Quiero recordarle al gringo

Yo no crucé la frontera

La frontera me cruzó

América nació libre

El hombre la dividió

—Los Tigres del Norte, “Somos mas Americanos”

Drafted to fight in America’s war in Vietnam in 1969, Manuel Gómez refused induction into the US Army. However, he refused not because of the war’s imperialist aims but because of his understanding of Latinx history in the United States. The young man invoked a 19th-century conflict, the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) to refuse his draft notice. “The memory of the Mexican-American War,” Gómez proclaimed in rejecting service, “is still an open wound in the souls of my people.” Over 120 years later, Gómez now leveraged the collective war memories of the US invasion of Mexico to protest another invasion in Vietnam. Gómez’s “wound” was not just Mexico’s loss of lands—which today comprise California, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming—it was the estimated 100,000 Mexicans and Hispanicized Indians who remained in the United States in the annexed territories. These Mexicans now found themselves a colonized people who had lost their land and their political rights and were now socially subordinated to whites. That’s why, even today, it is still popular among Latinx Americans—some whose families have lived on the same land for centuries—to proclaim “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.”

These collective war memories were ingrained into the family of University of Texas at San Antonio historian Omar Valerio-Jiménez. A “Mexican American worker with limited English proficiency,” Valerio-Jiménez’s father lived in Matamoros and commuted into the United States for work with his plastic-encapsulated birth certificate in hand. When a Border Patrol officer, in the 1960s, questioned his father about whether his birthplace of Hills Prairie, Texas, was, in fact, in Mexico, his father invoked the legacies of conquest, explaining that “Hills Prairie was in Texas, but Mexico owned Texas at one time, so perhaps he was born in Texas when Mexico still owned it?” His father was subsequently refused entry and traveled to a different bridge to cross into the United States. This sarcastic reply expressed defiance to the officer and a clear example of recalling memories of conquest as a “weapon of the weak.” Politicizing the history of conquest served as not only a form of resistance, but, in retelling this story to Valerio-Jiménez, his father contributed to the active remembering of the conquest and its legacies.

Exactly how this war has been remembered within the United States is the core of Valerio-Jiménez’s new book Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship, which explores how these memories of war inspired later generations in their fight for civil rights. Valerio-Jiménez suggests that this politics of remembering how borders changed—while people remained—crucially aided ethnic Mexicans in advancing their agendas for inclusion and civil rights across the Southwest. In doing so, Valerio-Jiménez writes that an “alternative view” of the conflict arises, which “center Mexican Americans’ experience by acknowledging the failure of the United States to enforce the citizenship guarantees in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war.” In particular, article 8 of the treaty allowed Mexican citizens in the ceded territory to retain their Mexican citizenship and return to Mexico at any time, to become US citizens, or to delay their choice for a year. After one year, individuals would collectively naturalize as US citizens. Most of these former Mexican citizens remained on their land in the annexed territories, resulting in this form of “mass naturalization” at the treaty stipulated date of February 2, 1849. However, while the 1790 Naturalization Act intertwined citizenship with whiteness, the citizenship associated with Guadalupe Hidalgo represented a failure, as subsequent generations of Mexican Americans were relegated to a second-class status. The treaty’s failed guarantees for property rights, education, and safety led to generational poverty, disenfranchisement, and systemic inequalities for Mexican Americans.

Valerio-Jiménez shows how, in the 1960s and ’70s, Chicano and Chicana activists deployed memories of the “conquest” in the wake of the Mexican-American War as a way to exert their cultural pride, advocate for farmworkers’ rights, reconceptualize their educational opportunities, and reassert their ties to the land. The Brown Berets traversed former Mexican territories in their Caravana de la Reconquista (1971–72) from California to Texas, all former Mexican territory lost in the first half of the 19th century. Famed New Mexican civil rights activist Reies Lopez Tijerina popularized the language of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to invoke linguistic and cultural rights for New Mexicans. One journalist even invoked this historical linkage when he wrote, “The Spanish-Americans involved in the land-grant controversy are not recent immigrants from Mexico, but descendants of Spanish settlers who changed from Mexican to American citizenship after the Mexican War in 1848.” Chicano students resisted the Vietnam War and the mandatory draft with historical parallels to the Mexican-American War based on the disproportionate casualties for Chicanos and the unjust nature of the conflict. Lea Ybarra and Nina Genera argued that both the Vietnamese and Chicano communities were “oppressed by the same imperialist system.” When Chicano activists of the 1960s are invoking a conflict from over a century before, they are deliberately combating the failed promises of the Treaty of Guadalupe and the assurances of protection granted in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War. Each of these groups and individuals understood the broader institutional and structural inequalities they faced as intrinsically linked to the failure to enact the treaty for resulting generations.

