150 Years of Occupation
by Bandino
In the spirit of 500 Years of Resistance of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, a broad coalition of students, civil and human rights organizations, community leaders, artists and labor activists will assemble in Sonoma, the site of the Bear Flag Rebellion, where California was lost in the onslaught of the U.S. policy of Manifest Destiny, to commemorate 150 Years of Occupation. Our commemoration will be in protest of the Sesquicentennial celebration of "California Independence Days" taking place from June 14 to July 5,1996.
MEXICO, "THE WESTERN EDGE
OF MANIFEST DESTINY""We had been the northern frontier of Mexico: We suddenly became the western edge of Manifest Destiny" -Yolanda Lopez, "Occupied Aztlan," in Crossroads magazine
ONE HUNDRED FIFTY YEARS AGO, President Polk declared that it was his purpose "to ac-quire for the United States-California, New Mexico and some other of the Northern Provinces."
This vision of North America as a "continent allotted by Providence" as the "Manifest Destiny" of the United States was widespread. The Congressional Globe declared, "We must march from ocean to ocean . . . . It is the destiny of the white race; it is the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race." The American Review contended that Mexicans would be "yielding to a superior population . . . out-living, out-trading, and exterminating [Mexico's] weaker blood."
Accompanying Manifest Destiny was the idea that the U.S. would civilize humanity. As one of the senators of that time rationalized, "War has its evils . . . but it has also been made, by the All-wise Dispenser of events, the means of accomplishing the great end of human elevation." A. Abbott Livermore, in The War with Mexico Reviewed, written in 1850, stated that "The Anglo-Saxons have apparently been persuaded to think themselves the chosen people, the anointed race, commissioned to drive out the 'heathen' and plant their religion and institutions in every country they could subjugate."
The view that Mexico was merely "a late stage in the breakdown of the Spanish Empire," a brief era in the history of a soon-to-be independent California, was not as unanimous as historian Bernard De Voto would have us believe in The Year of Decision: 1846. An editorial published that same year refers to the concept of Manifest Destiny as an "infamous business," actually "robbing Mexico of yet another large mass of her territory.
"WESTWARD HO!"
THE OCCUPATION OF TEXASIN 1821, AFTER ENDURING 300 years of Spanish occupation, Mexico gained her independence. She desperately needed time to consolidate her population of some 6 million, but the U.S. pushed against her most vulnerable region, the northwest.
Stephan Austin was among the first to found a settlement in Texas-San Felipe de Austin-in 1821, the very year Mexico won her independence from Spain:
. . . the onslaught of Euro-Americans was not welcome. Slaveholders and land speculators were granted permission to settle in Texas if they obeyed the conditions set by the Mexican government, namely that all immigrants be Catholic and take an oath of allegiance to Mexico." (Howard Zinn, The People's History of the U.S.)
When Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, Euro-Americans circumvented the law by freeing their slaves only to sign them into long contracts as indentured servants. The growing Anglo population of Texas resented Mexico's conditions for settlement as an "infringement of personal liberty." They saw themselves in danger of becoming alien subjects of a people to whom they believed themselves to be morally superior.
By 1834 a pamphlet "Security for Texas" advocated open defiance of Mexican authority. One year later Stephan Austin gave the call to arms despite the protests of Mexico's Minister to the U.S., Manuel Eduardo Gortiza, who decried the "arming and shipment of troops and supplies to territory which was clearly defined by treaty as Mexican territory."
VOICES AGAINST THE WAR ON MEXICO WHEN PRESIDENT POLK ORDERED General Taylor to the Rio Grande, a disputed border river, Colonel Ethan Allen Hitchcock wrote of his commanding officer in his diary:
He seems to have lost all respect for Mexican rights and is willing to be an instrument of Mr. Polk for pushing our boundaries as far west as possible. I have said from the first that the U.S. are the aggressors. We have not one particle of right to be here. It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war so as to have a pretext for taking California. My heart is not in this business but as a military man I am bound to execute orders.
The war had barely begun in the summer of 1846 when Henry David Thoreau, author of "Civil Disobedience," refused to pay his poll tax in a denunciation of the war on Mexico: "Law never made a man one whit more just, and by means of an undue respect for the 'law' even the well-disposed are daily made agents of injustice."
Horace Greeley asked the nation in an editorial in the New York Tribune, May 12, 1846: "Have the histories of the ruin of Greek and Roman liberty consequent on such extension of empire by the Sword held no lesson for us? Who believes that the scores of victories in Mexico will give us more liberty, a purer morality? Is not life miserable enough, comes not Death soon enough, without resort to the hideous engine of war?"
