Mexican American War Quotes

More than twice as many Americans lost their lives in one day at Sharpsburg as fell in combat in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American war combined.

Although most Americans believed in Manifest Destiny, few could agree on exactly which lands the United States was supposed to govern.

The casualties at Antietam numbered four times the total suffered by American soldiers at the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944. More than twice as many Americans lost their lives in one day at Sharpsburg as fell in combat in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War combined.

Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on, to the limited extent that any one person, however he or she strains, can “see” history from the standpoint of others.

This is what Mexican cops appreciate that American cops don’t. We are partners, mi hermano Arturo, in the same enterprise. Comrades in the War on Drugs. We could not exist without each other.

In the Mexican War, a skirmish between Mexican and American troops on the Texas-Mexico border led President Polk to state that “American blood has been shed on American soil,” and to ask Congress for war. Actually, the encounter took place in disputed territory, and Polk’s diary shows that he wanted an excuse for war so the United States could take from Mexico what the United States coveted, California and the whole Southwest.

Every major war in American history, except the Mexican and Spanish-American, has either led to central banking or resulted from it. Central banking and government have a symbiotic relationship that is often mediated by war. Central banking gives government a way to tap the productive power of the private sector and borrow from the future without the need to rely overmuch on unpopular tax increases. Government gives central banking the extreme profits that derive from immense borrowing to finance wars and other government projects.

Unprotected by the army, the Mexican peasants were helpless to resist the Apache raiders, with scores carried off into captivity and hundreds more slaughtered. The desert now reclaimed the untilled fields. Cattle, sheep, mules, and goats wandered free only to fall prey to the great packs of wolves and coyotes that trailed the Apache raiding parties just as the raven shadows the predator on his rounds. Skeletons lined the roads, littered the burned haciendas, and were picked clean by scavengers in deserted villages. It was a perfect reign of terror.

Its prickly commander, Samuel P. Heintzelman, a short, bearded West Point graduate who had served in the Mexican-American War and later became a major general in the Civil War, didn’t want to be there and was preoccupied with making extra cash through the thriving ferry service.

When Jack’s command won a sharp skirmish against the Mexicans, he personally captured the Mexican Commander Juan Sanchez who had been at the Alamo and Goliad. Instead of exacting revenge against Sanchez for the merciless killings of surrendered soldiers, Sergeant Hays treated Sanchez with the dignity and respect of a prisoner of war.

The Mexicans had fired the first shot. But they had done what the American government wanted, according to Colonel Hitchcock, who wrote in his diary, even before those first incidents: I have said from the first that the United States are the aggressors. . . . We have not one particle of right to be here. . . . It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses, for, whatever becomes of this army, there is no doubt of a war between the United States and Mexico. . . . My heart is not in this business . . . but, as a military man, I am bound to execute orders.

The Blessed Mother, bearer of the Logos Incarnate, had brought the logos to the warring, disillusioned, and defeated tribes of Mexico and had created out of this warring diversity one nation with a Messianic mission. Mexico was the "cosmic race." Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared as a mestiza, the mixture of European and Native American races. She was the cosmic symbol of the race mixing which the English had feared since the moment they had set foot on the soil of the New World. She was the symbol of Mexican identity. She was the symbol of Catholic race-mixing and the antithesis of England's (and later) America's and (still later) Germany's short-lived ideology of racial superiority.

Forget bringing the troops home from Iraq. We need to get the troops home from World War II. Can anybody tell me why, in 2009, we still have more than sixty thousand troops in Germany and thirty thousand in Japan? At some point, these people are going to have to learn to rape themselves. Our soldiers have been in Germany so long they now wear shorts with black socks. You know that crazy soldier hiding in the cave on Iwo Jima who doesn’t know the war is over? That’s us. Bush and Cheney used to love to keep Americans all sphinctered-up on the notion that terrorists might follow us home. But actually, we’re the people who go to your home and then never leave. Here’s the facts: The Republic of America has more than five hundred thousand military personnel deployed on more than seven hundred bases, with troops in one hundred fifty countries—we’re like McDonald’s with tanks—including thirty-seven European countries—because you never know when Portugal might invade Euro Disney. And this doesn’t even count our secret torture prisons, which are all over the place, but you never really see them until someone brings you there—kinda like IHOP. Of course, Americans would never stand for this in reverse—we can barely stand letting Mexicans in to do the landscaping. Can you imagine if there were twenty thousand armed Guatemalans on a base in San Ber-nardino right now? Lou Dobbs would become a suicide bomber. And why? How did this country get stuck with an empire? I’m not saying we’re Rome. Rome had good infrastructure. But we are an empire, and the reason is because once America lands in a country, there is no exit strategy. We’re like cellulite, herpes, and Irish relatives: We are not going anywhere. We love you long time!

the American cowboy was born of Reconstruction and carried all the hallmarks of the strife of the immediate postwar years: he was a hardworking white man who started from nothing, asked for nothing, and could rise on his own. The reality was that about a third of all cowboys were men of color—black or Mexican, and sometimes Indian—and that few rose to prosperity.

All around him, life carried on as usual on the American side of the river. The region was already seven years into the drug war, and it had all taken on a surreal normality. A block away from where he’d parked his squad car, people went about their shopping in the downtown stores, while Mexicans—some of them innocent bystanders—died in the city across the river.

How could sixty-two million people vote for someone they heard on tape bragging about repeated sexual assault? How could he attack women, immigrants, Muslims, Mexican Americans, prisoners of war, and people with disabilities—and, as a businessman, be accused of scamming countless small businesses, contractors, students, and seniors—and still be elected to the most important and powerful job in the world?

Now, Sal, we’re leaving everything behind us and entering a new and unknown phase of things. All the years and troubles and kicks—and now this! so that we can safely think of nothing else and just go on ahead with our faces stuck out like this, you see, and understand the world as, really and genuinely speaking, other Americans haven’t done before us—they were here, weren’t they? The Mexican war. Cutting across here with cannon.

In 1835, Americans in Texas rebelled against Mexican rule, waging a war under the command of a political daredevil named Sam Houston. In 1836, Texas declared its independence, founding the Republic of Texas, with Houston its president. Mexico’s president, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, warned that, if he were to discover that the U.S. government had been behind the Texas rebellion, he would march “his army to Washington and place upon its Capitol the Mexican flag.

In roughly that same time period, while General George Armstrong Custer achieved world fame in failure and catastrophe, Mackenzie would become obscure in victory. But it was Mackenzie, not Custer, who would teach the rest of the army how to fight Indians. As he moved his men across the broken, stream-crossed country, past immense herds of buffalo and prairie-dog towns that stretched to the horizon, Colonel Mackenzie did not have a clear idea of what he was doing, where precisely he was going, or how to fight Plains Indians in their homelands. Neither did he have the faintest idea that he would be the one largely responsible for defeating the last of the hostile Indians. He was new to this sort of Indian fighting, and would make many mistakes in the coming weeks. He would learn from them. For now, Mackenzie was the instrument of retribution. He had been dispatched to kill Comanches in their Great Plains fastness because, six years after the end of the Civil War, the western frontier was an open and bleeding wound, a smoking ruin littered with corpses and charred chimneys, a place where anarchy and torture killings had replaced the rule of law, where Indians and especially Comanches raided at will. Victorious in war, unchallenged by foreign foes in North America for the first time in its history, the Union now found itself unable to deal with the handful of remaining Indian tribes that had not been destroyed, assimilated, or forced to retreat meekly onto reservations where they quickly learned the meaning of abject subjugation and starvation. The hostiles were all residents of the Great Plains; all were mounted, well armed, and driven now by a mixture of vengeance and political desperation. They were Comanches, Kiowas, Arapahoes, Cheyennes, and Western Sioux. For Mackenzie on the southern plains, Comanches were the obvious target: No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.

When people discuss the drug war, they are usually referring to the one that began in the 1970s, without realizing that this was, at least, our third drug war in the twentieth century. I found David F. Musto’s The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control to be extremely helpful on the subject. It was depressing to see that drug wars, in this country, are almost never launched purely out of concern for public health. In almost every instance that Musto looks at there is some fear of an outsider—blacks and cocaine, Mexican Americans and marijuana, Chinese Americans and opium.

