Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
2 Introduction
Local Borders 3
U.S. invasion of New Mexico in 1846, all residents of the territory were
Mexican citizens because that territory had been part of the Mexican
nation. This line of questioning, though, attempted to establish Amadors status as Mexican by blood. Because Euro-American discourse
congured Mexican identity as invested in ones body, the status of ones
family as Mexican would have had signicance in determining an individuals immutable racial status. By this logic, if Amadors family ever
had been Mexican, then throughout his life Amador could only ever be
Mexican.
Melenudo understood this logic and kept ahead of Stansbury by demarcating a distinct change in the status of Amadors father. He was a
citizen of Mexico [before 1846], Melenudo answered reasonably, because Doa Ana was then part of Mexico, but in 1846 the American
forces came in and all of us who lived there took the oath of allegiance to
the United States. Melenudo, for good measure, testied to Amadors
own precocious performance of American nationalism at that same time.
[Martin Amador] was about seven years old, Melenudo recounted, but
he was right in there in the crowd at the place where the [U.S.] Major had
all of the people of the town of Doa Ana to congregate in a placita or
court.
This orid testimony did not satisfy Stansbury. He questioned whether
Amador had ever obtained naturalization papers to authenticate his U.S.
citizenship. Many Mexican Americans had feared that the U.S. government might not honor the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; in preparation
for this possibility some of them requested that local judges issue naturalization papers or other documents as proof of citizenship. Amador
later testied that he had petitioned the Doa Ana court in the 1860s to
secure such papers. At that time the judge informed Amador that he did
not need documents as he was already a citizen under the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo. Stansburys questioning, though, created a double
bind: if a lack of naturalization papers indicated foreignness, then a
request for naturalization papers constituted a de facto admission of
ones foreignness.
Refuting the double bind, Melenudo steadfastly answered Stansbury
by asserting his own right to U.S. citizenship without documentation. I
havent got any papers, Melenudo responded, and I am a citizen of the
United States. Without hesitation the federal attorney snapped, Dont
you know that you are not a citizen of the United States? Stansbury did
not accept that Melenudo, as a Mexican, could actually be American.
If Stansbury proved hard to convince, not all of Amadors Mexican
4 Introduction
witnesses applauded his efforts at claiming U.S. citizenship, either. Clemente Montoya, an elderly farmer in the Mesilla Valley, did endorse
Amadors monetary claim against the United States government, stating,
It is just. Yet, unlike Melenudo (who resided in Las Cruces), Montoya
proved openly hostile to Amador and other Mexicans who claimed to be
Americans. Amador, from Montoyas vantage point, had sacriced his
Mexican identity in pursuit of U.S. citizenship. This animosity might
have been heightened by the disparity in economic class between the
farmer and the merchant. Asked to comment on Amadors honesty,
Montoya distinguished between the past, when Montoya considered him
Mexican, and the present, when Montoya considered him American.
He used to be a very good man, Montoya stated. He is not so good now
because he is Americanized; I dont like Americans.
Indeed, Montoya performed linguistic acrobatics to avoid having to
claim an American identity for himself. Stansbury posed his usual questions about the witnesss own claims to U.S. citizenship, but unlike Melenudo or Amador, Montoya avoided answering them explicitly. Rather,
when asked directly about his own citizenship, Montoya chose his words
carefully: I was born and raised here [in southern New Mexico], he
responded. I have sons who are 53 years old; I have four sons; they are all
citizens. This meticulous answer implied that, like Melenudo, Montoya understood that he technically could claim U.S. citizenship. Unlike
Melenudo, he steadfastly refused to do so.
Montoyas indirect response to the citizenship questions stands out in
his testimony as the only time when he resorted to vagueness. For the rest
of his testimony Montoya answered in short, clear answers. When asked
if Martin Amador was a U.S. citizen, for instance, Montoya responded
simply, Yes sir. Montoya could answer easily about Amadors citizenship status because he believed that the hotelier had relinquished his
claims to Mexicanness. For himself, though, Montoya refused to accept
an American national identity. In the face of ambiguity about the relationship between Mexicans and Americans, Montoya chose a language of
calculated prevarication, asserting his U.S. citizenship without being
forced to claim the concomitant national identity.
