Posted on May 20, 2025 in Interviews
This TIE Talks features Omar Valerio-Jiménez, Professor of History and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies for the College of Liberal and Fine Arts at the University of Texas at San Antonio. In this interview, Omar discusses key themes and issues in his latest book, Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship. Underscoring the impact of the US-Mexico War on Mexican American identity, Omar shares how Mexican Americans have utilized collective memories of the war in civil rights activism, also highlighting the circulation of these memories across borders. Further, Omar previews his upcoming project on textbook reform to better represent Mexican Americans and digs into aspects of Mexico-US immigration most misunderstood by the American public.
This conversation is one of my earliest memories in which I discussed the US-Mexico War. I completed first grade in Mexico before immigrating to the United States with my family. The conversation with my next-door neighbor occurred in the summer before I began second grade in Taft, Texas. I had learned Mexico’s version of the war from my older brother and sister, and perhaps from other family members because I doubt my knowledge was from my first grade class. Similarly, my neighbor must have learned about the war from his family, but he learned the US version of the war. So when my neighbor and I had a disagreement about the war’s beginning and effects, we were voicing opposing views corresponding to the official version presented by the US and Mexico in their public schools. By sharing my views, I was taking part in “the transnational circulation of collective memories” like other Mexican immigrants who crossed the international border and voiced a different set of collective memories with US citizens.
Because Mexican immigrants have been arriving in the United States since 1848, they have participated in “the transnational circulation of collective memories” of the war beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing until the present day. These collective memories have been shared in both directions by people, newspapers, and books. For Mexican Americans, these collective memories from Mexico have inspired political and social movements because the memories present an opposing view of the war than the view they learned in school. Such opposing collective memories have led Mexican Americans to question the official US version of the war, including why the US view blames Mexico for starting a war over territory over which Mexico held jurisdiction. Mexico’s version not only characterizes the war as an act of aggression by a powerful nation over a weaker one, but also emphasizes Mexico’s vast territorial loss and the devastating effects on the Mexican citizens living on the annexed lands who became the nation’s first Mexican Americans.
Article 8 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo specified the choices offered to the approximately 120,000 Mexican citizens living in the annexed lands. They could choose to retain their Mexican citizenship, elect to become US citizens, or make no choice. If they did not make a choice but remained in the annexed lands, they would automatically become US citizens after one year (i.e., on February 2, 1849). Article 8 guaranteed full citizenship rights to the former Mexican nationals who became US citizens (the nation’s first Mexican Americans). The treaty promised to respect their property rights, voting rights, freedom of religion, etc. Unfortunately, the US federal government did not adequately enforce Article 8 so Mexican Americans could not fully exercise their US citizenship rights. Consequently, they became second-class citizens who were often denied their civil rights and lost social, economic, and political status after the war.
After the war, Mexican Americans were no longer Mexican citizens (i.e., Mexican nationals) and were not equal US citizens, so they existed somewhere in between—socially and culturally. This ‘in-between’ existence led to a ‘hybrid culture’ that has mixed Mexican and US culture from the mid-nineteenth century until the present.
The result of the war was the literal separation of Mexican Americans from Mexico. When Mexican Americans say, “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us,” they are referring to the result of the war, which redrew national borders. The nation’s first Mexican Americans tried to adapt to US society by learning the English language, the nation’s laws, and its cultural norms. However, neither the federal government nor US society completely accepted Mexican Americans as US citizens. After the war, Mexican Americans were no longer Mexican citizens (i.e., Mexican nationals) and were not equal US citizens, so they existed somewhere in between—socially and culturally. This “in-between” existence led to a “hybrid culture” that has mixed Mexican and US culture from the mid-nineteenth century until the present. While other immigrant communities have created such hybrid cultures, the “hybrid culture” of Mexican Americans has remained strong since their incorporation into the US because of Mexican immigration (unlike, say Italian immigration to the US) has persisted over the years.
During the Chicano Movement, Mexican American youth began taking more pride in their hybrid culture rather than viewing it as a source of shame. Previously, Mexican nationals and Mexican immigrants often criticized Mexican Americans for their perceived lack of Mexican culture, inability to speak Spanish fluently, and their relative ignorance of Mexico’s history. Influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and various ethnic movements (e.g., African Americans and Native Americans), Mexican Americans began self-identifying as Chicanos or Mexican Americans with an unapologetic hybrid culture and taking pride in their Mexican ethnicity. Instead of attempting to acculturate to US society as had previous generations, Chicanos highlighted their hybrid culture as a source of pride and a symbol of their desire for self-determination.
The first generation of Mexican Americans (1850s-80s) recalled the war and the treaty to press for their property rights and equal protection as they experienced land loss and vigilante violence because their citizenship rights were not enforced. While they complained about the negative legacies of US conquest, they often overlooked their ancestors’ and their own roles in conquering and subjugating Native Americans.
In the 1930s, the middle-class activists of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) asserted their American values and embraced whiteness as they separated themselves from working-class Mexican immigrants. Because the 1790 Naturalization Act stipulated that only whites could become naturalized US citizens, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo granted US citizenship to ethnic Mexicans on the annexed lands, then Mexican Americans became legally white with the treaty’s passage. When LULAC members embraced whiteness, they were doing so based on the treaty’s citizenship provisions.
