The chicano movement: dead or alive?  (Page 3/11)

The first Mexican diaspora from its northern borders began in 1846 to 1848. The U.S. occupation forces and the subsequent discovery of gold in California brought hundreds of thousands of Anglo fortune hunters who took the land from the Spanish ricos and Mexicans. The same pattern was repeated across the Southwest. The Anglos moving in with the backing of the U.S. government took the land from the Spanish ricos and Mexicans. The Mexican population lost its homeland. Those that remained in the Southwest after 1848 became a marginalized minority and ostracized mongrel race, remaining landless and powerless under the gun. Approximately 88,000 to 100,000 Mexicans and Spanish ricos resided in the Southwest by 1850. In 1853, the U.S. pressured Mexico into selling a small portion of the borderlands between Tucson, Arizona and Sonora, Mexico; the exchange was named the Gadsden Purchase.

While the U.S. was busy with its own civil war in 1860, France seized the opportunity of a defeated and weakened Mexico to invade in 1862. Eventually Mexican President Benito Juarez was able to rid Mexico of the French, but only to open the door to the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz (1876) who ruled Mexico until November 1910. The violent phase of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 lasted until 1930. This unstable and dangerous political situation created the conditions for a second Mexican diaspora away from Mexico and relocation of Mexicans back to their occupied homeland in the U.S. There are many historical survey texts on this entire period written by Mexican, Anglo American, and Chicano authors, each with unique perspectives. Common to Mexican texts is acknowledgment that more than half of the Mexican territory was lost to the U.S.A between 1835 and 1848, plus an additional part of southern Arizona, El Valle de la Mesilla, in 1853 (Gadsden Purchase). Missing in these Mexican texts however is a complete absence of the plight of the Mexican people abandoned in the lost lands. Anglo writers typically justify the land theft and occupation on divine intervention, god made them to do it to make the land productive and fulfill their destiny as a great race of people. White nationalism was born during this early period and remains a viable ideology in this 21 ^st century. White people generally believe the U.S.A. was meant to be a white nation and should remain so. Chicano authors, on the other hand, attempt to describe the context and socio-political conditions of Mexicans remaining in the lost homeland. Some basic works from these three sources include Victor Alba, The Mexicans: The Making of a Nation, New York: Pegasus edition translated into English , 1970; Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism , Cambridge Harvard University, 1981; and the pioneering work of the Chicano historian, Rodolfo Acuna, Occupied America: The Chicano’s Struggle Toward Liberation, New York, Canfield Press Harper and Row, 1972. A most recent revisionist Chicano political history text is Armando Navarro, Mexicano Political Experience in Occupied Aztlan; Struggle and Change, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press Rowman&Littlefield, 2005.