The conversation swings from the brothers Bush to the war in Iraq to the emerging rights of Muslim women to postfeminism to current cinema—Mexican, American, European (Giorgio goes spasmodically mad over Bu-ñuel), and back to Mexican again—to the relative superiority of shrimp over any other kind of taco to the excellence of Ana’s paella, to Ana’s childhood, then to Jimena’s, to the changing role of motherhood in a postindustrial world, to sculpture, then painting, then poetry, then baseball, then Jimena’s inexplicable (to Pablo) fondness for American football (she’s a Dallas Cowboys fan) over real (to Pablo) fútbol, to his admittedly adolescent passion for the game, to the trials of adolescence itself and revelations over the loss of virginity and why we refer to it as a loss and now Óscar and Tomás, arms over each other’s shoulders, are chanting poetry and then Giorgio picks up a guitar and starts to play and this is the Juárez that Pablo loves, this is the city of his soul—the poetry, the passionate discussions (Ana makes her counterpoints jabbing her cigarette like a foil; Jimena’s words flow like a gentle wave across beach sand, washing away the words before; Giorgio trills a jazz saxophone while Pablo plays bass—they are a jazz combo of argument), the ideas flowing with the wine and beer, the lilting music in a black night, this is the gentle heartbeat of the Mexico that he adores, the laughter, the subtle perfume of desert flowers that grow in alleys alongside garbage, and now everyone is singing— México, está muy contento, Dando gracias a millares… —and this is his life—this is his city, these are his friends, his beloved friends, these people, and if this is all that there is or will be, it is enough for him, his world, his life, his city, his people, his sad beautiful Juárez… —empezaré de Durango, Torreón y Ciudad de

A war always comes to someone else. In Salinas we were aware that the United States was the greatest and most powerful nation in the world. Every American was a rifleman by birth, and one American was worth ten or twenty foreigners in a fight. Pershing’s expedition into Mexico after Villa had exploded one of our myths for a little while. We had truly believed that Mexicans can’t shoot straight and besides were lazy and stupid. When our own Troop C came wearily back from the border they said that none of this was true […] Somehow we didn’t connect Germans with Mexicans. We went right back to our own myths. One American was as good as twenty Germans. This being true, we had only to act in a stern manner to bring the Kaiser to heel. He wouldn’t dare interfere with our trade--but he did. He wouldn’t stick out his neck and and sink our ships--and he did. It was stupid, but he did, and so there was nothing for it but to fight him. The war, at first anyway, was for other people. We, I, my family and friends, had kind of bleacher seats, and it was pretty exciting. And just as war is always for somebody else, so it is also that somebody else always gets killed. And Mother of God! that wasn’t true either. The dreadful telegrams began to sneak sorrowfully in, and it was everybody’s brother. Here we were, over six thousand miles from the anger and the noise, and that didn’t save us […] The draftees wouldn’t look at their mothers. They didn’t dare. We’d never thought the war could happen to us. There were some in Salinas who began to talk softly in the poolrooms and the bars. These had private information from a soldier--we weren’t getting the truth. Our men were being sent in without guns. Troopships were sunk and the government wouldn’t tell us. The German army was so far superior to ours that we didn’t have a chance. That Kaiser was a smart fellow. He was getting ready to invade America. But would Wilson tell us this? He would not. And usually these carrion talkers were the same ones who had said one American was worth twenty Germans in a scrap--the same ones.

When I was growing up, we took Texas history twice—if I remember correctly, in the fourth and the seventh grades. I cannot say with certainty that slavery was never mentioned. Of course, I didn’t need school to tell me that Blacks had been enslaved in Texas. I heard references to slavery from my parents and grandparents. A common retort when another kid—often a sibling—insisted you do something for them you didn’t want to do was “Slavery time is over.” And we celebrated Juneteenth, which marked the end of the institution. But if slavery was mentioned in the early days of my education, it didn’t figure prominently enough in our lessons to give us a clear and complete picture of the role the institution played in the state’s early development, its days as a Republic, its entry into the Union, and its role in the Civil War and its aftermath. Instead, as with the claim “The American Civil War was not about slavery. It was about states’ rights,” the move when talking about Texas’s rebellion against Mexico was to take similar refuge in concerns about overreaching federal authorities. Anglo-Texans chafed at the centralizing tendencies of the Mexican government and longed to be free. As one could ask about the states’ rights argument—states’ rights to do what?—I don’t recall my teachers giving a complete explanation for why Anglo-Texans felt so threatened by the Mexican government.

In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things. They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don’t have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. Call it the “Rove 1-2.” That’s literally all it’s taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base. While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn’t get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.

American politicians had done little through the years to stem the flood. Hispanic voters wanted their kinsmen to be able to enter the United States regardless of their ability to contribute to the economy or pay their own bills, yet this wasn’t the decisive factor. Farmers and small-business men wanted a source of cheap labor, and were content to pass the true costs, the social costs, on to the taxpayers. Generous public welfare programs also drew millions of Mexicans, more than small business or agriculture could possibly use. Even draining off an eighth of the population didn’t really help Mexico, which found itself racked by turf wars between vicious criminal gangs that smuggled drugs into the United States to supply the richest narcotics market in the world.

What it includes is what progressives call “history from below.” Typical of this approach is Howard Zinn’s classic work, A People’s History of the United States. Zinn purports to show the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, the Mexican War from the angle of deserting servicemen, the rise of industrialism as experienced by women working in the Lowell textile mills, the two world wars as seen by socialists and pacifists and postwar America’s role in the world as seen by peons in Latin America.4 Essentially Zinn uses the victim’s perspective to generate an anti-American narrative, one that is not confined to the academic sphere but has now spread virus-like through the culture.

A final challenge that we face as a result of our great dilemma is to be ever mindful of enlarging the whole society, and giving it a new sense of values as we seek to solve our particular problem. As we work to get rid of the economic strangulation that we face as a result of poverty, we must not overlook the fact that millions of Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Indians and Appalachian whites are also poverty-stricken. Any serious war against poverty must of necessity include them. As we work to end the educational stagnation that we face as a result of inadequate segregated schools, we must not be unmindful of the fact, as Dr. James Conant has said, the whole public school system is using nineteenth-century educational methods in conditions of twentieth-century urbanization, and that quality education must be enlarged for all children. By and large, the civil rights movement has followed this course, and in so doing has contributed infinitely more to the nation than the eradication of racial injustice. In winning rights for ourselves we have produced substantial benefits for the whole nation.

Ulysses S. Grant, to name one prominent doubter who actually fought in the conflict, would call the Mexican War “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” Even Sen. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who had at first so staunchly supported the war (as a way to extend slavery), began to have his doubts. He told the Senate: “A deed has been done from which the country will not be able to recover for a long time, if ever; it has dropped a curtain between the present and the future, which to me is impenetrable.” Nicholas Trist, the American envoy sent to Mexico City to negotiate the treaty, later recalled sitting down with the Mexican officials and trying to hide his guilt about concluding a treaty that sheared from Mexico nearly half of its territory: “Could those Mexicans have seen into my heart at that moment, they would have known that my feeling of shame as an American was strong…. For though it would not have done for me to say so there, that was a thing for every right-minded American to be ashamed of, and I was ashamed of it, most cordially and intensely ashamed of it.

The first drug laws, the anti-opium laws of the 1870s, were directed at Chinese immigrants, never mind that the country was full of white middle-class laudanum addicts, tippling from their dropper bottles all day long. Early in the next century, support for the laws criminalizing cocaine was ginned up by claims that “drug-crazed Negroes” were destroying white society and murdering white women. Southern senators, unperturbed by their wives’ opioid addictions, believed that cocaine made black men superhuman, even that it made them immune to bullets. When the first drug czar, a man named Harry Anslinger, wanted to criminalize marijuana, he appealed to people’s biases against immigrants from Mexico, claiming that the drug made Mexicans sexually violent. William Randolph Hearst jumped on this bandwagon, warning again and again in the pages of his newspapers about the dangers of the Mexican “Marihuana-Crazed Madman.” This demonization continues today.*1 White people are five times as likely to use drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses at ten times the rate of whites.*2 The racism of the drug war has been the single most important driving factor in the ever-escalating incarceration of people of color in the United States.

