Movie Review

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Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

The U.S.-Mexican War, 1846-1848. Prod. by Sylvia Komatsu, Rob Tranchin, and Paul Espinosa and dir. by Ginny Martin. KERA-Dallas, 1998. 220 mins. (PBS Video, 1320 Braddock Place, Alexandria, VA 22314-1698)

Following the lead of Ken Burns's magnum opus on the Civil War, pbs has produced a four-hour treatment of the Mexican-American War. While our first foreign war has not generated the interest of the fratricidal strife that it preceded, it is much too important to be overlooked. As one result of the war with Mexico, the United States acquired gold-rich California, whose request for statehood gave renewed impetus to the slavery question, which was only settled in the aftermath of the Civil War. A video treatment of this important conflict is long overdue, and this project fills that need. 1

The production sets the stage for the war with a discussion of Manifest Destiny and how that concept led American colonists in Mexican Texas to seek their political independence. Mexican authorities never accepted the outcome of this revolution, and when the United States annexed the Republic of Texas, Mexico regarded it as an act of war. The video presentation follows the events of the war in a fairly chronological sequence, from the opening battles along the Rio Grande in 1846 to the ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. The areas that often get short shrift in general accounts of the war, events in California and the political upheaval in Mexico that made prosecuting a war against the United States particularly difficult, are well covered. . . .

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