Title: Mexico - Manifest Destiny
Headings: 
Discussion Goals:
Goal #1: To understand the economic, social, and political status of Mexico at the time of American immigration
Third Cause - American refusal to submit to Mexican laws
Who resisted and protested the War?
Goal #5: To learn how the Mexican population fared in "Occupied Mexico"
Mexican Land Dispossession in California
Conclusions - Whose Manifest Destiny? The Conquest of Northern Mexico

Content: As the map below indicates, Texas was sandwiched in between the United States to its east and to the north and the state of Nuevo Mexico to the west. It is also worth noting the size of its largest territory - the sparsely populated and commercially unprofitable territory of California. Rodopho Acuna describes the economic status of the new nation as "bankrupt, and it needed time to build an infrastructure to unify the new country." But Mexico did not have time to build its political and economic infrastructure before the Americans began to look at its southern neighbor for their own economic betterment. Thus it was in 1821 - at the same time Mexico was struggling to recover from its war and create a new political and economic system - that Moses Austin approached the new government with an offer to bring a party of American immigrants into the Mexican state of Texas. Goal #2: To examine the causes that led up to  the Mexican American War and the way it contributed to the growth of the U.S. at Mexico’s expense
Causes of  the Mexican American War
U.S. government adopted an aggressive  foreign policy designed to force Mexico to sell Texas. North American immigration to Texas, eventually making Americans the dominant population. American refusal to submit to Mexican laws. Mexico adopted a new, centralized government, thus forcing the Mexican states to relinquish some of their power.