Before and during the U.S.-Mexican War, what do the United States and Mexico see
is at stake with the “new frontier” in the West?
Mexico and the United States went to war over a vast amount of terrain—what would
amount to half of Mexico when it was all over, beginning of course, with Texas, which the
United States annexed. The U.S. interest in expansion is very plain. Texas we wanted simply
for its fine agricultural production, cotton in particular, which turned out to be the major
commodity. California was the real goal in the far west—to have harbors on the Pacific and
make ourselves a continental empire. We were not terribly interested in New Mexico, Arizona,
Colorado, Utah and Nevada, all of which belonged to Mexico as well, but those territories
needed to be conquered if we were eventually to connect the Atlantic to the Pacific by
railroad, which was already a dream. From the point of view of Mexico, these lands were not
of any great value, but they belonged to Mexico. The lands were theirs and had potential
value in the future. They were not of immediate economic value, but Mexicans knew full well
that Texas was a wonderful place for agriculture. The reports that came back suggested that
Texas and California were potentially very rich provinces. I don’t think either the U.S. or Mexico
especially appreciated the desert. It wouldn’t be until the advent of air conditioning that we
would get excited about the desert country.
Mexico recognized that it needed to hold its northern frontier if for no other reason than to
stop the U.S. from moving even closer to Mexico, then taking the next inevitable step of
moving into Mexico City itself. There was a kind of domino theory at work here.
This was an extraordinarily remote area of the Mexican Republic. In those days, the population
centers were actually the reverse of the way they are today. In 1821, when Mexico became
independent of Spain, California was sparsely populated with something like 3,200 Mexicans.
New Mexico, on the other hand, had a population of about 40,000 and was the dynamo of
the northern frontier. Texas was also sparsely populated with about 2,500 Mexicans. The
folks who lived in this frontier zone essentially lived in islands—enclaves unconnected to one
another. There were no horizontal lines of communication across the Southwest. People who
lived in San Antonio were more apt to think of Saltillo, Monterrey, and Mexico City than they
were Santa Fe. People who lived in Santa Fe were unlikely to communicate with people living
in San Francisco. The gulf between them was enormous.
How did these vast distances shape attitudes and interests of people living in these
remote areas?
Many historians think that Mexico really was not even a nation at this early time but rather a
collection of nations. New Mexico, California, Yucatán, Zacatecas, Oaxaca—these distant
areas from the core of the nation were loyal to their own regional governments. This new
creation, this Republic of Mexico, which had no king nor none of the power that the Spanish
majesty had to demand loyalty and authority, was an abstraction. Mexico was a country in
the process of inventing itself, and these different parts simply didn’t hold together very well
until the center somehow coalesced. I think at this time the center seemed more of a threat to
those parts than a force to bring those parts together.
Revolts were breaking out in Mexico as the government moved more toward centralism in
the mid 1830s. Revolts were breaking out in Sonora, which included a bit of what is Arizona
today. Revolts in California, revolts in New Mexico, revolts in Texas. The Texas revolt happened
to be the most successful one because Texas was on the very edge of the U.S. and could
get arms, moral support and manpower from the U.S. Other distant places like Yucatán broke
away at the same time too, and stayed away several years before it was brought back into the
Mexican Republic.
It seems to me that Mexicans were ambivalent in their loyalty toward Mexico to the extent
that Mexico could not deliver the goods. Mexico could not defend them with troops. The
Mexican economy was not strong enough to furnish manufactured goods to frontiersmen at
reasonable prices and link the country to it economically. Mexican politics were in chaos and
the frontiersmen felt that they were neglected politically. Those problems left frontiersmen with
no compelling reason to be loyal to Mexico, but rather to look to themselves and after their
own self interest.
Some of the leading Californians thought the answer to this might be to create an
independent California or, perhaps, one under British, French or American protectorate. There
were a variety of options. New Mexicans thought, on the eve of the U.S.-Mexican War, about
breaking away from Mexico and forming an independent republic. We don’t know how many
New Mexicans did this, but there are some documents suggesting a separatist sentiment.
And it’s perfectly understandable that leaders in these provinces would look to their own fates
and not to the central government to solve their own problems for their families.
How did these settlers take their fates in hand and resolve problems that were
unique to their province?
