was designated as public property and a key source for Mexico City’s water supply. By the nineteenth century, its springs were running dry, and the viceroy’s former pleasure villa had been converted into a military academy. The Castle of Chapultepec saw a major battle in the Mexican-American War, where in 1847 the young cadets sacrificed themselves in a suicidal action against the invading Americans and became immortalized in the nationalist legend of los niños héroes. Thus the site of Chapultepec was already infused with political meaning when Emperor Maximilian I came to power in 1864 and dreamed of recreating Mexico City in the image of Paris. Though his regime was short-lived, his vision for Mexico City was not, and the new boulevard he cut from the city to Chapultepec would become “the spine of modern Mexico City” (85). The Porfiriato continued Maximilian’s efforts to make Mexico City a European-style showplace in the last decades of the nineteenth century. As Schenker recounts, Chapultepec performed much the same theatrical function as the Bois de Boulogne in Paris: the backdrop to a scene where well-to-do citizens enacted their social status and the state demonstrated its aspirations to modernize the city. Doubtless the wealthy citizens of Mexico City did use the park for this purpose, but the author’s reliance on guidebooks as...

Unequal partners: the United States and Mexico

Since Mexico's defeat in the Mexican-American War of the 1840s, the United States has continued to dominate Mexico economically, militarily, and politically. This long history of asymmetry has created a Mexican distaste for 'American arrogance', and an American vision of Mexico as its 'backyard'. The imbalance has damaged political negotiations, trade pacts, and capital flows, as suspicions and protectionism have undermined diplomacy. Despite these events, the two nations remain joined at the hip: more than 80 percent of Mexico's exports are to the United States, and the majority of foreign investment in Mexico comes from America. In Unequal Partners, Sidney Weintraub examines the current relationship of Mexico and the United States as one of sustained dependence and dominance. The chapters examine the consequences of this imbalance in six major policy areas: trade; investment and finance; narcotics; energy; migration; and the border. The book begins in 1954 when the Mexican growth miracle was at its apex, and proceeds to the present. Special attention is paid to the post-1982 debt crisis era, when Mexico began a more outward-looking trade policy. As this study reveals, Mexico has often been its own worst enemy in foreign relations. Over the past thirty years, the country has been plagued by debt, currency fluctuations, tax collection problems, political corruption, and state-controlled business monopolies that block foreign investment and importation. These factors have created an environment of instability, damaged outside perceptions, and weakened Mexico's bargaining position. Weintraub considers future policy changes that would help Mexico to level the playing field. Improving the education system, he argues, will benefit nearly every other activity and institution, and opening the oil market to private investment and technology will help develop deep-water drilling and revitalize this significant export commodity. In foreign relations, Mexico must be assertive - as it has been in easing U.S. restrictions on goods traded through NAFTA, and demanding U.S. aid to fight drug cartels - not passive, as it currently is on U.S. anti-immigration policy and the proposed border wall. Perhaps most importantly, the study points to the deeper development of policies that are proactive and outward looking.

A Class Apart (review)