The American Anti-Slavery Society, on the other hand, said the war was “waged solely for the detestable and horrible purpose of extending and perpetuating American slavery throughout the vast territory of Mexico.” A twenty-seven-year-old Boston poet and abolitionist, James Russell Lowell, began writing satirical poems in the Boston Courier (they were later collected as the Biglow Papers). In them, a New England farmer, Hosea Biglow, spoke, in his own dialect, on the war: Ez fer war, I call it murder,—     There you hev it plain an’ flat; I don’t want to go no furder     Than my Testyment fer that. . . . They may talk o’ Freedom’s airy     Tell they’er pupple in the face,— It’s a grand gret cemetary     Fer the barthrights of our race; They jest want this Californy     So’s to lug new slave-states in To abuse ye, an’ to scorn ye,     An’ to plunder ye like sin. The war had barely begun, the summer of 1846, when a writer, Henry David Thoreau, who lived in Concord, Massachusetts, refused to pay his Massachusetts poll tax, denouncing the Mexican war. He was put in jail and spent one night there. His friends, without his consent, paid his tax, and he was released. Two years later, he gave a lecture, “Resistance to Civil Government,” which was then printed as an essay, “Civil Disobedience”: It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. . . . Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers . . . marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart.

The enemy won some points at the very beginning. On both of the two days preceding his remarks about Worth, Hitchcock notes that American deserters had been shot while crossing the Rio Grande. Probably they were just bored with army rations but there was some thought that they might be responding to a proclamation of General Ampudia’s which spies had been able to circulate in camp. Noting the number of Irish, French, and Polish immigrants in the American force, Ampudia had summoned them to assert a common Catholicism, come across the river, cease “to defend a robbery and usurpation which, be assured, the civilized nations of Europe look upon with the utmost indignation,” and settle down on a generous land bounty. Some of them did so, and the St. Patrick Battalion of American deserters was eventually formed, fought splendidly throughout the war, and was decimated in the campaign for Mexico City — after which its survivors were executed in daily batches.… This earliest shooting of deserters as they swam the Rio Grande, an unwelcome reminder that war has ugly aspects, at once produced an agitation. As soon as word of it reached Washington, the National Intelligencer led the Whig press into a sustained howl about tyranny. In the House J. Q. Adams rose to resolve the court-martial of every officer or soldier who should order the killing of a soldier without trial and an inquiry into the reasons for desertion. He was voted down but thereafter there were deserters in every Whig speech on the conduct of the war, and Calm Observer wrote to all party papers that such brutality would make discipline impossible. But a struggling magazine which had been founded the previous September in the interest of sports got on a sound financial footing at last. The National Police Gazette began to publish lists of deserters from the army, and the War Department bought up big editions to distribute among the troops. Taylor sat in his field works writing prose. Ampudia’s patrols reconnoitered the camp and occasionally perpetrated an annoyance. Taylor badly needed the Texas Rangers, a mobile force formed for frontier service in the Texas War of Independence and celebrated ever since. It was not yet available to him, however, and he was content to send out a few scouts now and then. So Colonel Truman Cross, the assistant quartermaster general, did not return from one of his daily rides. He was still absent twelve days later, and Lieutenant Porter, who went looking for him with ten men, ran into some Mexican foragers and got killed.

the case of Hispanics and Native Americans, it’s not even clear that there was an offense. Consider: Texas legitimately revolted against Mexico and established an independent republic. Mexico can’t exactly complain about that, because Mexico had just recently revolted against Spain. Then Texas chose to join the United States. Texas has a disputed border with Mexico, and the Mexican War erupted over that disputed territory. Mexico lost the war, and American troops were in Mexico City. America could have kept all of Mexico; instead, America returned half of Mexico and paid $15 million to settle Mexico’s debts. Arguably there is a theft in here somewhere, but it’s hardly clear. Moreover, a treaty was signed between the two countries establishing the new borders.

The war with Mexico fiercely divided the American people. While the majority supported the war, a loud minority despised it, and their rancor filled the newspapers and the debates in the houses of Congress. A newly elected congressional representative from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, declared: ‘The war with Mexico was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the president.’ Lincoln challenged Polk on the issue that American blood had been shed on American soil and implied that the American troops were the aggressors. He charged that Polk desired ‘military glory … that serpent’s eye which charms to destroy … I more than suspect that Polk is deeply conscious of being in the wrong and that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.’ However, like many critics of the war, Lincoln voted for an appropriations bill to support military operations. An Illinois newspaper responded to Lincoln’s fulminations by branding him a ‘second Benedict Arnold,’ and Lincoln was defeated for reelection. Comparing Lincoln to Arnold was perhaps the most vicious charge that could then be made against an American. General Arnold has been a trusted favorite of George Washington during the American Revolutionary War. In August 1780 he had turned traitor and attempted to turn over the American army’s position at West Point to the British in exchange for money and a brigadier’s commission in the British army. His act of treachery was discovered but he was able to escape to safety behind British lines. Henry Clay, a former senator from Kentucky and unsuccessful candidate for president, often called the ‘Great Pacificator’ or the ‘Great Compromiser’ for his efforts to hold the Union together, spoke out forcefully: ‘The Mexican war,’ he said, ‘is one of unnecessary and offensive aggression … Mexico is defending her firesides, her castles, and her altars, not we.’ Representative

At first, the American war effort faced financial difficulties. In 1842, the government, in an effort to protect growing American industries and, as Southerners would say, to force them to buy eastern goods, set a high tariff on imports. While the tariff was successful in stifling foreign competition, it also drastically reduced government revenues and put severe limitations on the extension of international credit to American entrepreneurs. Coupled with currency inflation and a slowing of the business cycle, the United States Treasury was hard put to finance a war. At the beginning of hostilities, the treasury held only a small surplus of $7 million. When Polk recommended that the Congress place additional taxes on coffee and tea, the House of Representatives indignantly refused. Polk, however, was able to have passed a new bill lowering tariffs, and by the beginning of 1847 revenues began to increase. The Congress also voted to issue $10 million in new Treasury notes and bonds. Technical

Justin Butterfield of Illinois, a Federalist-turned-Whig, said of the Mexican-American War, said, “I opposed one war and it ruined me. From now on I am for war, pestilence and famine.

The Reverent Theodore Parker, Unitarian minister in Boston, combined eloquent criticism of the war with contempt for the Mexican people, whom he called 'a wretched people; wretched in their origin, history, and character,' who must eventually give way as the Indians did. Yes, the United States should expand...by 'the steady advance of a superior race, with superior ideas and a better civilization...by being better than Mexico, wiser, humaner, more free and manly'. ...The racism for Parker was widespread. Congressmen Delano of Ohio...opposed the war because he was afraid of Americans mingling with an inferior people who 'embrace all shades of color....a sad compound of Spanish, English, Indian, and negro bloods...and resulting, it is said, in the production of a slothful, ignorant race of beings'.

the program continued at the national level until 1964, but effectively ended shortly after the war in the Pacific Northwest as Mexican-American migrant workers met the local demand for labor. Many braceros returned to Mexico following the war but large numbers eventually returned and settled permanently in the Northwest, further increasing the region's diversity.

A speech that I heard Hugo Chavez give at a meeting in Caracas in July of 2010 comes to mind. He said something that seemed quite profound to me and which has stuck with me ever since: that the 20th Century was not "The American Century" at all as the US claims, but it was indeed the Century of Revolutions- for example, the Mexican, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese and Nicaraguan Revolutions- and the US violently opposed every single one of these. I would soon come to realize that the Cold War, at least from the vantage point of the US, had little to do with fighting "Communism," and more to do with making the world safe corporate plunder.

Why? He believed the two most-feared groups in the United States—Mexican immigrants and African Americans—were taking the drug much more than white people, and he presented the House Committee on Appropriations with a nightmarish vision of where this could lead. He had been told, he said, of “colored students at the University of Minn[esota] partying with female students (white) and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution. Result: pregnancy.” This was the first hint of much more to come. He wrote to thirty scientific experts asking a series of questions about marijuana. Twenty-nine of them wrote back saying it would be wrong to ban it, and that it was being widely misrepresented in the press. Anslinger decided to ignore them and quoted instead the one expert who believed it was a great evil that had to be eradicated.

viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America.

As the Hispanic population surges past 50%, Spanish will replace English as the dominant language. New waves of Mexican immigrants won’t have to learn English to work or collect welfare, so they won’t bother to. Thus, they will not be assimilated into American society as previous Mexican immigrants have been. Demographics and affirmative action will purge the Anglos out of police departments and other branches of local government. Bilingualism will increasingly be mandatory for both government and private employment. Eventually, a working knowledge of English will not be a requirement for government employment at all. Eventually, Anglo citizens who speak only English will be hard pressed to obtain any government employment or services. The southwest will be transformed into a Spanish-speaking, de facto province of Mexico. Enforcement of immigration laws by Hispanic-controlled police departments will disappear entirely. Some Hispanic-controlled police departments will publicly announce their defiant refusal to enforce immigration laws. Millions of desperate, poverty-stricken Mexicans will stream across the border.

