Neil Foley talks about the role of Mexican Americans in the history of the U.S. in Mexicans in the Making of America. The author gave his view of these events in the first chapter, “The Genesis of Mexican America,” where he presented the history of the appearance of Mexican Americans and the silent conflict between the two countries. The author’s central claim is that the American government created an image of lazy Mexican immigrants who cross the border to murder and sell illicit drugs; this stigmatization affected Mexican Americans, too (Foley 34). However, the truth was that white settlers from the southern states were illegal invaders in Texas in the 1830s because they refused to obey the country’s laws (Imery-Garcia 12). Discrimination against Mexican immigrants and citizens was rooted in the 1846-1848 war and the treaty’s approval, which included Texas and Mexican people living there into the U.S. territory and being denied their rights.
It was interesting to learn from this chapter the viewpoint of many people in the United States about Mexico as a country of cruel and uneducated people. Indeed, it points to the erased memory of the Aztec Empire, the abolition of slavery in Mexico much earlier than in the U.S., and the annexation of Texas. The 1846-1848 war between the two countries was an unfair, violent act of the U.S. government towards a weaker neighbor, which suffered economic downfall at that time (Foley 24). The new legislation after the war gave people the choice of returning to Mexico or becoming U.S. citizens with formally equal rights that were not respected in reality (Gutiérrez 5). Therefore, most of them wanted to be viewed as Spanish Americans rather than people of Mexican descent to avoid stigmatization. I agree with the author’s final point that this historical event created not only a political border between two neighbors but caused subsequent misunderstandings in the relationships between the two nations.
In summary, the first chapter in Foley’s Mexicans in the Making of America talks about the origin of Mexican Americans. Specifically, it analyzed the role of the war between Mexico and the U.S. for Texas’s territory in the future political climate between these countries. Overall, the annexation of Texas damaged the relations between them, resulting in the negative perception of Mexican immigrant workers and the desire of Mexican Americans to hide their ancestry.