Our war with Mexico
O'Rourke, David K.
will. And she can live above the glass ceiling for life---as long as she does not mind the eager young things getting off and on the elevator. According to one school of thought, men will behave...
...It guaranteed the civil, religious, and property rights of Mexican citizens in the ceded territory...
...political astuteness was insufficient for Lady Bird Johnson...
...With enough power, we apparently still believe, a man can have all the women he wants...
...David K. O'Rourke OUR WAR WITH MEXICO Rereading Guadalupe Hidalgo he war between the United States and Mexico ended 150 years ago this past February, but in some sense the struggle has continued by other means...
...One leader I spoke with recently described it as "slow and steady, but with a difference...
...The Irish, however, were truly immigrants...
...He added that, given the numbers of Hispanics, it is just a matter of time before they achieve higher office...
...gentle reticence was no safeguard for Mamie Eisenhower...
...And through it all, the wife smiles graciously and makes excuses...
...Commonweal 8 March 13, 1998 us...
...Perhaps this idea works with lesser baboons (though it seems hardly fair to blame one person for another's misbehavior), but the top baboon does not generally subscribe to it...
...Though the territorial shift was enormous, the treaty itself was temperate...
...Presumably that would have meant that the Native Americans in the ceded territory shared in all the legal protections guaranteed by the treaty...
...In the meantime, they shall be maintained and protected in the enjoyment of their liberty and property, and the civil rights now vested in them according to the Mexican laws...
...The defeat in 1996 of House Republican Robert Dornan by Loretta Sanchez in Southern California was greeted at first by astonishment and then by the charge from some that the defeat by a Hispanic of an established "white" politician could have been brought about only by fraud...
...They came here to start a new life, and chose to adapt to the customs and demands of their new home...
...Back in 1964, the year Hillary Rodham graduated from high school and a year after publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Jack Jones was crooning to nervous housewives: "Hey, little girl, comb your hair, fix your makeup...
...They were presumed to be Americans, at least legally, if they did not leave or register as Mexicans within one year...
...The fact that Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law enrolled only one new African-American student this past year, down from twenty the previous year, made the national news...
...John Quincy Adams, still in Congress at age eighttwo, thought the war with Mexico a shameless land-grab...
...It arises, I suspect, from the same kind of fear that greeted other ethnic groups, especially the Irish in the nineteenth century, as they moved from mere presence to positions of political and economic power...
...And it was over the war that Thoreau refused to pay his taxes, spent a symbolic night in jail in protest, and wrote his classic essay on "Civil Disobedience...
...Though the war's conclusion, in fact, did not bring about the expansion of slavery, it introduced the idea of race as a basis for civil status...
...In the century-and-a-half since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo many Westerners have preferred not to see the vast numbers of Hispanics living in what was once part of Mexico or acknowledge their rights as U.S...
...I don't know how, when, or if women are going to get past the glass ceiling...
...citizens...
...Women--whether single or married, professionals or homemakers--are not tokens of winning, like poker chips, and we demean ourselves when we speak of adultery, sexual compulsiveness, and harassment as peccadilloes...
...It is more likely to happen in our lifetime, however, if we have the courage to say that philandering is misogyny...
...One major complication for the United States was that the Mexican Constitution of 1824 had granted citizenship to the Indians in Mexico...
...I suspect that life in these parts is going to be very interesting when that happens...
...According to one school of thought, men will behave if their wives play a prescribed role to perfection, whether the role be domesticity and maternity or professionalism and assertiveness...
...The divisions which ultimately led to the Civil War even then ran deep...
...A profound racism has long colored American attitudes toward Hispanics...
...And are the only possible female responses either to "Stand by Your Man," if you're directly involved, or to argue that adults can do whatever they like sexually, so long as they're otherwise fulfilling their job descriptions...
...The dividing issue in the United States over the war with Mexico was slavery and its containment or expansion...
...Historian Francis Parkman begins his classic story of the American frontier, The Oregon Trail, with this description of a group of t Iispanics his party encountered on leaving Saint Louis in 1846: "On the muddy shore stood some thirty or forty slavish-looking Spaniards, gazing stupidly out from underneath their broad hats...
