My History Not Yours

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Recommended: Politics of the Mexican American War

“Victims of American Westward Expansion…Accommodation or Resistance?” When viewing a map of the country of Mexico prior to the American westward expansion, it was actually larger than the United States had been at that time. Some lands that Mexico lost in the Mexican - American war under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, are Texas (the second largest state in the present US), California (the third largest state in the present US) and New Mexico (the fifth largest state in the present US). Due to this defeat Mexico lost half of its national territory. Half of Mexico’s lands were gone and half of Mexico’s people displaced making them Americans and no longer Mexicanos. This occurred without their approval or consent. In the book “My History Not Yours” written by Genaro M. Padilla are accounts of men and women living in the lands of Texas, California and New Mexico during the this unruly time of loss and the unknown. The pages of this book contain the actual written accounts of Mexicanos and their feeling of outrage sadness and anger against the insurgence of their mother lands. The feelings of accommodation and resistance are a present among the writers within Padilla’s book but some lean towards one side and some the other. All humans are different and the people of Mexico handled and felt differently about the loss of their lands. Some possessed the mindset that the overtaking of their lands by the Americans was unacceptable and they resisted and resented the presence of the Anglo-Saxons that now occupied their territory. While others possessed more of an accommodating view. That being, they saw the Americans as a potential asset to develop the lands and that the US was more powerful than they so it would be best to tr... ... middle of paper ... ...brief portion of the feelings that accompanied the loss of land for California, New Mexico and Texas. As shown some were passive while others were aggressive. All felt and dealt with similar yet different experiences once America took over half of Mexico’s territory in 1848, after twenty-one months of war between the two nations (Padilla, 14). Whether one was accommodating or resistant to Americans in Mexico’s prior lands, the Mexicanos and Tejanos all felt uprooted, scared and unsure of what the future would hold for them. But one commonality that Juan Bautista Vigil y Alarid, Cleofas M. Jaramillo, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Eulalia Perez de Guillen Marine and Juan Nepumuceno Sequin all shared was that they told their stories and because of that the world will forever have the accounts of these people and their heritages told through their own histories.

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