Testimony by Montoya and Melenudo reveals the complexity of claiming or being assigned a Mexican identity along the nineteenth-century
Mexican-U.S. border. This case holds special relevance because it suggests that the Euro-American representatives of the U.S. nation-state
never secured absolute control over the contours of racial and national
identication, despite their having erected and policed those borders
Local Borders 5
6 Introduction
it is particularly important to note that even among the Spanish-speaking people of the region, contradictory impulses and allegiances divided
the settlers and their ideas about which nation was theirs. In the Mesilla
Valley an accident of geography allows us to follow this complicated
process across two different towns of Spanish-speaking residents in the
United Statesone that considered itself nationally Mexican and one
that considered itself American.
Most Mexican citizens living in the newly acquired U.S. territory decided to take their chances with the occupying government. In retrospect
this choice has been depicted as inevitable, but at the time it was not a
foregone conclusion, nor was it unanimously embraced. Even today,
most U.S. historians are unaware of divided sentiments among Mexican
nationals shortly after the war. Thousands of Mexicans in New Mexico
even ed the United States to form new towns south of the 1848 border.
Whether for practical, sentimental, or nationalistic reasons, these thousands explicitly rejected U.S. citizenship. Less than a decade after the
wars end, their effort to evade U.S. political and cultural control was
undermined when the Mesilla/Gadsden Treaty took effect in 1854. In
that year new negotiations between Washington and Mexico City redrew
the borderline yet again, this time incorporating these communities into
the United States. This historical development left a legacy of geographically adjacent, but ideologically opposed, population centerssites on
which this study seeks to uncover multiple ideas about being Mexican
that coexisted within U.S. border communities between 1848 and 1912.
Although not well known today, some of the most compelling nineteenth-century discussions about U.S. imperialism and national identity
played out over a cultural fault line that shot through southern New
Mexicos Mesilla Valley. Mexican settlers founded both Las Cruces and
La Mesilla on the newly drawn boundary line in 1850. Those who decided
to take a gamble with the United States, like the Amadors, built the town
of Las Cruces on the American side of the border. Others, unwilling to
live under a government that had just waged war against the Mexican
republic, established the town of La Mesilla just south of the border.
Fewer than ve miles separated Las Cruces and La Mesilla, but a wide gap
in ideas about their relationship to Mexican identity divided the settlers.
Ideological differences between these modest agricultural communities might have been ignored more readily had the political boundary
line stayed constant. Even after ratication of the Mesilla/Gadsden
Treaty, many Mexicans refused to allow the new political boundary to
disrupt their vision of their communities. As recently as 1978, 125 years
Local Borders 7
after the treaty incorporated New Mexico into the United States, Mesilleros and Cruceos remained at odds over whether they were Mexican
or American. Residents of these neighboring towns reimagined the national boundary line to explain divergent Mexican identities in ways that
bypassed or obviated the construction of international borders. In an oral
history interview from 1974 one longtime Las Cruces resident recalled
that the town of La Mesilla, about four miles to the west of Las Cruces, was
considered to be part of Mexico, and that Las Cruces was in the United
States. The two towns were separated by the river, the Rio Grande, and this
was also the boundary between the two countries. The rivalry between the
two towns was erce, and no one from either side dared enter into the other
country. Those who did in order to visit relations or close friends were
beaten. . . . The people of Mesilla were called Mesillaros [sic] by the people
of Las Cruces. The people of Las Cruces were referred to as The Gringo
Mexicans by the people of Mesilla.
8 Introduction
presumed to be part of ones bodily attributes, and ones status as Mexican became a state of being that depended in part on parentage. Actions
could no longer identify. This vision, which pivoted on the acceptance of
dominant nineteenth-century Euro-American articulations of race, permitted one to be racially Mexican and nationally American at the same
time, unlike the vision in La Mesilla.
This division within the Mesilla Valley continued for more than a
century, its echoes sounding long after the memory of why the towns
were divided had faded. Writing about his own experiences growing up
in southern New Mexico, one Mesillero remembered a distinct difference in his experiences attending school in La Mesilla and in Las Cruces.