Reviewed by: A Class Apart Rob Prince A Class Apart (2009). Directed by Carlos Sandoval and Peter Miller. PBS, American Experience. www.pbs.org. 60 minutes. A Class Apart, a documentary film co-directed by Carlos Sandoval and Peter Miller for PBS' venerable signature series American Experience, deftly chronicles the complicated history of Hernandez v. Texas, a relatively unknown, but nevertheless landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision. This case would determine whether Mexican-Americans, despite their legal status as members of the white race, deserved the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Presented through the recollections of Mexican-American historians, legal scholars, and actual participants, A Class Apart stitches together a troubling mosaic of a court victory inspired as much by the plaintiffs' fear over being treated as blacks were in the segregated South, as it was about their own exclusion from the jury system that spurred the filing of the appeal. [End Page 131] In 1848, at the end of the Mexican-American War, Mexico's peace treaty with the United States included a declaration that all Mexicans—who were still living in that part of their former country now annexed to the United States—were to be admitted as citizens and granted the privilege of being considered "white by law." This provision was included primarily because only whites could be considered for American citizenship at that time. A century later Mexican-Americans in Texas found themselves petitioning the Supreme Court due to the failure of the Jackson County, Texas courts to recognize their legally white status. From the very beginning of the film, the influence of Ken Burns' cinematic aesthetic on PBS documentaries is in ample evidence. Burns' stylistic trademarks are evident as A Class Apart's co-directors Peter Morris and Carlos Sandoval employ the three techniques audiences have come to expect from a PBS project: ample black and white still photography, an authoritative narrator (in this case the great Edward James Olmos), and on-camera interviews with experts on the subject matter. In fact, unsurprisingly, Morris and Burns had collaborated on Burns' Frank Lloyd Wright (1998) and, most recently, seven PBS episodes of 2007's The War. In A Class Apart, historians, legal scholars familiar with the case, and observers share their opinions and recollections about how a small, poor, and seemingly powerless Mexican-American minority community of citizens, led by defense attorney Gustavo "Gus" Garcia, a brilliant (but chronically alcoholic) legal genius, triumphed, against all odds, over a biased legal system that was representative of the South's locally rigged lily-white male juror selection process. That the guilt or innocence of defendant Pedro Hernandez, a farm worker who was convicted in less than four hours by an all-white jury of murdering Joe Espinosa, was never in doubt—the crime was committed in public and in full view of several witnesses—only further serves to underscore A Class Apart's Cinderella nature. The Hernandez appeal was based upon evidence that the county's Mexican-American citizenry had not been summoned to jury duty, much less served, in over 25 years. Garcia and his legal team claimed discrimination based on a claim that Hernandez had not been tried before a jury of his peers, a violation of his Constitutional rights to due process. Thus, Garcia had to prove that "white by law" was a Catch-22, an insidious method for white Texans to have their cake and eat it, too. Despite their legal status as whites, Garcia wrote in his appeal, Mexican-Americans were, in the words of one historian interviewed for the film, "a class apart," i.e. legally white but not treated as such. The film offers several poignant moments to drive home Garcia's argument. In the most telling example, a recounting is offered of how the defense team, denied access to the "white" bathrooms, was forced to use a toilet in the basement of the courthouse reserved for "colored" men. This particular set of circumstances, a degradation placed upon Mexican-Americans that made them feel they shared social status with blacks, [End Page 132] makes clear an ugly truth that becomes the film's backstory—Mexican Americans at that time...

Degeneration and the Origins of Mexico's War on Drugs

In the early twentieth century, the concept of “degeneration” helped to turn “drugs” into a problem of national importance in Mexico. By invoking this concept, Mexico's sanitary authorities secured provisions in the Constitution of 1917 which specifically authorized a newly constituted Department of Public Sanitation to lead a nation-wide campaign against drug abuse. That Department then inaugurated Mexico's modern war on drugs when, in 1920, it declared a law governing the import and distribution of the opiates, cocaine, and marijuana nationwide. This essay examines the idea of degeneration and how it came to play this crucial role in the foundation of Mexico's modern war on drugs.

