Recently, several prominent American academics and journalists have mentioned me in their books — notably Pat Buchanan, Victor Hanson, and Samuel Huntington; they cite my advocacy of Mexicano nationalism in the American Southwest. In 1999, I was interviewed by the Albuquerque Tribune. In that article, I predicted that by the late twenty-first century Mexicanos would constitute a demographic majority in the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, and would move first towards autonomy and then towards sovereignty. Moreover, I believe that the American Southwest and northern Mexico will join together to form a new country, which I call La República del Norte.
Responses to my thesis ranged from outrage to mild amusement, receiving a lot of play on the Internet. I have been called a traitor to the United States and a prophet of the Mexicano "reconquista" of the Southwest. My Mexicano and Latino colleagues mostly trip over themselves trying to disavow my ideas and reaffirm their undying commitment to the American dream. In their responses to Samuel Huntington's article in Foreign Policy magazine, Latino leaders and intellectuals revalidated, in the most obsequious manner, the power of the United States consumer society to assimilate Latino immigrants. Like many African American leaders after the Civil Rights movement, most of the early Chicano Nationalist have been co-opted by public sector jobs, and what they now consider to be "Hispanic" middle class respectability. The United States and it's continued Patriot Act and enhanced Police State have forced Chicano Nationalists to avert their gaze from the potential power of Latinos in the United States to reshape the geopolitics of North America.
I do not deny that the United States has tremendous power to assimilate immigrants. U.S. pop-culture and consumerism are characteristics of the new globalism. On the other hand, those signpost traits that U.S. citizens believe to be unique to their culture are in fact part of the universal heritage of the Enlightenment and Modernity. I am, of course, referring to representative government and capitalism. Moreover, Enlightenment values were widely shared across Western Civilization in Europe and the Americas. The Founding Fathers of the United States and Latin America were equally participants in the creation of the modern world. However, it is true that the social evolution of the United States and Latin America are different. The Catholic Monarchy of Spain stretched from Taos, New Mexico to Patagonia in Argentina; after Independence (1810-1825) it broke apart into eighteen countries. In contrast, the thirteen English colonies became the United States and expanded territorially at the expense of Indian tribes, France, Mexico, and Spain between 1797 and 1898.
The reason most of Latin America remains underdeveloped compared with the United States is not related to seminal cultural traits, but instead lies in the historical foundations of U.S. and European imperialism and their respective economies and social systems. I am not, of course, denying that Mexicanos and other Latinos are culturally different from Anglo North Americans. Rather, it should be recalled that Latin America forms an integral and organic part of the same Western Civilization as the United States, Canada, and Europe. Yet, it is not a shared European culture or Christianity that critics of Mexicano immigration fear; rather, it is the mixed race origins of Latinos that terrifies Pat Buchanan, Victor Hanson, Samuel Huntington and others. Theses critics fear that the ideal of a white republic like the United States, founded on eternal Anglo-Saxon values, will be swamped by a brown tidal wave mestizo and mulatto peoples from the Catholic and Indo-Hispano societies of Latin America. It is as if the struggle between Elizabethan England and the Spain of Philip II is still being played out along the US — Mexican border.
Samuel Huntington is correct in the essentials his thesis. The current lands known as the Southwestern United States (1847- ) were formerly the northern territory of Mexico and New Spain. For hundreds of years, the Southwest was "El Norte" (the north) viewed from Mexico City; the United States conquered the region in the war of 1846- 1848. Yet, the older north-south axis was never broken and shows every sign of reasserting itself. Huntington is, therefore, correct in saying that Mexicano immigrants have a unique historical relationship to the Southwest.
Around 1000 A.D., civilization in Meso-America was twenty-five centuries old. The first cities had emerged in eastern Mexico around 1500 B.C. Slowly, the avenues of trade began to connect Meso-America with its periphery in the north where colonial variants of its civilization began to emerge circa 500 A.D. in New Mexico and Arizona, and along the Mississippi River Valley. The civilization of Teotihuacán (15OBC-750AD) maintained extensive contact with the early Pueblo cultures of the southwest. Toltec soldiers, merchants, and missionaries from Tula (900-1200AD) sustained similar contact with the Anasazi, Mogollon, and Hohokam societies in New Mexico and Arizona.
