Watch the Author Interview on KNME
In both the historic record and the popular imagination, the story of
nineteenth-century westward expansion in America has been characterized
by notions of annexation rather than colonialism, of opening rather than
conquering, and of settling unpopulated lands rather than displacing
existing populations.
Using the territory that is now New Mexico as a case study, Manifest
Destinies traces the origins of Mexican Americans as a racial group in
the United States, paying particular attention to shifting meanings of
race and law in the nineteenth century.
Laura E. Gómez explores the central paradox of Mexican American racial
status as entailing the law's designation of Mexican Americans as
&#"white" and their simultaneous social position as non-white in
American society. She tells a neglected story of conflict, conquest,
cooperation, and competition among Mexicans, Indians, and
Euro-Americans, the region's three main populations who were the key
architects and victims of the laws that dictated what one's race was and
how people would be treated by the law according to one's race.
Gómez's path breaking work--spanning the disciplines of law, history,
and sociology--reveals how the construction of Mexicans as an American
racial group proved central to the larger process of restructuring the
American racial order from the Mexican War (1846-48) to the early
twentieth century. The emphasis on white-over-black relations during
this period has obscured the significant role played by the doctrine of
Manifest Destiny and the colonization of northern Mexico in the racial
subordination of black Americans.
