H
ad Mexico been able to retain all
of the territory it possessed upon
winning independence, it would
be more than twice as large as it is today.
California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas,
Nevada, and Utah would all be part
of Mexico, as would parts of what are
now Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, and
Oklahoma. Instead, soon after Mexico’s
birth, this immense region passed into the
hands of the United States. The takeover
occurred in a four-stage process: the
Texan Revolution, which made Texas
independent (1835–1836); the American
annexation of Texas (1845); the U.S.-
Mexican War (1846–1848), the conflict
between the United States and Mexico
that was the first war in which the United
States occupied a foreign capital; and the
Gadsden Purchase (1853), in which the
last piece of the once-mighty Far North
was sold to Mexico’s erstwhile enemy.
Informing the entire process was the
vague but popular U.S. notion of
Manifest Destiny, which said that
Americans were plainly intended by God
to spread what they considered to be
their superior civilization across the con-
tinent, even at the cost of the rights and
the lives of Mexicans and Native
Americans standing in the way.
These events left the Spanish and
Mexicans of the American Southwest in
the strange position of being treated like
outsiders in their own land by the Anglos
who flooded into the region after the
war. Their process of conversion from
being citizens to aliens, started by the war
was completed afterwards through legal
and extralegal means. Even today,
Mexican Americans sometimes call the
region “The Lost Land.”INDEPENDENCE
FOR TEXASTexans of Anglo-American descent out-
numbered Mexican-American Tejanos by
as many as 10 to one by the mid-1830s.
The Mexican government was well awareof the danger this large foreign-born
population posed to Mexico’s sovereignty
over the territory. “Texas will be lost for
this Republic,” Mexican Secretary of
State Lucas Alamán warned around 1830,
“if adequate measures to save it are not
taken.” Mexico proved unable to keep
Texas, Anglo settlers wanted independ-
ence from Mexico, and the Texan
Revolution made Texas independent. A
contributing cause to the loss of Texas
was Mexico’s political instability, which
reflected the wider political instability of
newly independent Hispanic America.Upheaval in Mexico
Mexico began its independent existence
bankrupt and devastated by 11 years of
revolutionary war. Civil turmoil between
warring factions made its early years even
harder, a situation mirroring that in many
other Hispanic-American nations. Within
three years of independence, Mexico had
acquired (1822) and deposed (1823) an
emperor, Agustín I, and established a lib-
eral, federalist constitution, the
Constitution of 1824. During this federal-
ist era, two principal factions formed. On
one side were the federalists, who were
liberal and egalitarian; they supported
religious toleration, relief for the
oppressed, and a system of federated sov-
ereign states. On the other side were the
centralists, who were conservative and
elitist; backed by church and military lead-
ers, they supported state establishment of
Roman Catholicism, the interests of
wealthy landowners, and a strong central-
ized, even dictatorial, government.
As early as 1827, President Guada-
lupe Victoria, a federalist, had to put
down an armed revolt by his vice presi-
dent, Nicolás Bravo, a centralist.
Victoria’s successor, Vicente Guerrero
(1782–1831), also a federalist, was over-
thrown by his vice president, centralist
Anastasio Bustamante (1780–1853), in
1829–1830. Bustamante had Guerrero, a
hero of the war of independence, execut-
ed by firing squad in 1831. BustamanteManifest Destiny and Hispanic America
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