The relations of the United States with Mexico,
discounting a few years of lull, almost always were tense. Without having
significant geographical accidents that would prevent traffic from one side to
another, the line of separation between the two countries, fixed by the Treaty
of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, February 1848, resembles a revolving door. With the
extraordinary growth of the American economy in the twentieth century,
thousands of Mexicans, through the fords of the Rio Grande, or through every
possible means through the thorny, deserted lands, reached the other side of
the border in search of a life best. The US government, tired of hunting them
with patrols and customs guards, wants to end that corridor by lifting, from
2007, an extensive more than a thousand kilometers.
The Spanish kingdom of North America
It was the Aragonese navigator, Don Tristan de Luna y
Arellano (1519 - 1571), who was the first to establish a settlement in West
Florida in 1559. He was part of the list of Spanish conquistadors, whose most
famous and famous name was Hernán Cortés, who had landed a little lower in
Mexico forty years earlier in 1519. The location chosen by Tristán de Luna was
Pensacola Bay on the Gulf of Mexico, and had its short fate blocked by a
devastating hurricane that two years later, in 1561, he destroyed the huts
newly erected by the sailors and destroyed the small fleet. A better settlement
was that of St. Augustine, which was founded on the Atlantic coast of Florida
by Admiral Pedro Menendez de Aviles in 1565, and became, in fact, the first
Hispanic settlement affirmed by those bands.
The west coast of the American continent, in turn, was
only occupied by Spanish missions during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, when a veritable necklace of reductions (San Diego, Santa Ana, Santa
Monica, Santa Bárbara, Santa Maria, Santa Cruz, San Jose, Santa Rosa, Los
Angeles, San Francisco, etc ...) stretched along the shores of the Pacific
Ocean between 1602 and 1806.
The
two Spanish-controlled ocean sides, in an arc of more than 6,000 kilometers,
that comprised the areas of Texas (subdivided between New Mexico, Nevada, Utah,
Arizona, Colorado) and California, were part of the Iberian America. An immense
semi-unoccupied area populated by Apaches, Navajos, Comanches, and numerous
other Indian tribes, administratively submitted to the viceroyalty of New Spain
(1525-1821), with capital in Mexico City. Territory that was incorporated to
the Mexican republic after the Independence, until the disastrous general Santa
Ana lost it to the United States in the War American-Mexican of 1846-8. At the
time, Mexico was forced to cede 55% of its territory: that is 1. 360,000 km². A
loan that was supplemented a few years later by the Gadsden Purchase of 1853-4
which involved the purchase of another 70,770 km² of frontier territory.
The Bolton Theory
This clamorous presence of the Spanish possessions of
North America, over the years, was simply banished from the teaching of history
in the United States. The students were led to believe that all the thousands
of acres integrated into the Union were a no man's land, a colossal emptiness,
a desert awaiting the Yankee settlers on their triumphal march through the
western plains. It was against this "forgetting" that the historian
Herbert Eugene Bolton turned when he published his seminal essay on Spanish
Borderer, the Spanish Frontier (Yale University edition, 1921). It was unacceptable
for him to extinguish the presence of the Franciscan reductions, the ranchos
and prisons erected, and the Spaniards, which formed a collar of stands
stretching from one ocean to the other. How could Americans ignore the names of
most of those states, cities, and landforms that kept their names from Spanish
conquerors and settlers? It was enough to look at the maps of the western and
southern states of the United States to verify this.
His intention was to shift the focus of US
historiographical attention-centered excessively on the annals of the Union's
Thirteen Founding Colonies-to the West, to the Gulf of Mexico, and to
California. The history of the United States could not be understood in
relation to European countries, but in conjunction with the other continental
nations.
In a communique made at a meeting of historians in
Canada, he stated that "in my own country the study of the Thirteen
British Colonies and the United States in isolation has obscured the diverse
and varied factors of its development, propelling the rise of a nation of
chauvinists. A similar distortion occurred in the teaching and writing of the
national history of other American countries "(47th Annual Meeting of
American.