It was, he recounted, only when he started junior high in a Las Cruces
school that he heard racist slurs about dumb Mexicans or los mojados
(the wetbacks), deprecations that he had not encountered in Mesillas
schools. In his memory Mesilla represented a safe haven for the Mexican
population, whereas Las Cruces was a place of racist exclusion.
Border Dilemmas compares the trajectory of one southern New Mexico town, Las Cruces, against the trajectory of its neighboring community, La Mesilla, as a starting point for rethinking Mexicans historic role
in the United States. Examining the rst generation of Mexicans who
lived in these sites opens new historical perspectives. It exposes the early
limits on racial and national identities created by U.S. imperialism in the
latter half of the nineteenth century. Decisions about accommodation
and resistance made during that period inuenced subsequent generations of Mexicans in the United States. To tell this story, I proceed along
two axes. First, I chart broad discussions about race, nation, and place
that occurred during New Mexicos territorial period (18481912); second, I consider how those discussions inuenced the founding, rise, and
decline of these two Mexican border towns.
This dual focus intervenes in a historical narrative of the Mexican-U.S.
border still haunted by notions of Americanization. Modern historians
in the United States have all too often projected anachronistic assumptions about the meaning of race, nation, and region into their historical
studies. One sign of such projections appears in the widely circulating
premise that northern Mexico and the southwestern United States developed in cultural and political isolation from other areas in Mexico.
As this study will show in some detail, to claim that individuals in New
Mexico never adopted identities informed by the Mexican nation-state
because of the territorys isolation confuses historical explanans with
expanandum. Even more recent scholarship that seeks to trace the
Local Borders 9
10 Introduction
Local Borders 11
This early assessment set the tone for subsequent historical discussions
about the development of Spanish American identity. The focus on
authenticating racial categories has therefore obscured other intersecting identities at play in the territory.
Studies following McWilliams have largely ignored the creation of the
much more dominant New Mexican regional identity. Although McWilliams put much effort into discrediting the idea of a Mexican being
Spanish American, he unquestioningly acknowledged New Mexicans as
possessing their own natural association, seemingly built through a
timeless geography. This mode of critique, which rejected any claim to
Spanishness, neglected the greater ambivalence that many Mexicans
demonstrated when claiming a racial or regional Spanish identity. Evidence of this ambivalence predates the writing of McWilliams, appearing
even in the linguist and folklorist Helen Zunsers discussion of her trip to
New Mexico in 1935:
Our friends called themselves Spanish Americans, but called their language
Mexican. There was deep antagonism in their attitude towards the people
and country of Old Mexico, and they resented being called Mexicans. Bad
country, old Mexico. Too many bandits. Kill all the time, have long knives.
Like to ght. We thought that this feeling was partly due to the fact that in
the southwest Mexicans are treated the way Negroes are in the southeast. . . .
When our friends left their town they had this experience over and over
again, and it was natural to resent the stigma attached to them. But in
addition, they always spoke of temperamental differences, as if the Mexi-
12 Introduction
can[s] were much more violent than they were. Yet we knew of individual
cases where Old and New Mexicans had been friends, and we were told that
the language differences were slight.
Local Borders 13
14 Introduction
Local Borders 15
U.S. notions of race and nation that accompanied the reorganizing of the
border region.
Transforming space can include bringing new biology, new names,
new social and political structures, and a new imagining of that places
relation to a wider sense of the globe and cartography. Space has importance both in a materialist sense and in terms of social processes that
structure relations of inequality. Materially, space affects the lives of
historical actors in concrete ways, shaping the quantity, types, and quality of material resources available. Imaginings of place also shaped these
actors assumptions about themselves in countless and sometimes imperceptible ways. Space is important to this study because historical
gures placed tremendous importance on naming the racial and national
meaning of being in the place known as the border. As this working
denition implies, space cannot be value-neutral. Individuals organize,
name, and contest the meaning of space within broader ideological processes that inform their sense of identity. If space is socially constituted,
then so, too, is the social spatially constituted.
