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The ‘Reconquista’—Mexico’s Dream of ‘Retaking’ the Southwest
By John Tiffany
Some
Mexicans and Mexican-Americans want to see California, New Mexico and
other parts of the United States given to Mexico. They call it the
“reconquista,” Spanish for “reconquest,” and they view the millions of
Mexican illegal aliens entering this country as their army of invaders
to achieve that takeover. To an extent, they also have actual armed
soldiers of the Mexican army, along with mercenaries from North Korea,
Russia and other communist or former communist lands, and have already
fired upon American Border Patrol officers and terrorized American
ranchers. Shockingly, certain politicians in America are willing to
sell out to the Mexicans. Here we consider the background to this
disturbing development.
Mexico,
of course, was once a Spanish colony, the Aztecs and numerous other
tribes in that region having been conquered by the Spaniards—or, in
many cases, having willingly sworn allegiance to the Spanish king in
order to free themselves from Aztec tyranny. (However, it may be noted
that in the northern reaches—the so-called Interior Provinces—of what
was once called “Mexico,” the natives had never been subdued by any
outsiders, including the Aztecs.) When a number of Mexicans, inspired
by Ameri ca’s example, revolted against Spain, they set up an
independent government and assumed theoretical rulership of a vast
area, in cluding what is now known as the South western United States.
America
subsequently obtained the Southwest in various ways—mostly by conquest
in the Mexican (or Mexican Amer i can) War, partly by purchase (the
Gadsden Purchase) and partly by agreement (the annexation of Texas, at
the time an independent republic. It should also be mentioned that the
bear flag of the Re public of California was raised by American
settlers at Sonoma on June 14, 1846.) This prompts the question as to
how Spain and then Mexico came to “own” what is now the American
Southwest, which, of course, was never under the control of the Aztec
nation.
Mexico’s
claim to the Southwest stems from Pope Alexander VI’s 15th-century
Treaty of Tordesillas, which established a demarcation line to define
the spheres of Spanish and Portuguese influence in the New World. The
line ran due north and south through a point 300 miles west of the
Azores and Cape Verde Islands. All newly discovered lands lying east of
this line supposedly belonged to Portugal, while all lands discovered
to the west belonged to Spain. The people—Indians, Eskimos and
Aleuts—living in these lands were not consulted. This treaty was
modified in 1506 by a new demarcation line 1,110 miles west of the
Azores. The new line ran longitudinally through the eastern hump of
South America, and is the reason Brazilians speak Portuguese. This
treaty gave Spain the controversial legitimacy to rule Mexico, and most
of North and South America, beginning with Her nándo Cortés’s rape of
the Aztec nation in 1521. Tordesillas allowed the Spanish and
Portuguese to loot and enslave indigenous populations, in return for
their promises to save the hemisphere’s natives “for God.” It was not
realized at the time that Portugal would get a much smaller slice of
the American pie than did Spain, since the Americas were still largely
unexplored. While Spain wound up with a claim to the Aztec and Inca
empires, rich in gold and silver, Portugal got nothing more than some
tropical rain forest with scattered primitive tribes.
