Laura E. Gómez - Manifest destinies: the making of the Mexican American race

Laura E. Gmez

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2018 by New York University

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gmez, Laura E., 1964 author.

Title: Manifest destinies : the making of the Mexican American race / Laura E. Gmez.

Description: Second edition. | New York : NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN | ISBN 9781479882618 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479894284 (pb : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Mexican AmericansRace identity. | Mexican AmericansLegal status, laws, etc. | Mexican AmericansColonizationHistory19th century. | RacismUnited StatesHistory19th century. | United StatesRace relationsHistory19th century. | Mexican AmericansNew MexicoHistory19th century. | RacismNew MexicoHistory19th century. | New MexicoRace relationsHistory19th century.

Classification: LCC E184.M5 G625 2017 | DDC 973/.046872dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012909

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For my son, Alejandro

Its hard to predict how academic books will fare. Often written for tenure (not the case with this book), they may suffer from being written for scholars in a narrow field, and most receive little attention. Once in a while, an author is lucky enough to publish the right book at the right time. That may be the case with Manifest Destinies, first published by New York University Press in 2007 and now released in a second edition on its tenth anniversary.

I routinely hear from people who say how moved they have been by reading Manifest Destinies. In some seventy-five community and academic talks on the book, Ive been impressed with the hungeramong Latinos and non-Latinos alikefor understanding this period of American history and what it may tell us about the present. I am grateful for the feedback I received at these settings, as well as for the comments provided in dozens of book reviews in the press, blogs, and academic journals in the fields of history, sociology, ethnic studies, and law. As a graduate of APS elementary, middle, and high schools who learned none of this history as a student, I am heartened to know that future generations of students will be exposed to this chapter of American history.

In part the success of Manifest Destinies is due to a naturally expanding audience. Latinos are now 17 percent of the total U.S. population,

Todays Latino college students can choose to major in Chicana/o studies, Latina/o studies, or ethnic studies more generally, or they can opt to take just a course or two in these programs. While Chicana/o, Mexican American, or Latina/o studies programs exist across the Southwest and in midwestern states including Illinois, Michigan, and Minnesota, they are most numerous in California. It is not surprising that Chicano/Latino studies courses are found on virtually every higher education campus in California, a state with more than fifteen million Latinos, from community colleges to research universities. Several months before this book went to press, I had the honor of guest lecturing about Manifest Destinies to eight hundred undergraduates taking the introductory Chicano studies course at the University of California, Los Angeles. Latino students are putting pressure on colleges and universities to offer courses taught by a growing cadre of PhDs in Chicana/o studies, comparative ethnic studies, history, and the social sciences. Building on the earlier, founding generation of Mexican American scholars, these and other scholars have created an exciting interdisciplinary field that draws on virtually every traditional discipline in the social sciences and the humanities. The blossoming of Chicana/o and Latina/o studies has occurred at the same time that critical race theory has taken root in the academy. This field started in law but has branched out to a variety of other scholarly fields, including education, criminology, ethnic studies, and the social science disciplines. Manifest Destinies, then, arrived at an opportune time in the evolution of two scholarly fields central to its analysis.

Manifest Destinies entered the scene when readers were increasingly interested in the growing Latino population and its origins. It gave voice to those who had the sense that the conventional history of the American West was, at best, lacking and, at worst, malicious in its omission of the force Americans used to establish control over the Mexican and indigenous populations in the vast territory it took from Mexico. Manifest Destinies provided a necessary correction to the history of race and racism in nineteenth-century America, given its focus on slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. This book reached beyond white-over-black oppression to tell a connected yet different story about imperial expansion west and south that produced distinctive racial dynamics involving Native Americans and Mexican Americans. I hope this anniversary edition of Manifest Destinies appeals to both new and returning readers who seek a more complete history of the Southwest and the original Mexican Americans whose destinies, along with other social groups, unfolded in unexpected ways.

As I was writing this book in 20067, there was a sense of the burgeoning political power wielded by Hispanics. In 2005 Antonio Villaraigosa appeared on the cover of Newsweek with the banner Latino Power! as the newly elected mayor of Los Angeles, the first mayor of Mexican origin to lead the city in more than 130 years. Manifest Destinies appeared in the same month that Americans elected Barack Obama president, an event that gave great hope to so many, especially African Americans and other people of color.

Yet after two Obama presidential terms, a very different attitude toward immigrants grips the nation. Obama presided over more deportations than any other president, and his Homeland Security apparatus put in place some of the most draconian immigration policies ever implemented, including E-Verify and Secure Communities, These laws and law enforcement practices led to pervasive violations of the civil rights of Latino-looking Americans, a particularized variant of racial profiling by police without regard to whether Latinos were born in the United States or had a legal right to be in the country. As this book goes to press, the nation is six months into the presidency of a man who explicitly campaigned on an anti-Mexican platform.

In the decade since Manifest Destinies was published, Americans have ricocheted through several popular ideas about race and racial inequality. For example, the