Treaty Of Guadalupe Hidalgo Quotes

Mexico surrendered. There were calls among Americans to take all of Mexico. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed February 1848, just took half. The Texas boundary was set at the Rio Grande; New Mexico and California were ceded. The United States paid Mexico $15 million, which led the Whig Intelligencer to conclude that “we take nothing by conquest. . . . Thank God.

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.

By late 1847, it was clear that Mexico had lost the war. With the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February 1848, everything to the west, including all of California, became a part of the United States. The terms of surrender called for an American payment of $15 million for the territory, the same price tag applied to the Louisiana Purchase forty-five years prior. With it, the project for the continental United States had been completed. Destiny had unfolded in Polk’s first term, just as the campaign rhetoric of 1844 had prophesied.

When the US won the Mexican-American War in 1848, Mexico was forced to cede nearly half of its territory—land that later made up California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming—for $15 million as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The people living there did not cross any border or migrate anywhere. Instead, the border crossed them, forcing US citizenship on them overnight with the promise they could keep the land they owned. That promise didn’t stop businessmen and railroad companies from stripping Mexican Americans of 20 million acres

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.

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.