By 1500 A.D., the Mexica-Aztec Empire was hegemon over most of Meso-America. The Mexica, like the Toltecs before them, were Norteños who migrated south from their mythic homeland—Aztlan—in the late thirteenth century. In 1325, the Mexica founded Tenochtitlan, their capital, on an island in Lake Texcoco. At first, they were a minor power among the warring states of Anahuac. In 1427 however, the Mexica overthrew the over lordship of Atzcapotzalco, and together with the cities of Texcoco and Tlacopan formed a triple alliance—the Aztec Empire. This dominant warrior society would be conquered by a small band of Spanish conquistadores led by Hernan Cortez and their accompanying native allies. When Spaniards conquered the Mexica-Aztec empire (1325-1521), the Mestizo people that this conquest produced took up the northern expansion of Mesoamerica. Likewise as these mixed bloods moved to conquer the northern lands they would be accompanied by native allies. As such, the age old migration to and from El Norte continued.
In 1598, Juan de Oñate entered and founded Nuevo Mexico for the Spanish Crown. This marked the effective termination of the age of Spanish imperialism. Earlier in the sixteenth century other conquistadors fanned out across North and South America.
Mexicano subjects of the Spanish Crown would establish northern colonies in Zacatecas (1545), Durango (1575), Nuevo Leon (1580), New Mexico (1598), Chihuahua (1635), Sonora (1640), Texas (1718), Tamaulipas (1740), and California (1769). By 1600 AD the Catholic Monarchy of Spain officially stretched from Taos, Nuevo Mexico in the north to Chile in the South, including Brazil when the Castilian and Portuguese Crown were united (158O-164O), though the overwhelming majority of the populations of this vast area were still native or mixed race.
In colonial Mexico, the large Creole ruling class rankled because of their exclusion from the highest offices of government; natives and mixed bloods also protested their exclusion from Creole society. In writings and petitions to the king and the Council of the Indies it was repeatedly asked why the sons of the land were being denied its fruits by an ungrateful government, and how Christians justified the inhumane treatment of native souls.
By 168O in El Norte, fledgling Spanish settlements were almost destroyed by a vast native Pueblo and Mestizo revolutionary movement starting in New Mexico, which rolled back Spanish control throughout the region. Don Diego de Vargas restored the Spanish settlements in New Mexico after 1692 with a cultural compromise which endured until the Mexican era (1821-1847). This agreement included a Spanish-Pueblo military alliance against other raiding tribes, and toleration of the Pueblo religion in exchange for public profession of Catholicism.
The Bourbon dynasty assumed the Spanish throne in 1700, ruling Latin America until independence (ca. 1825). The French royal family reinvigorated the Spanish empire, rebuilding its army, navy, and economy. During the long eighteenth century, the Americas became an area of intense international rivalry. Bourbon Spain and France were bested by Great Britain during the Seven years war (1756- 1763). A defeated Spain undertook a systematic reform of its empire; centralization and militarization alienated Spanish American elites. Moreover, Spain helped the American colonies gain independence from England which spread the idea to its own colonies.
In 1776, when the English colonies were declaring their independence and the Spanish were founding San Francisco, the Bourbon viceroyalty in Mexico was setting up the Commandancy-Generalship of the northern provinces of New Spain, consisting of California, Arizona, Sonora, New Mexico, Chihuahua, Texas, Nuevo Leon, Coahuila, Durango, Sinaola, and Zacatecas. This was a geographical pre-figuring of the lands that will make up a future Chicano-Mexicano State – La República del Norte.