This conflict from over 170 years ago reverberates across time, remaining ever present. Valerio-Jiménez’s task throughout the book is to convince readers that a vernacular form of this history collectively informed the social transformation of generations of Mexican Americans. Combing through oral tradition, newspapers, speeches, and, to a lesser extent, literature, Valerio-Jiménez documents how collective war memories were transmitted across five generations of Mexican Americans (1840s–’60s, 1870s–’90s, 1900s–’20s, 1930s–’50s, and 1960s–’70s). The tangible and immediate impacts of violence by the first generation of Mexican Americans “reverberated among succeeding descendants by influencing their identity and political activism.” When the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo failed to protect the property and political rights of the Mexicans who remained on the land now under US control, subsequent generations reaped the incrementally devastating consequences of disenfranchisement, dispossession, and violent repression. How subsequent generations chose to remember these lineages of conquest informed their advocacy as they pushed against their characterization as the perpetual stranger to full citizens. While the conquest was singular, the remembrances of it were myriad.

“History can either oppress or liberate a people,” Rodolfo Acuña, the founder of Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University Northridge, proclaimed in the opening line to his 1972 classic, Occupied America: The Chicano’s Struggle Toward Liberation. Writing in the throes of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, or El Movimiento, Acuña argued that “Mexicans in the United States are still a colonized people, but now the colonization is internal—it is occurring within the country rather than being imposed by an external power.” The remembrance of conflict informed Acuña’s internal colonization theory, which defined his seminal text. Since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which ended the Mexican-American War, the colonization of Chicanos was one within borders instead of outside of them.

Simply, memories matter—for history and the people who invoke them. The act of remembrance is more than just nostalgia or an individual recollection of the past. Beyond our personal experiences, we create and contribute to collective memories, which are influenced by learning about the past from our families and friends and, in turn, share those memories with others. Each generation remembers and invokes aspects of the past to their present. Memories encapsulate the contested visions of history. Historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage reminds us that memories involve the “active labor of selecting, structuring, and imposing meaning on the past.” In choosing to remember certain events at specific times, seemingly uncontroversial facts become subjects of politicization. Collective remembrance illustrates the opportunity to build awareness. As Acuña contended, “Awareness will help us take action against the forces that oppress not only Chicanos but the oppressor himself.” Central to this awareness becomes the act of remembering, or “refusing to forget,” the past injustices against Mexican Americans in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War. In the case of the generations of Mexican Americans in the decades after the conflict, this awareness was tied to offering alternative views of the conflict.

Historically, Valerio-Jiménez unravels how scholars, journalists, and activists “deployed collective war memories in varied and often contradictory ways to push their political agendas.” While the physical consequences of the war’s aftermath lessened and became less prominent after the initial generation, the influences remained in the second-class citizenship that defined Mexican Americans throughout the Southwest. While Valerio-Jiménez utilizes the book’s first chapter to summarize the events leading to the Mexican-American War, the negotiations surrounding the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and the immediate aftermath of the conflict, the following five chapters proceed chronologically across approximately 30 years each. How, then, did Mexican Americans still utilize the event, even as time granted them distance from the traumatic conflict?

In the late 1840s through 1860s, after the Mexican-American War, a cohort of “organic intellectuals” responded (mostly) peacefully to the failure of the United States to honor the treaty. While granted citizenship, this generation leveraged the treaty’s language to criticize the federal government’s inaction in the wake of violence and the encroachment on Mexican American land. Journalists publicized the plight of Mexican Americans, documenting the vigilante violence against working-class communities in gold mining and ranch work. Elites invoked the treaty to protest the gradual land loss of their estates. At the same time, consuls attempted to leverage the treaty in their diplomatic relationships with the United States on behalf of Mexican Americans. These initial assaults on their property and livelihoods revealed the stark limitations to their citizenship under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

These methods clarified how the first generation transmitted these collective memories to the second generation. Newspapers reprinted articles about the war from Mexican newspapers, participating in a “transnational circulation of war memories,” and Mexican immigrants brought with them starkly different memories of the war across the border. In their path toward statehood, Mexican Americans in New Mexico, or Hispanos, reflected the regional variations in remembering the war. While Mexican Americans in New Mexico, California, and Texas all cited the treaty to gain confirmation of their land grants, Hispanos also remembered the treaty promises of statehood and protection from Indigenous raids. This new generation turned to the institutions of the United States to advocate for civil rights. Mexican Americans worked to elect municipal and, to a lesser extent, state legislators, filed lawsuits to protect their treaty rights, and issued appeals to political leaders.