The success of (mainly bourgeois and white) women in this area was of crucial importance to the later development of the welfare state in these countries, which were only firmly institutionalized after World War II. Insofar as many of these policies alleviated some of the risks and insecurities felt by working-class families, they also exhibited significant racial biases. To use the US as an example, it has been well noted that mothers’ pensions were not directed to relieve and generally did not support African-American and other women of colour – this, despite the racialized nature of poverty in America: in 1934 Los Angeles, Mexican Americans constituted 10 percent of the population but only 1 percent of welfare recipient (forcing thousands of Mexicans to return to Mexico) while in Atlanta, Georgia, the average amount of relief given to a white person was nearly 70 percent more than that given to a black person ($32.66 versus $19.29 per month)

In the case of the Chicanx population, the US conquest and annexation of Mexican territory (a geographical area extending from Texas to California) following the Mexican American War (1846-1848) created a situation in which people of Mexican ancestry became subject to White domination...It was the general feeling among White settlers that they were superior to Mexicans...The question of how Mexicans should be classified racially was decided in 1897 by Texas courts, which ruled that Mexican Americans were not White. In California, they were classified as 'Caucasian' until 1930, when the state attorney general decided they should be categorized as 'Indians,' though 'not considered "the original American Indians of the US"'.

For example, the Chinese invented gunpowder. But for some reason these perennial warriors and kung-fu fighters weren’t savvy enough to use their invention as a weapon of war. The ancient Indians are widely credited with inventing the numerical system we currently use. But they certainly didn’t invent calculus like Newton and Leibniz did. Most uncomfortable for egalitarians and their ilk is that there are vast landmasses—sometimes entire continents—where the indigenous inhabitants have invented virtually nothing. Sub-Saharan Africans are not known for contributing much to rocket science, and black Americans are so underrepresented as inventors that everyone has heard a gorillion times about the mulatto who improved blood-storage methods and George Washington Carver’s wondrous dalliances with the magical peanut. The so-called “Native Americans” are credited with inventing the spinning top, which somehow proved incapable of defending them against the white man and his guns. And Australia’s aborigines? Well, let’s not talk about them, because they’d be embarrassed. Peruvians can take pride in developing the art of potato cultivation. And I’ve already covered the Mexicans and their nachos.

[I]n that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American War as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on, to the limited extent that any one person, however he or she strains, can “see” history from the standpoint of others.

In 1836 Texas proclaimed its independence from Mexico and beat back a Mexican effort to reclaim the land. Then, at the request of the Texans, the United States annexed this territory in 1845, precipitating the Mexican-American War. After the Mexican army was defeated in 1848, Mexico ceded territory to the United States in what is now California, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This treaty also gave U.S. citizenship to the fifty thousand or so Mexicans who remained.

In early 1941, the United States was a fifth-rate military power, its armed forces ranking seventeenth in size compared to other world forces. Long starved of financial support by Congress and the White House, the Army had little more than 300,000 men (most of them just drafted), compared to Germany’s 4 million and Britain’s 1.6 million. Not a single armored division existed, and draftees were training with broomsticks for rifles and sawhorses for antitank guns. The Army was in such bad shape, according to one military historian, that it would not have been able to “repel raids across the Rio Grande by Mexican bandits.” Although the Navy was in better condition, nearly half its vessels dated back to World War I. The Army Air Corps, meanwhile, could boast only about two thousand combat aircraft. After

What’s California like?” Jared asked after another minute’s silence. “Warm, very sunny,” Catherine replied. “They’ve got almost everything they need there. They can grow their own food, harvest their own lumber, and mine their own gold—that they sell to the Mexicans and Confederates. Plus the British in Victoria. Probably others.” “Do they even know they’re technically still part of this country?” “You won’t see any stars and stripes there, that’s certain. Each city is practically its own state.

While marriage rates for middle-class white women soared through the 1940s and 1950s, for black women, mid-twentieth century conditions were very different. Since emancipation, black women had married earlier and more often than their white counterparts. In the years directly after World War II, thanks to the return of soldiers, black marriage rates briefly increased further.66 However, as white women kept marrying in bigger numbers and at younger ages throughout the 1950s, black marriage rates began to decrease, and the age of first marriage to climb.67 By 1970, there had been a sharp reversal: Black women were not marrying nearly as often or as early as their white counterparts. It was nothing as benign as coincidence. While one of the bedrocks of the expansion of the middle class was the aggressive reassignment of white women to domestic roles within the idealized nuclear family, another was the exclusion of African-Americans from the opportunities and communities that permitted those nuclear families to flourish. Put more plainly, the economic benefits extended to the white middle class, both during the New Deal and in the post-World War II years, did not extend to African-Americans. Social Security, created in 1935, did not apply to either domestic laborers or agricultural workers, who tended to be African-Americans, or Asian or Mexican immigrants. Discriminatory hiring practices, the low percentages of black workers in the country’s newly strengthened labor unions, and the persistent (if slightly narrowed68) racial wage gap, along with questionable practices by the Veterans Administration, and the reality that many colleges barred the admission of black students, also meant that returning black servicemen had a far harder time taking advantage of the GI Bill’s promise of college education.69 Then there was housing. The suburbs that bloomed around American cities after the war, images of which are still summoned as symbols of midcentury familial prosperity, were built for white families. In William Levitt’s four enormous “Levittowns,” suburban developments which, thanks to government guarantees from the VA and the Federal Housing Association, provided low-cost housing to qualified veterans, there was not one black resident.70 Between 1934 and 1962, the government subsidized $120 billion in new housing; 98 percent of it for white families.

Something is wrong. How could sixty-two million people vote for someone they heard on tape bragging about repeated sexual assault? How could he attack women, immigrants, Muslims, Mexican Americans, prisoners of war, and people with disabilities—and, as a businessman, be accused of scamming countless small businesses, contractors, students, and seniors—and still be elected to the most important and powerful job in the world? How can we as a nation allow untold thousands of

How could sixty-two million people vote for someone they heard on tape bragging about repeated sexual assault? How could he attack women, immigrants, Muslims, Mexican Americans, prisoners of war, and people with disabilities—and, as a businessman, be accused of scamming countless small businesses, contractors, students, and seniors—and still be elected to the most important and powerful job in the world? How can we as a nation allow untold thousands of Americans to be disenfranchised by voter suppression laws?

How could sixty-two million people vote for someone they heard on tape bragging about repeated sexual assault? How could he attack women, immigrants, Muslims, Mexican Americans, prisoners of war, and people with disabilities—and, as a businessman, be accused of scamming countless small businesses, contractors, students, and seniors—and still be elected to the most important and powerful job in the world? How can we as a nation allow untold thousands of Americans to be disenfranchised by voter suppression laws? Why did the media decide to present the controversy over my emails as one of the most important political stories since the end of World War II? How

Dad’s favorite subject was history, but he taught it with a decidedly west-of-the-Pecos point of view. As the proud son of an Irishman, he hated the English Pilgrims, whom he called “Poms,” as well as most of the founding fathers. They were a bunch of pious hypocrites, he thought, who declared all men equal but kept slaves and massacred peaceful Indians. He sided with the Mexicans in the Mexican-American war and thought the United States had stolen all the land north of the Rio Grande, but he also thought the southern states should have had as much right to leave the union as the colonies had to leave the British Empire. “Only difference between a traitor and a patriot is your perspective,” he said. * * * I loved my lessons, particularly science and geometry, loved learning that there were these invisible rules that explained the mysteries of the world we lived in. Smart as that made me feel, Mom and Dad kept saying that even though I was getting a better education at home than any of the kids in Toyah, I’d need to go to finishing school when I was thirteen, both to acquire social graces and to earn a diploma. Because in this world, Dad said, it’s not enough to have a fine education. You need a piece of paper to prove you got it. MOM DID HER BEST to keep us kids genteel.

I was—and still am—worried about our country. Something is wrong. How could sixty-two million people vote for someone they heard on tape bragging about repeated sexual assault? How could he attack women, immigrants, Muslims, Mexican Americans, prisoners of war, and people with disabilities—and, as a businessman, be accused of scamming countless small businesses, contractors, students, and seniors—and still be elected to the most important and powerful job in the world? How can we as a nation allow untold thousands of Americans to be disenfranchised by voter suppression laws?