Britain
and various other countries, including Catholic France, were not hap py
about the pope’s decision to divide the New World between Spain and
Portugal and did not consider the treaty to have any legal value
whatsoever. Even Portu gal seems to have been dissatisfied, since it
proceeded to carve out a much larger Brazil than the eastern Brazil it
would have been entitled to under the treaty. Since the United States
inherited its claim to the western lands from Britain, the Treaty of
Tordesillas is logically a nullity as far as the U.S. government is (or
should be) concerned. It should perhaps be noted that U.S. claims to
the west really go as far back as colonial days, since many of the
British colonial charters purported to grant to the colonies lands in
America stretching all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
In
1767, Russia had already taken over Alaska and was looking at lands to
the south of it. King Carlos III of Spain became concerned about
Russian intentions regarding California and decreed a program to build
a series of forts or missions throughout California to ensure Spanish
control of that land. The Spanish government forced the aboriginal
Ameri can (so-called “Indian”) populations to build a series of 21
forts/missions for settler protection and agriculture. These missions
were built between 1769 and 1823. Because of a series of revolutions
that swept the Spanish empire in 1810, cash-starved Spain stopped
salary payments to its civil servants throughout the Ameri cas, and
these colonists were left to their own devices. It is noteworthy that
in 1810, there were less than 1,000 Span iards through out the entire
American South west, some 500,000 square miles of wil derness,
controlled only by the native Indians.1
At
one point the civilized Indian tribes of New Mexico, known as “Pueblo”
Indi ans, who had been conquered by the Span ish, revolted and
succeeded in driving the Spanish out of their lands. The Span ish
government, however, mounted a “re conquista” to again subject this
territory to their control, the first reconquista in Amer ican history.
(An earlier reconquista found in the history books refers to the taking
back of Spain itself from the Moors by the Christians, but of course
that has little to do with our subject matter here.)
It
took a combination of Criollos (ethnic Spaniards born in the New
World), Indi ans associated with them and Mestizos (racially mixed
people) to defeat Imperial Spain; but by 1821, after 38 years of
struggle, they triumphed, and modern Mexico was born. However, the
defeat of Spain changed little in what would someday be the Southwest
United States. The vast wil derness, which was then northern Mex ico,
continued to be virtually ignored by a slumbering and distracted
Mexican central government. From the time of Spain’s defeat by Mexico
in 1821, through 1848, the year the Mexican-American War ended, Mexico
endured 50 military plots, 22 governments, five constitutional
conventions, three constitutions and 10 of the 11 different terms of
leadership under that megalomaniacal president and military leader (he
was never actually a general), Antonio López de Santa Anna Pérez de
Lebrón, of Alamo notoriety.
Beginning
with Texas in 1845, which be came a sovereign country in 1836, and
California, Nevada, Utah and parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and
Wyo ming (all of which Mexico ceded to the United States in 1848),
American settlers outnumbered Mexicans by at least five to one in all
eight states except in Texas, where Americans outnumbered Mexicans 10
to one. One thing these settlers wanted was stable, representative
government, something Mexico had been unable to provide. They also
wanted to have a government that spoke their own language and shared
their culture. And so had begun the inevitable movement for
independence from Mexico among American settlers. This led to the
Battle of the Alamo and the Texan War for Independence, resulting in a
sovereign nation of Texas. After nine years of this, Texas, by mutual
consent, was annexed to the United States.
There
can be little doubt that President Polk engineered the 1846-1848 war
with Mexico in order to bring California and the other Southwestern
states into the union. War was declared on May 13, 1846, based on the
problems along the disputed Texas-Mexico border. Still, there is little
question but that Mexico would have been unable to indefinitely hold on
to her pre-1846 American territories even had the Mexican-U.S. War not
taken place. Sooner or later, all seven of the other states would have
followed Texas’s lead (as California was doing) and brought about
similar results.
The
Mexican War receives little attention in America’s classrooms, al
though its effects were far-reaching. David Saville Muzzey’s popular
1911 text American His tory explained the war to schoolchildren of the
early 20th century, told why the United States seized California in
1846 and how the U.S. government ended the Texas-Mexico border dispute.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidal go, which officially ended the war, was
signed in February 1848. (“Guadalupe Hi dalgo” is the former name of a
town in Mexico, 2 1/2 miles north of Mexico City. It was to this town
that the government of Mexico had fled as American troops took the
capital city. Guadalupe Hidalgo was named partly for Our Lady of
Guadalupe and partly for Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the well known
Mexican priest and revolutionary.)