Frederick Douglas, famed speaker and former slave, said of Mexico, "Our sister republic, seems a doomed victim to Anglo-Saxon love of dominion. The probability of the success of our slave-holding President is all too evident by the weak opposition arrayed against him."
"He was right. Only a handful of anti-slavery Congressmen voted against all war measures, seeing them as a means of extending the southern slave territory. Senator Joshua Giddings of Ohio declared, "In the murder of Mexicans upon their own soil, or in robbing them of their own country, I can take no part either now or in the hereafter. The guilt of these crimes must rest on others-I will not participate in them."
Years later, Ulysses S. Grant wrote that he believed President Polk had provoked the war, adding, "I had a horror of the Mexican War only I had not the moral courage to resign."
BEAR FLAG REVOLT IN CALIFORNIA WE FIND OURSELVES THREATENED by hordes of Yankee immigrants who have al-ready begun to flock into our country," protested Gobernador de California Don Pio Pico. In 1846 the Yankees declared outright that California was separated from Mexico as the "Bear Flag Republic."
Two years later, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, the "northern frontier of Mexico became the western edge of Manifest Destiny."
When naval officer Revere gathered the chiefs of the Indians living in California, he said, "The country you inhabit no longer belongs to Mexico":
Our armies are now in Mexico and will soon conquer the whole country. But you have nothing to fear from us if you do what is right . . . if you are faithful to your new rulers . . . .We come to prepare this magnificent region for the use of other men . . . who will hereafter occupy and till the soil . . . we shall not displace you if you act properly. We shall watch over you and give you true liberty."
TREATY OF GUADALUPE HIDALGO WITH THE SIGNING OF THE Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the legal iden-tity of thousands of Mexicanos changed completely. For these former Mexican citizens, now subject to a foreign government, it was to the Treaty that they turned for protection of their civil rights and their rights to land.
Article 9 of the Treaty guarantees "the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the U.S. according to the principles of the Constitution and in the meantime shall be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty and prosperity and secured in the free exercise of their religion without restriction." This is why the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is the most important document in existence for Mexican American Indios. "From it," states Armando Rendon in The Chicano Manifesto, "stem guarantees affecting not only our civil rights but our language, culture and spirituality."
The violation of the Treaty was anticipated and has indeed come to pass in hundreds of actions taken against Mexico in the expansion of the United States, as documented extensively by Garcia Cantu in Las Invasiones Norte Americans en Mexico.
STATE OF AZTLAN Since the fall of the Soviet Union, anything is possible territorially.
-Yolanda Lopez, "Occupied Aztlan," Crossroads
ANTONIO BURCIAGA IN his collection of es-says, Drink Cultura: Chicanismo writes of telling Andres Segura of the words beneath a mural of a battle scene between Mayan Indians and Spanish conquistadores: "They conquered us, but our culture conquered them . . ."
That is what is happening in the United States. The Southwest influence is everywhere, from architecture to interior decor, the music, the celebrations from Cinco de Mayo to Los Dias de la Muerte, the endless varieties of cuisine: of chili, of salsa.
"Today, there are signs that suggest that generations of old barriers between Indians and Chicanos are just beginning to fall," observes Armando Rendon in "A Case for Seeing Indians and Chicanos as a Single People," "Chicanos are an urban population while Indians are rural, reservation bound. The reconciliation of the two represents one of the most important new developments in the future healing of the land [la tierra]."
Mexicanos, Chicanos, Indios are indigenous to the American continent, to the land called Anahuac. These do not come from Spain or France. These are not North Americans who, as British subjects, came to colonize a continent. These are those whose claim is in the sense of a heritage, a recognition of being part of the land. During the June 14-July 5 observance of "California Independence Days" in Sonoma, California, the history of that independence needs to be seen without denying that the exploitation of ethnic minorities is part of that history. We must not forget upon whose backs California's agribusiness depends.
"We have not been conquered," declares Andres Segura, teacher of Azteca dance and culture, "we have been invaded, but we have not been conquered."
Although we may find ourselves on different sides of the border culturally and ethnically, we are one people. Someday Aztlan could become the model for the world as a place where different kinds of people can accomplish much if they but take the time to learn about each other and to listen to different points of view.
-Carlos Jimenez, The Mexican American Heritage
SOURCES
Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict
Carlos M. Jimenez, The Mexican American Heritage
Elizabeth Martinez, ed, 500 Years of Chicano History
Rudolfo Acuna, Occupied America
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States
Antonio Burciaga, Drink Cultura: Chicanismo
MAGUEY INFORMATION SERVICE
2940 16th Street, Suite 216, S. F., CA 94110
Phone: 415-431-5972
548 20th Street, Oakland, CA 94612
Phone: 510-893-3181, Ext. 120, Fax: 510-893-5362
