In the Shadow of Mexico: Mexican and Mexican American Conservatives during the Eras of U.S. Conquest and the Mexican Revolution, 1848-1940

Abstract

“In the Shadow of Mexico: Mexican and Mexican American Conservatives during the Eras of U.S. Conquest and the Mexican Revolution, 1848-1940” examines different forms of Mexican and Mexican American conservatism in Los Angeles during U.S. conquest (1848-1880) and the Mexican Revolution (1910-1940). This project understands conservatism as an individual’s and/or groups’ efforts to retain traditional political, social, and cultural structures and the status quo by resisting radical change. During these periods, some Mexican and Mexican American conservatives painted their liberal and leftist opponents as agents of social disorder, insecurity, and instability. Conservatism, in contrast, provided stability, security, and continuity as Los Angeles and Mexico experienced vast change. “In the Shadow of Mexico” considers a few perspectives of conservative Mexicans and Mexican Americans who negotiated changing patterns of state-formation in Mexico and the United States by clinging to traditional structures of power through their resistance to social change in Los Angeles and in Mexico. In the early-to-mid-nineteenth century, during the Spanish and Mexican national periods, a group of upper-class Mexicans adopted liberal ideas of republicanism and liberty to counter a centralized government in Mexico City. Part of this strategy involved leaders wanting to maintain power over lower-class Mexicans and Indigenous people. After the U.S.-Mexico War, some of these same leaders, now Mexican Americans, embraced conservative United States’ party politics to socially distance themselves from African Americans and Indigenous peoples. They worked to retain the traditional social and political structure during U.S. conquest that existed during Los Angeles’s earlier periods. Conservatism remained in the early-twentieth century, albeit in different forms. Some Mexican exiles articulated wariness about the liberal Revolution unfolding in Mexico. While in Los Angeles, these exiles continued to embrace traditional social and political structures they believed that the Revolution undermined. Unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, this Revolutionary Generation articulated and grounded their conservative politics within Mexico rather than in the United States. In doing so, they engaged in transitional citizenship which hinged on their views of the nation and mexicanidad that revolved around ideas about race, religion, and citizenship. In their attempts to define and “recover” the nation, they also articulated their own ideas of what it meant to be Mexican during the early-twentieth century. By utilizing Spanish newspapers, personal and family correspondence, and government records, this dissertation tells a more complicated story about Mexican and Mexican American politics in the United States. It contributes to ongoing conversations about the conservative political orientations of contemporary Latinx politics by looking at earlier periods of identity formation.