Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850

"Andrés is an extremely skilled historian. He’s gone on to great success with other books as well, but this was his first. It was also one of the earliest books to challenge the idea of Manifest Destiny as a way of understanding what was happening in places like Texas. To put it as concisely as I can, what Andrés is arguing is that national identities were relatively weak and unformed in this early part of the 19th century, and other identities that people had were oftentimes more important. For instance, in Texas, if you were a member of a Masonic lodge, that might be more important to you than whether you happened to be an American citizen or a Mexican citizen; about half the land grants that American immigrants in Texas received from the government of Mexico went to members of one of the York Rite Masonic Lodges, because the legislature of the state of Coahuila was dominated by members of that lodge as well. People wore their citizenship very lightly, is how I would put it. So giving up one’s American citizenship to become a Mexican citizen, where you received more land and you had this connection to other people in that state government through your lodge made sense. Yes, and one of the other things that Reséndez writes about is that institutions such as the Catholic Church connected people who lived in Texas or New Mexico to the rest of Mexico. But, economically, the northern frontier of Mexico was drifting into the orbit of the United States. So in both New Mexico and Texas, trade and commerce was being oriented towards the United States. That’s a much better way of understanding how they became detached from Mexico than the ideology of Manifest Destiny."