National Identity on a Shifting
Border: Texas and New Mexico in the Age of Transition, 1821-1848

Andrés Reséndez

Introduction

Traditionally, we have told the story of how nations emerged as a triumphant tale of domination exerted by a determined center over reluctant peripheries and by persuasive officials over skeptical masses. The literature depicts state formation and nation building as originating from the core outward and from top to bottom. Sitting at the apex of all political and social organizations, the state has been granted the leading role. After all, it was the state that built the infrastructure linking the center to all corners of the nation, increasing the network of communications within a territory and thus helping integrate a national market. Under the auspices of the state, a nationalist ideology was fashioned and disseminated to all prospective citizens. And it was the state bureaucracy, employing novel means of communication such as mass education, that perpetuated the nation unto subsequent generations. Whether accounts spotlight institutions or identities, the underlying theme is centralization: The national state wins out over lesser political organizations and potential challengers, and the people divest themselves of previous ethnic or local loyalties as the nation becomes their overriding identity.1	1
This core-periphery, top-down model has recently come under criticism. In particular, E. J. Hobsbawm has made a crucial methodological point: Although nations tend to be promoted from above, they nevertheless have to be analyzed and understood from below, "in terms of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people, which are not necessarily national and still less nationalist." People's perceptions (and not nationalist propaganda) constitute the most critical yardstick against which we can measure the success of attempts at national construction. Historians and theorists have been understandably concerned with state-sponsored nationalist discourse, but they have been less adept at explaining why this discourse was adopted by local communities and non-elite groups. A spate of new monographs shows that, rather than a simple imposition from the center and from above, both state formation and nation building have been two-way processes, involving dialogues and negotiations between nationalist-minded, centralizing officials, on the one hand, and local and regional communities and ethnic groups, on the other.2	2
An approach that pays attention to both state designs and responses from local communities is badly needed to rethink the story of how Mexico's Far North became the American Southwest. This episode has long been explained through a sweeping narrative, that of American expansionism. Undoubtedly, expansionism was a powerful 'mood' that prevailed in the United States throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. But expansionism has been used in the historiography as a catchall, explain-all concept to describe the social psychology of early Americans, to elucidate the relations between American settlers and Native Americans, and to provide a rationale for the policy pursued by the United States toward the Spanish/Mexican possessions.3 The dramatic territorial exchanges of this era have been presented almost as logical outcomes of that irresistible ideology; they thus require no further explanation. Worse still, by emphasizing how Anglo-Americans expanded their domain, we have left unexamined how other peoples reacted to this offensive, often confining non-Anglo-Americans to the role of passive victims as they watched their homelands being taken away.4	3
Yet when we look closely at this process, we obtain a starkly different image. Expansionism, at least on Mexico's northern frontier, meant first and foremost economic penetration that afforded local Hispanic and Native American elites the opportunity to profit. This circumstance led those local elites consciously to shift their allegiances to accommodate their interests, even in the face of opposition from other members of their own ethnic groups. Economic expansion provided the medium in which cross-cultural alliances were forged along Mexico's northern frontier. Rather than idle players, local elites were active agents who made choices of far-reaching consequences.	. . .