Jigsaws
Over Thanksgiving, I poured over a jigsaw puzzle with my five year old son: the United States fragmented into 200 pieces. As we slotted the pieces together — linking Mississippi to Alabama along the Gulf Coast, looping the Great Lakes together — he asked me whether America had always looked like this; then looked incredulous when I told him no, tracing the line of the 13 colonies.
A jigsaw puzzle’s an apt metaphor for the United States — a patchwork of territories, most of them acquired through commerce and conquest (two quintessentially American pastimes). But explicitly recognizing this turns the American immigration story on its head. Once you put the fact that the United States’ borders were not always fixed where they lie now center-stage, the entire perspective shifts. Who’s an immigrant? Who’s a foreigner? Who’s a local?
Nowhere can you tell this story better than in New Mexico. When I visited Santa Fé in 2018, it was snowing: the strings of dried chilis hanging from lampposts in the main square were covered white, whipped by an angry frozen wind. The unexpected cold added to my sense of disorientation. Standing in the city’s main plaza, the square bordered by low adobe buildings in different shades of terra-cotta, my eyes told me I was in Mexico, not the United States of America.
Once, this was Mexico. The Palace of the Governors has stood in the Plaza for four hundred years, ever since Pedro de Peralta founded the city of Santa Fe in 1610, in the name of the King of Spain. By the 19th century, New Mexico was the economic dynamo and political capital of the northern borderlands, with 40,000 inhabitants living mostly close to Santa Fe.
New Mexico only became American territory at the end of the bloody Mexican-American war, when in 1848 Mexico was forced to cede almost half its territory — lands making up the present-day states of California, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — and relinquish any claims to Texas.
So what does the story of New Mexico — and the people who stayed these as the border moved over them — say about American identity — and American views on Mexican immigration?
Mestizaje
The story doesn’t begin in 1848. Long before it was New Mexico - 10,000 years before — the land belonged to the Pueblo people. Other groups arrived later — people like the Comanche, the Apache, the Navajo. Millennia later, in 1598, the first Spanish colonizers arrived in New Mexico. But it was not until 100 years later that a reconquista finally secured the territory for the Spanish Empire with a new group of settlers, primarily from the northern Mexican town of Zacatecas.
Yet although these settlers came to hold New Mexico for the Spanish crown, their own roots already spoke to mestizaje — mixing. The Zacatecas colonists were mestizos and mulattoes — their ancestry mixing white, Black and Indian. The settlers also brought with them genizaros, or enslaved Indians: the settlers’ indentured household servants. For three centuries New Mexico — far away from the center of the Empire — developed a unique culture in relative isolation.
Then in 1821 the colony became the northernmost frontier of a newly independent Mexico. Caste — the dozens of gradations of race that had shaped power and politics in the Spanish Empire — was abolished. No more mestizaje. No more español. No more caste. Everyone was a Mexican.
Until, 25 years later, the Americans arrived.
Oh, those Americans, with their heads full of dreams of “Manifest Destiny” — the idea that the American republic was divinely favored, destined to one day spread across the North American continent. But when the first Anglo-Americans arrived in New Mexico, they were the immigrants. And the Americans were not “good immigrants”. They aggressively pushed for land grants and were often reluctant to assimilate into Mexican culture. Although Americans took up Mexican citizenship when it was felt to be advantageous to them, they openly aspired to US acquisition.
in 1846 the Americans finally invaded: the scale of the US victory left a weakened Mexico state with little option but to sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Mexico’s vast northern borderlands became the American southwest — and New Mexicans became citizens of the United States. The treaty transformed New Mexicans, overnight, into “whites” (there being, in 1848, no room for any other kind of citizen).
“Spanish Americans”
But were these New Americans really white enough? Not according to Congress, who in 1850 refused to grant New Mexico statehood. Anglo elites on the East Coast were reluctant to admit a state full of mixed-blood Catholic Mexicans and “Savage Indians” into the Union. Ultimately, it would take sixty years — and the invention of a whole new “Spanish American” ethnicity — for New Mexico to finally become an American state.
