The Social Ramifications of the Legal Constructionof Race in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo

Little historical attention has been given to the Mexican-American War and its ramifications on the United States. Aside from significantly increasing the size of the United States, the war had a peculiar cultural effect on the legal status of Mexican residents in America. Through the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo of 1848, Mexico ceded a significant portion of their land, and Mexicans were offered U.S. citizenship, becoming “incorporated into the Union of the United States” [1]. Through doing so, the Mexicans became “legally white” because no such bill had been introduced before regarding the naturalization of non-white residents of the United States. The Naturalization Bill of 1790 explicitly only listed “free white people” who reside in the U.S. for two years as citizens [2]. Although the naturalization of Mexicans may at first seem like a step in a positive direction, the early legal designation of Mexican residents of the U.S. as “white” failed to protect Mexicans by creating superficial legal protection without truly defending Mexicans’ rights.

The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo was never primarily about protecting Mexican rights but rather motivated by the desire of the U.S. to end the Mexican-American War. It is worth noting that the Mexican-American War was the first war that was started intentionally for the purpose of land acquisition [3]. The treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, after all, was a way to compromise the massive cessions of land agreed upon by Mexico with a promise of the fair treatment of Mexican residents of newly American territory [4]. This fact is represented in the treaty’s content—only two (Article VIII and IX) of the twenty-two articles of the treaty pertain to the legal status of Mexicans and their right to property, whereas the others deal with issues such as international diplomacy and land delineations [5]. The Senate even struck a potential Article X of the treaty, which was supposed to promise Mexican land grants [6]. The original Article X decreed that all Mexicans who owned land under Mexican law would continue to own that land in the U.S. However, both President James Polk and the Senate determined that the clause would complicate land rights in Texas. They also amended Article IX to make clear that Congress has sole control over when to admit Mexican territories into the U.S. Article IX is clear that Mexicans will be admitted “at the proper time (to be judged of by the Congress of the United States)” [7]. The clear hesitancy in Congress in indicating and expanding upon the rights of Mexican residents of the United States suggested that there were alternative motives in the federal government pertaining to Mexican rights.

Because of this ambiguity of the document concerning Mexican-American rights, the enforcement of the law led to legal barriers for Mexicans. For instance, Congress made it difficult for Mexicans to actually acquire the property rights for their land. Mexicans had to have concrete proof of ownership of their land under Mexican law, and this requirement prevented many Mexicans from gaining their citizenship. Due to differences in the American and Mexican property rights, the imposition of the American individual, private land ownership system onto the Mexican system dependent on common land ownership made it difficult to accept land grants. If multiple people share the same farmland, it is hard to define who truly “owns” property and therefore would be eligible for citizenship. In fact, Supreme Court Justice David J. Brewer criticized the confusing process of Mexican land rights and the “lack of precision in the language” [8]. In this way, the treaty failed to protect land rights, which are the most emphasized points in the scant articles of Mexican legal protection. Substantial work had to be done after passing the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo to clarify Mexican rights. The first case that did so, 35 years after the treaty, was In Re Ricardo Rodriguez (1897), a Texan district court case in which Ricardo Rodriguez requested the right to vote through citizenship in the United States. Judge Thomas S. Maxey ruled in favor of Rodriguez, clarifying Mexican rights under the 14th Amendment, concluding that Mexicans “may be individually naturalized by complying with the provisions of our laws” [9]. But it was not until 1954, more than half a century later, with the Supreme Court case Hernandez v. Texas, that Mexican rights were clarified in such a way on a national level. Pete Hernandez was accused of murder and his legal team argued that he was being discriminated against based upon the whiteness of his accusers. The crux of their argument centered around continued economic and social discrimination of Mexican-Americans even when they were legally “white.” The unanimous ruling was based upon the clarification of the 14th Amendment as not only applying to white and Black citizens of the U.S. but also to Mexican-Americans. Mexicans were determined to have rights equal to any other race. Mexicans were found to be a separate class from whites [10]. Although this was progress in terms of Mexican rights, the fact that Mexican equality was ambiguous enough to warrant a Supreme Court case a century after the original grant of Mexican citizenship speaks to the ineffectiveness of the original Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.

