Full Citation

Title: Mesillaros and Gringo Mexicans: The (Re) Construction of a Local Mexican Identity, 1848-1912

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2002

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Abstract: Following the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the citizenship and identity of individuals living in Southern New Mexico became a matter open to question. They were forced to make sense of competing notions about race, nation, and region. Questions about the racial and national implications of adopting/being assigned either a Mexican or an American identity became a critical issue in the newly transnational space. Two towns, Mesilla and Las Cruces, developed with competing ideas of race and nation. Although both towns were located in the United States, settlers in Mesilla frequently refused to acknowledge the boundary change and claimed their town as nationally Mexican Settlers in Las Cruces, conversely, attempted to integrate their town into the United States and conceived their Mexican identity as racial. This study explores the complexity of racial, national and regional ideologies in Southern New Mexico's Mesilla Valley from 1848 to 1912. The question of identity had longstanding repercussions on the lives of those living in the Mesilla Valley. This study uses the shifting national border in Southern New Mexico's Mesilla Valley to explore the complicated meanings of race, nation, and region along the nineteenth-century United States/Mexican border. Tensions and dissimilarities between the neighboring towns of Mesilla and Las Cruces make visible the complexity individuals faced when their local space was suddenly renamed either Mexican or American. To understand the ways that ideologies about race, nation, space and region developed during New Mexico's territorial period, this study considers areas in which changing circumstances perplexed local actors about the meaning of these categories. Changing conditions in Southern New Mexico confounded individuals who puzzled over the meanings of region, race, and nation at the boundary between the two nations. Mesillaros and Gringo Mexicans questions modern assumptions about how a Mexican/Mexican American identity emerged in the nineteenth century. This study disrupts commonly accepted knowledge about racial and national identities by suggesting that these identities have historically been dependent on the complexity of local contexts. By understanding how individuals deployed, disrupted and lived identities through local spaces we will begin to unravel the larger discourses surrounding national and racial identities.

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Authors: Mora, Anthony P.

Institution: University of Notre Dame

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Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Publisher Location: South Bend, IN

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Race and Ethnicity

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