Hijos del Pueblo: Gender, Family, and Community in Rural Mexico, 1730 – 1850

Hijos del Pueblo is a redo with nearly the same title as Deborah Kanter’s 1993 doctoral dissertation. For the book, she has added some 20 years to her study, through the Mexican-American War. Her purpose is to study women and how their lives changed during the post-independence era. She selected Toluca, a sizable region west of Mexico City, which was always too close to the capital to become a distinct, independent entity yet maintained its rural character. It was a district of maize and maguey that shifted somewhat to livestock ranching and then in the nineteenth century to intensive agricultural production. By the Porfiriato, one town in the Toluca basin, Tenango del Valle, was the most populous in the state of Mexico.As expected, Kanter finds great continuity of colonial practices over the period studied, but she also observes increasing disadvantage for some sectors of society. She depends largely on Spanish-language court cases to furnish the most comprehensive account possible of “gender, family, and mentalités” (p. 3). Villages comprised Toluca, and the great majority of their inhabitants were natives, most of whom were Nahuatl speakers who had inhabited the region for centuries. Two recent publications have brought to light information about Toluca’s Nahuas through translation and analysis of a treasure trove of last wills and testaments (Caterina Pizzigoni, Testaments of Toluca, 2007; and Miriam Melton-Villanueva and Caterina Pizzigoni, “Late Nahuatl Testaments from the Toluca Valley: Indigenous-Language Ethnohistory in the Mexican Independence Period,” Ethnohistory 55, no. 3 [2008]: 361 – 91). These documents are exemplary for their insights into community, ethnicity, family, religion, women, and change well into the 1820s, yet Kanter inexplicably and unfortunately omits any reference to these important works.As native populations recovered and the number of Hispanics also grew during the last century of the colonial period, the need for land for subsistence, to say nothing of a market surplus, increased exponentially. Expansive Spanish-owned haciendas tended to control water and grazing rights, and their majordomos not infrequently abused any villagers who protested. But rather than take up arms, individuals and town officials depended on the courts for redress, as they had for centuries. Even when the Indian Court was abolished in the 1820s and political ideology and practice shifted away from the ancient traditions of paternalism and indigenous corporatism, native peoples expected, sought, and often received justice from the local courts.Patriarchy is a prevailing leitmotiv in this work, and Kanter finds it generally to have served Toluca’s community well over the longue durée. The supreme patriarchs, the king and the pope, represented age-old institutions whose reach extended all the way to local cabildo magistrates and parish priests, who influenced the goings-on in the village and beyond. But patriarchy was subject to the vagaries of time, and where once the parish priest used the Spanish institution of depósito, for example, to sequester and protect a woman from abusive relatives, another priest, a willful one, or local official, might lock a women up to punish her, even though she had committed no crime, and most women had a difficult time challenging authorities. The lot of many Toluca women was hard, and especially hard for poor women (and poor men) and widows in general. A Castro and Campillo lithograph on the book jacket makes this point, depicting women on a road to market carrying heavy burdens. But the men in their company are also loaded down, and all are in traditional dress and out and about.Was life really worse for women in Toluca’s countryside? The extended family as household was a sanctuary of sorts, and if women tended to their duties and violated no norms, by and large they managed. Ethnicity, lineage, and legitimacy continued to define the community, and that same community could be inclusive of the disenfranchised as long as there were resources for all. But with a shortage of land and radical political innovations, it may be that poor individuals, and widows in particular, lost all entitlement.This book furnishes important new information about community life in transition in Toluca. It would have benefited greatly, however, from careful copyediting (“being hung nude,” p. 86) and support of assertions such as “Indian men likely felt more impotent than other men” (p. 51), and “The new state . . . became increasingly liberal and less inclined to protect rural women” (p. 108). The appendix fails to list any sources and the index is sorely deficient. That said, Hijos del Pueblo nevertheless contributes significantly to the field of gender studies and Mexican history and will be useful in classrooms and as a research tool.

Violent Externalities and Electoral Incentives: Understanding the Political Basis for 'Mexico's War on Drugs'

In recent years, Mexican President Felipe Calderon has declared “war” on the Mexican drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs). Over 10,000 individuals have been killed in drug related violence between January 2007 and June 2009, with many of the violent deaths concentrated in a few states such as Chihuahua and Sinaloa. I argue that the concentrated nature of the drug related violence is partially shaped by electoral politics. Furthermore, I theorize that the concentrated costs of the anti-narco campaign can be explained by the continued struggle between Calderon's PAN party and the once dominant PRI party. Using regression analysis and after controlling for the number of DTOs that operate in a given state, I find that the level of support that the PRI enjoyed in the July 2, 2006 Chamber of Deputies general election is positively correlated with the amount of drug related deaths subsequently experienced in that state between January 2007 through July 2009.