In 1821, Mexico won its independence from Spain and reconstituted itself first as an independent empire (1821-1823), then as a federal republic ironically modeled on the constitution of the United States. After three hundred years of colonial rule, Mexican creoles had little experience with self-government; moreover, the country's two strongest institutions, the army and the church were authoritarian and anti-democratic by nature. Political instability soon became chronic. Another strange twist of history, which would affect the migration of Anglo immigrants into Mexican territory, was the free trade agreement of 1823 between the Mexican government and the United States. Rich Nuevo Mexicano merchants took advantage of this agreement to link up with Anglo American merchants from St. Louis establishing the Santa Fe Trail. In the late colonial period a flourishing sheep industry developed in El Norte with trade going north and south; the animals were sold to Chihuahua for silver, which in turn was used to purchase American manufactured goods.
For El Norte the most ominous development at the beginning of the nineteenth century was in Texas. After the French sale of the Louisiana territories U.S., Anglo settlers now began to infiltrate the Spanish borderlands. In another strange twist of historical irony, the ailing Spanish government allowed U.S. Anglo immigrants to establish a colony in east Texas under the proviso that they would become loyal subjects, learn Spanish, become Catholics, and develop the region's economy. Conservative Mexican officials warned against the Anglo immigrants entering Texas reminding their countrymen that the Romans had made the same mistake when they allowed German tribesmen to move into Roman border provinces. In 1819, United States forces annexed Spanish Florida during the course of operations against the Seminole Indians. Later, President Andrew Jackson encouraged American settlers in Texas to revolt against Mexican rule (1835).
In the War of North American Aggression (1846-1848), Mexico would lose half of its national territory. During the war, Mexicano patriots at Taos responded to U.S. occupation by executing the newly appointed U.S. civil governor, Charles Bent, and several of his Mexicano collaborators. U.S. response to this execution was swift and deadly. Nearly fifty Mexicano freedom fighters in Taos were hung. One patriot who survived the battle, Manuel Cortés of Mora, organized and led effective guerilla military campaigns against the U.S. Army. Cortes' efforts against the U.S. military were successful until the end of the war with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in the spring of 1848. In the Treaty Mexico surrendered its claim to Texas, ceded California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Subsequently, the United States also acquired the Gila and Mesilla River Valleys in the Gadsden Purchase (1853).
According to both Articles VIII and IX of the treaty Mexican citizens who remained in the occupied territories "shall be incorporated into the Union…to the enjoyment of all rights of citizens of the United States." While the treaty language suggested full citizenship, Mexicanos living in the borderlands would endure decades of prejudice and disenfranchisement.
Nearly one hundred thousand Nuevo Mexicanos, Californios and Tejanos, remained in the borderlands and would form the foundation of the United States Mexican-American community. In 1850 Anglo settlers would discover gold in California near Sutter's Mill causing an avalanche of Anglo prospectors that would significantly change the ethnic makeup of El Norte until the early twentieth century. The population of San Francisco alone would grow from 812 to 25,000 from 1848-1850. Tensions between Mexicanos and Anglos quickly erupted into violence.
Life after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo for Mexicanos in El Norte became increasingly complex both socially and politically. The Anglo Protestant conceptualized view recognized the Mexican-American War as a part of their Manifest Destiny to Americanize this continent. To carry out this civic policy required the institutional and social domination of Anglo Protestant ideals over all the conquered people of the borderlands. Manifest Destiny resulted in the social and political subordination of both Native Americans and Mexicanos. Tactics included expelling populations, murder, and genocide, displacement of the landed populations, economic (labor), political and social marginalization, and vilification. Mexicanos were commonly and still are depicted as bandits, thieves and social/racial misfits.
Many modern Chicano historians suggest that the nineteenth century instilled a grassroots grievance and an ideological image that inspires many contemporary Chicanos in patriotic devotion set on liberating their lands from an occupying and colonizing Anglo-Saxon government-Chicano Nationalism.
In the first half of the 20th century civil turmoil in Latin America caused by aggressive US foreign economic policies drove waves of refugees north. Like today, US policies regarding Latin America shaped the conditions in which immigration took place. Before 1910 in Mexico, 35,000 to 50,000 US citizens owned 27% of Mexico's land. US investors would hold 150 million of 485 million acres of land. By 1900 US investors held some 90% of the incorporated value of Mexican industry. During the Porfirato, president Diaz of Mexico would bring prosperity to the Mexican middle and upper classes however the vast majority of poor Mexicans would excluded and continue to suffer. In the last years of the Diaz regime, real wages would decline significantly; agriculture especially Mexico's sugar markets dried up due to the US protectionist tariffs on US sugar interests in the Caribbean. Mining, timber, and ranching industries also stalled, yet the Diaz regime decided that the free market would correct itself. The twentieth century's first revolution would be waged for over ten years in Mexico (1910-1919). The chaotic violence of the Mexican revolution would further drive hundreds of thousands of Mexican refugees north into the United States and El Norte. The oncoming US involvement in WWI would create labor shortages and an economic boom in the United States further adding to the pull factor of immigrants heading north.
US census figures show that the Mexican population in the United States
growing from about 103,000 in 1900 to 1,400,000 in 1930. Just as today big business welcomed cheap Mexican labor. Mexican refugees would become the main source of seasonal migrant labor for California's agro-business. Mexican laborers worked the railroads, copper and coal mines and factories. A racist backlash against Mexican immigrants led to accusations that Mexican laborers were communists, thieves, inassimilable and wards of the state - arguments that are commonly mentioned in today's immigration debate. Another interesting note is the number of Mexican Americans who volunteered to serve in WWI is proportionately larger in numbers than the US population as a whole. Similar patriotic trends amongst Latino immigrants would continue up through the Korean, Vietnam and the current Iraqi and Afghanistan conflicts. Also during this era, Mexicanos began moving out of the Southwest for the first time to other locations in the US, responding to industrial labor shortages in the Midwest and Northeast. The Great Depression (1929-1939) and the competition for jobs led to the Mexican repatriation program where hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans were sent back to Mexico although many were legal US citizens. WWII and the need for labor would bring back the need for Mexican labor. The "Bracero Program" brought hundreds of thousands of Mexican laborers back into the US during the Second World War. As history has shown once the need for surplus labor is met by US business interests the Mexicanos are shown the back door, usually by force. By 1954 the US government would launch a massive military style immigration enforcement program called "Operation wetback" resulting again in mass deportations. Like earlier raids in the century many legal US citizens were denied their rights, detained and deported.
In the late 1960s Chicano, Black, and Red Power movements began to unfold advocating National Liberation for the native people of North America, and former black slaves. Armed confrontations between these groups and US federal officials began to take place throughout the United States. It was the result of this political environment that the struggle for liberation by the oppressed people of North America was first directly presented to the United Nations by a non-member delegation of Chicanos.
The leadership of Reies Lopez Tijerina, and the legendary Tierra Amarilla Court House Raid of 1967, would dramatize the growing unrest of the Chicano people who lingered mercilessly colonized under the American system of government. The Chicano people of New Mexico or "Manitos" who make up the once isolated population of New Mexico and what is now southern Colorado are the often forgotten people of "the lost land." Descendants of early mixed blood settlers from Zacatecas and indigenous Mexican tribes who intermarried with the pueblo people of today's Southwestern United States. This isolated group also consider themselves indigenous people but without Federal designated status. The struggle for land in New Mexico led by Tijerina would inspire others to stand up and fight against their colonizers. Students, and barrio youth, farm workers, and other civic organizations would all activate under the charismatic leadership of Corky Gonzales, José Angel Gutiérrez, César Chavez and others in the quest for political power and the establishment of a Chicano homeland. Members and advocates of
this movement were second or third generation Mexican immigrants, or "Manitos", "Californios" and "Tejanos" who had long suffered under US occupation since the reconfiguration of the Mexican border after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
The litany of 2Oth Century U.S. interventions and aggression which intensified in the twentieth century are too numerous to detail in this article, but such economic and military interventions only fomented the great Latino migrations north to the United States. Finally failed free trade agreements like NAFTA have devastated Mexican peasant agriculture, costs millions of jobs on both sides of the border, and pushed another avalanche of Mexicano and Central immigrants north looking for work, and economic opportunities. As the neo-colonial status of Latin American nations continue, impoverished masses have to choose between death by starvation, at the hands of U.S. backed paramilitary death squads, or head north in the hopes of starting anew. One can only wonder, by way of analogy, if Mexicanos and other Latinos now colonizing their former territories in the United States are not also the vanguard of a Völkerwanderung that will result in an alliance of Chicanos, Latinos and Norteños whose object will be the creation of a Norteño secessionist nation in the American Southwest and Northern Mexico.
Looking into the future it would not be so difficult for an acute observer to foresee the eventual geopolitical reconfiguration of North America. Demographic trends already obvious in 2007 will be more pronounced. In the former American Southwest Latino populations mostly from Northern Mexico could reconstitute themselves into a sovereign state called La República del Norte, with an area of just under one million square miles, a population of one hundred and twenty million (seventy million of which will be Latinos), its capital in Los Angeles, with one of the fastest growing economies in the world. The treaty of reorganization could be the result of a general North American conference in which political boundaries will be redrawn in order to conform to cultural and ethnic realities. Moreover, the prosperity of North America would make such a move seem less threatening and more conducive to business interests generally.
By 2050, geopolitical changes in East Asia could result in Chinese hegemony and the United States retreating from the East Pacific and concentrating on the Western Hemisphere.
The foreseeable peaceful independence of Quebec by 2040 will allay fears among the United States elites of an impending economic disaster and pose no security threat to the rest of North America. In fact, an Ontario-based Canada will flourish in a predominately Anglo-phone territory. The western Canadian provinces will gravitate into a loose union with the United States solidifying its hold over Alaska, which will be threatened by growing Chinese presence in Northeast Asia. Moreover, the annexation of the Canadian West will assuage American resentment over the secession of El Norte. Yet, in reality the loss of the Southwest could increase US security by creating a buffer zone, which will absorb Latino migration. Finally, the American ruling establishment will be forced to acknowledge the failure of its century-long policy of attempting to assimilate the Latino demographic tidal wave by means of a militarized border, oppressive immigration laws, anti-Hispanic cultural legislation, and mass deportations. These measures will increasingly demoralize the United States exposing the lie of its reputed democratic values.
At the same time, burgeoning Latino populations in all of America's metropolitan centers will seem to dilute the original WASP cultural values of the country, in a way English speaking African Americans could never do. In the end, the Anglo-American ruling establishment will accept a Southwestern nation state free from both American and Mexican control. Furthermore, U.S. strategic planners will be loath to include in their future body social such a large and disgruntled Spanish speaking, non-Protestant, minority group in proximate distance to their place of origin. With the growing Chinese threat in the Pacific, better to ameliorate Norteño nationalism than deal with a potential fifth column. I must emphasize that little violence will proceed these events—more in the nature of Quebec style mass demonstrations, an intifada-like uprising on university campuses or in economically depressed barrios; perhaps a few incidents of military resistance in response to heavy government pressure, arrests, and deportations—but no civil war or general breakdown will occur. The relatively peaceful disintegration of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe, the Baltic, Central Asia, the Ukraine, and Belarus will serve as a model. China's growing power in the Pacific will make sure the United States does not overreact to Norteño nationalism.
Mexico, meanwhile, will face a similar dilemma insofar as El Norte's dynamic American-style capitalism and conservative ranchero-frontier culture will seem at odds with central Mexico's centuries-old tradition of statism, and public sector economics. Mexico City's ruling elites will most likely prefer to relinquish El None rather than be dominated by it as occurred in the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A more manageable Mexico will emerge, about the size of France, with a hundred million people, and centered around the core cities of Mexico, Guadalajara, Vera Cruz, Puebla, and Oaxaca; in effect, the re-emergence of Meso-America's old indigenous states— Teotihuacan, the Toltec Empire, and the Mexica-Aztec federation. In the Yucatan, Chiapas, Belize, and Guatemala a Mayan nation seems inevitable, again emphasizing a trend detectable since the late twentieth century for cultural orientation to replace liberalism and ideology as a basis for nation building.
