Undermining Manifest Destiny: Interethnic Relationships in Tucson, - PDF document

Undermining Manifest Destiny: Interethnic Relationships in Tucson, 1860-1930 Sal Acosta University of Arizona Early in 1848, as the Mexican War was winding down, Sam Houston spoke to the Democratic Party in New York. In a narrative that he must have repeated many times since the independence of Texas in 1836, Houston recounted his interpretation of the events that led to the conflict, essentially, laying all the blame on Mexico. He proceeded to call for the annexation of the entire Mexican territory. American expansionist ambitions with regard to Mexico existed well before John O’Sullivan coined his famous phrase of manifest destiny in 1845 and they persisted in some form into the twentieth century, though the 1840s and 1850s produced their most vitriolic enunciation. These two decades witnessed the military and cultural encounter between the peoples of both countries and largely set the tone for how Americans viewed Mexicans for decades to come. A focal shift occurred during this period: the denigration of Mexico as a nation evolved into racialized characterizations against Mexicans as a people. The topic of difference had existed as narrative motif before 1845, but most accounts employed exotic, rather than racial undertones. The annexation of Texas in 1845 brought the imminence of military confrontation to national attention and produced an increasing interest in Mexico, its culture, and its people. Thus, the so- called Mexican question started to receive much coverage from travelers, pseudo-scientists, periodicals, and expansionist politicians. As these pundits offered answers to the Mexican question, race became the primary concern, especially, when they discussed whether the U.S. should condone the national and personal amalgamation of the two countries.

2 The tenet of manifest destiny rested on the premise that Anglo-Saxons naturally dominated darker races, and since Mexicans were an inferior race, Americans were destined to rule over them. Any privileges Americans granted Mexicans would simply prove their benevolence. The discourse of manifest destiny next concluded that Mexicans, as members of a mixed race, were not only inferior to whites but that they belonged to a different species altogether, or that, at the very least, they needed American supervision because they lacked republican virtue. Pseudo-scientists first approached the Mexican question by asserting that Mexican skulls and the organization of their brains appeared more “animal than intellectual.” Similarly, they contended that the small size of Mexicans—and Mexican animals as well— demonstrated their increasing degeneration. They added that their physical, behavioral, and intellectual inferiority resulted from racial mixing, since they retained the deceitfulness and immorality of Spaniards and the stupidity of Indians. The descriptions of the complexions of Mexicans revealed as much racism as mere perplexity. Narrators used terms such as yellow, Indian, black, slightly white, brown, swarthy, olive, and combinations of all these. These experts argued that animals from different species could not produce healthy and fertile offspring, and since humans descended from many different and incompatible origins, mixed children would be weak and infertile. Naturalists concluded that Mexican mestizos, like their mulatto counterparts in the U.S., would fade into extinction. Some Americans openly worried that mixed breeds could decide political outcomes or that a person of Mexican origin could, in theory, become president. Thus one must reconcile the contradiction between the anti-Mexican rhetoric of the discourse of manifest destiny and the prevalence of interethnic unions after the Mexican War. It becomes clear that the racial theories of the nation-building project held little sway over the Americans who migrated to the southwest.

3 Sam Houston concluded his speech to the Democratic Party by inviting his audience to visit the conquered territories and “look out for the beautiful señoritas… , and if you should choose to annex them, no doubt the result of this annexation will be a most powerful and delightful evidence of civilization.” The suggestion that Americans enter into relationships with Mexican women, even within the context of conquest, was in fact a controversial issue, since it squarely drew attention to the sensitive issue of ethnic amalgamation. Most politicians, newspaper editors, and fiction writers generally embraced the discourse of manifest destiny and depicted Mexicans negatively, but Mexican women frequently escaped their scorn. Like Houston, other Americans spoke with a similar sense of entitlement. A traveler maintained that it must be “in order of Providence, that [Mexican] women, so justly to be admired, are to become wives and mothers of a better race.” Others said that Mexican women developed the strongest of attachments once their “heart [was] touched by the blue eyes, light hair, and fair complexion of some…Anglo-Saxon.” They advised “all timid bachelors to go to Mexico at once.” No one, however, expressed the sense of entitlement better than the editor of the Mexico City volunteer newspaper, The American Star . He cheerfully summed up the attitude some soldiers had towards their relationships with Mexican women when he described a recent interethnic wedding: “Hurrah for annexation!” he wrote, “No more arguments on the policy of annexing Mexico, but go to work and annex her daughters.” Indeed, American qualms over the racial impurity of Mexicans differed when they focused their attention solely on the value of women as the spoils of war. Some voices claimed that the war had begun in part because of the jealousy of Mexican men over the admiration Mexican women felt towards the superior American men. The discourse of manifest destiny also shaped what some men wrote about Mexican women. Early in the war, a Philadelphia newspaper

4 predicted that Americans would eventually Anglo-Saxonize Mexico, but, the paper explained, first “Yankee young fellows and the pretty senoritas” should complete the annexation. After the war, two Cincinnati newspapers disagreed on how the U.S. should civilize Mexico, but both maintained that intermarriages should be part of the project: one proposed that Americans should break the stubborn spirit of Mexicans, Christianize them, and “marry their young women,” while the other responded that the effort need not involve violence, that if the nation indeed believed in its “manifest and inevitable destiny to infuse Anglo-Saxon notions, liberty, and blood into the Mexicans,” then marriages offered the best path to reaching that objective. More than just informal liaisons, the practice of intermarriage became visible during and after the Mexican war. Some Americans probably welcomed newspaper accounts that more than a dozen volunteers returning with Mexican wives, but others most likely reacted with disdain at the reality of interethnic relationships. Travel narratives of the war period almost always delineate a clear distinction between Mexican men and women. American male travelers made a connection between their interests, their attitudes about Mexican men, and their admiration for Mexican women. They almost universally vilified Mexican men as ignorant, indolent, inefficient, treacherous, and mendacious, but consistently included positive descriptions of women in their letters and accounts of the war, typically by underscoring that the women were superior to the men. American men most likely viewed Mexican men, not simply as war enemies, but also as competitors or obstacles in the post-war period. Some narratives, however, frequently offered warnings that focused on racial characteristics. In some cases, a traveler might repeatedly pay compliments to Mexican women for their beauty and manners, yet make occasional generalizations to explain that “their