Starting in the 1880s, Civic Officials, Artists, and Boosters — Anglo officials who had moved here from other places and also had a lot to gain in New Mexico becoming a full State — began propagating a mythology of whiteness, spinning a fairy tale they found a pretext for in the colonial language of Spanish conquest. These advocates for New Mexican statehood told a story in which the people of the state were not Mexican — not indigenous, not mestizo — but pure Spanish. The creation of this identity opened up the possibility of statehood, by suggesting that once upon a time, New Mexicans’ pure-blood Spanish ancestors had travelled north and — cut off from the rest of the Spanish Empire — forged a distinct, white identity over the course of 300 years of colonization.
Striving to become an American state, New Mexican elites rejected their Mexican roots. They created themselves a new European history, dressed up in Spanish lace. Family photos of New Mexicans from the 1920s and 1930s show women wearing mantilla like in Spain: men wearing sashes and broad brimmed hats. Founders’ Day's events were started, often by non-Hispanics, celebrating the Reconquista. Participants put on Conquistador helmets and swords and armor, marching to celebrate a Spanish victory against the indigenous New Mexicans.
This reinvention not only helped make the case for American statehood, finally awarded to New Mexico in 1912; it also worked to separate New Mexicans from immigrants arriving in the south, who in the 1920s and 1930s were subject to discrimination and forcible deportation (remember Olvera Street?) There were also economic incentives at work too: in the early 20th century, Santa Fe became the centre of a booming tourist industry that traded on an idealized version of colonial history — all romantic desert skies, wise Indians and Spanish passion.
But this is myth-making: modern science tells another story. In the past decade, DNA tests have shown that the average New Mexican has roughly 30 percent Native American DNA, as well as African and European genes. Some New Mexicans have also discovered Jewish ancestry, because among New Mexico’s original settlers were a number of forcibly converted Sephardic Jews, fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. A pure-bred “Spanish American” colony never existed. Yet in an appropriately ironic historical twist, under new Spanish laws designed to make reparations for 16th century religious persecution, these New Mexicans are now eligible to apply for a Spanish passport and become “Spanish Americans” — by virtue of the very non-whiteness that the original inventors of “Spanish America” sought to erase.
There are clear parallels in this New Mexican history with the politics of present-day Puerto Rico, another poor Latino territory acquired through war (this time in 1898), then denied statehood (for over a century, and counting.…). But more broadly, New Mexico’s story is a reminder that borders — and not just people — move too. It’s a reminder that the story of Latino immigration to the US doesn’t begin with people leaping border fences, but with the border itself moving over people.
Yet this isn’t just a story about people staying put: this is a story about immigration too. New Mexico’s story is a story about wave upon wave of newcomers arriving, asserting their power, whitewashing the past. It’s a reminder that one quarter of what is today the contiguous United States of America was once part of the United States of Mexico: and a reminder that once, white Americans were the unwanted immigrants.
As any five year old will tell you, perspective is a powerful thing.
With thanks to Rob Martinez, state historian of New Mexico, and Estevan Rael-Galvez for interviews in 2018.
Read More
On American Immigrants in the Southwest:
Benton-Cohen, Katherine. Borderline Americans. Harvard University Press, 2009.
Tyler, Daniel. "Anglo-American Penetration of the Southwest: The View from New Mexico." The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 75, no. 3 (1972): 325-38.
Henson, M.S., “Anglo-American Colonization”, Texas State Historical Association
On Spanish American identity:
Montgomery, C. "Becoming "Spanish-American": Race and Rhetoric in New Mexico Politics, 1880-1928." Journal of American Ethnic History 20, no. 4 (2001): 59-84
Nieto-Phillips, J. M. The language of blood: The making of Spanish-American identity in New Mexico, 1880s-1930s. UNM Press, 2008.
Valdes, A., ‘New Mexico Hispanics discovering and embracing their indigenous roots;, The New Mexican, 2 July 2016
On Reevaluating Ancestry and Identity:
Ebright, M. ‘Genizaros’, New Mexico Office of the State Historian, http://newmexicohistory.org/people/genizaros
Romero, S., ‘Indian Slavery Once Thrived in New Mexico. Latinos Are Finding Family Ties to It’, New York Times, 28 January 2018
Jones, S., ‘US Hispanics descended from Sephardic Jews seek Spanish citizenship’, The Guardian, 26 November 2018