Norteños are like Palestinians, Quebecois, and Sri Lanka Tamils - new nationalities. The tide of history is on their side; a new age of nationalism is sweeping the planet. This fourth springtime of nations is comparable to the first age of nationalism during the French Revolutionary era (1789-1830), the second age of nations after World War I (1918-1925), and the third period of national formations at the end of European colonialism (1947-1965).
Large-scale empires, especially multi-ethnic ones, have shattered (the Soviet Union, 1917-1991 and Yugoslavia, 1920-1992); others such as India and Indonesia appear shabby and unstable. Only the United States and China remain superpowers and each has millions of unassimilated minorities. It is the natural aspiration of any peoples who achieve national consciousness to establish their own sovereign nation-states. At least this has been the pattern since the English colonists broke away from England and established the United States (1776- ).
An observer of these developments might ask why the United States would oppose a similar movement on the part of its own national minorities. Smaller national states would satisfy ethnic-tribal ambitions, lead to local national renaissances, while a world government provides security, global economic planning, and environmental stewardship. No matter what its shortcomings, it would be better than the international anarchy produced by a rogue superpower acting unilaterally as in Iraq. The emergence of an independent Mexicano country in El Norte -- the American Southwest and Northern Mexico -- will not be achieved through violence or civil war. For who could stand up to the military might of the United States? Instead, one has to imagine a three-fold process by which Norteños - Chicanos, Mexican Americans, and Northern Mexicanos - slowly move toward a new national consciousness and then aspire for nationhood.
First, the ever rising tide of American nativism will alienate millions of Mexicanos as they suffer from increasing anti-immigrant sentiment, punitive legislation against the public use of Spanish, anti-Catholic Protestant fundamentalism, and widespread calls for the expulsion of Mexicanos or their forced assimilation. Secondly, as Mexicanos become a majority in the Border States, they will use the U.S. electoral system to further their national evolution. American democracy and capitalism will allow them to capture local governments and economies, moving from self-government to autonomy, then finally toward a sentiment for independence. The process will resemble the development of Quebecois nationalism in Canada or that of the Czechs in the old Habsburg Empire (1526-1919). Undoubtedly, the old Anglo vanguard of the United States will lash out viciously, but heightened world opinion will moderate its response. Furthermore, the moral contradiction of the United States acting like Israel, denying to others the same rights it claims for itself, will force the United States to concede or eventually face a long-term Palestinian-style Intifada along its border with Mexico. Thirdly, Mexicanos and other Latinos do not come to the United States to embrace or adopt Anglo-Saxon culture. In fact, they are the heirs of a much older and pluralistic civilization which most do not want to surrender. Instead, they cross the border hoping to find economic opportunities that do not exist in Mexico. They want the opportunity to work and higher wages, but not Anglo-American culture, which has very little real depth or quality. Furthermore, most Mexicanos realize that if the United States had not slowly infiltrated, then overwhelmed, their lost northern territories, Mexico would have been the beneficiary of California's gold rush, Texas's oil wells, and the Southwest's other natural resources. With these discoveries Mexico might have fulfilled the predictions of Alexander von Humboldt (ca. 1800) and become North America's superpower instead of the United States.
Mexico's failure economically is yet another factor pushing Mexicanos northward and will eventually lead to a new national identity in El Norte. Millions continue to move north no matter what measures are taken to stop this Völkerwanderungen. In fact, the frenzy of anti-Mexicano rhetoric and proposed anti-immigrant legislation will, in turn, heighten their sense of alienation and separateness, fostering the inevitable realization that Mexicanos in the borderlands must have a country of their own in lands once ruled by their ancestors - La República del Norte.