I always try to remind myself to cut the people south of the border a little slack. They were the real natives here until we forced them into a treaty at gunpoint. In 1848, the U.S. forced Mexico to cede 55 percent of its territory, including all of present-day California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma.
In exchange, the U.S. paid $15 million and agreed to assume $3.25 million in Mexican debts to American citizens.
Conservative defenders love to point to this payment as proof the acquisition was legitimate. But paying someone while holding a gun to their head doesn't make it a voluntary transaction. American troops occupied their capital and their government had collapsed, making Mexican resistance impossible.
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Mexican Cession territory, 1848
The treaty promised to protect the property rights and citizenship of Mexicans living in the ceded territories. Within decades, those promises proved worthless. Californio families who had owned vast ranchos for generations found themselves fighting expensive legal battles in American courts to prove ownership of their own land. Many lost everything to lawyers' fees and discriminatory laws designed to transfer property to Anglo settlers.
Even the American generals who won the war later admitted its injustice. Ulysses S. Grant, who fought as a young officer, later wrote that it was "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nationā¦
We and the former countries we came from have a long history of taking what we want from the natives, including land and resources, and then calling them savages and immigrants, and ourselves natives. I don't feel comfortable living in that ivory tower. We can't undo what has been done, but I believe we should treat them with more kindness than we often do. JMO
