Mexican American Food: The Legacy of Guadalupe Hidalgo

When U.S. conquistadores imposed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, Mexicans living in the frontier region from Texas to California became subjects of a hostile power. The Anglo newcomers looked on Mexicans with disdain based on recent war memories, old stereotypes from the sixteenth-century “Black Legend” of the Spanish as cruel, and simple racism. Many Mexicans fled, and those who stayed fought a losing battle for half a century to preserve their land and wealth. As the border economy developed in the late nineteenth century, northward migration resumed, and although it halted briefly during the Depression, the onset of World War II and the postwar boom brought ever-greater numbers of Mexicans into their old frontier. Meanwhile established Mexican Americans fought an ongoing battle to gain the rights of citizenship and equality promised not just in the Treaty of 1848 but also in the Constitution of 1789.