It is important to recognize that Mexicans still benefited in some ways from the legal status of whiteness. For example, anti-miscegenation laws banning mixed-race marriage did not apply to them. Still, there continued to be significant social, political, and economic discrimination levied against Mexicans, even if they were not explicitly legal [11]. A prime example of this divide was the de facto segregation of schools in Texas. School boards would regularly create separate schools for Mexicans for the purpose of teaching them how to “assimilate’ to society. The 1930 case Independent School District v. Salvatierra ruled in favor of these falsely altruistic schools, stating that it was not inherently discrimination to want to help the education of Mexican children. There was also generally a stark divide between Mexican lives socially and legally. On the legal side, the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo classified Mexicans as white on a technicality, and the U.S. Census considered Mexicans white until 1930, when they finally classified Mexican-Americans as a “Mexican race.” A decade later, however, they returned to grouping Mexicans with the white category. On the social side, Mexicans, except for the rare white Mexican, were often obviously of a darker complexion than whites. In In Re Ricardo Rodriguez, Rodriguez’s citizenship was challenged on the basis of his “copper-colored” skin tone and his facial features, including “dark eyes, straight black hair, and high cheek bones.” There were Jim-Crow-esque signs in Texas saying “Mexicans and Dogs Not Allowed.” Often when Mexicans took racial rights issues to courts, a common reason to discount their concerns was their legal designation as white preventing them from experiencing legally defined discrimination [12]. The dichotomy between the legal and social status of Mexicans explains why the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo only confused and delayed Mexican rights.

The Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaty failed to effectively protect Mexican essential rights because of alternative political motivations, poor enforcement of property rights, and unclear definition of the “Mexican” racial class. Given that the harmful effects of the complication of Mexicans’ racial status have been demonstrated over a century after the treaty, it is not surprising that vestiges of the treaty continue to linger today. For example, Mexican immigrants have the lowest rate of naturalization, despite being one of the largest immigrant groups. A Pew Research study determined that Mexicans on average were naturalized 32% less than other immigrant groups. The Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaty also created a sense of white-washing and separation from Mexican identity. According to writer-activist Fidel Martinez and novelist Julissa Arce, white culture was forced onto Mexicans and Mexicans in turn pulled away from their culture [13]. The construction of the Mexican identity through the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo was one of the most unique legal situations in American history and an example of not only the underlying motivations behind laws but also the often disparate gap between social and legal worlds.

Sources:

[1] “Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848),” National Archives, June 25, 2021, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/treaty-of-guadalupe-hidalgo.

[2] “Naturalization Acts of 1790 and 1795,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon, https://www.mountvernon.org/education/primary-source-collections/primary-source-collections/article/naturalization-acts-of-1790-and-1795.

[3] Omar Valerio-Jiménez, “The US–Mexico War,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.23.

[4] Rubén Donato and Jarrod S. Hanson, “Legally White, Socially ‘Mexican’: The Politics of De Jure and De Facto School Segregation in the American Southwest,” Harvard Educational Review 82, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 206.

[5] “Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848).”

[6] “Digital History,” https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=1141.

[7] “Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo: Findings and Possible Options Regarding Longstanding Community Land Grant Claims in New Mexico” (Government Accountability Office, June 2004), 27-32, 177, https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-04-59.pdf.

[8] Christine A. Klein, “Treaties of Conquest: Property Rights, Indian Treaties, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,” New Mexico Law Review 26, no. 2 (Spring 1996), 209, https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1854&context=nmlr.

[9] Texas State Historical Association, “In Re Ricardo Rodríguez,” Texas State Historical Association, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/in-re-ricardo-rodriguez.

[10] Dani Thurber, “Research Guides: A Latinx Resource Guide: Civil Rights Cases and Events in the United States: 1954: Hernandez v. Texas,” research guide, https://guides.loc.gov/latinx-civil-rights/hernandez-v-texas.

[11] “American Latino Theme Study: Law (U.S. National Park Service),” https://www.nps.gov/articles/latinothemestudylaw.htm.

[12] Donato and Hanson, “Legally White, Socially ‘Mexican,’” 202-225.

[13] “Latinx Files: When Mexicans Became ’White’-Ish,” Los Angeles Times, May 12, 2022, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/newsletter/2022-05-12/latinx-files-julissa-arce-book-latinx-files.