The Law: When Wars Begin: Misleading Statements by Presidents

On July 27, 2009, the Crime Subcommittee of the House Committee on the Judiciary held a hearing on H.R. 743, the Executive Accountability Act of 2009. The bill would apply criminal penalties to presidents and executive officials who knowingly and willfully mislead Congress or the of the United States for the purpose of gaining support for the use of U.S. armed forces. Although the bill was introduced in 2009, it could have been introduced in 1789, and the framers would have been pleased with it. They knew the danger of executive wars. They understood that executive military initiatives threaten the legislative powers of war and spending and undermine popular government. They concluded from a careful reading of history that executives often promote wars that are ruinous to their country, both in lives lost and treasures squandered. The framers believed that only one branch of the U.S. government--Congress--has the authority to take the country from a state of peace to a state of war against another nation. In voting on a matter that serious, members of Congress must have confidence in the information provided by presidents and executive officials. Often that information has been highly misleading, and lawmakers have not taken the time to independently assess and confirm the truthfulness of executive assertions. Checking Executive Wars The views of the framers about foreign wars are reflected in the writings of John Jay, whose entire career up to 1787 had been in foreign affairs, lf~~~~ anyone might have been sympathetic to executive powers in national security, it would have been him. We recall what he wrote in Federalist No. 64, about the Senate and the treaty power. He said, It seldom happens in the negotiation of treaties, of whatever nature, but that perfect secrecy and immediate despatch are sometimes requisite. There are cases where the most useful intelligence may be obtained, if the persons possessing it can be relieved from apprehensions of discovery (Wright 2002, 422). Whatever discretion Jay would have entrusted to the president in the negotiation of treaties, he was entirely opposed to executive wars. His warning about executive military initiatives appears in Federalist No. 4: It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting any thing by it; nay, absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for purposes and objects merely personal, such as a thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. Those motivations and others, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people (Wright 2002, 101). What Jay feared has come to pass. At least since the Mexican-American War of 1846, presidents have had a record of making misleading statements to justify wars. The framers understood that government officials will deceive the nation about the need for war. In Federalist No. 3, Jay referred to the causes of war, real or pretendea (Wright 2002, 98). In debating whether to use military force, members of Congress must receive from the president and executive officials reliable and truthful information. Legislative deliberation on such a grave matter as going to war must be informed. There can be no justification for the executive branch to knowingly and willfully mislead Congress and the public about the need for war. Deception and false statements in time of war may be necessary, but not in wars of choice for a democratic society. Section 1001 H.R. 743 adopts language from the False Statements Act, Section 1001 of Title 18. The purpose of the bill and the statute is to identify the types of conduct that would merit prosecution of individuals who falsify, conceal, or make other misrepresentations. …

Nation and Woman: From Conquered to Conqueror in Los Estados-Unidos (notas y episodios de viaje) by Alberto Lombardo

The Mexican conceives of love as combat and conquest. It not so much an attempt to penetrate reality by means of the body as it to violate it. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, 42. Nothing compares to the marvelous prosperity of the United States of the North ... if the absence of a female spirit, origin of the artistic sense and complement of the being, hardens and corrupts the heart of this amazing people, time will let us know. Jose Marti, Coney Island, (1) 82. Alberto Lombardo presents in Los Estados-Unidos (notas y episodios de viaje) (1884) the psychological trauma of the conquest of Mexican territory by the United States. It precisely this trauma that incites him to travel to his Northern neighbor, because he considers that studying the USA will benefit his Mexican homeland. Lombardo starts the prologue by explaining the different ways of life of Uncle Sam's sons. According to the author, this study will be supported by his own observations and the research of other experts. This Mexican lawyer (2) and scholar, influenced by the scientific and political (3) spirit of the Porfiriato (1876-1911), embarks on a luxury trip that will give him the opportunity to visit New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York and San Francisco, among other cities in the country. The national discourse related to the gain or loss of a territory very similar to a sentimental speech, because the land, like a desired woman, besieged, conquered, and may be lost to a rival. Traditionally, the American land associated with the female figure that conquered on the battlefield, and then covered with the mantles of civilization and masculine power. The homeland or nation becomes a mother or wife that her citizens--sons and husbands--should protect from the hegemonic desires of others. According to this discourse, Lombardo projects on men (the masculine figures), the military hostility of the conqueror and on women (the female figures), his desires of the re-conquest of pride. In other words, the role of the author changes from that of conquered to conqueror of women, in order to compensate for the loss of part of Mexico. The thesis of this paper to explore how Lombardo projects psychologically the military loss of part of the Mexican territory by U.S. men, and his attempt to compensate for that loss by romantically conquering women in the U.S. Additionally, I will explore the confrontation of the author with different female models he meets in the U.S., and why he feels attraction, rejection, or indifference towards them. I will also address the reasons behind the lack of representation of African American population in this discourse. This essay takes a psychological approach in order to analyze racial, gender, and class issues in Lombardo's travel book. The Mexican-American War (1846-48) demonstrates the imperial agenda of the U.S., a nation that appropriated a significant part of Mexico's territory. Although North Americans considered this territorial conquest a legal enterprise, Mexicans perceived it as an illegal military intervention. (4) After the war, the previous Mexican admiration for the United States changed to hate and fear. The impact of the conquest of this part of the Mexican territory twofold, on the one hand Mexicans consider it an attack to the sovereignty of their motherland that has being violated and amputated by the imperials desires of the U.S; on the other, they project their traumatic fears on the citizens of their neighbor country, the Americans. Lombardo not immune to these disturbing feelings which he reveals upon observing the behavior of U.S. men during his trip in Yankee land. Lombardo projects the military outrages of the United States in his description of American men's conduct. Sigmund Freud defines the uncanny as what is undoubtedly related to what frightening--to what arouses dread and horror (219). …