Green Grows the Laurel’ recalls the Irish contribution to the Mexican-American War of 1845-47. (It has been suggested that the Mexican term gringo derives from the title of this song, such was its popularity along the front line.)

When did your family come to the US?” Joaquin bit back a grin. “We didn’t. The United States came to us.” Mia’s brow furrowed in confusion. “What do you mean?” “My family has been living in Colorado since before this was a state or even a US territory. After the Mexican-American war, the border shifted south, making the San Luis Valley part of the United States. As my grandma likes to say, ‘We didn’t move. The border moved over us.

During that century the two countries nearly went to war again at least three more times. As prime minister in the 1840s, Sir Robert Peel was acutely conscious of the American threat to Canada, and warned Parliament of possible war. This was the age of ‘manifest destiny’, which for many Americans meant their country’s destiny to rule the whole of North America, including Canada. At the 1844 presidential election James Polk and the Democrats campaigned on a bellicose platform, demanding the territory which would become the Canadian province of British Columbia, the Pacific coast from Oregon north to the 54th parallel and the border with Russian America, now Alaska: hence the unwieldy slogan ‘Fifty-four forty or fight!’ When Polk was elected, he backed off and found an easier target to the south, embarking on the Mexican–American War of 1846.

In general, it could be said that we talk about many things. I’ll try to list them in no particular order. 1) The Latin American hell that, especially on weekends, is concentrated around some Kentucky Fried Chickens and McDonald’s. 2) The doings of the Buenos Aires photographer Alfredo Garófano, childhood friend of Rodrigo and now a friend of mine and of anyone with the least bit of discernment. 3) Bad translations. 4) Serial killers and mass murderers. 5) Prospective leisure as the antidote to prospective poetry. 6) The vast number of writers who should retire after writing their first book or their second or their third or their fourth or their fifth. 7) The superiority of the work of Basquiat to that of Haring, or vice versa. 8) The works of Borges and the works of Bioy. 9) The advisablity of retiring to a ranch in Mexico near a volcano to finish writing The Turkey Buzzard Trilogy. 10) Wrinkles in the space-time continuum. 11) The kind of majestic women you’ve never met who come up to you in a bar and whisper in your ear that they have AIDS (or that they don’t). 12) Gombrowicz and his conception of immaturity. 13) Philip K. Dick, whom we both unreservedly admire. 14) The likelihood of a war between Chile and Argentina and its possible and impossible consequences. 15) The life of Proust and the life of Stendhal. 16) The activities of some professors in the United States. 17) The sexual practices of titi monkeys and ants and great cetaceans. 18) Colleagues who must be avoided like limpet mines. 19) Ignacio Echevarría, whom both of us love and admire. 20) Some Mexican writers liked by me and not by him, and some Argentine writers liked by me and not by him. 21) Barcelonan manners. 22) David Lynch and the prolixity of David Foster Wallace. 23) Chabon and Palahniuk, whom he likes and I don’t. 24) Wittgenstein and his plumbing and carpentry skills. 25) Some twilit dinners, which actually, to the surprise of the diner, become theater pieces in five acts. 26) Trashy TV game shows. 27) The end of the world. 28) Kubrick’s films, which Fresán loves so much that I’m beginning to hate them. 29) The incredible war between the planet of the novel-creatures and the planet of the story-beings. 30) The possibility that when the novel awakes from its iron dreams, the story will still be there.

国外假学历咨询【Q微202 661 44 33】纽卡斯尔大学毕业证成绩单购买一模一样的证书如何办纽卡斯尔大学毕业证学历认证书。如何购买澳洲毕业证办理纽卡斯尔大学毕业证|购买UN毕业证|Q微2026614433|购买UN购买出售澳洲毕业证|购买澳洲文凭TheUniversityofNewcastle SSNSNSNSBSNSBNSMBmn Most Americans are ignorant of or oblivious to the reasons for the seemingly endless waves of would-be immigrants and asylum-seekers at its Mexican border. Journalist J. Malcolm Garcia has written a collection of stories that will make it crystal clear. In A Different Kind of War, Garcia walks a mile in their shoes, visiting Central America, Mexico and the American southwest to report on the why. It boils down to people cannot live like this. Lack of action means almost certain death.

The unstable Mexican state governments, like the Spanish before them, kept the people unarmed for fear of the same kind of rebellion that earned them their independence.

Almost 6,500 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed in one day at Antietam. This staggering number was four times the number that would be killed in the landings at Normandy on June 6, 1944. The total for this one day was more than the deaths in all of the other wars of the nineteenth century—the War of 1812, the Indian wars, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War—combined.

The blueprint for their ruin had already been drafted. Just as they had had no idea that their land had been handed from Spain to Mexico in 1821, the Mohaves were probably unaware that the United States had acquired the region at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848. Soon after, with no perceived conflict of interest, the Department of the Interior had combined the government agency that was designed to protect Indians (the Bureau of Indian Affairs) with the departments responsible for assessing, dividing, and redistributing their land (the General Land Office and the Geological Survey and Territorial Office). “Indian Removal” was the precursor to a transcontinental railroad, and in its first two years of statehood, California spent over a million dollars executing it. 12

Northern evangelical Protestantism provided authoritative justification for social causes. It influenced labor safety, workplace reforms, and the establishment of women’s rights organizations; alleviated suffering through voluntary medical societies; and protected exploited women who worked as prostitutes. However, there was a dark side to parts of evangelicalism in the North and South: its religious justifications for slavery, the Mexican- American War, the wars against America’s First Nations, and the conviction that manifest destiny “meant removing (or eliminating) those who stood in the way.

I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America.

Many of us understand that America was built on the brutality of slavery and the looting of Indigenous land. Fewer recognize the colonization of Mexico by the United States as a third pillar in the creation of present-day America. The first colonization of Mexico was of course by Spain. But the second colonization of my people came at the hands of the United States during the Mexican-American War. In school we learn of it as Manifest Destiny, as the God-given right of white people to steal native land. The result was not only the taking of land...but the reluctant acquisition of Mexicans. ...The annexation of Texas into the United States and a dispute over where the Texas border should be drawn gave President James Polk an excuse to loot more Mexican land...There were between 80,000 and 100,000 Mexicans living in the land stolen by the United States. Polk wanted the land, but not the Mexicans on it. They were never immigrants; they didn't come to the United States or cross the border; the border crossed them. After the war, the Mexico-U.S. border was carefully drawn to keep as many Mexicans out as possible, a purpose it still serves. But the border never stopped out roots from growing on both sides.

The legacy of unions that kept African Americans, Latinos, Chinese, and others out of factory work—redlining, exclusionary immigration policies, the looting of Mexicans' land during the Mexican-American War, deportations of Mexicans during economic downturns—all created a gap that we are still trying to close. In a country where Black Americans have been viewed as 'biologically inferior,' Mexicans as 'an ignorant "hybrid race,"' and Chinese immigrants as the 'ideal human mule,' there is far from a fair chance to access the same economic opportunities as white people.

Key Apache Warriors Cochise—one of the great Chiricahua (Chokonen) chiefs. Born c. 1805. No known pictures exist but he was said to be very tall and imposing, over six feet and very muscular. Son-in-law to Mangas Coloradas. Died in 1874, probably from stomach cancer. Chihuahua—chief of the Warm Springs band (Red Paint people) of the Chiricahua. Fought alongside Geronimo in the resistance. Died in 1901. Fun—probably a cousin to Geronimo and among his best, most trusted warriors. Fun committed suicide in captivity in 1892, after becoming jealous over his young wife, whom he also shot. Only slightly wounded, she recovered. Juh—pronounced “Whoa,” “Ho,” or sometimes “Who.” Chief of the Nedhni band of the Apache, he married Ishton, Geronimo’s “favorite” sister. Juh and Geronimo were lifelong friends and battle brothers. Juh died in 1883. Loco—chief of the Warm Springs band. Born in 1823, the same year as Geronimo. Once was mauled by a bear and killed it single-handedly with a knife, but his face was clawed and his left eye was blinded and disfigured. Known as the “Apache Peacemaker,” he preferred peace to war and tried to live under reservation rules. Died as a prisoner of war from “causes unknown” in 1905, at age eighty-two. Lozen—warrior woman and Chief Victorio’s sister. She was a medicine woman and frequent messenger for Geronimo. She fought alongside Geronimo in his long resistance. Mangas Coloradas—Born in 1790, he was the most noted chief of the Bedonkohe Apache. A massive man for his era, at 6'6” and 250 pounds, he was Geronimo’s central mentor and influence. He was betrayed and murdered by the U.S. military in 1863. Geronimo called his murder “the greatest wrong ever done to the Indians.” Mangas—son of the great chief Mangas Coloradas, but did not succeed his father as chief because of his youth and lack of leadership. Died as a prisoner of war in 1901. Naiche—Cochise’s youngest son. Succeeded older brother Taza after he died, becoming the last chief of the free Chiricahua Apache. Nana—brother-in-law to Geronimo and chief of the Warm Springs band. Sometimes referred to as “Old Nana.” Died as a prisoner of war in 1896. Victorio—chief of the Warm Springs band. Noted and courageous leader and a brilliant military strategist. Brother and mentor to warrior woman Lozen. Slain by Mexicans in the massacre of Tres Castillos in 1880.

