OUR HISTORY: A day like today 172 years ago

The Treaty of Guadalupe HidalgoDead or latent letter in the lives of Mexicans in the United States

By Armando García

Editor and Founder of Nuestra América Magazine

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was an agreement that officially ended the US-Mexico War. (1846-1848). It was signed on February 2, 1848 in Guadalupe Hidalgo, Zacatecas; a city north of the capital where the Mexican government had fled because the advance of US forces. According to its terms, Mexico ceded 55 percent of its territory, including the current states of Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Nevada and Utah, to the United States of America. Mexico had no choice but to give up all claims to Texas and recognized the Rio Grande as the border with the United States.

Nuestra America Magazine since 1995 has published twice the entire accord. We did it, because of importance so that the inhabitants of Mexican origin in the United States know their history, since from their signature and their ratification months later, it was when the history of the Mexicans is divided on both sides of border

For the inhabitants of the Mexican Republic, I consider, without fear of being mistaken, that the treaty is simply a dead letter, without interest for the rulers delivered to the descendants of those who invaded their country 176 years ago. But for Chicanos, descendants of Mexicans who stayed in the ceded territories, which the Chicano writer Rodolfo Acuna calls them the 'Occupied America', is a latent letter, because it is the one that has defined the treatment, the humiliation, the discrimination, xenophobia, violence, impunity, human trafficking and narcotics, perhaps worse than the treatment of the indigenous people in Mexico, the land of our parents and grandparents.

Mexicans in the United States have suffered, like or worse than other minorities, lynching, hanging, isolation, ethnic and linguistic oppression and sometimes territorial segregation and historical and cultural abandonment. Little has been missing so that we have been exterminated or placed in concentration camps or reservations such as Native Americans, original settlers of these lands.

The treaty is also a dead letter, because not even Mexico has officially questioned its legitimacy, for its innumerable violations, sufficient to nullify the validity of the agreements signed by the then President Antonio López de Santa Anna; due to the confession in the text of the treaty that the US army invaded Mexico.