From this perspective I want to consider how creating or remaking
location (that is, actually being in a particular place like La Mesilla, Las
Cruces, or New Mexico) affected the ways historical actors understood,
articulated, and challenged social and cultural relationships. The complicated relationship between La Mesilla and Las Cruces suggests the ways
that competing ideologies about race and nation tangibly inuenced the
organization of local space, practices, and social relationships. The two
towns took shape under competing notions about the relationship between racial and national identities. The Mexicans and Euro-Americans
who founded the towns attempted to congure each one to match their
own expectations about their nation. This, in turn, inuenced issues like
land tenure, the types and styles of buildings constructed, and even the
distribution of racialized bodies across the landscape. Thus, the imagining of place became a critical component in creating local borders, ones
not coterminous with the ofcial national border, that distinguished
Mexican understandings and articulations of their sense of race, nation,
and region. Creating local borders required that individuals grapple
with the meaning of abstractions like citizenship or national belonging
repeatedly.
Meta-ideologies like race or nation circulate widely, but it is only in
their immediate, local settings that individuals access and interact with
knowledge and power. Naming an expanse of land either Mexico or
16 Introduction
United States was (is) an act of power with profound implications for
the ways that individuals in that place understood (understand) their
identities and relationships to others. Creating a geography, building
permanent structures, and establishing governance inuenced how
nineteenth-century Mexicans and Mexican Americans made sense of the
racially charged international border. Likewise, individuals made sense
of and organized their local communities based on their ideas about race
and nation. As we will see, by the end of the nineteenth century many
individuals presumed that being in New Mexico imparted particular
meanings about race and nation. New-Mexican space became unique,
with a specic racial and national meaning.
By scrutinizing the rst generations of Mexican residents in the United
States, this study identies and historicizes many of the early anxieties
about Mexican racial and national identities, anxieties that inuenced
subsequent generations assumptions right up until today. Of course,
individuals in the twentieth century and in the twenty-rst also contributed, challenged, and constructed unique meanings for Mexican and
Mexican American in ever-changing historical circumstances. As this
study shows, though, the long-term processes that created the racial and
national meanings of these complex identities in the United States did
not originate in the twentieth century. Rather, this study lays the foundations for future work, which will link the ways in which nineteenthcentury individuals made sense of their racial and national identities with
later, twentieth-century understandings of being Mexican in the United
States. As the region in the nineteenth-century United States with the
largest Mexican population, New Mexico is the best place to begin to
consider these issues.
Local Borders 17
18 Introduction
U.S.-Mexico border 1848
U.S.-Mexico border 1854
Modern state borders
Extent of New Mexico Territor y 1850 1861
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Local Borders 19
20 Introduction
tures the variety of settlers who were either recent European immigrants
or claimed ancestry in Europe. Not exclusively Anglo or Anglo-Saxon,
many of these settlers identied themselves as Irish, French, German, and
so forth. Euro-American, therefore, acknowledges a greater diversity in
this segment of the territorial population.
I have included Spanish-language transcriptions of original sources
whenever practical. One personal story that could be told as an outcome
of this narrative is that the Moras relinquished their uency in Spanish in
the generation preceding me in an effort (later regretted) to integrate
more fully into the United States. As a result I was not raised in a bilingual
household and had to learn Spanish more or less from scratch. I therefore
feel acutely the personal and political implications of language choices
made on the border. Because Spanish prociency was (and often still is)
considered a key marker in claims to Mexican identity, it would have
seemed peculiar to me to override historical actors decisions to write in
Spanish by exclusively substituting English translations. As a result I have
included both Spanish and English in the text if available. With the help
of Carlos Marn I have made some minor changes (such as punctuation
and accents) to see that both conform to modern standards of readability. Unless otherwise noted, all the translations are my own. With the
methodology and terminology dened, we can turn to the structure of
the book.
Chapter Summaries
In six chapters this study explores the complicated meanings of race,
nation, and region during New Mexicos territorial period. Chapter 1
considers how differing ideologies about race and nation developed in
the United States and Mexico from 1821 to 1850. Part of the ongoing
tension between Las Cruces and Mesilla resulted from conicting visions
of Mexican and American national and racial identities that predated the
towns founding. Both Mexico and the United States intermixed notions
of a performative national identity with ideas about a racial identity to
dene their sense of nationalism. The two countries differed, though, in
the importance and meaning each assigned to performance and to race.