The federal commissioners compiled the investigators’ reports and submitted their findings to the secretary of war on April 2, 1878, and a month later to President Hayes and Congress. Major Jones also submitted a minority report, which interpreted the events differently. The commission’s report concluded that the Texas Rangers and Sheriff Kerber’s deputies had knowingly broken many laws and committed atrocities on both sides of the US-Mexico border. The Silver City desperadoes had pretended to be Texas Rangers when they entered people’s homes, and many eyewitness accounts identified actual Rangers as the persons who had shot at unarmed civilians. Victims also charged that several Texas Rangers had raped women.

The purchase of Louisiana from a beleaguered France, engineered by Thomas Jefferson, created not an 'empire for liberty,' as Jefferson had promised, but an empire for slavery. With New Orleans and its vast hinterland now under American rule, planters quickly occupied the rich lands between the western Appalachian ranges and the Mississippi River. The two great thrusts of slavery's expansion - one east to west from the Chesapeake and lowcountry, the other south to north from the lower Mississippi Valley - soon joined. Before long, slaveholders were casting covetous eyes on the southwestern corner of the North American continent, a vision that they translated into reality with the successful American assault on Mexico in 1848. The territorial settlement that followed the Mexican War exposed the federal government's long-established role as the agent of slavery's expansion. Federal diplomats who had wrested Louisiana from the French in 1803 took Florida from the Spanish in 1819. Between these two landmarks in slavery's expansion, federal soldiers and state militiamen forcibly expropriated millions of acres of land from the Indians through armed conquest and defended the slave regime from black insurrectionists and foreign invaders. After defeating slave rebels in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, in 1811 and British invaders in New Orleans in 1814, federal soldiers turned their attention to sweeping aside Native peoples.

The Salt War Riots Begin In early September 1877, José María Juárez and Macedonio Gandera organized local residents to stop paying the salt fee. They were prominent local citizens and salinero merchants who harvested salt and sold it across the border in Ciudad Juárez.

The proponents of Manifest Destiny had always attempted to invoke a certain providential quality: The nation’s unstoppable westward momentum was an ongoing affirmation from the heavens. That the defeated Mexicans were Catholic, of course, didn’t disturb this nativist narrative. But Providence had been even kinder than anyone could have possibly prayed for. At almost the exact time of the Mexican surrender, gold was discovered in a remote riverbed in northern California. And when the news of this discovery in California came to the eastern seaboard of America by the end of 1848, to the most fervent believer in God’s will in matters of war and conquest, this immense treasure must have seemed ordained proof that, yes indeed, God did love America more than any other nation in the history of humanity.

The award-winning American TV series Breaking Bad has a scene in its second season set in the murder capital of Ciudad Juárez. In this episode, American and Mexican agents are lured to a patch of desert just south of the border looking for an informant. They discover the informant’s head has been cut off and stuck on the body of a giant turtle. But as they approach, the severed cranium, turned into an IED, explodes, killing agents. The episode was released in 2009. I thought it was unrealistic, a bit fantastic. Until July 15, 2010. In the real Ciudad Juárez on that day, gangsters kidnapped a man, dressed him in a police uniform, shot him, and dumped him bleeding on a downtown street. A cameraman filmed what happened after federal police and paramedics got close. The video shows medics bent over the dumped man, checking for vital signs. Suddenly a bang rings out, and the image shakes vigorously as the cameraman runs for his life. Gangsters had used a cell phone to detonate twenty-two pounds of explosives packed into a nearby car. A minute later, the camera turns back around to reveal the burning car pouring smoke over screaming victims. A medic lies on the ground, covered in blood but still moving, a stunned look on his face. Panicked officers are scared to go near him. The medic dies minutes later along with a federal agent and a civilian. I’m not suggesting that Breaking Bad inspired the murders. TV shows don’t kill people. Car bombs kill people. The point of the story is that the Mexican Drug War is saturated with stranger-than-fiction violence. Mexican writer Alejandro Almazán suffered from a similar dilemma. As he was writing his novel Among Dogs, he envisioned a scene in which thugs decapitate a man and stick a hound’s head on his corpse. It seemed pretty out there. But then in real life some gangsters did exactly that, only with a pig’s head. It is just hard to compete with the sanguine criminal imagination. Cartel thugs have put a severed head in a cooler and delivered it to a newspaper; they have dressed up a murdered policeman in a comedy sombrero and carved a smile on his cheeks; and they have even sewn a human face onto a soccer ball.

Many reports have gone into the social impact of such terror. But a central question is still hotly debated: Why? Why do cartel soldiers hack off heads, ambush policemen, and set off car bombs? And why do they throw grenades into crowds of revelers or massacre innocent teenagers at parties? What do they stand to gain by such bloodshed? Whom are they fighting? What do they want? This puzzle goes to the heart of the debate about what El Narco has become. For the gangsters’ motivations in many ways define what they are. If they deliberately kill civilians to make a point, that would make them, by many definitions, terrorists. If they are trying to win the monopoly of violence in a certain territory, that would make them warlords. And if they are fighting a full-on war against the government, many would argue it would make them insurgents. It’s a touchy issue. Words such as terrorists and insurgents set off alarm bells, scare away investment dollars, and wake up American spooks at night. The language influences how you deal with the Mexican Drug War, and how many drones and Black Hawk helicopters you fly in.

More such deals are likely to mark the future of the Mexican Drug War. Bargains could be waiting for other Mexican traffickers wanted in the United States, such as Benjamin Arellano Félix or Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, or—if he is ever caught—even Chapo Guzmán himself. This system has some obvious flaws. When major criminals make deals to get out early, it can be seen as a bad example. It is not such a deterrent when a criminal career ends with the villain dating beautiful soap-opera stars. A long list of drug traffickers have ended up as celebrities. Asset seizure is also controversial. American agents get to spend dirty drug dollars. They say they are making money for Uncle Sam, but then again, they are also paradoxically reaping the benefits of cocaine and heroin being sold. When agents make money busting traffickers, there is an added incentive to sustain the whole war on drugs. Nevertheless, once these capos have been extradited and made deals, they are truly out of the game. The greater good, agents argue, is to use them to nail more crooks. That is the central imperative of drug warriors: keep seizing, keep arresting.

The export of cartel power into the USA is a sensitive issue. The discussion about Mexican cartels’ northward push gets pulled, often unfairly, into the flaming American immigration debate. The anti-immigrant brigade talk about Mexican laborers as an invading army; and they see all undocumented workers as potential cartel emissaries, using migrant communities to hide undercover ops. The Mexican Drug War, they say, is a reason to militarize the border. Residents of border states vex about the danger of spillover. If thugs are decapitating in Juárez, they fret, how long before they cut off heads in El Paso? Is the Mexican disease contagious? Down in Mexico, the argument is reversed. A common complaint by politicians and journalists is that there aren’t enough arrests of big players in El Norte. Why haven’t we heard of the capos in the United States? they ask. How come some Mexican fugitives live unharmed north of the border? Why has Mexico been goaded into a drug war while narcotics move freely around the fifty states of the union?

The San Fernando massacre is a landmark in the Mexican Drug War. It surely woke up anyone who still doubted the existence of a serious armed conflict south of the Rio Grande. But for those following the mass attacks on migrants, it was a tragedy waiting to happen. San Fernando began just like all the rest of the mass kidnappings. Zetas gunmen stopped the victims at a checkpoint and abducted them, in this case from two buses. The group featured many of the usual Central Americans, but was atypical in that it also had large numbers of Brazilians and Ecuadorians. The Zetas marched the prisoners to the San Fernando ranch, which is in Tamaulipas state, just a hundred miles from the U.S. border. After a long, hard journey, the migrants were closer than ever to their destination. Then something went wrong, and the Zetas decided to murder everybody. The pure scale of death shocked the world. The seventy-two corpses were piled haphazardly around the edge of the breeze-block barn, arms and legs twisted over one another, waists and backs contorted. There were teenagers, middle-aged men, young girls, even a pregnant woman. This horror could not be ignored.

