itzel’s Reviews > Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity > Status Update

okay i'm almost home and i genuinely cannot continue rn lest i burst into fits of anger inside a silly little amtrak

"in the early 1850s, american prospectors forcefully expelled mexican, mexican american, and other latin american 'greasers' from the goldfields. [...] those who persisted in the fields or refused to pay the tax were intimidated, beaten, or killed; throughout the 1850s violent crimes against mexicans in california increased dramatically." (19)

y has no one ever told me about this how come i never Knew im distraught

OH OKAY and so when I went to sonora and literally anywhere else and was at one of those stupid mini museums or whatever they just conveniently left out everything about the mexican techniques for the gold mining okay or maybe i just can't remember i pray it's that pls memory be failing me

"indeed, the bitterness and hatred toward mexicans stimulated by the recent war in many ways intensified anglo americans' hostility toward 'mexicans' [...] horsman notes that, if anything, 'the total mexican defeat convinced the americans that their original judgment of the mexican race had been correct.'" (18)

HORSMAN????! i'm ohh omg omg im glad he's been dead for Years bc if he WASNT oh next luigi is me

ok but also thank GOD for their ridiculousness because i don't think i would like a united states that engulfs the entirety of mexico

dude i think "the firebrand racist senator from south carolina, john c. calhoun" should actually genuinely off himself because what the actually jsjdhhd man . i'm sorry idk if i should say it this way but these white people disgust me . i won't be typing out what he says i can't stand it

"historian reginald horsman argued [that], "the bitter dispute concerning the annexation of mexican territory was primarily an argument not about territory but about mexicans." "though god might ... guid[e] the americans to the conquest of mexico," horsman observed, "he had not provided a detailed plan for american rule over mexican people."" (15)

IM BAFFLED i wanna say kay why es? maybe

"advocates of the 'all mexico' position faced some formidable challenges [...] the most troubling of these [being the] incorporation of even larger numbers of non-white, non-English-speaking people into the United States" (14-15)

be so fr,, dude the Face i made while reading this oh will i make it thru without imploding

not even 5 pages in and it's kinda depressing to see what they were worried abt came true