Jane McManus Storm Cazneau, 1807-1878

Jane McManus Storm Cazneau, 1807–1878 Megan Jenison Griffin Jane Cazneau, the most prolific female journalist on US foreign policy during the antebellum period, was not wanting in self-confidence. "To a certain point," she wrote Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft in July 1846, "I can and do control over half of the entire daily circulation [of the New York Sun] and from my position thus hold the balance of opinion on any man or measure" (qtd. in Nelson 30). While her admirers included former Vice President Aaron Burr and former President of the Texas Republic Mirabeau Lamar, her political opinions drew the ire of many, including Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who criticized her "masculine stomach for war and politics" (qtd. in Hudson 69). Her most telling dispute, though, was with her colleague Margaret Fuller. In a letter to James Nathan in June 1845, Fuller grumbled, "[Cazneau] is coming on Saturday with a set of Ionian distingúes to dine here!" (118).1 What exactly Fuller meant by the descriptor is not entirely clear, although her sarcasm is evident. The Saturday event was one of many afternoon teas for influential literati hosted by Mary Cheney Greeley, the wife of the prominent New York newspaper editor Horace Greeley. Cazneau's set included literary friends and fellow organizers for the Female Industrial Association: Ann Sophia Stephens, Caroline Sawyer, and E. D. E. N. Southworth.2 Fuller's dislike of Cazneau and her friends was apparently reciprocal. Caroline Sawyer recalled the event in a letter to the group's mutual friend Mirabeau Lamar, remarking, "[Cazneau] proposes another visit [to Mrs. Greeley's] in order to have an opportunity of turning Mrs. Stephens loose upon Miss Fuller. It would be amusing, and quite surprise her out of her dignity" (qtd. in Graham 71). Cazneau and Stephens were childhood friends and remained close throughout their lives; that they had a shared dislike of Fuller was only one mark of their friendship. [End Page 416] At least two issues fueled Cazneau and Fuller's disagreement at this time: their different approaches to women's rights and their beliefs on westward expansion. Cazneau, playing off Fuller's recent work of a similar title, wrote in July 1845 that the real "women of the nineteenth century" were those of the laboring classes, not the affluent and well-educated ladies in Fuller's book ("Women of the Nineteenth Century"). In this essay, she advocated practical and moderate solutions to gender inequality in the workforce, encouraging women to learn branches of business for which they might be better suited than men, and she mocked what she saw as Fuller's sense of self-importance. The two women were also divided on the annexation of Texas, an issue at the forefront of political debates during the summer of 1845. Cazneau argued for annexation under the pennames Storms or Montgomery for the New York Sun and the United States Magazine, and Democratic Review; Fuller, on the other hand, had only recently written in Woman in the Nineteenth Century that if Texas were annexed no one would "dare again to feel the throb of heavenly hope, as to the destiny of this country" (341). Fuller's opposition stemmed from Texas's admission as a slave state while Cazneau contended that Texas could be an important bridge for slowly moving slavery southward and, eventually, out of the country. Despite their dispute, their journalism, and in particular their direct connections to editor Horace Greeley, kept them in each other's path. Before Greeley sent Fuller to Europe in 1846 to report for his New-York Tribune, he had sent Cazneau to the Mediterranean in 1839 to write "Letters from an American Lady" (signed Josephine) for his New Yorker. Fuller also reviewed literature for the Tribune, and Cazneau's own first Tribune column appeared only days before Fuller died in a shipwreck in 1850. The women had a number of other striking similarities: Both served as foreign correspondents for their respective New York newspapers: Cazneau covered the US-Mexico War as MONTGOMERY for the New York Sun (1846–1848), and Fuller, writing for the New-York Tribune, reported on the various revolutions in Europe—most...