The act of collective remembering proved prone to various discrepancies. The increased immigration of Mexicans into the United States presented the opportunity for memories to “intermingle and reinforce each other.” Invoking the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans intermarried, socialized, and engaged with one another, all while forging movements for civil rights struggles against educational segregation, criminalization of Mexicans, poll taxes, boundary issues, and the lynching of Mexicans. In particular, mutual aid societies, or mutualistas, helped establish transnational ties as nationalistic alternative views of the conquest spread across the border, forming a “transnational circulation of memories.” However, as organizations developed to advocate for civil rights through remembering the treaty, no singular collective memory of the conquest emerged. Scholars, activists, and organizations “selectively remembered” the conflict “to suit their political goals.”

As fledgling organizations used their memories of the treaty to varying degrees, memories became politicized and depoliticized. Valerio-Jiménez showcases this by examining the differences between two leading organizations of the 1930s–’50s, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and Mexican American National Association (ANMA). While some LULAC members remembered the treaty to use its guarantees to lay claim to whiteness, others expressed a clear connection to their Indigenous heritages. LULAC members depoliticized their past as a method to gain acceptance. In contrast, other LULACers and many ANMA members drew a clear lineage from the treaty’s failure to the discrimination they encountered. In defining these differing remembrances, Valerio-Jiménez noted the class differences between the mainly university-educated LULAC and working-class organizers associated with ANMA. Despite these conflicts of memory, this generation lay the foundation for the legacies of the Mexican-American War—such as poverty, criminalization, and political disenfranchisement—that the Chicano Generation used to inform their activism two decades later.

Valerio-Jiménez’s intervention is a timely reminder of the enduring legacies of conflict stemming from war memories.

Politically, Remembering the Conquest highlights the contested nature of memory. Invoking the failure of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Chicano activists of the 1960s and 1970s established a nearly exhaustive list to add to the collective memory of conquest. Antiwar protestors echoed the previous generation’s positions (espoused by ANMA), concerning the hypocritical nature of the United States’s foreign involvement in promoting democracy. How could the United States, which long oppressed Mexican Americans, support democracy abroad? At the same time, marginalized communities continued to advocate for civil rights domestically. For 24 days, members of the Brown Berets occupied Santa Catalina Island, part of the Channel Islands off California’s coast. The activists argued that article 5, which demarcated the new boundaries of the US and Mexico, did not include the Channel Islands. From the island, the activists argued that the subordination of Mexicans was the result of a failure to enforce the treaty and lent justification to their continued struggle for civil rights.

However, this strategic deployment of the trauma of the conflict was highly selective. In remembering themselves as the conquered, Mexican Americans often omitted their role in removing—often forcibly—Indigenous communities on the far northern frontier of Mexico. In their testimonios, Californian elites—or Californios—recalled the treaty’s failed promises as they witnessed their estates and influence dwindle. But in remembering their experiences as conquered people, these elites expressed a “strategic amnesia” in their positions “as conquerors of Indigenous nations.” This amnesia extended into contradictory actions for generations as well. While critical of US expansionism, novelist Ruiz de Burton married a military officer and active participant in the system that Burton admonished. As Valerio-Jiménez argued, de Burton’s literary career highlighted the conflation of class and the contradictory notion of the failure of the treaty while retaining an opportunity for integration as full citizens.

While some individuals leverage the treaty to argue for their belonging in the United States, the war is also invoked to decry the “invasion” and “reconquest” of the Southwest by immigrant restrictions and xenophobic forces domestically. Anthropologist Leo Chavez documented the prolonged rise of what he termed the Latino threat narrative, or the presentation of Latino immigrants as a fundamental threat to US society. In remembering the war, these anxieties view the changing demographics of the United States as the next battle in the “unending” Mexican-American War.

Today, immigrant rights advocates continue to invoke the experience of conquest in advocating for their belonging to the United States. However, it is also a historically rich invocation of the collective war memories of 1848. As Valerio-Jiménez documented, these invocations represented “unfulfilled promises” for Mexican Americans.

Valerio-Jiménez’s intervention is a timely reminder of the enduring legacies of conflict stemming from war memories. In 2023, Joe Sacco’s graphic novel Palestine was rushed back into the press as readers drew connections to the ongoing conflicts in Gaza with the memories documented in the aftermath of the first intifada. When he returned to do Footnotes in Gaza, Sacco even commented, “Things had seemed very bad” when visiting in the early 1990s, “but things were very much worse 10 years later.” In documenting over 70 years of violence and trauma, psychologist Iman Farajallah—herself a witness to the first and second intifadas—remembers that “The experience was so vicious, so scary, so harmful that there are no words that you can actually describe it.” However, the witnesses to this era of immense violence do remember these experiences and themselves participate in the ongoing dissemination of collective war memories. These invocations join the rich lineage of collective memories of conflict to protest war. The legacies of conflict—and their increasingly accessible images in a global age—frame the shared bonds of trauma in keeping the memories of these conflicts alive, often through offering a human consequence to these periods of intense violence.