Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship (The David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History)

Valerio-Jiménez, Omar

ISBN 10: 1469675625 / ISBN 13: 9781469675626

Published by The University of North Carolina Press, 2024

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 398211005

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship (The David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History)
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1469675625
• ISBN 13: 9781469675626
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

This book analyzes the ways collective memories of the US-Mexico War have shaped Mexican Americans' civil rights struggles over several generations. As the first Latinx people incorporated into the nation, Mexican Americans were offered US citizenship by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war. Because the 1790 Naturalization Act declared whites solely eligible for citizenship, the treaty pronounced Mexican Americans to be legally white. While their incorporation as citizens appeared as progress towards racial justice and the electorate’s diversification, their second-class citizenship demonstrated a retrenchment in racial progress. Over several generations, civil rights activists summoned conquest memories to link Mexican Americans' poverty, electoral disenfranchisement, low educational attainment, and health disparities to structural and institutional inequalities resulting from racial retrenchments. Activists also recalled the treaty’s citizenship guarantees to push for property rights, protection from vigilante attacks, and educational reform.

Omar Valerio-Jiménez addresses the politics of memory by exploring how succeeding generations reinforced or modified earlier memories of conquest according to their contemporary social and political contexts. The book also examines collective memories in the US and Mexico to illustrate transnational influences on Mexican Americans and to demonstrate how community and national memories can be used strategically to advance political agendas.

About the Author

Omar Valerio-Jiménez is professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio.