Manifest Destinies, Second Edition

by Laura E. Gómez

  Moreover, it appears that the Spanish racial order was especially susceptible to challenge in frontier areas such as New Mexico.23 In these settings, even those with “impure blood” (i.e., indigenous ancestry) could transform themselves into “civilized” people in the context of a generally uncivilized, Indian-dominated frontier.24 Moreover, the Mexican government began to use the promise of upward mobility to induce settlers to its remote northern frontier. Anthropologist Martha Menchaca concludes that, over the centuries, “blatant racial disparities became painfully intolerable to the non-white population and generated the conditions for their movement toward the northern frontier, where the racial order was relaxed and people of color had the opportunity to own land and enter most occupations.”25 These fluid and dynamic processes suggest that the Mexican frontier and probably Latin America generally were places where racial identity had a strong performance aspect—where people knowingly and variably performed race in different social contexts.26

  The racially mixed people who settled Mexico’s frontier regions of Nuevo México, Alta California, and Tejas were only nominally “Spanish,” bearing out the phenomenon described by Menchaca. Consider, for example, the first Mexican census of Los Angeles, which in 1781 listed twelve settler families. Four of the twelve male settlers were described as Indian, two as Spanish, two as black, and four as some combination of those three groups; their twelve female partners were identified as Indian or as mixed Indian/black, or their race was not listed.27 In other words, among the two dozen first “Spanish” settlers of Los Angeles, only two settlers claimed to be Spanish, while twenty-two claimed other racial statuses. Spanish colonial officials and priests frequently characterized settlers in New Mexico as “mestizos, mulatos, and zambohijos,” that is, deeply mixed among Indians, Africans, and Spaniards.28

  The very first Spanish settlers, who arrived with Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s expedition of 1540, included twice as many mestizos and Indians as Spaniards.29 Fifty-eight years later, the 130 settlers in Oñate’s group included only thirteen married couples, so that the remaining men in the party turned to “Indian women, black slaves, and to Apache captives” for sexual and marital partners.30 In his pathbreaking study of New Mexico’s Spanish colonial period, Gutiérrez concludes that extensive racial mixture characterized the earliest waves of Spanish settlers.

  Those who called themselves Spaniards in seventeenth-century New Mexico were biologically a motley group. At the time of the colony’s conquest, the soldier-settlers were almost equally of peninsular and creole origin . . . [although they both] proclaimed themselves españoles. They did so primarily to differentiate themselves ethnically as conquerors from the indios, and not as statements of pedigree.31

  With little additional migration from Spain to the region, by 1680 New Mexico’s “Spanish” population consisted overwhelmingly of persons born in the region and of mixed racial ancestry.32

  What is more, the most active period of Spanish settlement in New Mexico did not occur until after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.33 In what one scholar has labeled “the most successful native revolt against European occupation in America,” the Pueblo Indians succeeded in completely removing Spanish settlers from New Mexico for twelve years.34 During that time, key leaders of the revolt died and the Pueblos struggled to maintain their unity in the face of linguistic, cultural, and other differences. Remarkably, a truce occurred in 1692, when the Pueblos allowed the surviving Spanish settlers who had retreated to El Paso (now El Paso, Texas) to return to New Mexico (though smaller anti-Spanish rebellions occurred as late as 1700).35

  In one of the most comprehensive analyses to date, historian José Antonio Esquibel has documented the efforts to recruit settlers to New Mexico after 1692. Such recruitment was necessary because relatively few of the pre-Revolt settlers chose to return. According to Esquibel, the lure of settling the frontier was especially strong for those people of mixed Indian/Spanish and black/Spanish parentage, who, by virtue of signing up as frontier settlers, “were given access to these opportunities for upward social mobility and other privileges denied them in their places of origin.”36 For instance, it was settlers recruited mostly from Mexico City who traveled nine months to reach New Mexico in 1694 to settle Santa Cruz de la Cañada (one of the sites of the rebellion against the Americans described in the previous chapter). Although more than 90 percent of the adults in this group were born in Mexico, they were listed as Spaniards (españoles).37 Overall, Esquibel concludes that the settlers who traveled to New Mexico in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were “ethnically and culturally diverse,” coming from fifteen regions and sixty-three towns in Mexico, as well as from other countries, including those in Africa, Asia, and Europe.38

  On the eve of the nineteenth century, New Mexican society was characterized by a five-tier racial hierarchy.39 The highest status racial group—and numerically the smallest—consisted of those individuals who immigrated from Spain or who had two parents born in Spain. Below them was a much larger group of Indian/Spanish mestizos, many of whom had become settlers in order to gain the advantages of upward racial mobility. Most Mexican elites were mestizos, but all Spaniards (in the top group) were elite as well. The third group—known as genízaros—consisted of Indians who had forcibly or voluntarily left their communities to join Spanish-speaking settlements and who had acculturated to varying degrees.40 Below genízaros were Pueblo Indians, who had independent communities but who regularly interacted with mestizo settlements. At the bottom of the racial hierarchy were other Indians—the Apaches, Comanches, Navajos, Utes, and others—who resisted Spanish domination to the extent that they operated outside the colonial society.

  To describe this hierarchy is not to deny the extensive mixture that existed in this society, as we have described. Thus, the five-tier hierarchy obscured extensive racial mixture, even as it sought to naturalize the five categories as formally comprehensive. Indeed, it is ironic that neither blacks nor Afro-mestizos appear as discrete groups in this hierarchy. Their official omission reflects the extent of racial mixture but also the fact that, precisely because of antiblack racism, blacks and black mestizos had even greater incentives to “improve” their racial status via strategies such as marriage, moving to the frontier, or wealth accumulation. Anthropologist Paul Kraemer points to the “disappearance” of blacks from colonial Albuquerque to illustrate the plasticity of race. For example, Albuquerque’s 1750 census showed a partially black population of 14 percent, but forty years later it had fallen to 0.5 percent, despite the presence of the same families in the two censuses.41 Kraemer would accordingly urge us to view skeptically New Mexico’s official 1750 census showing nearly six thousand “Spanish” settlers; the evidence suggests that the vast majority were racially mixed persons.42 Additionally, DNA research suggests that New Mexico’s Mexican American population is significantly more Indian than European in ancestry.43

  Looking from a distance at the Spanish colonial racial order in New Mexico at the turn of the nineteenth century, two contradictory trends are notable. On the one hand, there was increasing and inevitable racial and cultural mixture. The five categories in the hierarchy already represented extensive racial mixture, but additional racial mixture occurred across these racial categories, though the record does not tell us how large such subgroups may have been. For example, with genízaro slaves living in mestizo households came the promise of additional sexual unions (within the household, as between a male head of household and female genízaro servant, and across mestizo households) and the question of whether the children of those unions would blend into the mestizo settler population or inherit their parents’ status as genízaros. Kraemer speculates that “by marriage or some degree of economic success, the transition from genízaro to vecino [status as a Spanish settler] occurred almost routinely in the late colonial period.”44 Additionally, there were mestizo-Pueblo social-sexual unions. Based on his exhaustive analysis of census records, sacramental records, and
muster rolls, Esquibel concludes that there were mestizos who lived in Pueblo communities and Pueblo Indians who lived in Spanish settlements, and they “straddled the cultural boundaries between the Pueblo Indian communities and the Spanish communities.”45

  On the other hand, it was precisely such ubiquitous and multidimensional racial mixture that spawned a hardening of formal racial categories. It is at times of great racial mixture, in other words, that we would expect to see the rhetoric of racial difference and accentuated discourses of racial purity/impurity. The ultimate effect of the solidified racial order, in turn, was to facilitate and justify the Spanish colonizers’ exploitation of indigenous peoples. Literary scholar Rosaura Sánchez has observed a similar dynamic in eighteenth-century California:

  The othering of the Indians, both neophyte [Christian] and gentile [“heathen”], perceived by the Californios as culturally, linguistically, and ethnically different, serves therefore not only to mask the fact that a large percentage of the original colonists as well as later arrivals from Mexico shared the same Indian blood but more significantly to legitimate the conquest and exploitation of the Indians on the basis of a racial and cultural superiority.46

  In this way, the fiction of racial difference as signified by the “pure,” oppositional categories of “Spanish” and “Indian” became naturalized and taken for granted in Spanish colonial New Mexico.

  Race in New Mexico on the Eve of the U.S. Invasion

  By the early nineteenth century, the pressures on the caste system from an increasingly mestizo population had become too great for Mexico and the other Spanish colonies; too many mestizos who had been arbitrarily denied rights and privileges were growing wary of Spanish rule. Consider that by 1810 more than 80 percent of Mexico’s population of 6 million was either mestizo (Spanish/Indian mestizo and/or Spanish/African mestizo; more than 1.3 million) or Indian (almost 3.7 million).47 Motivated largely by the need to incorporate the majority of Mexico’s people (as well as those of other tenuously held colonies), and in an attempt to block Mexican independence, Spain in 1810 initiated a variety of changes to improve the position of Indians and mestizos.48 These changes included lifting occupational restrictions on mestizos and Indians, releasing Indians from paying tribute to the Crown, and, instead, making them liable for taxation like other subjects. Two years later, Spain abolished the racial castes and promised formal equality regardless of racial status. In large part, these changes reflected Spain’s instability as a colonial power and proved a harbinger for Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821. The Mexican Republic declared mestizos and Indians equal citizens. The fledgling Mexican legislature banned the future importation of slaves from Africa and mandated that current black slaves would be free after an additional ten years of servitude.

  What were the effects of these liberal trends on New Mexico, the most populous of Mexico’s northern provinces? The immediate impact of the new racial equality legislation was to endanger Pueblo Indians’ property rights. Mestizo settlers quickly seized on the equality initiative to challenge the size of land grants to the Pueblos and to encroach on Pueblo lands that adjoined mestizo settlements.49 Sando thus notes that the equal rights legislation, in New Mexico, “soon became the right for all equally to take Pueblo land.”50 At the same time, the liberalization of racial restrictions went hand in hand with an anticlerical, republican effort to secularize the missions, which substantially increased Pueblos’ autonomy. Anthropologist Alfonso Ortiz notes that, by the 1830s, only five priests were assigned to the Pueblos, leaving them “free to openly pursue the rich ceremonial life and ways of being that had secretly sustained them through the long years of persecution and oppression.”51

  A final noteworthy shift that occurred during the twenty-five-year Mexican rule of New Mexico was the liberalization of immigration restrictions to allow Euro-Americans to settle Mexico’s northern frontier.52 Given the dual problems of a large, hostile Indian population and the inability to suppress them militarily, Mexico opted to encourage immigration as the only feasible alternative. Mexico actively encouraged Mexican migration to its northern regions, offering land grants to attract settlers to the frontier (see Chapter 4). Mexico also encouraged American settlers, but with the strict requirements that such immigrants become naturalized Mexican citizens and convert to Catholicism (if they were not already Catholic). Historian Richard White estimates that as many as 40 percent of the American immigrants to Texas in the 1820s ignored those requirements—thus becoming the first “illegal aliens.”53 Unlike that to Texas, American immigration to New Mexico, both legal and illegal, during the Mexican period proceeded at a much slower pace. Only small numbers of Euro-American men arrived in northern New Mexico before 1850, primarily engaging in fur trapping or trading along the Santa Fe and Chihuahua trails. Some of these immigrants married or lived with native Mexican and Indian women, producing yet another class of racially mixed persons in New Mexico, however small it might have been.54

  In considering how the Anglo-American racial order intersected with the Spanish-Mexican racial order in the Southwest in the middle of the nineteenth century, we must begin with the preceding two centuries of Anglo-American presence in the Americas.55 Anglo-Americans’ relations with various Indian peoples were heavily shaped by two related demographic facts.56 First, Anglo-Americans were heavily outnumbered by indigenous people, whom they considered culturally and racially inferior. In this context, there was no possibility of either short-term military conquest or large-scale enslavement of Indian peoples. Second, the indigenous population of North America consisted of thousands of linguistically and culturally diverse tribes. Thus, while Indians outnumbered Anglo-Americans, “Indians” were not one group but many, and Anglo-Americans adopted the strategy of dealing with them on a tribe-by-tribe basis.

  Early Anglo-American settlers (sometimes in conjunction with one or more tribes) variously engaged in warfare, trading, treaty formation, and land purchase from Indian tribes. The result during the first two centuries of Anglo-American occupation of North America (in competition with French, Dutch, and other European colonizers) was reliance on alternating strategies of military struggle and treaty formation with Indian nations. Writing in 1783, George Washington opined that the latter was more cost-effective:

  The Indians . . . will ever retreat as our Settlements advance upon them and they will be as ready to sell, as we are to buy; That is the cheapest as well as the least distressing way of dealing with them, none who are acquainted with the Nature of Indian warfare, and has ever been at the trouble of estimating the expense of one, and comparing it with the cost of purchasing their Lands, will hesitate to acknowledge. . . . I am clear in my opinion, that policy and economy point very strongly to the expediency of being upon good terms with the Indians, and the propriety of purchasing their Lands in preference to attempting to drive them by force of arms out of their Country; which as we have already experienced is like driving the Wild Beasts of the Forest which will return to us as soon as the pursuit is at an end and fall perhaps on those that are left there.57

  Twenty years later, on the eve of the Louisiana Purchase, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the twin keys to dealing with what he characterized as the few remaining “obstinate” tribes were, first, to “encourage” their assimilation to farming and stock raising and, second, to incorporate them into the capitalist economy as an incentive for them to sell their land in order to purchase manufactured goods.58 Both strategies would become mainstays of federal Indian policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By 1823, leaders of the still young American nation were comfortable asserting “the discovery doctrine” as the rationale for taking title to Indian land based on racist assumptions.59

  The Anglo-American racial order at midcentury rested on the legacy of European colonialism in North America that was openly and forcefully justified by defining Indians as racially inferior. Another crucial dimension of the U.S. racial order was the legalized enslavement of African peoples on th
e basis of race, justified with claims of blacks’ racial inferiority. Beginning with the first arrival at the port of Jamestown in 1619 of a ship carrying Africans, “slavery developed quickly into a regular institution, into the normal labor relations of blacks to whites in the New World.”60 Even in those states in which slavery was not legal (and even among most abolitionists), the idea of black inferiority went largely unchallenged, whether speaking of slaves or free blacks.61 Thus, from before the nation’s founding, racism legitimated different Anglo-American strategies toward blacks and Indians: for Indians, it justified the wholesale dispossession of their land, while for blacks it justified exploiting their labor by treating them as property rather than as human beings.

  When American settlers and traders first encountered Mexicans in the nineteenth century, it was by no means clear where Mexicans would fit within the American racial hierarchy. Historian Reginald Horsman has written about Manifest Destiny and the problem of the Mexicans: “The Americans had two immediate racial models—the Indians and the blacks. Wherever the whites had moved in large numbers the Indians had disappeared. . . . The blacks were not disappearing but were increasing in numbers.”62 Politicians and newspaper editors publicly wondered which fate would await Mexicans: should they be treated like blacks or like Indians? Contemporary commentaries were split between the views that Mexicans were “really Indians” (a view emphasizing Mexicans’ predominant Indian ancestry) or more comparable to blacks in color, custom, and overall depravity (a view emphasizing culture over ancestry).63 In particular, American southerners were ambivalent about the nation’s expansion into Mexico because they considered “the Mexican race” a suspect, colored race “but little removed above the Negro.”64 It was southerners, in turn, who were the majority of the early American migrants to Texas and who had the earliest sustained contact with Mexicans. As historian Neil Foley has emphasized, Euro-Americans in Texas were adamant that “whiteness meant not only not black but also not Mexican.”65 Given that, the outcome of whether Mexicans were treated “like Indians” or “like blacks” in the American context may have been inconsequential, since both groups were excluded from the rights and privileges accorded whites. Yet it was precisely the ambiguity of Mexicans’ racial status that positioned them to play a role as an intermediate group, between whites and non-white groups like blacks and Indians. Mexicans’ status as a racially mixed group made it possible both for some Mexicans to occupy an “off-white” position and for the group overall to be classified as an inferior “mongrel” race. It may well have been the variations among Mexicans—due partly to perceptible differences in the extent of indigenous versus Spanish ancestry and partly to how individual Mexicans performed their racial identity—that placed Mexicans as a group in an ambiguous racial position within the U.S. racial terrain.