Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship

David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History

by Omar Valerio-Jimenez

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-Jimenez 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.

360 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 10, 2024

Reviews

[Synful · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is dense with history and facts which even with the good number of books I've read on Mexican American history I'd yet to learn. The unfortunate part, of course, is usually how many injustices there've been in the last nearly 200 years. Every new generation has had to re-learn about those injustices thanks to the attempts at erasure and almost complete lack of education about a massively important era in American history.

Since the time from the Mexican Revolution to about the present time is definitely covered even less, I found the last 2 chapters the most interesting, especially the last one with regards to the Brown Berets, Vietnam, and the small amount touched on Mexican Americans' own civil rights era of the 1970s and on. Either I need to search harder or a lot more needs to be written focusing on the 20th century, especially the latter half.

The book is thoroughly researched, evident by the nearly 100 pages of end notes. I will be honest, though, the phrases "conquest memories" or "collective memories" were, in my opinion, extremely overused and occasionally overextended in meaning. This is a relatively minor quibble. Overall, I can only imagine the amount of time spent not only finding so many stories of injustice, but trying to whittle down which ones to use. Definitely a reference book to keep and reread periodically to remember what has happened so we understand what is currently and may in the near-future happen.