According to
Muzzey, the annexation of Texas was a perfectly fair transaction. For
nine years, since the victory of San Ja cinto in 1836, Texas had been
an independent republic, whose military reconquest Mexico had not the
slightest chance of effecting. In fact, at the very moment of
annexation, the Mexican government, at the suggestion of England, had
agreed to recognize the independence of Texas, on condition that the
republic should not join itself to the United States. The United States
was not taking Mexican territory, then, in annexing Texas.
The
new state had come into the union claiming the Rio Grande as her
southern and western boundary. By the terms of annexation, all boundary
disputes with Mexico were referred by Texas to the government of the
United States. President Polk sent John Slidell of Louisiana to Mexico
in the autumn of 1845 to adjust any differences over the Texan claims.
But though Slidell labored for months to get a hearing, two successive
presidents of revolution-torn Mexico refused to recognize him, and he
was dismissed from the country in August 1846.
The
massing of Mexican troops on the southern bank of the Rio Grande,
coupled with the refusal of the Mexican government to receive Slidell,
led President Polk to order Gen. Zachary Taylor to move to the borders.
Taylor marched to the Rio Grande and fortified a position on the
northern bank. The Mexican and the Ameri can troops were thus facing
each other across the river. When Taylor re fused to retreat to the
Nueces, the Mexi can commander crossed the Rio Grande and ambushed a
scouting force of Ameri cans (April 1846). When the news of the attack
reached Washington early in May, Polk sent a special message to
Congress, concluding with these words:
We
have tried every effort at reconciliation. . . . But now, after
reiterated menaces, Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States
[the Rio Grande], has invaded our territory and shed American blood
upon American soil. She has proclaimed that hostilities have commenced
and that the two nations are at war. As war exists, and,
notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, exists by the act of
Mexico herself, we are called upon by every consideration of duty and
patriotism to vindicate with decision the honor, the rights and the
interests of our country.
The
House and Senate, by very large majorities (174 to 14, and 40 to two),
voted 50,000 men and $10 million for the prosecution of the war.
Meanwhile, Gen. Taylor had driven the Mexicans back to the south bank
of the Rio Grande in the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma.
Six days after the vote of Congress sanctioning the war, he crossed the
Rio Grande and occupied the Mexican frontier town of Matamoros, whence
he proceeded during the summer and autumn of 1846 to capture the
capitals of three Mexican provinces.
As
soon as hostilities began, Commodore John Drake Sloat, in command of
the U.S. squadron in the Pacific, was ordered to seize California, and
Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny was sent to invade New Mexico. The occupation
of California was practically undisputed. Mexico had only the faintest
shadow of authority in the province, and the 6,000 white inhabitants
made no objection to seeing the flag of the United States raised over
their forts. Kearny started with 1,800 men from Fort Leavenworth,
Kansas, in June, and on August 18 defeated the force of 4,000 Mexicans
and Indians which disputed his occupation of Santa Fé. After
garrisoning this important post he detached Col. Doliphan with 850 men
to march through the northern provinces of Mexico and effect a juncture
with Gen. Taylor at Monterey, while he himself with only 100 men
continued his long journey of 1,500 miles to San Diego, California,
where he joined Sloat’s successor, Stockton.
After
these decided victories and uninterrupted marches of Taylor, Kearny,
Sloat, Stockton and Doniphan, the Mexi can government was offered a
fair chance to treat for peace, which it refused. Then President Polk
decided, with the unanimous consent of his cabinet, to strike at the
heart of Mexico. Gen. Winfield Scott, a hero of the War of 1812, was
put in command of an army of about 12,000 men, to land at Vera Cruz and
fight his way up the mountains to the capital city of Mexico. Santa
Anna, who, by the rapid shift of revolutions, was again dictator in
Mexico, heard of this plan to attack the capital and hastened north
with 20,000 troops to surprise and destroy Taylor’s army before Scott
should have time to take Vera Cruz. But Taylor, with an army one-fourth
the size of Santa Anna’s, drove the Mexicans back in the hotly
contested Battle of Buena Vista (Feb. 23, 1847), securing the
Californian and New Mexican conquests. Santa Anna hastened southward to
the defense of Mexico City.
