GETTY^ IMAGESjoined the US in declaring independence,
leaving Spain with Cuba, Puerto Rico
and the Philippines. The political con-
figuration of the western hemisphere had
been transformed, with the young United
States going from strength to strength,
pushing into the west and the south.
Forgotten struggles
After achieving independence in 1821,
the government of Mexico (formerly New
Spain) was eager to populate its northern
frontier, which had long been subject to
attacks from Native Americans. Although
wary of the designs of its Anglo-American
neighbours to the north – there were val-
uable mines in Mexico – in the 1820s it
granted land to people willing to settle in this
region, some of them from the US, where debate
over slavery was intensifying. Mexico wanted to
ban the use of enslaved people, but Anglo settlers
who were profiting on cotton grown by slaves re-
belled and in 1836 declared the Republic of Texas. In 1844, US
presidential candidate James K Polk ran on a platform of national
expansion, expressed in the tenet of ‘manifest destiny’. After as-
suming the presidency the following year, Polk annexed Texas as
a state in 1846 and turned his gaze towards Mexico. The result-
ing Mexican-American War had a profound impact on the life of
that newspaper editor Ramírez and many like him.
After the war, and the acquisition of vast swathes of new ter-
ritory, the United States was faced with an internal conflict – the
fight over slavery, a major factor in the outbreak of the Civil War
(1861–65), which continues to dominate the nation’s historical
landscape. As the complex rebuilding of the United States began,
so too did the refashioning of its history, positioning national
identity around a common Anglo-Saxon
starting point, underpinned by Protes-
tantism. As immigration from the Med-
iterranean grew in the 19th century, this
form of A nglo nationa l identit y continued
to dominate, overshadowing Catholic
Italians and Portuguese; the ‘black leg-
end’ of the cruel barbarity of the Spanish
Conquistadors also continued to linger.
The long, complex Spanish history of
what’s now the United States largely fad-
ed from public memory, but it re-emerged
at the end of the 19th century in a signifi-
cantly repackaged form. Florida and Cal-
ifornia, with their appealing sunny
climates, bookended this new, commod-
ified version of the Hispanic past. Ver-
sions of this past appeared in many guises, from
the melodramatic, bestselling 1884 novel Ra-
mona, set among the ruins of the Spanish mis-
sion churches in California, to the ‘Fountain of
Youth’ site in St Augustine, Florida, touted as
the spot where Ponce de León landed in 1513.
Underneath the sentimentalised surface, though, darker
changes were afoot. Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who had
long lived in the lands that were ceded to the US in 1848 encoun-
tered growing social prejudices, as did others who immigrated
north from Latin America. Some restaurants did not serve Mex-
icans, and many cinemas forced their Hispanic clientele to sit
separately from Anglos. Many people in the ceded territory had
been swindled out of their land, or lost it after lengthy court bat-
tles. Hispanic communities also lived in fear of lynching.
Francisco P Ramírez foresaw what lay ahead, writing in
El Clamor Público that the law in the United States only “served
to widen the gap that has existed for some time between the for-
eigners and the natives”. Arguably, that gap has never been
closed. Latinx people from a range of backgrounds have been
forced to continue to fight for equality.
Today, a heated debate rages over the issue of immigration,
especially from central America. Feeding into this is an abiding
public belief that the US is somehow different from its neigh-
bours – yet the entire hemisphere was shaped by the same forces:
European incursion, the destruction of indigenous communi-
ties, the enslavement of African people, political rebellions and
the formation of modern republics. Indeed, the US is now
home to the second-largest Span-
ish-speaking population in the
world, after Mexico. If there is to
ever be a connected future be-
tween the US and its neighbours, it
must start with an understanding
of their shared past.Carrie Gibson is a historian
and author. Her new book is
El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten
Story of Hispanic North America
(Grove Press UK, 2019)Feeding the debate
about immigration is
an abiding public belief
that the United States
is somehow different
from its neighbours
Seals of approval
The Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo (1848), which ended the
Mexican-American war and
added 1.36 million km² of
territory to the United States