Right as the Mexican Drug War rages, the debate is reaching the second great flux in its history. The first came in the seventies, with the Jimmy Carter White House. Legalization advocates, including various doctors, got into key government positions, their papers got play, their ideas gained currency. States began to decriminalize marijuana and cocaine was viewed in the media as a happy-go-lucky party drug. Reformers thought they had won the debate. They were wrong. In the eighties, America lashed back against narcotics with a vengeance, and in the nineties the drug war went on steroids. The crack epidemic broke out, celebrities died of overdoses, and lots of middle-class parents got concerned about lots of middle-class kids on smack, speed, and sensimilla. In the early 1990s, surveys found large numbers of Americans thought drugs were the number one problem the country faced. The media was packed with stories of crack babies, cracked-up gangbangers, and nice white kids turning into demons on drugs. But that was two decades ago. The pendulum has swung back again. For now. Most people don’t even list drugs in their top ten of America’s problems. The economy is most people’s priority, and terrorism, immigration, crime, religion, abortion, gay marriage, and the environment all spark more concern than narcotics. Meanwhile, drug-policy reformers have emerged strengthened with propositions to decriminalize, spread medical use, and finally fully legalize marijuana. Proposition 19 to legalize cannabis in California narrowly missed passing, getting 46.5 percent in the 2010 vote. Activists are determined it will pass in 2012. And if not, in 2014. Or 2016. They can just keep on going.

Browness is a liminal legal, political, and cultural space that US Latinas and Latinos have inhabited since the US-Mexico War and the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo of 1848. In exchange for the benefits of land (nearly half of a Mexico), the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo reluctantly granted US citizenship to former Mexicans, and with it, an implied "whiteness." At the same time however, through legal and social convention ever since, the United States has denied full and equal membership to Latinas/os within the American polity. We have been wanted for our land and labor, while at the same time rejected for our cultural and ethnic difference. When economic times get tough, we become the disposable "illegal alien," and are scapegoated and deported. We are wanted and unwanted. Necessary, yet despised. We are Brown.

Where does the word cocktail come from? There are many answers to that question, and none is really satisfactory. One particular favorite story of mine, though, comes from The Booze Reader: A Soggy Saga of a Man in His Cups, by George Bishop: “The word itself stems from the English cock-tail which, in the middle 1800s, referred to a woman of easy virtue who was considered desirable but impure. The word was imported by expatriate Englishmen and applied derogatorily to the newly acquired American habit of bastardizing good British Gin with foreign matter, including ice. The disappearance of the hyphen coincided with the general acceptance of the word and its re-exportation back to England in its present meaning.” Of course, this can’t be true since the word was applied to a drink before the middle 1800s, but it’s entertaining nonetheless, and the definition of “desirable but impure” fits cocktails to a tee. A delightful story, published in 1936 in the Bartender, a British publication, details how English sailors of “many years ago” were served mixed drinks in a Mexican tavern. The drinks were stirred with “the fine, slender and smooth root of a plant which owing to its shape was called Cola de Gallo, which in English means ‘Cock’s tail.’ ” The story goes on to say that the sailors made the name popular in England, and from there the word made its way to America. Another Mexican tale about the etymology of cocktail—again, dated “many years ago”—concerns Xoc-tl (transliterated as Xochitl and Coctel in different accounts), the daughter of a Mexican king, who served drinks to visiting American officers. The Americans honored her by calling the drinks cocktails—the closest they could come to pronouncing her name. And one more south-of-the-border explanation for the word can be found in Made in America, by Bill Bryson, who explains that in the Krio language, spoken in Sierra Leone, a scorpion is called a kaktel. Could it be that the sting in the cocktail is related to the sting in the scorpion’s tail? It’s doubtful at best. One of the most popular tales told about the first drinks known as cocktails concerns a tavernkeeper by the name of Betsy Flanagan, who in 1779 served French soldiers drinks garnished with feathers she had plucked from a neighbor’s roosters. The soldiers toasted her by shouting, “Vive le cocktail!” William Grimes, however, points out in his book Straight Up or On the Rocks: A Cultural History of American Drink that Flanagan was a fictional character who appeared in The Spy, by James Fenimore Cooper. He also notes that the book “relied on oral testimony of Revolutionary War veterans,” so although it’s possible that the tale has some merit, it’s a very unsatisfactory explanation. A fairly plausible narrative on this subject can be found in Famous New Orleans Drinks & How to Mix ’em, by Stanley Clisby Arthur, first published in 1937. Arthur tells the story of Antoine Amedie Peychaud, a French refugee from San Domingo who settled in New Orleans in 1793. Peychaud was an apothecary who opened his own business, where, among other things, he made his own bitters, Peychaud’s, a concoction still available today. He created a stomach remedy by mixing his bitters with brandy in an eggcup—a vessel known to him in his native tongue as a coquetier. Presumably not all Peychaud’s customers spoke French, and it’s quite possible that the word, pronounced coh-KET-yay, could have been corrupted into cocktail. However, according to the Sazerac Company, the present-day producers of Peychaud’s bitters, the apothecary didn’t open until 1838, so there’s yet another explanation that doesn’t work.

In Illinois a struggling former officer and Mexican- American War veteran whose in- laws were Southern sympathizers, Ulysses S. Grant volunteered to lead a regiment of volunteers. He wrote, “Whatever may have been my opinions before, I have but one sentiment now. That is to have a Government, and laws and a flag and they all must be sustained. . . . There are but two parties now, Traitors and Patriots and I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter.

Like many Jewish Americans, she didn’t lose any close family members in the Holocaust but heard grim tales of more distant relatives, and read other horror stories from the war years. Those feelings were triggered as she watched Trump on the 2016 campaign trail, lashing out against Mexicans and other immigrants and stoking violence at his rallies.

Cuando el movimiento chicano empezó, vimos en Nuevo México, a las Chicana y a otras, trabajando para recuperar las tierras perdidas con la guerra de 1846-48 contra Estados Unidos, miles salieron de las escuelas secundarias para protestar contra el racismo, y muchas se pusieron Boinas Marrones para defender sus comunidades. Nosotros nos unimos a la United Farm Workers como campesinas y apoyamos el boicoteo. Nosotros marchamos en contra de la Guerra de Vietnam el 29 de Agosto de 1970, solo para ser perseguidos, acosadas y maltratadas con los gases lacrimógenos de la policía que incluso mató a tres chicanos ese día. When the Chicano movement began, we saw Chicanas and others in New Mexico working to get back land lost with the 1846-48 US war, thousands walking out of high schools to protest the racism, and many putting on Brown Berets to defend their communities. We joined the United Farm Workers as campesinas and boycott supporters. Thousands of us marched against the Vietnam war on August 29, 1970, only to be chased and struck down by tear-gassing police who also killed three Chicanos that day

Nothing pushes down Mexican labor costs—increasing the differential—like a drug war raging throughout the country. In fact, the more violent the war, the lower Mexican labor costs, and so the greater the Mexican/American differential and the more attractive Mexico becomes to foreign direct investment seeking an advantage in the American market.

Many Americans are unaware of how our ancestors used Christianity to justify subjugating other peoples. Christianity was the heart of the Puritan ideal of a city on a hill, a concept that undergirded the later belief in manifest destiny,which led to genocidal wars against the peoples of our First Nations, the Mexican- American War, and the romantic myths of the Noble South and the Lost Cause. The combination of toxic political ideology, religious fervor, and a belief that one’s views mirror God’s can be used by the faithful to fuel fires of extremism and to blind followers to the evils they commit in the name of their God.

Nationalism and Evangelical Christianity combined to create ate the revolutionary idea that America was a “‘model republic’ that could redeem the people of the world from tyranny.” But this belief was infused by white supremacy that fueled the genocide of America’s First Nations. James McPherson writes, “By 1850 the white man’s diseases and wars had reduced the Indian population north of the Rio Grande to half of the estimated million who had lived there two centuries earlier. In the United States all but a few thousand Indians had been pushed west of the Mississippi.”The radical racism of some Americans was expressed in pseudoscientific writings to “find biological evidence of white supremacy,” and “radical nationalism” cast Mexicans as an unassimilable mixed race “with considerable Indian and some black blood.” The Mexican- American War “would not redeem them, but would hasten the day when they, like American Indians, would fade away.