Scott
took Vera Cruz in March and worked his way slowly but surely, against
forces always superior to his own, up to the very gates of Mexico City
by August 1847. Here he paused, by the president’s orders, to allow the
Mexicans another chance to accept the terms of peace the United States
offered: the cession by Mexico of New Mexico and California in return
for a large payment of money. The Mexican commissioners, however,
insisted on having both banks of the Rio Grande and all of California
up to the neighborhood of San Francisco, besides receiving damages for
injuries inflicted by the American troops in their invasions. These
claims were preposterous, coming from a conquered country, and there
was nothing left for Scott to do but to resume military operations.
Santa
Anna defended the capital with a force of 30,000 men, but the Mexicans
proved no match for the American soldiers. Scott stormed the fortified
hill of Chapultepec and advanced to the gates of the city. On September
13 his troops entered the Mexican capital and raised the Stars and
Stripes over “the palace of the Montezumas.”
From the
beginning of the war Polk had been negotiating for peace. He had kept
Slidell in Mexico long after the opening of hostilities and had sent
Nicholas Trist as special peace commissioner to join Scott’s army at
Vera Cruz and to offer Mexico terms of peace at the earliest possible
moment. He had allowed Santa Anna to return to Mexico from his exile in
Cuba in the summer of 1846, because the wily and treacherous dictator
held out false promises of effecting a reconciliation between Mexico
and the United States. He had asked Congress for an appropriation of $2
million for peace negotiations when Gen. Taylor was still near the Rio
Grande, 10 days before Gen. Kearny had taken Santa Fé and the province
of New Mexico, and before Gen. Scott’s campaign had been thought of.
When
the Mexican commissioners made advances for peace at the beginning of
the year 1848, they were given terms almost as liberal as those offered
them before Scott had stormed and occupied their capital. By the treaty
concluded at Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico was required to cede its claim
to California and New Mexico, as well as lands in between them and to
the north, to the United States and to recognize the Rio Grande as the
southern and western boundary of Texas. In return, the United States
paid Mexico a gratuitous $15 million cash and assumed some $3,250,000
more in claims of American citizens on the Mexican government. Mexico
was in debt to the Rothschild bankers at this time, and apparently most
of the cash went to them. Considering the facts that California was
scarcely under Mexican control at all and might have been taken at any
moment by Great Britain, France or Russia; that New Mexico was still
the almost undisturbed home of Indian tribes; that the land from the
Nueces to the Rio Grande was almost a desert; that the American troops
were in possession of the Mexican capital; and that the United States
did not have to give a dollar to Mexico, the terms offered Mexico were
extremely generous.
The
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was ratified by the U.S. Senate on March
10, 1848. The last U.S. soldier had departed from Mexico by July 31.
Polk was urged by many to annex the whole country of Mexico to the
United States, but he wisely refused to consider such a proposal.
Mexicans
were subsequently to note with pleasure that bad luck had followed upon
imperialism, since the acquisitions of Guadalupe Hidalgo, by upsetting
the balance between the “slave” states and the “free” states,
precipitated, 13 years later, the American War Between the States or
“Civil War.”
Mexico
had ceded Texas, California and the vast expanse of territory in
between them, amounting to more than half the land area of the
republic, adding half a million square miles of territory to the United
States. Mexico’s then-president, Manuel de la Peña y Peña, expressed,
with the treaty, this hope:
I
desire nothing more ardently than that our treaty may prove the
immutable basis of that constant harmony and good understanding that
should prevail sincerely be tween two republics.
But
the United States was not quite done acquiring land from Mexico. The
Gadsden Purchase, one of the most curious real estate deals in which
Uncle Sam has ever taken part, remained.
James
Gadsden (1788-1858), whose name the purchase bears, was a grandson of
Christopher Gadsden (1724-1805), a South Carolina Revolutionary soldier
and statesman. James Gadsden soldiered for several years under Gen.
Andrew Jackson, and it was he who seized the papers that led to the
trial and execution of two British subjects in Spanish Florida in 1818,
an incident that strained British-American diplomatic relations almost
to the breaking point.
Gadsden
was appointed by President Monroe as the commissioner in charge of
placing the Seminole Indians on reservations. While living as a painter
in Florida, he championed nullification and lost the patronage of
President Jackson. He had long been interested in promoting railroads
and upon his return to South Carolina in 1839 was chosen president of
the South Carolina Railroad Company. His pet dream was to knit all
railroads in Dixie into one system and then to connect it with a
southern transcontinental railroad to the Pacific, to make the west
commercially dependent on the southeast instead of the northeast.
After
engineers advised Gadsden that the most direct and practicable route
for the southern transcontinental railroad would be partially south of
the U.S. boundary, he made plans to have the federal government acquire
title to the necessary territory from Mexico. Through his friend and
fellow empire dreamer, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis (later to be
president of the Confederacy), Gadsden was appointed U.S. minister to
Mexico by President Franklin Pierce with instructions to buy from
Mexico enough territory to complete a railroad to California.
The
territory desired by Gadsden and his group was then a sort of
no-man’s-land, experiencing frequent Indian raids. The United States
wanted to make certain boundary adjustments; Mexico needed money and
wanted a settlement of her Indian claims against the United States; and
Gadsden and his friends wanted a route for their railroad.
In
1852 Gadsden agreed to pay Mexico $10 million for a strip of territory
south of the Gila River, incorporating the Mesilla Valley and lying in
what is now southwestern New Mexico and southern Arizona. (It is not
known how the money was divided among the Mexican politicians.) The
agreement was not ratified by the U.S. Senate until 1854.2
In
return, the claims of Mexico for damages caused by marauding Indians
from north of the border, amounting to several million dollars, were
abrogated. The Gadsden Purchase territory was an area of 45,535 square
miles, almost as large as Pennsylvania. Naturally, the
“reconquistadors” want to gain, for free, title to the Gadsden Purchase
along with the lands conquered from Mexico, as well as the territory of
Texas. v
FOOTNOTES
1U.S. census of 1850.
2.
Some sources (such as the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia) claim that
Santa Anna played a major role in the negotiations for the Gadsden
Purchase. One source even went so far as to assert that the purchase
being highly unpopular in Mexico, Santa Anna’s role caused him to lose
even more of his then-dwindling popularity and finally to be forced
from office and into exile again. However, this appears to be
impossible. Santa Anna, who was kicked out of Mexico several times,
went into exile in 1848 after losing the Mexican War. Not until 1853
was he recalled again, and named “president for life,” with the title
of “Serene Highness,” according to the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Thus, since the purchase came about in 1852, it seems unlikely Santa
Anna could have been one of the negotiators.
Bibliography
Chamberlain, Samuel E. (introduction and postscript by Roger
Butterfield), My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue, Harper & Bros., New York, 1956.
Miller, Robert R., Shamrock and Sword: The St. Patrick’s Battalion in the U.S.-Mexican War, University of
Oklahoma Press, Norman and London, 1989.
Parkes, Henry B., A History of Mexico, 3rd ed., Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1966.
Peck, Lt. John J. (foreword and commentary by Richard F. Pourade), The Sign
of the Eagle, Copley Press, San Diego, 1970.
Tennery,
Thomas D. (edited and with an introduction by D.E. Livingston-Little),
The Mexican War Diary of Thomas D. Tennery, University of Oklahoma
Press, Littleton, 1970.
Traas, Adrian
G., From the Golden Gate to Mexico City: The U.S. Army Topographical
Engineers in the Mexican War, 1846-48, U.S. Army, Washington, 1993.
http://www.progress.org/gads.htm
http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist6/muzzey.html
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