This presentation will focus on Mexican Americans’ use of collective memories of the U.S.-Mexico War to encourage civil rights reform movements. It will explore several examples from Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship (April 2024). The book analyzes the ways collective memories of the US-Mexico War have shaped Mexican Americans’ civil rights struggles over several generations. As the first Latinx people incorporated into the nation, Mexican Americans were offered US citizenship by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war. Because the 1790 Naturalization Act declared whites solely eligible for citizenship, the treaty pronounced Mexican Americans to be legally white. While their incorporation as citizens appeared as progress towards racial justice and the electorate's diversification, their second-class citizenship demonstrated a retrenchment in racial progress. Over several generations, civil rights activists summoned conquest memories to link Mexican Americans’ poverty, electoral disenfranchisement, low educational attainment, and health disparities to structural and institutional inequalities resulting from racial retrenchments. Activists also recalled the treaty's citizenship guarantees to push for property rights, protection from vigilante attacks, and educational reform. The talk will address the politics of memory by exploring how succeeding generations reinforced or modified earlier memories of conquest according to their contemporary social and political contexts. It will also describe collective memories in the US and Mexico to illustrate transnational influences on Mexican Americans and to demonstrate how community and national memories can be used strategically to advance political agendas.

Omar Valerio-Jiménez is Professor of History and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies for the College of Liberal and Fine Arts at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He teaches courses on Latinx, borderlands, Texas, public history, U.S. West, race/ethnicity, and immigration. His publications include The Latina/o Midwest Reader, Major Problems in Latina/o History, and River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands. His most recent book, Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in April 2024. It analyzes the ways in which memories of the U.S.-Mexico War have shaped Mexican Americans’ civil rights struggles, writing, oral discourse, and public rituals. His next book project, “Challenging Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Textbook Reform, and Archive Preservation,” explores textbook reform and archive preservation efforts by Mexican American scholars and activists in New Mexico and Texas during the early twentieth century. To conduct research for this third book project, Professor Valerio-Jiménez received an Award for Faculty from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Spencer Foundation Racial Equity Research Grant.