This book analyzes the ways collective memories of the US-Mexico War have shaped Mexican Americans' civil rights struggles over several generations. As the first Latinx people incorporated into the nation, Mexican Americans were offered US citizenship by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war. Because the 1790 Naturalization Act declared whites solely eligible for citizenship, the treaty pronounced Mexican Americans to be legally white. While their incorporation as citizens appeared as progress towards racial justice and the electorate's diversification, their second-class citizenship demonstrated a retrenchment in racial progress. Over several generations, civil rights activists summoned conquest memories to link Mexican Americans' poverty, electoral disenfranchisement, low educational attainment, and health disparities to structural and institutional inequalities resulting from racial retrenchments. Activists also recalled the treaty's citizenship guarantees to push for property rights, protection from vigilante attacks, and educational reform. Omar Valerio-Jimenez addresses the politics of memory by exploring how succeeding generations reinforced or modified earlier memories of conquest according to their contemporary social and political contexts. The book also examines collective memories in the US and Mexico to illustrate transnational influences on Mexican Americans and to demonstrate how community and national memories can be used strategically to advance political agendas.
Omar Valerio-Jimenez is professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Remembering Conquest fills in the wide gap in historical knowledge about the Mexican American experience and its role in civil rights history. For the journalism historian, the book offers an introduction to many early Spanish-languages newspapers, journalists, and editors whose stories have long been largely overlooked in the canon of American journalism history."--American Journalism Omar Valerio-Jimenez develops an important intellectual and cultural analysis of Mexican American life and war memory following the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. . . . [His] use of historical memory to understand ethnic Mexican oppression, mobilization, and identity-making allows scholars to bridge connections between historical eras usually understood as separate entities and asserts agency to historical actors, resulting in a crucial addition to the historiography of the U.S. Southwest."--Western Historical Quarterly Valerio-Jimenez 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."--American Journal of Legal History The book's six chapters describe how Mexican Americans created their own social, political, and cultural scripts to condemn Anglo American racism between the mid-nineteenth century and the late twentieth century."--Pacific Historical Review
