Great Britain, Blockades, and Neutral Rights: Royal Navy Operations during the Mexican- American War, 1846-1848

Although neutral during the Mexican American War (1846-8), Great Britain’s Royal Navy had to navigate the war’s naval component, particularly commerce raiding and blockades, as it sought to protect and promote trade and neutral rights. While able to use international pressure to limit privateering, handling the blockade proved more problematic. Although US policies largely mirrored British expectations in the Gulf of Mexico, along Mexico’s Pacific coast, inconsistent US Navy actions created tension. The professionalism of both American and British naval officers and a willingness of both governments to compromise effectively diffused any potential crises. Bien qu’elle soit restée neutre pendant la guerre américano-mexicaine (1846-1848), la Marine royale de la Grande-Bretagne a dû s’occuper de l’aspect naval de la guerre, en particulier les corsaires marchands et les blocus commerciaux, alors qu’elle cherchait à protéger et à promouvoir le commerce et la neutralité des droits. Pour limiter la course, la Marine pouvait recourir à des pressions exercées au niveau international, mais la gestion des blocus s’est révélée plus difficile. Bien que les politiques américaines aient reflété en grande partie les attentes britanniques dans le golfe du Mexique, les mesures incohérentes prises par la Marine américaine ont créé des tensions le long de la côte pacifique du Mexique. Le professionnalisme des officiers de marine américains et britanniques et la volonté des deux gouvernements de faire des compromis ont efficacement dissipé toute crise potentielle.

Latinxs, Discrimination, and Crime

The Latinx community is ever expanding in America, accounting for over half of the population growth since 2010. While immigration numbers have decreased, Latinxs are still projected to represent 27.5% of the total American population by 2060. The Latinx community holds a distinct position in the American racial hierarchy, sometimes sandwiched between their White and Black counterparts, but often intertwined with the oppressions faced by Blacks as well as confronting their own marginalization. Furthermore, Latinxs often find themselves in a unique disjuncture between their cultural heritage and American norms. Such factors coalesce into a distinct lived experience for Latinxs in America. Due to their structural position in American society, it is unsurprising that Latinxs are disproportionately entangled in the criminal justice system at the state and federal levels, with Latino men being incarcerated at a rate nearly three times higher than their White counterparts. The unique American history of the Latinx community created factors that distinctly impact those labeled Latinx. From the Spanish colonization of Latin and North Americas, the Mexican-American War, Mexican Repatriation, to the modern conservative push to “build the wall,” those of Latinx American heritage have been racialized, marginalized, and oppressed in the United States. This history has led to an era of Juan Crow and a crimmigration system that distinctly legalizes the discrimination and perpetuates the marginalization of Latinxs in America. The lived experiences of Latinxs, particularly their encounters with discrimination, cannot be separated from their entanglement with the American criminal justice system. Several unique cultural factors, such as ethnic identity, familism, and religion, also aid Latinxs in their resilience against discrimination and its impacts. Further research to empirically inform the development of culturally appropriate interventions and policies for Latinxs is imperative in promoting equity and inclusion for one of America’s most overlooked and vulnerable populations.

Texas, Santa Anna, and War

This chapter is devoted primarily to episodes of aggression by foreign powers in which Alamán was somewhat involved by virtue of his connections with the central government. The Texas rebellion took that vast territory out of Mexican control and into independent nationhood for about a dozen years despite Santa Anna’s less-than-effective efforts to suppress the American colonists there. An armed naval incursion by France on the basis of a monetary claim for damages against French businesses committed in Mexico City by Mexican soldiers, an episode known at the Pastry War (1838), saw Alamán involved in arbitration of the conflict. Of vastly greater importance was the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), engineered by U.S. President Polk, which wrested away half the national territory of Mexico; Alamán’s descriptions of the war and its aftermath are deployed, including his own peripheral involvement with damage to his home and relations with American officers.

