Thread: Happy Guadalupe Hildago Day

On Guadalupe Hidalgo Day, Here’s Why The U.S. Has Title To The Southwest

The Second Annual "National March for Immigrant Rights" is scheduled to be held on the U.S.-Mexico border on February 2nd.

Last year, the march was also held on February 2nd.

What’s going on here? Why February 2nd?

Answer: February 2nd is the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. That 1848 treaty officially ended the Mexican War and legally turned over most of the Southwest to the United States.

The average American doesn’t know much about the Mexican War and thinks about it less.

But here in Mexico they do think about it—a lot.

In Mexico, everybody knows that "the U.S. took half our national territory."

"La Intervención Norteamericana" has been described—by Mexican writer and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz—as "one of the most unjust wars of conquest in history."

Not only that, but the loss of Mexico’s northern territories has been used as a reason—an excuse, really—for the economic failures of Mexico compared to the economic success of the United States.

According to at least one poll, conducted in 2002 by Zogby in Mexico, 58% of respondents agreed with the statement that "the territory of the United States’ Southwest rightfully belongs to Mexico". [MS Word] Now that’s definitely a different perspective.

In a lighter vein, some Mexicans jokingly quip that, when the U.S. took half of Mexico’s territory, we took the half with the paved roads.

Some Americans are shocked to learn that Mexicans actually have a different historical perspective than we do.

How dare Mexicans say the U.S. took the Southwest from Mexico? How dare they have a different perspective than us?

It’s time for a reality check. Different nations have different historical perspectives on the same historical events. That’s one reason they are different nations.

Of course Mexicans say that the U.S. took (or even "stole") the Southwest! Why wouldn’t they?

We’ve got to get over this naïve belief that everybody in the world has the same values, and that everybody wants to be just like us.

Maybe we should have thought twice about importing millions of people from the only country on earth with an irredentist claim against us—and then encouraging them not to assimilate!

It’s not that the facts of the war are in dispute. A Mexican historical text and an American historical text provide the same facts about the war. It’s just that the "spin" is different. (And nowadays, some of the American treatments of the war are more critical of the war than the Mexican ones.)

Even some of the arguments used on our side are a little lame.

Some try to prove the territory wasn’t conquered. After all, we did pay $15 million dollars for it.

True, but that makes it sound like a garden variety real estate deal. Mexico was soundly defeated, and as defeated nations throughout history, had to abide by the terms of defeat.

It was a conquest. And historically there’s nothing unique about that. Just about every country in the world was formed by some type of conquest and just about all the real estate in the world has been conquered and re-conquered, some of it quite a few times.

That includes Mexico. The contemporary conventional Mexican view is that the evil Spaniards conquered Mexico. But when Hernan Cortes arrived in 1519, the present-day country of Mexico did not exist. The Aztec Empire (itself a product of conquest) only covered about a quarter of present-day Mexico. After the Spaniards conquered that empire, they went on conquering numerous other indigenous entities, including the Tarascan Empire, enemy of the Aztec Empire, thus assembling the enormous colony of “Nueva Españaâ€

Originally Posted by zeezil

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And supposing the Mexican War hadn’t started in 1846, it’s quite probable Mexico would have lost the territories anyway.

The region in question was far from the heartland of Mexico, and sparsely settled. Neither the Spanish Empire nor the independent Mexico which succeeded it did much to develop the area, which was prone to frequent anti-government uprisings.

In the 1840s, there was speculation that the British, the French or the Russians might take try to take it.

But the most likely possibility would have been that growing communities of unassimilated American settlers would have revolted, seceded from Mexico, and joined the U.S.

Actually the Americans and some Spanish in California did exactly that, they revolted and formed the Bear Flag Republic a couple of months before the US declared war on Mexico.

You got to love mexico and their third- world, flawed reasoning.

Mexico cannot exploit the land they have to their economic benefit and they complain about not having more land with which to destroy.

Mexico has done nothing to improve the lives of anybody around the world, including their own citizens.

And a Happy Guadalupe Hidalgo Day to you and yours too!!

This is a neglected holiday. We need some decorations and songs to help celebrate it better.