The second chapter narrows the focus to the founding of La Mesilla
and Las Cruces. By using these towns as touchstones, I consider how
competing racial and national ideologies in Mexico and the United States
translated on the local level. Regulating space in the Mesilla Valley be-
Local Borders 21
came a primary concern in disputes between Euro-Americans and Mexicans after 1850. Each town developed through a conscious effort to imbue the border cartography with a particular vision of national identity.
One of the most challenging elements of studying the nineteenthcentury border is the scarcity of sources, especially from Mexicans. The
historical record is too ambiguous and complex to make clear claims
about their diverse experiences. As analytic categories I consider two
central aspects of daily life in the Mesilla Valley: religion and gender.
While the rst and last two chapters chart the development of abstract
ideologies, chapter 3 considers the specic ways that the Las Cruces
Catholic parish, St. Genevieves, gured in local contests. During the late
nineteenth century the arrival of European and Euro-American clergy
challenged Mexicans control over their parish. The chapter considers
those instances when religion became visible and salient in discussions
about race, nation, and local borders. In so doing, it considers the day-today impact of such discussions on Mexican Americans.
Chapter 4 similarly analyzes narratives of gender and sexuality in
southern New Mexico from 1850 to 1912. Examining court records,
newspapers, and personal narratives, this chapter discusses how different individuals incorporated or rejected ideas about gender and sexuality into their discussions about place. Not only did Mexicans and
Euro-Americans have competing ideas about the meaning of the region
as Mexican or American, but they also differed in the ways that they
imagined the space through gender lines. Debates about Mexican identity frequently focused on what it meant to be, specically, a Mexican
man or a Mexican woman living in a U.S. territory.
Differing ideas about race and nation continued to divide New Mexico
through the end of the nineteenth century; however, by 1880 many EuroAmerican and Mexican American elites wanted to avoid debates over the
racial and national meaning of the territory. Prominent individuals became proponents of a racially and nationally unied New Mexican
regional identity that obscured the local conicts. The nal two chapters
consider how certain historical actors wrote about the region in efforts to
make New Mexico knowable as a distinct geographic entity with its own
unique qualities. In other words, I argue that those who wrote about the
territory participated in a discourse that congured New Mexico as a
subject or object with new meanings intrinsic to that space and, therefore, identiable and open to study. Euro-American authors that I discuss in chapter 5 composed their understanding about New Mexico
partly in conversation with each other and partly in response to East-
22 Introduction
erners, whom they imagined had the power to invest in the territory,
vacation there, or grant New Mexico statehood.
The nal chapter considers how enterprising Mexicans adapted similar
ideas and language about New Mexico for their own purposes. Certain
members of the Mexican elite willingly accepted the American national
identity as they participated in the regional New Mexican discourse. After
1880, for instance, the Spanish-speaking population founded a bevy of
newspapers throughout the territory. These editors often endorsed
American nationalism, deliberately suppressing an association with a
national Mexican identity. At the same time, however, these same editors
claimed that being native New Mexican distinguished them from EuroAmericans as well.
It is worth remembering that the racial division discussed in chapters 5
and 6 is entirely articial and structural to allow convenient analysis in
this book. The Mexicans and Euro-Americans discussed in those chapters wrote simultaneously and, in fact, often engaged with each other.
Neither side articulated a sense of the region unilaterally while the other
merely reacted. As we will see, Euro-Americans and Mexican Americans
shared, borrowed, and contested their ideas about New Mexicos signicance in the United States.
Thinking again about Martin Amador, John Stansbury, and the deposition witnesses, we know that they all disagreed about what it meant to be
Mexican or American in an American territory. Such incidents suggest
why the Mesilla Valley is particularly important for historians interested
in race and nation. It was, after all, one of the rst sites in which the
nineteenth-century United States grappled explicitly with the implications of its new border with Mexico. Southern New Mexicos history
shows that claiming Mexican identity in the United States was a more
complex and ambivalent process than historians have previously assumed. Mexicans were forced to reconsider the meaning of their racial
and national identities because the meaning of their location had itself
changed. Differing strategies developed as individuals attempted to make
sense of the shifting local circumstances and their position in metaideologies. The strained and complicated relationship between La Mesilla and Las Cruces, in particular, suggests the ways in which competing
ideologies about race and nation tangibly inuenced the organization of
local space, practices, and social relationships.