Texas

This chapter is substantially devoted to the issue of Texas, beginning with a long passage on the overall problem of Texas. Minister Alamán pushed a law through Congress in 1830 aimed at choking off American immigration into Texas, but it proved to no avail as the colonists continued to come with their slaves, their Protestantism, and their very different political culture, setting up the conditions for their pulling away from Mexico, and eventually for the Mexican-American War a decade later. The latter section of the chapter deals with Alamán’s efforts to establish a permanent union of cooperation and mutual defense among most of the nations of Spanish America, which was ultimately unsuccessful because of political chaos in the countries and personal jealousies among the leaders.

The Early Republic and Santa Anna

When Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, it inherited a declining silver economy, and an ever-expanding northern neighbor that already had begun its industrial revolution with an abundance of immigrants eager to seize the future. Mexico struggled to stay independent. When Spanish troops invaded in 1829 and in 1838 when French sailors seized the wealthy port of Veracruz, General Antonio López de Santa Anna defeated them and became a national hero even though he lost part of his leg battling the French. He could not defeat, however, the better-equipped volunteers from the north. By the conclusion of the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) and a subsequent land sale, Mexico had lost 55 percent of the territory it had possessed in the 1820s. Internally, Mexico limped along with an underfunded treasury and enormous debts. Although Santa Anna was the most successful of all Mexico’s generals, he was not the only one eager for power and glory. Generals and politicians wanted Mexico to protect the Church and the army as the colony had, or construct a more secular government with Church funds and a variety of state militias. Of course, women benefitted little from any of this. Until railroads were built in the 1880s, Mexico continued as a democratic republic funded by moneylenders risking their fortunes to support the government and perhaps make huge profits for themselves.

Voyages Through Literary Space: Mapping Globe and Nation in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast

In his youth, Richard Henry Dana Jr. rebelled against the conventions of his upper-class New England upbringing when he signed on as a common sailor on a merchant ship bound for Alta California. The notes of his travels describe the strenuous life at sea, a captain’s sadistic streak, a crew’s mutinous tendencies, and California’s multicultural fur trade economy. First published in 1840, Dana’s travelogue Two Years Before the Mast became an unofficial guide for emigrants traversing the largely unmapped far western territories in the wake of the Mexican-American War. Connecting Dana’s widely-read narrative to current developments in the discipline, this article discusses strategies of visualizing literature and includes an exercise in ‘discursively mapping’ actual and imagined spaces and mobilities of the text. Considering strategies and toolsets from the digital humanities as well as theories such as Lefebvre’s concept of representational space, the article reflects on the methodological and practical pitfalls brought about by the visualization.

Visual Allusions to the Mexican-American War

The Mexican-American War (1846-48) is often described as the first major war in US history inspired by the idea of Manifest Destiny. The significance of this war, however, has not been matched by a rigorous scrutiny of its representation in contemporary visual culture. This study hopes to contribute to filling this void through an iconological investigation of three American paintings made in the Düsseldorf Academy, by now canonized and perceived as ultimate visual treatments of the topic. The paper first discusses the war and the public debates surrounding it in the US, then turns to the visual scene and introduces how the war was portrayed in various art forms. Next, it touches upon the artistic milieu of the Düsseldorf Academy in preparation for the analysis of the three paintings to follow. The study argues that these images depart from the American tradition of depicting war through concrete battle scenes. Instead, they offer symbolic representations or allusions, approaching the war in terms of morality, political philosophy and its potential social and economic consequences, while also employing ambiguity to urge viewers to contemplate on the implications of the war. In the meanwhile, they seem to express little if any consideration for the impact of the war on Mexico, its culture, and people.

Indian Raids in Northern Mexico and the Construction of Mexican Sovereignty

This essay focuses on the borderlands of Mexico and the United States in the decades following the Mexican-American War. There, American, Apache, Comanche, and Mexican inhabitants came into contact with one another and their distinctive and sometimes conflicting understandings of sovereignty led to significant discord. In different ways, Mexico and the U.S. sought to assert control over part of these borderlands, which included restricting the movement of outsiders within their territory. Apache and Comanche peoples, on the contrary, regarded free movement across the region as “irrevocable.” The increasing American population both provided demand for livestock that drove indigenous raids into Mexico and curtailed access to land and resources, promoting migration across the border and making it exceedingly difficult for Mexico to assert sovereign control over northern territory.