Mexicans in the Making of America

"Mexicans in the Making of America examines the impact of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants on U.S. culture, politics, and economy since the 1848 U.S.-Mexican War, when the United States seized the northern half of Mexico--the present-day states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas (annexed in 1846), Nevada, Utah, and parts of Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma. From the moment the United States signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the war, America sealed its destiny--and that of Mexico--as two nations, separate and unequal, inextricably linked by geography and bound together by generations of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants. Latino USA is a transnational history of an emergent national identity that includes people of mixed-race and composite, hybrid cultures from Mexico who continue to reside mainly in the American Southwest. At the national level, it is the history of the fear of immigrants, particularly fear of Mexicans over the past fifty years, that has brought us to the present moment--a time in which white majorities in many states are declining and in which the United States is trying to cope, in various ways, with the very thing it denies: that it is not, and has never been, a purely Anglo-American nation"--Provided by publisher.