Hispanic Americans In The American West

ASU HST 200 (Historical Themes) Westward Expansion, 1840-1900 Hispanic Americans In The American West Nearly 75,000 Hispanics currently residing in the American Southwest were promised U.S. citizenship by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which put an end to the MexicanAmerican War in 1848. Of those who accepted the offer, about 90% chose to remain in the country despite being immediately demoted to second-class citizenship status. These regions were sparsely inhabited in comparison to the rest of Mexico, and they had remained so ever since Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821. In actuality, New Mexico, home to about 50,000 Mexicans, was the hub of regional colonization in the years just before the conflict with the United States, not Texas or California. Those who did colonize the region, nevertheless, took great pride in their ancestry and their ability to produce successful, large-scale rancheros. These so-called Californios soon lost their property to White invaders who just uprooted the legitimate landowners, using force if necessary, in defiance of the treaty's provisions. Most of the time, repeated attempts at legal recourse were met with silence. Hispanic landowners who insisted on maintaining their ground were often left impoverished for their efforts when judges and attorneys allowed the cases to go through a costly judicial procedure. Like Chinese immigrants, Hispanics were forced to labor in the lowest-paying occupations with the poorest working conditions. They performed the riskiest mining work or worked as peóns (manual laborers akin to enslaved people), vaqueros (cattle herders), and cartmen (transporting food and supplies) on the cattle ranches owned by White landowners. A few times, angry Hispanic residents rebelled against the White settlers who had taken their possessions away from them. The White Caps, or Las Gorras Blancas, were a group of several hundred Mexican Americans that organized in New Mexico in 1889–1890 in an effort to regain their property and scare away White Americans in order to stop more land acquisitions. To vent their mounting resentment and rage, White Caps launched assaults on White farms, setting barns, houses, and crops on fire. But none of the things they did really brought about any real changes. Some White Caps finally gave up out of fear of severe retaliation against their families, while others were apprehended, assaulted, and imprisoned. In the early 1890s, some White Caps took a more political tack and won elections to municipal offices around New Mexico. However, as worries about the movement's possible influence on the territory's statehood bid grew, other residents intensified their suppression of it. In addition to taking away their lands, other US legislation aimed to strip Mexican Americans of their cultural identity. "Sunday Laws" forbade "noisy amusements" like cockfights, bullfights, and other traditional events that were popular among the Hispanic population at the time. "Greaser Laws" allowed for the incarceration of any Mexican American jobless person on the grounds of vagrancy. Such regulations did have a cost, even if Hispanic Americans clung tenaciously to their cultural heritage as their last bastion of self-identity. The vast wave of Anglo-American settlers in California and the Southwest simply swept out the Hispanic people that had been residing and prospering there, often for decades. Even while Hispanics were citizens of the United States with full rights, they soon found themselves outnumbered, outvoted, and, eventually, marginalized. Corrupt state and municipal administrations discriminated against White people in terms of wages and working conditions, and mining firms and cattle barons preferred White individuals in land conflicts. Barrios—clusters of working-class homes—or expanding metropolitan regions like Los Angeles were more remote from White American centers. Hispanic Americans experienced the negative effects of White settlers' unrelenting drive west, much like Native Americans and Chinese did.