Omar Valerio-Jiménez, Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship

The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo brought the US–Mexico War to an end by transferring some 525,000 square miles of Mexican territory to the United States. For the Mexican nationals living in that territory, the peace agreement offered them a choice: they could remain and become US citizens, or they could return to Mexico. Most chose the former option. That decision, and the ramifications of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, remained etched in the collective memory of the Mexican American community for generations.

This is the topic of Omar Valerio-Jiménez’s newest book Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship. Rather than returning to the well-trodden paths of inquiry into the war and its immediate aftermath, Valerio-Jiménez instead investigates how the war shaped the collective memory of the Mexican American community from the 1840s to the 1970s. Families and friends shared viewpoints on the war—often realizing that their interpretations of the conflict differed from the stories they read in their textbooks. Mexican American activists and organizers disseminated their views on the war to the wider public through speeches, editorials, and novels. Group memories and public memories, Valerio-Jiménez argues, combined to create a distinctive Mexican American collective memory of the US–Mexico War—one that often ran counter to the dominant national perspectives offered by US and Mexican narratives.

The central element of this Mexican American collective memory was the promise of equal citizenship included in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Articles VIII and IX of that agreement stipulated that Mexicans who remained on territory acquired by the US would be granted ‘all the rights of citizens of the United States’, and would be ‘protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty and property’. As Valerio-Jiménez shows, Mexican Americans from the 1850s through the 1970s and beyond constantly referenced this promise of equal citizenship in their calls for civil rights reform. Newspapers like the Los Angeles-based El Clamor Público cited the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in their protests against the lynching of Mexican Americans in the 1850s. Mexican Americans living in New Mexico in the 1890s couched their claims for statehood in the promises guaranteed to them by Treaty. Mexican Americans in Texas used it to speak out against segregated schooling in the early twentieth century. In cataloguing these efforts across the US Southwest over a span of 120 years, Valerio-Jiménez shows how the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo—and the promises of citizenship included therein—became a pillar of Mexican American collective memory. By grounding their demands for justice within the legal framework of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexican Americans both reaffirmed their shared history and crafted more effective arguments to advance civil rights.

Valerio-Jiménez also demonstrates how the boundaries of the Mexican American community were shaped by demands for equal citizenship included in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The 1790 Naturalization Act restricted citizenship to white persons; as scholars including Ariela Gross have shown, extending citizenship to Mexican Americans after the war made them legally ‘white’. In this racialized context, the marshaling of collective memory towards the pursuit of equal citizenship influenced the contours of Mexican American identity. For example, Valerio-Jiménez describes how Mexican Americans emphasized their Spanish heritage while downplaying their connections to Indigenous peoples of the US Southwest. In the early twentieth century, as immigration from Mexico increased following the Mexican Revolution, some Mexican Americans fearful of anti-immigrant backlash drew contrasts between their own communities—made up of people who had been in the country for generations—and new arrivals who were not protected by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Others, however, formed mutualistas—mutual aid societies—that included both Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals in their membership, using the same collective memory of conquest to advocate for a more transnational community. In this way, Valerio-Jiménez shows how different elements of the same collective memory could be utilized for a variety of civil rights initiatives and, in turn, could produce different formulations of Mexican American identity in the US Southwest.

After an introductory chapter narrating the US–Mexico War and its immediate aftermath, Remembering Conquest proceeds chronologically. Each chapter focuses on a single generation of Mexican Americans spanning roughly 20 to 30 years. These generationally divided case studies read as self-contained essays highlighting how Mexican Americans used the collective memory of the conflict to respond to key issues of that time. The structure of Remembering Conquest shows the continuities in collective memory that existed across generations. Further research can be done, however, on the evolution of this collective memory from generation to generation. Mexican Americans consistently used the collective memory of the US–Mexico War in their demands for civil rights, but how did each subsequent generation of Mexican Americans build off or reject the efforts of their mothers and fathers before them? How did the relationships between generations transform Mexican American collective memory, and the way it was marshaled towards demands for civil rights?

Remembering Conquest utilizes a kaleidoscopic range of primary sources. Valerio-Jiménez draws upon Spanish-language newspapers, speeches, memoirs, the papers of mutual aid societies, and historical textbooks to trace the presence of collective memory and interpretations of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. His subversive use of testimonies collected by the agents of historian and ethnologist Hubert Howe Bancroft is particularly clever. In the 1870s, Bancroft collected the testimony of Californios who remained in the territory after the US conquest in 1848. Valerio-Jiménez draws upon these unpublished accounts to reveal how Mexican Americans remembered the transfer of sovereignty in the region, offering a very different interpretation than the Anglocentric, triumphalist narrative Bancroft put forward in his multivolume History of California.

With Remembering Conquest, Valerio-Jiménez has offered us an exceptionally well-researched investigation into the ways Mexican Americans used the memory of conquest and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to push for civil rights in the US Southwest. His work is an important reminder of the impact of legal agreements and their capacity to shape communities, identities, and collective memories across generations.