Mexican immigrants were prevented from joining LULAC because its members did not want to be associated with non-citizens fearing that they would lose the few privileges of US citizenship that they were able to exercise. By the 1950s, the Asociación Nacional Mexico-Americana (ANMA), the political arm of a miner’s union, embraced Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans because both groups experienced similar discrimination and ANMA members believed that their union would be more powerful. ANMA also traced Mexican Americans’ second-class citizenship to the war and the failure of the US government to enforce the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
During the Chicana/o Movement of the 1960s-70s, various activists embraced ANMA’s views of the war and its legacies of conquest. Like ANMA members, these Chicana/o activists traced their political disenfranchisement, poverty, disproportionate incarceration, denial of civil rights, and poor educational opportunities to the legacies of conquest introduced by the US-Mexico War. They also embraced Mexican immigrants as fellow ethnic Mexicans who experienced discrimination and deserved to be defended by Chicana/o civil rights organizations.
…previous mass deportations did not alleviate the country’s economic challenges, but they did create devastating consequences because they led to widespread family separations, disrupted ethnic Mexican communities, and fanned anti-Mexican sentiments.
The American public often misunderstands the extent that Mexican immigrants are embedded throughout the US economy. When the current administration proposes to deport one million undocumented workers each year, the target of these raids will be mainly Latinos and many of these immigrants will be Mexicans. There are published studies that describe the potential devastating economic impact of removing undocumented immigrants from the workforce. In addition to hurting the nation’s economy, mass expulsions will lead to family separations because many undocumented immigrants are part of mixed-status families, which are families with members of various citizenship statuses (e.g., the father might be undocumented, the mother might be a permanent resident, while their children are US citizens because they were born in the US). So the deportation of undocumented immigrants will leave their US-born children and permanent resident spouses in the US.
Another misconception about immigrants promoted by various politicians and some media outlets is that many immigrants are criminals. Various studies have shown that immigrants commit crimes at a much lower rate than US citizens. This makes sense because undocumented immigrants want to keep a low profile and avoid drawing attention to themselves, which would occur if they committed a crime. They understand that committing a crime will likely lead to their arrest and deportation.
The general US public probably does not have a collective memory of previous mass expulsions that targeted Mexican immigrants. The federal government directed mass deportations during the Great Depression of the 1930s and during Operation Wetback in 1954. These mass expulsions were preceded by a rise in xenophobia and by politicians’ argument that expelling undocumented immigrants would solve the nation’s economic woes. These two previous mass deportations did not alleviate the country’s economic challenges, but they did create devastating consequences because they led to widespread family separations, disrupted ethnic Mexican communities, and fanned anti-Mexican sentiments. In both previous mass expulsions, US-born children were part of the deportees. In contrast to the general public’s lack of awareness, Mexican American scholars and civil rights activists do have collective memories of these previous mass expulsions. Such collective memories partly inform the opposition to mass deportations among civil rights activists and scholars.
My next project is a study of eight scholars and activists in New Mexico and Texas (two men and two women in each state) from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. These individuals sought to reform textbooks to be more inclusive by including positive portrayals of Mexican Americans and their contributions to the history of each state. They believed textbooks’ negative characterizations of Mexican Americans directly led to their second-class citizenship as the public was unaware of their contributions to US society. In addition to seeking to revise textbooks, they strove to preserve documents and buildings related to Mexican American history because they believed such preservation efforts would be critically important for future historians’ work.
While doing research for Remembering Conquest, I learned of these eight individuals and decided to conduct more research on their lives. As a historian, I became fascinated with the efforts of these scholars and activists because my research benefits directly from their preservation work. I became intrigued with their textbook reform efforts after realizing that the struggles to make textbooks more inclusive has been a long-term project that continues today.
Omar Valerio-Jiménez is Professor of History and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies for the College of Liberal and Fine Arts at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He teaches courses on Latinxs, borderlands, Texas, public history, U.S. West, race/ethnicity, and immigration. His publications include The Latina/o Midwest Reader, Major Problems in Latina/o History, and River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands.
His most recent book, Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in April 2024. It analyzes the ways in which memories of the U.S.-Mexico War have shaped Mexican Americans’ civil rights struggles, writing, oral discourse, and public rituals. His next book project, “Challenging Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Textbook Reform, and Archive Preservation,” explores textbook reform and archive preservation efforts by Mexican American scholars and activists in New Mexico and Texas during the early twentieth century. To conduct research for this third book project, Professor Valerio-Jiménez received an Award for Faculty from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Spencer Foundation Racial Equity Research Grant.
This interview was conducted by Sabrina Cofer. She is the digital media producer at Choice.
This interview feature invites academics, librarians, teaching faculty, and higher education stakeholders to discuss their latest projects and research. Spotlighting both early and late career researchers, TIE Talks aims to sit down with fascinating individuals whose engaging and informative work inspires others in their fields and intersects with DEIA topics.
Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.
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