Given the sparse population of these northern provinces, one of the principal goals was to
find more sources of populations. Living in Santa Fe, for example, imposed an isolation from
the rest of Mexico. It was a 40-day journey from Santa Fe to Chihuahua. From Mexico City,
the journey by wagon could have taken as much as six months. So where did New Mexicans
sell products? The U.S. looked like a very attractive market. It was a 60-day journey across
the Santa Fe trail to Missouri but the trail was actually more level and safer in many ways than
traveling through the Apache-infested country of northern Mexico.
By the time of the war with Mexico, New Mexicans were enormously dependent on the United
States for trade goods. That included largely manufactured goods made of metal such as
hinges, hair pins and scissors. It also included manufactured cloth that was produced more
inexpensively by machines in the United States than could be made by hand in Mexico. Silver
was the principal commodity of the Mexicans. Americans were drawn west to trade their
goods and bring silver back into the U.S., a place that had been short of hard cash. Silver
drove the Santa Fe trade.
New Mexicans thought of themselves as surrounded by hostile Indians, and indeed they
were. —Navajos to the west, Utes to the northwest, Comanches to the northeast, Apaches
to the south. One could go on and break these groups down into still smaller entities as
the New Mexicans did, who understood Apaches, for example, by many different names—
Gileños, Mimbreños, Lipanes. These totaled 20 or 30 different groups of hostile Indians
that surrounded New Mexico. The danger that the U.S. posed was, in many ways, less
dramatic than the danger that Indians posed on the eve of the war between the United States
and Mexico.
The desire on the part of many Mexican frontiersmen to bring in more colonists from
somewhere was acute. “How are we going to defend ourselves in these remote provinces,
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Source E • Civic Discussion
unless there are more of us? If we are surrounded by Indians, then we need to increase our
numbers too.” But the odds of getting immigrants from Mexico were really very slight. Central
Mexico was so far away, so to look to the United States seemed to make a great deal of
sense. As the Americans came in, the Mexican frontiersmen thought of this as a real boon,
by and large. It didn’t mean that they were in love with Anglo-Americans, nor thought that
Anglo-American culture was something that was without its dangers or threats to them. But
it simply meant they would be more secure with more gun-carrying people who were likely
to help them fight Indians. On the eve of the U.S. war with Mexico, relations with Indians had
actually worsened rather than improved. One sees that in the laments of frontiersmen, as
they begged Mexico’s central government for military help. There’s a wonderful quote from
the legislature of the state of Chihuahua, suggesting that Mexicans in Chihuahua essentially
couldn’t travel the roads, farm or ranch without Indians’ permission—that, in fact, they raised
cattle and sheep for the benefit of Indians, who would come and take them. Apaches, on the
other hand, boasted at one point that they allowed the Mexicans to raise sheep for them and
that they never wanted to take all of the sheep for fear that their herds would be decimated
and they would have no fresh sources.
I think the question of worsening Indian relations can’t be understood apart from the western
movement of Anglo-Americans at this time. We think of Anglo-American frontiersmen as
being hardy souls wandering out to conquer the wilderness. Mexicans thought of those very
same frontiersmen not as hardy pioneers but rather gun merchants—that they were selling
guns to Indians who used those guns to take Mexican cattle and horses to sell to the AngloAmericans in exchange for ammunition. So Mexicans essentially had no control over the
frontier. They no longer controlled the arms trade—they no longer controlled ammunition.
During the 1830s and 40s, Indians increasingly found markets for stolen goods with the
Americans and the military situation just simply deteriorated. New Mexico was braced for
war with Navajos just a month before Stephen W. Kearny marched over the Santa Fe trail to
invade New Mexico. So, New Mexico really was at war on several fronts simultaneously.
As we think about Anglo-American/Mexican relations during this time, the emphasis naturally
is on conflict. We have a war heating up. But underneath the surface, there was also a terrific
amount of accommodation as Anglo-Americans moved in, lived with Mexicans in New Mexico
and California, and intermarried. The very same Anglo-Americans who left the United States
with racist attitudes wound up as minorities in Mexican communities. They adapted and,
indeed, embraced Catholicism, embraced the Spanish language, and literally embraced
Mexican women with whom they had very close relationships. So, the Mexican frontier
became a place of considerable harmony even as there was conflict on other levels.
can the quotes be seen in this excerpt“The American army is unjustly invading our territory, and the only thing we are doing is defending our homes and our dignity.”
“Our manifest destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
“The war represented the triumph of expansionism over the principle of self-determination,”