...Article IX declared that the Mexicans in the ceded territories "shall be incorporated into the United States of America, and admitted as soon as possible, according to the principles of the Federal Constitution, to the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the United States...
...Hispanics, to the contrary, are very much aware that "they were here before us,'" and do not see themselves as foreigners...
...If men do not behave, it is because their women have somehow failed...
...His most recent book, Demons by Definition (Peper Lang, New York 1998), is a study of social idealism, religious nationalism, a~id the demonizing of dissent...
...It's time to stop making excuses for men who see women as prizes in the power game--playmates, not players...
...The repeal of California's affirmative-action law and the anti-immigrant attitudes that have gained popular support are part of this anti-Hispanic sentiment...
...You'd better look good when your husband walks in the door, advised Hit Number 14, "Wives and Lovers," because "day after day, there are girls at the office, and men will always be men...
...I'll agree with the prevailing wisdom on one point: the current scandal is not about sex...
...The difference is that the political offices, such as school boards and city and town councils, are chosen not for their high profile but for their effects on family and neighborhood life...
...President James Buchanan called the Mexicans a "mongrel race...
...He contrasted them with a nearby frontiersman, "a tall, strong figure, with a clear blue eye and an open, intelligent face," whom Parkman saw as a symbol of "that race of restless and intrepid pioneers whose axes and rifles have opened a path from the Alleghenies to the western prairies," and who, in his view, would soon cut a path through other "slavish-looking Spaniards" on the road to Mexico City...
...others will be more subtle...
...Did all these women simply make poor choices...
...In much of the United States affirmative action is seen principally as an African-American issue, but in California the focus is t lispanic...
...But it's not about perjury either...
...I IostiIe actions on their part against Americans or American-owned property were judged to be acts of war...
...Is that really what it means to be a ma~to be unable to resist attractive women...
...Anti-Hispanic attitudes are still alive and well here in the far West...
...Brilliance did not protect Eleanor Roosevelt from the other woman...
...Very few will turn him down, and virtually nobody will kiss and tell...
...The racism that slavery nourished, the animosities that fed the war, and the land-greed it unleashed often ended up victimizing the Mexican and Native American people who lived in ~he ceded territory...
...A decade later, Stephen A. Douglas, in his debates with Lincoln, referred to "the amalgamation of white men and Indians and Negroes we have seen in Mexico" as justification for his support of racial segregation...
...The opposition to the war was so great in many parts of the country that President Polk's Democrats lost badly in the congressional election of 1846, even as reports of General Winfield Scott's victory were coming in, and then lost the presidential election in 1848 as well...
...David K. O'Rourke, O.P., who has served as pastor in a number of California parishes, lives in Oakland, California...
...In fact, in California, many people seem to have difficulty admitting that there are more than 8 million Hispanics living among LaVonne Neff is executive book editor at Loyola Press in Chicago...
...Their wives' dazzling beauty did not keep the husbands of Jacqueline Kennedy or Diana, Princess of Wales, from finding extracurricular interests...
...This scandal is also about self-respect...
...Comlnonweal 9 .~4arch 13, 1998...
...The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded nearly one-half of Mexico to the United States--1 million square miles encompassing what are now the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, California, most of Colorado, and part of Wyoming...
...But within the American territories, they were treated, in effect, as foreigners, members of other nations...
...The fact that the enrollment of Hispanic students fell from twenty-two to six in a state where Hispanics make up one-fourth of the population was practically overlooked...
...While there may be pragmatic adaptations to American laws and customs, the border with Mexico is seen as a bureaucratic line, and a porous one at that, given how many families have members on both sides...
...Coretta Scott King and Kasturbai Gandhi married saints, but both had to endure the elevator that kept delivering fresh women (Gandhi, who presumably was not after power, also claimed not to be after sex: he wanted naked young women in his bed so he could strengthen his character by saying no...
...It's about power...
...Some will throw themselves at him...
...Even given these anti-Hispanic attitudes, their entry into political life is moving ahead...
Vol. 125 • March 1998 • No. 5
