Mexico never had a chance to recover from the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, writes a Houston historian. That war ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. For 15 million dollars, Mexico ceded some 55 percent of its prewar territory to the United States. A tight-fisted U.S. Congress said it was too much. The Treaty gave the U.S. what became all or part of the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, the entire State of Texas that then included part of Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma and New Mexico. The remaining southern part of Arizona, and part of southern New Mexico were purchased by the June 8, 1854, Gadsen Purchase for ten million. Near-endless negotiations were the job of Nicholas Trist, chief clerk of the U.S. State Department. Trist persisted even after he was fired by the impatient President James K. Polk. The Treaty was signed by Trist, a civilian without official authority, and a Mexican federal representative. Congress whined about “formality.” But the deal was too good: Trist’s treaty was ratified.
About 80,000 Mexicans lived in parts of California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas during 1845-50; far less in Nevada, southern and western Colorado and Utah. Mexico City did not occupy or govern much of this territory. Most of it was too dry and mountainous for human habitation. And, early on, touchy indigenous tribes had handily, savagely, thwarted Spain’s, then Mexico’s, northward expansion. Spaniards reported mounted Apaches raiding New Mexican settlements in the 1650s. In 1680s, Comanches, the prototype horse tribe of North America,” provided a harsh welcome for intruders.
The two postwar U.S.-Mexican treaties cut Mexico in half. It granted existing property rights of Mexican citizens living in the transferred territories. But such property rights tended to be ignored by the United States, especially during bumpy economic times; the Great Depression for example.
Mexico was trying to emerge from a ruinous, backward, exhausted social condition in 1920. This was the result of the 1910 Revolution, and the preceding “era of progress,” – 35 years under Porfirio Diaz, a liberal turned brutal dictator. In what was supposed to be the beginning of a freedom-embracing post-Revolutionary period, a series of rebellions erupted. Roving anonymous bands of armed men, cast adrift by surrendering, assassinated, or suborned leaders, refused to lay down their arms or their loathing for feudal hacendados, oligarchic politicos. The 1917 Constitution was a democratic document, but nobody was paying attention. The dreams for which campesinos had fought – freedom in a very broad, if naive, sense, the right to finally be recognized as more than expendable serfs, an opportunity to be a true citizen in a Mexican society ruled by law – were ignored. The betrayal and assassination of Emiliano Zapata, April 10, 1919, forecast their future. In the 1950s, you could hear weathered veterans recall the last days of such men. In 1923, there was a rebellion against the first coherent, if iron-fisted, post-Revolutionary administration – that of General Alvaro Obregon. Several of his one-time friends and officers – comandantes in Jalisco, Oaxaca, Veracruz and other states – nearly succeeded. But the U.S., tired of chaos on its border, sent Obregon arms, even airplanes. There were other eruptions. The new constitution limited elected officials to a single term. Obregon and a military and political colleague, Plutarco Elias Calles, planned to play round-robin, taking turns as president. There was an uprising. Many former generals, several close to both Obregon and Calles, were executed. Later, during a outdoor banquet at La Bombilla restaurant in Mexico City, Obregon was assassinated. The politicos were terrified. It wasn’t just their military and political rivals who threatened them, but religious and other “fanatics,” people no one knew, now menaced them. Calles quickly created the National Revolutionary Party (PNR) to select consensus political “candidates,” keeping competition within the Revolutionary elite and its cronies. Competition with peace.
A virulent anti-Catholic, Calles disastrously had begun a war in 1926 against Mexico’s Catholic establishment. Almost everyone in Mexico was Catholic. Fifty thousand campesinos – the Cristero Rebellion centered in Jalisco – rose against the government. The U.S. sent an unusually canny ambassador, Dwight Murrow, who was a protestant, to Mexico. In June 1929, Murrow’s campaign of soft negotiation on all fronts brought an end to the rebellion, which cost 80,000 lives. Calles and the Church made concessions that betrayed promises made to, and the hopes of, Mexico’s campesinos.
One final uprising of the generals, led by Gonzalo Escobar, exploded in 1929. It, too, was a real threat. It, too, was mercilessly put down with aid of the United States, which provided Calles, Mexico’s Jefe Maximo, with whatever he wanted. If the 1848 war had left Mexico awash in chaos, dashed hopes, fields of bodies and a maimed economy, the events of 1910-1929 left most of the population worse off. Then, October 19, 1929, the U.S stock market crashed, tearing apart the U.S. economy, slamming into a Mexican economy – and society – reeling from years of strife. Clouds of high-sounding words by generals, politicians, philosophers and priests had proven to be sophistry. The poor were not better off, they remained at the bottom, exploited, neglected. A species of prejudice once again turned penoes and campesinos into mozos, pelones, canalla – rabble – or as Jalisco author Mariano Azuela called them in his famous novel of the Revolution, “Los de Abajo” (“The Underdogs”). “The ranks of the jobless tripled between 1930 and 1932. The poor were not just worse off than before but more numerous,” wrote one Mexican historian. Tlaloc, Mejica god of rain, withered Mexico’s two chief crops with a drought. In 1933, 30 percent less corn and 22 percent fewer beans were produced than in 1907. These were mainstays of the rural and the barrio diet, which sank toward malnutrition.
Simultaneously, Mexico was hit by the United States’ 1929-1939 Mexican Repatriation Program. It was a Herbert Hoover idea to mass deport Mexicans and Mexican-Americans as the depression’s unemployment grew. Tens of thousands of Mexicans were coerced to leave. Due process disappeared. The U.S. Mexican population dropped an estimated 40 percent. Figures for California were mixed, contradictory, untrustworthy. The state of Indiana lost three-fourths of its Mexican population. Colorado, Illinois, Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Utah, Wisconsin, Wyoming lost over half. Deportees routinely lost personal property, automobiles, homes, businesses, other investments. Many didn’t have time to pick up paychecks or close savings accounts. They were transported to the nearest border town, marched across an international bridge by armed Agents or National Guard troops and told never to return. Mexico, in deep financial depression since 1911, was unprepared to receive the flood of deportees, most of whom were destitute when they arrived. Mexico, a primary source of cheap labor during the World War I, now became a desperate semi-solution for a depression-wracked United States. But one U.S. observer asked a nasty question: Would Mexican immigrants be sent for again when prosperous times returned, to be treated as “cheap labor” and then returned penniless to poverty-ridden relatives? The Bracero Program instituted during World War II provided the answer to that question.