During the 17th and 18th centuries, European powers competed for control of North American colonies while Native peoples struggled for sovereignty, resulting in various shifting alliances and armed conflicts. Following US independence from England, these conflicts continued to play out, but the new nation eventually achieved dominance over much of North America. In the 19th century, US expansionism led to tremendous territorial growth and the incorporation within the US of large swaths of land that were previously ruled by Spain, as well as territories controlled by other European powers (see Figure 3.4).
Figure 3.4 Map of US territorial expansion
US expansionist policy was rooted in both material and ideological concerns. It reflected the geopolitical and economic ambitions of the US as a nation as well as the financial interests of bankers, merchants and speculators (Acuña, 2015; Duany, 2017; Gonzalez, 2011). There was money to be made by the US acquiring more territory and expanding the frontier, and expansion would enrich individuals while also solidifying US power. In addition, the doctrine of Manifest Destiny framed it as inevitable, desirable and even divinely ordained that the US would expand across North America, a view that was tied to racist notions about Whites’ supposed political and cultural superiority to Indigenous and ‘mixed race’ people (Horsman, 1981).
Incorporation of lands previously held by the Spanish happened in three phases: Florida and the Southeast were annexed at the beginning of the 19th century; Texas, the Southwest and California in the mid-century; and Puerto Rico at the century’s end (Gonzalez, 2011). These three phases, and the ways in which lands and peoples were incorporated, not only provide the historical backdrop for the current status of Spanish and Spanish-speakers in the US but they also shape that status; the roots of the racialization of Spanish can be traced back to this period. We include key dates in the following discussion; more details are presented on the timeline in Figure 3.2 as well as on the map in Figure 3.4.
Phase 1: Florida and the Southeast
As we have seen, the Spanish were the first Europeans to explore and/or claim much of what is now the Southeastern US. However, the French and the British also had designs on the region and the control of various areas switched hands several times among the three of them. Here, we focus on how these lands were incorporated by the US.
The French laid claim to the Louisiana territory, which in addition to the present-day state of Louisiana, also comprised all or part of what is now Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wyoming. At the start of the 18th century, French outposts reached all the way from the Gulf of Mexico to Hudson Bay, in present-day Canada. These lands were inhabited by numerous Indigenous peoples including the Caddo, Choctaw, Crow, Lakota, Natchez and Osage, among others.
France ceded Louisiana to Spain in the second half of the 18th century, took it back again roughly 40 years later, and ultimately sold it to the US in 1803 in what is commonly known as the Louisiana Purchase. During the period of Spanish colonial rule, Spain had recruited thousands of settlers to Louisiana; thus, the Louisiana Purchase ‘brought the first group of Spanish-speaking people under the U.S. flag’ (Gonzalez, 2011: 35). People from the Canary Islands were predominant among the Spanish settlers and their language variety shaped the isleño Spanish that was spoken in several isolated Louisiana communities well into the 20th century (Lipski, 2008).
In contrast with Louisiana, the Spanish not only explored Florida but also established various settlements and missions there fairly early on. For example, St. Augustine, the oldest city in what is now the continental US, was founded in 1565. Colonial control of Florida shifted hands several times between the Spanish and the British, and it was returned to the Spanish in the late 18th century. Following US independence, tensions with Spain mounted as a result of US expansionist designs and of Spanish colonies’ provision of refuge to African Americans escaping from slavery and Native peoples fighting the US (Gonzalez, 2011).
The US annexed Florida via a type of rebellion called a filibuster, which was used or attempted throughout the borderlands. The way in which filibusters worked was that large numbers of Anglo settlers and speculators moved from the US into sparsely populated areas held by the Spanish. Next, the settlers declared independence from Spain; US troops were sent in and Congress eventually approved incorporation of the newly Anglo-settled lands. Under the pressure of repeated filibusters, Spain transferred ownership of Florida to the US in exchange for just 5 million dollars (equivalent to about 100 million dollars in 2019), in the hopes that this might quench the US thirst for more and more land and allow Spain to retain its empire (Gonzalez, 2011). It did not.
Phase 2: Texas, the Southwest and California
In the same year that the US took Florida from Spain (1821), the end of the Mexican War of Independence brought the close of Spanish colonialism in continental North America. As a result, Texas, the Southwest and California were now all part of an independent Mexico.
The Spanish had not established many settlements in Texas and thus the population remained predominantly Apache, Caddo and Comanche. Following independence from Spain, Mexico sought to attract White settlers who would provide a ‘counterweight’ to Texas’s Native population (Massey, 2016: 161). Once in Texas, the settlers who poured in from the US, many of them adventurers and land speculators, became increasingly rebellious toward the Mexican government (Gonzalez, 2011). They were unhappy with various aspects of Mexican law and religious culture, but Mexico’s 1829 abolition of slavery was the biggest point of contention (Gómez, 2007; Massey, 2016). When Mexican authorities sought to enforce the ban, Anglo settlers declared Texas’s independence, and war broke out. While the Army of Texas lost the mythologized Battle of the Alamo in 1836, they went on to defeat the Mexican army and establish the independent Republic of Texas later that same year. Texas’s admission to the US was delayed as Congress debated the balance of slave and free states, but it was eventually admitted (as a slave state). As Ramos (2019) explains, despite the still common portrayal of the Texas Revolution as ‘an organic uprising’ and of the Battle of the Alamo as a heroic stand for freedom, ‘the Alamo was in Mexico – its seizure [and Texas’s] was precisely an act of American expansion.’ Further, the role of slavery in Texas’s independence and its eventual admission to the US, as well as the references to race in arguments both in favor of and against annexation (Gómez, 2007), illustrate that ‘race was at the core of the earliest attempt to define a clear symbolic boundary between Anglo-America and Latino lands to the south’ (Massey, 2016: 162).
Following the incorporation of Texas, the US sought to continue its territorial expansion. It sent troops into Mexican territory, initiating what is generally known in the US as The Mexican-American War (1847–1848). What is frequently referred to in Mexico as La Guerra de la Intervención Estadounidense (‘The War of US Intervention’) was brutal, with tremendous losses on both sides. US troops advanced far into Mexico, eventually capturing and occupying Mexico City. (The alternate names for the war underscore the role of language in historical representation.)
The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo officially ended the war and established the Rio Grande as the border between the two nations. Under the terms of the treaty, Mexico ceded over half of its pre-war territory to the US and gave up all claims to Texas. The roughly 525,000 square miles of land transferred from Mexico to the US included all or part of present-day Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. While some US politicians had argued for annexing more Mexican territory, opponents, who objected to adding so many non-White or racially mixed people to the US, ultimately prevailed (Gómez, 2007; Gonzalez, 2011). A few years later, the US paid Mexico 10 million dollars for roughly 30,000 additional square miles of land in present-day Arizona and New Mexico in what is known as the Gadsden Purchase.
Post-annexation, Anglo migrants from the eastern US quickly outnumbered the former Mexican citizens who remained north of the new border (Massey,