The German military were equally unenthusiastic, because they were oblivious to the damage caused by their insecure ciphers during the Great War. For example, they had been led to believe that the Zimmermann telegram had been stolen by American spies in Mexico, and so they blamed that failure on Mexican security. They still did not realize that the telegram had in fact been intercepted and deciphered by the British, and that the Zimmermann debacle was actually a failure of German cryptography.

White terrorism and Jim Crow, 300 years of genocidal warfare against American Indians, repeated pogroms against Mexican and East Asian Americans, and the blinding, mind-boggling contradictions of American leadership - that many of the framers of American democracy, men held in nearly universal reverence by White Americans, owned Black slaves, and that the majority of White American leaders since the Civil War, at every level and in every social field, have been White supremacists and segregationists.

Generally the officers of the army were indifferent whether the annexation was consummated or not; but not so all of them. For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory. Texas was originally a state belonging to the republic of Mexico. It extended from the Sabine River on the east to the Rio Grande on the west, and from the Gulf of Mexico on the south and east to the territory of the United States and New Mexico – another Mexican state at that time – on the north and west. An empire in territory, it had but a very sparse population, until settled by Americans who had received authority from Mexico to colonize. These colonists paid very little attention to the supreme government, and introduced slavery into the state almost from the start, though the constitution of Mexico did not, nor does it now, sanction that institution. Soon they set up an independent government of their own, and war existed, between Texas and Mexico, in name from that time until 1836, when active hostilities very nearly ceased upon the capture of Santa Anna, the Mexican President. Before long, however, the same people – who with permission of Mexico had colonized Texas, and afterwards set up slavery there, and then seceded as soon as they felt strong enough to do so – offered themselves and the State to the United States, and in 1845 their offer was accepted. The occupation, separation and annexation were, from the inception of the movement to its final consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union. Even if the annexation itself could be justified, the manner in which the subsequent war was forced upon Mexico cannot. The fact is, annexationists wanted more territory than they could possibly lay any claim to, as part of the new acquisition. Texas, as an independent State, never had exercised jurisdiction over the territory between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. Mexico had never recognized the independence of Texas, and maintained that, even if independent, the State had no claim south of the Nueces. I am aware that a treaty, made by the Texans with Santa Anna while he was under duress, ceded all the territory between the Nueces and the Rio Grande – , but he was a prisoner of war when the treaty was made, and his life was in jeopardy. He knew, too, that he deserved execution at the hands of the Texans, if they should ever capture him. The Texans, if they had taken his life, would have only followed the example set by Santa Anna himself a few years before, when he executed the entire garrison of the Alamo and the villagers of Goliad. In taking military possession of Texas after annexation, the army of occupation, under General Taylor, was directed to occupy the disputed territory. The army did not stop at the Nueces and offer to negotiate for a settlement of the boundary question, but went beyond, apparently in order to force Mexico to initiate war. It is to the credit of the American nation, however, that after conquering Mexico, and while practically holding the country in our possession, so that we could have retained the whole of it, or made any terms we chose, we paid a round sum for the additional territory taken; more than it was worth, or was likely to be, to Mexico. To us it was an empire and of incalculable value; but it might have been obtained by other means. The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive

The chief musician-a sergeant-led the twelve-nuan regimental band that provided entertainment as well as the music to which the army marched and fought.

All known cases of women in the ranks involved volunteers who, unlike regulars, often did not have to undergo physical examination upon enlistment. One Alabama Volunteer passed off a female companion as his frail younger brother until the ruse was discovered. Caroline Newcome took the name "Bill" and served as a private in the Missouri volunteers until pregnancy betrayed her. A similar case occurred in the Mississippi volunteers.

Often they are mentioned in the same breath as drugs that are smuggled across, or terrorists that might try to be. What crosses the border is dangerous; the Southwest is our 'exposed flank.' There is a nagging fear that we've gone to sleep with the back door unlocked. "In Mexico the migration is less imagined and more concrete. It's something people from the poorest and most remote corners of the republic have participated in for years -- at least as far back as 1848, when the United States, through the Mexican War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, acquired nearly half of their country, stranding many Mexican nationals in a foreign land. Then, as now, migration has been recognized to be a two-way street, of people leaving home for a while, working, and then mainly returning home. The relatively fast pace of American industrialization, coupled with Mexico's economic and demographic crises, has accelerated the movement north. Today, if you are among the majority of Mexicans -- those with very little money -- working in the United States is not merely something you hear about, but something you might consider. It is one of life's few options.

There had been a lot of days since the election when I wasn’t in a very forgiving mood toward anyone, including myself. I was—and still am—worried about our country. Something is wrong. How could sixty-two million people vote for someone they heard on tape bragging about repeated sexual assault? How could he attack women, immigrants, Muslims, Mexican Americans, prisoners of war, and people with disabilities—and, as a businessman, be accused of scamming countless small businesses, contractors, students, and seniors—and still be elected to the most important and powerful job in the world?

If some Mexican-Americans have their way, they will not have to go back to Mexico for burial; Mexico will come to them. What is called the Reconquista movement aims to break the Southwest off from the United States and reattach it to Mexico or establish it as an independent, all-Hispanic nation, thus reversing the territorial consequences of the Mexican-American war. Reconquista is widely promoted on college campuses. Charles Truxillo, a professor of Chicano studies at the University of New Mexico, thinks “Republica del Norte” would be a good name for a new Hispanic nation, which would contain all of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas and the southern part of Colorado. The Albuquerque-born Prof. Truxillo says the new nation is “an inevitability,” and should be created “by any means necessary.” He doubts violence will be necessary, however, because shifting demographics will make the transition seem natural.

History is a delicate matter in a diverse country. Shortly after the fall of the Alamo—likewise in 1836—Mexican troops defeated the Texans at the Battle of Coleto Creek near Goliad, Texas. The Texans surrendered, believing they would be treated as prisoners of war. Instead, the Mexicans marched the 300 or so survivors to Goliad and shot them in what became known as the Goliad Massacre. Mexicans resent the term “massacre.” With the city of Goliad now half Hispanic, they insist on “execution.” Many Anglos, said Benny Martinez of the Goliad chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), “still hate Mexicans and using ‘massacre’ is a subtle way for them to express it.” Watertown, Massachusetts, had a different disagreement about history. In 2007, the town’s more than 8,000 Armenian-Americans were so angry at the Anti-Defamation League’s refusal to recognize the World War I Turkish massacres of Armenians as genocide that they persuaded the city council to cut ties with the ADL’s “No Place For Hate” program designed to fight discrimination. Other towns with a strong Armenian presence—Newton, Belmont, Somerville, and Arlington—were considering breaking with the ADL. Filmmaker Ken Burns has learned that diversity complicates history. When he made a documentary on the Second World War, Latino groups complained it did not include enough Hispanics—even though none had seen it. Mr. Burns bristled at the idea of changing his film, but Hispanics put enough pressure on the Public Broadcasting Service to force him to. Even prehistory is divisive. In 1996, two men walking along the Columbia River in Washington State discovered a skeleton that was found to be 9,200 years old. “Kennewick Man,” as the bones came to be called, was one of the oldest nearly complete human skeletons ever uncovered in North America and was of great interest to scientists because his features were more Caucasian than American Indian. Local Indians claimed he was an ancestor and insisted on reburying him. It took more than eight years of legal battles before scientists got full access to the remains.

With the end of the bracero, or agricultural guest worker, program in 1964, the 20 million Mexicans who had, since World War II, annually migrated to work in the U.S. fields found themselves without jobs. Some- as historians have well documented- continued to work in the fields illegally, but just as many- as historians have largely ignored- began to work on construction sites, on factory floors,and in chemical shops. Although Americans may not have wanted to work in the fields, they did want to work in industrial jobs. Migrant labor, unprotected from the state, created an alternative to the American worker. This cheap labor made key parts of the 1980s boom possible, whether in Houston's strip malls or Silicon Valley's electronics factories.

The Mexicans had fired the first shot. But they had done what the American government wanted, according to Colonel Hitchcock, who wrote in his diary, even before those first incidents: I have said from the first that the United States are the aggressors. . . We have not one particle of right to be here. . . It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses, for, whatever becomes of this army, there is no doubt of war between the United States and Mexico. . . My heart is not in this business. . . but, as a military man, I am bound to execute orders.