Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race

View the Table of Contents
Read the Introduction

We Know We’re Not White: Author Interview on San Diego Weekly Reader

?Gómez sets out to write ?an antidote to historical amnesia about the key nineteenth-century events that produced the first Mexican Americans.? A law professor at the University of New Mexico, Gómez takes a three-pronged approach: she looks at Chicano history via sociology, history, and law, using New Mexico as a case study. At the heart of the book is the idea that Manifest Destiny was not, according to Gómez, a neutral political theory. Rather, it was a potent ideology that endowed white Americans with a sense of entitlement to the land and racial superiority over its inhabitants.?
?La Bloga

?Shows the impacts (then, as now) of the dominant white racist frame coming in from outside what was once northern Mexico.??Racism Review

"[A]n interesting and comprehensive look at what New Mexicans really lost after being conquered by the United States."
—The Albuquerque Journal

?Gómez?s insights into the struggles at play in the nineteenth-century Southwest are extremely relevant for today—a time in which identity politics are still predominant in discussions about culture. . . . With Chicanos making up the youngest racial group in America (34 percent are under the age of 18), the complicated relationship between the U.S. and its Mexican citizens is clearly something that is going to be on the table for a long time to come. Manifest Destinies presents a portrait of the forces that were present when this group was still in its infancy.?
?Pop Matters

?Are Mexican Americans a racial or ethnic group? This is the important question Manifest Destinies asks and answers. . . . Marvelous, dense, and richly researched.?
—Ramon A. Gutierrez, University of Chicago

?Highlights the largely neglected history of multiracial populations that, throughout our nation?s history, have come together along the frontier. With her analysis of racial ideologies . . . Gómez promises to make a valuable contribution to this literature.?
—Rachel Moran, author of Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance

?Anyone interested in understanding the historical experience of the largest ethnic group in the country will find Manifest Destinies both timely and of great interest. . . . Simply put, her work is first rate in every way.?
—Tomás Almaguer, author of Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California

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 pathbreaking 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.